Based out of the Sustainable Health Initiative, or SHI, at the Yale Global Health Institute, the Venture Development Program helps undergraduates and graduate students make their health startups a reality. In collaboration with TSAI City, the program supports the development of innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing health issues. This spring, there are 12 teams participating in the program. 

“It can be very scary and daunting to just pull a company out of thin air, especially when you’re a student,” said SHI Venture Development Program fellow Rod Bravo, who helps mentor each team. “Having a sense of belonging and structure that we have been building here allows us to appropriately support global health venture creation.”

SHI was founded in 2019 by Sten Vermund, the former dean of the School of Public Health, to create a space that combines global health work and the University’s innovation ecosystem. 

The initiative quickly partnered with businesses and incubators in India. After SHI identified a few entrepreneurs with potential global health ventures, they sent them to India to work with incubators and scale their projects, said Terese Chahine, a School of Management lecturer in social entrepreneurship and an advisor at SHI. 

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The SHI held a mini-speaker series and continued to offer mini-grants for students’ projects. As the pandemic continued, SHI leaders decided to take the program in a new direction.

“We started to think about how we could nurture global health innovation without necessarily traveling,” said Fatema Basrai, the managing director of SHI. “So that’s when we started kind of focusing more on the Yale community, particularly student-led global health innovations.”

In the fall of 2023, SHI developed a new cohort system. After students apply to the program with potential start-up ideas, they get paired up with one of the two student fellows, who provide each team with guidance and advice. 

The program also has other perks. They have a speaker series where those with global health start-ups share their own experiences. It also houses mentors-in-residence, like Emily Sheldon, the co-founder of the African Health Innovation Center, who offers students additional counsel. 

“I think this cohort model has been helpful and successful,” Basrai told the News. “We’ve gotten good feedback from the students that they really enjoy coming together in person, learning from a speaker, and getting time to get to know each other.”

Bravo said that students enter the program with their startups at different stages of evolution. While some students are still developing a business plan for their project, others already have prototypes and are ready to attain additional funding.

“Fostering that seed to become someone who could be an entrepreneur — that in and of itself, I think, is part of the University’s responsibility,” Bravo said.

Braeden Cullen ’27 is a co-founder of Spinertia, a startup that uses AI to give athletic trainers and medical professionals a visualization of live spinal movements, who also participates in the program. For him, the diversity of expertise in the startups has created a collaborative environment.

“Biotech ventures specifically are really difficult to get off the ground,” Cullen said. “There’s a really high knowledge barrier that stops a lot of people from going super deep. SHI makes it a lot more approachable.” 

SHI can access faculty and resources from the School of Public Health and the Institute of Global Health. They have also collaborated with Yale Ventures and InnovateHealth, which have helped offer intellectual property protection and pitch competitions. 

For Basrai, though, TSAI City has been crucial to the development of the Venture Development program, helping participants learn how to pitch an idea or build a financial model. 

“SHI Innovators are able to benefit from the whole ecosystem, where they’ll get a seed grant from InnovateHealth, then they’ll go to an accelerator workshop at TSAI,” Chahine told the News. “And then they might partner with faculty and get advice from YaleVenture. Each one builds on what the other one does.”

Still, the SHI ventures go beyond the development phase. Many go on to make a real-world impact on society. Developed by Blake Robertson SPH ’24, “Upkeep,” for example, is a comprehensive database that uses AI to provide a better health experience for older adults. He has since interviewed the geriatric community and connected with state government Medicaid offices to gain resources and improve the efficacy of his product. 

MiChaela Barker’s SOM ’24 SPH ’24 developed “Matcha Scrubs,” which produces satin-lined scrub caps that are designed for people with different hairstyles to promote diversity in the medical profession. Sooah Park ’27 created “SHED,” an app that seeks to use videos and interactive exercises to provide culturally conscious sexual education. Clara Guo SOM ’24 MED ’24 developed “Lucid. Care,” a behavioral health diagnostic and monitoring platform. 

“A lot of the founders that are coming out of SHI consider the needs of local and global communities,” Bravo said. “It has all been formed by what the people of this community need, whether they’re patients, whether they’re elderly populations, and the list kind of goes on and on.” 

As the program looks to the future, Bravo said he hopes it will expand to a full-year cohort. Chahine, the SOM lecturer, also wants the program to support more ventures that respond to lived experiences. 

“We want to begin supporting individuals who don’t have the academic expertise or the network or the funding or the research that someone at Yale would have,” Chahine said. “Can we think about using Yale to impact the rest of the world that can actually allow Yale students to impact others globally?”

Applications for the SHI Venture Development Program’s fall 2024 cohort will open next semester. 

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One of those students, D’Alessandro de Afvdial, is a sixth-grader at Augusta Lewis Troup School. He told the News he had never been to a museum before stepping into the Peabody with his classmates.

