Andrea Cook, PhD, is a biostatistician whose work focuses on leveraging available data such as electronic health records (EHRs) to efficiently address important public health questions and improve the overall health of our population. Dr. Cook has developed research methods using EHRs and other existing health care data for major initiatives led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Her work spans many areas, including hypertension control, cancer screening, obesity, diabetes, built environment, and alternative medicine for pain.
The goal of Dr. Cook’s research is finding interventions that improve patient care. She studies how pragmatic clinical trials, which are conducted under real-world conditions in health care organizations such as Kaiser Permanente Washington, can deliver more effective care and improve patient outcomes. Dr. Cook is a lead biostatistician for the Biostatistics and Study Design Core of the NIH Collaboratory, which facilitates the implementation of pragmatic clinical trials. She addresses the numerous statistical challenges of pragmatic clinical trials including how to design studies to answer research questions without impeding the delivery of care and how to use EHRs for more cost-effective studies.
Dr. Cook also studies how to use EHR data to improve the way we monitor the safety of new medical products including vaccines, drugs, and medical devices. She contributes to the FDA Sentinel Initiative and the CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink and has led the development of new statistical methods for actively monitoring medical products for rare adverse events using distributed data networks.
Dr. Cook obtained her PhD in biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2005. She is a member of the American Statistical Association and the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society. She is also an affiliate professor in biostatistics at the University of Washington.
Role of built environment; obesity prevention and control; nutrition
Analysis of longitudinal data; sequential methods
Physical activity; nutrition; built environment
Drewnowski A, Aggarwal A, Cook A, Stewart O, Moudon AV. Drewnowski et al. respond. Prev Med. 2016 Feb 5. pii: S0091-7435(16)00038-4. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2016.01.024. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed
Nelson JC, Wellman R, Yu O, Cook AJ, Maro JC, Ouellet-Hellstrom R, Boudreau D, Floyd JS, Heckbert SR, Pinheiro S, Reichman M, Shoaibi A. A synthesis of current surveillance planning methods for the sequential monitoring of drug and vaccine adverse effects using electronic health care data. EGEMS (Wash DC). 2016 Sep 6;4(1):1219. eCollection 2016. PubMed
Cherkin D, Balderson B, Brewer G, Cook A, Estlin KT, Evers SC, Foster NE, Hill JC, Hawkes R, Hsu C, Jensen M, LaPorte AM, Levine MD, Piekara D, Rock P, Sherman K, Sowden G, Wellman R, Yeoman J. Evaluation of a risk-stratification strategy to improve primary care for low back pain: the MATCH cluster randomized trial protocol. BMC Musculoskelet Disord. 2016 Aug 24;17(1):361. doi: 10.1186/s12891-016-1219-0. PubMed
Drewnowski A, Aggarwal A, Cook A, Stewart O, Moudon AV. Geographic disparities in healthy eating index scores (HEI-2005 and 2010) by residential property values: findings from Seattle Obesity Study (SOS). Prev Med. 2015 Dec 3. pii: S0091-7435(15)00357-6. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2015.11.021. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed
Study uses geographic data to track change over time.
A new study finds that moving from low- to high-density neighborhoods might be related to reductions in weight gain.
New research suggests fast food and other aspects of built environments don’t affect weight, contrary to earlier findings.