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Megan M. Cotter

Pronouns: She/Her

Research Scientist

Megan brings a decade of experience in conducting and managing complex research and evaluation tasks using health equity and implementation science lenses.

Megan specializes in qualitative analysis and can easily pivot between grounded theory, theory-driven, and rapid analysis approaches. Megan is adept at facilitating interviews, focus groups, roundtables, and panels of experts to generate ideas, reach consensus, and gather data on complex topics. She manages project budgets and timelines, personnel, evaluation design, instrument development, implementation, quality improvement and technical assistance, data analysis and synthesis, and dissemination of findings. She is an experienced project and task manager committed to project timeliness, fostering a collaborative research and evaluation environment that lifts the voices of those involved at all levels, accurate reporting of activities and findings, and producing products that are useful and relevant for intended audiences.

Megan leads evaluation and research tasks related to cancer, violence prevention, immunization, and metrics development. For the Federal Cervical Cancer Collaborative, she co-facilitated a series of roundtables across the U.S., U.S. Territories, and Freely Associated States and used findings to develop a toolkit to support safety-net settings of care in adopting evidence-based practices for providers. She supports projects on violence prevention for a range of federal clients such as National Institute of Justice, CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, and the Department of Defense to address topics including sexual assault, bullying, intimate partner violence, and human trafficking. She is currently evaluating CDC’s Adult Immunization Program and leads product development to disseminate evaluation findings.

Before joining NORC, Megan worked as an evaluator at the American Cancer Society, where she conducts process and outcome evaluations of lung, breast, colon, and cervical cancer programs aimed at improving access for vulnerable populations. She collected mixed-methods data to assess the effectiveness of partnerships, identify facilitators and barriers to implementation, and inform program scale-up. As the evaluation advisor for ACS’s suite of ECHO programs, Megan developed instruments and identified metrics to evaluate ECHOs’ reach and effectiveness across a range of subject matter areas including cancer screening and HPV vaccination. Megan also worked as an Evaluation Fellow at CDC in the Office on Smoking and Health and the Community Guide.

Project Contributions