Lin, a professor of cell biology and founding director of the Yale Stem Cell Center, was honored for his contributions to stem cell research. The prize, conferred by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, was first announced through a press release on the Academy’s website on Jan. 31.

“I feel extremely honored by the prize because it represents a seal of approval for my research by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a distinguished learned society established by the Founding Fathers in 1780,” Lin told the News. “It encourages me to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge.” 

Roughly 150 people attended the ceremony, including members of the Academy, fellow faculty members at the School of Medicine and many of Lin’s current and former research group members and students. University President Peter Salovey gave opening and closing remarks, while David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy, gave an introduction highlighting Lin’s achievements. Nancy Brown, the dean of the School of Medicine, presented the prize to Lin. 

The speakers praised Lin’s contributions to the fields of stem cell biology, reproductive biology and  developmental biology. 

Lin extensively researched stem cell niche theory, which describes the microenvironment that sends signals to stem cells and allows them to self-renew. He also discovered Argonaute/Piwi genes, which play “indispensable roles” in stem cell self-renewal mechanisms and germline development, per Lin. 

“Your pioneering work, which includes the demonstration of stem cell asymmetric division, the proof of the stem cell niche theory, and the discoveries of the Argonaute/Piwi gene family and piRNAs, has illuminated the complex interplay of molecular signals that govern stem cell self-renewal and differentiation,” Brown said to Lin while giving him the award. “These discoveries have opened, as you have described, a ‘new world of genes’ and new avenues for therapeutic intervention in regenerative medicine.”

Lin joined the Yale faculty in 2006 and established the Yale Stem Cell Center, having founded and directed the Duke Stem Cell Research Program the year prior. Under his direction, the Yale Stem Cell Center has expanded from two member labs to 102 labs, making it among the largest stem cell research organizations in the world.

Beyond his research, Lin has also mentored researchers and graduate students who have gone on to establish their own labs. Katherine Uyhazi GRD ’12 MED ’13, Lin’s first MD/PhD student at Yale, started her lab at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. In an email to the News, Uyhazi emphasized Lin’s ability to guide students through both scientific and personal questions.

“His mentorship also extends beyond science — he once gave a lab meeting on finding happiness in your career!” Uyhazi wrote. “‘Enjoy the process itself, not just the end goal,’ he said. This advice has stuck with me over the years and I now find myself passing on his words of wisdom to my own students.”

Daniel Cox, who was Lin’s first-ever graduate student at Duke University, now serves as director of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. Cox said that Lin’s research attracted him even before they both joined Duke.

“I actually reached out to him when he was still at the Carnegie Institute in his postdoc, and [Lin was] like, ‘how do you find me?’ But I had been following his work, even in his postdoctoral studies,” Cox said. “By the time I knew he was coming to Duke, I was so excited. Even as a junior faculty member, it was clear that he was going to be a mover and shaker and intellectual thought leader in the field.”

Oxtoby, the Academy president, emphasized how infrequently the Academy confers the Amory Prize. The Academy’s prize committee presented just two out of its eleven total prizes in 2024 as Lin received the Amory Prize and British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah received the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies.

Originally known as the Francis Amory Septennial Prize, the Amory Prize was first awarded in 1940 to researchers who contribute “conspicuously meritorious work” to the “treatment and cure of diseases and derangement of the human sexual generative organs in general.” Since then, the Academy has broadened the scope of the award to include reproductive medicine and physiology more generally. 

Before Lin, the prize was most recently awarded in 2020 to Ruth Lehmann and Gertrud Schüpbach for their research in DNA repair, embryonic development, RNA regulation and stem cell research. 

Lin’s professional path has not been without challenges. As a Chinese-born academic who graduated from Fudan University in 1982, Lin said factors outside of the scientific process, such as geopolitics, have impacted him and other Chinese-American scientists.

“In the past few years, geopolitical tensions between the US and China have affected Chinese-American scientists, including myself, and STEM students from China,” Lin wrote. “McCarthyism-like sentiments among some right-wing politicians sparked fear, leading to a sharp decline in talent retention since 2018.” 

In March 2022, the University suspended Lin and placed him on paid administrative leave amid a Department of Justice investigation. 

Lin received an outpouring of support from University faculty members, who wrote multiple letters defending Lin and expressing concern over the University’s response to the investigation, which they claimed lacked due process. Faculty members also suggested that Lin was unfairly targeted on the basis of his Chinese descent. 

The DOJ never publicly revealed its allegations and eventually dropped the investigation, and Lin was reinstated to his lab in April 2022.

“As we acknowledge the unique experiences that come with being an Asian American researcher, it’s crucial to highlight that the pursuit of scientific excellence transcends cultural or ethnic boundaries,” Lin wrote. “It’s my hope that by sharing my experiences, I can inspire young researchers from diverse backgrounds to pursue their passions in science, regardless of the obstacles they may face.”

Lin also expressed hope that recent developments, such as the September 2023 establishment of the Asian Faculty Association at Yale — which was founded to “promote and protect” Asian and Asian American faculty members — and the recognition of Yan Fuqing, School of Medicine class of 1909 and the first Asian graduate from the medical school, indicate growing support for Chinese- and Asian-American faculty. 

“Upon learning about my prize, the University’s leadership once again demonstrated their support by hosting a wonderful ceremony and celebration for me,” Lin wrote. “I have all reason to believe that Asian-American faculty will continue to thrive at Yale.”

The Academy elected 269 new members out of 1,200 nominees in 2023.

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Dengue flu is a tropical viral disease that spreads to humans through the bite of an infected Aedes mosquito. Though dengue is not contagious from person to person, mosquitoes that previously did not carry the disease can become newly infected after biting an infected person, further propagating the disease’s spread through the population. Dengue can cause severe flu-like symptoms — and some cases can be deadly. 

