Thomas J. Cook

Thomas Cook has more than 30 years of experience as an envi­ron­men­tal geologist special­iz­ing in site inves­ti­ga­tion and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. As the discipline leader for 3D-Visu­al­iza­tion and Analysis (3DVA), Thomas is responsible for training and mentoring the growing 3DVA team at CDM Smith, providing senior technical assistance and support to users on dozens of projects annually.

He has championed the development and imple­men­ta­tion of compre­hen­sive data management programs for envi­ron­men­tal and water resources data and has been involved in many evaluations and needs assessments to review the entire “life cycle” of envi­ron­men­tal data management. 

Thomas has worked on projects of all sizes for public and private orga­ni­za­tions in North America, Europe, and Asia, but two of his proudest projects “include sites where many years of ongoing remedial actions were not able to success­fully clean the sites up to an acceptable level. Through the use of 3DVA we were able to locate and delineate high concen­tra­tion residual cont­a­m­i­na­tion in low permeable units that was acting as a secondary source to the aquifer,” he says. “By targeting these low permeable cont­a­m­i­nated subsurface volumes with in-situ remedial activities, including at one of the sites the use of perme­abil­ity enhancement techniques, each of the sites was able to reach regulatory concen­tra­tion goals within 1 year of the conclusion of the enhanced remediation activities.”

His favorite part of his job is “mentoring the ever-growing 3DVA user group here at CDM Smith. I have been using 3DVA software for nearly 30 years but prior to joining CDM Smith I was either the sole 3DVA user or one of very small group,” he says. “Since joining CDM Smith in 2011 I have been fortunate enough to be able to grow the practice to the point where we now have a large multi-disci­pli­nary worldwide user group applying our 3DVA software tools to a wide range of projects.”