Meet Eliza Gomez, a UTRGV Unsung Hero
Text by Amanda A. Taylor-Uchoa
Eliza Gomez, director of Emergency Management and Continuity Planning for all UTRGV campuses, is the first in her role supporting the Officer of Emergency Management. She joined UTRGV in 2020 to manage the newly created COVID Response Team to help mitigate the spread of the virus and serve the community during the surge of the pandemic.
While she has built a long career in emergency management, her favorite part of the job continues to be supporting the community with any concerns they might have. This included offering aid to COVID-19 cases at UTRGV by talking students and staff through their symptoms and fears.
“Emergencies and disasters don’t care about time, they happen when they do, and we, as the Office of Emergency Management and UTRGV’s Incident Management Team, are always ready to respond at any time,” she said.
WHAT IS YOUR ROLE AT UTRGV?
I work with our UTRGV partners across all departments and with our external community partner agencies to help make our UTRGV community safe, prepared, responsive and resilient to disasters or events that impact our community. I manage the coordination of communication, planning, exercising, training and evaluation of our plans, and our team builds relationships that strengthens our community’s resources and situational awareness. This spans public health and pandemic response, natural disasters such as hurricanes, severe weather and storms, and man-made threats such as bomb threats or active attacker/active shooter situations.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED HERE?
I joined the UTRGV family in early August 2020, recruited to create and manage the UTRGV COVID Response Team, and in July 2021 became the university’s first director of Emergency Management and Continuity Planning.
DESCRIBE YOUR AVERAGE DAY
The beautiful and exciting thing about the world of emergency management is that there’s no such thing as an average day. Something new is always happening, something new is always able to be learned, and new partnerships and collaborations are always to be discovered or created.
We participate in county, regional, state and UT System workgroups on topics like public health response, COVID-19/pandemic, annual professional conferences, coordination calls and briefings on latest weather reports, regular county meetings, trainings and exercises, our own lock-down drills, fire drills and power outages. We also do on-campus event planning and coordination, like graduation, press conferences, move-in days, and on-campus special events.
We’re the people “behind the scenes,” if you will, making sure all the things are in place and that supports and services are available whenever needed, such as law enforcement, fire or medical response, and crisis emergency notification to our campus community.
We work with law enforcement, fire rescue, health and medical providers and with our executive leadership at UTRGV to maintain the safety and security of our campuses and the UTRGV community every day. My schedule is never a typical office day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The work of an emergency manager is always 24/7/365. We monitor storm and weather announcements, field calls and questions, or address response situations late at night and on weekends. Emergencies and disasters don’t care about time, they happen when they do. And we, as the Office of Emergency Management and UTRGV’s Incident Management Team, are always ready to respond at any time.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF YOUR JOB?
I love what I do, but my favorite thing is to be able to teach others critical skills and concepts so they can be better prepared and ready to respond or react in times of crisis or disaster. Being able to share information with communities and link the segments of communities together in a fully inclusive, accessible way creates stronger, healthier, more resilient communities and businesses.
Learning from our experiences and growing and evolving from them makes the experience that much more valuable. And taking those lessons learned and making ourselves, our homes and our business operations stronger and better than before is what it’s all about for me. In our field, that’s called continuity, but in plain terms, it is really gaining wisdom, strength and building a better place than we had before.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE MEMORY, OR STORY, ABOUT YOUR TIME HERE?
While I’m thrilled that the level of health in our community has resumed after we have gone through “COVID-World,” and that the UTRGV COVID Response Team wrapped up its operations in May 2022, I deeply loved the work of our team and I can recall countless late-night screening calls with students who were nervous, anxious and scared as they were going through their symptoms and diagnosis and managing their health. Being available to them, letting them share their worries and fears with me, and sharing the protocols that UTRGV mindfully put in place to manage their care and return them to campus and life safely – that truly meant the world to me. As a mom, I know what it is to worry about my child away from home – that instinct never fades or goes away.
For departments that experienced outbreaks, being able to work with their management, protecting the privacy of sensitive information of individuals and treating them with the same dignity and respect that I and my team would demand in our own personal situations – that truly made me realize the importance of what we were doing. It was personal, and individual, and it mattered. At times, of course, we would receive frustrated cases, but the number of thankful emails, relieved phone conversations, and watching the patients safely return to their daily lives made all of us on the team feel a profound sense of gratitude and accomplishment of our mission to keep UTRGV safe and healthy. The unseen work our team put forth, combined with the incredible guidance and support of the School of Medicine and the UTRGV Infectious Disease Outbreak Committee, helped save lives and greatly reduce the spread of COVID-19 at a critical time.
COVID-19 is by no means gone, nor are pandemics in the future; but hopefully people remember the valuable and critically important ways to protect themselves and others around us so we can have a healthy and successful year. I’m proud and humbled to have played a part in that.
TELL US SOMETHING MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU:
I write poetry, throw pottery, and I am a strong advocate for special needs and the foster care/adoption community. I am a mom to my beautiful little boy thanks to the opportunity of being a medical foster parent and being able to make him mine forever.
WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UTRGV COMMUNITY?
I am so happy and humbled to be a part of the UTRGV family. I embrace its mission fully, and even before I moved to the Valley nearly five years ago, I knew I wanted to work with UTRGV. In fact, the very first phone call I made during my job search in the Valley (I was still living in Miami and working at another university at the time) was to a person with whom I have the privilege of working with every day. I love the fact that UTHealthRGV is growing and meeting the needs of the communities here, and I am excited to see the growth, change and progress across the Valley – from campuses to the mobile clinics, to testing and vaccination operations, to countless collaborations.
Every place I go I see the impacts UTRGV has, and that fills me with gratitude and pride. Watching my little boy wear his UTRGV gear puts a huge smile on my face. And hopefully, someday, he’ll join the ranks as a future Vaquero. UTRGV really is the future of Texas and it’s as bright and warm as the South Texas sun.
