Melissa McPheeters, PhD, MPH

Melissa McPheeters, PhD, MPH is a Research Professor of Health Policy and Biomedical Informatics, and the Co-Director of the Center for Improving the Public’s Health Using Informatics, which is committed to ensuring that informatics tools are developed, tested and used to improve public health. She has returned to Vanderbilt after a three-year hiatus to lead a medical-center wide initiative to instill genomic and data-driven evidence directly into the clinical environment using biomedical informatics. For the past three years she was at the Tennessee Department of Health where she founded the Office of Informatics and Analytics and served as Principal Investigator on three federally funded grants to address the opioid epidemic, each with a strong focus on analytics. In that role she developed the department’s program in informatics and analytics, creating a cohesive program that crossed divisions to provide leadership in interoperability, data architecture, data analytics and communication and dissemination of data. She built a team that included epidemiologists, informaticians, statisticians, health educators, sociologists, data architects and business intelligence experts focusing on ensuring that the right data were available at the right time for policy and programmatic decision making. She had a particular focus on working across the academic medical and public health spaces to ensure consistent and appropriate flow and use of data. Prior to that she served on faculty at Vanderbilt for ten years where she was the director of the Vanderbilt Evidence-based Practice Center, focusing on integrating complex research data into rigorous reviews that were usable and useful to clinicians, patients and policymakers, including leading methods development in a number of areas.