The State of the School address included a panel with several YSPH researchers pursuing high-impact ideas in the “face of disruption,” as the panel’s moderator, Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, described it.
The first to be discussed was the Population Health Information and Visualization Exchange (PopHIVE), a platform that combines data from hospital records, national surveys, and anonymous search results to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive view of public health. PopHIVE “democratize[s] some of this data and gets it out in the public sphere in a way that hasn’t been done before,” said Dr. Dan Weinberger, PhD, professor of epidemiology in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases.
Weinberger has co-led its creation along with Yale Senior Fellow Dr. Anne Zink, MD. He said the PopHIVE team has been working with state and local health departments and talking with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and corporations about the project and how it might fill some of the public health data gaps in the United States.
Dr. Nicole Deziel, PhD, MHS, associate professor of epidemiology in Environmental Health Sciences, found areas of overlap between her research on the health impacts of fracking and the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s emphasis on eliminating toxic chemicals, such as pesticides and additives, from the food system. Deziel’s fracking research was partly based in the area near East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment in 2023 caused a toxic chemical spill and a controlled burn to get rid of the chemicals.
Deziel flew to Ohio and “canvassed the community with [MAHA Ohio members] in 100-degree heat to talk to many residents and hear from the community directly what they were concerned about.” She and Professor Michelle L. Bell, PhD, successfully led the submission of a 40-page proposal for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to study health impacts on the rural community—an announcement that received applause from the audience.
Social connectedness has been a focus of Dr. Yusuf Ransome, DrPH, MPH, associate professor of public health in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Inspired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s report on loneliness and social isolation, Ransome collaborated with several 1stGenYale undergraduates and New Haven filmmaker Josh Bibbey to create a documentary about social connectedness in New Haven and New England, guided by the question, “How do individuals in our community define and understand what social connectedness means?”