By Dr. April Haynes, OFO, on detail to OPACE Tamar Khafi, Ph.D.
, thrives on “digging deep” to identify the source of an issue and innovate solutions. As director of the Data Innovation and Governance Staff in the Office of Planning, Analysis and Risk Management (OPARM), Dr. Khafi leads and coordinates the agency’s data collection, analysis and reporting activities.
Through her leadership, Dr. Khafi has empowered her team to overcome hurdles of changing priorities and technology. Leveraging Education Toward a Nontraditional Career Khafi attended The George Washington University in Washington, D.
C., majoring in international affairs and psychology. She was inspired to pursue an academic career in developmental psychology during a research methods course.
After graduating in 2007 with two Bachelor of Arts degrees, she pursued a doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Her UCR courses explored study design and analysis, with a focus on statistics and quantitative methods. After receiving her Ph.
D. in 2015, Khafi decided to leverage her research and statistical skills to influence decision making at the federal level. Her desire to have a broader impact on the public brought her to the Social Security Administration (SSA) in November 2015, as a social science research analyst.
There, she contributed to the development of a new tool to assess a person’s functional abilities, as well as the collection of new occupational data on.
