As the director of community and research development Todd Gary focuses on building external relationships with members of the regional and national biomedical data science industry for the School of Applied Computational Sciences. He has experience working in the health care data science industry as a visiting scholar and as director of research at WPC Healthcare where he received national recognition for creating the Sepsis Condition Awareness Platform. He also has advised several graduate students throughout their data science practicum projects, many of which were conducted with industry partners including several Fortune 500 companies and nationally known health care scientists.

Gary has more than 20 years of experience creating major research and infrastructure projects within the community of minority serving institutions, especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

• He founded and then directed the Institute for Understanding Biology Systems for 10 years, helping to create and fund undergraduate research programs at Tennessee State University.
• He co-founded and directed the Minority Institute Astrobiology Collaborative (MIAC), and the NASA Minority Institution Research Support (MIRS) program. These programs attracted the attention and support of Nobel laureate Barry Blumberg and were presented at the National Academies of Science. This work led to research support and faculty development, which allowed 30 faculty members to receive external funding and faculty promotions.
• He has collaborated with faculty members from more than 20 MSIs on research proposals and have had great success mentoring students in research. He developed an undergraduate research model published in the Council of Undergraduate Research and has had more than 40 students as co-authors on publications and presentations at national conferences.  
• He also has experience as a supervisor, including hiring and training more than 20 part-time and full-time staff members and 40 volunteers to engage as many as 8,000 K-12 students in STEM activities at an HBCU.