When she learned she had won, Hahamy immediately ran to the bathroom, with a pair of heels in hand and shoes untied, to change into her heels and celebrate. 

Hahamy — a former reporter for the News — is one of four Yale seniors to be awarded with a 2024 Rhodes Scholarship. Come fall, she will join Jackie Testamark ’24, the other American winner, and Iman Iftikhar ’23.5 and Victoria Kipngetich ’24, two international recipients, at Oxford. The four women are among 62 students globally to receive this year’s Rhodes Scholarship.

“I ran outside [of the New York Public Library] as soon as I could because my parents had come into Manhattan with me and took their day off,”  Testamark said. “So it was my parents, my sister and I [locked] in a group hug outside the library right after I found out.”

The Rhodes Scholarship provides funding for two or three years at Oxford University. This year’s Yale recipients have academic interests ranging from journalism to social sciences, history and art.

Rhodes Scholars are elected on the basis of criteria established in the will of Cecil Rhodes, the scholarship’s benefactor. Such criteria include academic excellence, ambition for social impact, collaborative aptitude and a promise of leadership. This year was also the first the Rhodes Trust returned to in-person interviews following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They inspire us already with their accomplishments, but even more by their values-based leadership and selfless ambitions to improve their communities and the world,” Ramona L. Doyle, American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, wrote in a press release announcing the American winners.

Nyasha Mukonoweshuro, an international student who is taking graduate coursework at Yale as a 2023-2024 Henry Fellow, also received a Rhodes Scholarship this year. She recently graduated from Loughborough University and hopes to pursue a B.A. in jurisprudence at Oxford.

Iman Iftikhar

After a 15-hour flight to her interview in Islamabad, Pakistan, Iftikhar was relieved and overwhelmed when she was told she had won the scholarship.

She felt she was not only carrying her personal hopes and dreams, but also those of the ten other finalists in her constituency, who, she believes, deserved the award equally. 

“First thing that I felt was relief, but I also felt overwhelmed,” Iftikhar said. “I felt the responsibility that comes with winning such a big award; particularly also because everybody that I had met at the interviews was amazing and an incredible person.”

At Yale, Iftikhar is a history and philosophy double major. Her thesis focuses on the intellectual lineage of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, a human rights movement in Pakistan born out of the war on terror.

At Oxford, she plans on pursuing a two year master’s program studying intellectual history or political theory followed by a second master’s degree in South Asian studies. 

Madison Hahamy 

Hahamy, who is an English major, previously served as a staff reporter for the News and a senior editor for The New Journal at Yale. She is pursuing a certificate in human rights at Oxford and plans on studying the theory and history of antisemitism. Thus, she will complete her first master’s in refugee and forced migration studies, followed by another master’s in English from 1900 to present.

This semester, she is doing a human rights capstone project and an English independent study. She is examining the ways in which journalism and human rights both complement and contradict each other — or in her words  “how journalism helps and harms people” to understand how journalism can improve in the future.

“I’m thinking of using the first degree as a way to gain understanding of antisemitism and then the second degree as a way to study how literature and journalism have both portrayed antisemitism,” she said. 

Jackie Testamark

Testamark, a classical civilizations and history double major, plans to study the history of art and visual culture at Oxford. Specifically, she hopes to examine the advent of museums and the imperial acquisition of artworks and artifacts from across the globe. She aims to work with curators to build a decolonial museum that recontextualizes the objects and puts them in a more global and holistic context.

Testamark plans to focus her studies on the heyday of Western imperialism from the 15th through 18th centuries.

“I want to examine the legacy of classicism in that period and the value that people put on this Greco Roman education,” she told the News.

Victoria Kipngetich

For Kipngetich, who is from Kenya, her Yale coursework has tried to interrogate Africa’s role in the world, particularly in relation to an emerging multipolar order — a system in which multiple states have similar levels of power.

For her first master’s degree, she plans to study global governments and diplomacy, especially regarding other rising and middle powers, to understand what Kenya can learn from them. She wants to follow it with a master’s in public policy and translate those theories into tangible policy and actionable strategy for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kenya as a diplomat.

Path to the Rhodes

Students interested in studying at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars start their journeys in the spring of their junior year, when the Office of Fellowships offers workshops and information sessions about the fellowships available for study in the UK and Ireland. Throughout the summer, they offer individual advising for those students considering applying for fellowships such as the Rhodes, according to Emma Rose, Director of the Office of Fellowships at Yale.

American Yalies then submit applications via the Student Grants Database to outline their intentions for studying at Oxford in order to gain the University’s endorsement for the scholarship. Applicants are then interviewed by the Yale campus committee for endorsement. Those selected by the committee go through to the national competition, in which nominees from across America compete within 16 U.S. districts. Students from outside of the U.S. may apply for the Global Rhodes or the Rhodes specific to their country of origin, which have slightly different deadlines. 

If an applicant who was endorsed by Yale is selected as a finalist in the national competition, they are then invited to interview in their home district.

The Yale Office of Fellowships supports Rhodes hopefuls as they move through the application process. While the office is not allowed to help applicants craft their applications, they offer other kinds of resources to help them prepare, according to Emma Rose, director of the Fellowships office. The office helps students select recommenders and stages mock interviews for finalists, Rose told the News.

