Dr. Joshi is Dean and a Distinguished University Professor of the School of Public Health of the University of Memphis. Dr. Joshi is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator, researcher, administrator, and mentor. He is an established population health informatics researcher who combines his academic training in clinical medicine, public health, and informatics to design and develop human-centered, technology-enabled interventions to enhance population health outcomes across diverse community settings. He has extensive experience in utilizing community and hospital-based data to implement and evaluate informatics-enabled solutions to address social, economic, and health inequities of the 21st century. He combines data-driven innovative entrepreneurial creative approaches to advance excellence in public health education, and research, that can address public health challenges in the community by preparing the next generation of public health leaders. Despite his administrative role, continues scholarly and research contributions toward improving the good health and well-being of individuals, families, and the communities they live in. Dr. Joshi conceptualized the SMAART informatics model using combined principles of the human-centered approach, humanistic, behavioral, learning, and information processing theory to advance the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals. He has designed and developed, standalone and internet-enabled, multi-lingual, digital health interventions such as population health dashboards, consumer health informatics, m-health interventions, and population-based surveillance tools across multiple settings to improve population health outcomes.
Dr. Joshi successfully completed more than two dozen research projects in the areas of population health informatics across multiple countries including the US, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Haiti, Egypt, and Brazil. These projects were funded by several Federal, State, and international government agencies and other private foundations. Dr. Joshi also launched the first of its kind fully online Certificate and MS Population Health Informatics Programs. He was awarded by the Open Society Institute to establish the Regional Population Health Informatics Education Hub to prepare the public health workforce with skills in population health informatics and how community data can be utilized to design human-centered interventions for the improvement of population health outcomes. The hub is established at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health with an aim to create a regional network of experts in the population health informatics field ready to respond as a team to the next public health challenge. Dr. Joshi has been leading CUNY SPH efforts to implement the NYC Resource Navigator Test and Trace Program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and secured an award of a $10 million contract with the Housing Recovery Operations of the Mayor’s Office to implement the aftercare resource navigator program to address COVID-19 recovery efforts. Currently, he is the Chair of the Global Health Informatics Working Group of the American Medical Informatics Association. He is also an author of the first textbook published on Population Health Informatics: Driving Evidence-based solutions into practice published by Jones Bartlett. Dr. Joshi will help establish and co-lead the Center for PH-IDEAS, collaborating closely with Dr. Michelle Taylor, Director of the SCHD to oversee all components of this agreement.

Dr. Taylor earned her MPA from Harvard University in 2018, her DrPH from John Hopkins University in 2015, and her MD from East Tennessee State University in 2002. She has served as Deputy Director for Practice Integration at the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) and Division Chief of the Aerospace Medicine Division at the Office of the Air National Guard Surgeon General. She’s also held multiple positions at the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD), including currently as Director. Dr. Taylor served as a pediatrician and was Associate Medical Director and Deputy Administrator for Maternal and Child Health at the Shelby County Health Department. In this role, she was responsible for the overall management of Maternal and Child Health Programs (MCH) and oversaw programs geared toward providing services to under-resourced families through home visitation, case management, and outreach education. Prior to that, she was an MCH/Emergency Preparedness Physician at the Shelby County Health Department.
Dr. Taylor is a well-seasoned practitioner, and her research and applied work has predominantly focused on public policy issues impacting the health status of minority and disadvantaged populations. She has special emphasis on problem identification, policy formation, and development of leadership skills in practice and policy. Her leadership experiences have fueled her desire to make a real difference on behalf of vulnerable populations, about chronic disease, shortened life expectancies, and concentrated poverty. Dr. Taylor as the position at the highest level of the SCHD, will lead the efforts of the applicant organization and co-lead the proposed Center for PH-IDEAS at School of Public Health University of Memphis. Dr. Taylor’s extensive experience and expertise as a leader, practitioner, epidemiologist, and Health Director will assure success across all components of this agreement.

