Danielle Gilmore

Why did you choose the Trachtenberg School?

I chose Trachtenberg because I wanted to work in industry and needed a doctoral program that treated applied research as central to that path. After my MPP, I was looking for a program that would deepen my expertise in program evaluation while preparing me to work with organizations, policymakers, and other decision-makers outside academia. Trachtenberg stood out because its PhD in Public Policy and Administration offered a concentration in program evaluation and was designed to connect rigorous research with real-world practice. The program’s focus on applying evidence to public and organizational problems made it a strong fit for the kind of career I wanted to build: one centered on using research to improve programs, inform strategy, and support better decisions.

Looking back, what are the most valuable skills, tools, or aha-moments you gained at Trachtenberg that you still rely on today?

GW gave me the methodological foundation for something I had valued long before becoming a researcher: people closest to a problem hold knowledge that institutions often miss. Through phenomenology, I gained the language, methodology, and rigor to study lived experience and meaning as evidence rather than anecdote. That changed how I understood research and my role as a researcher. I still pair phenomenology with program evaluation today. Evaluation helps me understand whether systems are achieving their intended outcomes. Phenomenology helps me understand how people experience those systems and what traditional measures might fail to capture.

What advice would you share with someone looking to pursue a career similar to yours?

Do not build your career around a job title. Build it around the questions you want to answer and the change you want your work to support. My career has crossed public health, policy, evaluation, consulting, philanthropy, and nonprofit governance, but the throughline has remained the same: understanding how systems affect people and using evidence to improve them. Develop strong research and evaluation skills, learn across disciplines, and spend time with people closest to the issues you study. Technical expertise matters, but so does knowing whose knowledge is missing from the evidence informing a decision.