When Cassius Lockett was getting his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis, he worked in the kitchen of a restaurant being investigated for possibly causing several cases of acute gastroenteritis — the stomach flu.

It was during this investigation that he met an epidemiologist and an environmental health specialist from the local health department. Lockett was immediately hooked while talking to the epidemiologist about their job and decided to combine epidemiology with the nutrition education he was already pursuing.

Lockett, 55, now leads the Southern Nevada Health District, an agency that oversees the health of more than 2.3 million Nevada residents and 40 million tourists annually.

He replaced Dr. Fermin Leguen, who retired last month.

“It’s a privilege to work in SNHD with all its innovation, and one of the main things that drove me to apply for this position was the passion from the employees. They really do work hard,” Lockett said. “It’s a privilege to serve this community. Actually, every day I wake up and I really feel fortunate to work here and work in this community.”

Before landing in Las Vegas, Lockett worked in various roles across northern California and as an epidemic intelligence officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also spent almost a decade teaching epidemiology, infectious disease and informatics at the private Walden University in Minneapolis.

Lockett first joined SNHD in 2014 as director of community health, then moved back to California’s Bay Area two years later to take care of his father, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

From 2016 to 2021, Lockett served as director of public health, policy and planning for San Mateo County, Calif., but Las Vegas had become another home for him.

Lockett and his wife were married at the Riviera — now the site of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall — and he missed the “very passionate employees here and the innovation that is produced from this organization.” He returned to Las Vegas in 2021 just before the emergence of COVID-19 strains like the omicron variant, and helped lead the region’s response, pushing for vaccination and testing events that led to the health district administering over a million vaccines during the height of the pandemic.

As director of disease surveillance and control at SNHD in 2021, Lockett used his experience in California with large-scale, community-based testing to organize over 20 testing sites across the region through a mobile testing van. They also tested on site at a couple of casinos.

Lockett said that effort “really helped us with our case detection” and instructing the public on how to protect themselves from COVID through masking and social distancing or isolating when sick.

Lockett was approved in a unanimous vote to become the next district health officer at a meeting in the fall.

Board members commented that they appreciated his commitment to following data and science, as well as his future vision for the health district, which includes efforts to continue strengthening the region’s public health infrastructure and address the impact of environmental factors like climate change on human health.

“Since your arrival, I’ve seen a tremendous evolution in disease surveillance for the health district,” Frank Nemec, a physician and at-large member of the board, said in October. “I appreciate your work there and bringing science to this department in a meaningful and constructive way. I look forward to your leadership.”

The future of health in the U.S. remains up in the air as the nation deals with diseases such as the spreading measles outbreak in Texas and the growing risk of bird flu, which has infected at least 70 people — with one death — and caused massive outbreaks in birds, poultry and dairy.

It’s all been made even more unstable with the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, placing a known anti-vaccination advocate, raw milk enthusiast and COVID conspiracy theorist at the head of the nation’s health response amid a time of low vaccination rates.

But Lockett’s biggest worry is the slashing of critical funding at the federal level that could help SNHD and other localized health agencies offer services to the public, especially as President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) promise cuts in staff and budgets to a number of areas.

Lockett said a reduction or elimination of federal funding is “going to impact the public health infrastructure and our ability to respond to any kind of emerging infectious diseases.” He added that SNHD has seen this and planned for the shrinking of some federal resources and “natural ending” of a few grants in the next year or two.

To retain their workforce, Lockett is looking at more public health funding through grants, and noted that Gov. Joe Lombardo has made a line item specifically for public health infrastructure in the state’s proposed budget this year.

There’s also plenty of new initiatives Lockett wants to tackle as the district health officer, he said. He plans to work on projects that modernize data to get electronic laboratory results or health records to people faster; help implement a vector control system; and mitigate the impacts of heat on the public, especially after the record-breaking summer Las Vegas experienced last year.

He’s especially passionate about a program he called “Nurse with a Backpack,” a medically licensed street team that would provide basic treatment and resources on site to the homeless in urban and rural areas of Southern Nevada.

But it’ll all come down to funding.

“One of the things we would like to do is work with the current administration and find neutral ground and activities because right now, I mean, there’s just no crystal ball,” Lockett said. “I think it’s going to be more important than ever, regardless of what happens, that we use data to guide our decisions and data to guide our communications. That’s going to be key moving forward.”