Faculty & Trainees

Dr. Abujarad's research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the design, development, and use of digital health tools in the domain of public health, clinical, as well as health services research.He is currently studying the use of automated screening, motivational interviewing, virtual coaching, and digital health to enhance identification of elder mistreatment at the point-of-care. The "Virtual cOaching in making Informed Choices on Elder Mistreatment Self-Disclosure (VOICES)" tool was developed under an R01 supported by the National Institute of Aging (NIA) to provide a self-administered screening and educational process in the emergency department setting. VOICES continues to be expanded upon in additional research projects exploring other populations such as older adults with cognitive impairments and settings such as the primary care setting. Dr. Abujarad is also studying the use of digital health to improve the Informed Consent process. He is the PI on the “Patient-Centered Virtual Multimedia Interactive Informed Consent (VIC)” an R21 funded by AHRQ. In this study, he developed and evaluated a reusable infrastructure that will enable the informed consent process to be performed on handheld devices (e.g. iPads) utilizing interactive multimedia libraries (e.g. graphics, video clips, animations, presentations, etc.) designed to enhance patient comprehension and quality of care.Research projects include: Examining the effect of enhancing e-referral to deliver a comprehensive, multi-sector-connected-service model via a community-driven coordinated-case-management approach to improve older adults’ capacity for self-care; utilizing digital health to build and strengthen the personal care aides (PCAs) workforce to meet the overwhelming demand for high-quality, lower-cost supports and services for older adults at home through an implementation of a new more efficient and cost-effective way. As a computer scientist, his research is focused on software solutions for healthcare service challenges. His background in computer science enables him to refine the design, as well as implementation and deployment of health systems, that is easy-to-use, user-friendly, user-centered, and feasible.

Dr. Agrawal is an Emergency Medicine and Global Health specialist with a specific focus on refugees and other displaced populations. Her research focuses on the use of various field methodologies to study issues specific to forced migration and implement sustainable interventions to affect the challenges these populations face. In collaboration with international, national, and local community partners, she is currently conducting several projects that aim to better understand the physical and mental health impact of displacement on resettled populations in the US, create more effective programs to assist in the resettlement process by assessing health literacy, healthcare and insurance access, and long term health outcomes for refugees resettled in the US. Dr. Agrawal holds a variety of national leadership roles. She is a Past-President of the Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine, and an elected Member-at-Large of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). As a board member of the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) of New Haven, she has developed a community-based research program designed to improve the linkage between refugees in the New Haven community and health and social services. Dr. Agrawal is a graduate of Cornell University, received her MD from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and completed her emergency medicine residency at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospitals. Dr. Agrawal is a graduate of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Global Health and International Emergency Medicine Fellowship and received her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Agrawal holds faculty appointments in the Yale University School of Medicine, the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine, and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Dr. Altalib is the Chief of Neurology at the Veteran Administration (VA) Connecticut Healthcare System. He also serves as the Northeast Regional Director of the VA Epilepsy Centers of Excellence. He helped established a VA Neurobehavioral clinic, which provides clinical care for Veterans who suffer from emotional distress and/or behavioral problems associated with neurological conditions (such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, and epilepsy). At Yale University he also provides care for people with neurological injury that impact emotional processing. For instance, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, movement disorders (and their treatments) can affect brain circuits and chemistry and lead to mood, anxiety, and even psychotic disorders. Furthermore, neuropsychiatric conditions such functional movement disorder and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures are managed in his clinic. Dr. Altalib is also the Director of the Yale Epilepsy Outcomes Research Program, in which he oversees clinical trials and cohort studies related to epilepsy interventions. In addition to seizure control outcomes, his research explores psychiatric co-morbidity of neurologic disease. He is currently the primary investigator of a studies examining the neurologic substrates of depression in people with epilepsy; the burden of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures in the Veteran population; and measuring coordination of health care using social network analysis methods.

