Advisory Board

Paul T. Anastas is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment. He has appointments  in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Chemistry, and Department of Chemical Engineering. In addition, Prof. Anastas serves as the Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. Anastas took public service leave from Yale to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency Science Advisor from 2009-2012. From 2004 -2006, Paul Anastas served as Director of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, D.C. He was previously the Assistant Director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he worked from 1999-2004. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Dr. Anastas received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and worked as an industrial consultant. He is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the Director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program. Dr. Anastas has published widely on topics of science through sustainability including eleven books, such as Benign by Design, Designing Safer Polymers, Green Engineering, and his seminal work with co-author John Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.

Dr. Michelle Bell is the Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health at the Yale University School of the Environment, with secondary appointments at the Yale School of Public Health, Environmental Health Sciences Division; the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs; and the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, Environmental Engineering Program. Her research investigates how human health is affected by atmospheric systems, including air pollution and weather. Other research interests include the health impacts of climate change and environmental justice. Much of this work is based in epidemiology, biostatistics, and environmental engineering. The research is designed to be policy-relevant and contribute to well-informed decision-making to better protect human health and benefit society. She is the recipient of the Prince Albert II de Monaco / Institut Pasteur Award, the Rosenblith New Investigator Award, and the NIH Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) Award. Dr. Bell holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. in Environmental Engineering), Stanford University (M.S. in Environmental Engineering), University of Edinburgh (M.Sc. in Philosophy), and Johns Hopkins University (M.S.E. in Environmental Management and Economics and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering). She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Everette serves as the Executive Vice President at Trust for America's Health in Washington, DC. Before TFAH, Dr. Everette was the inaugural Executive Director of Health Equity Solutions. Prior to this, Dr. Everette served as the Managing Director of Federal Government Affairs with the American Diabetes Association, providing strategic leadership on policy and advocacy initiatives with the White House, several federal agencies, and Congress. Prior to this, Dr. Everette worked as a government relations consultant with Drinker, Biddle, and Reath, LLC, where she represented the interests of several nonprofit health care organizations. Everette has also worked for the Service Employees International Union, RESI, the State of Maryland, and the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation.

Paulette Frank is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest and most broadly based healthcare company. She is responsible for defining J&J’s strategic direction to accelerate and amplify positive environmental impact and for identifying and supporting solutions at the intersection of human and environmental health.Under her leadership, J&J launched ambitious climate goals in September 2020, which will accelerate the company’s transition to 100% renewable electricity and carbon neutrality for its operations, while also partnering with suppliers to reduce upstream carbon emissions.Ms. Frank has been with J&J for 25 years, and before being appointed Chief Sustainability Officer she served as J&J’s Vice President, Global Environmental Health, Safety & Sustainability. She is a member of the J&J Supply Chain Leadership Team and co-chairs the J&J Enterprise Governance Council. She is also a passionate advocate for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion and co-chairs the J&J Supply Chain Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council.Ms. Frank has been working in the fields of environmental stewardship, employee health & safety and sustainability for 30 years. She is a sought-after speaker and contributor at international workshops and conferences, providing a voice for the company’s values and long-standing commitment to help create a healthy future for people, our communities, and the planet. She was previously co-chair and continues as a member of the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale (CBEY) Advisory Board.

As the first director of the new Office of Climate Planning, Dr. French advises the Commissioner of DEEP on mitigation, adaptation and resilience plans across all divisions of the agency. Her first charge is to administer the Governor’s Council on Climate Change. Previously, Dr. French served as the Director of Resilience for the CT Department of Housing, and as the Director of Community Engagement for the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA) from 2014-2018. Dr. French also spent a year in Congress as a Congressional Science Fellow in the Office of US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), serving as a policy advisor to the Senator in the areas of energy, environment, and agriculture.

Dr. Frumkin is Senior Vice President at The Trust for Public Land. Previously he served as head of the Our Plant, Our Health initiative at the Wellcome Trust in London, Dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, Director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Professor and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Dr. Frumkin has served on the boards of the Bullitt Foundation, the Children and Nature Network, the Seattle Parks Foundation, the American Public Health Association, and the Washington Global Health Alliance, among others.

