After Ranney’s remarks, YSPH Chief Development Officer Benjamin Zoll moderated four panel discussions with alumni and faculty addressing the Scholarly Areas of Focus. While these areas were newly identified for the strategic plan, in these conversations it became clear that they build on the past and present work of faculty, students, and alumni.
1. How place, space, and climate impact health
Hannah Beath, MPH ’23, is director of the office of climate and health at the Connecticut Department of public health. She says her job puts her in a place to help advance policies, regulate emissions, and enact state compacts. “These are huge tools we can leverage at the state level,” she said. Beath said it was tempting to look for “grand sweeping policy changes that will come in and fix everything. Of course, we know that’s not going to happen.”
Instead, she said, “We don’t need everybody perfectly doing climate work . . . What we really need is a lot of people working perfectly at doing small things.”
Beath was on a session with Dr. Colin Carlson, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases), who is finishing his first year on YSPH’s faculty. Carlson’s lab is involved with 30 efforts to increase the climate resiliency of Connecticut communities, ranging from monitoring beaches for pathogen levels to analyzing heat injury surveillance data to adapting private wells and subsurface water sources to increased sea salt due to rising sea levels.
He said, “Every epidemiologist is a climate epidemiologist now. Everything we do is permeated by climate.”
2. Reducing harm from intersecting epidemics
Building trust is essential to reducing harm from intersecting epidemics in communities, said Dr. Patricia Nez-Henderson, MD ’98, MPH ’94. Born and raised in Navajo Nation, she is a leading authority on tobacco use among indigenous populations.
Once sacred, tobacco decimated native communities when it was commercialized by the tobacco industry. Nez-Henderson documented the health and economic burdens of commercial tobacco and in 2021 Navajo Nation enacted the Niłch’ Éí Bee Ííná – Air is Life Act, the first comprehensive ban on commercial tobacco products on American Indian tribal lands.
Dr. Ijeoma Opara, PhD, LMSW, MPH, associate professor of public health is the founder and director of the Substances & Sexual Health Lab. She was born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey to Nigerian parents. Her mother died of complications from diabetes when she was 46; her father died of a heart attack when she was an MPH student. While studying intersecting epidemics, she was drawn to learning about data and data trends but wanted to know “the faces behind the numbers.”
She studies substance among youth in Paterson, New Jersey, near where she grew up. Her research interests focus on HIV/AIDS, STI, racial and gender specific prevention interventions for Black girls, and community-based participatory research with urban youth. “It takes a long time to create trust when doing community-level work,” Opara said. “Once you label yourself as a scientist people get scared about how we’re going to use their data.”
3. The health implications of emerging technology
Before he was an associate professor at YSPH, Dr. Yusuf Ransome, MPH, DrPH, worked in home repair. Trust was not an issue with his customers because he was upfront about how much his work would cost. In public health, researchers build trust by being clear about how technology can enhance health. “Why are people turning to technology for social relationships; how can public health play a role?” he said.
Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, he focuses his work on creating sustainable pathways to health for historically underserved communities in the United States and globally. His research integrates social connectedness, spirituality studies, and digital technology to address complex public health challenges. “Social isolation has just as much risk of mortality as smoking and drinking,” he said.
Jessica Federer, MPH ’08, former chief digital officer for Bayer A.G., is interested in how technology can improve women’s health. “We still don’t know why women account for 80 percent of autoimmune conditions, two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients, and are more likely to die of heart attacks,” she said. “Women were prohibited from being studied and then were understudied. Technology can help address those inequities.”
4. Cost of and connection to the health ecosystem
In a session on the high cost of health care in the U.S., Dr. Zack Cooper, PhD, asked the audience how many of them knew the average cost of health insurance premiums for a family of four. More than one person got the right answer, $25,000. “That’s a Toyota Corolla you’re buying every year,” noted Cooper, associate professor of public health and economics at Yale University. Cooper, whose research on unexpected medical expenses led to the No Surprises Act, said that despite the country’s polarization “what gives me some hope is I still get calls from both sides of the (political) aisle. They lean into research,” said Cooper, who also is director of health policy at Yale's Tobin Center for Economic Policy.
Cooper’s co-panelist was Dr. Peter Singer, MD, MPH ’90, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Singer said that “employer-sponsored health insurance is the biggest driver of inequity in the United States,” noting that when company plans spread health care cost increases proportionally across their work force “it affects people lower on the pay scale much more than people at the top of the pay scale.”