While the disease is most prevalent in South America from June to September, during and after the monsoon season, there is now an alarming rate of cases in Brazil and other South American countries. According to Albert Ko, the professor of public health at the School of Public Health, there have been over two million cases reported in Brazil in 2024.

“2024 [is] one of the largest epidemics this country has experienced,” Ko wrote in an email to the News. 

Ko wrote that he expects the outbreak in Brazil to worsen in the coming months because the northeast part of the country is only now entering peak dengue season. 

The disease has begun to creep northward, causing concern from the CDC. On Monday, the Puerto Rico Department of Health declared dengue an epidemic following a recent case spike. 

“While dengue virus spread is right now mainly an issue in South-East Asia and in Central and South America and equatorial Africa … it is likely that the vectors that transmit viruses like dengue will spread to new geographic areas,” David Martinez, a professor at the School of Medicine who studies viral pathogens, wrote in an email to the News. “We are starting to see the local, albeit limited, transmission of dengue virus in some southern U.S. states that have the climate to support mosquito population growth and spread.” 

Dengue is unique from other mosquito-borne infections, Martinez noted, in that the immune system recognizes each of its four distinct variations differently, meaning that immunity to one form of the virus typically does not grant immunity to the others. 

Further, unlike other infectious diseases, multiple dengue infections can often bring about worse cases. Martinez said that dengue’s specific characteristics make it particularly difficult to counter. 

“Dengue virus has another trick up its sleeve compared to other mosquito-borne [viruses]: it can use host antibody immunity as a “Trojan horse” to exacerbate disease through a phenomenon called ‘antibody-dependent enhancement of disease,’” Martinez wrote. “Therefore, immunity to [one] dengue virus [variant] can make disease worse.” 

According to Martinez and Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiology professor at the School of Public Health, climate change has contributed to the unprecedented outbreak of dengue this year in several ways. Increased temperature and rainfall have extended mosquito breeding grounds, and mosquitoes are now present in areas that were previously not warm enough for breeding.

Florida, California and Texas — coastal states that have been affected by climate change — have particularly seen an increase in dengue over the past few years. 

These changing climate conditions also lead to longer lifespans for mosquitoes and, thus, longer dengue seasons. A 2023 study led by the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that the transmission potential of dengue may increase by 10 to 20 percent in the next 30 years due to climate change. 

Beyond climate change, Grubaugh explained that this year’s rapid rise in cases may be due to the re-emergence of serotype 3, a previously uncommon dengue variant to which the population has little immunity.

Brazil was the first country to roll out a public vaccine campaign against dengue. However, Grubaugh said this may not be enough to stop the epidemic.

“While it is exciting to see Brazil administer a dengue vaccine (Qdenga from Takada), their supplies are very limited and something like only 10 percent of the population would have access,” Grubaugh wrote. “On top of this, the vaccine is not very effective at protecting against all serotypes and variants of dengue virus. So the likelihood that dengue vaccination actually significantly halts spread in 2024 is quite low.”

Public education in resource-limited areas could help improve the situation, Martinez said. Individuals can help curb its spread by removing common household objects that become reservoirs near the home, as they can become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. 

He also emphasized that there needs to be more “investment in basic science” to understand specifically how the virus causes disease and to help develop antiviral drugs that reduce case severity.

Robert Dubrow, a professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, highlighted that the spread of dengue should serve as a warning for the spread of other viral infections due to climate change. 

“As the planet warms, we can expect Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, the two mosquito species that can carry the dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses, to spread to higher altitudes and latitudes,” Dubrow wrote in an email to the News. “It’s vital for the public health system to stay vigilant.”

There are approximately 550 cases of dengue fever a year in the continental United States. 

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The Connecticut Office of Health Strategy signed off on YNHHS’s certificate of need, or CON, application to buy Waterbury Hospital, Rockville General Hospital and Manchester Memorial Hospital from Prospect Medical Holdings. Negotiations for YNHHS to acquire the financially troubled hospitals have been ongoing since October 2022. 

The state’s approval of the CON greenlights the way for YNHHS to finalize the terms of the acquisition deal with Prospect Medical Holdings, keeping the hospitals from shuttering their doors. The acquisition would see YNHHS expand its total bed count by 700 and add about 4,400 additional employees, for a total of approximately 33,400. The for-profit Prospect hospitals would also be reverted to non-profit status.

“I am glad that all the parties have been able to reach an agreement on this transaction in a way that ensures that the residents who live in each of the hospitals’ host communities will continue to have local access to essential medical care, and the jobs of the employees who provide this care will be preserved under this new ownership,” Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont wrote in a statement. 

For over a year, Yale New Haven Health has been in negotiations with Prospect Medical Holdings and the state to iron out an agreement to acquire the three, Prospect-owned hospitals.

Following a six-week-long cyberattack on the three hospitals last August, Yale New Haven Health proposed a “Recovery Plan” that lowered its originally proposed purchase price of $435 million and asked the state to provide financial assistance for the deal. In return, the system would provide the three hospitals with support in their efforts to recover from the cyberattack.

Shortly after, negotiations between Yale New Haven Health, Prospect and Connecticut’s Office of Health Strategy for the acquisition deal went confidential to ensure that they continued as efficiently as possible.

“We continue to meet with all parties, including the Connecticut Office of Health Strategy and Prospect, CT to bring the transaction to a successful conclusion,” said Dana Marnane, director for public relations at Yale New Haven Health, in an email to the News in October.

State conditions on YNHHS

The new CON contains 46 conditions that the state’s Office of Health Strategy, or OHS, will require Yale to adhere to, including the hiring of an independent monitor for five years that reports to the OHS at the sole expense of YNHHS. 

“The [Independent Monitor] shall be responsible for monitoring NewCo’s compliance with all of the conditions set forth in this Agreed Settlement and shall produce a schedule of required reports and data to be shared with the [OHS],” the CON stated. 

