Our Team

Root Cause Research Consulting LLC is a young firm, but our team is not.

Our firm was established in 2025. Before that, we spent decades inside federal, state, and local agencies.

When we say we understand your challenges, it's because we've sat where you sit. We served as HR leaders, senior operations managers, labor economists, I/O psychologists, and evaluators - improving agency policies, practices, and outcomes from the inside.

We formed a boutique consulting firm to do that work from the outside, where we can help others fix their challenges instead of living with them.

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Organizations we have worked in and with during our careers.

Some of these are organizations our team members worked inside as staff. Others are clients we have worked with on funded projects throughout our careers.

Most of these pre-date the formation of RCRC. Our current client is the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO).

Federal Agencies

Air Force (USAF), Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI),Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Executive Office of the President, Government Accountability Office (GAO), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Personnel Security Research Center (PERSEREC)

State and Local Agencies

Broward Sheriff’s Office, FL; County of Napa, CA; Superior Court of California, County of Orange; District of Columbia Superior Court

Corporations

Northrop Grumman, Westat

Meet Our Experts

  • Headshot of Suzanne Kaasa

    Suzanne Kaasa, Ph.D.

    Chief Executive Officer & Senior Performance Measures Consultant

    Suzanne is a Senior Social Psychologist who founded RCRC in 2025 after two decades of evaluation work across county, state, and federal government. She helps agencies use the data they have to effectively to measure and improve performance.

    Career Highlight - At the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), she advised dozens of project teams as an internal methods expert and co-developed the root cause analysis approach this firm is named for — pairing RCA approaches with rigorous social science methods to develop more impactful recommendations for better agency outcomes.

    Ph.D., Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine.

  • Headshot of Charles Law

    Charles Law, Ph.D.

    Senior Workforce Management Consultant

    Charlie is a Senior Industrial/Organizational Psychologist who has spent his career using research and analysis to help government organizations manage their workforce — in the military, in federal agencies, and as a professor of psychology. He uses best practices to support employee engagement, performance, and retention.

    Career Highlight - As an analyst with the U.S. Air Force Occupational Measurement Squadron, he ran job analyses across ten enlisted career fields and helped build items for the Weighted Airman Promotion System, the test governing enlisted promotion service-wide.

    Ph.D., Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Rice University.

  • Headshot of Evelyn Darbut

    Evelyn Darbut, M.S.

    Senior Risk Assessment Consultant

    Evelyn is a Senior Industrial/Organizational Psychologist who has spent her career managing workforce risk — building personnel assessments that survive union grievance and legal challenge at local and federal levels and leading the design, testing, and implementation of AI workflows in government and large private-sector operations. She can tell an agency where automation belongs in a personnel decision and where it doesn't.

    Career Highlight - Over eleven years at the Broward Sheriff's Office, she ran every promotional process for the agency across law enforcement, fire rescue, emergency services, and detention.

    M.S., Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of Central Florida.

  • Headshot of Katherine Tek

    Katherine Tek, M.A.

    Senior Strategic Planning Consultant

    Katherine is a program strategist who has spent a decade turning funded initiatives into working programs — managing federal grant portfolios from application through reporting, leading statewide operations, and negotiating partnerships across school districts and international agencies. She helps agencies turn their initiatives into action steps that map to performance measures and adhere to realistic timelines with accountability.

    Career Highlight - At Save the Children, she led an emergency preparedness program that trained more than 10,000 emergency workforce practitioners, educators, and community members across the U.S. Gulf Coast.

    M.A., International Education, The George Washington University.