Professor; Director, Program for Humanities in Medicine; Director, Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers' Workshop
People
Program Team
Program Administrator; Program for Biomedical Ethics Manager; Program for Humanities in Medicine Manager
Lecturer; Writer in Residence, Program for Humanities in Medicine
Randi earned a B.S. from The University of Pennsylvania where she studied the history and sociology of science; an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, New York; an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, and an M.P.H. from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, NY.Postdoctoral Fellow
Robert Rock, MD, completed his family medicine training in the Residency Program for Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center prior to coming to Yale. Dr. Rock received his undergraduate degree in Art History from New York University and his Doctor of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Rock's career has included work in the design of interdisciplinary health equity curricula at the undergraduate and graduate medical education level. Career Interests: Dr. Rock envisions a career that combines community oriented primary care with policy-driven community based participatory research to advance health equity. Research Interests: Research interests include exploring social accountability on the part of healthcare institutions in relation to community benefits spending and tax exemption; exploring the impacts of promotion policies within academic medicine in relation to the minority tax; and community input and benefit in service learning health equity curriculum design.- Cyra Levenson
Senior Advisor in the Arts
As head of the Guggenheim’s Education and Public Engagement Department Cyra Levenson leads the museum’s efforts to reach a broad audience through programming, content development, academic partnerships and community engagement. Levenson has a significant role in partnering across the foundation’s international network. Prior to joining the Guggenheim Museum in March 2020, Levenson was the Deputy Director and Head of Public and Academic Engagement at Cleveland Museum of Art. In this role, she was responsible for leading all aspects of public and academic engagement, including public programming, academic affairs, interpretation of the collection and exhibitions, and community engagement. In Cleveland she also established a community arts center and led efforts to implement the museum’s diversity, equity, and inclusion plan. Previously, Levenson served as the Curator of Education and Academic Outreach at the Yale Center for British Art. During her tenure at theYale she helped to launch Making the Invisible Visible: Art Identity and Hierarchies of Power in collaboration with Dr. Robert Rock, a workshop that is now included in the orientation program for all medical students. Levenson has also held positions in the museum education field at The Rubin Museum of Art, The Heritage School in New York, and Seattle Art Museum. She holds a Master of Education degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College. She has published on topics including creativity and cognition, visual literacy, and critical pedagogy. Cyra Levenson holds a Master of Education degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio). She has published on topics including creativity and cognition, visual literacy, and critical pedagogy.
Faculty Affiliates
Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine (Medical Oncology & Hematology); Member, Cancer Prevention and Control; Faculty Affiliate, Program for Humanities in Medicine
Ash Alpert, MD, MFA, (pronouns they/them) is an Instructor of Medicine (Hematology). Dr. Alpert completed their post-doctoral fellowship (T32) in health services research at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Alpert received their medical degree from the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and completed residency at Cambridge Hospital and fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Wilmot Cancer Institute of the University of Rochester Medical Center. Their research and scholarship focuses on improving experiences and outcomes for transgender people with hematologic disease or cancer, and they work with a community advisory board of transgender people diagnosed with cancer with whom they have conducted research and published research and scholarship for over five years. They received a Young Investigator Award from Conquer Cancer, the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Foundation to develop patient-centered and non-stigmatizing gender identity data collection methods to be implemented in oncology settings and investigate the connections between experiences of violence and cancer risk for transgender people. Dr. Alpert is also involved with advocacy efforts nationally including working with national oncology organizations such as the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and ASCO to implement structural changes to improve outcomes for transgender people with cancer.Professor Emeritus of Medicine; Special Advisor to the Associate Dean for Student Affairs, Medical Education
Research Interests- Humanities
I am interested in early professional identification; stories of the profession, patients, New Haven and ourselves; power relationships in health care; and improving the learning environment. I was a junior high school English teacher before medical school and am interested in the intersection of the humanities with medicine. My research interests are in these areas and in ways to improve the medical student experience. I was the associate dean for student affairs for 23 years, through October 2021, and for six years directed the first Master Course for first-year medical students entitled Introduction to the Profession. I will be on sabbatical from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2022 during which time I hope to identify new ways that I can contribute to the Medical School community.Professor of Medicine (General Medicine)
Research Interests- Motion Pictures
- Wheelchairs
- Qualitative Research
- Healthcare Disparities
