Elizabeth Cook – Child Trends – ChildTrends

Elizabeth Cook is a mission-driven researcher, program evaluator, and project director who focuses on ensuring that all adolescents have sexual and reproductive health information and health care sufficient to live the life they want. She is currently lead evaluator for two randomized control trial evaluations of adolescent sexual health programs and serves as an evaluation expert on a project to revise a healthy relationship and sex education program for young adults with intellectual disabilities. Cook is an experienced technical assistance (TA) provider to U.S. states and organizations that use federal funding to administer sex education programming to adolescents.

Cook has more than 15 years of experience in adolescent health research and is skilled in mixed methods research, culturally responsive program evaluation, technical writing, questionnaire and interview protocol development, technical assistance, team building and supervision, management of million-dollar project budgets, and public speaking. Some of her past projects include identifying innovative practices for providing sexual health services to teens in school-based settings, overseeing a scoping review of school‑based efforts to support students who have experienced trauma, and helping develop the first National Survey of Early Care and Education public-use dataset as a data analyst.

Cook’s work appears in JAMA Network Open, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, School Mental Health, and American Journal of Preventive Medicine, among others. She has also been quoted as an adolescent health expert in the New York Times and has trained and presented research findings to many federal government and professional audiences. Moving forward, Cook is interested in collaborating with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to identify ways to increase their access to sexual and reproductive health education and health care that reflect their values, priorities, and needs.

Cook holds a Master of Science in Public Health with an emphasis on reproductive, perinatal, and women’s health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and a Bachelor of Science in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Kansas.