Discussing the visit, de Afvdial said that he loved “discovering new things” and was especially excited to explore the Peabody’s exhibits on electricity and other technological inventions. 

“Come this summer, I would love to come here with my family,” he said.

Mayor Justin Elicker, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, NHPS Superintendent Madeline Negrón and New Haven Arts, Culture and Tourism Director Adriane Jefferson welcomed first graders from the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration and sixth graders from the Augusta Lewis Troup School as the first visitors on Tuesday. 

Accompanied by their teachers, students gawked at the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs and exhibits on the evolution of the human species and the history of science and technology. 

“It sends a real statement that the first kids into this building are New Haven Public School kids from the community,” Elicker told the News. “On top of that, the fact that you now no longer have to pay to get into the Peabody just opens up this world to so many kids that previously wouldn’t have been able to explore this space.”

Following a $160-million donation from Edward P. Bass ’68, the Peabody underwent a four-year renovation, and is now free for all visitors in perpetuity, joining the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art. 

Elicker said that while New Haveners missed being able to visit the Peabody’s collections during the renovation period — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic — the reopening has reminded people of its value to the community. 

“Of course, we missed coming in here,” Elicker said. “On the other hand, having been closed for so long, it made a lot of people realize just how special this space is, building up anticipation for today.” 

Beyond expanding and reorganizing its exhibition spaces, the Peabody is also set to increase educational programming for K-12 students and develop a partnership with NHPS. 

In an interview with the News, Superintendent Negrón said that the specifics of this partnership are still unclear. Initial discussions between NHPS and the Peabody began three weeks ago, though both parties demonstrated interest in forging a stronger relationship, she said.  

Nevertheless, she expressed optimism about how the Peabody’s new K-12 education center could offer opportunities to local students and enrich their educational experience. 

“I think [the Peabody] is an opportunity just to continue to expand on learning,” Negrón said. “For example, many of our kids are interested in having leadership roles and having an opportunity to go into all kinds of different fields. This could be a way that kids could come in and learn from the people who work here, what it means to hold one of these professions and explore academically.”

The Peabody will also enhance the exhibits’ educational experience through a new app called “Amuse.” 

According to Dakota Stipp, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Amuse was founded in 2019 in collaboration with Yale’s Center for Engineering and Innovative Design. Once visitors download the app, depending on where they are standing in the Peabody, they will receive videos, tidbits of information and other types of short-form content related to different exhibits. While the Peabody is the first museum to use the app, Stipp said he hopes to expand its use to other public spaces, including museums, parks and historic landmarks. 

Stipp said that Amuse accrues data on how visitors interact with the app, informing what types of future content the Peabody will develop. The app also allows users to learn more about the city, he said. 

“When you’re looking at the map of the museum, you can actually zoom out, and then you’ll find historic information about New Haven,” Stipp said.

For the next 29 days, the Peabody will be using a ticketed reservation system. 

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Tappe, who worked as an administrator at New York University before Yale, orchestrated the fraud scheme during her employment at NYU. She rerouted $3.5 million earmarked for university equity programs to two fictional shell companies. Using the companies, she stole over $660,000 to cover personal expenses, including an $80,000 swimming pool and over $500,000 in renovations to her home in Westport, Connecticut.

Tappe had previously been charged by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with one count of first-degree money laundering, one count of second-degree grand larceny, two counts first-degree offering a false instrument for filing and two counts of first-degree falsifying business records. In January 2023, the DA’s office said that she had pleaded not guilty to all four counts of the indictment. 

However, in late February, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced that Tappe pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree grand larceny.

According to a press release from the office, Tappe will be sentenced to five years’ probation, will sign a written waiver of her right to appeal and provide full restitution totaling $663,209.07 in advance of sentencing.

“Cindy Tappe shamelessly used her high-ranking position at NYU to steal more than $660,000 in state funds,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “Her actions … deprived student programs of key resources meant to aid children with special needs and young English Language Learners.”

Before coming to Yale, Tappe was the director of finance and administration for NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and Transformation of Schools. During her time in the position, she redirected money from a pool of $23 million in New York state funding. The funding was allocated to administer two state educational programs that help school districts improve results for English language learners and address disparities in special education.

The funding agreements require that a certain percentage of subcontractors on grant-related projects are awarded to minority- and women-owned business enterprises — or MWBE — to comply with New York state law, the statement said. At NYU, Tappe distributed over $3.5 million of the funding to three certified MWBE subcontractors to provide services related to the grants. 

However, none of the companies worked on the contracts. Instead, according to the district attorney’s office, they acted like “pass-throughs”: Each company took 3 to 6 percent of the invoiced amounts as overhead and sent the remaining $3.25 million to two shell companies she created: High Galaxy Inc. and PCM Group Inc. Tappe also drafted fictional invoices on company letterhead to justify the payments.

