Affiliated Faculty

YCCCH's affiliated faculty are committed to collaboration on a wide range of topics for interdisciplinary research including food and water insecurity, infectious diseases, population displacement, climate disasters (preparedness, post-disaster response, morbidity and mortality surveillance), health co-benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation, climate change and pandemics, climate change impacts on microbial diversity and antibiotic resistance, and climate justice.

Serap Aksoy, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Trypanosomiasis, African
Tsetse Flies
Global Health
One Health
Professor Aksoy is a tropical medicine researcher whose work focuses on the epidemiology of insect transmitted (vector borne) and zoonotic diseases. Her research has been on tsetse flies and the pathogenic parasites they transmit that cause highly neglected and fatal diseases of humans in Africa, known as Sleeping Sickness. Her laboratory focuses on deciphering the vector-parasite molecular dialogue and parasite development during the transmission process with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets of interference and developing transmission blocking vaccines to reduce disease. Her fundamental and interdisciplinary work on tsetse and its microbial symbionts has identified key principles that shape host-microbe interactions. Her studies with tsetse's mutualistic microbes identified nutritional contributions that facilitate female fecundity and mediate host immune system development. Her studies with tsetse's commensal microbiota led to a novel biological method, coined as paratransgenesis, in which anti-parasitic molecules are synthesized in the beneficial gut microbes, thus making the gut environment inhospitable for disease causing parasites. Ability to spread such modified microbes into natural insect populations is being explored to reduce disease transmission as a novel biological method.Dr. Aksoy maintains collaborative research activities with Yale researchers as well as with multiple universities and research institutes in Africa. Their studies in Kenya and Uganda investigate the epidemiology of Sleeping Sickness disease, with a focus on understanding the major drivers that sustain disease transmission, as well as on population genetics of flies and parasites and their microbiota. She initiated and led a large international consortium that eventually sequenced the genome of six tsetse fly species. This effort vastly expanded molecular knowledge and genomic resources on this neglected disease vector, and collectively expanded research capacity in bioinformatics and functional biology in many laboratories in sub-Sahara Africa. As the co-editor in Chief of the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases between 2007-2020, she has been a major voice for building research and publication capacity for global neglected tropical diseases. Throughout her professional career, Aksoy has been an advocate of and innovator in Global Health; served as a dedicated mentor to students and scientists in the US and in Africa, China, Italy and Turkey helping to prepare the next generation of leaders in the fields of epidemiology and zoonotic disease control.
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Paul Anastas
Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) and Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment
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.
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Theodore Andreadis, PhD
Clinical Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases)
Dr. Theodore Andreadis is the Director of The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Head of the Center for Vector Biology & Zoonotic Diseases where he formally directed the State of Connecticut’s Mosquito and Arbovirus Research and Surveillance Programs. He is a native of Massachusetts, has two grown children and resides in Cheshire with his wife Peg. Dr. Andreadis holds a B.S. degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology and M.S. degree in Medical Entomology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Insect Pathology from the University of Florida at Gainesville. He is also holds an appointment as a Clinical Professor within the Epidemiology of Microbial Disease Division at the Yale School of Public Health and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Pathobiology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of over 195 scientific publications on mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases and his current research activities focus on the mosquito ecology, microbial control of mosquitoes and the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases
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Carl Baum, MD, MSc
Professor of Pediatrics (Emergency Medicine) and of Emergency Medicine
Carl Baum, MD, FAAP, FACMT, is board-certified in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and in Medical Toxicology, and has over 25 years' experience in both subspecialties. He serves as attending physician in the Pediatric Emergency Department, and as Director of the state-funded Lead Poisoning and Regional Treatment Center. Nationally, Dr. Baum serves the following organizations:• Executive Committee, Council on Children and Disasters, American Academy of Pediatrics• Medical Toxicology Subboard, American Board of Pediatrics/American Board of Emergency Medicine• National Biodefense Science Board, Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response, US Department of Health and Human ServicesIn addition, he is a member of the International Society for Children's Health and the Environment.
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Michelle L. Bell, PhD
Mary E. Pinchot Professor at the School of the Environment and Professor of Environmental Health; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Environmental Health
Epidemiology
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.
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Laura Bothwell, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor of Clinical Public Health; Assistant Professor, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Bioethics
Environment and Public Health
Epidemiology
Ethics
History
History of Medicine
Human Rights
Political Systems
Public Health
Social Justice
Social Medicine
Global Health
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
Pharmacoepidemiology
Government Regulation
Vulnerable Populations
Policy
Social Determinants of Health
Public Health Systems Research
Adaptive Clinical Trials as Topic
Dr. Bothwell is an ethicist and historian of public health. Her research examines social, historical, and ethical dimensions of epidemiology with a particular focus on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Her current book project examines how international and national policies have influenced trial rigor and ethics, protections of vulnerable trial subjects, and participant diversity in RCTs. She also does work at the intersection of climate change, epidemiology, and ethics. She completed a PhD in the History and Ethics of Public Health and Medicine from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Health Policy, Law, and Ethics in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has also had visiting appointments at Oxford University, Foundation Brocher, the Karolinska Institutet, and National Taiwan University. She teaches public health ethics and the history of public health, and provides pre-departure ethics training in global health practice. She holds a secondary appointment in the Section of the History of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.
