 
Hello.
I'm Sangeeta Mookherji
and I'm going
to be your instructor for this
course, program evaluation.
Let me tell you a little
bit about myself first.
I have a master's in Health
Science from Johns Hopkins
School of Public Health
in international health,
and I have a Ph.D., also from
Hopkins, in Health Economics.
Prior to that I studied
comparative literature
at the undergraduate level.
And that means that I speak
three languages fairly well,
two adequately, and
one quite badly.
But you should also know that
I'm not a career academic.
I spent 15 years in
public health practice
when I worked in
about 18 countries,
I actually lived in
five of those countries,
and I worked with
public health programs.
Most often, advising them
on evaluation activities
or conducting evaluations
on their behalf.
Through all this
experience, I've really
come to believe that
without good evaluations
we're simply not going to make
the progress in public health
that we desire, we are not going
to learn how to better control
disease, we are
not going to learn
how to prevent the conditions
that we know how to prevent
until we generate better
evidence from good evaluations.
And that's what
you're going to learn
to do here in this course.
You're going to
learn to do-- how
to do good evaluations, what
makes a good evaluation.
And to do that you're going
to bring a lot of skills
that you've learned in the
course of your public health
education and that you
will continue to learn.
You're going to need to
know about epidemiology,
biostatistics, social and
behavioral theory, qualitative
and quantitative
research methods.
As an evaluator, you're going
to need to bring all of those
and apply them to a particular
evaluation question.
And that's what we're
also going to learn
how to do here in this course.
I think that no matter
what area of public health
you end up working
in, you're going
to need to know something
about evaluation.
If you're a policy maker
or a program implementer,
I guarantee you,
you're going to want
to know whether something
is working or not.
And if you're going to
know something about that,
you're going to need to
do a good evaluation.
You're either going to need
to know how to do it yourself
or you need to--
you're going to need
to know whether the
team that you've hired
is proposing a good
evaluation or not.
So the skills you learn in
this course, the knowledge
that you'll get from
this course will help you
in either of those endeavors.
 
I happen to love evaluation.
I find that no matter what,
it's a fantastic challenge.
Every single evaluation
I do is different,
every single evaluation requires
a different set of skills,
it requires me to be
critical, think critically,
thinking all the time.
I loved the newness of it,
the continual challenge,
and I love the idea
that I'm working really
hard to generate evidence that
will help us make progress
in public health,
in combating disease
and preventing disease
and giving people
a better quality of life.
 
