Laurie Gaydos is a highly respected researcher and educator in public health, serving as a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the Deputy Director for the Executive MPH Program at the Rollins School of Public Health. Laurie received her undergraduate degree in Public Policy from Brown University and her PhD in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Women’s and Children’s Center at Emory before joining the faculty at the Rollins School of Public Health in 2007.
As a leader in public health education, Laurie focuses on innovative methods of instructional and curricular delivery, including the use of distance and hybrid methods to train workforce professionals and those outside of the traditional classroom setting. She also has a focus on developing multiple modes of interaction for students, including remote boot camp sessions for skill building and protocols for student advising via technology.
On the research side, Laurie is a mixed-methods researcher with a focus on women’s, reproductive and maternal/child health issues. She also employs her mixed-methods skillset to evaluate public health interventions around myriad topics, most recently examining the COVID-19 response in Georgia. Laurie has published more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and commissioned works, and has made dozens of public presentations on her work.
Laurie has received numerous awards for her work, including the Noah Krieger Memorial Prize for Excellence in Public Policy, the Delta Omega Professional Development Award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the McMahon Young Investigator’s Award from the Center for Women’s Health Research and a STAR (Science Translated to Action and Results) award.
For the summit’s program evaluation session, Laurie will guide attendees in understanding more about program evaluation – focusing on the components of program evaluation, why planning evaluation prior to program implementation is important, examples of program evaluation in action and an applied exercise to support attendees in learning Program Evaluation 101.