Although Tappe used some of the routed funds for NYU payments and employee reimbursements, she kept more than $660,000 for personal expenses, such as renovations to her Connecticut home that included an $80,000 swimming pool. 

“Ms. Tappe strongly regrets her misconduct,” wrote Deborah Colson, Tappe’s lawyer, in an email to the News. “She accepted responsibility for her wrongdoing in open court and will pay the restitution in full prior to sentencing. She looks forward to putting this case behind her.” 

Tappe was confronted by NYU leadership in 2018, before leaving the school. She was hired by Yale in 2019 as the School of Medicine’s operations director; following Tappe’s indictment, Yale initially placed her on leave and later fired her. 

“Yale University terminated Ms. Tappe’s employment after learning of the indictment,” University spokesperson Karen Peart wrote to the News. “Like all Yale employees, she underwent pre-employment screening, including reference and background checks.”

Bragg emphasized that Tappe’s schemes were harmful for the minority groups that grant funding was intended to support.

“Her fraudulent actions not only threatened to affect the quality of education for students with disabilities and multilingual students, but denied our city’s minority and women owned business enterprises a chance to fairly compete for funding,” Bragg said in a press release. 

Tappe was fired from Yale in 2023.

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Vasan is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert who works to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy outcomes for marginalized populations in New York City, as well as nationally and globally. As part of the School of Public Health’s “Leaders in Public Health” Dean’s Speaker Series, which showcases accomplished individuals in the field of public health, Vasan and Ranney discussed how government and academic institutions can work together to solve macro-level health issues and how New York City is combating climate change and its health effects.

“[This campaign] is a collective project — it’s not the job of a public health department or a school of public health alone … We need to have intent, focus, and coordinated effort across public, private, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors,” Vasan said.

Vasan described the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s “HealthyNYC” campaign, which seeks to increase the life expectancy of New Yorkers. According to the Annual Summary of Vital Statistics, life expectancy in New York City dropped from 82.6 years in 2019 to 78.0 years in 2020 — a difference of 4.6 years following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign hopes to achieve an average life expectancy of over 83 years by 2030. The department predicts that, if the campaign succeeds, New York Citycould avert 7,300 deaths by 2030.

Vasan also noted the HealthyNYC campaign includes other goals targeting chronic and diet-related diseases, the mental health crisis, COVID-19 deaths, homicide deaths and drug overdose deaths.

The Department also recognized the impact of racial disparities, historical disinvestment in minority communities and environmental and social factors being worsened by climate change, which he described as a public health crisis.

Arinze Colin Agu ’25 is a first-year graduate student at the School of Public Health concentrating in Climate Change and Health. At the event, he asked Vasan to speak on how climate change affects peoples’ mental health, and what the Department is doing to help.

“We know that extreme weather and air quality events exacerbate mental health diagnoses — in terms of ER visits, hospitalizations and self-reported data,” Vasan replied. “The idea that [climate change] is a risk just to our physical health is obviously not true; there are real mental health impacts.” 

Vasan also emphasized that public health officials and state governments should start planning potential health responses to future weather-related emergencies. For him, agencies should consider “what we need to have in place to be activated, rather than what we need to bring in place at the moment there is an emergency.”

This need for materials and plans for potential emergencies comes after Congress cut funding to the CDC and many cities and states are tightening their public health budgets.

Vasan highlighted the New York State Department of Health’s Heat Vulnerability Index, which is a composite score of green space and tree cover, median income, racial demographics — which track closely with inequity and poor health outcomes — and other factors that cause residents to at a greater risk of death during and immediately following extreme heat.

“Although we have the adequate resources to tackle mental health challenges that are consequent upon climate change and disaster-related events, vulnerable communities and those affected may not be aware enough to actually use these resources,” Agu told the News. “We need to improve upon our communication strategies, dispel rumors, and reduce inaccessible language”.

Vasan said that the HealthyNYC campaign is interested in focusing on places that have been historically neglected by policymakers and health officials. These areas often have less medical and public infrastructure, are transportation deserts, and fall higher on the Heat Vulnerability Index, he added.

Rachel Nussbaum ’25, a first-year graduate student at the School of Public Health, told the News that she hopes the campaign will also support people with long covid-19 or post-COVID-19 conditions. This January, the United States experienced the second-highest COVID-19 spike of all time since the omicron waves. Nussbaum also referred to the growing body of evidence that points to the risk of long covid increasing with each subsequent reinfection.

“It’s dangerous to be referring to COVID-19 in the past tense, when 15 percent of Americans reported having had long covid-19,” Nussbaum said. “Death is not the only negative health outcome that we have to reckon with — it is also disability… so we need to be focused on prevention, masking and developing better vaccines.”

