Representative Shelley Sekula-Gibbs

Shelley Ann Sekula-Gibbs (born June 22, 1953) is an American physician and Republican politician who served as a Representative from Texas in the United States Congress from 2006 to 2007. She represented Texas’s 22nd congressional district for the final weeks of the 109th Congress, having won a special election in November 2006. A dermatologist by training, she holds the distinction of being the first dermatologist and the first female physician to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Over the course of her career, she has combined medical practice, local government service, and regional governance, and she currently serves as a director on The Woodlands, Texas, Township Board of Directors.

Sekula-Gibbs was born on June 22, 1953, to parents of Czech, German, and Polish ancestry. She was raised in Texas and educated in Catholic schools, ultimately attending Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. There she excelled academically, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry. She went on to earn her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Following medical school, she completed a residency in family practice at the University of Florida and then a dermatology residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she specialized in dermatology.

Following her medical training, Sekula-Gibbs established a dermatology practice in the Clear Lake area of Houston, building a long-standing career as a clinician. She operated her own dermatology practice for many years before selling it in 2015. She later returned to practicing dermatology in November 2023. In addition to private practice, she was active in academic medicine, teaching at Ben Taub Hospital and serving as a clinical assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in the Texas Medical Center. Her professional and civic engagement extended to regional health policy and medical institutions: she served on the Greater Houston Partnership’s Health Care Advisory Committee, on the Houston-Galveston Area Council Emergency/Trauma Care Policy Council, and on the board of directors of the Friends of the Texas Medical Center Library.

Sekula-Gibbs entered electoral politics in Houston at the beginning of the 2000s. In 2001, running as Shelley Sekula-Rodriguez, a name she used during her marriage to KHOU-TV newscaster Sylvan Rodriguez, she won election to the Houston City Council, At-Large Position Three. She was re-elected in 2005 under her present name, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, and became the first physician ever elected to serve on the Houston City Council. During her tenure from 2002 to 2006, she served on a wide range of committees, including the Quality of Life, Budget and Fiscal Affairs, Pension Review, Council Governance, Environment and Public Health, Ethics, and International Liaison and Protocol committees. Her council service focused on municipal quality of life, fiscal oversight, public health, and ethics in city government. She resigned her city council seat on November 8, 2006, following her victory in the special election to fill the unexpired term of Representative Tom DeLay. A special election to fill her vacated council seat was held in May 2007; in the runoff, Democrat Melissa Noriega won the position.

Her entry into congressional politics came amid the controversy surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who had represented the area that included her residence after the 2003 Texas redistricting. DeLay, under indictment on conspiracy charges—charges on which he was ultimately acquitted in 2013, with the acquittal affirmed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 1, 2014—announced his retirement rather than face a difficult re-election campaign. After DeLay’s announcement, Sekula-Gibbs expressed interest in the seat but waited for him to complete the official withdrawal procedure before filing her papers. Because Texas courts ruled that Republicans could not replace DeLay’s name on the November 2006 general election ballot after he had won the primary, the party was forced to turn to a write-in strategy. On August 17, 2006, Republican precinct chairpersons selected Sekula-Gibbs as the endorsed Republican write-in candidate for the 22nd District. Several Republicans—Sekula-Gibbs, Tom Campbell, Tim Turner, and David Wallace, the mayor of Sugar Land—had sought the endorsement. Campbell and Turner withdrew and supported her after her selection, while Wallace initially continued his own write-in campaign before dropping out days later.

The 22nd District, encompassing parts of Fort Bend, Galveston, Brazoria, and Harris Counties, was heavily Republican, having supported President George W. Bush with approximately 64 percent of the vote in 2004. Nonetheless, the write-in requirement made Sekula-Gibbs’s task difficult, as write-in candidates historically had not prevailed in Texas, and the district’s electronic voting machines required voters to spell out a candidate’s name via a wheel-and-cursor system. The race, in which she faced Democratic former Representative Nick Lampson and Libertarian Bob Smither, was rated one of the most competitive in the country by national political analysts, with several nonpartisan reports classifying it as leaning Democratic. A late October 2006 poll by John Zogby, sponsored by the Houston Chronicle and KHOU, showed Lampson leading with 36 percent to Sekula-Gibbs’s 28 percent among more than 500 likely voters. On November 7, 2006, she lost the general election to Lampson but simultaneously won a separate special election held the same day to fill the remaining weeks of DeLay’s unexpired term.

