1. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES Public Health Service
Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC)
Atlanta, GA 30341-3724
February 24, 2017
To Whom It May Concern:
Sara Dever came to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a Work Study
student from Emory University. She worked for me in the Environment, Safety and Health
Compliance Office in 2016. She worked as lead data entry, Quality Control, and assistant
coordinator for a team of student office safety inspectors conducting surveys of offices and
common access areas for safety hazards. Despite being new to safety, she has become very
skilled at it.
Sara was an exceptionally hard worker, unfailingly pleasant, and had solid interpersonal
skills. She was very much my go-to person, and oversaw the collection of large amounts of
critical safety data as well as ensuring correct input into a database. She was thoughtful,
concerned about excellence, determined, and innovative. She was concerned about
succession planning to ensure that, upon the end of her tenure, her successor would have all
the required tools to succeed. She was innovative, independent, and thoughtful about her
work. She adopted suggestions the first time, and developed her own ideas about how to
maximize performance. She was willing to take on new tasks outside her comfort zone,
and learn new things. She was comfortable with meeting new individuals in what is
otherwise a daunting organization and she worked very hard. She took supervision well,
and was willing to take on tasks with which she is not familiar. She has done extremely
well during her time at CDC. I would give her my highest recommendation.
Respectfully submitted,
D. Ross Spears, Ph.D.
CAPT, US Public Health Service
CDC Division of Select Agents and Toxins