Vasan described how the HealthyNYC campaign emphasizes primary prevention or actions aimed at health promotion and disease prevention before illness occurs, rather than relying solely on treating diseases when they happen.

Before the end of the discussion Ranney also asked Vasan about building the public’s trust in public health, and what the most important levers are for the next generation of leaders in public health.

“Don’t fall victim to false choices,” Vasan replied. “It’s not either bottom-up or top-down, it’s not either grassroots or grass-tops … Push past the reductive narratives about what is more important than another, and let us aspire bigger than any one of us can achieve.”

The School of Public Health Dean’s Speaker Series events are held in Winslow Auditorium, in the lower level of 60 College St.

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In the full academic year since the launch of ChatGPT, Yale administrators and instructors have altered their guidelines and teaching styles to accommodate for the new technology. Though many remain concerned about plagiarism with respect to AI, some professors have embraced using AI in the classroom. 

Ben Glaser, a professor of English, initially became interested in applying AI to the humanities after he took a summer course for faculty members on natural language processing in 2022. He recalled thinking that AI was going to “transform the writing landscape.”

“I thought, ‘I’ll teach a writing course, because then we’ll be thinking about how to write well, which I do all the time,’” Glaser said. “‘We’ll be thinking about these tools that might hinder or maybe help.’” 

In the fall of 2023, Glaser taught an introductory English seminar titled “Writing Essays with AI,” in which he and his students discussed how artificial intelligence could be applied to writing. They also explored the relationship between authorship, creativity and AI. 

His ultimate goal, he said, was to help his students become better writers.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, the AI can never be creative,’” Glaser said. “And I’m like, ‘Can’t it? Let’s interrogate these distinctions.’” 

Students in the course read AI-generated stories, analyzed the differences between poetry written by humans and written by AI and even practiced using AI to plan essays. For their final projects, they researched how various industries are using AI.

In November 2022, shortly after Glaser designed and proposed the course – roughly a year before he first taught it — the company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, its popular generative AI program. According to Glaser, the release of the chatbot program prompted students and teachers to pay more attention to how AI could transform learning. 

Poorvu Center responds

For the Poorvu Center, the University’s center for teaching and learning support, the release of ChatGPT was a catalyst to develop academic AI guidelines, said Alfred Guy. The deputy director of the Poorvu Center and director of the Poorvu Center’s writing and tutoring programs, Guy has helped conduct workshops on AI and facilitate professor education programs about the technology.

Guy learned of the imminent release of ChatGPT through Facebook, and he immediately felt that the Poorvu Center ought to respond. After the chatbot went public, the Poorvu Center released its first guidelines on AI usage in Yale classrooms in January 2023.

“The very first thing we said is, ‘These tools are powerful, and people are going to use them,’” Guy said. “Everything that comes after this should be thought about in terms of how people are going to use these tools.” 

As AI software like ChatGPT became more mainstream, Guy noted that Yale instructors did not generally react with panic or fear. Still, they wondered how AI would affect them, and whether they needed to take concrete steps of action in their own classrooms. Guy said that the Poorvu Center’s teaching guidelines, which are now overseen by a five-person committee, are aimed at answering these questions.

The current guidelines include suggestions for how instructors can address AI in their syllabi, remind students to correctly cite AI and offer precautions when using AI technologies. Beyond providing links to dozens of articles and webinars on AI, they also encourage instructors to try AI tools for themselves and share their feedback with the center.

Guy said the Poorvu Center’s approach to AI over the past year has changed. Rather than striking a cautionary tone, the Center now encourages hands-on exploration of AI technology. 

“We have shifted very slightly toward AI in our tone and in our attitude,” Guy said. “Even in our specific advice to faculty, we are saying, ‘You really should engage.’” 

Glaser also pointed out that Yale’s open approach to teaching and learning with AI does not necessarily mirror that of other colleges and universities. He said that because of broader institutional support and awareness of the technology, he thinks that AI is not as contentious at Yale as it may be at other universities.

“If we get out of the Yale bubble, the writing landscape looks really different, and AI tools are gonna behave differently,” Glaser said.

AI in the classroom

As one of their class projects, Glaser required the class to revise Poorvu’s suggested AI-use guidelines.

Jared Wyetzner ’27 was a member of Glaser’s class and previously co-founded Myndful-AI, a machine learning chatbot that provides high school students with mental health resources.

Wyetzner said the class generally agreed that AI tools had a role in Yale education.

“What we moved toward is that AI can belong in your classroom,” he said. “There’s just a certain way that should be used to facilitate work.” 

To Wyetzner, AI is best seen as a tool that he compared to the “calculator” of writing. 

