Sarah Cook is a Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Previously, she worked as an adjunct with the Institute for Global Development of the University of New South Wales, Australia and was formerly Director of the Institute. From 2015 to 2019, she was Director of UNICEF’s Office of Research, Innocenti and, from 2009 to 2015, Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and has also worked for the Ford Foundation in China. Dr. Cook received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and a M.Sc. in Social Policy in Developing Countries from the London School of Economics. Her research has focused in particular on China's social and economic transformations, including work on labour markets and employment, gender, poverty and inequality and social welfare reforms. Recent projects have included a long-term study on social protection in Asia, research on migration and health in China and work on the implications of China’s rise for international development. Current interests include new directions in social policy being taken by emerging and developing countries in the context of financial, social and environmental crises. She is a former Trustee of UNITAR (2015-2021).

Patti P. Phillips (Chair) is the co-founder and CEO of ROI Institute, Inc., a US-based consulting firm that serves for-profit, not-for-profit, government and non-governmental organizations in 70 countries as they build capability in measurement, evaluation, and human capital analytics using the ROI Methodology®. An internationally recognized leader in measurement and analytics, Patti is routinely invited to speak at industry conferences worldwide and contributes to the growing amount of research in human capital and human capital analytics. Her expertise is documented in over 50 published books. Her work has been cited on CNBC, Euronews, and National Geographic and published in more than a dozen business journals. She is a thought partner to research organizations such as The Conference Board and the Institute for Corporate Productivity. Patti holds a PhD in international development.  

She is the recipient of the 2022 Association for Talent Development (ATD) Thought Leader Award and the 2019 Center for Talent Reporting Distinguished Contributor Award. In 2019, she was named among the top fifty coaches globally by the Thinkers50 organization and named a finalist for the Marshall Goldsmith Distinguished Achievement Award for Coaching. Patti serves as the chair of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) People Analytics Board; Senior Adviser for The Conference Board; board chair for the Center for Talent Reporting (CTR), board member of the International Federation of Training and Development Organizations (IFTDO), and board member of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). She is a former Trustee of UNITAR (2018-2024). 

Sven Harten is Head of the Competence Centre for Evaluation Methodology / Deputy Director at the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval).  He is an evaluation expert and Political Scientist, with a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science an evaluation expert with more than 20 years of experience in the design and implementation of evaluations in the field of development cooperation. Sven Harten has lived and worked for 15 years in countries of the Global South, where he was mainly active as an evaluator and project manager, with M&E missions in more than 50 countries; Full-time employment as an employee at the World Bank, the European Commission, among others, as well as an independent consultant.

Karin Kohlweg is an independent evaluation consultant with more than fifteen years of experience in international development. She has substantial experience in planning, managing, and implementing different types of evaluations, studies, reviews, UNEG peer reviews, and meta-analyses in various sectors and topics including gender mainstreaming, institutional capacity development, education, civil society, private sector, water, hygiene and sanitation and others. She conducted quality assurance on a regular basis, developed, and revised evaluation guidelines and manuals and provided advice to monitoring and evaluation frameworks. She supported different Government departments, UN organizations (UNDP, UNIDO, UNICEF, etc.), bilateral agencies, NGOs, and others in improving their evaluation systems as part of their organizational capacity development efforts. She is also a registered management consultant at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, certified as a gender audit facilitator and an adult education trainer. Karin is a lecturer at different universities teaching evaluation and conducted a good number of monitoring and evaluation training for various organizations.

Karin Kohlweg has a university degree in Social Anthropology and one in Social Development Planning and Management. She used to work for UNICEF Regional Office in South Asia, UNICEF Bangladesh, the Austrian Development Agency and held evaluation courses at different universities. In 2018 she established her own company, pme Kohlweg Consulting, www.pmekohlweg.com.

Carlos Tarazona is a senior evaluation officer at FAO where he is responsible for leading major evaluations. He has more than 20 years of experience in the evaluation of agricultural and rural development programs including capacity development initiatives. Before joining FAO, Carlos served as an evaluation officer at the International Atomic Energy Agency and managed the Independent External Evaluation of FAO. Carlos holds a master’s degree in international agriculture from Larenstein University in the Netherlands and Reading University in the United Kingdom.