As Chief Data Officer and former Director of Health Services Research for the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI), Dr. Thomas Carton leads multiple teams that conduct various types of health services research that span clinical research, quality improvement, and social epidemiology. As Principal Investigator of the Research Action for Health Network (REACHnet), Dr. Carton leads a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team that is creating a regional informatics, patient engagement, and research infrastructure to efficiently conduct comparative effectiveness research. Both positions underscore the importance of collaborative work grounded in frequent communication, careful planning and budgeting, realistic research objectives, and mentoring within and beyond my organization. He holds (or held) multiple leadership positions within PCORnet (the national Patient Centered Research Network), including Chair of the PCORnet Steering Committee and leading or co-leading working groups on data linkage, health services and public health research, research innovations, and cross-network collaborative research. Locally, Dr. Carton serves on the board of the community health information exchange, the Greater New Orleans Health Information Exchange. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Global Health Systems and Development at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where he teaches doctoral level econometrics classes and mentor pre-doctoral trainees in advanced statistical and econometric methods.