“You learn how to do math, addition, multiplication all that, by yourself, and then it gets to the point where you use a calculator and that becomes the standard,” he said. “How can we still learn from our writing and also have AI tools in the process?”

One Yale course quickly added AI to its classroom: CPSC 100, Yale’s introductory programming class, which is co-taught with Harvard’s CS50 course.

According to Ozan Erat, a Yale computer science professor who helps run CPSC 100, the course used two different AI technologies. The first, a chatbot called Duck Debugger, allowed students to ask questions about the course and helped them debug code. The second, CS50 Duck Bot, was integrated with the online forum Ed Discussion and replied to students’ questions.

Because of Duck Debugger, Erat says attendance at CS50 office hours dropped by roughly 30 percent. He said that this was a positive development, as students with easier questions could ask Duck Debugger at home while those with more in-depth questions could receive more attention during office hours. 

Though Erat was initially worried about academic dishonesty, he said that by the end of the semester there was not an “excessive use of cheating.” He noted that the percentage of students referred to the University’s Executive Committee did not drastically change, and the CS50 instructors plan to continue to use Duck Debugger and Duck Bot as part of the course. 

Plagiarism worries

The News spoke with Mick Hunter, the Chair of the Yale College Executive Committee, about students using AI to commit plagiarism and academic dishonesty. He said the Committee began to see cases related to AI shortly after the launch of ChatGPT. In response, the University added a section on AI use to its academic integrity guidelines. 

While the use of AI was “clumsy” in these first cases — students generating false citations for a paper, for example — now the cases are “less blatant,” Hunter said.

“We’re still seeing students who are breaking the rules and using AI in ways that are not allowed, but it seems students are either learning to cover their tracks or use AI more responsibly,” Hunter added. 

However, Hunter estimated that the Executive Committee has received around 10 cases related to AI since November 2022, placing them “in the minority” of academic dishonesty cases. 

By virtue of his job in the Poorvu Center, Guy considers himself “just short of an expert” on pre-AI plagiarism.

Though Guy acknowledged that AI could contribute to plagiarism in writing, he expressed optimism about different ways instructors could help limit it. 

Guy referred to multiple research studies which demonstrate that rates of plagiarism decrease when instructors require students to write low-stakes responses to class material, set interim deadlines for larger assignments through the semester and foster conversations where students describe their ideas. 

Changing assignments to include requirements beyond the capacity of a language-generating AI model, he proposed, could also reduce instances of plagiarism. 

Glaser and his students also discovered that using chatbots for writing comes with its own challenges. Due to its capacity for error and “idiosyncratic” responses, students need a type of “literacy” to interpret AI outputs and screen for errors. 

“We quickly realized in the classes that to get anything good out of them, you actually have quite a bit of a dialogue,” he said. 

By the time the students finish writing ChatGPT a good prompt, assessing the quality of its response and incorporating the response into their writing — not to mention citing it — the process might be more effort than it is worth, Glaser pointed out. 

“By the end of that process, I’m not worried about plagiarism,” Glaser said. “I’m just wondering, ‘Was that actually efficient or useful? Did it make you a better writer?’ I think the answer is sometimes yes.”

Yale established the Poorvu Center in 2014.

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Lipska is a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine who specializes in endocrinology and diabetes. On Dec. 14, she testified at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing titled “What is Fueling the Diabetes Epidemic?” During the hearing, she underscored the need for the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices to address the root causes of diabetes and obesity. 

Many of Lipska’s patients suffering from Type I Diabetes — a chronic condition where the pancreas produces little-to-no insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels — spend nearly half of their household income on insulin, which is vital for them to stay alive. Many also struggle to afford medications such as Ozempic — the brand name for semaglutide, which the FDA approved to treat Type II Diabetes — or Wegovy, another brand name for a similar drug approved for weight management. 

“I see patients in clinic who struggle paying for the medicines and often don’t take their medicines because they cost too much — and I see the consequences,” Lipska said in an interview with the News. “I get very upset about this, and I get very angry at our healthcare system because people suffer when they cannot afford the medications they need.”

On the stand, Lipska presented evidence from a 2017 survey conducted at the Yale Diabetes Center which showed that one in four diabetes patients who were prescribed insulin had to ration the medication due to cost. According to Lipska, though recent advocacy efforts have led to a decrease in insulin prices, the medication remains expensive.

These novel medications are not cheap. Patients with Type II Diabetes — a condition in which insulin is unable to lower a patient’s blood sugar — often pay over $900 per month for Ozempic. Similarly, patients suffering from obesity have to pay $1,300 a month for Wegovy. Patients must take these medications continuously for an indefinite period in order to maintain their ongoing effects. 

“Patients are looking at a potentially lifelong treatment and could be facing the most expensive subscription service in the history of medicine,” Lipska told the News.

