Dr. Pont is passionate about working towards good health for all through clinical care, education, policy, and research. In 2017 Dr. Pont joined the Texas Department of State Health Services’ (DSHS) executive team and now serves as the Medical Director for the Center for Public Health Policy and Practice. Dr. Pont served as the Acting State Epidemiologist from February through December of 2020 and served as a member of Texas’ Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel and the department’s executive COVID response leadership team. The DSHS Center for Public Health Policy and Practice includes the Office of Practice and Learning and the Office of Public Health Policy. These offices include the Preventive Medicine Residency Program, Texas Public Health Library, Continuing Education programs, DSHS Institutional Review Board, Office of Minority Health designation for the state, and policy expertise across many fields, including health disparities, health economics, and Medicaid. Additionally, Dr. Pont is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population Health with the University of Texas Dell Medical School and an Adjunct Associate Professor with Texas A&M College of Medicine. Prior to joining DSHS, Dr. Pont worked to improve the health of children, families, and communities with a focus on underserved and Spanish speaking populations. For nearly a decade Dr. Pont served as the Medical Director for Austin Independent School District, including providing leadership to help guide the district through the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and helping to advance a number of school and community-based health initiatives. Dr. Pont has provided clinical care in Federally Qualified Health Centers and at Dell Children’s Medical Center where he co-founded the Texas Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Obesity, which grew to include nationally recognized multidisciplinary individual and group family-based programs, community initiatives, health policy work, and intervention based research addressing childhood obesity and healthy living. Nationally, he co-founded and served as the inaugural chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Obesity, and he has been an investigator or center director on more than $75 million of philanthropic, CDC, NIH, and Medicaid/1115 Waiver grant funding. In his free time, Dr. Pont enjoys playing the guitar, learning martial arts with his sons, and an annual mission trip to Guatemala with his church where he and his wife collaborate with a Mayan community development non-profit to teach a lay midwife training program.