According to Rose, the Rhodes scholarship is unique among the many fellowships offered by the University because it allows recipients to study among a community of distinguished scholars dedicated to creating a positive social impact — what Rose calls a “life-changing” opportunity. 

“We are so delighted that these exceptional students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in their chosen field of study as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University,” Rose wrote in an email to the News. “We wish them many congratulations on the excellent and well-deserved outcome of all their dedication and hard work. We also would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people across the University who were involved in supporting and endorsing Yale’s finalists this year.”

The first Rhodes Scholarships were awarded in 1902.

Update, Nov. 16: The article originally stated that four Yalies won 2023 Rhodes Scholarships. Although only four Yale College students won Rhodes Scholarships, a fifth student who is currently taking graduate coursework at Yale as a Henry Fellow, also won the scholarship. The article has been updated to reflect this.

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During the three-day national conference — which featured 196 college and university chapters, three tribal chapters, and 500 different STEM employers — AISES students met with internship recruiters, toured colleges and STEM industries in the local area and met with leading Indigenous figures in STEM. 

The Yale chapter of AISES won first place in the conference’s Student Hackathon. The students created a Google browser extension that added chatbots to travel websites that recommend clean energy decisions related to tourism. 

For current yAISES Co-Presidents Madeline Gupta ’25 (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) and Jordan Sahly ’24 (Eastern Shoshone), attending the national AISES conference felt like proof that being Indigenous and interested in STEM are not mutually exclusive. 

“Something we focus on a lot is how science at its core is Indigenous, and Indigenous people were the first scientists on these lands — especially when it comes to waterways and taking care of the earth,” Gupta said.

For Kyra Kaya ’26 (Kanaka Maoli), attending the national conference was an important networking platform because it is one of the few opportunities where students get to interact with the Indigenous people in STEM. 

Kaya said that the community has grown tremendously at Yale in the past years, but it is still a relatively small group relative to all of STEM at Yale.

Gupta told the News that she believes yAISES has existed for over a decade but dissolved in 2019 and did not resume during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In December 2021, however, Gupta and Mara Gutierrez ’25 (Diné/Navajo Nation) revived yAISES. Prospective data science and chemistry students, respectively, Gupta and Gutierrez said that they were motivated to restart an AISES chapter on campus after recognizing a dearth of Indigenous representation in their STEM courses and extracurricular activities.

Members of the organization say they have committed to promoting the visibility of Indigenous students in STEM — not only within the University community but also in the workplace.

“A lot of our work is really going off [the phrase], ‘you can’t be what you can’t see,’” Gupta said. “And so we try to connect our students with people that have done this and are successful in their careers and industries that have to do with STEM, whether it’s graduate school, or an industry job: making sure our students know that representation is out there and exists.”

To do so, yAISES also hosts speaker events in order to support their members’ professional development. Last year, the organization hosted a College Tea in collaboration with Morse College, featuring Larry Bradley who is involved in related anthropological and archaeological work.

yAISES meets every Friday at the Native American Cultural Center to plan community events. During these meetings, Sahly emphasized that yAISES members have shown a “strong commitment” to learning Indigenous approaches to science, ecology and environmental studies. 

“Historically, Indigenous peoples were scientists and observed medicine and foodways — being Indigenous and STEM is something that’s always been a part of Indigenous culture,” said Matthew Makomenaw, director of the Native American Cultural Center.

This semester, yAISES also began working on college application outreach — especially in the wake of the United States Supreme Court decision that axed affirmative action. Called the “Branches Program,” the program matches undergraduates at the Native American Cultural Center to Indigenous high school students who are applying to colleges this year. 

In addition to providing college application and essay writing assistance, yAISES provides support for students looking to pursue STEM undergraduate courses and professional development in higher education. 

“For the up-and-coming scientists, who haven’t even really broken into our upper-level sciences, we can make sure that they make it all the way to upper-level education,” Sahly said. “And so our chapter has been really committed to how we can find these pathways into STEM, specifically at institutions of higher learning.”

Although yAISES members credited Yale for providing institutional funding — which allowed 10 members to attend the national AISES conference — members like Kaya believe that the organization is one of the only gateways for Indigenous students to interact with the sciences at Yale. 

Gupta urged that the University hire more Indigenous faculty within the sciences, which she believes would provide additional institutional support to Indigenous STEM students. 

“If you look towards Yale’s STEM departments, you’ll notice that they don’t tend to reflect the same [Indigenous] diversity that the humanities departments do broadly.”

yAISES will host its next College Tea on Pathways to Big Tech at Saybrook College on Nov. 13.

Correction, Dec. 7: This article has been updated to rewrite references to “NAISES conference” as “national AISES conference” and to correct two incorrect attributions.

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During the pandemic, SPH researchers Anne Wyllie and Nathan Grubaugh developed the SalivaDirect test, an inexpensive and less invasive method of testing for COVID-19 that uses a patient’s saliva rather than a testing swab. Now, SalivaDirect hopes to develop tests with this saliva-based method for other diseases and to work with domestic and international labs to make the test more accessible. 

“The support that the NIH has provided is going to be monumental to the team,” said Steph Tan, a former assistant research lead at SalivaDirect. “There are so many brilliant ideas that emerge but are halted by insufficient funding, so this will certainly catalyze these efforts, and allow us to invest time into the science instead of trying to procure funding.”