Texas Governor Rick Perry had announced on August 29, 2006, that a special election for the unexpired portion of DeLay’s term would be held on November 7, 2006, concurrent with the general election. This unusual arrangement required voters in the 22nd District to cast ballots twice for the same congressional seat—once in the special election to fill the term ending January 3, 2007, and once in the general election for the full term beginning that day—with different sets of candidates on each ballot. Sekula-Gibbs appeared by name on the special-election ballot, along with Libertarian Bob Smither, while Lampson chose not to file for the special election and appeared only on the general-election ballot. Sekula-Gibbs characterized the arrangement as an “unusual race” but noted that having her name on one ballot would serve as a “memory jog” for voters asked to write in her name on the other. She won the special election on November 7, 2006, and was sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives on November 13, 2006. Her brief tenure in Congress, which lasted until January 3, 2007, coincided with the closing weeks of the 109th Congress. During this period, she participated in the legislative process and represented the interests of her constituents, stating that she intended to use her time in Washington “for tax cuts, for immigration reform, [and] to make sure we have a good solution for the war in Iraq.”

After leaving Congress at the expiration of DeLay’s term, when Nick Lampson was sworn in on January 3, 2007, Sekula-Gibbs remained active in Republican politics. She ran again for the 22nd District seat in the 2008 election cycle. In the Republican primary, she finished first with 29.72 percent of the vote, short of the majority needed to secure the nomination outright, and advanced to an April runoff against Pete Olson, a former aide to Senator Phil Gramm and chief of staff to Senator John Cornyn. During the campaign, she criticized Olson as a “Washington insider” who had moved into the district only months earlier to run for office. Nonetheless, Olson secured the endorsements of 12 of Texas’s 19 Republican members of Congress. In the April 8, 2008, runoff, Olson defeated Sekula-Gibbs with 69 percent of the vote to her 31 percent. Olson went on to defeat Lampson in the November 4, 2008, general election, winning 52 percent to 45 percent, with Lampson carrying the Galveston County portion of the district but unable to overcome Olson’s margin in Harris County. Sekula-Gibbs’s 2008 primary campaign was managed by conservative activist Clymer Wright, known as a leading figure in Houston’s municipal term-limits movement.

In later years, Sekula-Gibbs shifted her public service focus to regional governance and local issues in The Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston. In July 2019, she filed to run for The Woodlands Township Board of Directors, Position 5, emphasizing priorities such as flood mitigation, incorporation, traffic and mobility, and parks and recreation. In the November 2019 election she faced attorney Walter C. Cooke and Rashmi Gupta, winning the seat with 48.43 percent of the vote and outpacing her nearest rival by nineteen percentage points. She was sworn in as a director on November 20, 2019, and was re-elected to a second term on November 12, 2021. On November 7, 2023, she again won re-election to the Board, defeating opponent Tricia Danto with 51.38 percent of the vote. In her service on the Township Board, she has acted as alternate chairman of the One Water Task Force and has served on the Visit The Woodlands board of directors, the Parks and Recreation advisory council, and the audit, budget, and investment committees. She successfully lobbied for the creation of a new Upper Watershed position on the San Jacinto Regional Flood Planning Group and is a member of the North Houston Association Water Committee.

Transportation and regional planning have also been central to Sekula-Gibbs’s more recent public work. She serves as the Township’s representative on the Conroe/The Woodlands Urbanized Area Transit Advisory Committee, where she has held the position of chairman. In 2024, she was selected to serve on the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC), where she is the primary member for the TAC Environmental category. She also serves as an alternate member for the Environmental category on the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) Subcommittee and as the primary member for the Local Government category on the Transportation Air Quality (TAQ) Subcommittee. Alongside these responsibilities, she returned to clinical dermatology practice in November 2023, continuing the dual track of medicine and public service that has characterized much of her career.

Sekula-Gibbs’s personal life has intersected with her public trajectory. She has been married three times. Her first marriage was to Alan Greenberg. Her second marriage was to KHOU-TV newscaster Sylvan Rodriguez, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000; before his death, Rodriguez encouraged her to pursue public office, a suggestion that helped catalyze her entry into electoral politics. In June 2002, she married Robert W. Gibbs Jr., former director of corporate community relations at Reliant Energy and president of the Reliant Energy Foundation, who also established the law department at Houston Lighting and Power. The couple reside in The Woodlands, Texas. Sekula-Gibbs is the mother of two adult children and is a Roman Catholic.