Audrey Cooper
Audrey Cooper
Director of the UNM Evaluation Lab
Audrey Cooper, Director of the UNM Evaluation Lab, works alongside students and community partners to use evaluation as a tool for meaningful change. Her work centers community voices, builds evaluation capacity, and helps organizations turn their values and findings into action.
Audrey Cooper, Director of the UNM Evaluation Lab, works alongside students and community partners to use evaluation as a tool for meaningful change. Her work centers community voices, builds evaluation capacity, and helps organizations turn their values and findings into action.
Faculty spotlight page- Audrey Cooper, MPH, RN, is the Director of the UNM Evaluation Lab, where she works at the intersection of evaluation, public health, policy, and community engagement. With more than a decade of experience in nonprofit health care, her professional background spans clinical quality, health policy, evaluation, and health center management.
Cooper’s path to the Evaluation Lab began as a graduate fellow in 2017 while pursuing her Master of Public Health at The University of New Mexico. Over the years, she took on expanding roles within the Lab, including coordinating the Summer Institute, serving as a team lead, teaching and presenting, and serving as Associate Director before becoming Director in 2024.
At the heart of her work is the belief that evaluation should lead to meaningful action. Through a community-based participatory approach, Cooper and the Evaluation Lab work with nonprofits, government entities, students, and other partners to identify what communities value, understand what is working, and determine what they want to change. Rather than producing reports that simply sit on a shelf, the Lab helps partners use evaluation findings to strengthen programs, inform decisions, and create change rooted in community priorities.
Cooper also emphasizes trust and relationship-building as essential parts of community-engaged work. By recognizing community organizations as experts in their own experiences, the Evaluation Lab combines professional evaluation skills with the knowledge, values, and priorities of its partners.
Through its graduate fellowship, Summer Institute, learning communities, and community partnerships, the Evaluation Lab also builds evaluation capacity across New Mexico while giving UNM students hands-on experience they can carry into their careers. For Cooper, this work ultimately comes back to strengthening communities' ability to understand their own needs, make values-based decisions, and shape their own futures.
