New population health fellowship supports early career faculty

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UTHealth Houston is investing in the future of population health with the launch of a new research fellowship program designed to support early career faculty through mentorship, training, and dedicated funding.

Developed by the Office of Population Health in collaboration with the Population Health Council, the program brings together an inaugural cohort of seven fellows from across the university’s schools to advance innovative, interdisciplinary research aimed at improving health outcomes in communities across Texas and beyond.

“This fellowship represents an investment in the next generation of leaders who will shape the future of population health,” said María E. Fernández, PhD, vice president of population health and implementation science at UTHealth Houston and professor and Lorne Bain Chair in Public Health and Medicine at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. “By bringing together fellows from across the UTHealth Houston schools, we are creating a unique environment where different perspectives can generate meaningful solutions that strengthen the health and well-being of communities across our state and nation.”

This one-year, renewable fellowship offers each fellow $15,000 in salary support and $15,000 in funds to support pilot studies. The program also provides robust mentorship, seminars, skill-building workshops, and targeted support to develop scholarly and practice-based projects, all aligned with both institutional priorities and fellows’ career aspirations.

Fellows were selected through a competitive application process that evaluated the research questions, methodology, feasibility, and population health relevance of proposed projects; the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration; and applicants’ readiness to benefit from the fellowship’s mentorship and training opportunities.

Xiaoyang Ruan, PhD — McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston

Project: “Decoding Variations in GLP-1-Induced Weight Loss Among Obesity Populations”

Ruan is an assistant professor and a member of the Center for Translational AI Excellence and Applications in Medicine. His research focuses on real-world, data-driven, deep learning architectures for real-time risk modeling and deep phenotyping to support precision medicine.

He emphasizes collaborative, team-based approaches to advancing safe, reliable, and clinically meaningful artificial intelligence in health care and is committed to fostering multidisciplinary partnerships that bridge technology and medicine to improve diagnostics, treatment planning, and patient outcomes.

His project aims to:

• Identify individuals with obesity who have been exposed to anti-obesity medications by integrating electronic health records and medical claims data
• Characterize patterns of GLP-1 drug use in the overall population and in demographic and nonmedical determinants of health subgroups
• Examine the characteristics of patient subgroups exhibiting varying degrees of weight-loss response to GLP-1 therapy

Higinio Fernández-Sánchez, PhD, RN — Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston

Project: “Embodied Narratives of Long-Term and Lifetime Survivors Aging With HIV”

Fernández-Sánchez is an assistant professor and nurse scientist whose research examines health inequities affecting Latin American migrants and other communities made vulnerable by structural oppression and inadequate policy protections. His work focuses on HIV prevention and treatment engagement, human trafficking, and the broader social and structural determinants shaping health among migrants in the United States.

Fernández-Sánchez centers the expertise of migrants, community organizations, and frontline providers as he investigates how immigration status, stigma, language barriers, and precarious labor conditions intersect to produce disparities in access to care.

Through a participatory body mapping workshop, his project aims to document the embodied experiences of long-term and lifetime survivors aging with HIV. The workshop enables participants to visually represent life-course milestones, stigma, resilience, and health transitions; map elicited interviews that build on participants’ body maps; and synthesize visual and narrative data through an intersectional, analytic lens, creating a visual narrative matrix that links symbols, stories, and structural contexts.

Ashley R. Shaw, PhD, MPH — UTHealth Houston School of Public Health

Project: “MIND+SOUL: A Peer-Led, Faith-Based Intervention to Promote Brain Health and Reduce Dementia Risk Among Older Black Adults” 

Shaw is an assistant professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences and a member of the Center for Health Equity. Her work focuses on reducing disparities in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias through culturally tailored, community-engaged lifestyle interventions.

It integrates evidence-based dietary approaches, behavior change science, implementation methods, and qualitative research strategies to capture lived experience, community perspectives, and contextual factors that shape intervention delivery and impact. Her research examines how nutrition, cardiovascular risk, and social and structural factors shape brain health across aging, with a specific focus on older Black adults.

Her project aims to adapt and implement a culturally and spiritually tailored peer educator training curriculum to support delivery of the MIND+SOUL intervention in predominately Black church settings, pilot test the feasibility and acceptability of the MIND+SOUL program in two predominantly Black churches in Houston, and evaluate participant changes in dementia-related knowledge, dietary behavior, and cardiovascular risk awareness.

Ethan Hunt, PhD, MPH — UTHealth Houston School of Public Health in Austin

Project: “Phones Off, Eyes Up: Pilot Study of Adolescent Sleep and School Engagement in Texas Middle Schools”

Hunt is an assistant professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences whose research focuses on adolescent sleep, screen use, and daily behavioral health. He utilizes wearable and mobile-sensing technologies to investigate how school environments and policies influence youth sleep, engagement, and well-being. His work encompasses collaborations with Texas school districts and national cohorts, aiming to inform scalable, evidence-based strategies that support healthy development. 

His project aims to assess the feasibility and acceptability of integrating wearable devices and smartphone-sensing tools among middle school students, examine whether restricted school-day phone use leads to increased evening screen exposure and disrupted sleep, and characterize variability in student technology behavior and policy adherence several months after cell phone ban implementation.

Linda Pang, MD — McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston

Project: “A Framework for Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness in Patients with Interstitial Lung Disease”

Pang is an assistant professor of geriatric and palliative medicine and a geriatrician and palliative care physician with a deep commitment to improving the lives of older adults and patients with serious illness. Her clinical work centers on compassionate goals-of-care conversations and supporting families through complex medical decision-making. She is passionate about developing models of care to expand community-based palliative care, and her research focuses on addressing social isolation and loneliness in patients to improve their quality of life.

Her project aims to assess the prevalence of social isolation and loneliness among older adults living with Interstitial Lung Disease, as well as assess associations between their social, physical, and psychological symptoms, clinical disease characteristics, and social isolation and loneliness. It also explores their lived experiences to identify challenges and barriers to participating in the community.

Tulsi Patel, RDH, MHA — UTHealth Houston School of Dentistry

Project: “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Me: A Nutritional Counseling Initiative to Improve Oral Health Literacy”

Patel is an associate professor and director of the Center for Health Promotion. As a dental hygienist and prevention advocate, her work focuses on advancing population health by integrating oral health into broader health strategies through evidence-based prevention, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her research focuses on the development of scalable models of health promotion that improve patient outcomes and reduce preventable chronic conditions.

Her project aims to develop a video resource to improve health literacy focused on the connections between nutrition and oral/overall health, explore patients’ attitudes and beliefs regarding these connections, and assess the effectiveness of the video resource.

Funlola Are, PhD — UTHealth Houston School of Behavioral Health Sciences

Project: “Evaluating Primary Care Stepped Care Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Population-Level Impact”

Funlola is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, program director of the UTHealth Houston Nurturing Resilience Initiative, co-training director for the Psychology Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and a training director for Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine Program. 

Her research focuses on innovative methods to identify children at risk for traumatic stress and ways to expand the reach of evidence-based prevention and intervention initiatives to underserved populations. She has several clinical and research grants focused on the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based interventions in nontraditional service settings such as after-school programs and primary care. 

Her project aims to evaluate the reach, equity, and engagement of an adapted trauma intervention across pediatric populations and assess the impact of the intervention on population-level primary care and health outcomes.