Miles McNall, Ph.D., is the director of the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative at Michigan State University. McNall has 20 years of experience with the evaluation of health and human service programs. He coordinated the evaluation of HIV prevention programs for young men at the University of Minnesota Medical College and guided the development of client outcome monitoring systems for agency programs at Catholic Charities of Chicago. At the CORE Center in Chicago, he evaluated HIV/AIDS care and substance abuse treatment programs and coordinated the agency’s healthcare quality improvement efforts.

Since joining the faculty at MSU, McNall and his colleagues have conducted evaluations of comprehensive community initiatives, school-based health centers, and intensive home-based treatment services for children with severe emotional disturbances. More recently, McNall has been involved in the evaluation of systems change initiatives, including efforts to transform early childhood and youth mental health systems in several Michigan communities. McNall has been a member of the Michigan Association for Evaluation (MAE) since 2006 and joined the MAE board in 2010.

While working with communities to resolve complex problems McNall became interested in participatory systems modeling as a set of methods that enable diverse groups of people to come together to generate a common understanding of the nature and underlying dynamics of complex problems and to test out different strategies for more effectively managing them through simulation modeling. McNall is the lead organizer for the biennial Innovations in Collaborative Modeling conference at Michigan State University.