Megan Catlin (Cat-lynn) is a results-driven drug policy researcher with specialization in demography and data science applications to public health, national security, and public policy. As a Senior Data Scientist with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), she serves as an expert in a diverse portfolio of technical topics spanning drug availability and use while cultivating a passion for innovating analytical solutions to barriers to 21st century data insights. Megan is recognized for her persistently solution-oriented approach to coordinating and creating the missing relationships, methods, and tools that decisionmakers need to make smarter, timelier, and more efficient choices. One such project she spearheaded is the ONDCP Nonfatal Drug Overdose Dashboard; a first-of-its-kind, real-time surveillance tool for tracking nonfatal overdose, naloxone administrations, and related metrics nationwide, at state and county levels, by suspected drug involvement, and along leading demographic dimensions.

Megan’s vision for data modernization in the field is knit with a well-rounded knowhow of successful performance and budget integration, national and local program evaluation, and interagency coordination from her decade at ONDCP, prior nonprofit work manipulating big clinical data and drafting certification trainings for treatment program evaluators, and witnessing the complexities of substance use disorders firsthand as a mental health clinician. As ONDCP’s National Opioids and Synthetics Coordination Group’s Lead Statistician, Megan’s holistic view of the drug environment, its gaps, and the major players were instrumental in designing the White House’s evaluation system for tracking progress against the heroin epidemic. As part of that venture, she grew a network of 800 interdisciplinary professionals working on or adjacent to the crisis domestically and abroad and co-hosted monthly webinars for multiple years for purposes of bolstering rapid actionable surveillance, new data-sharing relationships, and aligning federal efforts with state and local requirements.

Megan has facilitated interagency drug data working groups, served on The Interdiction Committee, and provided data, quality assurance, visualizations, and talking points to support thousands of the Office’s public-facing materials, presentations, and senior-most level engagements. She’s written White Papers on topics such as, geospatial methods to save lives, tracking community vulnerability to the overdose epidemic, using time series analysis to identify growing disparities in opioid-involved mortality rates by race, creating an integrated system of drug data and statistics, and the economic benefit and return on investment of substance use disorder treatment services. She’s presented at MIT Hackathons and annual medical examiner and emergency medical services conferences and consulted on data science projects with entities like West Point’s Science Network Center, a Director of the Merida Initiative, and the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists. Her work also been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, and The Journal of Analytical Toxicology. Megan lives in Virginia Beach with her husband and three energetic toddlers.