If formula using text within a cell as search criteria

I have an excel sheet that we use to Audit employees. Data from the Audit is entered on one sheet within the workbook then a second sheet is used as our score card to tally incidents.

I am currently using various if statements (mostly countifs) that search for each employee name on the Audit sheet then match different criteria to return a count of how many times that specific employee has violated a regulation. However as employees switch, it is a very long process to manually adjust the formulas to the new names as we have a lot of employees and these formulas are being used in 5 different instances for each employee.

Here is an example of one of the formulas that I am currently using:

=countifs('17 Q1 Audits'!D3:D,"Chris",'17 Q1 Audits'!P3:P, ">0.25")

I was wondering if there is a way to tell the formula instead of searching for Chris to look a cell A52 (which is where the name Chris is listed as text only for the line) then search for whatever text is in cell A52 but complete the rest of the functions as normal.

This would make it so names in column A on the score card sheet are the only thing that need to be adjusted, the formulas would no longer need to be manually adjusted with the name.

Is this possible?