Many conditions work to ensure current employees at the three hospitals can maintain their jobs. Notably, the agreement requires YNHHS to rehire all non-management employees and use their “best efforts … to minimize the elimination of individuals’ jobs.” YNHHS must also recognize all established bargaining agreements between hospital employees and the previous management. 

Other conditions focus on community-building efforts. YNHHS and the Prospect hospitals must have community representatives on its board of directors. In addition, the hospitals must hold community meetings to engage the public with hospital activities that allow community members to ask questions. 

The hospitals will also work with local health organizations and stakeholders to conduct a Community Health Needs Assessment to systematically identify community needs. To increase accessibility, YNHHS will also make culturally and linguistically appropriate services available and integrated into the hospitals’ operations. 

All three hospitals will adopt the YNHHS financial assistance policies, and all hospitals will continue to offer Medicaid services. Further, YNHHS must increase its aggregate community benefit expenditures across each hospital. 

“For-profit ownership of community hospitals — especially when tied to hedge funds — should never again be tolerated in our state,” John Brady, vice president of the statewide labor federation AFT Connecticut, wrote in an email to the News. “We have been consistent on our priorities – the health and well-being of our communities and caregivers.”

For five years, Northeast Medical Group — the medical foundation associated with YNHHS — will offer semi-annual reports on Medicaid patients’ access to specialty treatments, including medication-assisted treatment for substance misuse, dermatology, ENT services, neurology, orthopedics, and pain management. 

YNHHS will also invest $6 million in behavioral health services that target increasing access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment. 

“With today’s approval by the Office of Health Strategy, I encourage Prospect to work with Yale to reach a deal that will allow them to finalize this purchase and bring a much-needed resolution to this transaction,” Lamont wrote.

Healthcare providers, legislators push to finalize deal

Throughout the negotiation process, many healthcare professionals, legislators and health policy experts around the state have urged the deal should move forward, and should do so as quickly as possible.

Of concern to these individuals is the volatile financial status of Prospect Medical, and the effects that its for-profit business model has had on its hospitals’ ability to provide care.

Following the cyberattacks, State Senator Saud Anwar, co-chair of the Connecticut General Assembly Public Health Committee, told the News in October that the hospitals could not bill their patients or pay medical supply vendors.

As a result, the CT Mirror also reported that the state was also forced to provide a $7 million bailout to the hospitals, which were struggling to stay afloat after being unable to receive Medicaid reimbursements during the attacks. 

“This was a perfect storm from the hospitals’ perspective,” Anwar wrote in an email to the News. “They were already struggling financially, and the fact that their medical records and ability to see as many patients as they usually see, as well as their ability to bill patients as normal, resulted in a financial issue that harmed cash flow, making their ability to manage their finances significantly more difficult.”

Prospect owes the state at least $67.39 million in health provider taxes that date back to March 2022, according to three state tax liens filed against the California-based company. 

The company’s financial struggles and alleged mismanagement have generated widespread frustration among several Connecticut healthcare providers, who told the News that they continue to support the YNHHS purchase of the Prospect hospitals.

Those financial difficulties “call attention to the dire need for responsible, committed new ownership of ECHN’s hospitals,” said Diane Carlson, president of the Manchester Federation of LPNs and Techs United, AFT Local 5144, who works as a licensed practical nurse at Manchester Memorial Hospital. 

The state’s approval of the CON greenlights the way for Yale to finalize the terms of the acquisition. 

“Our patients and our caregivers deserve better than a hedge fund that fails to pay its fair share to the communities from which it profits,” she added.

According to Rep. Jason Doucette, D-Manchester, the state representative for one of the towns containing a Prospect hospital, Prospect’s management style has “negatively affected” the availability of vendors and supplies. 

He believes that Prospect’s financial woes also harm the morale of doctors, nurses and other hospital employees.

“The private equity model of doing business in health care, together with [Prospect’s] inability to refinance certain company debts, then compounded by the cyber attack in mid-2023, created a dire situation where the bills simply weren’t getting paid,” he wrote in an email to the News. “Most of the people I speak to in the community are hopeful that the acquisition by Yale will bring a significant overall improvement to the ECHN system generally, and that frankly anything is likely to be better than the current situation.”

As the deal moves forward after the state’s approval, however, healthcare professionals continue to provide care to Connecticut residents, even as they face uncertainty over future management and job prospects.

Annie-Marie Cerra, president of AFT Local 5055 for Manchester Memorial Hospital Nurses and an emergency department nurse at Manchester Memorial, highlighted healthcare workers’ continued commitment in an email to the News.

“This acquisition process has created a lot of anxiety for all of us. Despite that, our member nurses and health professionals – as well as our physician colleagues – have shown up every day in our hospitals to provide the excellent care our patients and their families deserve.”

Yale New Haven Hospital was founded as the General Hospital Society of Connecticut in 1826.

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Headquartered in New Haven, Arvinas achieved two drug development milestones last month. The breast cancer drug that it is jointly developing with Pfizer, called vepdegestrant, received “fast-track” federal review from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The company also administered the first human test dose of another drug, labeled ARV-102, which targets neurodegenerative illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease.

Arvinas credits its success to a proprietary technology called PROTAC, an abbreviation for the term ‘proteolysis-targeting chimeras.’ The drugs, taken orally, use cells’ biological machinery to break down disease-causing proteins within the body — an approach that creates a promising avenue for treating a wide range of diseases including cancer and certain neurological disorders.

Arvinas scientists say that the distinct protein-breakdown approach targets proteins that are widely recognized to cause disease, taking the guesswork out of choosing a biological target that might have unintended consequences — or none at all.

“We’ve proven that PROTAC will be a product … a drug that shows up in a bottle on a pharmacy shelf that someone can buy and take,” said Ron Peck, Arvinas’ former medical officer.

The FDA’s fast-track process is designed to accelerate the development and approval of drugs that are considered to potentially meet an unmet medical need. The drugs also must have sufficient data to show that they would be an important and effective potential therapy — criteria that Arvinas’ and Pfizer’s vepdegestrant could meet, said Ian Taylor, the company’s chief scientific officer. 

