Current PhD Students

I am a third year PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. My research interest is in the implementation, evaluation and modeling of public health interventions and/or policies geared towards the control of infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, TB, hepatitis, and other diseases of global health importance.

Cole is a computational biologist with a background in ecology & evolutionary biology of infectious disease. They completed their MSc at the University of Alberta, and their undergraduate education at the University of Toronto. He works at the intersection of disease forecasting and climate epidemiology, and is particularly interested in developing methods to detecting the signal of climate change in patterns of infection, including outbreaks and case data.

Jack Carew is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. His research interests lie at the intersection of vector-borne diseases, climate modeling, global health, and human migration. He has collaborated with teams in Syria, Colombia, Jordan, and Cameroon on projects elucidating environmental and genetic characteristics of malaria and leishmaniasis transmission.

Meet Yale School of Public Health's Catherine Chant.

Melanie H. Chitwood is a doctoral candidate in the Ted Cohen Lab. She is interested in using mathematical models to understand the transmission and prevalence of tuberculosis in high burden settings. She has previously worked as a Research Associate in the Cohen Lab, where she was involved in projects in Brazil and on COVID-19 estimates and projections. Melanie received her BA from Hampshire College and her MS in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Kelly is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. Her research interests focus on reducing vector-borne and zoonotic diseases in low income countries by identifying social, biological, and environmental risk factors of disease. Specifically, she hope to use molecular epidemiological studies to gain insight into pathogenesis and to improve the prevention and control of infectious diseases.

Katherine (Katie) Hill is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases working under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Heimer. She is also a Public Health Workforce Development Fellow with the Office of Public Health Practice. Her research interests include substance use, harm reduction, xylazine, kratom, sexual health and behavior, and improving the health of incarcerated individuals.

Meet Yale School of Public Health's Emily Johnson.

Jiye Kwon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. She is primarily interested in the intersection of pathogen genomics, bioinformatics, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. In the Pitzer-Weinberger Lab, she aims to integrate these areas to study the risk, development, and spatiotemporal spread of resistance and pathobionts to ultimately strengthen disease surveillance systems. Prior to her doctoral studies, Jiye earned her MPH with public health modeling concentration from Yale School of Public Health and conducted respiratory and gastrointestinal microbiome research with the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) while working in the Pettigrew Lab.

Torre is a PhD student in the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases Department at the Yale School of Public Health. She holds an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management from the University of Oxford and MA in Global Affairs form Tsinghua University, where she was a Schwarzman Scholar. She previously worked as interim chief of staff at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and joined the founding team of the Columbia Climate School. She is interested in the anthropogenic drivers of zoonotic disease emergence, the impact of climate change on health systems, and national and international governance of pandemic prevention.

Elisabeth Nelson is a PhD candidate in the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. She is interested novel forms of vector control and in optimizing Wolbachia release programs to help with scale-up and expansion into low-resource endemic settings. She is currently working on a Wolbachia release randomized control trial in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her research is primarily focused in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Matthew Ponticiello (he/him) is an MD PhD student pursuing his PhD in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases through the Yale School of Public Health. His research interests include implementation science, LGBTQ health, the treatment of opioid use disorder in criminal justice settings, and mood disorders. Matt is particularly interested in using qualitative methods to integrate social science and epidemiologic methods to improve the uptake of evidence-based care. Matt earned his B.S. in Global and Public Health Sciences at Cornell University. He then worked at the Weill Cornell Center for Global Health under Dr. Radhika Sundararajan. There, his research focused on community-based interventions to improve the uptake of HIV care among medically pluralistic communities. The majority of Matt's work was spent studying novel methods to improve the uptake of HIV care by collaborating with traditional healers in Uganda and Tanzania. Matt also contributed to the development of a community health worker-delivered gestational diabetes screening program in Pune, India.

Meet Yale School of Public Health's Abbey Porzucek.

Eva Rest is an M.D.-Ph.D. student pursuing her Ph.D. in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. Her research interests include disease modeling, dynamics of respiratory and vaccine-preventable diseases, public health interventions, and global health. Eva hopes to use her M.D.-Ph.D. training to integrate clinical infectious disease care with dynamical disease models and data-driven surveillance and interventions. Eva earned her M.S. in Global Infectious Disease at Georgetown University where she studied respiratory disease dynamics and spatial heterogeneity in vaccination patterns in the lab of Dr. Shweta Bansal. Previously, she researched harm reduction strategies for substance use disorders at the University of Illinois Chicago's Institute for Health Research and Policy. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, studying global health and health policy. Eva is passionate about disability representation and accessibility in medicine. She co-founded and co-leads Medical Students with Disability and Chronic Illness (MSDCI) at Yale and is involved with disability and accessibility advocacy and research.