Dr. Tyndall is the Director of Advanced Analytics and Visualization within the Tennessee Department of Health’s (TDH) Office of Informatics and Analytics (OIA). He is responsible for leading the team that runs Tennessee’s drug overdose surveillance activities, including work on several federally funded grants. Over the past four years, his team has established a robust public health surveillance system for overdose using primarily pre-existing sources of administrative health data. This work includes innovative uses of data including hospital discharge records, syndromic surveillance, death certificates, toxicology results, prescription drug monitoring data, and arrest data, among others. These data support the state’s overdose prevention and treatment activities, and they guide planning and the allocation of resources across several state agencies. Dr. Tyndall also supports the development of the TDH Integrated Data System which is used to link these disparate sources of data for use in the department’s work. He is also involved in several data modernization and workforce development initiatives being undertaken in the department.

Dr. Tyndall received his PhD in sociology, with a concentration in quantitative methods, from Vanderbilt University. He has over four years of experience working with OIA on overdose surveillance activities and supporting development of the Integrated Data System. Dr. Tyndall has over six years of experience working on federally funded grant activities focused on drug use, including CDC’s Overdose Data to Action and Prevention for States grants as well as several Bureau of Justice Assistance grants.