New YSPH Pilot Grants Support Innovative Interdisciplinary Research

The Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) is advancing its commitment to innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration through a new funding initiative designed to help researchers tackle some of the most complex challenges in public health.

This spring, YSPH launched its inaugural Transformational Pilot Funding grants, providing important internal seed money to help its researchers pursue ambitious, cross-disciplinary studies that have the potential to transform health outcomes locally and globally.

The initiative reflects a key priority of the school’s long-term Strategic Plan, which calls for the development of novel funding mechanisms to promote scientific innovation and reward rigor, creativity, and impact.

“This kind of institutional support is critical,” said Dr. Melinda Irwin, PhD, MPH, associate dean of research at YSPH. “These one-year pilot projects will enable our scientists to engage in interdisciplinary research that addresses some of the most urgent public health problems of our time.”

Three research teams were selected from a competitive pool of 17 proposals. Each will receive up to $100,000 to gather preliminary data and explore ideas that could pave the way for larger, externally funded projects.

One project, led by a group of faculty at the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric, and Environmental Epidemiology (CPPEE), will investigate how environmental exposures combine with genetic risks to trigger diseases such as type 2 diabetes, ADHD, and thyroid cancer in children. The pilot funding will allow the team to analyze large genomic and environmental datasets, along with molecular data, to better understand how genes and toxins combine to spark illness. The team includes Dr. Andrew DeWan, PhD, MPH, associate professor of epidemiology (chronic diseases); Dr. Nicole Deziel, PhD, MHS, associate professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences); and Dr. Zeyan Liew, PhD, MPH, associate professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences). DeWan and Deziel are co-directors of CPPEE.

“Unlike genetic factors, there is currently no universal screening tool for environmental exposures,” DeWan said. “This pilot grant may lead to discoveries that guide future research into how genes and environmental factors together shape our health and development.”

Dr. Fan Li, PhD, and colleagues from the YSPH Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS) and Yale School of Medicine, are tackling a blind spot in large-scale public health research. They’re advancing statistical methodology and software that embed cost-effectiveness analysis within complex longitudinal cluster randomized trials. Their goal: help health care stakeholders and policymakers determine whether novel system-level interventions justify further investment and broader implementation.

“We know policymakers and stakeholders are more likely to support the scale-up of new interventions and treatments if they not only improve patient health outcomes but also do so in a cost-effective manner,” said Li, associate professor of biostatistics at YSPH and of cardiovascular medicine. “Integrating a rigorous statistical framework that embeds cost-effectiveness objectives into complex health care trials will provide health care leaders with the essential data they need to make more informed decisions when allocating resources.”

Li’s collaborators on the pilot are Dr. Drew Cameron, PhD, MA, assistant professor of public health (health policy), and Dr. Joseph Ross, MD, MHS ’06, professor of medicine (general medicine) and of public health (health policy and management).

A third team, led by Dr. Colin Carlson, PhD, is developing a framework to tally deaths indirectly caused by climate change, such as those linked to infectious diseases. By linking mortality data with climate models, the team hopes to quantify climate’s hidden toll on global health — vital information that could drive future policy decisions and inspire action.

“Our project is going to develop a standardized way of counting those deaths, then test the approach on a few of the biggest burdens on global health,” said Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases).

Those experts include faculty and staff with YSPH’s Public Health Modeling Unit and the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. Ultimately, the research team hopes to leverage the collected data and collaborative research effort to create a broad new study that would be known as “The Global Burden of Climate Change Study.”

Carlson’s co-investigators on the project are Dr. Kai Chen, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences); Dr. Virginia Pitzer, ScD, professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases); Dr. Daniel Weinberger, PhD, professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases); Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases); and Dr. Nathan Grubaugh, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases).

The launch of the Transformational Pilot Funding grants directly supports a core goal of YSPH’s long-term Strategic Plan: to build pathways that translate rigorous science into tangible health benefits. By encouraging bold, interdisciplinary projects and developing new funding mechanisms, YSPH aims to accelerate research that is creative, impactful, and deeply collaborative.