Dr. Gretchen Berland is a practicing general internist at Yale School of Medicine, and spends her time working in both the inpatient and outpatient arenas. Her interests also include using the documentary format combined with participatory action research as a means to study patient experience, and to better understand health culture and behavior. She has taught courses at Yale College, exploring the impact of the media on health care—both as a research and educational tool, and understanding the relationship between modern media and the medical community, specifically how different constituencies have utilized the media to shape perceptions of health and the medical profession.Associate Professor of Medicine (General Medicine); Associate Program Director of People & Culture, Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program; Vice Chief for Collaborative Excellence, General Internal Medicine
Aba (Osseo-Asare) Black received her Bachelor's degree from Princeton University and earned her M.D. at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry. She completed her residency at the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Program, where she was selected to serve as chief resident. A general internist by training, she is an emotionally intelligent physician leader who excels at strengthening relationships and building consensus. She has strategically created and directed innovations that promote health equity and optimize the workplace experiences of health care professionals from all walks of life. As a medical educator and residency program leader, she collaborates with team members to support the professional development of medical trainees and enhance organizational culture. Her leadership and equity-minded expertise has been recognized regionally and nationally.Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences; L+M Hospital chair of, Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences
Sarah Cross, MD, is an obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine, or high-risk pregnancies. While she wishes no one would have a complicated pregnancy, she is honored to be there when things get challenging. “Advocating for women is nearest and dearest to my heart. I chose maternal-fetal medicine to address urgent public health issues that face pregnant and postpartum individuals, including the disparities in birth outcomes, such as prematurity, and maternal mortality,” Dr. Cross says. Within maternal-fetal medicine, Dr. Cross is especially interested in periviability, which is the cusp of neonatal viability—usually 22 to 23 weeks—and counseling patients who encounter issues at this stage of pregnancy. Much of what maternal-fetal medicine specialists do is deliver unexpected news. And while Dr. Cross says she can’t make bad news good, she can make a challenging process less difficult for a patient. “Not only do I want my patients to understand the medical information I am giving them, but I want them to feel seen and heard,” she says. Furthermore, Dr. Cross says she appreciates the many grey areas in obstetrics and that sometimes there isn’t a “right answer.” She tries to reach patients where they are. “I can recommend something to a patient but then I want to ask what they think,” she says. “I want to help them make safe choices that are right for them.” In addition to providing prenatal care, consultations, and fetal ultrasounds, Dr. Cross is involved in teaching and research. “One of my projects is teaching medical trainees to do high-stakes counseling, especially when the prognosis is unclear,” Dr. Cross says. “We use simulations so residents will have practice before having these hard conversations with patients.” Lastly, Dr. Cross is a published poet and co-teaches a course on medicine & poetry at the medical school. She is an affiliated faculty in the Medical Humanities Program where she serves as a mentor for students in the writing concentration (in poetry).Assistant Professor in the Physician Associate Program, Department of Medicine; Faculty Director, Research Education, General Internal Medicine; Associate Director, Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership, Yale School of Management; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Faculty Director, Workforce Development and Diversity, Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC), General Internal Medicine
Research Interests- Health Services Research
- Hispanic or Latino
John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History & Head of the Medical Historical Library
Melissa Grafe is the Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale School of Medicine and joined Yale University in 2011 as the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. She leads the Medical Historical Library team and manages the library's collections, including over 100,000 medical and scientific volumes from the 12th-21st centuries, as well as a growing digital collection. She also works with students and faculty on research and classes; develops grants and publications; oversees major digitization projects; curates and stages exhibitions; and manages gifts and donations, among other duties.Grafe received her Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University and was a Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow at Lehigh University Library followed by an appointment as the Humanities Librarian at Lehigh before coming to Yale. She is past president for the Medical Heritage Library (2018-2020) and Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (renamed Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences).Associate Clinical Professor, Yale School of Nursing
Creative Writing Mentor for Yale Medical and Nursing Students. “Small Circles of Time”, a Book of Poetry about my childhood in South Dakota.Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Medicine)
Research Interests- Health Services
- Opioid-Related Disorders
- Prisons
- Opioid Epidemic
- Jails
- Opiate Overdose
Benjamin A. Howell, MD, MPH, MHS grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco along with a Masters of Public Health from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He completed residency and chief residency in the Internal Medicine-Primary Care residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital after which he stayed at Yale to complete a health services research post-doctoral fellowship in the National Clinician Scholars Program. He then stayed at Yale, joining the faculty in the Section of General Internal Medicine and is also faculty in the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine and the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. Dr. Howell is interested in addressing social and structural determinants of health to improve the health outcomes of individuals, families, and communities impacted by mass incarceration and increase access to evidence-based treatments for addiction.Assistant Professor