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Xi Chen, PhD
Associate Professor of Public Health (Health Policy) and Associate Professor at Institution for Social and Policy Studies; Affiliated Faculty, Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Affiliated Faculty, Department of Economics
Research Interests
Aging
Air Pollution
Alzheimer Disease
Child
Cognition
Dementia
Economics
Medicare
Pensions
Retirement
Social Behavior
Climate Change
Big Data
Xi Chen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Public Health (Health Policy), of Global Health, of Economics, and of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. He is a faculty fellow at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Yale Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Yale Center for Climate Change and Health, Yale Macmillan Center, Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS), and a faculty advisor of the Yale-China Association. He is a PEPPER Scholar at Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. His research endeavors focus on economics and public policies on population aging, and global health systems. Currently, his main research projects involve: 1) Economics of cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), using both medical claims data and survey data to investigate how cognitive aging may affect decision-making and healthcare utilization, and ADRD care quality, costs and equity; 2) Pension, retirement policies and health of the aging population; 3) The impact of environmental pollution and climate change on older adults; 4) life course factors and healthy aging. Professor Chen is a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and its Cluster Lead in Environment and Human Capital, Editor at the Journal of Population Economics, President of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS) (2018-2020), and an Academic Committee member of the Global Lecture Series on Chinese Economy. He is an adjunct professor at Peking University and at SJTU-Yale Joint Health Policy Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University. He consults for the United Nations and the World Bank. He is an alumni affiliate of Cornell Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors & Disparities, Cornell Population Center, and Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences. He has served as a grant reviewer for the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the Research Council of Norway, Guest Editor at the Journal of Asian Economics, a member of the editorial board at China CDC Weekly, and a reviewer for more than 30 peer-reviewed journals. Professor Chen's work has been recognized through numerous awards, such as the George Warren Award (2012), the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the AAEA (2013), the Interdisciplinary Paper Award of the Gerontology Association of America (2019), the Best Abstract Award at the Academy Health Research Meetings (2020), Top 1.5% Economist Worldwide rby RePEc. He is a Butler-Williams Scholar at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) (2019). His timely and rigorous economic evaluations on the COVID-19 pandemic won the Kuznets Prize (2021). His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 100+ peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, LANCET, JAMA Network Open, PLoS Medicine, LANCET Public Health, JEEM, JoPE, EHP, SSM, JEoA, and AJAE. These studies have been widely covered 3,000+ times in popular media worldwide, such as BBC, CNN, CBS, WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Macmillan Report, The Times of London, NPR, NBC News, Reuters, Associated Press, Time Magazine, Fortune, Slate, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, Science Magazine, Nature, DW, ABC (Australia), ABC (USA), EuroNews, Foreign Policy, FOX News, New Scientist, The Hill, National Geography, Foreign Affairs, The LANCET, RT, Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, and People's Daily, The Hill, CBC, VOA, The Telegraph, AFP, Scientific American, SCMP, The Independent, Yahoo Finance, VoX, Barron's, USA Today, LA Times, WIRED, VICE, The Atlantic, The Scientist Magazine. He is a commentator at BBC, CNN, EuroNews, CGTN. Chen has written opinion pieces for NYT. Chen has been invited by The National Committee on United States China Relations (NCUSCR) as a delegate of U.S. - China Healthcare Dialogue (Track II). In the past ten years, Professor Chen has supervised more than 30 postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Yale College students who have won a number of outstanding paper awards. Chen has taught quantitative methods in health economics and health services research, as well as U.S.-China Health Systems at Yale. Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University.
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Jamie Childs, ScD
Lecturer in Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Bartonella
Borrelia
Orthohantavirus
Leptospira
Lyme Disease
Rabies
Rickettsia
Global Health
Zoonoses
Arenavirus
Senior Scientist Childs’ area of research includes theecological dynamics of directly-transmitted zoonotic viruses, including the hantaviruses, arenaviruses and rabies, and vector-borne bacteria, including rickettsia, bartonella and borrelia. Prior to coming to Yale in 2004, Dr. Childs served as the Chief of the Viral and Rickettial Zoonoses Branch at CDC. His recent interests and research, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Albert Ko, Division Chief at Yale, and Fleur Porter, an MPH candidate, focus on the ecoepidemiology of intra- and inter-specific transmission of leptospires in an urban slum setting in Salvador, Brazil. The Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) is the principal reservoir host for leptospires causing human disease in Salvador, however, scant knowledge exists on the mechanisms of acquisition, maintenance and shedding of this bacterium by rats. Humans are directly infected by leptospires through contact with environments contaminated with spirochetes shed in the urine of infected rats Defining parameters of the natural history of leptospiral infection within individual rats and within rat populations, coupled with determinations of critical environmental and ecological features underlying the distribution and density of rat populations, will help elucidate risk factors for human infection and disease.
