Bonnet, Deborah G.

(b. 1951, Billings, Montana). M.B.A. Indiana University; M.S. Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, B.S. Psychology, Virginia Polytechnic and State University.

Bonnet is Vice President for Evaluation at the Lumina Foundation for Education, where she designs and manages the evaluations of the foundation's grants and research work. Before joining Lumina Foundation, she headed the Indianapolis-based virtual firm DBonnet Associates, where she specialized in evaluation services for private foundations and nonprofit organizations. Over the course of 27 years of evaluation consulting, she has conducted more than 100 evaluation studies in a variety of fields, including education, health, human services, community development, leadership, and the arts. She is a pioneer in independent evaluation consulting. Her work has been influenced by Don Campbell, from whom she gained the vision of an experimenting society; Michael Scriven, the quest for correct answers; and Michael Patton, permission to settle for the doable. She is currently working on a model framework for foundation-level evaluation.

She has been an active conference presenter and member of the American Evaluation Association since 1981 and has served as Board Member, Secretary-Treasurer, Chair of the Independent Consulting TIG, and Chair of the Ethics Committee. She served on the Advisory Board of AEA's New Directions in Evaluation and has authored several articles on evaluation, as well as a chapter in Applied Strategies for Curriculum Evaluation.