The breast cancer therapy is currently being evaluated in Phase 3 clinical trials that are evaluating its effectiveness in patients with advanced, or metastatic, breast cancer who have previously been treated with endocrine medications that affect hormones in the body. Vepdegestrant is also being tested in other Phase 3 clinical trials as a combination therapy with other medications, including the breast cancer drug palbociclib.

Meanwhile, Arvinas’ drug for neurodegenerative diseases, ARV-102, dosed its first human subject at the end of February. In a news release, the company detailed how the medication, in preclinical studies, targets a protein called leucine-rich repeat kinase 2, or LRRK2. 

Research suggests that increased expression and activity of LRRK2 are associated with brain diseases like Parkinson’s. In primate studies, the company says, ARV-102 reached deep into the brain to degrade LRRK2 by up to 90 percent.

Arvinas’s recent drug development advancements mirror a broader trend of growth within New Haven’s burgeoning biotech landscape. With its proximity to research institutions like Yale University and a supportive ecosystem for startups, Peck and other biotech entrepreneurs believe that the Connecticut area has emerged as a hub for pharmaceutical companies to innovate.

“Connecticut is a great place to do drug discovery and drug development,” said Martin Mackay, co-founder of the New Haven-based biopharmaceutical company Rallybio. “There is great talent here. We thought we’d be able to really build partnerships with top academics … we thought we could hire great people here.”

Founded in 2013, Arvinas spun off from the lab of Yale biochemist and professor Craig Crews, employing a group of 20 individuals. Since then, the company has ballooned in size to 450, said Taylor. Today, the company has four drugs in development, including vepdegestrant and ARV-102, and has been publicly traded on the stock market since 2018.

For Taylor, the fact that New Haven has a less-saturated biopharmaceutical industry than other cities has helped the company thrive. In a less crowded field, he said, startups have a greater opportunity to establish themselves as key players and expand their operations over time.

Compared with established biotech hubs like Boston or San Francisco, lower rent and overhead costs help startups with limited funding allocate more resources towards research and development, Taylor added.

Mackay described the significance of partnerships between academia, industry and local government in fueling innovation. Rallybio, for instance, launched out of the University of Connecticut’s technology incubator program in Farmington, giving the company access to the university’s offices and laboratories.

He highlighted how university and government partnerships helped Rallybio gain footing during the drug development process.

“I think it starts off with the state government being attractive to come into Connecticut: you feel wanted,” Mackay said. “There was a recognition that there were great people here, that you could actually build companies. Very welcoming local government and local politicians make it a great place to discover new medicines and develop the biotech industry.”

But Arvinas’s researchers still face challenges in drug development, including regulatory hurdles, funding constraints and scientific challenges.

New biopharmaceutical startups face high costs associated with running clinical trials. Though trial costs vary widely, a 2018 analysis found that the median expense for a single Phase 3 trial reached $19 million, with the most expensive multi-thousand patient trials reaching upwards of $340 million.

New Haven’s biopharmaceutical companies are no exception, even if rent costs are lower than in other cities. Rallybio, for instance, laid off nearly half its workforce last month, shrinking from 44 employees to 23. The money that Mackay’s company saved was used to obtain clinical trial data on pregnant mothers.

“You can pay in biotech dearly because you can’t raise the money that you need so easily,” Mackay said. “To extend the runway, we needed to make our money last longer. The people that we parted with were truly great human beings and great individuals, and it was kind of really hard for us to make those decisions. But we needed to make sure that we can get the data to see if this program is going to work”

According to Peck, researchers developing a new drug also face a fundamental obstacle: uncertainty that the molecules or biological mechanisms the drug targets will have positive outcomes for patients. 

But scientists like Taylor remain optimistic, particularly about the promise of Arvinas’ PROTAC technology. The technique, he believes, creates a new way to hit disease-causing proteins, over 80 percent of which are considered to be “non-druggable” by traditional drugs known as inhibitors. 

“The challenge is getting the molecules to have drug-like properties,” Peck said. “Would these things actually work in humans? It’s looked great in laboratory systems, but do they really work?” 

Arvinas is located at 395 Winchester Ave.

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Led by Eric Song, an associate research scientist and resident physician at the School of Medicine, the researchers found that injecting vaccines directly into the eyes of mice can activate an immune response, potentially protecting mice from brain infections caused by the herpes simplex virus. According to Song, their findings demonstrate that physicians could use the eye’s immune response to help fight bacteria and tumors. 

“We hear this phrase a lot: ‘the eye is like a window to the brain,’” Song told the News. “That’s kind of centered around this idea that the eye is central nervous system tissue, like the brain.” 

Song explained that when diseases affect the neurons, they are often observable in both the brain and the eye’s retina. His study demonstrated that immune reactions in the retina mirror those in the brain. His team discovered that stimulating the immune system in the retina can also protect the brain against diseases and tumors. 

“I think it’s important because this opens up a new anatomical avenue that hasn’t been described before,” Song said. “Our paper is the first to really show that there’s functional lymphatic vessels.” 

Song and his team primarily study “immune privilege,” a concept initially proposed in the 1940s which suggests that immune responses are significantly reduced in the brain and eyes. For a long time, the scientific community believed that these organs were immune-inactive, Song said. However, infections and autoimmune diseases still occur in these sites, which indicates that there is a present immune response distinct from other parts of the body. 

Song and his team previously discovered that the brain and eyes lack traditional lymphatic vessels, which help drain proteins and fluids. However, they identified that the membrane tissues surrounding these organs do contain lymphatic vessels, and physicians can manipulate these vessels to enhance immune responses.

The eye’s anterior and posterior compartments have different drainage systems to the lymph nodes, parts of the immune system that filter substances in the lymphatic fluid and contain white blood cells to help the body fight infections. 

