Cook, Thomas D.

Ph.D. Communication Research, Stanford University;

B.A. German and French, Oxford University.

Cook is John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he is also Professor of Psychology and of Education and Social Policy and a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research. He was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Adolescence in High Risk Settings and is a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and a member of its Committee on the Future of Work.

Cook has contributed to evaluation through exploring methods for inferring causation and for probing the generalization of causal hypotheses. He is substantively interested in educational evaluation, especially as it concerns preschool programs (Sesame Street), whole-school reform initiatives (James Comer's School Development Program), and understanding why experimentation has been so rare in educational evaluation.

Cook has numerous publications, including two recent books: Managing to Make It: Urban Families in High-Risk Neighborhoods and Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (with Shadish and Campbell). Cook was the recipient of the Gunnar and Alva Myrdal Prize for Science from the Evaluation Research Society in 1982, the Donald Campbell Prize for Innovative Methodology from the Policy Sciences Organization in 1988, and the Distinguished Scientist Award of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association in 1997. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was named a Margaret Mead Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2003.