Building a healthier Texas, one adolescent at a time

A typical well visit might not seem like the place for quiet revolution. But inside the exam rooms of People’s Community Clinic in Austin, where Celia Neavel, MD, has spent more than 30 years building comprehensive programs for at-risk youth, every visit is a step toward changing how medicine understands and serves adolescents.

A family physician with fellowship training in adolescent medicine and developmental disorders, Neavel is the founding director of the Center for Adolescent Health at People’s, a full-spectrum clinic that has grown into one of the most robust youth-focused programs in Central Texas. Her commitment to equity, team-based care, and community-rooted innovation has earned her the title of TAFP’s Texas Family Physician of the Year.

Still, she’s not likely to mention the title herself. “When talking to Dr. Neavel, you would never know the extent of her body of work and accomplishments,” says Feba Thomas, MD, a former colleague at People’s and Neavel’s nominator. “She often will credit her teams and colleagues, and you would never know how she drives these projects or how much she has done.”

Neavel’s path to medicine began early. “I wanted to be a doctor starting in fourth grade,” she said. Raised in Baytown, Texas, she was influenced by a family steeped in both science and social justice. Her father was a research scientist at Exxon and her mother cared for the family at home. 

“Her side of the family,” Neavel says of her mother, “social justice was incredibly important.” Neavel’s maternal grandmother worked at Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati, and Celia would occasionally accompany her to work. “I didn’t understand what she did until I started working at People’s and was introduced to this whole concept of health educators…. She would talk to women about birth control.” 

She earned her undergraduate degree from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas, a liberal arts track that fed her interest in narrative medicine. She then completed medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, followed by an internship in psychiatry and a family medicine residency at the University of Cincinnati, where she also completed a self-designed fellowship in adolescent and developmental medicine.

Along the way, she and her husband, pediatric urologist Joe Cortez, MD, raised three children: Beth, Elena, and Geordie. “My children have made me very brave,” she says. “I sometimes get their counsel as I’ve moved into areas that maybe weren’t comfortable for me.”

Building the Center for Adolescent Health

When Neavel created the Center for Adolescent Health in 1993 as part of People’s Community Clinic, she knew it would be a good fit for how she wanted to practice — holistically, compassionately, and with an eye toward systemic change.

“I was very clear about what my vision was,” she says. “I had this interdisciplinary model in mind from my fellowship.”

The Center for Adolescent Health is now a gold-certified youth-friendly program providing comprehensive care for adolescents and young adults ages 10 to 24. This includes behavioral health services, reproductive health care, LGBTQ+ affirming support, and developmental screenings.

A People’s colleague, Chief Medical Officer Louis Appel, MD, MPH, has worked with Neavel for more than 25 years. In his nomination letter, he wrote: “Long before the concepts were more broadly promoted, Dr. Neavel built a program that was and is team-based, holistic in its approach to care, and dedicated to the inherent value of youth and the importance of supporting youth to build a healthy future for themselves,” he wrote.

In 2005, Neavel launched the GOALS Program, Generating Outcomes and Liaisons for Students, to offer integrated care for children and youth with neurodevelopmental and behavioral concerns that interfere with learning. The collaborative program includes not only PCC physicians, but also social workers, psychiatrists, lawyers, and others.

“Dr. Neavel has exemplified compassionate care, visionary leadership, principled advocacy, heartfelt mentorship, and an unwavering dedication to the health of children, adolescents, young adults, and our community,” Appell wrote.

Advocacy and agency

Throughout her career, Neavel has balanced direct clinical care with relentless advocacy at the organizational, state, and national levels. She has testified before the Texas Legislature on reproductive health and vaccine access and played a key role in passing a law that allows teen parents to consent to their own vaccinations.

Neavel is active in the Texas Medical Association, where she helped create the LGBTQ Health Section and is active on the Committee on Behavioral Health and the Women Physicians Section, among other committees and task forces. She is also involved with the Texas Pediatric Society, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, and the Travis County Medical Society.

Her belief in agency, especially as a physician, is foundational to her advocacy. “Being a physician, what I’ve learned is even if you’re not feeling it, it gives you a lot of power and platform. So, you need to leverage that for good,” Neavel says.

Mentorship as legacy

Neavel is quick to point out that her accomplishments are never hers alone. “It’s not really so much about me, it’s about what the team is able to do together. I couldn’t do any of this without them,” she says.