Frederick (Rick) L. Altice is a professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Public Health and is a clinician, clinical epidemiologist, intervention and implementation science researcher at Yale University School of Medicine and School of Public Health. Dr. Altice’s primary research focuses on interventions and implementation science at the interface between infectious diseases and addiction and he has conducted research in several global health settings. He also has a number of projects working in the criminal justice system, including transitional programs addressing infectious diseases, medications for opioid use disorder (methadone, buprenorphine, extended release naltrexone), mental illness, homelessness and social instability. Specific topics include alcohol, opioid, stimulant and nicotine use disorders on HIV treatment outcomes, HIV and addiction treatment, interface with the criminal justice system, and pharmacokinetic drug interactions between treatment for substance use disorders and antiretroviral and tuberculosis therapy. At a basic level, his research focuses on clinical epidemiology, especially in key populations at risk for HIV (e.g., MSM, TGW, PWID, prisoners, sex workers) and development, adaptation and evaluation of of biomedical and behavioral interventions to improve treatment outcomes. His research, however, has evolved and included development and testing of mobile technologies (mHealth) to intervene with key populations to promote health outcomes.  His research is especially concentrated in health services research techniques with a focus on implementation science, seeking to introduce and scale-up evidence-based interventions in numerous contexts. A number of implementation science strategies are underway to examine scale-up of medication-assisted therapies to treat opioid use disorder in community, criminal justice and in primary care settings. Most recently, his work has been augmented through use of decision science techniques to understand and promote patient preferences, including the development of informed and shared decision-making aids. His work has emerged primarily with a global health focus with funded research projects internationally in Malaysia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, and Indonesia. He has participated in projects through the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency, Special Projects of National Significance with HRSA, and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. He is currently also collaborating on projects with the WHO, UNAIDS, USAID, PEPFAR and UNODC. Current internationally funded projects in dedicated research sites that are being conducted in Malaysia, Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Peru. His research and training sites in Malaysia (2005), Peru (2010) and Ukraine (2005) are dedicated training and research sites for the Global Health Equity Scholars Fogarty Training Program and the Doris Duke International Fellowship program. He is currently the director for two International Implementation Science Research and Training Centers with collaborations between Yale University and the University of Malaya and Sichuan University.

Dr. Aydin is an Emergency Medicine intensivist, currently practicing as an attending physician in the Emergency Department and Surgical Intensive Care Unit.  She is also the Medical Director of SkyHealth and the inaugural Medical Director of the YNHH Adult Ground Critical Care Transport (CCT) team.  She has served on several society boards, and is a recognized national and international speaker on Emergency Medicine and Critical Care topics.

Dr. Barbara C. Banz is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine where she leads the Yale Developmental Neurocognitive Driving Simulation Research Center (DrivSim Lab). She earned her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University. Dr. Banz completed a three-year T32 postdoctoral fellowship (NIAAA/NIDA) focused on addiction neuroscience in adolescents and young adults in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Banz’s graduate and early postdoctoral research was largely focused on using neurocognitive and neuropsychological testing, electrophysiology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging to build a neurocognitive profile of college-aged drinkers. In 2017, Dr. Banz joined the DEM and the Yale DrivSim Lab as a postdoctoral associate. As a cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in youth alcohol use, her ongoing research is aimed to develop a profile of how alcohol and drug use during youth use translates to neurocognitive functioning and real-world implications among young drivers. In the Yale DrivSim Lab, Dr. Banz designs and builds high-fidelity driving simulation studies in order bridge cognitive neuroscience with real-world application. Through her multidisciplinary and translational research program within the Yale DrivSim Lab, Dr. Banz works to transform her novel empirical work to real-world meaningful impact; understanding the brain to save the lives of teens and young adults to they can thrive in early adulthood and beyond.

Dr. Chekijian joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 2007 where she works full time as an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine. She is faculty member in the Section of Global Health and International Emergency Medicine as well as in the Section of Administration. She has served as the inaugural Medical Director of patient experience since 2011. She is also the Medical Director of the Physician Assistant and Nurse Practitioner group in the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Chekijian is a seasoned educator and is the founding Medical Director of the APP post-graduate training program which admitted its 1st cohort in 2015. She completed the Yale Medical Education Fellowship in 2014. Her research interests lie in global emergency medicine and include emergency care systems' development in low and middle-income countries, unintentional injury prevention in low and middle-income countries, as well as stroke and cardiac care in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Chekijian has led and participated in projects in the Republic of Armenia, Uganda, and Iraq. She has consulted for the World Bank and the US Department of State. She is an active member of the Stroke Initiative Advisory Task-Force for Armenia (SIATA). Dr. Chekijian was awarded a Fulbright in 2020 for her work to improve emergency care in Armenia by the establishment of a new emergency medicine residency program in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health of Armenia and supported from a research standpoint by the School of Public Health at the American University of Armenia. She is deeply committed to patient experience, communication and humanism in medicine. Dr. Chekijian co-produced a film that addresses human rights as it relates to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 under the working title “The Hidden Map” that premiered at the Toronto Pomegranate Film Festival in 2019.

American University of Beirut Medical Center Profile Mazen El Sayed, MD, MPH, FAAEM, FACEP is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at American University of Beirut and the Director of Clinical Operations and Medical Director of the AUBMC Transfer Center. His research interests include Mass casualty incidents, Emergency Medical Services, Prehospital Care, EMS systems, EMS priority conditions, Disaster Preparedness, ED Administration, and Outcome Research.