According to Wyllie, the inception of this saliva-based protocol was coincidental. One night in 2020, she set up a Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, test — a lab technique that rapidly amplifies copies of DNA segments — where she put saliva directly into gel wells. Even though only half of the wells successfully reproduced the DNA, the results inspired Wyllie and her team to explore the possibility of saliva-based testing.

“There was massive motivation just to help in any way possible and to increase access to affordable testing,” Wyllie told the News. “I have already been working with saliva for well over a decade and I champion its usage. And when we were seeing all the problems with nasopharyngeal swabs very early on in the pandemic response, I sort of wondered whether saliva could help us overcome those.”

After conducting research in 2020 and launching a final protocol in 2021, Wyllie and her team worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to help grant it Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA. This made the test available in labs that meet governmental regulations. In these designated labs, SalivaDirect provided their protocol for doing saliva-based COVID-19 testing.

Even though COVID-19 cases have decreased, researchers at SalivaDirect are excited to expand the organization’s scope to include more infectious diseases. Tan noted that she is especially interested to see if saliva can help detect monkeypox. 

“We’re currently working on projects developing assays for a whole panel of respiratory viruses, as well as herpes viruses,” Claire Laxton, a postdoctoral associate at the School of Public Health and a member of the SalivaDirect team, said in an email to the News. “We’re also examining the potential for saliva in, for example, screening for diabetes, and mild traumatic brain injury.”

The SalivaDirect team pulled together evidence that saliva can be used not only to detect respiratory viruses and bacteria — which get washed into saliva while someone is infected — but also to help study people’s immunity and other disease states. Saliva contains antibodies and other analytes that can offer clues about someone’s health.

Wyllie also wants to develop tests that detect pathogens like the flu and RSV to replace traditional diagnostics, which are usually much more expensive and difficult to produce. Ultimately, Wyllie believes that SalivaDirect testing is useful in settings with few resources, as it is relatively easy to collect saliva without complex collection devices.

Wyllie and her team hope to increase SalivaDirect’s outreach in the upcoming months. Already, the nonprofit  has worked with over 200 labs across the country and they hope to expand even further. 

Each SalivaDirect test costs between $1 and $4. 

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Harvey Kliman, a research scientist in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and senior author of the study, developed a new classification system for pregnancy losses based on examining the placentas of babies who passed away. Of the millions of pregnancy losses each year, 40 percent are classified as “unexplained,” leaving families uncertain about the cause. Kliman said he seeks to use his research to help families understand what caused their loss.

“If you don’t know why it happened, invariably, these women feel that they must be responsible,” Kliman said. “Guilt is an understatement. They feel devastatingly responsible for the loss. They are already the mother of this child, and they feel they failed their child.”

The researchers found that the causes of pregnancy loss depend on the phase of the pregnancy, according to Parker H. Holzer GRD ’21, a Yale data science doctoral student and an author of the paper, wrote to the News. With the study, Holzer said the authors hope that doctors can now know what signals to look for at each stage of pregnancy, allowing doctors to hopefully further decrease the rate of pregnancy loss.

To uncover these signals, the researchers analyzed 1,256 placentas from 922 patients. All of these patients’ pregnancies had ended in loss and were referred to Yale’s consult service for evaluation. Of the pregnancies, 70 percent were miscarriages, while 30 percent were stillbirths. 

The researchers attributed the deaths to placental complications including cord accidents, abruptions, thrombotic issues and infections. They attributed other cases to two new categories, which they introduced — “placenta with abnormal development” and “small placenta,” which are placentas below the 10th percentile for gestational age.

  As director of volunteer organization Measure the Placenta, Ann O’Neill works to promote using the Estimated Placental Volume test placenta in prenatal care. The organization is comprised of parents who experienced stillbirths due to an undetected very small or large placenta. She told the News about the guilt she experienced when her baby, Elijah, was born still in 2018. 

“The pressing question that at first I was terrified to ask was ‘Why did he die?’” O’Neill said. “How could this seemingly healthy baby out of nowhere just die?”

When O’Neill turned to pathologists to find answers, she said they provided little help. They labeled Elijah’s passing as unexplained, but his pathology report had one oddity: Elijah, a large baby, had a small placenta. The size difference was so pronounced, according to O’Neill, that pathologists told her the placenta might not be Elijah’s. Though later genetic tests revealed it was his, O’Neill told the News that the pathologists initially wondered whether it might have accidentally been swapped with another placenta. 

O’Neill said she left the meeting with the pathologist feeling disappointed and still seeking answers. Later, O’Neill listened to a podcast in which Kliman discussed the possibility that a small placenta may cause stillbirths. Hoping to find an answer, O’Neill sent Elijah’s physical placenta to Kliman, who attributed Elijah’s death to his small placenta.

“Getting an answer from Kliman was huge in so many ways,” O’Neill said. “Number one, the self-blaming doesn’t happen.”

The study offers additional findings on a larger scale. The study suggests that placental examination can identify the cause behind approximately 99 percent of stillborn cases. The researchers noted that over 60 percent of unexplained stillbirths are due to “placental insufficiency,” or that the placenta is too small in proportion to the baby’s size. Another cause is placental dysmorphia, which describes the placenta’s shape or weight. 

Though the research may help provide closure to these families, Kliman said it will be difficult to translate into clinical changes. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists sets clinical practices in this field. The ACOG requires direct scientific proof that changes to standard treatment, such as measuring the placenta, will result in different outcomes. 