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Miraj U. Desai, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Miraj U. Desai, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Program for Recovery and Community Health of the Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. At Yale, he is also a Fellow of Pierson College, Affiliated Faculty in the Center on Climate Change and Health (Yale School of Public Health), and a Member of the South Asian Studies Council. He has been at Yale since 2011, completing his clinical and postdoctoral fellowships, prior to joining the faculty in 2015. His work focuses on the cultural, community, and social justice foundations of mental health. Dr. Desai leads the Structural Health and Psychology (SHP, or "ship") Lab. The SHP Lab investigates—through multiple methods and community engagement—the structural bases of health, equity, and inequity. This work also involves developing a novel basic and applied science—which his lab calls “structural psychology”—to aid in these efforts. Structural psychology spans the entire translational science spectrum, inclusive of basic, clinical, community, and population health research. Dr. Desai's scientific work on culture, community, race, and racism has been funded by a range of awards, including a K01 Award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities/NIH; a Pioneering Ideas Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; a KL2 Scholar Award from the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation/NIH (for research in partnership with local African American faith communities); and a NIMH Supplement for Minority Health and Mental Health Disparities Research (for research featuring Asian and Latinx communities). Dr. Desai’s book, Travel and Movement in Clinical Psychology: The World Outside the Clinic (Palgrave), with Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, examines the relationship between mental health and various forms of structural oppression. Dr. Desai is a recipient of the Melba J.T. Vasquez Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions (American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program); the Distinguished Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry Award (APA Division of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods); and the Sidney Jourard Award (APA Society for Humanistic Psychology). He is a Minority Fellow of the APA and was named a 40 Under 40 Leader in Health by the National Minority Quality Forum. Dr. Desai is a practitioner of Zen and is proficient in Gujarati, French, and Hindi.
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Nicole Deziel, PhD, MHS
Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences); Co-Director, Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology (CPPEE)
Dr. Deziel obtained a Master’s of Industrial Hygiene and Doctorate in Environmental Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research is focused on applying statistical models, biomonitoring techniques, and environmental measurements to provide comprehensive and quantitative assessments of exposure to traditional and emerging environmental contaminants in population-based studies. Her research uses a combination of large, administrative datasets and detailed community-focused studies to advance understanding of environmental exposures to chemicals, particularly carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. This research also serves to illuminate exposure mechanisms underlying associations between environmental chemicals and disease, thereby informing more effective policies to reduce exposures and protect public health. Dr. Deziel's contributions have been directed at two main areas: (1) exposure and human health impacts of unconventional oil and gas development (“hydraulic fracturing”) and (2) residential exposure to chemicals in common consumer products (e.g., pesticides, flame retardants) and cancer risk (particularly thyroid cancer). In addition, she consider disproportionate burdens of exposures (“environmental justice”) and the combination of environmental and social stressors in the context of her work.
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Durland Fish, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Babesia
Babesiosis
Borrelia
Chikungunya virus
Climate
Epidemiology
Biological Evolution
Insect Vectors
Lyme Disease
Parasitology
Public Health
Ticks
Global Health
Evolution, Planetary
Climate Change
Durland Fish, a native of Berwick, Pennsylvania, received his B.S. degree at Albright College in Reading, PA in 1966 with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. Upon graduation he was employed with the Pennsylvania Department of Health as a sanitarian and in 1967 became Regional Vector Control Coordinator in charge of insect and rodent-borne diseases. His investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in 1968 stimulated a career in public health entomology. In 1970, Fish entered the graduate program in entomology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he received his M.S. in 1973. He went on to continue his graduate studies at the University of Florida where he received his Ph.D. in entomology with a minor in ecology in 1976.Fish studied vector ecology at the University of Notre Dame with a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. He went to New York in 1980 as Assistant Professor of Biology at Fordham University, where he taught ecology and medical entomology. In 1985, he joined the faculty at New York Medical College where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Community and Preventative Medicine and Director of the Medical Entomology Laboratory, and became Director of Lyme Disease Research Center in 1990.He joined the faculty at Yale School of Public Health in 1994 where became Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases with a secondary appointment to Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Fish also served on the faculty of the interdisciplinary Microbiology Ph.D. Program and the Yale College Environmental Studies Program. He is founding Director of the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies Center for EcoEpidemiology and serves on the Steering Committee of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute. His research on epidemiology and prevention of vector-borne disease has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Sandia National Laboratory, New York State Dept. of Health, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Mathers Charitable Foundation, and the American Lyme Disease Foundation. He has been awarded the honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from Albright College and Master of Arts from Yale University. He was recipient of a Mentor of the Year Award at Yale School of Public Health in 2012 and received the Hoogstraal Medal in Medical Entomology from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and hygiene in 2015.Fish retired on July 1, 2015 and is now Professor Emeritus at Yale School of Public Health where he remains active in research, writing, and advising students.He is a member of many professional scientific societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Entomological Society of America and the Ecological Society of America. He has served as chairman of the Medical and Veterinary Entomology Section of the Entomological Society of America, president of the New York Entomological Society, and president of the International Northwestern Conference on Diseases in Nature Communicable to Man. He has also served on Executive Boards for the Society for Vector Ecology, Acarological Society of America, and the American Committee on Medical Entomology of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He has served on Editorial Boards for Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Journal of Medical Entomology, and is Founding Editor of Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. He has presented over 100 papers at professional meetings and has published more than 130 scientific journal articles in entomology, ecology, and medicine. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, Newsweek, Science, Science News, Audubon Magazine and the New York Times, and he has appeared on numerous television programs including NBC News, NBC Today Show, ABC Nightline, CBS This Morning, and was featured in documentaries produced by The Discovery Channel and BBC.
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Alison Galvani, PhD
Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis (CIDMA)
Research Interests
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
Africa, Southern
Ecology
Economics
Epidemiologic Methods
Epidemiology
Biological Evolution
HIV
Influenza, Human
Parasitology
Public Health
Tuberculosis
Global Health
Evolution, Planetary
Infectious Disease Medicine
Alison Galvani, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis (CIDMA) and the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. She has applied her modelling and health economics skills to address myriad public health challenges, including HIV/AIDS, Zika, Ebola, influenza, and COVID-19. In 2015, Galvani became the youngest faculty member ever appointed to an endowed chair in the history of the Yale School of Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. and B.A. from the University of Oxford.
