EA - Introducing new leadership in Animal Charity Evaluators’ Research team by Animal Charity Evaluators

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing new leadership in Animal Charity Evaluators’ Research team, published by Animal Charity Evaluators on November 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionHello EA Forum! As some of you may already be aware, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has recently expanded our team, most notably in Research. As such, we'd like to introduce ourselves as ACE's new Director of Research and Evaluations Program Manager and share how we intend to engage the EA community via this forum moving forward. We both joined ACE this summer, right as the annual charity evaluation season kicked off. Since we were hired, two new researchers, Alina Salmen, Ph.D. and Max Taylor, have joined, as well as our new Executive Director, Stien van der Ploeg.Our BackgroundsElisabeth Ormandy - Director of ResearchI have an academic background in Neuroscience (B.Sc.), Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare (M.Sc.), and Animal Welfare and Ethics (Ph.D.). I completed a research fellowship in animal policy development for the Canadian Council on Animal Care and held a post-doctoral fellowship position at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I also taught various undergraduate courses at UBC including: Animals and Society, Animals and Global Issues, Scholarly Writing and Argumentation, and Animals, Politics and Ethics. In 2015, I opted to leave academia to co-found the Canadian Society for Humane Science—I served as their Executive Director until I joined ACE. In that role, I gained experience in nonprofit management, impact assessment, and strategic planning, and learned the importance of strengthening the animal advocacy movement.Alongside my paid work in animal advocacy, I currently serve in a number of volunteer roles, most notably as a Board member for the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals.Vince Mak - Evaluations Program ManagerI have a generalist background—I graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and spent the beginning of my career in financial services. I discovered effective altruism in 2019, developed an interest in animal advocacy after reading Animal Liberation in 2020, and began doing EA-style charity evaluations across cause areas as a volunteer with SoGive in 2021. Outside of my job at ACE, I currently assist in various capacities with EA research, grantmaking, and movement building.ACE's Next Steps on the EA ForumOur intentionsIn the past few years, ACE's activity on the EA Forum has been to provide updates on our work and share our thinking. As an EA organization dedicated to transparency and intellectual rigor, we would like to take it a step further and interact more closely with the community that shares these values. As we tinker with our evaluation methodology in the months and years ahead, we plan to invite your feedback during the intermediate stages; we do not want to just inform you, we want to be informed by you. In addition to opportunities to critique our thinking, you can also expect from ACE transparency about our processes, responsiveness to fair and genuine criticism, and a commitment to evolve our thinking in response to new evidence.Adjustments to our evaluations process so farThis year, our research team altered the way we approach our evaluations, partially thanks to input from people on this forum in the past. For instance, we have now implemented quantitative scoring frameworks for our Programs and Cost Effectiveness evaluation criteria—a marked departure from how we assessed these criteria last year.We appreciate the EA community's willingness to provide constructive criticism so that we can continually refine our methods. More recently, some of you have already volunteered your time and expertise by sharing proposals for how ACE can improve. In particular, we thank Nuno Sempere for a th...