Michael (Clay) Moore earned his bachelor’s degree from UNT in computer science in May 2020. In December 2021, he was in the first class of students to graduate with a master’s in artificial intelligence at UNT, the only university to offer such a program in Texas. His graduate work concentrated on machine learning, but as an undergraduate, his interest in modeling disease spread led Clay to the Center for Computational Epidemiology and Response Analysis (CeCERA), where he worked as a research assistant — work that continued as he pursued his master’s. In the CeCERA lab, he worked with RE-PLAN, a tool originally designed to be used by public health agencies to build response plans for anthrax or smallpox events. When the pandemic hit, RE-PLAN was extended into a COVID-19 vaccination distribution tool, which was licensed for commercial development, and Moore worked closely with the licensee to integrate the system into the company’s platform.