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Drew Gentner
Associate Professor Tenure
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Kenneth Gillingham
Professor and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
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Annie Harper, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Annie Harper has a PhD from Yale University in cultural anthropology. She conducts research on how vulnerable populations, particularly low income people with mental illness, cope with poverty and financial difficulties, and how to support them in this area. She is particularly interested in understanding how the financial services and retail industries could better serve low income people generally, and people with mental illness in particular. She is committed to combining rigorous research with practical work that makes a difference now, to which end she works closely with the City of New Haven and the broader community’s efforts to provide support to low income residents struggling with financial difficulties. She is originally from the UK, but has lived for many years in New Haven with her husband, who is originally from Pakistan, and their three children.
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Saria Hassan, MD
Assistant Professor Adjunct; Director, Pediatric Global Health Track, Pediatrics; Deputy Director, Yale-TCC
Dr. Saria Hassan is an Instructor in General Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. She is core faculty at the Equity Research Innovation Center. She is certified in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and spent her early years as a Primary Care Physician for the under-served in New Haven, CT. She is now the Deputy Director of the Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine, where she hopes to continue her work with under-served populations by addressing the important issue of health disparities. Her research interest is in using implementation science and implementation science frameworks to design, implement and evaluate interventions to reduce cardiovascular risk disparities in the US and globally.Dr. Hassan is also the Director of the Pediatric Global Health Track for residents in the General Pediatrics department. Please visit the Pediatric Global Health Track website for more information.
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Debbie Humphries, PhD, MPH, MA
Assistant Professor of Clinical Public Health; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
Developing Countries
Ghana
HIV
Hookworm Infections
Malaria
Parasitology
Public Health
Vietnam
Global Health
Nutrition Policy
Dr. Humphries has a broad background in public health research and practice. She has been a consultant in the areas of diet and physical activity behavior change, sustainability of community health programs, program monitoring and evaluation, and training in participatory monitoring and evaluation for organizations in Vietnam, Africa and in the United States. She has extended that reach through her Practice-based Community Health Research course which places student groups with agencies in the State of Connecticut to plan and evaluate programs. Sample projects include: Determining the Best Time to Implement Routine HIV Testing in Jails; Barriers to Accessing Health Care and Health Needs of Undocumented Immigrants; Evaluation of HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and care in Connecticut Correctional Facilities; and Strategies to Reduce Low Birth Weight in New Haven: An Evaluation of the Outreach Strategy of the New Haven Maternal and Child Health Department. Humphries is also a member of the Community Research Engagement steering committee at Yale.Dr. Humphries’ research addresses interactions between nutrition and infectious disease, as well as programmatic approaches to improving public health. This work has taken her to Asia and Africa where she has studied environmental factors and intestinal helminth infections and their relationship to anemia as well as effectiveness of intervention programs. She is currently collaborating on a longitudinal study to characterize parasite and host factors affecting response to deworming in Ghana.
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Jeannette Ickovics, PhD
Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Yale School of Public Health; Dean of Faculty, Yale-NUS College; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Chronic Disease
Community Health Services
Epidemiology
Obesity
Pregnancy
Prenatal Care
Urban Health
Jeannette R. Ickovics is the Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She served as the Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College from 2018-2021, and was a Visiting Professor during the 2017-2018 academic year. Yale-NUS is a partnership between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. It is a selective college of liberal arts and sciences in Asia committed to training global leaders to solve some of the world's most complex challenges. As Dean of Faculty, she was responsible for faculty development and curriculum across the Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Her legacy is marked by the recruitment of world-class faculty, establishing a multi-tiered mentoring program, and building research infrastructure as well as a culture of research at the College.At the Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Ickovics was Founding Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health (2002-2012), and Founding Director of CARE: Community Alliance for Research and Engagement as part of Yale's inaugural Clinical and Translational Science Award (2007-2017). She was also Deputy Director for the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS where she was Director of an NIH training program for pre- and post- doctoral fellows for 15 years (now in its 22nd year). Dr. Ickovics’ research investigates the interplay of complex biomedical, behavioral, social and psychological factors that influence individual and community health. She uses this lens to examine challenges faced by those often marginalized by the health care system and by society. She has expertise in running large, scientifically rigorous clinical trials in community settings. Her community-based research – funded with more than $40 million in grants from the NIH, CDC, and private foundations – is characterized by methodological rigor and cultural sensitivity. She has held important academic and community leadership positions for the past decade, honing her leadership skills and expertise. As Director of CARE, she was seen as a trusted and respected collaborator. Through her work at CARE, she secured New Haven as the first US site of Community Interventions for Health, a multi-national, multi-sectoral research collaborative focused on the prevention of chronic diseases worldwide. She was founding Chair of the Adherence Committee of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (NIAID), responsible for the adherence portfolio across 27 AIDS Clinical Trials Units nationwide. In addition to other grants, she has been PI on two multi-site NIH-funded randomized controlled trials on an innovative model of group prenatal care, demonstrating a 33% reduction in preterm birth and other positive health outcomes for mothers and babies. Based on these results, The United Health Foundation funded a dissemination study of group prenatal care in Detroit MI and Nashville TN, with an eye toward national scale-up. Dr. Ickovics also was PI of a public-private evaluation with Merck for Mothers (evaluating the use of community health workers for pregnant women with chronic disease), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, and an NIH-funded randomized controlled obesity prevention trial at 12 middle schools in collaboration with the Rudd Center and the New Haven Public Schools. She is author of more than 220 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Ickovics is recipient of national awards and recognition, including most recently the Strickland-Daniel Mentoring Award from the American Psychological Association (2018), and elected a member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (2020).
