Dan Cook, Ph.D.
Education
Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering
Oklahoma State University
M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering
Oklahoma State University
B.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering
Oklahoma State University
A.S., Mathematics
Tulsa Community College
A.A., Secondary Education
Tulsa Community College
Dr. Cook has more than 15 years of experience in the fields of construction, concrete,
cement, and research & development. Dr. Cook grew up working for his family owned
concrete construction company starting as a laborer and working through the positions
of finisher, foreman, and estimator. Dr. Cook has a vast experience of building concrete
structures from floor slabs using post-tension cabling, parking lots with minimal
elevation for drainage, city streets, private dams, small bridges, retaining walls,
residential house slabs and driveways, decorative concrete, and concrete repair.
During his undergraduate studies, Dr. Cook continued to work for this family owned
construction company to help pay for college. Then Dr. Cook worked as a research assistant
on a variety of projects in the concrete laboratory at Oklahoma State University.
Some of his most noteworthy contributions as a research team member of Tyler Ley were
the development of the Box Test AASHTO TP 137 as a workability test for slip formed
paving and creation of the Tarantula Curve for aggregate proportioning in a concrete
mixture design.
Upon completing his doctorate, Dr. Cook worked as a technical service engineer for
an international cement supplier. Dr. Cook provided technical support for both customers
and internal personnel on a variety of topics related to cement, slag cement, concrete,
masonry, and oil-well. Some of these tasks included communicating material specifications,
generating concrete submittals, submitting slag and cement submittals, designing mixes
for concrete, conducting quality audits, and troubleshooting hardened and fresh concrete
and masonry. Also, Dr. Cook has designed mixtures for a wide-spread of applications
such as high strength concrete, slip formed paving concrete, typical slab-on-grade
concrete, pumpable concrete, self-consolidating concrete, flowable fill, grout, and
even a few mass pour mixtures.
Dr. Cook joined the academic world as a research associate in Civil Engineering Department of Oklahoma State University. He also taught classes for the HCMTB program (ODOT training center). Dr. Cook is an assistant Professor of Professional
Practice in the Construction Engineering Technology (CET) and the director of the HCMTB. This HCMTB program provides both training and certifications for technicians to inspect, sample, and test construction materials. Dr. Cook has been a main voting member of ASTM 04.02 Concrete & Aggregate. Dr. Cook has also been a member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and is a committee member of ACI 211 ”Proportioning of Concrete Mixtures” and ACI 302 “Construction of Floor Slabs”