Barbara Befani is a Research Fellow at the University of Surrey and a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia (formerly a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies). She specialises in innovative methods for impact evaluation, with a broad overview of available options and causal inference models. Her key research areas cover Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), Process Tracing / Bayesian Updating, and the criteria guiding the choice and combination of evaluation methods. In addition, she is currently working on quality criteria and scoring systems for evaluations using qualitative methods. She holds a (European) PhD in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies (thesis in Evaluation Methodology) and a MSc in Social Statistics. Barbara is an active member of the global evaluation community and past or current member of the American, European, British, Swedish and Italian evaluation societies. She is a former Secretary General of the European Evaluation Society (EES) and was scientific programme coordinator of the 12th EES biennial conference in Maastricht.