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Kaveh Khoshnood, PhD, MPH
Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Track Director, Critical Topics, Executive MPH; Faculty Director, InnovateHealth Yale; Program Co-Director, Global Health Ethics Program, Yale Institute for Global Health; Track Director, Critical Topics in Public Health, Executive MPH
Research Interests
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
Epidemiology
Ethics
HIV
Human Rights
Public Health
Violence
Global Health
Infectious Disease Medicine
Dr. Khoshnood is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Yale School of Public Health and executive committee member at Yale Council on Middle East Studies. He is co-founder of Yale Violence and Health Study Group and a faculty member of the Program on Conflict, Resiliency and Health at the Yale MacMillan Center. Dr. Khoshnood is trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has more than three decades of domestic and international experience in HIV prevention research among people who use drugs and other at-risk populations. Dr. Khoshnood's research interests include: 1) epidemiology and prevention of HIV/AIDS, 2) research ethics and 3) humanitarian health. His projects are primarily in China, Lebanon and Bhutan. Dr. Khoshnood teaches a new course on health in humanitarian crises.
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Jaehong Kim
Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor of Engineering; Professor, Environmental Health Sciences
Jaehong Kim is currently Professor and Chair of Chemical and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale University in 2013, he was the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor and the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Seoul National University in Korea in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. He is interested in diverse aspects of environmental science and engineering, from fundamental photocatalytic and photoluminescent materials chemistry to water quality engineering in the developing world.
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Albert Ko, MD
Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Dengue
Epidemiology
Leptospirosis
Urban Health
Global Health
Meningitis, Bacterial
Infectious Disease Medicine
Dr. Albert Icksang Ko is the Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and a Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research program in Brazil, which focuses on delineating the role of social marginalization, urban ecology and climate in the emergence of infectious disease threats in slum communities and informal settlements. He and his team have mobilized research capacity to develop and implement community-based interventions to epidemics of meningitis, leptospirosis, dengue, Zika virus infection and associated birth defects, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Ko is also Program Director of the Fogarty/NIH Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at collaborating international sites. He is a member of the WHO R&D Taskforce for Zika Virus and R&D Blueprint Working Group. During the pandemic, he served with Indra Nooyi as co-chair of Governor Lamont’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group. Dr. Ko continues to advise the Governor and the State on its pandemic prevention and control plan, in addition to supporting the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in its COVID-19 response in Brazil.
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Peter James Krause, MD
Senior Research Scientist in Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases), in Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and in Pediatrics (Infectious Disease) and Lecturer in Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Babesiosis
Blood Transfusion
Epidemiology
Lyme Disease
Relapsing Fever
Borrelia burgdorferi
Infectious Disease Medicine
Biostatistics
Diseases
Dr. Peter J. Krause is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. He received his B.A. with honors in biology from Williams College and his M.D. from Tufts University School of Medicine. He completed his Pediatric internship and residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Stanford University Medical Center and his Pediatric Infectious Diseases training at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1979 where he became Professor of Pediatrics and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. He moved back to Yale in 2008.Dr. Krause carries out translational, epidemiological, and clinical research in the study of vector-borne disease. His primary focus has been on human babesiosis but he has also carried out research on two companion tick-borne infections, Lyme disease and relapsing fever caused by Borrelia miyamotoi. He is the author of more than 200 peer reviewed scientific publications, 2 books, and 35 book chapters. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and is on the Editorial Boards of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, Plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Pathogens. He has served on several leadership committees of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and Connecticut Infectious Diseases Society. He recently served as Chair of the committee that wrote the Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Infectious Diseases Society of America's 2020 Guideline on Diagnosis and Management of Babesiosis. He also was selected as a Member of the committee that wrote the Infectious Diseases Society of America Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Lyme Disease. He has been cited in American Men and Women of Science, The Best Doctors in America, and Who’s Who in America. He is currently serving on the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health Tick Borne Disease Working Group 2021-2022.Dr. Krause and his colleagues were the first to:Characterize the frequency and clinical outcome of human tick-borne disease coinfection Identify the long-term persistence of Babesia infection in people Perform an antibiotic treatment trial for human babesiosis Characterize persistent and relapsing babesiosis in immunocompromised hosts Develop a laboratory method for screening the blood supply for Babesia microti infection Discover human infection by the relapsing fever spirochete Borrelia miyamotoi Discover human infection by Borrelia miyamotoi in the United States (co-discoverers) Develop a Borrelia miyamotoi antibody assay Describe the epidemiology of Borrelia miyamotoi infection Provide evidence that Borrelia miyamotoi may be transmitted through blood transfusion They also have quantitated the risk of transmission of babesiosis and Lyme disease though blood transfusion and developed several antibody and molecular-based tests for the diagnosis of babesiosis and Borrelia miyamotoi.
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Stephen Latham, JD, PhD
Senior Research Scholar; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health, Yale Institute for Global Health; Director, Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics
Stephen R. Latham, JD, PhD is Director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. A graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and UC Berkeley’s doctoral program in Jurisprudence, Latham is a former healthcare business and regulatory attorney, and served as Director of Ethics Standards at the AMA before entering academia full-time. Latham is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and has been a graduate fellow of Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics and a Research Fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. At Yale, Latham teaches about bioethics and environmental ethics in the College, the Law School, and the School of the Environment. He chairs the Human Subjects Committee, co-chairs the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, and does clinical ethics consultation at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. He is a former board member and Secretary of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, from which he received a Distinguished Service Award in 2010. Latham's 100+ publications in bioethics and health-law have appeared in leading medical, bioethics and health-law journals.