In this case, Kliman said, it is nearly impossible to meet ACOG’s standards. Scientists can never be certain that a treatment will prevent a stillbirth, according to Kliman. Further, he said, it is difficult to change clinical practices because healthcare professionals are not trained in using the EPV test during their residency and fellowship programs. Consequently, Kliman said, some doctors might question the need to incorporate the EPV into their established routines. 

The study encourages clinicians to adopt the EPV tests to manage high-risk pregnancies and make informed decisions about the timing of delivery. If they identify a small placenta, along with other factors, early delivery may mitigate the risk of fetal loss before birth.

Still, the researchers said that the study has limitations. The study lacked comprehensive data on maternal demographics, such as race or ethnicity. Nevertheless, the researchers told the News they recognized that this could be an important point for further research. 

“This study will need to be confirmed by others, however it is likely to change our ability to diagnose the cause of pregnancy loss and potentially help to prevent this tragedy,” Hugh Taylor ’83, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science, wrote to the News. 

Following the study, Kliman said he hopes to explore the genomics underlying pregnancy losses and to delve deeper into the mechanisms that link dysmorphic placentas to pregnancy complications. 

Kliman and Taylor are now conducting an NIH-funded trial that sequences the entire genome of patients who have experienced more than one miscarriage. 

“It’s terrifying to find an answer, but when you do, the emotional guilt is relieved,” O’Neill said. “You have the weight off your shoulders. For future medical care, it’s crucial to understand what caused the previous loss so that in any future pregnancies you can be monitored for those things.”

Stillbirth affects one of every 175 births in the United States.

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But according to a Yale study published this summer, patients who were Black, Hispanic or Latino, Spanish-speaking or insured by Medicaid were more likely to be skipped in emergency room lines. Those patients also had a higher likelihood of being treated in hallways and leaving before treatment was complete.

The study looked at over 90,000 cases of queue jumping at the Yale New Haven Hospital’s emergency department between 2017 and 2020 and adds to a growing body of research pointing out disparities in the timing and quality of care received in the emergency room. 

According to Hazar Khidir, instructor of emergency medicine at the School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, these disparities are often rooted in systemic problems like individual bias, structural racism and economic inequality.

“It’s not just a triage nurse being racist toward a patient,” Khidir said. “There are issues at the structural level.” 

The queue

When a patient first enters the emergency room, they go through a screening process to ensure that they will receive the appropriate level of care.  

According to Rohit Sangal, lead author of the study and the associate medical director of Yale New Haven Hospital’s adult emergency department, emergency rooms typically use a metric called the Emergency Severity Index, or ESI, to triage patients. 

The ESI scale is ranked from one to five, with the most ill patients, such as those experiencing a stroke or heart attack, categorized as ESI 1. The least sick patients, such as those requiring a medication refill, are categorized as ESI 5.  If there is no space in the emergency room — which can happen when there is a shortage of staff, a shortage of beds or when many patients arrive at once — a line forms. This line, said Sangal, is known as a “queue.” 

Patients in a queue are seen by a doctor according to how sick they are and when they arrive. But still, unexplained queue jumps — the term the researchers used to describe people being skipped in line — might occur. The data used in the study do not specify why someone was jumped. 

But queue jumps can happen for a variety of reasons, said Lesley Meng, a professor at the School of Management and co-author of the study.  One legitimate reason for a queue-jump occurs when a waiting patient’s condition worsens. For example, if a patient experiences a seizure or another emergency situation in the waiting room, according to Sangal, they would be jumped in line. 

“The waiting process is dynamic,” Sangal said. “A patient’s clinical status may change, which changes where they need to be in the queue.” 

Even without the possibility of being skipped in line, patients frequently avoid the emergency room if they are worried they might have to wait for several hours, said Caitlin Donovan, a spokesperson for the National Patient Advocate Foundation. 

If a patient experiences long wait times, they might be reluctant to return to the hospital to treat their health problems.

Ignoring health problems can have serious consequences for both the patient and the system, Donovan said, including “worse health outcomes and ultimately higher costs.” 

“Ideally, there’s a treatment space for everyone when they come in,” Sangal told the News.

However, Meng also noted that it is often difficult for patients to tell if they are being skipped over for medical reasons or for other ones — including socioeconomic privilege.

For example, Khidir explained, a privileged patient might have their primary care doctor call the emergency room ahead of their visit to make sure they are seen quickly. Someone without a primary care doctor might have to wait longer. 

She also pointed to one of the study’s findings: patients insured by Medicaid are more likely to be queue-jumped, even though emergency room providers are typically unaware of a patient’s insurance status. 

According to Khidir, this is because Medicaid and insurance status can affect the triage process through indirect means. 

For instance, patients on Medicaid might have a more difficult time finding a doctor who accepts their insurance. If they don’t have a regular doctor, they might not receive a diagnosis for conditions they have, Khidir explained. By the time they are seen in the emergency room, they would appear to be less sick than they actually are.

“A triage nurse doesn’t need to see if a patient has Medicaid for that to have an effect on the triage process,” Khidir said. 

Addressing inequalities 

The Yale queue-jumping study is far from the first research to point out disparities in the emergency room. For example, a study published last September found that non-white patients received less urgent ESI triage scores than white patients, while another study from Boston University found that Black and Hispanic patients experience longer emergency-room wait times than white patients.

