Affiliated Faculty

Professor Aksoy is a tropical medicine researcher whose work focuses on the epidemiology of insect transmitted (vector borne) and zoonotic diseases.  Her research has been on tsetse flies and the pathogenic parasites they transmit that cause highly neglected and fatal diseases of humans in Africa, known as Sleeping Sickness. Her laboratory focuses on deciphering the vector-parasite molecular dialogue and parasite development during the transmission process with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets of interference and developing transmission blocking vaccines to reduce disease.  Her fundamental and interdisciplinary work on tsetse and its microbial symbionts has identified key principles that shape host-microbe interactions. Her studies with tsetse's mutualistic microbes identified nutritional contributions that facilitate female fecundity and mediate host immune system development. Her studies with tsetse's commensal microbiota led to a novel biological method, coined as paratransgenesis, in which anti-parasitic molecules are synthesized in the beneficial gut microbes, thus making the gut environment inhospitable for disease causing parasites. Ability to spread such modified microbes into natural insect populations is being explored to reduce disease transmission as a novel biological method.Dr. Aksoy maintains collaborative research activities with Yale researchers as well as with multiple universities and research institutes in Africa. Their studies in Kenya and Uganda investigate the epidemiology of Sleeping Sickness disease, with a focus on understanding the major drivers that sustain disease transmission, as well as on population genetics of flies and parasites and their microbiota. She initiated and led a large international consortium that eventually sequenced the genome of six tsetse fly species. This effort vastly expanded molecular knowledge and genomic resources on this neglected disease vector, and collectively expanded research capacity in bioinformatics and functional biology in many laboratories in sub-Sahara Africa. As the co-editor in Chief of the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases between 2007-2020, she has been a major voice for building research and publication capacity for global neglected tropical diseases.  Throughout her professional career, Aksoy has been an advocate of and innovator in Global Health; served as a dedicated mentor to students and scientists in the US and in Africa, China, Italy and Turkey helping to prepare the next generation of leaders in the fields of epidemiology and zoonotic disease control.

I am a URM physician-scientist and Professor of Pediatrics (Gastroenterology), Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. I have led an NIH-supported laboratory for over 2 decades and trained multiple undergraduate students, post-docs, medical students and research scientists, the majority of whom come from under-represented backgrounds. My research interest is focused on mechanisms responsible for diarrheal diseases. My lab primarily investigates mechanisms regulating the CFTR chloride channel in the intestine and how these are linked to genetic, and non-genetic diarrheal diseases and Cystic Fibrosis (CF). We elucidated trafficking mechanisms regulating CFTR that are implicated in diarrhea that are the basis for successful drug therapies to treat constipation and increase intestinal fluidity (Linaclotide, Lubiprostone). Currently, we investigate kinase signaling mechanisms responsible for regulating CFTR in genetic and non genetic diarrheal diseases and CF affecting newborns and children. My clinical practice is focused on food and gut health in children to treat and prevent obesity, and chronic lifestyle diseases. We promote the use of healthy food for prevention of intestinal diseases in children, provide nutritional consultation, and design culturally sensitive diets for parents. We provide conventional standard of care along side nutritional promotion as needed, but focus on foods, exercise, stress reduction and lifestyle as a primary modalities for disease treatment and prevention.

Paul T. Anastas is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment. He has appointments  in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Chemistry, and Department of Chemical Engineering. In addition, Prof. Anastas serves as the Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. Anastas took public service leave from Yale to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency Science Advisor from 2009-2012. From 2004 -2006, Paul Anastas served as Director of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, D.C. He was previously the Assistant Director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he worked from 1999-2004. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Dr. Anastas received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and worked as an industrial consultant. He is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the Director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program. Dr. Anastas has published widely on topics of science through sustainability including eleven books, such as Benign by Design, Designing Safer Polymers, Green Engineering, and his seminal work with co-author John Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.

Dr. Theodore Andreadis is the Director of The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Head of the Center for Vector Biology & Zoonotic Diseases where he formally directed the State of Connecticut’s Mosquito and Arbovirus Research and Surveillance Programs. He is a native of Massachusetts, has two grown children and resides in Cheshire with his wife Peg. Dr. Andreadis holds a B.S. degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology and M.S. degree in Medical Entomology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Insect Pathology from the University of Florida at Gainesville. He is also holds an appointment as a Clinical Professor within the Epidemiology of Microbial Disease Division at the Yale School of Public Health and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Pathobiology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of over 195 scientific publications on mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases and his current research activities focus on the mosquito ecology, microbial control of mosquitoes and the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases

Ernest Asare is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. His primary research focuses on using mathematical models to describe the transmission dynamics, evaluate the impact of interventions and understand the influence of meteorological and climatic factors on diarrhea and malaria diseases. He uses mathematical models to better understand and quantify the drivers of differential impact of rotavirus vaccines. He is also interested in how climate change will affect mosquito population and intensity and distribution of malaria.

