Congratulations Lex Ellinson – AES Emerging New Talent!
Senior Consultant, Alexandra (Lex) Ellinson, was awarded the Emerging New Talent at the Australasian Evaluation Society International Evaluation Conference.
The Awards Committee praised the scale of what she has achieved in just four years as well as her commitment to the profession.
Lex has designed and managed large-scale long-term evaluations of youth policy and social housing and worked in partnership with Indigenous communities. Her approach is informed and pragmatic – she has managed projects with quasi-experimental, realist-informed and co-design approaches to suit different contexts and different purposes.
As Secretary of the AES’ Advocacy and Alliances Committee, she works to promote the use of evaluation and evaluative thinking by Australian agencies and organisations. She is also a member of the Realist Special Interest Group.
Lex discovered evaluation as a profession while studying philosophy and social sciences at university in the early 2000s, and sensed that, “evaluation nicely brings together my academic interest in the rational grounds for making normative judgements based on empirical data, which is a longstanding philosophical question.”
Accepting the award, Lex couldn’t help but demonstrate the reflective thinking that we know and love. She reflected on the inquisitive minds and commitment to doing good that she’d encountered at the conference and her excitement at being part of a profession capable of having such wide-ranging conversations. At Gill Westhorp’s pre-conference workshop, they’d discussed ‘everything from the ontology of a tea cup to patronage systems in Laos’.
Congratulations Lex. We’re sure there are more great things to come!