Attorney Geballe is a Professor of Clinical Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health. She currently teaches Public Health Law and directs the Health Policy Practicum. For several decades she was a Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, co-teaching the Legislative Advocacy Clinic. She serves as the Distinguished Senior Fellow at Connecticut Voices for Children, a state research and advocacy organization she co-founded in 1995 and led as President until 2008. A graduate of Yale Law School (1976) and the Yale School of Public Health (1995), she practiced civil rights law with the ACLU for more than a decade, representing, among others, Connecticut's foster children in successful systemic reform litigation against the state child welfare department, inmates with HIV/AIDS in litigation against the state department of correction, and school children with HIV/AIDS who were being excluded from the New Haven Public Schools. Her publications include Geballe, Gruendel & Andiman, Forgotten Children of the AIDS Epidemic (Yale University Press, 1995). She has consulted internationally on public health and AIDS law in China and South Africa, and served on several dozen state commissions and task forces on topics ranging from Connecticut's spending to child and adult mental health services in Connecticut. A decade ago, she co-founded the Connecticut News Project, that parent organization of CT Mirror which provides professional reporting about Connecticut government, policy and politics - www.ctmirror.org. She continues to serve on its Board of Directors and has served on the Boards of multiple other state and national organizations, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood's Legal Advisory Board, and the Melville Charitable Trust.

Emily Goddard is a data analyst at the YPCCC. Her research interest is at the intersection of environmental sustainability and human health, with particular focus on mental health and the co-benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation. She wrote her master’s thesis on the relationship between wildfire smoke-specific fine particulate matter and symptoms of anxiety and depression, for which she was awarded the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding MPH Thesis. She received her MPH from the Yale School of Public Health in 2023, where she concentrated on Climate Change and Health, and her BA from Vassar College in 2015.

Rachel matriculated to Yale in 2018 to pursue MD/PhD training at Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health. She graduated from Duke in 2016 with a double major in global health and psychology. At Duke, she began conducting global mental health research, with her thesis focusing on adolescent mental health in rural Kenya. After graduating, she took a gap year to study malaria elimination in low- and middle-income countries at UCSF, and another to study the intersection of nutrition, epigenetics, and cardiovascular disease at the Framingham Heart Study. At Yale, Rachel is completing her dissertation on implementation of evidence-based tuberculosis care in Uganda in Dr. Luke Davis' lab. Rachel is also affiliated with Dr. Sarah Lowe's Trauma and Mental Health Lab to study the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers. Rachel hopes to advance her training in biostatistics and mixed methods throughout her MD/PhD training.

Tara Houska is a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, a tribal attorney, land defender, environmental and Indigenous rights advocate, and founder of the Giniw Collective, an Indigenous women, two-spirit-led frontline resistance to defend the sacred and live in balance. Ms. Houska was active in resisting the Line 3 oil pipeline, the Dakota Access pipeline, and is heavily involved in the movement to defund fossil fuels. She is a TED speaker, the recipient of the 2021 American Climate Leadership Award and the 2019 Rachel’s Network Catalyst Award. Ms. Houska served as an advisor on Native American affairs to Senator Bernie Sanders, and co-founded Not Your Mascots, a non-profit committed to promoting positive representation of Native Americans in the public sphere. She has written for the women-led climate anthology “All We Can Save”, the New York Times, CNN, Vogue, and Indian Country Today. Tara earned a Bachelor of Science, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Mitchell has worked as Director of the Hartford Health Department, and with environmental justice communities to prevent and reduce environmentally-related disease and change policies that are detrimental to environmental health. Dr. Mitchell co-chairs the NMA’s Commission on Environmental Health. He is also Director of State Affairs for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. He chairs the Equity and Environmental Justice Subcommittee on Climate Adaptation on the CT Governor’s Council on Climate Change.

Rachel is an MPH student in the Environmental Health Sciences department of Yale's School of Public Health, where she is pursuing the Climate and Health Certificate. She is focusing on how government policies can best protect disabled populations during climate emergencies, and how communication initiatives on indoor air quality can decrease the spread of disease. In addition to serving as a master’s student representative on the YCCCH Advisory Board, she is an elected member of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, and a student worker with the YSPH social media team. She received her BS from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2015; prior to matriculating, she wrote about the intersection of human health, environmental exposures, and climate change for outlets like Vox, Health, InStyle, and Glamour.