Once emergency room inequalities are documented through studies like the queue-jumping study, hospital administrators then decide how to address disparities. 

Howard Forman, a professor of radiology at the School of Medicine and the director of Yale’s healthcare management program, said that there is one obvious solution to the problem.

“Queue jumping wouldn’t matter at all if there were no queues,” Forman told the News.

In addition to getting rid of wait times, Forman said the healthcare industry should prioritize repairing structural inequalities that disadvantage patients from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. Though he acknowledged that those issues are difficult to correct immediately, removing queues and structural inequality should remain on “our short list of problems we’re working on,” Forman said. 

In the short term, other solutions could include changing the triage system, said Chris Chmura, the current manager of clinical projects and education at YNHH, who previously worked as a triage and trauma nurse in the emergency department. 

The ESI system, developed in 1999, is now over 20 years old. Chmura believes that it is not well equipped to handle today’s patients with more complex health needs.

“We’re using tools that were designed in a totally different healthcare setting,” said Chmura. 

Over the past year, YNHH has shifted to a machine-learning tool that uses electronic health records to make more informed triage decisions. 

Chmura said that this tool can help patients receive triage rankings called acuity scores, which are based on the algorithm’s predictions of their health outcomes and the risk of an adverse event. 

“We’ve optimized our front-end flow and our triage process and physician processes,” said Beth Liebhardt, the executive director of emergency services at YNHH, and a co-author on the study. 

Liebhardt said that the data used in the queue-jumping study were collected before 2020. Since then, YNHH has begun to shift away from ESI rankings to a hybrid triage system that uses machine learning to rank patients. 

Liebhardt believes that the study’s findings might change if repeated today.

“With a different timeframe, I think those numbers would look different,” Liebhardt said. 

In addition to machine learning, other triage strategies, such as a split-flow model where patients are separated by the severity of their health needs, might help reduce bias in the emergency department, said Sangal. 

Another solution, according to Forman, is for hospitals to hire multilingual patient advocates to staff emergency department waiting rooms. These advocates could translate for patients who are uncomfortable with English and alert the triage nurse if a patient’s condition worsens.

For Forman, it’s also important that any new solution for addressing inequalities in the emergency room is thoroughly researched. He said it “would be best” to test each idea one by one to see which are meaningful and which are less so.  

Meng confirmed that she and other researchers from the medical school, the School of Management and YNHH are investigating changes made in the YNHH emergency room and their effect on patients. 

“We’re essentially studying every little piece of a patient’s journey through the ED to try to understand whether there are inefficiencies, whether patients are harmed during their waiting, and to come up with ways to make things better,” Meng said.

The study was published in July in the scientific journal JAMA Network Open and

conducted by researchers from the School of Medicine, the School of Management and Yale New Haven Hospital.

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Although levels remain low compared to this time last year, cases across Connecticut have been steadily increasing over the past several weeks. The most recent available CDC data indicate that there were 184 new COVID-19 hospitalizations in Connecticut during the week of Aug. 19, up from 80 weekly hospitalizations at the start of July. 

In New Haven County, according to the CDC, there were 89 new hospitalizations during the week of Aug. 19, a nearly 30-percent increase from the week prior.

“We have seen the same general uptick in cases on campus that have been reported elsewhere, as students travel to campus and gatherings bring people together again,” wrote Madeline Wilson, Yale’s chief campus health officer, in an email to the News. 

But experts believe that COVID-19 cases may be even higher than the newest CDC reports suggest. According to Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, the hospitalization data is a “lagging indicator,” meaning that the rise in hospitalizations is a delayed measurement of a previous spike in COVID-19 cases.

The current COVID-19 caseload, he explained, is difficult to measure accurately.

“Over the past few weeks we have seen a rise in COVID hospitalizations, which … suggests that there has been a rise in cases preceding these admissions,” Gonsalves wrote in an email to the News. “Since many people are not testing or don’t have the resources to do so, how many cases we have locally [is] hard to discern.”

The difficulty in estimating current COVID-19 cases might be exacerbated by lenient reporting requirements for when people test positive.

According to Choukri Ben-Mamoun, a professor of microbial pathogenesis and pathology at the Yale School of Medicine, at-home, over-the-counter rapid antigen tests are increasingly popular tools to screen for COVID-19. Testing at home, he noted, rather than at certified facilities that are required to report new COVID-19 cases, might be causing a potential underreporting of COVID-19 diagnoses.

An Eris wave

Despite difficulties in estimating COVID-19 numbers, Gonsalves believes that the U.S. is in the midst of a “summer surge” likely driven by new variants of the coronavirus. Notable among these, experts say, is the EG.5 variant of the virus, also known as Eris.

A descendant of the Omicron variant responsible for 20.6 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S, Eris is currently the dominant and fastest-circulating variant of the disease in the country. 

According to Michael Cappello, a professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at YSPH, new variants like Eris may be more contagious or better at dodging immunity acquired from previous vaccination or infection. Such factors could be driving the uptick in symptomatic  cases.

Because the new variants can more easily evade “short-lived” protection from a previous COVID-19 infection or vaccination, Cappello explained, people might be at greater risk of developing the disease as they become “more relaxed” and less likely to take precautions like wearing a mask and washing their hands.