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Xuhui Lee, PhD
Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor at the School of the Environment
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Anthony Leiserowitz
Senior Research Scientist at the School of the Environment
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an expert on public climate change and environmental beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them. He conducts research at the global, national, and local scales, including many surveys of the American public. He conducted the first global study of public values, attitudes, and behaviors regarding sustainable development and has published more than 200 scientific articles, chapters, and reports. He has served as a contributing author, panel member, advisor or consultant to diverse organizations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6 Report), the National Academy of Sciences (America’s Climate Choices Report), the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Kennedy School, the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Economic Forum, among others. He is a recipient of the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Mitofsky Innovator Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, and the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 680 stations and frequencies nationwide. Twitter: @ecotone2
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Sarah Lowe, PhD
Associate Professor of Public Health (Social and Behavioral Sciences), Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Clinical Professor of Nursing; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Anxiety Disorders
Mental Disorders
Disasters
Genetics, Behavioral
Mental Health Services
Psychological Phenomena
Psychology, Clinical
Rwanda
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
Mood Disorders
Substance-Related Disorders
Stress Disorders, Traumatic, Acute
Resilience, Psychological
Disaster Victims
Psychiatry and Psychology
Psychological Trauma
Trauma and Stressor Related Disorders
Exposure to Violence
Gender-Based Violence
Sarah Lowe, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health, with secondary appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Nursing. Her research focuses on the long-term mental health consequences of a range of potentially traumatic events, as well as the impact of such events on other domains of functioning, such as physical health, social relationships, and economic wellbeing. Her work explores the mechanisms leading from trauma exposure to symptoms, and the role of factors at various ecological levels – from genetics to neighborhoods – in shaping risk and resilience. She uses a range of methodologies to achieve her research aims, including structural equation modeling, latent growth curve analysis, geospatial modeling, and qualitative analysis, among others. Dr. Lowe received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Boston and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training program at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
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Xiaomei Ma, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases); Co-Leader, Cancer Prevention and Control
Research Interests
Chronic Disease
Epidemiology
Leukemia
Lymphoma
Myelodysplastic Syndromes
Myeloproliferative Disorders
Neoplasms
Dr. Ma is Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, and Co-Leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, Yale School of Medicine. She studies the etiology and health outcomes of different types of cancer, with a focus on pediatric cancer and malignancies of the hematopoietic system (e.g., leukemia, lymphoma, myelodysplastic syndromes, and myeloproliferative neoplasms). Her research has addressed the impact of immunological factors, chemical exposures, and genetic characteristics on the risk of cancer. In addition, she has assessed the patterns of care and cost implications of cancer screening and treatment in older adults.
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Nikhil S. Malvankar
Associate Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Research Interests
Bacteria, Anaerobic
Bacterial Adhesion
Bacterial Infections
Biophysics
Chemistry, Physical
Electron Transport
Environmental Microbiology
Microscopy, Atomic Force
Nanotechnology
Nikhil is an associate professor at Yale. His lab studies structures, functions and mechanisms of conductive protein filaments (nanowires) Geobacter uses to transport electrons derived from metabolism to produce electricity and clean up waste. Nikhil’s team discovered that these filaments show high conductivity due to continuous arrangement of cytochrome hemes. Nikhil’s team is now using these nanowires to develop electrogenetics - electronic control of bacterial growth, communication and adhesion. Nikhil has received the Blavatnik Award for Innovation and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2021, NSF CAREER Award in 2018, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and Hartwell Foundation Individual Biomedical Research Award in 2017, Charles H. Hood Foundation Child Health Research Award in 2016 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2014.
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Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS
Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine), of Epidemiology (Chronic Disease) and of Public Health (Social And Behavioral Sciences) & Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Founding Director, Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC), Yale School of Medicine; Director, Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Director, Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI); Director, Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership
Research Interests
Chronic Disease
Health Services Research
Internal Medicine
Social Justice
Socioeconomic Factors
Global Health
Women's Health
Caribbean Region
Vulnerable Populations
Minority Health
Healthcare Disparities
Community-Based Participatory Research
Social Discrimination
Social Determinants of Health
Patient Reported Outcome Measures
Global Burden of Disease
Population Health
COVID-19
Dr. Nunez-Smith is Inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research; C.N.H Long Professor of Internal Medicine, Public Health, and Management; Founding Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC); Director of the Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Associate Cancer Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Yale Cancer Center; Chief Health Equity Officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation; Core Faculty in the National Clinician Scholars Program; Research Faculty in the Global Health Leadership Initiative; Director of the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership; and Co-Director of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship. Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on centering community engagement, supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases. Dr. Nunez-Smith has extensive expertise in examining the effects of social and structural determinants of health, systemic influences contributing to health disparities, health equity improvement, and community-academic partnered scholarship. In addition to primary data collection, management, and analysis, ERIC has institutional expertise in qualitative and mixed methods, population health, and medical informatics. Dr. Nunez-Smith is the principal investigator on many NIH and foundation-funded research projects, including an NIH-funded project to develop a tool to assess patient reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare. She has conducted an investigation of the promotion and retention of diversity in academic medical school faculty and has published numerous articles on the experiences of minority students and faculty. Funded by NIH/NIMHD, she established the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands, supporting several chronic disease research projects and enhancing health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region; the flagship ECHORN Cohort Study recruited and is following a community-dwelling adult cohort (n=3000) to examine novel chronic disease risk and protective factors. She received NIH/NHLBI funding to build upon this work by recruiting children into an expanded intergenerational ECHORN cohort, inclusive of a biorepository. She is also PI on one of five NIH/NIMHD-funded Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers on Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine which leverages the ECHORN infrastructure to conduct collaborative research on hypertension and diabetes. Most recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shed national attention on the health and healthcare disparities of marginalized populations, she received NIH funding to leverage ECHORN to improve the COVID-19 testing cascade in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Further, she was called upon to chair the Governor’s ReOpen CT Advisory Group Community Committee and was subsequently named co-chair of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. She served as Senior Advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response and Chair of the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Nunez-Smith has mentored dozens of trainees since completing fellowship and has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Nunez-Smith is board certified in internal medicine, having completed residency training at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fellowship at the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, where she also received a Masters in Health Sciences. Originally from the US Virgin Islands, she attended Jefferson Medical College, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and she earned a BA in Biological Anthropology and Psychology at Swarthmore College.
