Octavio N. Martinez Jr., M.D., MPH

Octavio N. Martinez Jr., M.D., MPH, is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is also the fifth executive director to lead the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health since its creation in 1940 and senior associate vice president of The University of Texas at Austin Division of Campus and Community Engagement.

The foundation’s grants and programs support mental health services, research, policy analysis and public education projects in Texas. The Hogg Foundation is part of the Division of Campus and Community Engagement at UT Austin. Martinez heads up the Community Integrated Health Initiatives program for the division. He is also a clinical professor in the university’s Steve Hicks School of Social Work; faculty affiliate with the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice in the School of Law and an adjunct professor at UT Health San Antonio/Long School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Martinez currently serves on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for Preparedness and Response Board of Scientific Counselors and on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Health and Medicine Division’s Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity. He formerly served on NASEM HMD’s Standing Committee on Medical and Public Health Research during large-scale emergency events, as well as on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Governance and Financing of Graduate Medical Education (2014) and the Committee on the Mental Health Workforce for Geriatric Populations (2012).

From 2002 to 2006, he served as a Special Emphasis Panel member for the National Institutes of Health, National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Martinez also served on the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services to the Secretary of Health. Additionally, Martinez is a member of the board of directors for Trust for America’s Health, board member (and former chair) of the National Hispanic Council on Aging, a commissioner on the Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health, executive committee member of the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium and a member of the Austin State Hospital Redesign Steering Committee.

Prior to joining the Hogg Foundation in 2008, Martinez was a clinical psychiatrist at Albemarle Mental Health Center and an affiliate associate professor at the Brody School of Medicine in North Carolina. He was part of a team that created a 23-hour crisis unit at Albemarle Hospital in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to serve a 10-county catchment area that includes the Outer Banks.

Before that, he was an assistant professor and psychiatrist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and a faculty associate with the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics. In San Antonio, he served as director of psychiatric consultation-liaison services for University Hospital and the Audie L. Murphy Veterans Administration Hospital. He also was co-director of behavioral sciences for the UTHSCSA medical school and developed two community psychiatric clinics for underserved areas of Bexar County.