Welcome!  

I am an Assistant Professor at Carleton University's School of Public Policy and Administration. My research investigates how global development organizations and Canadian public institutions generate, interpret, and act on evidence when designing and evaluating public policy and programs. This contributes to two related research areas: 

1. My research develops the theory, methods, and practice of evaluating international development projects to answer the question “What truly works to improve health and education outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, and how do we know this?” This includes methodological contributions that integrate machine learning and text mining into traditional evaluation methods used by economists to answer new types of questions about development projects. 

2. The methodological aspects of this research have enabled me to expand this agenda by asking the question, “How is evidence used in policy-making in Canada and abroad?”  

As an economist and evaluation scholar, I have a deliberately interdisciplinary portfolio that engages with scholarly communities in economics and the broader field of evaluation.  I hold a Credentialed Evaluator designation and have designed and implemented numerous randomized control trials, mixed-methods evaluations, and cost-benefit analyses of projects with international agencies, governments, and NGOs  in Canada, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, Honduras, Rwanda, Zambia, Cambodia, Brazil, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Since 2021, I have been a member of the Canadian Women Economics Committee. Since 2025, I have also been the academic representative for the Performance and Planning Exchange, a non-profit dedicated to fostering professional development in performance measurement, and am on the Editorial Board for the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation.

In 2022, I completed my PhD in economics at Queen's University. 

I can be reached at ardyn.nordstrom@carleton.ca.