Student Spotlight – Chloe Yee

Chloe Yee went to a high school of 4000 students in Berkeley, California where as many girls dropped out due to pregnancy as went onto Ivy League schools. That disparity of means and opportunity has been a prime motivator for Chloe ever since.

A student in the 5-year BA/MPH program, Chloe is graduating from Yale College this spring and will do her MPH internship this summer and complete her coursework in the Department of Health Policy and Management for her Master’s in Public Health next year. For the last two years she has been a research assistant to Drs. Shayna Cunningham and Jeannette Ickovics in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences where she is using county level data from the Centers of Disease Control detailing health determinants to try to see if those tools can be used for teen pregnancy prevention.

She has also interned with the International Refugee Committee and led Community Health Educators, a community service group from Yale College that designs and presents health education workshops in the city of New Haven’s public middle and high schools. “Sex education is a big passion of mine because a little education goes a long way,” says Chloe. The group’s workshops include other topics, such as nutrition and mental health, and fill a void in the city where there are no health education teachers. “Working with these kids is the light of my life at Yale. They have such impressive questions and are curious.”

Chloe’s major for her undergraduate degree is the history of medicine and public health. She has married her interest in health disparities, education and history in her senior thesis, which tells the story of Drs. Megumi Shinoda and Kazue Togasaki. These two doctors, who were detained in Japanese internment camps during the second world war, served as the token OB-GYNS in the camps and oversaw the births of nearly 10 thousand children throughout their careers. Dr. Shinoda was the granddaughter of a graduate of the Yale Medical College. The project, says Chloe, helped her see how women supported each other under difficult conditions, such as captivity. Today, coming from an under resourced background is another form of captivity. “Grass roots approaches that mobilize women are essential to helping young mothers and their children to thrive.”