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Kieran O'Donnell, PhD
Assistant Professor
Research Interests
Biological Psychiatry
Molecular Epidemiology
Depression, Postpartum
Pregnant Women
Dr. O’Donnell is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences within the Yale School of Medicine where he leads the Health-Omics & Perinatal Epidemiology (HOPE) Research Group.Dr. O’Donnell's research focuses on maternal perinatal mental health and the developmental origins of mental health. His group integrates genomic and epigenomic data with measures of psychosocial risk to 1) better understand individual differences in maternal perinatal mental health and 2) identify the molecular processes that underlie the persisting influence of the prenatal environment on child/adolescent neurodevelopment. Dr. O'Donnell's research occurs in the context of a number of large prospective longitudinal cohorts, including the Montreal Antenatal Well-Being Study, as well as randomized controlled trials of maternally-focused psychosocial interventions.
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Virginia Pitzer, ScD
Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Ecology
Immunization
Paratyphoid Fever
Rotavirus
Typhoid Fever
Global Health
Virginia Pitzer, joined the Yale School of Public Health as an assistant professor in 2012. She earned her Sc.D. in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2007, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) and a postdoctoral fellow in the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics (RAPIDD) program at the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health prior to coming to Yale.Pitzer’s work focuses on mathematical modeling of the transmission dynamics of imperfectly immunizing infections and how interventions such as vaccination, improved treatment of cases, and improvements in sanitation affect disease transmission at the population level. Her primary research is in rotavirus, (one of the leading causes of severe diarrhea in children in developed and developing countries) for which two new vaccines have been recently introduced. She is also interested in the spatiotemporal dynamics of respiratory syncytial virus and evaluating control options for typhoid fever. Her paper Demographic Variability, Vaccination, and the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Rotavirus Epidemics appeared in Science magazine in 2009.
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Thomas Pogge, PhD
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science
Having received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, Thomas Pogge is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as co-founder of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network aiming to enhance the impact of scholars, teachers and students on global poverty, and of Incentives for Global Health, a team effort toward developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org). His recent publications include Designing in Ethics, co-edited, Cambridge 2017; Global Tax Fairness, co-edited, Oxford 2016; Politics as Usual, Polity 2010; World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd edition, Polity 2008; Global Justice and Global Ethics, co-edited, Paragon House 2008; John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, Oxford 2007; and Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, edited, Oxford & UNESCO 2007. More information at https://campuspress.yale.edu/thomaspogge/
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Krystal Pollitt, PhD, P.Eng.
Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health
Research Interests
Air Pollution
Environmental Exposure
Mass Spectrometry
Exposome
Dr. Pollitt’s research explores the human exposome through characterisation of environmental and biological samples using analytical and mass spectrometry (MS) techniques. Her group has developed various mass spectrometry (ICP-MS, LC-MS and GC-MS) to measure exposure to complex mixtures of trace elements and organic compounds. She has applied these exposure assessment methods in numerous in epidemiological studies. Visit our lab website: pollittlab.weebly.com
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Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, PhD
Professor of Public Health (Social and Behavioral Sciences); Director, Office of Public Health Practice; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Director, YSPH Global Health Concentration; Director, Maternal and Child Health Promotion (MCHP) Program
Research Interests
Breast Feeding
Child Care
Child Development
Community Health Workers
Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2
Food Deprivation
Hypertension
Maternal Health Services
Maternal-Child Health Centers
Mental Health
Nutrition Surveys
Obesity
Global Health
Healthcare Disparities
Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Ph.D., is Professor of Public Health, and Director of the Office of Public Health Practice, the Global Health Concentration, and the Maternal Child Health Promotion track at the Yale School of Public Health. He is the PI of the Yale-Griffin CDC Prevention Research Center (PRC). His global public health nutrition and food security research program, supported with over $70 million in extramural funds, has contributed to improvements in breastfeeding and other maternal, infant and young child nutrition outcomes, iron deficiency anemia among infants, household food security, and early childhood development. He has co-led innovative mixed-methods implementation studies assessing the impact of community health worker person centered interventions on breastfeeding, type-2 diabetes, post-partum hypertension and mental health outcomes among in vulnerable communities, including people of color in the U.S. He has published over 340 research articles, 3 books/monographs, and numerous journal supplements, book chapters, and technical reports. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (elected in 2019) and served in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Food and Nutrition Board from 2012-18. He has been a senior advisor to maternal-child community nutrition programs as well as household food security measurement projects funded by the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the U.S. Agency for International Development, The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH),The World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Governments across world regions. He obtained his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and his MS in Food Science and his PhD in Nutrition from the University of California at Davis. His postdoctoral training at UC Davis focused on the link between nutrition and early childhood development.