Elizabeth Marhoffer is an Assistant Professor in the Clinician-Educator Track in Yale's Section of General Internal Medicine. She has a special interest in Narrative Medicine and holds a Certificate of Professional Achievement from Columbia University in the field. Her clinical work is centered at the West Haven VA.Associate Professor of Medicine (General Medicine); Director, Yale Center for Asylum Medicine, Internal Medicine
Research Interests- Human Rights
- Refugees
- Global Health
Katherine C. McKenzie, MD, FACP is a faculty member at Yale School of Medicine and the director of the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine (YCAM). She has practiced medicine at Yale for over 25 years. She teaches undergraduates, students, and residents, and is a member of Yale Refugee Health Program. She is a physician advocate for social justice and human rights. Dr. McKenzie founded and directs YCAM. In this capacity, she has performed forensic evaluations of asylum seekers at Yale and in detention facilities, and has testified as an expert witness in immigration court for individuals referred by law schools, human rights organizations, and immigration attorneys. She leads the asylum medicine teaching program for trainees and faculty at Yale, mentors healthcare providers across the US, and lectures extensively nationally and internationally on topics of asylum, detention, and physician advocacy. She is an expert advisor for Physicians for Human Rights and serves on the boards of the Society for Refugee Healthcare Providers, Project Access New Haven, and Integrated Refugee and Immigrants Services. She is involved in medical-legal partnerships and collaborates with attorneys on civil litigation that supports human rights. She is a founder and director of the Society of Asylum Medicine. She has written reviews, clinical case reports and opinion essays in publications including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, Time magazine and CNN, among many others. At Yale, she received the Charles W. Bohmfalk Prizes for Teaching in Clinical Sciences, the Leonard B. Tow Award for Humanism in Medicine, and the Faculty Award for Achievement in Clinical Care. She has been named a “Top Doctor” by Connecticut Magazine for many years. She is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and has been certified with the American Board of Internal Medicine since 1995.Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Medicine); Associate Program Director, Department of Internal Medicine; Co-Director, Ambulatory Education, TIMRP, Medicine; Director, Clinical Competency Committee, TIMRP, Medicine; Site Director, Traditional Internal Medicine Residency Program, VA Connecticut, Department of Internal Medicine
Research Interests- Education, Medical
- Rural Health
- Global Health
Dr. Cynthia Frary McNamara is an Associate Program Director for the Traditional Internal Medicine Residency Program, (TIMRP), for which she is also serving as the Director of the Clinical Competency Committee and the Co-Director of Ambulatory Education. Dr. McNamara is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and an internist at the Veterans Administration Hospital Connecticut. She is honored to provide primary care for our country’s veterans and to teach medical trainees. Dr. McNamara is interested in mentorship; she directs the MentorAdvisorCoach (MAC) Program for the TIMRP and is a mentor to approximately fifty trainees. Dr. McNamara's interests also include medical education, particularly topics related to social and identity-based determinants of health and global and rural health that contribute to health disparity. She has received two Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholar awards to serve as a teaching physician in Uganda and Rwanda and has worked providing primary care in areas of Central America. Cynthia received a Yale Department of Medicine Educational Research Grant support work on a project entitled Needs Assessment for Rural Medicine Curriculum in United States Medical Schools and presented an abstract at the 2024 SGIM National Meeting. She is part of the Women's and Gender Health Education core faculty and has taught Medication Abortion and Abortion Regulations and Patient Care, highlighting how abortion regulations contribute to health disparity; some of this work has been published, and an abstract has been presented at the 2024 SGIM National Meeting. Dr. McNamara and colleagues created an outpatient elective in Addiction Medicine for the TIMRP, an oral presentation describing the process, and this elective was presented at the Association of Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance Abuse and Addiction (AMERSA) conference in 2023.Assistant Professor; Program Director, Collaborative Behavioral Health & Addiction Medicine in Primary Care (CHAMP), Program in Addiction Medicine; Associate Program Director, Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program; Program Director, Substance Use Skills Training to Advance Integrated Care (SUSTAIN), Program in Addiction Medicine; Medical Director, Physician Associate Program; Medical Director, Physician Assistant Online Program
Kenneth Morford, MD is an Assistant Professor and clinician educator at Yale School of Medicine. He trained as a general internist in the Yale Primary Care Residency Program, served as chief resident, and completed addiction medicine fellowship at Yale. He provides primary care and addiction treatment at a community-based opioid treatment program and cares for patients on the addiction medicine consult service at Yale New Haven Hospital. He directs two HRSA-funded interprofessional addiction training programs, called CHAMP and SUSTAIN. He also serves as an associate program director for the Yale Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program and medical director of the Yale Physician Associate Program and Yale Physician Assistant Online Program. He is passionate about medical education, interprofessional collaboration, substance use disorders research, and integrating addiction medicine into primary care.- Research Interests
