Dr. Samantha Abbato is an evaluation consultant and Director of Visual Insights. Sam has a passion for maximising evaluation use through effective communication and evaluation skill building using a pictures and stories approach and increasing the academic rigour of evidence.

Sam’s academic qualifications include: a PhD (Epidemiology) and MPH (Epidemiology/Biostatistics), UC Berkeley (1997), a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Honours in Physiology, Monash University (1988). For her PhD she undertook extensive qualitative training in Medical Anthropology to complete an ethnography of the social and cultural context of the lived experience of diabetes in an urban Aboriginal community In addition, she lectured in epidemiology and qualitative methods at the University of Queensland (1997-2000).

Sam has directed Visual Insights People, a team of experienced evaluation, visual communication and systems thinking professionals, for nine years. She has worked as an independent evaluation consultant for more than 16 years and has 30 plus years of health and community sector experience. Sam is a specialist in health and community sector evaluation with extensive experience in qualitative and quantitative evaluation approaches, working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and a range of culturally and linguistically diverse communities, including refugees.She was the recipient of the 2015 AES Evaluation Publication Award (Caulley Tulloch Award).