Chad Cross discusses the One Health approach, his penchant for building new programs and the emerging New World screwworm threat.

Welcome to Rise & Research where cutting-edge discoveries are made as accessible as your morning coffee. This monthly feature offers a closer look at the transformative research happening on our campus. Pull up a chair as we talk with faculty who are pushing boundaries while creating opportunities for the next generation. 

In this installment, Jacob Gordon sits down with Chad Cross to discuss his research interest and work as a professor of One Health.

I sit at a table in front of the door of a small coffee shop in Amarillo, Texas. The walls of windows help usher in the mid-morning sunlight while the consistent burring of coffee grinders and hissing of espresso machines fills the air.

Chad Cross, professor of One Health at Texas Tech University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, enters shortly after I’ve set up for our discussion. As we approach the counter to order our drinks and food, he tells me why this is his go-to coffee spot. Turns out, there’s more than just his desire to support a local establishment.

“It’s very close to my office, so I can easily walk here, especially on a beautiful day like today,” he says. “They also roast their own beans, and I’m a great fan of that. I roast my own, too.”

Cross joined Texas Tech this past fall after spending more than two decades at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) School of Public Health. He also spent a decade in federal service with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Veterans Health Administration.

His background is tailor-made for One Health, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the way humans, animals and the environment interact and affect each other. Cross has six degrees: bachelor’s degrees in biology and wildlife science, master’s degrees in counseling, entomology and nematology, as well as mathematics and statistics, and a doctoral degree in ecology. 

We sit down to talk about his research interests, the One Health approach and how the emerging threat of New World screwworm demands a One Health response. 

Q: For those who may be unfamiliar, can you describe what the One Health approach is?

A: It’s really the merging of human, animal and environmental health together. It’s a forced de-siloing of three traditionally separate disciplines. One Health itself isn't a discipline; it is a context for how we approach research.

And it’s not necessarily new. In the early 1900s people started talking about the importance of not just looking at the health of humans, but also the health of animals because they share diseases, spaces, water and lots of things in which their connection makes a lot of sense. Not only that, we live in an environmental context. What we do to the environment impacts us, and what happens in the environment is not independent of our health.

Q: Can you talk about how your academic trajectory led to you being a professor of One Health?  

A: I started off very traditionally in wildlife biology and minored in biochemistry and mathematics. I sort of fell in love with this idea of using advanced models to tell a story, so I started looking for degree programs for graduate school.

I ended up at Old Dominion University and got a master’s degree in mathematics simultaneously with my doctorate in ecological sciences. I worked with both departments and helped them develop a new degree program where students can do the master’s and doctorate simultaneously in those two disciplines. It was a way for me to help build something that didn’t exist at the time. 

Immediately after completing graduate school, I accepted a position as an assistant professor in biology and mathematics at a small state college in the Midwest. I left my academic position to do a postdoc in environmental health and spatial statistics with the EPA on the UNLV campus. We were developing some interesting technology associated with geographical information systems. We focused a lot on human and animal health, environmental health and ecosystems. For example, what happens if you convert a forest into a megastore parking lot? What does that do to runoff and water contamination and human health concerns with air contaminants? I found myself becoming more involved in human health, as opposed to just focusing on the health of animals.

I decided that if I was going to be working on the human side of things, I needed to become better at communicating with groups and processing and understanding the human condition. I ended up with my master’s degree in counseling, and I worked in clinical practice part time for about a dozen years. I found I became really interested in working with people and understanding people.

"One Health itself isn't a discipline; it is a context for how we approach research."

Q: How did you become interested in pairing public health with your academic background?

A: As I was doing my postdoc, we started asking important questions about environmental health, and it became very apparent to me that healthy environments can lead to healthy populations and unhealthy populations can lead to unhealthy environments.

I helped develop a new program in epidemiology and biostatistics as part of UNLV’s growing interest in public health, which brought several individual disciplines together to answer very complex problems. There were only a couple of people who had formal public health training. The rest of us brought our own disciplines and learned along the way. 

What we learned quickly was that every question we had associated with health — whether that was the health of the environment, animals or people — was a brand-new inquiry in our state because no one had investigated it. It became a great opportunity for us to really develop from the ground up, not only an academic program, but an entire formalized set of public health questions.

Q: I know you’re still settling into your role at Texas Tech, but what drew you to the School of Veterinary Medicine and becoming a professor of One Health? 

A: I saw this as a great opportunity to bring my experience and my research skills and interest to help another new program grow. 

What we do in One Health here is novel to the state. I think it will help build a sustained agenda for the institution. It will also help develop our basic knowledge and understanding of disease and disease processes for the entire state of Texas and the Panhandle for a long time. Lots of rural livestock locations and feedlots in an area that weren’t well serviced by veterinary science now have an opportunity to have rurally trained veterinarians. I think the impact potential is huge.

Q: You’ve spoken about New World screwworm in the past. What makes it such a looming threat?

A: It’s an ectoparasite, so it is external to the body, but essentially burrows into tissues to feed. It was very prevalent in this part of the world not so long ago but was pushed south past Panama and to South America in the 1960s.

Because it has been absent from the U.S. for so long, it’s really dropped out of our common thinking about what we need to be concerned about for livestock and animal health and human health. The people who were around in the 60s, the cowboys and the ranchers and those who had to deal with this, are largely no longer around. There isn’t a lasting historic memory of the parasite to a great degree. 

Q: How does a One Health approach address something like New World screwworm?

A: We have several governmental agencies who are working with local and statewide veterinarians on animal health who are partnering with the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) with human medicine and with wildlife professionals. Looking at human, animal and environmental health all together is foundationally how this problem is being approached.

We have started a huge front-end development to build capacity among local, state and federal parties, as well as physicians and veterinarians. We have participated in tabletop exercises that brought together several hundred folks in a big room and went through scenarios about how we would handle these things. We’re developing technologies at Texas Tech, as well as other universities here in Texas, to detect, prevent and address the issue from a foundationally interdisciplinary perspective.

Q: What excites you about the opportunity of working at a new program like the School of Veterinary Medicine?

A: I like to help new students and young professionals develop careers to answer the questions I’ll never have time to get to or that I can’t even think of currently. If students want an opportunity to work in a program that is by definition de-siloed, and where they get to think about problems from broad perspectives, this is a great opportunity to do that. 

This is a great chance for existing veterinarians to come and get trained in One Health Sciences. They’d be able to expand what they do clinically into research enterprises. I’m happy to work with anyone who wants to look at interesting questions from different perspectives.

Q: What does From Here, It’s Possible™ mean to you?

A: What I like about that slogan is it reminds us that we have invested in something that is sustainable long term. Even if you get a job outside of your discipline, what you learned at Texas Tech and the context of all of that core disciplinary learning is going to be brought to bear on what you do for a living. If you can invest in education, you can go anywhere you want to go.

About Chad Cross

Degrees: B.S. Purdue University, 1993 and 1994; M.S. Old Dominion University, 1997; M.S. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2003; M.S. University of Florida, 2021; Ph.D. Old Dominion University, 1998. 

Learn more about Texas Tech's School of Veterinary Medicine.