Dr. Pascucilla was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer/Director of Public Health for the East Shore District Health Department (ESDHD) in 2010, which serves the Towns of Branford, East Haven, and North Branford, Connecticut. Prior to ESDHD, he served as the Assistant Director of Health for the City of Hartford, Department of Health & Human Services, and past positions include the University of Connecticut, Department of Environmental Health & Safety, Yale University, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health and several local public health districts. Michael holds a Ph.D. from Queen Margaret University's Institute of Global Health & Development, a Bachelor of Science Degree in Public Health/Nutrition from Southern Connecticut State University, and a Master's Degree in Public Health from the University of Connecticut's School of Community Medicine & Health Care. Dr. Pascucilla is a Nationally Certified Environmental Health Specialist/Registered Sanitarian and has over 30 years of experience as a public health official in local, state, and federal government. He is very active in the public health field and is a former Site Visitor for the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB). He currently sits on a Board of Directors/Past President for the Connecticut Association of Directors of Health (CADH) and on the Board of Directors for the Connecticut Public Health Association (CPHA) and the Conference for Food Protection (CFP). Dr. Pascucilla is also the past President of the Connecticut Environmental Health Association (CEHA) and served within the leadership of this organization for over seven years, where he continues to be an active member. Dr. Pascucilla holds several National and Connecticut State public health certifications and over the course of his career, he has been very engaged as a public health official in governmental and academic settings. His experience includes hands-on participation in several national/federal grant-funded initiatives, including a practicum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Yale University. His experience also includes health prevention education and promotion among diverse community populations, staff supervision, administrative/budget/grant management, population health policy, workforce development, code enforcement, volunteer/committee, food/water safety, indoor air quality, and communicable disease prevention/education. Dr. Pascucilla is also a Part-time Professor at Southern Connecticut State University in the School of Health & Human Services, Department of Public Health, located in New Haven, Connecticut. He has combined his passion for this professional field of public health and higher education as local health departments strive to hire and find well-qualified, public health college-educated employees. He is actively mentoring/working to improve public health training/hands-on courses to assist college students in their career preparation. To that end, his organization also regularly promotes the public health field at public events/venues, public schools, and colleges, and hosts high school and college students with internships to attract young adults into the next generation of the public health workforce. Dr. Pascucilla's public health research focuses on climate change and food allergies, which includes a U.S. Patent. In 2016, he received the National Environmental Health Association's Professional Sabbatical Award, where he researched food allergies in the United Kingdom. Michael also researched, designed, and secured grant funding to build the world's first solar electric pump-out vessel, which serves the east shores of Connecticut's Long Island Sound. With respect to his experience outside his positions as a public health official and an educator, Michael is committed to this professional field by improving the quality of his local environment and is very engaged in his hometown community. Michael resides in the Town of Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife and two sons, and their family enjoys running, boating, fishing/shellfishing, swimming, and the many other recreational activities that Long Island Sound offers.

Ms. Patel is the Vice President at Metropolitan Group and the co-founder at Aawaz4Climate. In her previous work as Director of the American Public Health Association's Center for Climate, Health and Equity she worked to inspire action and advance policy that addresses climate change at the nexus of health equity. As Deputy Director for the Center for Public Health Policy, Ms. Patel led the organization’s most notable environmental health programs, including water safety and security, children’s environmental health, tribal public and environmental health, environmental health messaging, transportation and health, and healthy community design. She champions diversity and advance health equity and environmental justice while promoting public health solutions.

Ms. Shepard has a long history of organizing and engaging Northern Manhattan residents in community-based planning and campaigns to address environmental protection and environmental health policy locally and nationally. She has successfully combined grassroots organizing, environmental advocacy, and environmental health community-based participatory research to become a national leader in advancing environmental policy and the perspective of environmental justice in urban communities — to ensure that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment extends to all.

Vasilis Vasiliou, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He received his BSc in Chemistry (1983) and PhD in Biochemical Pharmacology (1988) from the University of Ioannina, Greece. He then trained in gene-environment interactions, molecular toxicology and pharmacogenetics at the Department of Environmental Health in the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati (1991-1995). In 1996, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy where he rose through the ranks to become Professor and Director of the Toxicology Graduate Program. Since 2008, he was also Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In July 2014, he joined the faculty of Yale University in his new position. Professor Vasiliou has established an internationally-recognized research program that has been continuously funded by NEI/NIH and NIAAA/NIH since 1997, and recently NIEHS. His research interests include the etiology and molecular mechanisms of environmentally-induced human disease, such as liver disease, obesity & diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. His research focuses on the means by which the exposome (total exposures throughout life), metabolism (specifically aldehyde dehydrogenases and cytochrome P-450s) and antioxidants (glutathione and catalase) contribute to human health and disease. His laboratory utilizes state-of-the-art integrated system approaches that include metabolomics, lipidomics, exposomics, tissue imaging mass spectrometry, deep-learning, as well as human cohorts and genetically-engineered mouse models in order to elucidate mechanisms, and to discover biomarkers and novel interventions for human disease. Dr Vasiliou is the director of the NIEHS-funded P42 Yale Superfund Research Center and also the director of the NIAAA-funded R24-Resource Center for Mouse Models and Metabolomics Tools to Investigate Alcohol Metabolism and Tissue Injury. Dr. Vasiliou has published over 250 papers and edited three books on Alcohol and Cancer. Dr. Vasiliou is the editor of Human Genomics and serves on the editorial boards of several toxicology and visual sciences journals. Professor Vasiliou is committed to training the next generation of scientists. At the University of Colorado, he was the Director of the Environmental and Molecular Toxicology Graduate Program for 15 years. At Yale he leads an NIAAA-funded T32 Translational Alcohol Research Program (TARP) Training Program for post-doctoral fellows, and an NIHES -funded R25 Summer Research Experience in Environmental Health (SREEH) Training Program that introduce undergraduate students in Connecticut (CT) to Environmental Health Research. Dr. Vasiliou has trained mentored and advised more than 60 trainees ranging from MPH and PhD students to postdoctoral fellows and junior faculties.