In this study, Song and his team found that the posterior compartment drains through the optic nerve, which can be enhanced or inhibited to affect immune responses. Lymphatic vessels at the back of the eye and those surrounding the brain are interconnected and drain into the same lymph node, which facilitates a coordinated immune defense.  

They also discovered that blocking the lymphatic system’s communication in the optic nerve can reduce the immune system’s reaction to adeno-associated virus. This virus is often used in gene therapy, a technique that modifies a person’s gene to treat or cure a disease. 

They found that when the herpes vaccine is injected into the eye, it induces an immune response. By blocking this response, gene therapy could be more effective, as the vector viruses will not be attacked by the immune system, enabling the modification of genes. 

Ellen Foxman, a professor of immunobiology at the School of Medicine, noted that one of the initial FDA-approved gene therapies for a genetic eye disease had little effect because the body created an immune defense against the virus used to deliver the gene therapy. But now, Song and his team’s study offers a method to suppress this immune response, potentially enhancing gene therapy’s effectiveness. 

“It’s really exciting because there’s sort of a lore that the eye is an immunologically privileged site,” Foxman said. “It’s just that you don’t have any immune responses against things in the eye and the brain. But this challenges that dogma and says, ‘Well, let’s see, is that really true?’”

According to Akiko Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at the School of Medicine, certain individuals have mutations or deficiencies in gene expression that lead to eye diseases. But gene therapy can compensate for these missing genes and introduce them to the body via viral vectors. While previously these vectors were quickly eliminated from the eye, Song’s findings suggest that scientists could obstruct this draining and prevent an immune response that would typically flush out this vector. 

“It’s significant because [the study] has many clinical implications,” Iwasaki said. “Now that we understand this new lymphatic drainage system, and [Song] manipulated it to enable gene therapy more efficiently. Other drugs can also benefit from this new knowledge and strategy of either blocking or enhancing the posterior eye drainage.”

Iwasaki also said that Song’s technique could be leveraged to use for gene therapy in the eye. 

The discovery opens up new avenues for treating a variety of eye-related diseases. Currently, Song and his team are investigating how their findings could be useful for treating other diseases that affect the eye, such as glaucoma and macular edema. He said that he will continue to look at other features of the nervous system and if there are other barriers to allowing effective immune responses.

“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in order for anything to be translational,” Song said. “It should be our job and other labs to really focus down on specific diseases of the eye or the brain and see how this applies in those settings.”

Iwasaki also said scientists should conduct clinical trials to ensure the techniques are both effective and safe before applying their discoveries to human therapies. Nevertheless, Iwasaki said he is optimistic for its use in future clinical practice. 

“I suspect that translation of this finding is relatively straightforward,” Iwasaki said. 

The concept of gene therapy first arose in the 1960s. 

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The alliance, known as CARE, is a joint partnership between the School of Public Health and Southern Connecticut State University that uses community-engaged research to help improve the health of low-income and marginalized communities. This is the second consecutive five-year grant from the CDC’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health program, which funds various initiatives that target health disparities across different racial groups. 

According to Alycia Santilli, the director of CARE at SCSU, the alliance hopes to use this new funding to expand access to healthier foods, support breast-feeding accommodations and strengthen transportation infrastructure.  

“In New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods — predominantly communities of color — we see wealth disparities that are staggering; 34 percent of residents live below the federal poverty threshold, compared to 26 percent across New Haven and 10 percent in [Connecticut],” Santilli wrote in an email to the News. “More than 30 percent of [households] in these neighborhoods experience food insecurity. Wealth disparities drive health disparities.” 

CARE directs multiple initiatives that address different health issues, including vaccine outreach, chronic disease prevention and health education in New Haven Public Schools. In 2019, CARE founded Supporting Wellness at Pantries, or SWAP, a health advocacy program that seeks to improve the community’s overall nutrition by increasing the selection of healthier food options at New Haven food pantries.  

Sofia Morales, a program manager of research and evaluation at CARE, said the program hopes to expand to 12 additional food pantries across the city.  

“If we really want to increase the access to healthy foods at food pantries, we need to change the system,” Morales said. “We need to work with the regional food bank and others at the policy level to make healthy food accessible so pantries can procure more nutritious options for community members.” 

The new grant will also allow CARE to form a working group to help identify and implement policy changes in the food access system. Morales said members of the working group will include food pantry workers, leaders from community-based organizations, representatives from regional food banks and those with lived expertise of food insecurity.  

Along with SWAP, CARE hopes to expand two other initiatives. The first is the ​“Support Breastfeeding Anytime, Anyplace” campaign, which seeks to provide more breastfeeding accommodations in community spaces. The second is the “Roots of Racial Inequities in Breastfeeding” program, which offers healthcare providers cultural competence training to target breastfeeding disparities among Black and Brown patients.  

Further, CARE hopes to reinforce its “Safe Routes For All” active transit plan, which, in collaboration with the New Haven government, seeks to expand the city’s walking, biking and transit infrastructure. The plan also is looking to promote road safety measures to make New Haven safer for walkers and bicyclists.  

Jackson Higginbottom, a program administrator for health and vaccine communications at CARE, pointed to how CARE listens to community members who have advocated for greater support for maternal care and road safety. 

“I really hope that as long as we are continuing to support and listen to our community, and our priorities are in alignment with theirs, we will have the impact that we are hoping for,” Higginbottom said. 

Morales emphasized that CARE prioritizes input from community members who have endured socioeconomic inequities to inform their approaches to current health disparities in New Haven.  

To expand its outreach and impact, CARE relies on the partnerships it has formed across different cities to help provide input on pertinent local issues, Santilli said.  

“This work should not ever be done in a vacuum,  but in close collaboration with folks on the ground who are deeply tied to — and experiencing — health inequities every day,” Santilli wrote to the News. 

CARE was founded in 2007 at the School of Public Health. 

