Dr. Prathit Kulkarni is currently Assistant Chief of the Medical Care Line at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, Texas. He is also Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Infectious Diseases at Baylor College of Medicine.

Dr. Kulkarni originally hails from Tyler, Texas. He attended Rice University for his undergraduate studies, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry. He then attended Baylor College of Medicine for medical school, where he completed the International Health Track. Thereafter, he did residency training in Internal Medicine & Pediatrics also at Baylor, during which time he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.

Following this, Dr. Kulkarni spent 2 years working at CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer. Projects there included work related to the Ebola virus disease epidemic, an outbreak of meningococcal meningitis at a large university, and an investigation into a cluster of illnesses due to the toxic chemical methyl bromide.

After his time at CDC, Dr. Kulkarni returned to Baylor to complete fellowship training in adult Infectious Diseases. After fellowship, Dr. Kulkarni stayed on as an attending physician at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and as a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine. Most recently, he has actively been working on the COVID-19 response since the pandemic began several months ago.

Dr. Madhuri Sopirala, MD, MPH serves as the Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Control at VA North Texas Health Care System and as an Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX.  She is a board-certified Infectious Diseases Physician with a Master's in Public Health in Clinical Investigation.  She has over 14 years of experience in hospital epidemiology and infection control and in infectious diseases.  She is a fellow of Infectious Diseases Society of America and American College of Physicians.