“The new variants … are potentially more transmissible and perhaps less susceptible to vaccine induced antibodies, but it’s a bit early to know for sure whether they will present a greater risk to the Yale community in terms of severe illness leading to hospitalization,” Cappello wrote to the News. “For now, the current CDC and Yale guidelines are appropriate to follow, but as with any fluid situation, students should remain alert to changes in recommendations.”

In response to the uptick, Yale continues to monitor COVID-19 cases on campus and requests that those who test positive report their result to the University, Wilson told the News. Free rapid antigen tests are also available to students at residential colleges and in designated locations, such as the Yale Bookstore.

In January, Yale Health expanded its infrastructure to create a new Campus Health Office, helmed by Wilson, to coordinate the University’s health response, including vaccination registration. She noted that the University also plans to roll out free COVID-19 and flu vaccines in October, with information about accessing them set to be released after Labor Day.

“Overall levels of immunity on campus are high due to prior vaccination and infection, and we hope that most will take the opportunity to get the updated COVID vaccine and boost immunity further,” Wilson wrote. “While we are vigilant, we feel we are well-equipped to manage the inevitable cases on campus this fall.”

Looking ahead

Public health experts told the News that they expect fall and winter to bring a resurgence of COVID-19, particularly since most mitigation measures have been dropped across the country and at institutions of higher learning.

“COVID is likely seasonal similarly to other respiratory diseases,” Jeffrey Townsend, Elihu Professor of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, wrote to the News. “As the summer comes to an end, it is likely to begin to increase in prevalence in alignment with other respiratory diseases.” 

Townsend noted that because many people will be over six months from their last COVID-19 booster as winter approaches, they will be at increased risk to variants like Eris. Other factors, such as a reduced reliance on protective measures, such as masking, and frequent gathering in closed-air environments will likely also play a role in this season’s transmission.

However, public health faculty whom the News contacted for comment agreed on the key steps needed to reduce the burden of COVID-19 in the coming months.

Both Cappello and Gonsalves recommended staying up-to-date on vaccinations, getting the next vaccine booster in the coming semester, wearing a mask in crowded indoor spaces and testing for COVID-19 if feeling ill.

“You don’t want COVID. Even if you are young and healthy, risks still remain for you, and … while you may not get seriously ill, we are all one or two degrees of separation from those at higher risk,” Gonsalves said. “Getting through this means getting through this together.” 

Connecticut’s COVID-19 public health emergency declaration ended on May 11, 2023.

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WMHC is the first-ever academic and trainee-led conference focusing on the field of women’s mental health. The event aims to bring clinicians, researchers and advocates together to share knowledge with health trainees, the greater New Haven community and, in recent years, a global audience.

The conference will feature individuals from diverse backgrounds — both within and outside of academic and medical spaces — to highlight and discuss the mental health experiences of women from different communities. 

“This year, we have a panel focused on the impact of political and humanitarian crises on the mental health of women impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the US-Mexico border crisis,” Gul Saeed, a postdoctoral candidate at the School of Public Health, wrote to the News. “It is our goal that this conference will shed light on the critical need to prioritize women’s mental health and tailor mental health care to the needs of different communities.”

Since the conference’s inception in 2019, WMHC has extended beyond the Yale and New Haven community, according to Maria Iuliano, assistant chair of the conference. In addition to all states in the United States, WMHC has reached 52 countries through its virtual programming. 

 “It’s been amazing to connect with mental health advocates, researchers, and trainees across the globe, and it is empowering and exciting to hear from our lineup of speakers who are able to highlight topics that are often understudied, overlooked, or minimized in the field,” Iuliano said.

This year’s keynote lecture, “Finding Gender Joy: A Conversation with Dominique Jackson,” will feature Jackson sharing her story as a transgender immigrant and discussing her own mental health experiences. Christy Olezeski, director and co-founder of the Yale Pediatric Gender Program, has also assisted in organizing a special event for YPGP patients to meet with Jackson outside of the lecture.

Additionally, organizers have invited Wang, esteemed essayist and author, to discuss her New York Times bestseller “The Collected Schizophrenias,” in which she explores her schizophrenia diagnosis, her experience with chronic illness, the wide-reaching effects of ableism and the effect of art and spirituality on the psyche. Wang has previously detailed her own mental health struggles while a student at Yale, noting how colleges and universities may be falling short in their approach to handling student mental health. 

“We felt it was especially important for us to have Esme Wang return to Yale for the first time since her experience here to reflect on the recent experiences of students in crisis here at Yale and to highlight the massive mental health policy changes implemented by Yale’s student health earlier this year,” said Erin Davidowicz, chair of WMHC and third-year resident in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry.

Davidowicz added that the WMHC at Yale has always prioritized important conversations about LGBTQ+ mental health, especially transgender health care. By recognizing the ways in which women’s mental health and LGBTQ+ health intersect, she hopes that attendees will be able to organize all kinds of gender-responsive care, both for women and for minoritized gender identities.

“The WMHC aims to facilitate discussion surrounding LGBTQ+ and transgender mental health, and we find this discussion to be very timely, given today’s social and political climate,” said Iuliano.

According to Angela Nunez, ProNET Research Manager at the School of Medicine, the conference looks to highlight every type of journey in the mental health community, covering issues including mental health history in the context of family trauma and living with diagnoses and chronic illnesses. Other topics to be discussed by speakers and presenters include creativity, the LGBTQ+ community and immigration.