In the hearing, Lipska noted that if Medicare were to cover Wegovy for its beneficiaries with obesity, American taxpayers would have to pay $268 billion. 

Further, according to a study conducted by Luan Yu, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, the populations least able to afford these treatments are the ones who need them the most.

“We found that these minority populations who have higher prevalence of obesity also have more financial barriers, in terms of accessing healthcare and afford[ing] the medications,” Lu told the News.

However, other countries are avoiding these steep costs. Lipska testified that Ozempic costs $100 per month in Sweden and just $80 in Australia and France.

In contrast, patients in the U.S. must pay 10 times that amount. For Lipska, the lessons learned from insulin affordability should inform how the government negotiates prices with pharmaceutical companies for novel medications like Ozempic.

“The Inflation Reduction Act already authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies under specific provisions, and for a limited set of drugs,” Lipska told the Senate.

According to Lipska, this process involves aligning the launch price with the drug’s value and what patients can afford. She argued the government should sit at the negotiating table with pharmaceutical companies such as Novo Nordisk, the developer of Ozempic which has a market value higher than Denmark’s GDP. 

Still, Lipska emphasized the need to tackle diabetes and obesity upstream, instead of relying on drugs. For her, more long-term preventative solutions, such as reducing food deserts, are more favorable than using weight-loss medications. 

“In cardiovascular disease prevention, we always talk about prevention being more cost-effective than management or treatment,” Lu told the News. “It’s better to prevent people from becoming obese. Then, if they become obese, you treat them.”

In the hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders — chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — underscored Lipska’s call to action. 

“Nearly 30 years ago as I think we all know and the American people know, Congress had the extraordinary courage to take on the tobacco industry whose products killed nearly 400,000 Americans every year including my father,” he said. “Now is the time for us to seriously combat the Type II Diabetes and obesity epidemics in America.” 

Over one in 10 people in the United States suffer from diabetes.

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Scheduled for launch in March 2024 by the medical school’s Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at the School of Medicine, the new 16-week program will be titled “Medical Software and Medical Artificial Intelligence” and will be directed by Xenophon Papademetris, a professor of biomedical informatics & data science at the School of Medicine. The certificate program is intended to help educate medical professionals to better engage with the evolving use of technology in the healthcare industry.

“As technology continues to advance, the need for professionals well-versed in the intricacies of medical software and AI becomes paramount,” Papademetris said. “This course is not just about acquiring knowledge; it’s about fostering leaders who can bridge disciplinary gaps and contribute meaningfully to the intersection of technology and healthcare.” 

According to Papademetris, the program traces its roots back to 2017, when he first taught the undergraduate “Medical Software Design” class. Papademetris also developed a companion Yale Coursera Course titled “Introduction to Medical Software,” which has enrolled over 17,000 students worldwide.

The course aims to address the growing demand for professionals capable of navigating medical software design, AI integration and regulatory compliance in the health and technology fields, he said.

The certificate program will span four consecutive modules using a combination of prerecorded videos, quizzes and live Zoom sessions with industry experts: an introduction to medical software, an introduction to artificial intelligence, a class on the use of AI in medical software and a module about the developing role of AI in medicine. 

According to Dennis Shung, an assistant professor of medicine who helps teach the last module, the certificate program is targeted toward career professionals, including software engineers, data scientists, regulatory professionals and doctors interested in healthcare technology.

“[The course will] level up people who are already in the industry who have already demonstrated interest in medical software and AI,” he said.

Mary-Anne Hartley, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science and an instructor in the program, also hopes that the modules will help students cultivate ethical and effective use of AI tools in healthcare.

In the fourth module of the course, for instance, the program’s students will see examples of these tools’ application at Yale and in a global health setting by Hartley’s ongoing work in Zanzibar.

“This course exposes people to the need, potential and opportunity for them to recognize the importance and responsibility to make or use technology for patients in low resource settings,” Hartley said. “People have to be able to represent patients better and use technology specific for certain target patient groups.”

According to Papademetris, the certificate’s faculty are full-time professors at Yale from various departments, including radiology, biostatistics, emergency medicine and sociology. Applications for the program are set to open in January 2024.

“Since everyone cannot come to Yale, Yale can go there,” Papademetris told the News.

The School of Medicine was founded in 1810.

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On Nov. 14, the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics hosted a community forum in Marsh Lecture Hall and on Zoom to discuss Connecticut’s Bill on medical aid-in-dying, or MAID. Over 260 people attended in person or on Zoom. Panelists Stephen Latham, director of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Thaddeus Pope, bioethicist and professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law and Jules Good, a disability justice activist and policy analyst, provided insight about MAID from various angles including national trends, international and ethical trends and opposition. 

After the event, the News spoke with Joan Cavanagh, an advocate against MAID, who criticized the panel for its lack of viewpoint diversity. 

