Graduate Follows Unexpected Path to Career Success
By: Jeff Joiner | September 8, 2025
Jovelyn Castellanos MS’20 grew up wanting to be a doctor, but her experiences working for a nonprofit health provider convinced her that an alternative career path would better feed her passion for improving health care access.
Castellanos works for Health Wildcatters, a leading health care-focused accelerator and investment firm in Dallas that specializes in providing seed funding and resources for pioneering startups. As the director of strategic initiatives and public affairs, she is leading the company’s outreach efforts, including launching the Women in Science and Healthcare (WISH) Network in 2022, which now includes more than 500 members. Castellanos was recognized for her work with the WISH Network and Healthcare Wildcatters by being named one of the 40 Under 40 class of 2025 honored by the Dallas Business Journal.
As a student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Castellanos focused on a future in medicine by earning a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in molecular and cellular biology. After receiving her master’s, she decided to take a year off from college before starting medical school. That year changed the direction of her life.
During her gap year, Castellanos took a job with the Momentous Institute in Dallas, a nonprofit that works with children and their families in areas of social emotional and mental health needs. Working as a research coordinator, she collected data, served as a bilingual researcher, worked with parents on consent and explained the institute’s research. She also worked with school systems, including the Dallas Independent School District, involved in studying social emotional health in the classroom.
It was while at Momentous that she began to fully understand the need for more equitable health care access in many urban neighborhoods and the importance of social determinants of health, or the nonmedical determinants of health such as environment.
“This not only opened my eyes to the needs in our communities from a health care perspective but also made me realize that that there are careers out there in this work that make a difference,” Castellanos said. “I began to realize that communities need help and that you don’t have to be a doctor to give back to your community, so I decided to go back to school but not to medical school. That’s how I decided to go to UTD.”
Castellanos enrolled in the Healthcare Leadership and Management master’s degree program in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, which prepares students for careers in the nation’s growing health care industries.
“I did my research on schools and, growing up in Garland, Texas, I had always heard great things about UTD including that the professors were great,” Castellanos said. “And it was close to home.”
Castellanos continued working for Momentous full time while attending classes at UT Dallas in the evening. It was also during her last semester as a UT Dallas student that the global COVID-19 pandemic struck ― one which would not only impact her education but also have a profound effect on her understanding of health care. In-person classes at UTD went virtual during the pandemic, and the response to the disease was an eye-opening experience for a student of health care leadership.
“I remember looking at the email Dr. Britt Barrett sent us the week everything on campus was shut down,” Castellanos said. “He said, ‘Be a leader, be calm, be confident and be encouraging. Health care leaders are looked upon to lead, so set an example.’ He was so inspiring. I knew then we were living our education.”
After graduating, Castellanos’ career continued to focus on COVID-19 when she went to work for Parkland Hospital in Dallas in community relations where much of her work involved outreach efforts surrounding the pandemic. That’s where she developed a passion for strategic communications as she and her coworkers educated people about ways to avoid contracting COVID-19 with public messaging campaigns and creative community-based conversations.
When vaccinations were introduced, messaging shifted to creating trust in a health care system that encouraged vaccinations, especially in communities with limited health literacy.
“I would connect with different local, city and county leaders to create these conversations, even partnering with Univision,” said Castellanos, who was tasked with creating coalitions involving Latino, refugee and immigrant communities. “We created COVID vaccine pop-ups, put together educational programming, social media toolkits and worked with community leaders to create vaccine promotional messages.”
For Castellanos, the work she did for Parkland had a profound effect on her ideas about health care and access and changed the direction of a career.
Castellanos went to work briefly for the UT Southwestern Medical Center before joining the staff of Health Wildcatters where her work now focuses on the concepts of startups with transformational ideas for health care products and services. Launched in 2013, Health Wildcatters is an innovative hub for health care startups that has grown to support 118 companies and raise more than $350 million.
“It’s truly eye-opening to see how health care is changing so quickly,” Castellanos said. “Looking at it from a community perspective, it’s fascinating to see how innovations — from streamlining pre-authorizations to breakthroughs in biotech, life sciences and other emerging technologies — are poised to truly disrupt and transform the way health care is delivered.”
With her background in community health care access, Castellanos is constantly looking for ways to connect the dots between new technologies being developed by Health Wildcatters startups and the people who would benefit from the products and services.
“Innovation not only involves new technologies but also creating innovative ways that health care can be delivered,” she said.
Castellanos said her role with Health Wildcatters has shown her the future of health care ― something that is hard to see when you work in the midst of the system.
“Sometimes only when you step outside the traditional box of health care delivery can you see the future,” Castellanos said. “That has been very rewarding.”