Jacob is a board-certified otolaryngologist-head and neck surgeon from central Texas with seven years’ experience in active community-hospital associated clinical practice. He graduated summa cum laude from Texas A&M University with a BS in biochemistry, and then attended Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He next completed a five-year otolaryngology residency at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he was chosen “Outstanding Chief Resident as Educator.” He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and holds a Certificate of Knowledge in Clinical Tropical Medicine and Traveler’s Health from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Jacob and his wife have four children and live near Ft. Hood, Texas, one of the largest army bases in the US. His clinical practice includes many veterans and families of soldiers, as well as some active-duty personnel. He sees patients of all ages and performs a wide variety of surgical procedures. He enjoys reading, traditional media and digital art, cooking, gardening, masonry, and landscaping. His father was a programmer, specializing in drivers for automating control systems, and he learned to swap hard drives, flash ROM chips, and even feed a paper tape reader, from a very young age.

As a long-time computer hobbyist, he had a leading role in EMR selection and administration when his small multispecialty group transitioned to a new system in 2013. He subsequently became more deeply interested in understanding informatics while learning about Epic during go-live preparation, eventually becoming focused on usability, systems design, and analytics, including SQL database reporting. He holds a CompTIA A+ certification, ten Epic proficiencies (all with honors) and seven Epic badges. His informatics passions are ease of use, quality of care, physician satisfaction, and patient safety.

Troy is a native to California. He attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California for his undergraduate studies and majored in biology and chemistry. Troy attended medical school at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Throughout his medical education, Troy did research on underserved populations with work published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine on the impact of funding instability on the teaching health center graduate medical education program. During his psychiatry rotations, Troy discovered his fascination with the human mind, the rewards of aiding patients in their recovery from mental illness, and an appreciation for the legal side of psychiatry. For these reasons, he is now pursuing a psychiatry residency at the University of California, Riverside.

As a psychiatrist, Troy has been privy to many of the ways psychiatry has fallen behind other areas of medicine. One of these areas is the lack of utilization of information technology within healthcare. He desires to be part of the groundbreaking ways that psychiatry utilizes information and data from providers, thus improving healthcare for the mentally ill. Whether this is by incorporating electronic medical records within a hospital system or through the use of AI to improve outcomes, he has learned clinical informatics can be used as a catalyst between data and optimizing clinical care for those who suffer from severe mental illness. He foresees clinical informatics becoming a vital aspect of every care delivery team. As clinical informatics continues to be ingrained within medical systems and healthcare delivery, he is excited to be a part of this transition and relish the career opportunities a master's degree in clinical informatics can provide.