Dr Watts is the Chief Sustainability Officer of the NHS, responsible for its commitment to deliver a world-class net zero emission health service.Nick is a medical doctor licensed in Australia and the UK, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Notre Dame, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians’ Faculty of Public Health. Prior to the National Health Service, Nick worked internationally as the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown and the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, a collaboration of UN agencies and academic centres across the world. He has also focused on engaging the health profession on the links between public health and climate change, having founded both the Global Climate and Health Alliance and the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change.

Dan Weinberger is an Associate Professor in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health. His research uses a combination of quantitative analysis, laboratory experiments and field work to understand the epidemiology and biology of respiratory infections. Recent work has focused on developing novel analytical methods for the evaluation of vaccines using time series and spatial data. He collaborates widely with public health agencies and academic organizations around the world on these issues. He earned his PhD in biological sciences from Harvard School of Public Health, with a focus on Infectious Disease Epidemiology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies in the Fogarty International Center at the NIH.Research: The research in the Weinberger Lab is at the intersection of microbiology and epidemiology. We focus on understanding the biological and epidemiological drivers of respiratory infections, including pneumococcus, RSV, influenza, and Legionella. Major research areas include understanding the biological drivers of the emergence of rare pneumococcal serotypes following vaccine introduction, developing novel statistical approaches to evaluate vaccine impact from observational data, evaluating the importance of interactions among respiratory pathogens, and understanding environmental drivers of Legionellosis. We employ a variety of tools including experimental and quantitative approaches. Our work is funded by grants from the NIH/NIAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Emerging Infections Program (a collaboration between the CDC, the Connecticut Department of Public Health, and Yale). You can learn more about our research here. Teaching: I teach the Public Health Surveillance course at YSPH. This class uses a mix of lectures, cases studies, and hands on data analysis exercises. Students learn to perform common surveillance analyses including aberration detection (e.g., CUSUM), time series analysis, and spatial cluster detection (SATSCAN). Students learn to do these analyses in either SAS or R.

Dr. Wilson is an environmental health scientist who works in community-university partnerships, crowd science, and citizen science on environmental health and justice issues. He is director of the Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) lab which provides technical assistance, consultation, and research support to communities with environmental justice and health issues in Maryland, the Washington, DC region, and across the country. He is a PI on a project to build geospatial tools for environmental justice, park equity, and climate equity; a PI of a project to provide outreach on environmental public health issues in the state of Maryland; Co-I on a project to assess environmental justice issues associated with stormwater management in the Washington, DC region; and a Co-I on a project to assess impacts of disasters and flooding risk on susceptible populations in environmental justice communities.  He is currently a member of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), on the board of the Citizen Science Association, and Editor in Chief of Environmental Justice.

Elizabeth Yeampierre is a internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and Indigenous ancestry born and raised in New York City. A national leader in climate justice movement, Elizabeth is the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. She is Executive Director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community based organization. Her award winning vision for an inter-generational, multi-cultural and community led organization is the driving force behind UPROSE. She is a long-time advocate and trailblazer for community organizing around just, sustainable development, environmental justice and community-led climate adaptation and community resiliency in Sunset Park. Prior to assuming the Executive Director position at UPROSE, Ms. Yeampierre was the Director of Legal Education and Training at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, Director of Legal Services for the American Indian law Alliance and Dean of Puerto Rican Student Affairs at Yale University.  She holds a BA from Fordham University, a law degree from Northeastern University.