Carl Baum, MD, FAAP, FACMT, is board-certified in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and in Medical Toxicology, and has over 30 years' experience in both subspecialties. He serves as attending physician in the Pediatric Emergency Department, and as Director of the state-funded Lead Poisoning and Regional Treatment Center. Nationally, Dr. Baum currently serves the following organizations: • Executive Committee, Council on Children and Disasters, American Academy of Pediatrics • National Biodefense Science Board, Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response, US Department of Health and Human Services • Therapeutic Use Exemption Committee, US Anti-Doping Agency In addition, he is a member of the International Society for Children's Health and the Environment.

Dr. Bei’s research interests in Plasmodium – the causative agent of malaria -  lie at the intersection between population genetics, genomics, molecular genetics, epidemiology, and immunology.  Her current research uses a translational systems biology approach to study the impact of antigenic diversity on immune evasion, transmission, and virulence in setting of declining malaria transmission.  She is studying the development of genotype-specific and genotype-transcendent immunity and assess the effect of specific persisting genotypes on neutralizing humoral immune responses and their transmission potential in the mosquito vector.  She also works on malaria vaccine candidate discovery and validation, studying the functional consequences of naturally arising diversity.  Dr. Bei has ongoing research projects in Senegal in addition to many active collaborations in Sub-Saharan African countries in both East and West Africa.

Dr. Michelle Bell is the Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health at the Yale University School of the Environment, with secondary appointments at the Yale School of Public Health, Environmental Health Sciences Division; the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs; and the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, Environmental Engineering Program. Her research investigates how human health is affected by atmospheric systems, including air pollution and weather. Other research interests include the health impacts of climate change and environmental justice. Much of this work is based in epidemiology, biostatistics, and environmental engineering. The research is designed to be policy-relevant and contribute to well-informed decision-making to better protect human health and benefit society. She is the recipient of the Prince Albert II de Monaco / Institut Pasteur Award, the Rosenblith New Investigator Award, and the NIH Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) Award. Dr. Bell holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. in Environmental Engineering), Stanford University (M.S. in Environmental Engineering), University of Edinburgh (M.Sc. in Philosophy), and Johns Hopkins University (M.S.E. in Environmental Management and Economics and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering). She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Laelia Benoit is a Clinical Fellow (PGY-2) in the Solnit Integrated Training Program in Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center. She is a French and Brazilian Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist (fully trained in France) and came to the U.S. in 2021 to work as a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at the Yale Child Study Center. Dr. Benoit maintains her affiliation with the French NIH (Inserm, CESP, Centre de Recherche en Epidémiologie et Santé des Populations). Dr. Benoit is the co-director of QUALab, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Lab, a collaboration between the Yale Child Study Center (Dr. Andrés Martin), and the CESP (Dr. Bruno Falissard). Dr. Benoit's previous research focused on early intervention in psychosis, anxious school refusal, and access to care for minorities. Her current project assesses the impact of climate change on the mental health of children and adolescents in three countries (the US, Brazil, and France). Laelia Benoit favors citizen research approaches involving adolescents, their parents, professionals, and family support groups. Her teaching (Yale University, Universidade de São Paolo, University of Paris) focuses on qualitative methods for researchers and psychological and social science skills for caregivers and school professionals to help them support children's health and reduce inequities in health care. Professional honors: Yale International Physician-Scientist Resident and Fellow Research Award (2023), Fulbright (2021), Monahan Foundation (2021), Inserm Award (2016), Paris Public Hospital AP-HP Award (2016). Methods: Qualitative (Grounded theory), Social Science, Mixed-methods, Transcultural Keywords: Youth mental health, Climate Change, Access to care, School refusal, Migration, Early Intervention (Autism, Psychosis), Adoption. Books : "L'adolescent fragile, peut-on prédire en psychiatrie? (2016), "Phobie scolaire, retrouver le plaisir d'apprendre" (2020), "Infantisme" (2023). All publications. Researchgate

Dr. Bothwell is an ethicist and historian of public health. Her research examines social, historical, and ethical dimensions of epidemiology with a particular focus on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Her current book project examines how international and national policies have influenced trial rigor and ethics, protections of vulnerable trial subjects, and participant diversity in RCTs. She also does work at the intersection of climate change, epidemiology, and ethics. She completed a PhD in the History and Ethics of Public Health and Medicine from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Health Policy, Law, and Ethics in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has also had visiting appointments at Oxford University, Foundation Brocher, the Karolinska Institutet, and National Taiwan University. She teaches public health ethics and the history of public health, and provides pre-departure ethics training in global health practice. She holds a secondary appointment in the Section of the History of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

