Tammy Cook

Overview

Tammy Cook is Vice President and Director, Data Operations Center. She has more than 30 years of experience and is an expert in survey operations management. She guides policy and procedures for recruiting, training, and managing thousands of field employees. She serves as operations director for some of Westat’s largest and most complex field projects. For a large national longitudinal cohort study of U.S. tobacco users and nonusers (age 12 and older), she manages all aspects of field operations, including overseeing a staff of more than 800 interviewers and over 60 field management staff. She performed a similar role for 15 years on the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), directing field operations for a survey conducted 3 times a year for approximately 15,000 beneficiaries living in household and long-term care settings.

Cook brings her end-to-end survey expertise to several survey research methods projects, including designing and managing a geographic information system (GIS) tracking system to reduce curbstoning/fabrication and increase efficiency among field interviewers; creating a field operations readiness dashboard that tracks events that may disrupt field data collection; and designing innovative field management systems to promote efficiency and quality.