Translating science

The Yale School of Public Health is translating science into real-world impact. Three stories and a personal essay detail research projects across YSPH’s Scholarly Areas of Focus, led by Drs. Nicola Hawley, Yusuf Ransome, Kai Chen, and Zack Cooper.

A study of diabetes in American Samoa ran into issues with data collection because the high humidity and heat caused glucose sensors to fall off study participants. Dr. Nicola Hawley, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (chronic diseases), worked with an entrepreneur who had a better adhesive, allowing the study to get more robust data.

Hawley identified the crucial challenge in her GROW study, focused on understanding the impact of gestational diabetes on maternal and child health in American Samoa. Due to its tropical climate — with temperatures generally between 75 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit and year-round high humidity around 80% — the wearable continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensors often failed to stay adhered to study participants. This resulted in data loss and setbacks in the research, making it difficult to accurately identify at-risk individuals and direct preventative resources effectively.

“Although many women are at risk of obesity, American Samoans are pretty active — many people walk for transportation, some families have home-based plantations, and household chores tend to be a bit more demanding (no vacuum cleaners!) That, combined with the humidity, was presenting a real challenge in getting a full 10 days of data,” Hawley explained.

Enter Pete Lomas, a health care innovator who empathizes deeply with the challenges faced by individuals relying on CGMs. As a physically active adult living with type 1 diabetes, Lomas speaks from experience about the complexities of managing blood glucose levels. "It's a challenge 99% of the time," he said.

Lomas’ company, Not Just a Patch, specializes in durable adhesive patches designed to extend the life of CGM sensors on the skin, even in harsh conditions. By supplying robust adhesive patches, Not Just a Patch is helping to ensure the reliability of sensor data in the high heat and humidity of American Samoa. Consequently, Hawley’s team gains better insights into who is at risk of gestational diabetes, allowing for targeted preventative measures.

Lomas said he has to make rigorous preparations before a simple activity like an ocean swim. "If I'm not very, very, very prepared, I could quite simply die — not by a shark attack, but due to a hypoglycemic attack,” he said. “Blood glucose level awareness is something that people with type 1 diabetes have to do constantly, all day, every day." This vigilance translates into actionable insights for enhancing the reliability and usability of CGMs, even in challenging environments.

“We were lucky to connect with the CEO of Not Just a Patch,” Hawley said. “They have offered incredible guidance and in return — since these devices are very new to American Samoa — we hope we will be able to generate some good data for them as they expand their markets to similar places and climates.”

Hawley's use of adhesive patches from Not Just a Patch shows how tailored solutions can address local challenges, ensuring that crucial research is not impeded by environmental factors, and helping to advance public health research in communities everywhere.

–Jane E. Dee

Dr. Yusuf Ransome’s public health research on well-being was prompted by an event that didn’t seem health-related: while walking down a block in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, he saw that a church had closed, the building boarded up and in disrepair. In the past, this church was open to residents for fellowship and provided assistance to community residents, not just its members. The church hosted a weekly food pantry, helping address food insecurity, and also ran clothing drives. Seeing the boarded-up building, Ransome asked himself “where are these people now going for help?”

“I put a health scientist lens on this and thought, ‘How prevalent is this? Are there other churches closing? And how can we measure the impact of church closures on community health?’” said Ransome, DrPH, MPH, associate professor of public health (social and behavioral sciences) at the Yale School of Public Health. Ransome has since spent the past four years collecting data and researching how the decline of churches in American life impacts the public’s health.

His preliminary research shows that areas with higher church closings also had higher rates of COVID-19 infections and other poor health outcomes. He’s sharing what he’s learned with communities. At the inaugural Faith, Place & Health event in June 2025, he introduced a web dashboard developed by his Society, Connectedness, and Health (SOCAH) Lab, in collaboration with the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions (YCGS) and the Public Health Data Science and Data Equity (DSDE) group. The dashboard allows users to visualize geographic patterns of church closures across the United States — empowering community members, advocates, and policymakers to understand and respond to these shifts. 

