Current Role
Heather Champion is a Senior Applied Research Scientist. She leads the design, execution, and dissemination of applied research studies that inform strategic decisions, enhance client offerings, and strengthen thought leadership. She also contributes expertise in content creation, ensuring research activities are rigorous, relevant, and immediately usable by program, product, and client-facing teams.
She works with our staff and global clients, to design and conduct customized needs assessments (discovery) and evaluations, and research for our programs, products, and services. This work includes identifying organizational and leadership needs, articulating program outcomes, selecting the most appropriate methods for evaluating initiatives for improvement and impact, reporting findings and partnering with key stakeholders to discern actionable insights. Heather also serves as a subject matter expert for our Leadership Analytics services.
In addition to providing evaluation services, Heather has led organizational efforts to implement standardized systems for evaluation & discovery services and data management across the organization to improve our understanding of the impact of our leadership solutions and to improve clients’ ability to make data-driven decisions.
Experience
Heather has over 25 years combined experience in research, evaluation, and leadership development and has multiple peer-reviewed articles, book and book chapter contributions, white papers, conference presentations, and facilitated workshops.
Prior to joining us, Heather was a researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, applying her background in developmental psychology to research and evaluate interventions focused on adolescent risk behaviors. Since joining CCL in 2008, she has worked with clients from a broad range of sectors including government, finance, manufacturing, technology, pharmaceutical, nonprofits, and early leadership development, and she has extensive experience in the healthcare sector including public health, healthcare systems, and healthcare foundations.
Heather has provided evaluation, research, and discovery services globally, including in North America, Asia, Europe, Middle East, South America, and Africa. She has led the implementation of systems to standardize and automate data collection and client feedback, and she’s provided evaluation capability development workshops for internal staff and external clients. She has extensive experience with grant-funded and third party–funded projects from foundations, federal agencies, and other organizations. Heather has expertise with a wide range of research and evaluation methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, including leader analytics, measuring ROI, success case methodology, the evaluation of action learning and action development, executive coaching, and social network analysis.
Educational Background
Heather has a PhD in Developmental Psychology, an MS in Developmental Psychology, and a BA in Psychology, all from North Carolina State University. She has also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Adolescent Health at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
Professional Affiliations and Certifications
Heather is a member of the American Evaluation Association, Society for Industrial Organizational Psychologists, and International Leadership Association.
