About

Billy Oglesby, PhD, MBA, MSPH, FACHE

I build health sciences institutions that produce measurable impact for students, faculty, and the communities they serve.

I am the inaugural Humana Dean of the Jefferson College of Population Health, the nation’s first college of its kind, and Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives at Thomas Jefferson University, where I lead AI strategy. For the university, I founded and chair the AI@Jefferson Taskforce, identify and evaluate the platforms the colleges adopt, am writing the institutional policy for responsible AI use, and am building a university-wide capability-building program for faculty, staff, and students.

I am a researcher and university executive by trade, not a computer programmer, and I build what I teach. Health AI Central, which I founded, runs on 40+ agents I designed and operate, tracking the health AI field from discovery to adoption. I am founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Health AI, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal with a published AI-use policy and humans making every judgment that matters. I chair Intelligent Teaching: AI in Health Professions Education, a national conference whose first edition drew 200 attendees to 50 sessions.

I have published 50+ journal articles, chapters, and reports, given 70+ invited talks, and helped secure $40M+ in external funding. I am an NACD Board Leadership Fellow and a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and the Royal Society for Public Health.

The longer version

My approach is simple: lead with the use case, not the technology. Twenty-five years with payers, providers, life science companies, and technology firms taught me that adoption follows from what people need, want, and can actually work with, in classrooms, clinics, and boardrooms alike.

I have been building for the web since high school, starting with raw HTML in the early 1990s when the internet was just arriving. Through my undergraduate years I worked at one of South Carolina’s first digital advertising agencies, designing SEO and UI strategies for clients. The tools have changed; the habit hasn’t.

At the College, I lead a faculty of researchers and healthcare executives and have spent a decade turning population health research into degree programs, enterprise partnerships, and community outcomes. Before becoming dean I was Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, where I led a restructuring of online degree programs that added more technology and enabled students to finish faster. As founding faculty at Kent State University’s College of Public Health I built a highly ranked online MPH in Health Policy and Management, led community health needs assessments, and consulted on population health strategies across several health systems in Northeast Ohio. At the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health I led the university’s successful Carnegie community-engaged designation and directed the Kellogg Foundation’s Engaged Institutions Initiative.

On governance: I serve on the board of the American College of Medical Quality, was president of the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research, and served on the board of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. I completed Cornell University’s Chief AI Officer Program, Johns Hopkins University’s AI in Healthcare Program, and the Wharton School’s Advanced Finance Program, and I hold an MBA in healthcare strategy, a PhD and an MSPH in health behavior, and a BS in corporate finance.

I invest in and advise early-stage and mature health AI companies, and I am a member of Wharton Alumni Angels.

Ask me about

• Building the nation’s first College of Population Health
• Running a peer-reviewed journal with AI in the loop and humans at every decision
• Chairing a brand-new national conference on AI in health professions education
• What 40+ agents taught me about model selection, cost, and security
• How a university actually decides on AI: the committees, the policies, the people
• Why I invest in health AI companies and what I look for

Principles

• Lead with the use case, not the technology. Adoption follows from what people need, want, and can actually work with.
• Humans make every judgment that matters. Automate the volume; keep the decisions.
• Publish the failures. A failure log is worth more than a feature list.
• Build what you ask others to adopt. Strategy written by people who have never shipped anything is just wishful thinking.
• Safety is practice, not posture. Red-team your own work before anyone else does.
• Evidence over enthusiasm. Measure learning, cost, and error, and say what you found.

Press kit

• Headshot: download (JPG, 533 × 800)
• Short bio as plain text
• How to describe me: “Billy Oglesby is a university AI strategy executive and population health dean who builds on frontier AI models himself.”

Contact

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/billyoglesby