David M. Fetterman is president and CEO of Fetterman & Associates, an international evaluation consulting firm.
He works in a wide range of settings, ranging from townships in South Africa to Google in Silicon Valley. Clients and sponsors include: the U.S. Department of Education, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Hewlett Packard Philanthropy, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. David has also provided consultation services for the: Ministry of Education in Japan, Ministry of Health in Brazil, Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, and Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Māori Development) in New Zealand.
He has 25 years of experience at Stanford University, serving as a School of Education faculty member, School of Medicine director of evaluation, and senior member of administration. Fetterman concurrently serves as a faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Previously, Fetterman was a professor and research director at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Principal Research Scientist at the American Institutes for Research, and a senior associate at RMC Research Corporation.
Fetterman is a past president of the American Evaluation Association. He received both the Lazarsfeld Award for Outstanding Contributions to Evaluation Theory and the Myrdal Award for Cumulative Contributions to Evaluation Practice. Fetterman also received the American Educational Research Association Research on Evaluation Distinguished Scholar Award and the Mensa Award for Research Excellence. He was selected as the top anthropologist of the year 2019 and top anthropologist of the decade in 2020. Fetterman is the founder of empowerment evaluation. He has published 17 books, including Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation: Stakeholder Involvement Approaches, Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-assessment, Evaluation Capacity Building, and Accountability (with Kaftarian and Wandersman), Empowerment Evaluation in the Digital Villages: Hewlett-Packard’s $15 Million Race Toward Social Justice, Foundations of Empowerment Evaluation, and Ethnography: Step by Step (4th edition).