Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, announced Tuesday that Senior Fellow and Lecturer Kaakpema "KP" Yelpaala will serve as the new Faculty Director of InnovateHealth Yale (IHY). Yelpaala, MPH '06, replaces Kaveh Khoshnood, MPH '89, PhD '95, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases), who has led IHY since July 2019. Yelpaala’s leadership position is effective as of January 2024.
This transition reflects YSPH’s continued commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship as a core pillar of our work, Ranney said in a schoolwide email. It also acknowledges both Yelpaala’s scholarly and practical experience in equitable, commercially successful health innovation, and Khoshnood’s growing role as faculty leader of YSPH’s Humanitarian Research Lab (in addition to his other roles within the school, including within the Executive MPH program and the BA/BS program). Fatema Basrai will remain the staff director of IHY.
“I am delighted to pass this role over to my colleague, Kaakpema "KP" Yelpaala, a distinguished public health innovator and global entrepreneur,” said Khoshnood. “I am confident that under the leadership of KP and our new dean, IHY will expand and become more integrated into our school and university.”
InnovateHealth Yale was founded at YSPH in 2013 to support the creation of innovative solutions to challenges in public health and education for underserved communities in the United States and low-resource countries. IHY was one of the first programs at a school of public health supporting this thematic area, and has had tremendous success, including:
- Coaching over 200 students.
- Funding 52 startups operating in 30 countries.
- Awarding over $400,000 in impact grants and internship funding for a broad array of student ventures.
- Having our alumni go on to be funded and supported by Techstars, MIT Solve, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, and leading venture capital firms.
You can learn more in IHY's 2023 Impact report, which you can download here.
“I would like to thank Kaveh for his outstanding leadership! We are so grateful for his service and vision, and for that of Marty Klein prior to him,” Ranney said. “And I am just thrilled to usher in a new phase of innovation and entrepreneurship in public health under KP’s direction.”