Opening Plenary and SOPHE Welcome

M. Elaine Auld, MPH, MCHES, is the chief executive officer, emerita, for the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE). As SOPHE’s chief executive officer from 1995 to 2021 she oversaw the organization’s portfolio in professional preparation, professional development, research, publications, and advocacy. Over her more than 40-year career, Ms. Auld has published some 50 journal articles and book chapters on the profession’s role in community and school health education, health equity, national and international workforce development, and public policy. With regard to the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, Ms. Auld was principal investigator on several Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cooperative agreements that provided training and materials development for professionals, promoted the model as part of the National Task Force on the Future of School Health Education, and helped establish SOPHE’s School Health Teacher Education Standards used in credentialing.

As Chief Community Health Officer, Alexander Garza, MD, is responsible for deepening SSM Health’s focus on social determinants of health, equity and social justice, as well as supporting the work of SSM Health’s transition to population health.
Dr. Garza has decades of experience in public health, quality and safety and policy development. He has organized and led SSM Health’s overall response to the COVID-19 pandemic before assuming the role of Incident Commander for the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, overseeing the region’s coordinated response efforts.
Dr. Garza became Chief Community Health Officer in August 2020, after serving as Chief Medical Officer since 2018, overseeing quality, patient safety, clinical analytics. Prior to this role, he served as SSM Health’s Chief Quality Officer, as well as Chief Medical Officer for the St. Louis region.
Board-certified in emergency medicine, Dr. Garza has over 13 years practicing and teaching in higher education. Before joining SSM Health, he was an Associate Dean and Professor at the Saint Louis University College of Public Health and Social Justice. He has published numerous scientific papers on original research in peer reviewed journals and lectured nationally and internationally.
Previously, he served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Medical Officer to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He legislated health, medical and biodefense authority for the DHS and played a critical role in protecting the US from threats of terrorism. Dr. Garza is also a Colonel with over 20 years of service in the US Army Reserves. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and serves as the Command Surgeon for the 352 Civil Affairs Command. He has received numerous awards for his service including the Bronze Star and the Combat Action Badge.
Dr. Garza received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Missouri – Kansas City, a medical degree from the University of Missouri – Columbia and a master’s degree in Public Health from Saint Louis University.

Dr. Escoffery is a Professor in the department of Behavioral, Health, and Social Sciences at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. She has studied cancer prevention and control and the uptake of evidence-based interventions for over 15 years. She is the PI of the Emory Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network which is exploring multilevel interventions to increase HPV vaccination among rural residents in GA. She is active in SOPHE at the state and national level.

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician and epidemiologist whose work focuses on the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation.  She seeks to broaden the national health debate to include not only universal access to high-quality health care but also attention to the social determinants of health (including poverty) and the social determinants of equity (including racism).

As a methodologist, she has developed new methods for comparing full distributions of data, rather than simply comparing means or proportions, in order to investigate population-level risk factors and propose population-level interventions.  As a social epidemiologist, her work on "race"-associated differences in health outcomes goes beyond documenting those differences to vigorously investigating the structural causes of the differences.  As a teacher, her allegories on "race" and racism illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss.  She hopes through her work to initiate a national conversation on racism that will eventually lead to a National Campaign Against Racism.

Dr. Scharff has spent the majority of her academic public health career working with and in the community to help support their work in improving public health. She works with several local public health organizations to support them in organizational management and public health actions, including strategic planning, board development, grant reviews, assessment, planning, and evaluation. She directs the Office of Public Health Practice that assures that students and faculty have opportunities to work with and in the community on public health practice and practice-based research. She currently works with Generate Health, a non-profit organization with a goal of eliminating disparities in infant mortality, serving on committees and reviewing grants. In addition, she supports Nurses for Newborns, an agency that provides home visitation for pregnant and postpartum women, by evaluating their program and serving on the research advisory board. Finally, she is a co-developer with the St. Louis City and County health departments on a jointly formed academic health department that assures collaboration between the organizations in areas of research, policy, workforce development, and student training with the goal of improving the public health infrastructure.