Dean Ranney to Grads: Create Trust, Embrace Hope

The Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) celebrated its first graduating class as an independent school this week with a rousing ceremony in historic Woolsey Hall.

As parents snapped pictures and students cheered their peers, Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH praised the Class of 2025 for its resilience. She said that trait will serve its members well as they step into a world reeling with political and economic uncertainty. “I know you, our Class of 2025, has the empathy and the skills that are just what the field of public health and the globe need now,” Ranney said.

Ranney noted the challenges ahead: the foundations of good health—safe housing, nutritious food, robust social connections, clean air and water—feel increasingly out of reach for many in the United States. Globally, trust in public health is at an all-time low.

Yet this class, this group of future leaders in public health, has the capacity to rebuild that trust. She urged students to listen with empathy and to build bridges to communities that feel unheard; to be transparent about data and what they know and don’t know; and finally, to follow through and act, in partnership with communities.

Class members were already stepping up to the challenge, she told them. As students they helped create the school’s new strategic plan. When a measles outbreak began in the southwestern U.S., class members filled a void of timely information with ‘gumshoe epidemiology’, creating weekly online reports that went viral.

“You outdid the U.S. CDC,” Ranney said as students cheered.

Ranney also praised the class for leading new programming and platforms, such as a compassionate dialogue series, that emphasized communication across divides. “You built trust and agency through action, right here at Yale,” she said.

Visit our Commencement 2025 website to watch a complete recording of the 2025 graduation ceremony.

That helped her predict with confidence that “Over the course of your career, you will rebuild trust. You will change systems, and you will do so through listening, data, and action…. Go forth and do awesome things.”

Dean Ranney’s belief that the Class of 2025 was ready for the future was underscored by the keynote speaker, the actor Arséma Thomas, MPH ’18. “Once you graduate from YSPH, you have a degree in empathy,” said Thomas, best known for their role as young Lady Agatha Danbury in the Netflix period drama “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”

“There is something about this discipline that gives each of us a universal tool for change and impact,” Thomas said. “You can’t avoid it…You look and interpret the world first through the lens of empathy and humility, and that is a rare gem when the world looks the way it does.”

Thomas was followed by Class Speaker Lucia Shen, MPH ’25 (Social and Behavioral Sciences), who told her classmates they shared a spirit of hope.

“We’re the ones who face broken systems and dare to imagine something stronger, fairer—something that truly transforms lives for the better,” she said. “We’re the ones who know that data can be a language of justice, that policy can be a tool for healing, and that listening—really listening—to people is as powerful as any intervention.”

Public health professionals don’t retreat from challenges, Shen said, they rise to them. “It’s about standing in the spaces where others have given up and saying, “Not us.’”

Of the 365 students who graduated Monday, 299 received MPH degrees and 66 received a Master of Science degree in public health. Included in the total were 13 joint MPH degrees awarded to students enrolled in other graduate programs in the Schools of Nursing, Management, Environment, Divinity, and Yale’s Physician Associate Program.

Earlier in the day, graduates and their families gathered at the Omni Hotel for the annual graduation luncheon, where Dean Ranney announced this year’s outstanding student awards.

On May 18, the school conferred 24 PhDs to graduates in a special hooding ceremony at 47 College Street. “You are amongst the elite of the elite,” Ranney told the assembled crowd of students, parents, and well-wishers. “You are also the changemakers. Receiving your hood today marks you as someone who is going to go on to shape the future of the field of public health, through research, through teaching, through whatever job it is you take next.”

During the occasion, Associate Dean of Research Dr. Melinda Irwin, PhD, MPH, presented this year’s YSPH PhD Research Prize to two recipients:

Chao Cheng (Biostatistics): Correcting for bias due to mismeasured exposure in mediation analysis with a survival outcome, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series.

Emma Mew (Chronic Disease Epidemiology): O le tagata ma lona aiga, o le tagata ma lona fa’asinomaga (every person belongs to a family and every family belongs to a person): Development of a parenting framework for adolescent mental wellbeing in American Samoa ,published in Children and Youth Services Review.