- Adolescent Medicine
- Health Services Research
- Humanities
- Opioid-Related Disorders
- Pediatrics
- Tobacco Use Disorder
- Substance Abuse, Intravenous
- Alcohol-Related Disorders
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Hospital Medicine); Firm Chief for Safety and Quality, Internal Medicine
I am a Med-Peds hospitalist — I spend half my clinical time taking care of hospitalized adults and half taking care of hospitalized kids, including newborns during their birth hospitalization. I am a medical educator, training medical students in their early clinical skills and working with medical students and residents in the hospital, including as one of the faculty leaders of the Race, Bias, and Advocacy in Medicine distinction pathway for Internal Medicine residents. I have research and quality improvement interests in diagnostic reasoning, reducing medical errors, breastfeeding medicine, and in improving health disparities. I have been working in the area of prenatal substance exposure since 2020 and in that time have collaborated with local partners including my pediatric hospital medicine colleagues, child abuse specialists, addiction medicine specialists, obstetrician/gynecologists, social workers, a Yale Law School student clinic, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, community partners and others locally and nationally committed to improving care for families affected by substance use and substance use disorders. This work seeks to reduce the criminalization of substance use during pregnancy through clinical care pathways that guide clinical indications for toxicology testing in newborns and policy work to engage families with appropriately matched resources, and thereby encourage treatment access resulting in healthy families that remain together after birth. I went to Oberlin College for a BA in Politics, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry for my MD and came to Yale for Combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency which I completed in 2018. I am mother to Cliff and Pepper, and an avid gardener, bicycle commuter, and Jane Jacobs fan.Associate Professor of History of Medicine
Research Interests- Bioethics
- Death
- Epidemiology
- Ethics
- Expeditions
- History of Medicine
- Medicine in Literature
- Global Health
- Cryopreservation
- Biomedical Technology
- Infectious Disease Medicine
Joanna Radin (Associate Professor) received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of biomedical futures who cares about how people in the past imagined how science, technology and medicine would change their lives. This has led her to think and write about global histories of biology, ecology, medicine, technology, and anthropology since 1945; history and anthropology of life and death; biomedical technology and computing; feminist, Indigenous, and queer STS; and science fiction.All of these themes are present in her current book project, which reconsiders the history of science through the career of Michael Crichton.She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017), the first history of the low-temperature biobank and co-editor, with Emma Kowal of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017), which considers the technics and ethics of freezing across the life and environmental sciences.Professor of Medicine (General Medicine); Director, Writers Workshop; Medical Director of the Yale New Haven Health Systems Long COVID Consultation Clinic, General Internal Medicine
Dr. Lisa Sanders is the Medical Director of Yale's Long Covid Multidisciplinary Care Center. In addition to her work as a physician and teacher, she writes the popular Diagnosis column for the New York Times Magazine and the Think Like a Doctor column featured in the New York Times blog, The Well. Her column was the inspiration for the Fox program House MD (2004-2012) and she served as a consultant to the show. In 2010, she published a book titled Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis. In 2019 she collaborated with the New York Times on an eight-hour documentary series on the process of diagnosis for Netflix. Her most recent book is a collection of her columns and is titled, Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries. Sanders' path to medicine was anything but traditional. As an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, she majored in English, wrote for The Flat Hat, the college paper, and served pints of ale at Chownings Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. After graduation she took a job with ABC at Good Morning America. Less than 10 years later, while working for CBS News, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story for coverage of Hurricane Hugo as it slammed into her hometown of Charleston, S.C. But by then, Sanders said, she was ready to move on professionally and decided that of all the subjects she covered as a journalist, medicine intrigued her most. After two years at Columbia University’s Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Program, Sanders was accepted to the Yale School of Medicine “as part of the 10 percent of the class they reserve for weirdos,” she said. In addition to her time in the hospital, Sanders is currently researching clinical decision making and the way diagnostic decisions and errors are made. She has also published two books on weight loss and food choice — The Perfect Fit Diet: Combine What Science Knows About Weight Loss With What You Know About Yourself in 2004 and The Perfect Fit Diet: How to Lose Weight, Keep it Off and Still Eat the Foods You Love in 2005.- Nora Segar, MD MPH, is Director of Palliative Medicine at the Saint Raphael Campus of Yale New Haven Hospital and Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. She received her medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and completed her residency and chief residency at the Yale Primary Care Residency Program. She completed her hospice and palliative medicine fellowship training at Northwestern University. Prior to returning to Yale in July of 2020, Dr. Segar practiced palliative care at the Jesse Brown VA in Chicago, and community-based primary care. Dr. Segar is dedicated to improving the care of patients with serious illness, and to primary palliative care education.