Alumni Spotlight: Amy Neftzger
Henry David Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” No one has taken that more to heart than Amy Neftzger (’89). As a child, she was destined to be a jack of all trades. Whether it was entering writing contests or following her grandfather’s musical footsteps, she balanced multiple hobbies at once. As an adult, she remains busy with a myriad of activities.
Neftzger knew that life’s journey would only get crazier once she became a military spouse. She started taking college classes in California and continued studying in New England when her husband got temporarily stationed up north. When he got relocated again in Jacksonville, she finished her psychology degree at the University of North Florida. She remembers taking Dr. Fred Rahaim’s Industrial Organizational Psychology course and realized that’s what she wanted to pursue. In 1992, she went on to earn her master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from Middle Tennessee State University, and has settled down in the greater Nashville area.
After completing her postgraduate degree, Neftzger took a position in human resources for the Tennessee State Department. She quickly excelled in the field, performing organizational and job analysis to design strategies to test the effectiveness of HR programs regarding employee selection, training and evaluation. She started creating standardized assessments for national organizations while simultaneously teaching students industrial and organizational psychology as an adjunct professor at MTSU. She has become a leader in the healthcare analytics field, having spent six years as a director at Optum, leading the Payment Integrity operations group to identify healthcare fraud through behavior patterns. In 2021, she was promoted to her current position of senior director of advanced research and analytics for UnitedHealth Group, where she manages analytic teams to improve the health care experience for special needs and high-risk populations.
Throughout this journey, Amy Neftzger - Author maintained her interest in writing. She authored numerous educational publications, and she’s currently working on a couple more tackling bias in machine learning and validity issues with modeling. She’s also written fiction with her novel “The Ferryman” and short stories including “Confessions From a Moving Van” and “Conversations With The Moon.” Plus, she writes stories for children, having finished three volumes in “The Kingdom Wars” series. Her first children’s book — and first work as an illustrator — was “All That the Dog Ever Wanted,” in which a golden retriever learns how to play jazz. Since she balances so many projects, she never suffers from writer’s block. “If I’m ever struggling to continue a story, I’ll shift to something else,” she said. “After not seeing it for a month, I’ll return with a fresh perspective.”
She finds the fiction works to be more challenging than the nonfiction — since you must manifest the architecture and believable content — but there’s not too much difference between preparing adult fiction versus children’s fiction. She starts both by “searching for urban legends and doing background analysis on the parameters.” The main difference is that she tones down the subject matter and language while avoiding “talking down” to the kids. Her literary influences are Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett — the latter two whom she named her dogs after.
Music is still a big part of her life, as well. She no longer studies piano and flute like when she was younger, but she did pick up drumming a while back and joined her husband, guitarist Tyra Elliott Neftzger, in a band called Lucky Munk. They also love to travel, and the couple spent two years living in Ireland and traveling across the European Union, spending a month in each country. They ended by celebrating Christmas in the actual North Pole in the Arctic Circle.