Luke Heinkel

People are surprised to find that a rigorous impact evaluation is not always the right tool if they want to understand if their program is working. We like to say that if you are doing something innovative then uncertainty abounds, and there are leaner, more rapid evaluation tools to figure out quickly what isn’t working that will set the program up for a future impact evaluation.”

Luke Heinkel is a program director on R4D’s evaluation and adaptive learning team whose innovative approach to program support sits at the intersection of design thinking and program evaluation. Mr. Heinkel is an evaluation and learning expert with over 15 years’ experience conducting research in the Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific, Europe, and the United States.

A former teacher, Mr. Heinkel is happiest working with students and teachers in classrooms where the team’s co-design and adaptive learning principles come to life. The team also applies these approaches at the strategic level, working with governments and foundations to make evidence-based strategic programming decisions. Mr. Heinkel has written several evaluation reports and policy papers in the fields of education and innovation in development.

Before joining R4D, Mr. Heinkel was a research analyst at Mathematica Policy Research where he worked on large program evaluations both internationally and in the United States for clients such as the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MasterCard Foundation. Mr. Heinkel is a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Namibia 2005-07), where he taught English and math at a rural junior secondary school and founded a scholarship program for Namibian students.

Mr. Heinkel holds a master’s degree in urban planning from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and a BS in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.