From Shadowing Dad to Serving Travis County
January 22, 2026
Dr. Madeline Huff continues a family legacy of caring.
It made sense when Madeline Huff decided to become a doctor.
She had spent years of her childhood working in her father Thomas’ Harlingen medical office, watching as the family medicine doctor helped a community in need.
And Dr. Thomas Huff had long served the Rio Grande Valley city of about 70,000 residents, sometimes spending entire days at his private family practice, staying until the late hours of the night to see every patient that he could.
However, it wasn’t until Madeline graduated from Texas State University with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in biochemistry that she fully understood the true importance of her father’s mission. It was then, working in a medical lab focused on nanomedicines—the kind of diagnostic tools that could one day prevent cancer—that she had a realization.
“At that time, I was missing something,” Dr. Huff said. “I think I was missing the human aspect that I was really craving. It was me wanting more of a human connection and to do something good, especially for my community.”
How Dr. Huff Found Her Path in Medicine
Next came The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, and then a family medicine residency at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. After completing residency with Dell Medical School in 2025, she was hired by CommUnityCare Health Centers, part of the Central Health system, to treat a patient population much like the one she grew up with.
And best yet, it was in family medicine, just like her father.
“I’m very proud of her,” Dr. Thomas Huff said. “She’s always showed an interest.”
A Background That Led to CommUnityCare Health Centers
The middle child of five, Dr. Huff remembers spending many days in her father’s office, sometimes filing charts for him, other times stuffing envelopes. Once, when her father was a medical director at the Wound Healing Center at Harlingen Medical Center, she shadowed him.
“That’s a good example of whether you want to be in medicine or not,” he said. “She passed that test.”
Those experiences made a difference, Madeline says, because what came from it was a sense of community.
“Whenever a patient walked out of a room, they weren’t even talking about medicine, they were talking about life. They were talking about family,” Dr. Huff said of her early experiences with her father.
When Dr. Huff enrolled in medical school, she felt UTRGV was the perfect fit because it tied her to the community that helped shape her. Later, when matching with Dell Med for a family medicine residency, its Advancing Care Transformation (ACT) curriculum stood out since it had a narrow eye on health system sciences.
“It focused on leadership, problem-solving, and quality improvement,” she said of the ACT program. “I had a background in research, and that’s something (which spoke to me): How do you make something better and more efficient?”
Just as important during her residency, though, were her clinical rotations at CommUnityCare Health Centers in year three of her training.
Her ambulatory care training was completed at the Central Health Southeast Health & Wellness Center, where she worked with a patient population that was largely enrolled in the Medical Access Program (MAP), a health coverage program for Travis County residents with low income and no access to other health care options. In 2024, the Central Health system served almost one in eight residents of Travis County, totaling just over 170,000 patients.
“Every single week we had a clinic as residents,” Dr. Huff said, “and we would have our own patient panels.”
One of her early victories was with a patient she treated with diabetes. Forming a treatment plan to reduce uncontrolled blood sugar levels, Dr. Huff worked with the patient to achieve lifestyle changes and healthy decision-making. About a year later, the patient’s hemoglobin a1c levels were back to normal.
“She cares about her patients,” Dr. Thomas Huff said. “She’s a caring person and has strong empathy for people. We have talked a lot about medical practice, and she does some of the same things I did—she crosses her t’s and dots her i’s. She doesn’t leave the clinic and forget about everything. She still thinks about her patients.”
Looking Ahead
As a family medicine provider—an area of medicine that includes pediatrics, obstetrics, family medicine, internal medicine, and geriatrics—Dr. Huff believes in treating patients with measures that can lead to the detection or treatment of chronic illnesses. When it comes to women’s health, she says, it’s about “empowering women about their own bodies and just helping them through all things.”
Dr. Huff’s training certainly prepared her for what’s ahead, but she hasn’t forgotten her family’s legacy and her father’s mentorship.
“I think just growing up and going into his office and seeing the impact that he had in our community really ignited that initial interest in medicine,” she said.
Her goals include investing more time in research, working toward leadership, and most importantly making an impact on the community she serves.
“That’s something I took away from him,” she said of her father. “It was the relationships that he built with his patients that were most important. I admired that, and I always hoped to do the same.”
