Deborah C. and Clifton B. Phillips Centennial Chair for Clinical Research in Transplant Medicine, J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center
Professor of Outcomes Research in Surgery, Academic Institute
Director, Patient Engagement, Diversity, and Education, Department of Surgery
Houston Methodist
Weill Cornell Medical College
Dr. Waterman is a national innovator, a Full Professor, and the Division Chief for Patient Engagement and Diversity, representing both J.C. Walter Transplant Center at Houston Methodist Hospital and the Center for Health Data Science and Analytics at the Houston Methodist Research Institute.
As a Health Services Researcher and Social Psychologist, she has conducted research in areas including how best to expand access to optimal treatments, reduce racial disparities, ensure informed decision-making, ensure patient-centered care, and improve health outcomes. Her work also examines the effectiveness of educational and multilevel interventions to improve care delivery and reduce racial disparities in access to optimal treatment outcomes. She has been the Principal Investigator on 10 federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has published more than 125 journal articles and book chapters, and has designed and tested the efficacy of a suite of innovative educational resources including mobile decision aid applications, a digital storytelling application, and texting interventions about living donation. These award-winning resources have been translated into multiple languages and delivered to patients in thousands of clinical settings in the United States, Canada and online. Her research has been supported by almost $30 million in grants.
She is also a national policy leader in the area of transplantation, having served on multiple national committees for the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), The Transplantation Society (TSS), and the American Society of Transplantation (AST). She co-chaired national workgroups for the AST’s Consensus Conference on Best Practices in Live Kidney Donation, which established a set of recommendations for optimal transplant education, and for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) End-Stage Renal Disease Access to Kidney Transplantation to develop quality metrics for transplantation within dialysis centers. She served as a keynote speaker at the White House’s Organ Donation Summit, after which she led the design and development of a national, web-based clearinghouse of educational resources about kidney transplant and living donation which launched online by UNOS. Finally, she continues to serve as an AST Fellow and received the 2019 AST Clinician of Distinction Award for national influence in transplantation by a non-physician. Prior to joining the faculty at Houston Methodist Research Institute, she was a faculty member at both the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
