YSM News and Recognition

In its 2026 rankings, U.S. News & World Report named Yale School of Medicine (YSM) as one of the best medical schools in the United States for research. The outlet ranks schools in four tiers, and YSM achieved Tier 1 status, which is given to the highest performing medical schools. For its rankings, U.S. News & World Report takes into account the total dollar amount of research grants and contracts, average NIH research grant dollars per faculty member, as well as median MCAT scores, acceptance rate, and faculty/student ratio, among other factors.

Four Yale School of Medicine (YSM) researchers have joined Biohub’s Immune Cell Reprogramming program. With a mission to “cure or prevent all disease,” Biohub brings together AI and biology to better understand the causes of diseases and how to treat them. The YSM researchers and their Biohub projects are:

• Julien Berro, PhD, associate professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry—programmable mechano-transducers for precision diagnostics and therapeutics
• Rong Fan, PhD, Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and professor of pathology—decoding and engineering immunity through spatial multi-omics
• Richard Flavell, PhD, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—T cells for sensing cancer, exploring applications from first contact to cancer prevention
• Andrew Wang, MD, PhD, associate professor of internal medicine (rheumatology)—engineering T cells for diseases of the brain.

Two YSM graduate students were among the winners of Yale's 2026 3-Minute Thesis Competition, wherein students present their research to the public in just three minutes. Mackenzie Bender (left), a PhD student in the Department of Immunobiology, won third place for her presentation, “Immune Cells Need Emergency Brakes Too.” Carolina Piletti Chatain, a PhD student in the Department of Neuroscience, won a People's Choice Award for her presentation, “I Think, Therefore I Sneeze: Brain Control over Immunity.”

Joao P. De Aquino, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been selected to receive the 2026 Young Investigator Award from the International Narcotics Research Conference (INRC). The honor recognizes emerging leaders whose research is advancing the study of opioid pharmacology and function. As part of the award, De Aquino will present his current research at the 2026 INRC annual meeting, July 13–16. De Aquino directs the Pain and Addiction Interaction Neuroscience Lab at Yale, where his research focuses on the intersection of chronic pain and substance use disorders and on the development of novel, non-opioid therapeutics.

The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the AGS Health in Aging Foundation has named Cameron Gettel, MD, MHS, as the 2026 recipient of the Jeffrey H. Silverstein Memorial Award for Emerging Investigators in the Surgical and Related Medical Specialties. Gettel, assistant professor of emergency medicine, aims to advance the understanding of emergency department care transitions and clinical outcomes in the growing geriatric population. He is also clinical investigator at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation and co-director of the Yale Emergency Scholars Fellowship.

Alyssa Gillego, MD, was recently honored by YWCA Greenwich with a Women Who Inspire Award, established to recognize and celebrate outstanding women who have excelled in philanthropic, professional, and volunteer pursuits, and who have enriched the lives of many in the Greenwich community. Gillego, assistant professor of surgery (surgical oncology), who has expertise in treating mastectomy, among other conditions, cares for patients at the Smilow Cancer Hospital Care Center in Greenwich.

Cole Jensen, MPH, a PhD student in computational biology and bioinformatics, was recently awarded a prestigious National Institutes of Health F31 award, also known as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, which provides predoctoral students with up to five years of funding for mentored research training with the goal of making them independent researchers. Jensen, a member of the Kleinstein Lab, is a computational biologist with a background in epidemiology, statistics, and evolutionary biology. His research interests include developing computational evolutionary and graph-based approaches for studying B cell biology.