Above and Beyond: Honoring faculty and staff

The Yale School of Public Health community gathered for a special End of Year Celebration on May 13 to reflect on recent accomplishments, recognize outstanding faculty and staff award winners, and unveil the school's new ceremonial mace.

While the special event recognized exemplary award-winning work, it also acknowledged how the school community — together — has worked to link science and society, making public health foundational to communities everywhere.

Winners were congratulated for work that stood apart, from prestigious faculty honors recognizing extraordinary mentoring, teaching, and research, to the coveted Staff Award for Outstanding Service.

The winners are:

Can Meng is recognized with the Teaching Fellow Award. As a PhD candidate in biostatistics, he brought strong statistical skills and made difficult concepts easy to understand. He earned consistent praise for his clarity, fairness, and responsiveness, making a meaningful difference in students' learning experience.

Olivia Kachingwe, PhD, was honored for her one-on-one mentorship that shapes students into confident, capable public health researchers. She sets high expectations, gives direct and rigorous feedback, and shares a genuine passion that encourages students to reach their full potential.

Chantal Vogels, PhD, was recognized with the new Yale School of Public Health Innovation in Teaching Award for her active-learning approach to infectious disease laboratory methods. As one of the inaugural recipients of the YSPH Innovation in Teaching Grant, she introduced a "lab-in-a-suitcase" model, pairing each module with hands-on exercises, creating a dynamic learning environment that strengthens students' real-world preparedness.

In her Social Justice and Health Equity course, Danya Keene, PhD, brings passion and a patient, thoughtful teaching presence, asking incisive questions that encourage students to think more carefully and independently. Dr. Keene leaves a lasting imprint on how her students think, speak, and work in public health.

Camille Edmond was honored for her exceptional leadership and service in managing complex administrative operations, streamlining workflows, and ensuring compliant, responsive support that enables researchers and programs in our community to succeed. In particular, she is recognized for her contributions to the operations of Dr. Ko's Lab, a large and complex environment spanning dozens of collaborators, multiple federally funded projects, and international partnerships. Her responsiveness, professionalism, and commitment to service make her a trusted and invaluable partner to faculty and staff alike.

The following awards are for outstanding faculty peer-reviewed publications published in 2025.

Ke Li, PhD, was recognized for his paper Unraveling the Role of Viral Interference in Disrupting Biennial RSV Epidemics in Northern Stockholm, which was published in Nature Communications. The study shows that interactions between influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) can disrupt expected epidemic cycles in the community.

Mark Schlesinger, PhD, was recognized for his paper The Shadow Price of Uncertainty: Consequences of Unpredictable Insurance Coverage for Access, Care, and Financial Security, which was published in The Milbank Quarterly. The study examines how coverage uncertainty shapes access to care, chronic disease management, and financial wellbeing. The findings reframe how we think about access, establishing coverage stability as a central policy priority.

Zuoheng "Anita" Wang, PhD, was recognized for her paper Inferring spatial single-cell-level interactions through interpreting cell state and niche correlations learned by self-supervised graph transformer, published in Nature Machine Intelligence. The work uncovers previously hidden, distance-dependent cell-to-cell interactions across complex tissues and advances our ability to study cellular communication.

Tamara Beetham, HPM PhD student (who has since graduated), Chima Ndumele, PhD, and Susan Busch, PhD, were honored with the Team Science Award for their paper Medicaid: Increased Patient Access to MOUD in Residential Treatment Associated with Facility Openings and Closures, 2012–22, published in Health Affairs. The study examines how Medicaid waiver policies affected access to evidence-based addiction treatment. This work highlights that policy can transform care not only by changing behavior, but also by reshaping the systems that deliver it.

Jeannette Ickovics, PhD, Daniel Carrión, PhD, and Robert Dubrow, PhD, were honored with the Team Science Award for their paper Indicators from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Perspectives and Experience of City Leaders from 118 Cities, published in the Journal of Urban Health. Based on a global survey of 191 leaders across 118 cities in 52 countries, their findings show that cities are both at the frontlines of climate vulnerability and are powerful places for advancing public health solutions.

Colin Carlson, PhD, was recognized with the Impact Award for his paper Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change, published in Nature Climate Change. He and his co-authors demonstrate that the true health burden of climate change has been systematically underestimated, providing some of the clearest evidence to date that climate change is an urgent and ongoing public health emergency.

The End of Year Celebration also included the unveiling of the school's new ceremonial mace, which incorporates deep historical symbolism and celebrates the school’s history, vision, and mission, as well as its status as Yale’s newest independent school. The new mace will make its official debut at Yale’s 325^th commencement on May 18th.

As a ceremonial object carried into future commencements — crafted from campus wood, scientific glass, and centuries of public health symbolism — the new mace proclaims that YSPH's commitment to linking science and society is not just a statement, but a living tradition.