Dr. Tim Mercer

Chief of the Division of Global Health, Dell Medical School

Dr. Mercer is the chief of the Division of Global Health at The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and an assistant professor in the Departments of Population Health and Internal Medicine. He is a primary care physician for the Healthcare for the Homeless program with CommUnityCare, Austin’s largest federally qualified health center. He is also a clinician educator, where he precepts medical students and residents in his clinic, lectures on homeless health care and global health, and mentors students in research and program implementation. Fundamentally, he is interested in solving health system challenges to improve access, quality, and equity in health for vulnerable populations globally. To achieve these goals, he has helped lead numerous quality improvement, implementation science, and health systems innovations. Locally, he is the director of a 5-year project in Austin, Texas, funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to implement and evaluate a mobile, integrated care model for individuals with chronic homelessness and tri-morbid serious mental illness, substance use disorder, and a chronic medical condition; the principal investigator of an implementation science project funded by Gilead to train mid-level providers and implement and test a simplified protocol to scale up Hepatitis C treatment for the homeless population in Austin; and a member of Dell Medical School’s COVID-19 Leadership Task Force working with a broad community coalition to lead the response to address and prevent COVID-19 among population groups suffering from inequities, including individuals experiencing homelessness and the Latinx population. Globally, Mercer has been involved with the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) in western Kenya for nearly 15 years, serving as AMPATH’s medicine team leader from 2015 – 2017, where he held joint faculty positions in the Departments of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine and Moi University School of Medicine, and was based full-time in Eldoret, Kenya. He currently leads Dell Med’s membership in the AMPATH Consortium, facilitating faculty and trainee engagement with our partners in Kenya. He is also the co-investigator of an NIH-funded cluster randomized trial using implementation science to evaluate an intervention to improve referral networks for patients with hypertension in western Kenya. Finally, he is leading Dell Medical School’s global engagement with partners in Mexico, where he recently co-led an interdisciplinary team from UT Austin, funded by the President’s Award for Global Learning, to conduct a community health needs assessment in four low-income, rural communities in Puebla, Mexico, and is now leading the replication of AMPATH/MAPAS in Mexico with the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla Facultad de Medicina (BUAP Faculty of Medicine) and the Secretaría de Salud Estado de Puebla (State of Puebla Ministry of Health) with the goal of transforming primary health care and improving population health in low-income, rural communities in the State of Puebla, Mexico. Mercer studied biology and philosophy at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, received his Master’s in Public Health (MPH) with a focus in social and behavioral sciences from the Yale School of Public Health, his medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine, and completed combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency training at Duke University Medical Center.