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The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Initially established by physician-writer Abraham Verghese as a one-off event, the workshop has gained prominence within the School of Medicine for training new doctors across specialties to hone the craft of writing.

“We teach medicine as stories,” said Lisa Sanders, the co-director of the workshop and a professor at the School of Medicine. “It’s not like medicine is just science. It’s always about that intersection between human beings, sickness or death, and science. And if you just focus on the science, you’re missing a lot.”

The Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop is open to all medical residents at Yale’s internal medicine department and other fields, including psychiatry, surgery and emergency medicine. A few months before the workshop, residents submit a 1200 maximum creative or personal essay as part of their application, said Anna Reisman, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and the co-director of the program.

Selected participants bring those pieces to a two-day workshop where they refine and revise each others’ pieces. The residents also learn writing techniques under the guidance of the program directors, who themselves are physician-writers and creatives. Reisman is also co-director of the program for humanities in medicine, and Sanders created and authors the New York Times Magazine’s “Diagnosis” column — the inspiration for the television show House M.D.

At the end of the program, the writers read aloud their final pieces to students and faculty. Their essays are published in an online zine titled “Capsules.”

“The objective really is for us to teach the craft of writing,” said Reisman. “We teach residents who take part to learn some of the elements of writing, learn how to tell a story and learn how to write a personal essay. We talk about good verbs, writing with precision, all the basic craft lessons, and we spend time doing some writing exercises.”

This experience has proved integral for residents like Effie Johnson, a workshop participant and editor for “Capsules,” who felt tentative about her writing abilities as a medical student.

“I had a lot of impostor syndrome,” said Johnson. “The opportunity to just talk about writing, get feedback on my writing, and have the opportunity to grow is something that really attracted me. Writing is part of the way that we can solidify what is important to us, using it as motivation, especially those emotional experiences.”

Justin Dower, another resident who participated in the program, said he was also excited at the prospect of working with the workshop leaders and the other participants. Learning about the diversity of experiences that each of the new doctors wrote about, he added, was informative.

As a healthcare provider, Dower said he also believes that studying the medical humanities has improved his ability to connect with his patients.

“The humanities gives us a way to get better … by studying the experiences of writers in the past, writers in the present, learning from patients, and also other practitioners,” Dower said. “By reading what they have written, we can really get a better understanding of how to meet the people that we’re trying to serve and how to connect with them.”

The News interviewed several additional participants in the workshops, many of whom spoke about how the workshops helped them reflect on their experiences as physicians and healthcare providers. 

Morgan Goheen, an infectious diseases fellow in the School of Medicine’s division of infectious diseases who participated in the workshop, said she plans to spend most of her time as a physician-scientist in the lab. As an academic researcher, she said she hopes that improving her writing will allow her to communicate her research more effectively.

Writing has also been a tool to better connect and communicate with her patients, Goheen added. 

“It’s a way to express and appreciate what lies before me, whether it’s an individual patient or discussion of a global disease burden like malaria,” said Goheen. “Having the skills to notice and appreciate things that are affecting my day-to-day work has been an important part of letting me process and be better at working with people that are really different from me.”

Not every writer’s piece in the workshop centered around medicine. Caroline Raymond-King, for instance, wrote about her partner, their chickens and their dog.

“It’s hard in residency, but when you have a story to tell, it’s nice to have the skills to be able to write it,” Raymond-King said. “Writing really gives me the space and time to think about what I really care about.”

That space to reflect has been critical for some of the participants to reflect on challenging experiences they’ve encountered during their medical training, several told the News. In her piece for the workshop, Lara Rotter wrote about her experience treating a victim of domestic violence while still in medical school. 

Rotter said she believes that many people in the medical field harbor stigma around experiencing hardship during clinical practice. Doctors, she said, are often expected to remain emotionally unperturbed, even when encountering traumatic cases like domestic violence and abuse. 

“In medicine, we often fall into the trap of connecting professionalism with being unemotional and not encountering any difficult situations,” she said. “Often when difficult situations are encountered, we think this means we are too vulnerable or not perfect enough.” 

But through her writing, Rotter said she hopes to open up about doctors’ emotional and mental well-being as they navigate challenging patient experiences.

“We just really want to share stories to normalize things that are happening, that we all experience these things, and that we all have these difficult encounters with patients,” said Rotter.

For Matthew Morrison, an emergency medicine physician in New York City and a lecturer of medical humanities at Yale College, the quality of a physician’s writing might not even matter. Rather, he said he believes that having a creative outlet is a necessity for doctors.

“Doctors, who are occasionally ourselves human, need artistic and creative outlets for what we experience,” Morrison wrote in an email to the News. “The vast majority of us will write abominable poetry, and that is perfectly fine. But we need to remember that we are entitled to our experiences. Only a human — and not an algorithm, not a computer, not an LLM — can see the gestalt.”

The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop was established in 2003.

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But there’s one problem: Berger said she doesn’t actually remember much from the show. When she thinks back, she said that she blanks on the specifics, like the outfits, the dances and the speeches. 

“If I didn’t have the set list beforehand, I would’ve had no idea what she actually said,” Berger said. “In the moment, it was like having an out-of-body experience.”

Berger is not the only Swiftie to report lapses in memory during the singer’s performances, with many fans documenting mysterious memory gaps during shows on social media and in the press. But Nathan Carroll SPH ’24, a resident psychiatrist at Jersey Shore University Medical Center and a second-year student in the School of Public Health’s Executive Master of Public Health program, might have an answer. 

In a pre-published literature review titled “Here And Then Swiftly Gone: Taylor Swift-Induced Amnesia,” Carroll and a team of researchers investigated the scientific basis behind those reports of memory gaps among concertgoers. While Carroll’s report is not yet peer-reviewed and does not include real participants, it compares reported memory loss symptoms to existing scientific research on short-term amnesia.