The forum opened with remarks from Connecticut State Representative Josh Elliot who emphasized the importance of listening to advocates from every side of the issue. 

“What we should be getting from this process is the strongest bill possible that protects people who are at deficits within the medical community, but also supports people who are looking to ensure that they have self-determination when it comes to their bodily autonomy,” Elliot said. 

Eliot was one of the lead sponsors during the 2023 Connecticut General Assembly supporting a bill that would have legalized MAID in Connecticut if passed. This bill made it farther than ever before in the House, advancing out of the Public Health Committee, but failed to advance out of the Judiciary Committee. 

Each speaker on the panel had 15 minutes to outline their positions on MAID, followed by a question and answer section with questions from the audience. 

The first speaker, Thaddeus Pope, a law professor and bioethicist began by providing listeners with general data about MAID. 

In the failed Connecticut legislation, in order to qualify for MAID, the patient would have to be 21 years old, have decisional capacity and be diagnosed with a terminal illness. The patient also would have to be the one to administer the lethal prescription. 

Patients would have to pass multiple rounds of screening with a prescribing physician, a consulting and a mental health physician. Even after going through this meticulous process, Pope said, an estimated third of the patients would ultimately choose not to take the lethal prescriptions. 

Advocates for MAID argue that it provides “death with dignity,” Pope explained. With this logic, he explained, as the burden of terminally ill patients’ lives outweighs the benefits, they want to avoid excessive suffering by giving patients the agency to control the timing and manner of their deaths. 

Jules Good, a disabled activist and policy analyst, joined over Zoom with an opposing viewpoint. Good described the dangers of instituting MAID, which they call assisted suicide. 

“In a healthcare system with so many clear barriers for marginalized peoples, a policy of assisted suicide is inherently dangerous,” Good said. “Not being able to afford care, not being able to access care, should not be reasons that people are choosing to end their lives prematurely.” 

Good said they believe that normalizing assisted suicide allows a broken healthcare system to “escape culpability for its systemic failures” leading to many people ending their lives unnecessarily. 

Latham said he prefers the term physician-assisted suicide and echoed many concerns that Good raised about the practice. He began by comparing Belgium and the Netherlands’ standard for MAID of irremediable suffering to the proposed Connecticut bill’s stricter standard of being terminally ill — meaning that person is already dying. 

Latham also addressed common concerns applicable to Connecticut that he said many people had regarding the passing of MAID in Oregon, the first state to legalize the practice. He said that many people worried that MAID would incentivize the healthcare system to provide low-quality care to people with low income in Oregon, thereby eliminating “inconvenient patients.” 

“Exactly the opposite happened,” Lantham said. “The people that used these programs were overwhelmingly insured, white and educated.” 

After the panelists spoke for their allotted 15 minutes, organizer Lori Bruce facilitated a Q&A session for panelists to answer questions from the live and online audiences. Questions ranged from comparing MAID to other end-of-life options such as euthanasia and palliative sedation to concerns about potential loopholes or issues the Connecticut bill may pose. 

After the forum ended, Brittany Fleck, an in-person attendee, told the News she was surprised by the level of debate.  

“I was not expecting it [the forum] to be political at all,” Fleck said. She added that the discussion was “riveting” but that she didn’t expect it to be “as intense.” 

Joan Cavanagh, a member of Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide, said that she was disappointed the forum had two speakers in support of MAID and only one opposed. 

She shared emails with the News showing that Bruce initially agreed to have one speaker from Second Thoughts CT and one from Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide on the panel as well but withdrew the offer on Oct. 11. 

“At that point, it became even clearer that this was mainly a discussion to talk about how to make the bill “better” or more “acceptable” and thus more likely to pass, not the objective educational forum that was being claimed,” Cavanaugh told the News. 

When asked about the viewpoints of the forum’s speakers, Bruce disagreed with the characterization of the event as pro-MAID. She said the three speakers were chosen so that Pope could speak on national trends, Latham on international trends and ethics and Good as an opposition figure.

Panelists demonstrated open-mindedness to one another’s line of thinking. For instance, all panelists agreed that some kind of training — credentials, certification requirements or a training program — would help ensure the safe use of MAID. 

In 1994, Oregon approved Measure 16, a Death with Dignity Act ballot initiative, becoming the first U.S. state to legalize medical aid-in-dying.

The post Advocates, opponents discuss medical aid-in-dying legislation in Connecticut appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As part of the Dean’s Invited Speaker Series through the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the event featured a talk by Hansen on safety for artificial intelligence, followed by a discussion facilitated by Dean Jeffrey Brock ’92. During his talk, Hansen described how artificial intelligence and machine learning have evolved since his time as a Yale undergraduate in the 1990s. Now, he said, the technology is used widely, from automating app safety to filtering out spam emails and screening for breast cancer. 