The 2023 conference will be free and completely virtual on Friday, April 28, with in-person events taking place at the University on Saturday, April 29.

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With ever-growing worry about ecological conservation and biodiversity conservation, bird window collisions have seen increased concern. While there have been informal reports of bird collisions on Yale’s campus since as early as 2005, there has been no systematic effort to address the crisis — until the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative. 

In the fall, eight Yale student researchers took one of three routes — Central, Medical or West — to monitor on-campus bird strikes during migration season. The struck birds were collected and/or documented and the experiment was repeated during eight weeks of the spring season which is when the birds tend to migrate to northern climates. 

“We started the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative with the aim of accelerating the adoption of bird-safe building design on Yale’s campus and beyond,” said Viveca Morris, executive director of law, ethics & animals program at Yale Law School and a lead on the project.

The collected birds were eventually moved to the Peabody Museum after being processed by undergraduate research assistants under guidance of Kristof Zykowski, collections manager in vertebrate zoology, mammalogy and ornithology departments at Peabody.

By the time the team embarked on this project last year, they already had several years of bird-window collision data, but these data collections were opportunistic and mostly restricted to the main campus, according to Zykowski. 

With the support from Yale’s Planetary Solutions grant and with help from a team of dedicated student monitors, the team was able to conduct the first systematic survey that covers most of Yale’s campus. 

After analyzing the data obtained during fall migration, both Morris and Zykowski concluded that collisions occur throughout the campus across any and all regions of it. Still, some buildings have a greater share in bird mortality. 

With support from the Planetary Solutions Project Seed Grant, the initiative is conducting two research projects over the 2022-23 academic year. Zykowski noted that the first project is focused on collecting comprehensive data on the precise locations and frequency of bird-window collisions on Yale’s campus, as well as developing a data-driven plan to significantly reduce these collisions at both new and existing buildings. 

“We hope it will provide a useful and powerful model for other institutions to follow,” Morris said. 

Retrofitting glass facades with “feather-friendly film” has been proven to be effective in controlling bird collisions. 

The second project, explained Morris, is focused on producing a first-of-its-kind report on the effectiveness and potential of emerging city-level public policies aimed at accelerating the adoption of bird-friendly designs at a greater scale. This project will document the experiences of cities with bird-friendly policies and encourage other cities to follow effective ones. 

“We’ve looked at bird-friendly building laws in six cities with case studies coming out on five,  San Francisco, New York, Madison, Cupertino and Arlington,” said Meredith Barges DIV ’23, a student policy researcher for the project who also co-chairs Lights Out Connecticut — a statewide conservation project focusing on migratory birds. 

Barges has been active in conducting interviews with people at the forefront of bird-friendly lawmaking, including government representatives, neighborhood activists, architects and glass suppliers. 

She has sought to assess the practicality of these laws and the types of buildings they apply to. Her work demonstrates the legal trend toward bird-friendly construction. 

All members of the Yale and New Haven community can now contribute to the project on the iNaturalist app.

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The word “cannabis” refers to all products retrieved from the plant Cannabis sativa or modernly known as cannibus seeds. The plant has around 540 chemical constituents, and one of its products is “marijuana,” which contains significant concentrations of cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol. THC is responsible for creating drug-inducing effects; however, some plants contain lower concentrations of THC and are used for industrial and medicinal purposes instead. There are over 100 types of cannabinoids, including cannabidiol, or CBD, which has much milder effects compared to THC and has anti-epileptic and neuroprotective attributes. 

Cannabis can be used in different ways and the effects differ according to the form in which it is consumed. The most common form is smoking using the dried leaves and buds of Cannabis sativa. Another form is hashish, which is a dried plant compound, typically consumed by smoking with tobacco or by adding to foodstuffs. Hash oils and concentrates are liquids and extracts of the plant respectively. The former is smoked and the latter is vaporized in conservative quantities due to high THC concentrations (https://mjarsenal.com/collections/mini-dab-rigs).

Now, you might be wondering, can you order weed online? Yes, there are sites like dank.ca that offer same day delivery.

Director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, said. “Cannabis has been cultivated for thousands of years … to make strong fiber for ropes and sails, serve as a food and a medicinal plant, and… for intoxication and religious use.” 

THC achieves its brain-altering, recreational functions through endogenous cannabinoids that act as neurotransmitters to enable communication between nerve cells. This allows THC to bind to cannabinoid receptors that may affect physical or mental behaviors. For instance, THC can affect how the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex function in the brain, which are both regions associated with memory formation and attentional instincts. 

Furthermore, it can impact spatial recognition, balance, posture and coordination by disrupting functions of the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. Therefore, it could be unsafe to drive or pursue physical activities under the influence of THC. On the contrary, cannabis products, like those available at Terpene Belt Farms, offer an alternative without the psychoactive effects associated with THC, and that’s why cannabis terpenes is a better option for this.

THC also achieves its addictive functions by stimulating the reward mechanism in the endocannabinoid system, or ECS, which activates during pleasurable activities such as sex and eating. Like most drugs, misusing cannabis will cause neurons in the rewards system to elevate levels of dopamine, which trains the brain to repeat the pleasurable behavior, making cannabis products highly addictive in nature.

