Rights Lab Visiting Fellow in Human and Labour Rights Measurement and Evaluation
Email: Lauren.Damme@nottingham.ac.uk
Lauren K. Damme, Ph.D., collaborates across the Rights Lab on research relating to forced labour data, measurement and evaluation. She is an internationally-recognized leader in measurement and evaluation of human rights, with over two decades of experience designing and managing large-scale research initiatives. Dr. Damme is one of the foremost global experts in the measurement of labour exploitation, including child labour, forced labour and human trafficking. She led the U.S. Department of Labor’s global evaluation portfolio on child labour, forced labour, and human trafficking, negotiating bilateral agreements with ministries and overseeing field-based prevalence surveys and rigorous impact evaluations in low-resource, high-risk settings, and has worked across 30+ countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, providing strategic and technical leadership to governments, international organizations, and multilateral agencies. Her work spans the public, philanthropic, academic and private sectors and focuses on building accessible, actionable evidence to improve outcomes for vulnerable populations.
In her current full-time role, Lauren is the Director of Innovation in Evaluation & Research at the U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL’s) Chief Evaluation Office*, where she supports the Department's work on AI evaluation and the use of AI in social science research. She also holds research, advisory and faculty appointments at the AI Evaluation non-profit Humane Intelligence, the Data Foundation, and at the George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School, where she teaches graduate courses on public policy evaluation, AI and social science research. In over 14 years at DOL, Lauren has previously served as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Director of Research for the Chief Evaluation Office, Mansfield Fellow to the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Evaluation Bureau, and Senior Evaluation Research Advisor for the International Bureau’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking. In public, she has overseen more than 150 evaluations and prevalence studies supporting $14B in federal programming focused on labor issues, human rights, and social services. In 2024, Lauren earned the Secretary's Distinguished Career Service Award for her contributions to the Department’s mission. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Program Evaluation from George Washington University, an M.Sc. in International Development Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is the author of several book chapters and articles on applied generative AI use in social science research, and a forthcoming book on the forced labor of migrant domestic workers (Springer International).
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* The views presented here are her own and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of the U.S. Department of Labor.