Behind Swifties’ memory loss, the researchers believe, could be a type of amnesia linked to heightened emotion and excitement.

Carroll’s team focused specifically on post-concert amnesia associated with Swift’s Eras Tour, which debuted on March 17, 2023. Anticipation for the tour was palpable from the onset: Following Swift’s announcement that she was going on tour for the first time in five years, Ticketmaster’s website experienced unprecedented demand, leaving many fans unable to snag tickets in time.

Carroll recounted watching his fellow residents trying to secure tickets on Ticketmaster when the platform crashed. While they were eventually able to get tickets and attend the concert, Caroll said he noticed that they returned with gaps in their memory for portions of the concert.

“I remember trying so hard to remember everything because I spent a lot of money and a lot of time,” said Gabriela Mendoza Cueva SPH ’24. “I think I just had so much adrenaline from being hyped up that I don’t remember a lot of things.”

Swift fans’ loss of memory sparked Carroll’s interest. How was it possible, he recalled thinkimg at the time, that people could forget concerts they’d been so passionate about?

But that passion, Carroll and his colleagues now hypothesize, might be behind fans’ lapse in memory — a phenomenon that Carroll said he believes shares similarities with a condition called transient global amnesia, or TGA.

TGA is a type of short-term memory loss often triggered by highly emotional experiences, such as physical exertion, emotional stimulation, high-stress events and migraines. While the condition involves an inability to form new memories, it does not result in a loss of consciousness or self-awareness, and memory issues last for less than 24 hours. Individuals experiencing TGA may also encounter symptoms like disorientation around people and places, agitation and anxiety, and occasionally, headache, dizziness or nausea.

Though TGA has been well-documented in scientific research among older individuals between the ages of 50 and 80, post-event amnesia has not been as extensively studied in younger people, Carroll said — making the process of finding published literature on TGA in younger populations challenging. 

“The overlap between the Taylor Swift concertgoer population and the traditional population seen with TGA don’t share a tremendous number of characteristics,” he said. 

But Taylor Swift’s shows might fit the bill for an emotional, TGA-linked event. For fans, Carroll described the event as a “three-hour concert of non-stop excitement.”

During highly emotional or strenuous events, Carroll said, the body begins to release the stress hormone cortisol, a natural chemical that alters heart rate and blood pressure. Researchers believe that, in TGA, those changes in blood pressure affect the brain’s hippocampus, a portion of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory. 

“These fluctuations in blood pressure are thought to affect the ability of your brain to record episodic memory, giving rise to transient global amnesia,” Carroll said.

Carroll and his team note in their review that, given that the number of young people with TGA in scientific literature is small, it’s an important and unexplored area of research. And since TGA symptoms are temporary, many who experience it don’t report memory loss to health professionals.

“Since the memories do come back, a lot of people don’t seek treatment for it either, so it’s missed all the time,” he said.

However, not all researchers think that Carroll’s theory about Swifties’ amnesia and TGA answers the question.

According to Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, memory loss at concerts is not a brand-new phenomenon.

“I worry that we scientists try a little too hard to be current sometimes,” Corlett said. “I think the phenomenon itself is perhaps not so novel — people have been having extreme emotional responses to pop stars since Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” 

Corlett also questioned whether Swift fans were experiencing TGA at all since many typically didn’t end their night in a characteristic “fugue state” — where people become temporally or spatially disoriented. 

But that doesn’t diminish the impact that music can have on the brain, said Corlett.

“We remember music because it is a really potent combination of stimulus features that render it very memorable,” Corlett said. “It is characteristically structured like a story.” 

For concertgoers, Carroll and his team’s review recommends some prevention mechanisms to avoid amnesia, including staying hydrated, being mindful of breathing and excitement levels and avoiding recording the concert while watching.

Those recommendations resonated all too well with some Taylor Swift fans. 

A few months after Madelyn Dawson ’25 saw Swift’s Red Tour in 2013, she said she couldn’t remember any details. Dawson chalked up the lapse to the show’s overwhelming nature and competing mental priorities between experiencing and documenting the show.

“It’s hard to both live in the moment and experience shows while you’re there and also trying to have an archival collection of them,” she said. 

But for Shivesh Shourya SPH ’25, who went to an Eras Tour concert twice and saw the tour’s film, avoiding his phone helped him remember more of the performance. By the time he watched his second show, a new mindset improved how he remembered moments from the experience.

“I remember most of the concert simply because I wasn’t … trying to capture every moment on video and being more present,” said Shourya. “When I went to go see the Eras movie, I had great memory at that point.”

The Eras Tour set the record as the first tour to gross over one billion dollars. 

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Researchers at the School of Medicine, Brown and the University of Washington analyzed a nationwide database with data from 4,888 hospitals between 2016 and 2020. They found that less than two percent of patients who were diagnosed with both stroke and cardiac interventions were treated with endovascular thrombectomy, or EVT — the only effective treatment for patients dealing with cardiac malfunctions. 

“I’ve always felt that we weren’t able to offer as many stroke treatments to those patients [in cardiac intensive care units],” Adam de Havenon ’01, a professor of neurology at the School of Medicine and the lead author of the study, told the News. “But in medicine, there’s a huge gap between something you anecdotally experience and demonstrating that in a data set, which is what we did in this study.” 

According to de Havenon, cardiac interventions, after neurosurgical procedures, are the second leading surgical procedure that causes stroke. During cardiac interventions, surgeons can accidentally knock debris off of the aortic arch, causing clots and plaque to travel upstream to the brain, increasing the likelihood of stroke, specifically ischemic stroke.

Fabio Ramponi, a professor of cardiac surgery at the School of Medicine, the risk of stroke varies for different cardiac interventions. For minor surgeries, like valve replacement, the risk of stroke is roughly two percent. For patients who need multiple cardiac interventions, the risk of stroke increases to 10 percent. 