Michael Cappello MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics and Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale Medical School. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in Biomedical Ethics and received his MD from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. After training in adult and Pediatric infectious diseases at Yale, Dr. Cappello joined the faculty in 1995, where he oversees a laboratory and field based research program focused on global health, tropical medicine and molecular parasitology. He is a 2007 recipient of the Bailey K. Ashford medal, awarded by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene “for distinguished work in tropical medicine.” In addition to research, Dr. Cappello provides clinical care as an Infectious Diseases specialist at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. He is co-founder of the Yale Partnerships for Global Health, an initiative that advances scientific knowledge, promotes international understanding, and builds human capacity through collaborative research and training. From 2007-15, Dr. Cappello directed the Yale World Fellows Program, a multi-disciplinary, campus-wide initiative whose mission is to cultivate and inspire a global network of leaders committed to positive change. From 2016-21, he chaired the Council on African Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and was faculty director of the Yale Africa Initiative. Dr. Cappello is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Academic Advisory Council of Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Dr. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University School of Public Health. His work explores the challenges faced by health systems in the Anthropocene, with a focus on how climate change increases risks from both infectious diseases of poverty and pandemic threats. His research also explores problems in global health governance, with several ongoing projects focused on the legal, political, and scientific determinants of outbreak reporting and scientific data sharing. Dr. Carlson is also the co-founder and executive director of Verena, a cross-university collaboration of over a dozen early career scientists developing a data science-driven approach to assessing which viruses pose a risk to human health, and where, when, and why they might emerge in human populations. In 2019, Verena was selected as an NSF Biology Integration Institute, a five-year, $12.5m cooperative agreement that has supported a global study of bat immunology, a cohort of eight doctoral students at five universities, and new open platforms for data sharing. Prior to joining Yale University, Dr. Carlson was research faculty at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, and earlier, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland. He has also contributed to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Daniel Carrión is an environmental health scientist focused on the intersection of climate, energy, and health (in)equity. He conducts exposure science and environmental epidemiology of ambient temperature and air pollution in the United States and internationally. Broadly speaking, his goal is to understand the relationship between structural forms of inequality with exposure and health disparities to identify and support interventions. More specifically, he is interested in the role of the home and neighborhood environment as opportunities for intervention towards climate and health equity, largely focused on energy transitions. Dr. Carrión received his BA from Ithaca College, an MPH from New York Medical College, a PhD from Columbia University, and postdoctoral training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Beyond his research, Dr. Carrión is a Senior Fellow of the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice, a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and a governor-appointed member to the New York State Minority Health Council.

Dr. Chang is an Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine with clinical expertise in cardiology and echocardiography (cardiac ultrasound), and research interests in environmental health. His clinical activities include general cardiology, cardiac imaging, and the use of echocardiography for minimally-invasive structural heart procedures. His investigative work focuses on understanding how environmental factors and climate change impact heart health, and how we may leverage digital data sources to detect such harms while exploring risk mitigation strategies for their effects. He completed his undergraduate training at Yale University, then attended Stanford for medical school and internal medicine residency, where he served as Chief Resident. He undertook graduate research training with a Masters degree in Epidemiology there, which he extended to a PhD in Epidemiology and Clinical Research. He completed his cardiology fellowship at Stanford, then pursued an advanced fellowship in echocardiography at the University of California San Francisco.

Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering in 2016 from Nanjing University in China. During 2014-2015, he served as a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to joining the Yale School of Public Health faculty in July 2019, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Fellow at Helmholtz Zentrum München-German Center for Environmental Health.Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health. His work involves applying multidisciplinary approaches in climate and air pollution sciences, exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiology to investigate how climate change may impact human health. Much of this work has been done in China, Europe, and the U.S.