In addition to offering food and clothing, some churches provide other critical public health services such as health screenings. “When a church closes, what really goes away?” one participant asked during the June event. Another said his church hosts blood pressure screenings in partnership with local nursing students, calling it an example of the church “preaching on both diabetes and Jesus.”

Documentation of where churches have been closing has not previously been available. But Ransome plans to make his data-driven approach broadly available. Users can visualize the geographic patterns of church closures and the rate of closures per 10,000 people, drawing on county-level data, with plans to narrow down to the census-tract level. The dashboard also includes other social determinants of health such as levels of education and poverty, allowing people to understand church closures in context of other social factors, and how these all concentrate to impact well-being, including social connectedness at the community level.

Ransome’s research also links closures to spirituality and social connectedness at the individual level. While many studies have shown that social connectedness improves mental health and resilience, Ransome’s research also explores the intersection between social connectedness and spirituality and their multiplicative impacts on health. He shared these studies at TEDx Prospect Hill in December 2025 at the Foote School in New Haven, Conn.

“The current framing of social connectedness is that if people are lonely or they're socially isolated, the obvious solution is to get more friends, to get more involved,” he said. “However, there's a component of this that we forget, which is how do you evaluate who to get involved with?” One way is through spirituality and believing in a higher purpose in life, which he calls “Spiritual Social Connectedness.” The premise is that people are fundamentally connected to one another, each having unique gifts to contribute toward a larger shared purpose in life. A Foote School teacher who was in the audience told him she couldn’t wait to incorporate his lesson into her next class.

The talk was one example of how he is sharing his research about social and structural influences on well-being directly, not only with national audiences, but with local communities.

“I realized that I can co-create and participate in science with people just by having ordinary conversations,” he said.

He plans to host other community events, to continue giving public talks, and is working on a social media channel to help people build meaningful connections and improve their health.

– Jane E. Dee

The effects of extreme weather are often outsized, obscuring the less dramatic but still significant toll it exacts. A new tool developed by the Yale School of Public Health aims to bring attention to these less visible harms on health and well-being.

Dr. Kai Chen, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences), is internationally known for his research on the health impacts of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and wildfire smoke on communities. Chen’s findings led him and the Chen Lab to create the eXtreme-weather Toll Tracker, which displays local data about extreme weather in the United States by county.

Users can download and explore the data to uncover trends and understand how a changing climate is affecting them and their neighbors. Maps and graphics help to visualize the findings, making them more understandable. Chen’s goal is to empower communities, foster societal well-being, and build trust in climate health science.

"We created this tool purposely because we want the public to use it," said Chen, faculty director of the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. "There's a huge health cost associated with these extreme-weather events, and people should know about it."

Collaborating with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Chen and his team compared public perceptions of climate risk with actual data on deaths from extreme weather. They discovered that people underestimated the risk of dying from heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfire smoke.

The toll tracker includes surprising evidence. In Connecticut, for example, the number of deaths attributable to wildfire smoke exceeds those from other extreme weather year after year. The research also shows the cost of wildfire smoke originating from the West Coast or Canada is substantial. As temperatures rise, pollution from these fires is poised to become one of America's deadliest climate disasters, he said.

The data is alarming. In the past 20 years, deaths due to heat have increased by 50%, now reaching over 4,000 deaths per year across the continental U.S. Flooding accounts for more than 1,000 deaths annually, and wildfire smoke for more than 1,100 deaths. Despite common assumptions about economic losses from property damage and insurance costs, few recognize the vast health costs, Chen said.

Chen publishes his research in peer-reviewed scientific journals where they're read by researchers and policymakers. The eXtreme-weather Toll Tracker website is a better way to communicate findings to a general audience, said Yale PhD student Mitchell Manware, MPH ’23, who designed the tool. Research by Chen Lab scientists underpins “this democratization and sharing of knowledge,” Manware said.

