David Lakey, MD

Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer
The University of Texas System
Senior Adviser to the President, UT Health Science Center at Tyler

David Lakey is Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer for The University of Texas System. He is also Senior Adviser to the President at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler. He previously served on federal public health advisory committees for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Defense Health Board. Currently he serves on the March of Dimes Board of Trustees and the Trust for America’s Health Board of Directors.

Dr. Lakey served as Commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services from January 2007 to February 2015. As Commissioner, Dr. Lakey led one of the state’s largest agencies with a staff of 12,000 and an annual budget of $3.3 billion and oversaw programs such as disease prevention and disaster preparedness, family and community health services, environmental and consumer safety, regulatory programs and mental health and substance abuse prevention and treatment programs. During his tenure as Commissioner, Dr. Lakey served as president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) in 2011‐2012, and received several national awards including the AMCHP President’s Award, the March of Dimes President’s Public Health Leadership Award, and the Arthur T. McCormack Award. 

He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, graduating with high honors from Rose‐Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, and received his medical degree with honors from Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Lakey was a resident in internal medicine and pediatric medicine and completed a fellowship in adult and pediatric infectious disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Katharine Buek, PhD, MPH

Senior Postdoctoral Researcher
Texas Safe Babies Initiative
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of The University of Texas System
Email:

Katharine Buek is a health and education researcher with 15 years’ experience conducting research in the U.S. and internationally. She joined Population Health in 2018 after completing her PhD in Human Development at the University of Pennsylvania, where her training focused on quantitative methods and psychometrics. She also holds an MPH from the George Washington University. Dr. Buek has designed and implemented experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation studies in the U.S., Africa, and Asia. She has worked closely with programs serving children and families to define program objectives, identify performance measures, and collect high quality data to measure program outcomes and impacts. Her primary research interests include parent and family influences on early childhood health and development. She currently works with the Safe Babies project to examine parent social and behavioral correlates of early maltreatment.

Nagla Elerian, MS

Director of Population Health Strategic Initiatives
University of Texas System
Email: 

Nagla Elerian is the Director of Population Health Strategic Initiatives at the Office of Health Affairs at UT System.  Prior to joining the UT System, Nagla was the Director of the Center for Health Statistics at the Department of State Health Services. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Zoology and a Master of Science in Health Statistics with a minor in Geography.  She has 25 years of work experience in public health, health statistics and program management.  Nagla worked in the areas of maternal and child health, birth defects, mental health and substance abuse, Medicaid managed care, and healthcare quality.  In 1995, Nagla established the first electronic Birth Defects registry in Texas. In 1998, she established an evaluation program for Medicaid managed care where she initiated many improvements to the Medicaid managed care data and reporting.  In 2000, she joined the NorthSTAR program where she initiated many reporting mechanisms to allow the use and sharing of data for program improvements.  In 2007, Nagla joined the Decision Support unit at the Mental Health and Substance Abuse, where she developed through a multi-stakeholder collaboration the risk assessment tools to allow the state to evaluate and manage mental health centers and substance abuse providers using financial, access, quality and outcome indicators.  She provided information and recommendations to the Texas Resiliency Disease Management workgroup for migration of the mental health assessment tool and worked with various stakeholders as she developed the algorithms for placement of eligible children into mental health services using the newly adopted Children and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS). 

Jon Gibson, MS CS

Data Architect and Developer
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of The University of Texas System
Email:

Jon Gibson joined Population Health in 2016 in the role of Data Architect and Developer to support research needs with incoming and generated data as well as any IT system needs the group might have.  He also serves as the Population Health Information Security Administrator.  Jon earned a  BA in History as well as a BS and MS in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.  Prior to Population Health, Jon spent seven years as a Software Developer/Software Engineer with the University of Texas Libraries helping develop large data repositories for digital collections such as the Guatemalan National Police Archive (ahpn.lib.utexas.edu) and the Latin American Digital Initiative (ladi.lib.utexas.edu) containing millions of objects and their associated metadata.  He has over 20 years of experience in IT in a variety of areas including user support, technical training, network administration, server support and SQL and web development.

Sheila Kuschke

Senior Administrative Associate
University of Texas System
Email: 
Phone: 

Sheila Kuschke is the Senior Administrative Assistant at the Office of Health Affairs at UT System. Prior to joining UT System, Sheila was the Executive Assistant to the Commissioner of the Department of State Health Services. She has over 30 years of high level administrative experience at the state and federal levels as well as with non-profit and for-profit organizations.

Lark Needham

Administrative Specialist for Population Health
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:
Phone:

Haley "Lark" Needham is an accomplished, versatile procurement and planning coordinator with more than 20 years experience with a global/public company. Her experience includes procurement and planning, management of purchases of over $20 million in inventory annually, supply chain management, vendor relations, public relations, commodity driven market analysis, process improvements, and administrative support.

Eileen Nehme, PhD

Program Director, Texas Health Improvement Network
Assistant Professor for Population Health
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:

Eileen Nehme earned her Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan in 1993 and PhD in epidemiology from UT Health Science Center in Houston, Austin Regional Campus in 2015. In the interim, she worked in violence and injury prevention, and youth development and advocacy at local government and non-profit organizations. Her work has focused on the connections between health and place, the impact of policies and environments on health behaviors, and equitable access to healthy environments. She was the lead author on the 2015 South Lamar Corridor Study Health Impact Assessment, the first HIA conducted in Austin, Texas. Dr. Nehme also taught an undergraduate epidemiology course for two years through the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin.

MOlly O'neil, MS

Data Analyst
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:

Molly O’Neil earned her MS in Epidemiology at The University of Texas School of Public Health and her BS in Biology at The University of Texas in Austin. Her research interests focus in spatial epidemiology and understanding disparities in access to care in Texas.  She joined Population Health to assist with geospatial and visualization projects, including community health indicator mapping. She currently works as a data analyst with the Safe Babies initiative, which includes multiple projects investigating and informing prevention efforts aimed at improving infant health, safety, and wellbeing.

Daniel Oppenheimer, MFA

Director of Population Health Communication
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
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Phone: 

Daniel Oppenheimer joined population health in 2016 to oversee communications. He received his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and is the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster 2016). Before coming over to UT System he was Director of Strategic Communications for the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at The University of Texas at Austin. As a freelance writer and short documentary filmmaker, his articles and videos have been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Tablet Magazine, the History News Network, and Salon.com. Dan oversees the communications track of the Population Health Scholars program.

Divya Patel, PhD

Assistant Professor
Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies
UT Health Science Center at Tyler
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
email: 

Divya Patel joined the Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies (TCHMB) in November 2015 as Assistant Professor.  She is an epidemiologist (Ph.D., 2003, University of Michigan) with a broad interest in women’s health research.  Previously, she served on the faculty in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan (2004-2010) and in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale University (2010-2012).  She received a 5-year career development award from the National Cancer Institute for her research focused on the prevention and early detection of human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers in women.  She has also worked at the Texas Department of State Health Services and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on population-level maternal and child health projects.  Dr. Patel holds an adjunct position at the University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston - Austin Regional Campus, has taught several graduate-level courses in Epidemiology, and has provided research mentorship to students ranging from undergraduates to medical residents and fellows.