Wendy Hicks

Overview

Wendy Hicks, a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), is a Vice President for Survey Management and Design with expertise in survey design and operations as well as methodological research and evaluation. Her technical work identifies optimal methods for assessing and reducing measurement error in survey data and leveraging exploratory methods studies, laboratory experiments, and field studies with associated survey operations. As a manager, her work focuses on change management strategy, planning, and implementation.

Hicks serves as deputy project director for the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, a longitudinal health study. In that role, she led the project in transitioning from an in-person data collection to a full multimode design, reducing project costs substantially while maintaining quality. She also served as project director for a survey of doctoral recipients for the National Science Foundation, a longitudinal multimode survey with a sample size of more than 120,000. Her efforts leading the Westat team through a transition from the prior long-standing contractor ensured the launch of data collection on the target schedule and with no meaningful change in key estimates. As a senior manager on the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), she led a major modernization effort. Combining her skills as a methodologist and as a manager of projects in transition, Hicks directed a large field and web experiment on the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a survey historically conducted only face-to-face with an interviewer-administered instrument.

Education

• MS, Survey Methods and Statistics, Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland
• BA, Psychology, Vanderbilt University