Cason Schmit—an associate professor at Texas A&M University School of Public Health—directs the MPH program and the Program in Health Law and Policy. A licensed attorney with a JD from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, Schmit's interdisciplinary research spans law, health informatics, ethics, and public health policy, with notable publications, including in Science, Milbank Quarterly, BMC Public Health, and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
His work, initially at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and continuing at Texas A&M, explores the role of law as a tool to promote population health. He studies law as a structural determinant of health and has 10 years of experience in legal epidemiology (i.e., the study of the impact of law and policy on population health). He has created longitudinal and cross-sectional legal datasets for assessing the health or economic impacts of law, including datasets on vaccination laws, health information exchange, telehealth, community health workers, and COVID-19 emergency actions.
Schmit's current research centers on health information technology, particularly the alignment (or misalignment) between law and public health ethics. A voting member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance standards workgroup, he is actively exploring AI regulatory strategies that integrate public health policy innovations. Schmit also advises state and national policymakers and advisory bodies on health data policy and public health data governance, collaborating with organizations such as the CDC, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, and the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. His work has directly influenced proposed federal public health data modernization policies.
