Senior Fellows

Our Senior Fellows are emerging thought leaders who are helping us to build the field of evaluation in one or more of the areas in which we work. 

Priya Patil is an accomplished social scientist and international development professional with deep experience in epidemiologic research and evaluation, performance measurement and management, and design for scale. Working internationally for 14 years in over 15 countries, Priya’s experience includes leading social investment and evaluation efforts in health, women and girls, youth and gender equity. For USAID, she led a nine country effort in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean developing novel systems to capture medical information from hard to reach areas; developed evaluation, impact measurement and management tools and strategies for health and infrastructure portfolios implemented in Africa and Asia; and led the development of a philanthropic marketplace designed to accelerate private funds into disease eradication organizations working across the globe. Priya authored several UNFPA reports on better program strategies for resource allocation, co-authored the WHO/World Bank report on health workforce, and has published and presented her work in peer reviewed publications and international conferences. A National Institutes of Health Doctoral Fellow and a Fogarty International Award Recipient, Priya earned her MPH and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and BA from the University of Chicago.

Priya is an independent consultant living in San Francisco and serves on the Advisory Board of Tipping Point Community, a venture fund focused on poverty alleviation in the Bay area.

Fellowship Topic: Real-time evaluation and strategic learning are cutting-edge evaluation practices in think tanks, development institutions, nonprofits, and foundations. Tremendous opportunities exist to develop associated methodologies, operations, and tools that capture information for "real time" evaluation and learning. Harnessing work in the international development community, Priya is conceptualizing and testing mobile technology's use for virtual real-time evaluation and strategic learning in the philanthropic and nonprofit space.

Subarna Nandi Mathes has extensive experience with designing and implementing monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems for complex and complicated initiatives such as advocacy efforts and global networks. She also has evaluation experience in the fields of HIV/AIDS and women’s rights and livelihoods, particularly in the contexts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. As a Steward of International Advocacy and Network Evaluation at Innovations for Scaling Impact (iScale), Subarna advises key peace and human rights organizations, including Crisis Action, Human Rights Watch, and Global Witness on how to strengthen their advocacy monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems. She led the set up of a planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning system for the Campaign to End Pediatric AIDS (CEPA), a multi-level advocacy campaign across six sub-Saharan African countries, funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. Prior to iScale, Subarna managed a Gates Foundation-funded collaborative action-learning initiative to develop and implement the next frontier of advocacy impacts, learning, and evaluation. She also conducted an evaluation of ActionAid India’s post-tsunami recovery programs. Subarna has graduate degrees in South Asian Studies from the University of Michigan and in Public Administration from the University of Washington. She speaks fluent Bengali and is proficient in Hindi and Urdu. 

Fellowship Topic: Subarna is looking at ways to advance the field of international advocacy evaluation and learning, with a particular focus on the needs and demands of advocates working on the ground in the global south. She is examining the limitations and constraints faced by advocates that need to be addressed across contexts and issue areas in order to advance advocacy evaluation. She also is looking at the fundamental skills and capacities required for advocates to do purposeful advocacy evaluation. Subarna is conducting primary and secondary research and working to develop a Community of Practice on International Advocacy Evaluation to advance these goals.

Nancy Latham is Chief Learning Officer at LFA Group: Learning for Action, a firm headquartered in San Francisco that provides highly customized research, strategy, and evaluation services that enhance the impact and sustainability of social sector organizations. Nancy has eight years of experience providing research and evaluation services to nonprofits and foundations in a wide variety of program areas, including housing, homelessness, youth development, education, journalism, and advocacy. With expertise in quantitative methods and research design, she has directed or provided technical assistance to over 100 projects at LFA Group. Projects of note include evaluations of: a collaborative brought together to provide permanent supportive housing and services to chronically homeless individuals in Los Angeles; the advocacy capacity and effectiveness of a portfolio of environment advocacy organizations funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the Public Insight Network (a journalism model replicated at over 30 public radio stations, magazines, and newspapers that taps a network of over 100,000 “citizen sources” to bring public insight into the making of news stories); and the impact and institutionalization of a program for students 50 and older at 13 community colleges across the country. Nancy earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley, a Masters of Public Management from the University of Maryland, and an AB in Political Science from Stanford University.

Fellowship Topic: Nancy is expanding on a current LFA Group engagement to evaluate the HOPE SF Initiative, which seeks to transform five of San Francisco’s most distressed public housing sites into thriving mixed-income communities. Integral to the Initiative’s design is the objective to create the systems changes that are needed to reduce fragmentation and inconsistency in service delivery to public housing residents. To reach this goal, HOPE SF brings together an ambitious and wide-ranging collaboration of ten city departments and agencies, multiple foundations, and a housing intermediary. Nancy’s project will use a strategic learning conceptual framework to design a systems change evaluation that supports stakeholder decision-making in this highly complex and shifting environment. Nancy plans to use her engagement to develop a practical toolkit that other evaluators can apply when evaluating systems change initiatives that face conditions of similar complexity – a landscape characterized by: actors with a dedication to participatory principles and collective impact; public/private partnerships; multiple centers of authority; feedback loops that do not always function as intended; and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration among individuals and groups that sometimes define the same problem differently.