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Professor
University of Utah - Craig H. Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital
Mary Jo Pugh PhD, RN is a Research Career Scientist at VA Salt Lake City and a Professor of Medicine at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah. A critical mission drives her research: to define and predict the lifelong health consequences of military service. Informed by her unique perspective as a Veteran, nurse, and developmental psychologist, her work focuses on the complex aftermath of military exposures like Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
She pioneers the use of large, linked Department of Defense (DoD) and VA datasets to uncover hidden patterns, or phenotypes, among Veterans managing multiple chronic conditions. Her current studies are building one of the most comprehensive pictures of post-combat health to date, integrating this "big data" with deep clinical data from neuroimaging, biomarkers, and cognitive testing. This powerful approach allows her team to investigate the most pressing questions in Veterans' health, such as how repeated occupational blast exposure contributes to the later development of neurodegenerative diseases like epilepsy and dementia.
The ultimate goal is to transform TBI care from a one-size-fits-all model to one of precision and personalization. By applying artificial intelligence to this rich data, Dr. Pugh’s work aims to identify which Veterans are most at risk and to map optimal treatment pathways for their specific clinical profile, creating smarter, more effective treatment guidelines.
