Member

Melissa Wadman is the Manager of Program Evaluation at the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. Her work at the Smithsonian includes overseeing various evaluation projects related to educational programming and facilitating a culture of evaluation institution-wide through professional development opportunities and resource-sharing. She has worked on a variety of educational evaluation projects involving school-museum partnership programs and was recently the PI for a grant project in collaboration with the University of Maryland on what supports students need for self-directed learning with Smithsonian digital assets. She has extensive experience in informal learning evaluation working with a variety of museums including children’s museums, science centers, art museums and history museums. Over the past 16 years, Melissa has worked both as an external consultant in research and evaluation as well as an in-house evaluator (formerly as Director of Impact Evaluation at Liberty Science Center). She has a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the George Washington University. She was the co-organizer of the 2015 ICOM Committee on Education and Cultural Action conference and a member of the Committee on Audience Research and Evaluation of the American Alliance of Museums.