Science & Symbol

Yale School of Public Health leadership led the design of the school’s new ceremonial mace that incorporates deep historical symbolism and celebrates the school’s history, vision, and mission, as well as its status as Yale’s newest independent school. The new mace will make its debut at Yale’s 325th commencement on May 18.

Each time the mace is carried into a commencement ceremony, the Yale School of Public Health’s vision of “linking science and society, making public health foundational to communities everywhere,” is proclaimed publicly, reminding graduates, families, faculty, and the broader Yale community what YSPH stands for and where it is headed.

Shelley Diehl Geballe, JD ’76, MPH ’95, professor in the practice (health policy) has been chosen to carry the new mace as faculty marshal in the 2026 Commencement procession. Her two-plus decades on the YSPH faculty and her direction of the Health Policy Practicum place her at the heart of our school’s commitment to educate future generations of public health leaders.

“It truly truly truly is an honor to be the first faculty member to carry the new mace, honoring YSPH’s independence, its outstanding new leadership, and its community of talented students, faculty, researchers, and staff united in their commitment to advancing health for all," Geballe said.

YSPH will retire its former mace, a copper globe encircled by a raised metal equator with the words “Health Promotion” and “Disease Prevention.”

The strategic plan's emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration is literally built into the mace's form. Ideas generated from a YSPH schoolwide survey guided the initial planning about how to visualize the school’s strengths, and each element of the mace was chosen with intentionality. YSPH leadership led the process with collaborators at Yale Architecture and across Yale.

The Yale School of Architecture created a new mace for itself in 2025 that was an inspiration for the new YSPH mace. At the top of Yale Architecture’s mace is a model of its brutalist building on York Street, designed by architect Paul Rudolph.

The architecture team working with YSPH included Timothy Newton, Alyse Guild, and Nathan Burnell. Burnell and Guild are instructors in the school’s fabrication labs. Newton is senior critic and director of the fabrication labs.

Guild and Newton designed the head of YSPH’s mace, a blue globe surrounded by figures of people, symbolizing how the work of public health is centered in community. It is also a nod to Yale’s motto of Lux et Veritas, and to the ways in which science and society are inherently intertwined.

Guild cut the head on a Fiber Cell Metal Laser machine from stainless steel. The globe—in Yale blue—was made in the Scientific Glassblowing Laboratory at Yale’s Department of Chemistry. It’s made of borosilicate glass, the primary material used for high-quality lab glassware, symbolic of the wet lab work that is core to YSPH’s past and future.

The head sits on a collar of 3-D printed stainless steel. The collar represents the Bowl of Hygeia. Hygeia is the Greek goddess of health, cleanliness, and hygiene, and the source of the word hygiene —representing how our school is built on the knowledge and traditions of millennia.

Below the Bowl of Hygeia is a hexagonal collar ornamented with sterling silver charms representing Hygeia; an Elm tree (symbolic of New Haven and Yale); and the Broad Street Pump (an early exemplar of modern public health). There also are charms depicting the YSPH Shield; a law scroll, representing health policy; and the data symbols Mu and Σ (sigma) and an epi curve—a curriculum in miniature, reminding graduates of the data science tools and responsibilities they carry forward.

The shaft is constructed of wood from an Elm tree on the YSPH campus that was damaged during a storm. Elm trees have been historically significant to Yale and New Haven, the "Elm City."

The star-shaped shaft references the star of life, the universal symbol of hospitals and emergency medical services. Its six points represent YSPH’s current academic departments: biostatistics, chronic disease epidemiology, environmental health sciences, epidemiology of microbial diseases, health policy and management, and social and behavioral sciences.

The handle’s extruded star shape takes the form of a herald trumpet communicating the Yale School of Public Health’s vision of linking science and society, and its mission to “educate and equip the best public health scientists, practitioners, and leaders to develop systems-level solutions for a healthier society.”

The pommel is in the form of the Lassa virus that was identified and isolated in 1969 at the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) in the Yale Department of Epidemiology, now the Yale School of Public Health.

As a ceremonial object carried into future commencements—crafted from campus wood, scientific glass, and centuries of public health symbolism—the new mace proclaims that YSPH's commitment to linking science and society is not just a statement, but a living tradition.