The researchers first analyzed patients’ billing codes and identified those who received EVT, the most effective stroke treatment for patients with ischemic strokes. During EVT, a surgeon inserts a thin catheter through a limb into the patient’s brain and uses a stent retriever to remove the clot. EVT is only effective within 24 hours of stroke symptoms. The team also determined the exact dates patients were diagnosed with a stroke and when they were treated with EVT. 

The researchers then identified the presence and timing of cardiac intervention among the patients treated with EVT. Of the 630,000 stroke patients, more than 12,000 patients also had a cardiac procedure, which they defined as including both cardiac surgeries and other interventions, such as catheter-based stent placement and inserting cardiac pacemakers. 

“What we found was that individuals who had their stroke after cardiac procedures were less than half as likely to get [EVT] within three days after the cardiac surgery,” de Havenon said. “And that was consistent with our hypothesis and my personal experience.”

According to Kevin Sheth, a professor of neurology at the School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, patients who had both a cardiac intervention and ischemic stroke — and were then treated with EVT — were twice as likely to be discharged home. Many patients who weren’t treated with EVT had to endure long-term care, Sheth said.

Ramponi noted that some patients may not receive EVT because it is harder to detect stroke among cardiac patients. While it can help doctors guess if there is decreased blood flow on one side of the body, doctors can’t always be sure.

“When the patient gets to intensive care, it’s hard to make a full neurologic exam because the patient is still under some sort of sedation,” Ramponi told the News. “The anesthesia is still lingering, so it’s hard to assess in a very systematic way.”

Further, de Havenon argued that it’s difficult to determine if EVT will be useful for patients — especially if doctors observe stroke symptoms hours after the patient wakes up from sedation — because the treatment is only effective for a short amount of time. Some cardiac procedures force patients to be sedated for days, making stroke detection even more difficult, according to de Havenon. 

Still, many doctors differ on how to help identify strokes in patients following cardiac interventions. For de Havenon, medical workers ought to monitor these patients more closely. For example, nurses could wake patients out of sedation to identify potential signs of stroke. They could also use bedside tests, such as an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to help determine the onset of stroke, he said. 

Still, Ramponi argued that doctors should focus more on preventing strokes altogether. 

“In my opinion, the focus has to be more on prevention,” Ramponi said. “Even if you detect [the stroke] early, the prognosis for the patient won’t be as good as if they never had a stroke.” 
The National Institute of Health estimates that roughly 795,000 people experience strokes in the United States per year.

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Led by Sarah Lowe, a professor of public health in social behavioral and sciences at the School of Public Health, in collaboration with researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Chicago and Oxford University, the researchers reviewed the scientific literature on the connection between chronic climate change and mental health issues. The study reported that the existing research is sparse — and scientists ought to do much more to help inform specific public health interventions. 

“Climate change is already harming human health, including growing mental health impacts,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to the News. “This paper underscores the critical need for more research on these impacts and investments in providing mental health support for individuals and communities struggling with the issue of climate change and the aftermath of climate change disasters.”

There is substantial evidence that natural disasters caused by climate change, such as hurricanes — which many scientists consider to be acute climate change — can directly impact mental health.

During a recent Climate Change and Trauma Webinar with the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Betty Lai, a professor in counseling psychology at Boston College who was not involved in the study, highlighted this connection. 

“Disasters are directly linked to potential mental health distress symptoms,” Lai said.

Lai said that climate disasters especially affect children, recalling one study that demonstrated that one in four children who witnessed Hurricane Ike in 2008 were still reporting anxiety and PTSD symptoms 15 months later. 

In the webinar, Lowe noted that much of her research typically centers on the long-term mental health consequences of traumatic events. Her doctorate began with a study on how Hurricane Katrina exacerbated socioeconomic and racial disparities. 

However, after joining the School of Public Health in 2019, Lowe said, she realized that the bulk of research on climate change and mental health focuses only on acute climate change and not on the effects of long-term climate change. 

“[I]t seemed obvious that climate change could influence mental health in other ways, and I was hearing a lot from young people and in the media about how the threat of climate change escalation was leading to significant anxiety,” Lowe wrote in an email to the News. “We decided to embark on this systematic review to see what work had been done on the topic, knowing that there was likely to be research outside of our specialties.”

In the study, the researchers analyzed qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies that examined the effects of slow-onset climate change on mental health indicators, which, according to Lowe, ended up being a “huge undertaking.” After screening over 10,000 abstracts, they included only 57 in the final review. 

They found that there is a lack of research on the specific link between chronic climate change and PTSD and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Most studies, they claimed, tended to focus on how the climate affects anxiety and depression symptoms and negative emotions, such as sadness, fear and anger. In addition, they noted that low and middle-income countries, the places most likely to feel the effects of chronic climate change, have less research output.

Lowe said she was especially surprised by how small the body of literature is on chronic climate change and mental health.

“As a point of comparison, I conducted a review of studies published in 2018 on PTSD and depression symptoms after disasters; in that single year, without using gold-standard systematic review methodologies, and focusing on only two outcomes, my colleagues and I identified 100 peer-reviewed articles on the topic,” Lowe wrote. 

For Lowe, because this body of research is so small, it is too early to determine the main differences between chronic climate change and acute climate change. Still, the preliminary evidence suggests that acute natural disasters may have more consistent negative impacts and are more likely to cause PTSD-related symptoms. 

Lowe emphasized the importance of conducting more qualitative and quantitative research across different disciplines to clarify the effects of chronic climate change. She also noted that longitudinal cohort studies, combined with interviews and focus groups, could help researchers learn more clearly how climate change affects overall well-being. 

Joan Monin, a professor of public health at the School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, praised the call for more climate change research, noting how it could impact future policy. 

“This work is so important because it suggests that policymakers can implement changes to mitigate the effects of climate change,” Monin wrote in an email to the News. “This can have far-reaching effects on the mental health of large communities.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, it is estimated that one in five adults in the United States live with a mental illness. 

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