Still, her mentorship has shaped countless careers. She developed the Plan II scribe program at People’s, where UT undergraduates interested in medicine work in the clinic as paid scribes and interns, gaining direct exposure to trauma-informed, relationship-centered care.

“She has mentored medical students and residents, MAs who have gone on to become nurses and physicians, nurses who have gone on to become nurse practitioners, scribes who have gone on to become physicians, and others,” Appel wrote in his nomination letter.

Seeing the whole person

Neavel is known for her ability to bridge disciplines and see the whole picture. “Adolescents don’t segregate their psyche and their soma,” she says, referring to the interconnectedness of the mind and body. “It’s very challenging to bridge into an adolescent whose world is completely different from yours and find the right language and body language and really be able to connect.... You have to be on your game with adolescents. You can’t walk in and not be there, because they’ll know.”

Her approach — equal parts science, sociology, and storytelling — has helped create safe spaces for some of the region’s most vulnerable youth. “She has built trust with these patients who have been harmed by many systems and empowered them to improve their health,” Feba Thomas, MD, wrote in her letter nominating Neavel for the award. “Many times, her exam rooms and department were the only safe space for vulnerable patients.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Neavel led wellness groups for staff, modeling the same trauma-informed care for her colleagues that she had practiced with patients for years.

“She’s always there to listen or help offer suggestions and advocate,” Thomas wrote. “Watching how she navigated growing a vision of team-based, holistic care for the adolescent population to empower themselves from a dream to a reality has been truly inspirational.”

Centering adolescents, changing medicine

Neavel sees adolescents and patients up to age 24 now — a decision she made deliberately. “I did not start out doing that, but that was a very good move. They bring in their babies or their boyfriends or girlfriends or whatever. So, it feels very family oriented,” she says.

Her team handles everything from anemia to trauma to gender-affirming care. And she continues to push systems forward, developing partnerships with schools, expanding behavioral health integration, and leading research on suicide prevention and trust in youth health care.

“I never thought this job would be so politically important,” she says. “This work has become just critical.”

Neavel has always believed that care should adapt to people, not the other way around. It may not have been called full-spectrum family medicine, or population health, or holistic team-based care when she started her career as a physician, but the health care world has caught up to the work she’s been doing all along.

“The language that I have now didn’t exist to explain what I was doing when I started. I love that medicine has sort of caught up. It’s given me words to explain what I do.”

Narrative medicine is one of those terms for her. “Now I know that’s what I believe in. It ties in all my love of reading and language and writing and art.”

Narrative medicine is a comprehensive, holistic discipline in which a physician or other provider applies linguistic skills to better understand the language patients use when describing their state, or when telling their stories.

“When you hear these stories, they could overwhelm or drown you, but if you can look at them as stories and you can say, okay, they’re going to exist whether I’m here or not. What can I do to make them different?”

She employs this approach outside the clinic as well, saying her work in organized medicine, in academia, and in advocacy is to channel those stories into change.

A legacy of relationships

From her earliest days, Neavel has built programs the same way she built her career: relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation. Early in her career at People’s, she spent time developing relationships with local doctors and community partners to build residency opportunities and curricula. Now 30 years later, she continues building new partnerships and maintaining decades-old relationships to benefit the clinic, its clinicians and staff, and her patients.

“You have a deep responsibility as a leader to use whatever platform you have to effect positive change,” she says. “The other thing, of course that’s gotten me through all of this is all these relationships with nonprofits and staff and MPHs and advocates. It’s wonderful when you can build these bridges, and you really form a community, a community of people you enjoy being with.”

The persistence has paid off. She helped found the Manor Mustang Health Center, a school-based clinic serving Manor ISD. She has co-written policy for TMA and helped develop a youth-friendly certification model for clinics statewide. And she continues to publish research on topics ranging from integrated care models to adolescent trust in mental health screening.

“Her impact on generations of patients and physicians will continue to be felt for years to come,” Thomas wrote of Neavel. “Her vision has guided not just the People’s Community Clinic Center for Adolescent Health, but many organizations in Texas and across the nation. She embodies what it is to be a family physician.”

When expressing her appreciation to those gathered at the awards ceremony during the 2024 Annual Session and Primary Care Summit in November, Neavel said she felt the award recognizes how important taking care of adolescents and young adults is for our future. “I’m very proud of family physicians. I’m proud to be in this space where we can drill into what data and science can teach us and also integrate our story about being humans together…. This award validates that constant striving to be wiser and smarter and more present for our most challenging patients is important.”