“THC stimulation of CB1 receptors is responsible for most of the cognitive and behavioral effects that we associate with cannabis ingestion including euphoria, appetite stimulation, anti-nausea effects, sedation, anti-anxiety effects and drowsiness,” John Krystal, professor of translational research and chair of psychiatry, wrote in an email to the News. “But THC also produces anxiety, worsened concentration, impaired learning and memory, paranoia, racing thoughts, altered perception, sense of unreality and impaired coordination.”

Cannabis has been shown to have healing properties. Several unusual forms of epilepsy caused by chemotherapy, as well as decreased appetite caused by HIV/AIDS, may be helped by cannabinoid-containing medications. Moreover, some research points to minor benefits of cannabis for symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Alternative means of pain-relief could be opiates, which are highly sedating, or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) that cause reasonable threat to kidney patients. Considering these options, I thought about this, it becomes clear that cannabis holds promise as a viable alternative with potential health benefits.

The medicinal properties of cannabis are acquired through CBD and low quantities of THC. Various proposed modes of action for CBD have been studied, including interactions with GABA receptors, effects on serotoninergic and NMDA receptors, amplification of adenosine transmission and modulation of the flow of calcium ions. The additive benefits of CBD and THC, as well as CBD’s capacity to lessen the euphoric side effects of THC, may be attributed to pathways of CBD’s action. 

The latest research in the field clarifies the beneficial effects of THC on epileptic management in animal models as well as the importance of the ECS in the maintenance of seizures. Moreover, CBD has also proven to be an anticonvulsant in animals undergoing epileptic episodes and can offset the effects of seizures by acting with THC in a synergetic fashion.

Despite the growing trend of legalizing recreational cannabis use and medical use in the United States, the safety, potential health risks and long-term effects remain largely unknown, so it is important to find a medical marijuana doctor and get professional assistance. 

On Jan. 10, New Haven’s only adult-use cannabis retailer started dispensing cannabis solely for medical use.

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Gabriel Gadsden ENV ’27, associate professor of wildlife and land conservation Nyeema Harris and postdoctoral researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center Nigel Golden hypothesize that “social ecological landscapes of fear,” or SELF, create place-based bias, which in turn influences the success of conservation efforts. 

The researchers point out that in grappling with a place’s identity, conservationists often encounter bias based on predominant cultural and historical narratives, disregarding the ecological landscapes themselves. 

“The social-ecological landscape of fear theory states that fear of relinquishing dominant narratives of space creates a bias in where, how and to what extent conservation and environment scholars conduct studies,” Gadsden told the News.

Place-driven biases have deep historical context. For instance, Black scholars can feel hesitant to pursue research in disproportionately racist environments, which can affect conservation goals, according to Gadsden. 

“Science is not as objective as perhaps previously casted across disciplines,” Harris wrote to the News. “The SELF theory proposed forces applied scientists, especially those in natural sciences, to grapple with history. We question not only the past biophysical attributes of the ecosystem that shape contemporary patterns of biodiversity and nature processes, but also how legacy tied to socio-economic conditions and treatment of people drive such patterns.” 

Gadsden’s work is the first of its kind to study how fear in ecological research affects humans, as previous studies have focused specifically on animal behavior in fear-stimulated environments. 

“Past theories of fear separate humans and nonhumans,” Gadsden wrote. “Our paper unionizes ideas about fear borrowed from the humanities and social science[s] with ecology. It compels disciplinary experts to come to terms with the nature of societies’ histories that promote colonization mindsets in environmental scholarship, and ways to overcome this fear-based or place-based bias.”

Gadsden’s research offers unique prospects, acknowledging that place-based bias is a layered dilemma. In his work, Gadsden focuses on the researchers; he suggests that in order to eliminate any biases, researchers should be cognizant and engage with subject communities in a proactive fashion. 

More precisely, Gadsden insists on a three-tier approach to address the crisis. First is co-creation, which is when eco-political and eco-justice scholars unite to cope with geographical prejudices. It could spur them into action, he said, as they invest in missed histories and carry out more intentional research.

The second step is community collaboration, where scientists cooperate to understand attitudes and behavior in specific geographies, interacting with local habitats to create a more stable conservation framework. 

Lastly, Gadsden prompts researchers to recognize the role of history in their work. For instance, the displacement of indigenous people in Yosemite between 1850 and 1966 made the forest ecosystem more susceptible to fires, and in order to propel conservation efforts, it is important to be aware of the ecosystem’s pre-displacement state.

Environmental studies major Roxanne Shaviro ’26 said that there are multiple ways intergenerational trauma can affect people and manifest itself in research. There are very few people of color in the major, which she said could partly be because of traumas resulting from racial discrimination.

 “People don’t want to face trauma,” Shaviro said. “I saw very few people of color in academia growing up.” 

Since the inception of ecological scholarship, dominant narratives have projected false ideals for ecological inquiry, according to Gadsden’s study. Thus, the resulting landscapes of fear have caused gaps in scholarship. In order to remedy this, there has to be a broader effort to consult multiple sources, which can allow researchers to avoid implicit bias in prioritizing ecological issues in certain areas.

Harris’ diverse team at the Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, where Gadsden works, aims to negate biases by doing hands-on work with a wide array of terrestrial systems, from national parks to farmlands and backyards. The team is working resiliently to not let fear constrain their exploration.

The study was published in the January 2023 issue of BioScience.

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