Chen emphasized the tool’s potential to motivate individuals to take precautions and engage in climate action. For policymakers, the information can be used to prepare communities for extreme weather, making them more resilient.

"People are aware of single extreme weather events because of the news — the wildfires in Los Angeles, the flooding in Texas," Chen noted. "But they understand them as single events with fatalities. We are working to reveal the true health costs of every extreme-weather event.”

— Jane E. Dee

Rising health care spending is crushing the American dream. With employer-sponsored premiums set to rise by 10% this year and Affordable Care Act Marketplace premiums going up by 18%, many people are being forced to choose between going uninsured or paying exorbitant costs to remain insured. Over the last 20 years, U.S. health care spending has nearly tripled from $1.9 trillion in 2004 to $5.3 trillion in 2024. Today, health care costs account for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy.

Research has the potential to address these soaring costs and improve people’s lives, but to make that happen we have to produce rigorous scholarship that tackles the kitchen table issues American families are facing every day. More than that, we have to make sure that research we produce doesn’t just sit in academic journals. We have to step outside the university and talk directly to people around the country who are writing policy, influencing policy, and — importantly — those who are most affected by policy and to whom policymakers are accountable.

I’m an economist who studies U.S. health care policy. I also run a lab at Yale focused on how to make health care more affordable. Our team consists of health economists, data experts, and research assistants, as well as a former chief of staff to a member of Congress, a former senior staffer at the White House, and a former Senate aide. To make sure we communicate effectively with different groups around the country, we get advice from those who do it best, for example, a former producer of a major television news show and former speechwriters for the U.S. treasury secretary.

The atypical staff we hire reflects our atypical mission: to produce world-class scholarship that is at the academic frontier and to use that scholarship to materially improve public policy and better the lives of those outside the academy.

Lately, I’ve focused on using my research to help local communities by conducting one-off analyses for state policymakers. That has involved my staff regularly engaging with lawmakers at the state and local level.

In Indiana, for example, my team worked with officials to study a merger between Union Hospital and Terre Haute Regional Hospital in Indiana and see how the transaction impacted prices and the wider economy. This local analysis flowed from a national study that was published in 2024.

My research shows that when hospital mergers result in less competition it often leads to higher health care prices in the region. In Indiana, we estimated that the merger would raise commercial health care prices of the merging parties by between 10% and 30%, raise local insurance premiums by 3% to 10%, lower nurses’ wages by approximately 5%, and cause approximately 500 job losses outside the health sector.

To drive real change and ensure the local community understood how the merger might impact their health care and the local economy, we met with lawmakers in Indiana, appeared regularly on local TV, spoke to business leaders in Terre Haute, and even published an op-ed in the Indiana Star with Indiana’s current secretary of health and family services.

Those efforts made a difference.

Before the Union-Terre Haute merger, Indiana was one of 19 states where state law shielded hospitals from federal antitrust enforcement. This year, the Indiana state senator who sponsored the original law led a successful charge to repeal it. In remarks on the Senate floor, the senator cited our research as influencing his decision to reverse course and ensure future mergers are subject to greater scrutiny.

We’re also working hard to inform the national conversation. Last December, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee on how rising health care costs impact American families and on the consequences of losing insurance coverage. That same week, I published an essay in The New York Times on the path for reform that lawmakers should pursue. In the days and weeks that followed, we had many conversations with lawmakers about the tangible steps we could take to make health care in the U.S. more affordable.

None of this is about reimagining academia for the sake of it. It’s about recognizing that when research engages directly with the problems people face — and when it’s carried into the places where decisions are made — it can shape outcomes in meaningful ways. The model we are building shortens the time between evidence and action. For American families who need affordable, quality health care, every minute matters.

— Dr. Zack Cooper, PhD

Dr. Zack Cooper, PhD, is an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and in the Yale Department of Economics. He is also director of the Health Care Affordability Lab at Yale, which will launch in March 2026.