Xi Chen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Public Health (Health Policy), of Global Health, of Economics, and of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. He is a faculty fellow at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Yale Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Yale Center for Climate Change and Health, Yale Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS), and a faculty advisor of the Yale-China Association. He is a PEPPER Scholar at Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. His research endeavors focus on economics and public policies on population aging, and global health systems. Currently, his main research projects involve: 1) economics of cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), using both medical claims data and survey data to investigate how cognitive aging may affect decision-making and healthcare utilization, and ADRD care quality, costs and equity; 2) pension, retirement and other aging-related policies and health of the aging population; 3) impacts of environmental pollution and climate change on older adults; 4) machine learning and causal inference in better understanding life course factors and healthy aging; 5) the role of large language models (LLM) in health care and long-term care; 6) trends of diversity, equity, and Inclusion in global ADRD clinical trials. Professor Chen is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and its Cluster Lead in Environment and Human Capital, Editor at the Journal of Population Economics, President of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS) (2018-2020), and an Academic Committee member of the Global Lecture Series on Chinese Economy. He is an adjunct professor at Peking University and at SJTU-Yale Joint Health Policy Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University. He consults for the United Nations and the World Bank. He is an alumni affiliate of Cornell Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors & Disparities, Cornell Population Center, and Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences. He has served as a grant reviewer for the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the Research Council of Norway, Guest Editor at the Journal of Aging & Social Policy, Guest Editor at the Journal of Asian Economics, a member of the editorial board at China CDC Weekly, and a reviewer for more than 30 peer-reviewed journals. Professor Chen's work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the Best China Paper from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) (2011), the George Warren Award (2012), the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the AAEA (2013), the MacMillan Faculty Research Award (2013, 2017), USDA-ERS (2008), James Tobin Summer Research Award (2014-2022), the Kempf Award (2017-2018), awards from the National Institute of Health (NIH), the U.S. PEPPER Center Scholar Award (2016), Emerging Scholar and Professional Organization Interdisciplinary Paper Award of the Gerontology Association of America (2019), the Best Abstract Award at the Academy Health Research Meetings (2020). He is a Butler-Williams Scholar at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) (2019). His timely and rigorous economic evaluations on the COVID-19 pandemic won the Kuznets Prize (2021). His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 146 peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, Nature Aging, LANCET, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, PLoS Medicine, JAERE, JEEM, JoPE, EHP, SSM, JEoA, and AJAE. These studies have been widely covered 3,000+ times in popular media worldwide, such as BBC, CNN, CBS, WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Macmillan Report, The Times of London, NPR, NBC News, Reuters, Associated Press, Time Magazine, Fortune, Slate, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, Science Magazine, Nature, DW, ABC (Australia), ABC (USA), EuroNews, Foreign Policy, FOX News, New Scientist, The Hill, National Geography, Foreign Affairs, The LANCET, RT, Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, and People's Daily, The Hill, CBC, VOA, The Telegraph, AFP, Scientific American, SCMP, The Independent, Yahoo Finance, VoX, Barron's, USA Today, LA Times, WIRED, VICE, The Atlantic, The Scientist Magazine. He is a commentator at BBC, CNN, EuroNews, CGTN. Chen has written opinion pieces for NYT. Chen has been invited by The National Committee on United States China Relations (NCUSCR) as a delegate of U.S. - China Healthcare Dialogue (Track II). In the past ten years, Professor Chen has supervised more than 40 postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Yale College students who have won a number of outstanding paper awards. Chen has taught quantitative methods in health economics and health services research, as well as U.S.-China Health Systems at Yale. Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University.

Senior Scientist Childs’ area of research includes theecological dynamics of directly-transmitted zoonotic viruses, including the hantaviruses, arenaviruses and rabies, and vector-borne bacteria, including rickettsia, bartonella and borrelia. Prior to coming to Yale in 2004, Dr. Childs served as the Chief of the Viral and Rickettial Zoonoses Branch at CDC. His recent interests and research, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Albert Ko, Division Chief at Yale, and Fleur Porter, an MPH candidate, focus on the ecoepidemiology of intra- and inter-specific transmission of leptospires in an urban slum setting in Salvador, Brazil. The Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) is the principal reservoir host for leptospires causing human disease in Salvador, however, scant knowledge exists on the mechanisms of acquisition, maintenance and shedding of this bacterium by rats. Humans are directly infected by leptospires through contact with environments contaminated with spirochetes shed in the urine of infected rats Defining parameters of the natural history of leptospiral infection within individual rats and within rat populations, coupled with determinations of critical environmental and ecological features underlying the distribution and density of rat populations, will help elucidate risk factors for human infection and disease.

Deborah R. Coen earned a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. Her research interests include the history of the modern physical and environmental sciences, modern central European intellectual and cultural history, history of the family, and scientific internationalism. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007) and The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (2013), both published by the University of Chicago Press. Her latest book, Climate in Motion: Thinking Across Scales in the Habsburg Empire (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2018), is the first study of the science of climate dynamics before the computer age. In 2018-19, she will be studying the physical and social science of climate change with the support of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship.

Dr. Cort is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, Faculty Advisor for the Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) and has a secondary appointment in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering and over 15 years experience in global corporate settings advising on sustainability matters including metrics, risk management and auditing practices.