Dr. Zhang is a biostatistician and data scientist and Division Director in the School of Public Health at the University of Memphis. She has vast experience in working with public health data and strong expertise in data operation and machine learning techniques, including methods in cluster analyses and directed/undirected network construction and comparisons. Dr. Zhang has a long track record of federal agency funded research as the principal investigator (R01AI121226, R21AI099367, R03HL095429) and a co-investigator on many other grants (e.g., HRSA R40 from CDC, PC102166 from DOD). She has more than 180 publications since 2004 plus three R computing packages and several the publications are in high rank journals.
Regarding student training, she has taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students and has strong expertise in mentoring graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Since 2003, she has taught several courses (mostly graduate leveled courses) as an independent single instructor and supervised/advised more than 20 graduate students (and two post-doctoral fellows) on projects related to data sciences. Dr. Zhang will be responsible for UofM collaborative efforts in leading Strategy A3 data modernization to improve data infrastructure and develop and implement data modernization for the SCHD.

Debra Bartelli, DrPH, is a Research Associate Professor of Urban Health and the Director of Undergraduate Programs. She received her MPH and doctoral degrees from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Before joining the University of Memphis faculty, Dr. Bartelli worked for a national research firm conducting evaluations for non-profits, foundations, and government agencies. She also directed a multi-sector initiative in Shelby County designed to improve health outcomes, improve quality of care, and reduce healthcare costs with a focus on infant mortality reduction, chronic disease prevention, and end-of-life care. Dr. Bartelli's public health interests are diverse and include the built environment, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), environmental policy, food insecurity, and program evaluation. She is a founding member of the University’s iIMPACT Center. She also conducts fieldwork focused on improving public health infrastructure, access to clean water, and reducing food insecurity in rural Haiti.

Marian Levy, DrPH, RD, FAND is Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Memphis. Dr. Levy received her doctorate in public health from UCLA, with a fellowship from the National Cancer Institute. A Registered Dietitian and Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, she has spearheaded numerous initiatives to promote health equity, support social justice, and provide effective COVID response. Since 2005, she has served on NIH special emphasis review panels for the National Institute for Minority Health Disparities and has a robust research portfolio.
Over the past 25 years she has collaborated on numerous community-based research initiatives to promote health equity, support social justice, and provide effective COVID response. Dr. Levy has enjoyed a long-standing (15-year) collaboration with the Shelby County Health Department, first as a consultant to their pandemic flu planning, later initiating the Academic Health Department partnership with the University of Memphis School of Public Health, and most recently collaborating on community research to contain COVID-19. Additional collaborations with the SCHD have pertained to the county-wide health needs assessment (MAPP) process; opioid epidemic; infant mortality; and workforce development. As Associate Dean, she has coordinated the School’s Public Health Summer Institute for several years, in which SCHD staff received training in a range of topics (e.g., health equity, social determinants, Public Health 3.0, infectious disease epidemiology, leadership development, data management, SAS, and R). Dr. Levy has held several leadership posts, including President of the Tennessee Public Health Association. She currently serves on the Governing Council of the American Public Health
Association and as a Site Visitor for the Council on Education for Public Health, the accrediting body for Schools of Public Health. Dr. Levy will be responsible for UofM collaborative efforts in leading Strategy A2 to strengthen the foundational capabilities for the SCHD related to organizational competencies, culturally tailored communications, policy development, community partnerships, and effective emergency response.

Dr. James is a medical sociologist and demographer with expertise relating to public health in the American South. Dr. James is President of the Southern Demographic Association, has presented at Capitol Hill and the National Cancer Institute, and has published in leading public health journals including the American Journal of Public Health.

Jonathan Bennett serves as Assistant Director, Research and Evaluation of the Center for Community Research and Evaluation (CCRE) at the University of Memphis. Dr. Bennett supervises all CCRE research operations including evaluation of tens of millions of dollars of sponsored projects, including three cradle-to-career pipelines, regional teenage pregnancy initiatives, multiple COVID-19 vaccination outreach campaigns, and many other projects in public health, public policy, and education. Dr. Bennett also serves as chief data scientist and statistician for CCRE with expertise in applied quantitative methods, including the execution of rigorous randomized and quasi-randomized studies and the utilization of cutting-edge methods to collect, evaluate, and visualize data. Dr. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester, specializing in political methodology.