But the development of AI can also have far-reaching implications, Hansen added.

“We in technology will be coding the laws of today and tomorrow,” he said. “Will the spirit of the law actually meet the spirit of the regulation?”

Hansen highlighted the role of machine learning in Google products like the Google Play Store — where the company scans 28 billion app-to-device pairs to make sure apps meet safety standards — and Gmail, which uses machine learning to efficiently sort large quantities of data and block spam. He described how Google’s Chrome web browser uses machine learning to prevent cybersecurity threats, a feature that is now featured on Safari and Firefox.

Beyond Google, Hansen also spoke about how artificial intelligence could play a role in secure technology and digital infrastructure.

“We’re headed to a world where the structures of life and society are digitized, and the whole supply chain needs to be safe,” said Hansen. “The mistakes here are very different from when I miss a spam message.”

Those risks, Hansen said, can impact governments and economies across the world.

Hansen said that after visiting Poland and working with Eastern European cybersecurity experts over the past 18 months, he learned how cyber attacks have disrupted digital supply chains in Ukraine for years, even predating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

“I think we’re in a unique moment where the infrastructure for the 21st century is being laid down,” Hansen said. 

Hansen stressed the importance of continued cybersecurity research and cautioned against hasty development of artificial intelligence technologies. 

At Google, he said, they use a set of principles known as the Secure AI Framework to help mitigate those risks by establishing guidelines for secure AI systems.

Brock said that artificial intelligence creates a new medium for individuals to engage with technology.

“This changes the way anyone can interact with a computer, whether it’s someone who wants to write a technical piece of code, or somebody who just kind of wants to take an idea and turn it into something,” Brock said. “The fact that we’re able to have a conversation as bizarre as this one represents a turning point in the evolution of the history of these technologies.”

Students also expressed that they thought Hansen’s talk was informative. 

Braden Wong ’25, who attended the talk, also said the event served as a social gathering place for peers interested in computer science.

“The work in privacy and cybersecurity is an interesting topic,” said Wong. “It’s good to see friends, so there’s always people you run into that you know.” 

The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science is located at 17 Hillhouse Ave.

The post Google VP talks cybersecurity at Tsai CITY event appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Peers are people who have received treatment for mental health crises in emergency departments, or EDs, and have successfully recovered. By introducing peers into EDs, the team hopes to help patients in mental health crises interact with people who have had similar experiences.

“When patients are in psychiatric crisis, there aren’t good places for us to treat them properly,” said Ambrose Wong, the lead researcher of the team and an assistant professor of emergency medicine. “A lot of them come in through the emergency department. If there’s a place where there’s a psychiatric emergency department — for example, here at Yale — they get seen by a psychiatrist. But with most places in the country, patients are not within an easy distance to a place where there are psychiatrists on call 24/7.”

Emergency departments are fast-paced environments where hospital workers must make life-and-death decisions. The team envisions that peers will only support patients who are undergoing mental health crises.

While hospitals across the country have implemented peers in various medical departments, this new project is the first time that they will be introduced into emergency departments. The peers will be trained to understand medical jargon and the ED environment to help patients navigate the healthcare system. The team emphasized that peers will also assist patients with outpatient care, not only acting as a mediator of sorts within EDs, but also showing them how to make appointments, receive medications and negotiate costs.

“I think a lot of physicians [in EDs] don’t know what the trauma even is, so they don’t even know how to be trauma-informed,” said Anthony Pavlo, a clinical psychologist on the team and an associate research scientist in psychiatry. “The peer might be able to get that story a little bit more from a patient, understand it a bit more and be able to communicate [the patient’s] certain triggers.”

The team is partnering with New Life II, a faith-based recovery organization in New Haven, and the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health to help recruit and train peers. Both organizations previously used peers in their work. 

The team received funding received for five years from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a nonprofit institute created through the Affordable Care Act. The first two years will be devoted to preparation work, recruitment and training, while the trial will begin in the third year, rolling out across five sites in Connecticut. 

“EDs are particularly good about sharing best practices,” said Mark Sevilla, Vice President of Behavioral Health and Emergency Services at Yale New Haven Hospital. “If we can prove a changed outcome for these patients, I think it sets a really strong precedent for being able to be replicable in other departments.” 

For Sevilla and the team, an improvement in patient outcomes would signify an important shift in mental healthcare. In particular, it would highlight the importance of quality mental healthcare access across different communities. . 

The project seeks to make mental healthcare more accessible for patients who don’t have full insurance coverage — particularly those belonging to marginalized groups. These patients are at a greater risk of mental health crisis due to their limited access to psychiatric care in EDs.

According to the project’s website, the team plans to enroll 57,870 visits for adults with behavioral and other psychiatric issues.

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