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Narasimha Rao
Associate Professor
Narasimha Rao is an Associate Professor of Energy Systems at the Yale School of the Environment. His research examines energy’s role in poverty, human development, and in mitigating and adapting to climate change. He studies equity dimensions of energy transitions and their broader development impacts in emerging economies. He has developed the idea of ‘decent living energy,’ the energy needs to support basic well-being in different societies. His work addresses the public health impacts of energy poverty and their spatial distribution, including identifying populations vulnerable to heat stress, and ambient air pollution. In future work, he plans to assess multiple dimensions of poverty, including energy, air pollution, diet-related health risks and other living conditions together, so as to identify synergies in tackling them.
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Tormod Rogne, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases)
Research Interests
Environmental Health
Genetics
Pregnancy
Prenatal Care
Reproduction
Global Health
Perinatal Care
Genomics
Child Health
Dr. Rogne is a medical doctor and researcher who focuses on perinatal epidemiology. Some of the ongoing projects includes evaluating how climate change affects pregnancy, the role of modifiable risk factors on reproductive health and adverse pregnancy outcomes, and how being born preterm affects the risk of cardiovascular and infectious diseases in adulthood. To tackle clinically relevant questions and providing robust results, he applies modern methods ranging from negative controls and inverse-probability weighting to genetic epidemiological methods and genome-wide association analyses. Dr. Rogne places emphasis on using high-quality data, in particular by use of data from population based cohorts and national registries.
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Barbara Ruhl
Senior Research Scientist
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Gerald Torres
Professor
Professor Torres’ work over the past several years has addressed the environmental justice challenges posed by climate change. Locally, he works with the Sea Grant Programs in New York and Connecticut to help our coastal communities formulate resiliency and adaptation standards. In addition, Professor Torres works with Indigenous Nations to help highlight the impacts of climate change on those communities. This work opens up new avenues for research and practical action at the intersection of climate change, resource use, and public health.
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Jeffrey Townsend, PhD
Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Co-Leader, Genomics, Genetics, & Epigenetics Research Program
Research Interests
Algorithms
Bacteria
Bacterial Infections and Mycoses
Beer
Bread
Cell Transformation, Neoplastic
Coccidioidomycosis
Computing Methodologies
Biological Evolution
Fungi
Genetic Engineering
Microbiological Phenomena
Models, Genetic
Models, Theoretical
Mycoses
Neoplasm Metastasis
Neoplasms
Phylogeny
Viruses
Wine
Models, Statistical
Likelihood Functions
Logistic Models
Polymerase Chain Reaction
Sequence Analysis, DNA
Nonlinear Dynamics
Molecular Epidemiology
Gene Transfer Techniques
Crops, Agricultural
Evolution, Molecular
Nature
Sequence Analysis, Protein
Gene Expression Profiling
Public Health Informatics
Microarray Analysis
Genetic Speciation
Host-Pathogen Interactions
Genetic Phenomena
Mathematical Concepts
Organisms
Phenomena and Processes
Professor Townsend received his Ph.D. in 2002 in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University, under the advisement of Daniel Hartl. His Ph.D. was entitled "Population genetic variation in genome-wide gene expression: modeling, measurement, and analysis", and constituted the first population genetic analysis of genome-wide gene expression variation. After making use of the model budding yeast S. cerevisiae for his Ph.D. research, Dr. Townsend accepted an appointment as a Miller Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, where he worked to develop molecular tools, techniques, and analysis methodologies for functional genomics studies with the filamentous fungal model species Neurospora crassa, co-advised by Berkeley fungal evolutionary biologist John Taylor and molecular mycologist Louise Glass. In 2004, he accepted his first appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. In 2006 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In 2013 he began to work on statistical approaches to fit mathematical models of disease spread and emergence, and to work on the somatic evolution of cancer, and was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2017 he was named Elihu Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and in 2018 he was appointed Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2019 he was appointed a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, in recognition of the development of innovative approaches to population biology, including the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, disease evolution and transmission, and evolution of tumorigenesis; and research that has enabled curtailment of pathogen evolution, outbreak mitigation, and informed therapeutic approaches to cancer metastasis and evolution of therapeutic resistance in cancer. In 2021 he was selected as the Co-Chair-Elect of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research. In 2022 he was appointed Co-Director of the Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics Program of the Yale Cancer Center. In 2023 he was elevated to Co-Chair of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research.
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Paul Turner, PhD
Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Research Interests
RNA Viruses
Dr. Paul Turner is the Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and Microbiology faculty member at Yale School of Medicine. He obtained a BA in Biology (1988) from University of Rochester, a PhD in Microbial Evolution (1995) from Michigan State University, and did postdocs at National Institutes of Health, University of Valencia in Spain, and University of Maryland-College Park, before joining Yale in 2001. Dr. Turner studies evolutionary genetics of viruses, particularly phages that infect bacterial pathogens and RNA viruses transmitted by arthropods, and researches the use of phages to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases. He is very active in science-communication outreach to the general public, and is involved in programs where faculty collaborate with K-12 teachers to improve STEMM education in underserved public schools. Dr. Turner’s service includes the National Science Foundation’s Bio Advisory Committee, and his honors include Fellowship in the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and American Academy of Microbiology.
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