Who We Are | Staff

David Lakey, MD
Associate Vice Chancellor

Nagla Elerian, MS
Director of Population Health Strategic Initiatives

Jon Gibson, MS CS
Data Architect and Developer

Anjali Gupta, PhD, MPA
Research Data Analyst

Sheila Kuschke
Senior Administrative Associate

Dorothy Mandell, PhD
Assistant Professor

Zabin Marediya
Senior Research Coordinator

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.

Dorothy Mandell, PhD

Assistant Professor
Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies
Safe Babies Research Initiative
UT Health Northeast
Affiliate of The University of Texas System
Email: [email protected]

Dr. Mandell received her PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle in Developmental Psychology and her BA from The University of Texas at Austin. She also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and the University of Amsterdam. Her research has spanned multiple topics in maternal and child health including understanding long-term effects of a variety of perinatal and post-natal insults and intergenerational transfer of traits. She has also conducted analyses and research on a variety of public health topics, including work that has supported the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force, Healthy Texas Babies, and the strategic plan to align prevention resources between the Department of Family Protective Services and the Department of State Health Services in Texas. She served as the primary investigator for the Texas Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) and is currently a research consultant for Texas PRAMS. She is currently an Assistant Professor at UT Health Northeast and supports the Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies and is the Primary Investigator for the Safe Babies project in Population Health.

Zabin Marediya

Senior Research Coordinator
Safe Babies Research Initiative
UT Health Northeast
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:

Zabin Marediya earned both her BS in Human Development and Family Sciences and her BS in Nutrition from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research experience includes issues related to child health and development. She has worked on studies focusing on the nutritional value of preschoolers’ packed lunches, the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia in children with autism spectrum disorder, and the nutritional, anthropometric, and growth status of children with autism spectrum disorder. She is currently the Research Coordinator for the Safe Babies project in Population Health within the Office of Health Affairs at UT System.

Lark Needham

Administrative Specialist for Population Health
UT Health Northeast
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 Northeast
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.

Daniel Oppenheimer, MFA

Senior Communications Lead for Population Health
UT Health Northeast
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:
Phone: 

Daniel Oppenheimer joined the UT System Population Health initiative 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.

Divya Patel, PhD

Assistant Professor
Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies
UT Health Northeast
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.

Ella Puga, MPH

Program Manager
Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies
UT Health Northeast
Affiliate of the University of Texas System
Email:

Ella Puga joined the Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies (TCHMB) in November 2015 as Program Manager.  Ella earned both her BS in Biology and her MPH in Hospital and Molecular Epidemiology at the University of Michigan.  She is an epidemiologist who previously worked in public health practice at both the local and state government levels.  At the City of Austin Health and Human Services Department (2004-2012), Ella served as team lead for epidemiology and public health preparedness.  At the Texas Department of State Health Services, she worked as an epidemiologist for the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, Office of Minority Health, and most recently, the Texas Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) at the Center for Health Statistics (2012-2015).  For DSHS and its sister Texas Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies, Ella also co-coordinated the Analytics User Group, a bi-monthly forum for HHS employees to present and discuss software tools and techniques used in data analysis and analytics for their projects.  Her research experience includes work in both infectious disease and women’s health.  Throughout her career, Ella has mentored undergraduate and graduate students completing public health practice internships. 

Jair Soares, MD, PhD

Chancellor's Health Fellow
The University of Texas System
Chair and Professor
McGovern Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Jair C. Soares is chair of McGovern Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Pat R. Rutherford Chair in Psychiatry at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He has been named a 2016 Chancellor’s Health Fellow for The University of Texas System Office of Health Affairs. The UT System Office of Health Affairs established the Chancellor’s Health Fellowship program in 2004 to recognize high-impact innovative work at individual health institutions that are aligned with the overarching mission of the UT System and have potential for broad societal impact on health care, education and research. The work of previous Chancellor’s Health Fellows has focused on patient care quality, as well as public health and health care ethics, among other topics.

Soares has edited or co-edited three textbooks, has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in psychiatric literature, and he co-edited the peer-review journal “Bipolar Disorders-An International Journal of Psychiatry and Neurosciences.” He has extensive clinical research experience in the field of mood disorders, as well as brain imaging modalities and neurocognitive methods to investigate the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder and the mechanisms of action of pharmacological treatments.

Melissa Valerio, PhD, MPH

Chancellor's Health Fellow
The University of Texas System
Dean and Associate Professor
UT School of Public Health at Houston San Antonio Regional Campus

Melissa Valerio is Regional Dean and an Associate Professor of Health Promotion and Behavioral Science at the UT School of Public Health, San Antonio Regional Campus. Prior to returning to Texas, she spent five years as Assistant Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She obtained her Master’s degree in Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and her PhD in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan. Dr. Valerio's interests include chronic disease management and prevention, the design and evaluation of effective health education messages and materials, and survey methods. She is particularly interested in health literacy and cultural competence issues related to health education and communication in minority underserved communities.