Dr. William Kassler's resume is indeed impressive. He's worked as the Chief Medical Officer at the New England Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He ran the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) health research and evaluation branch, and he's even got private sector experience to boot. In fact, Dr. Kassler worked as the CMO for government health and human services at IBM (IBM  ) Watson Health while moonlighting as the division's deputy chief health officer.

Due to this background, Palantir (PLTR  ) recently put Dr. Kassler in charge of its life science and public health teams. Like other tech companies, Palantir is pushing hard into public health in the wake of the pandemic.

According to Julie Bush, the company's head of public and government health initiatives, Palantir's public health efforts go back much further, all the way back to 2010 in fact.

Back then, the number-crunching firm put its software to good use to help the CDC coordinate data about food-borne outbreaks from different state health agencies. Palantir's software helped bring together "multiple data sources" to "answer critical questions quickly," Bush told FierceBiotech.

And it's these capabilities proved more than necessary during the pandemic. Palantir's roster of public health clients more than doubled last year as the firm helped with vaccine rollouts and contact tracing. But despite this success, there are a few concurrent problems- which have since become the core focuses of Palantir's public health initiatives.

According to Bush, the company aims to achieve greater harmonization among different data sources, protect security and patient identities, manage various analytic models more efficiently, and improve collaboration between data scientists and health practitioners.

It's on this last item where Dr. Kassler's experience will be crucial. Using his public health know-how and his private tech experience, Dr. Kassler hopes to serve as an intermediary of sorts between these two camps.

"In order to deploy technology, you have to understand the theory and the logic and the practice of healthcare and public health," he told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

"What I can bring to Palantir is my expertise as a clinician...as somebody who has been working in this field for years to help with the science and the strategy and the relationships."

Kasher also hopes to put Palantir's software solutions into the hands of public health officials to help them make better decisions in the next pandemic. Key areas he wants to focus on include: patching supply chain issues, dealing with localized hotspots, and tracking racial and ethnic inequities.

Kassler also wants to apply Palantir's tech to more practical uses. For instance, Palantir's software could help the CDC narrow down the location of outbreaks of food-borne illness to avoid sweeping food recalls. Or to help pharmaceutical companies and regulators to look through different datasets to help speed along the process of drug development.

"We have the ability to apply advanced analytic techniques... but we first have to get that data together and into a format that'll let us take advantage of these wonderful technological developments," said Dr. Kassler, quoted by CNBC. "That's what's really exciting about the tools that Palantir has to offer."