Samah Fodeh-Jarad, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the Yale School of Public Health. She is also affiliated with the Yale Institute for Global Health (YIHG) and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. Dr. Fodeh has distinguished herself as researcher in the field of Biomedical Informatics and Big Data Science with a growing national and international reputation. Her contributions include the development of complex computational methods and tools that are critical for advancing biomedical informatics research and data science. Through her work, Dr. Fodeh demonstrates the utility of exploiting and combining multiple data modalities by employing methods from data mining, machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. Her research is focused on health and social media data mining to answer critical health related questions to suicide risk, opioid addiction, migraine diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Fodeh is also interested in studying patient-centered aspects of care including communications in clinical settings between patients and healthcare providers, stigmatizing language, social determinants of health and their impact on health-related outcomes.

Rebekah Heckmann, MD, MPH, MPA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. She is also a Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, the Director of Resident Research for the Department of Emergency Medicine, the Associate Medical Director of the Project ASSERT Program, and Core Faculty for the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. She completed her residency in emergency medicine and served as chief resident at the University of Washington before pursuing a health policy research and translation fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. While working as an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s, she earned a master in public administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Heckmann has extensive experience performing health policy analysis and working within public health and global health systems. She focuses her research activities on using quantitative social science methods, including system dynamics modeling, to design and advocate for evidence-based health policy. She is board certified in emergency medicine and addiction medicine.

Dr. Melnick completed his medical degree at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and his emergency medicine residency at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Melnick's research focuses on improving EHR usability as a means to achieve the quadruple aim to improve healthcare delivery. He is currently launching a five-year National Institute on Drug Abuse R33 award as Principal Investigator of the ADAPT project to refine and evaluate the uptake, usability, and equity of a nationally disseminated multicomponent clinical decision support intervention previously developed by his team to increase treatment initiation in the emergency care of people with opioid use disorder. That previous tool was a five-year UG3/UH3 award to develop, disseminate, implement, and test a user-centered decision support system to facilitate ED-initiation of buprenorphine for individuals suffering from opioid use disorder. Dr. Melnick is in his fifth year of funding by the American Medical Association to study EHR use and its relationship to physician professional burnout and retention. From 2013-2018, Dr. Melnick completed a five-year K08 career development award with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. As the Interim Research Section Chief and Program Director for the Yale/VA Clinical Informatics Fellowship and the Informatics Track for the Yale School of Medicine Master of Health Science Degree Program degree, Dr. Melnick plays an active role in education and research mentorship for junior faculty, informatics fellows, emergency medicine residents, and Yale School of Medicine students. Double board-certified in Emergency Medicine and Clinical Informatics, Dr. Melnick works clinically as an attending physician in the Emergency Department at Yale-New Haven Hospital’s York Street and Shoreline campuses.

Dr. Christine Ngaruiya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) at Yale University, and was the DEM Wellness Officer and the Director of Global Health Research until July 2023. She is currently an adjunct faculty in the Department. She completed the Global Health and International Emergency Medicine fellowship in the DEM in 2015, also matriculating with a Master of Science and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at that time. She is also a graduate of the NIH Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH) program, which she was competitively selected for from a national pool of applicants for the 2019-2020 cohort. Her research interests center on: Non-communicable Diseases, barriers to care, and community-based interventions with a particular focus on Africa. She joined faculty at in the Yale DEM as Assistant professor in Fall 2016. Her past professional work has focused on health disparities amongst minority populations in the U.S. and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Some past honors include: the Emergency Medicine Resident’s Association (EMRA) Augustine D’Orta Award for outstanding community and grassroots involvement, Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance Associate and the 2014 Harambe Pfizer Fellow Award for social entrepreneurship, the 2016 University of Nebraska Outstanding International Alumnus award, the 2018 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Global Emergency Medicine Academy Young Physician award, and the 2019 Yale School of Medicine Leonard Tow Humanism award. In 2020, she was selected as 1 of 24 women nationally as part of the Stanford-affiliated, Gates Foundation funded WomenLift Health Leadership Cohort. She has held several national and international leadership positions including with: the American Medical Students’ Association (AMSA), the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA), the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine’s (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy, the Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) conference committee and the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) Research Committee. She was a member and regular contributor to the Young People’s Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN). She is also a founding member of the Yale Network for Global Noncommunicable Disease (NGN) with an inaugural cross-campus symposium in 2016, which continues to plays a role as a hub for global NCD work involving the Yale community. Additionally, she served on the research pre-symposium committee for the African Conference on Emergency Medicine in 2014, on the Scientific Committee in 2016, and as the chair for the research pre-symposium committee in 2020. She has sat on a number of NIH panels related to global NCD topics, and has lectured both nationally and internationally on the same. She was a senior contributor to the first ever national study on NCDs in Kenya using the WHO STEPs tool in collaboration with Kenya Ministry of Health, was awarded one of five 2017 Yale Global Health Leadership Institute Hecht-Albert junior faculty pilot awards to do an ED-based study on NCDs in Kenya, was one of two 2019 Yale Institute for Global Health faculty network awardees to assess the role of Natural Language Process in heart attack patients in Pakistan, and a recipient of two NIH awards (NHLBI and NIDA) in 2021 to conduct NCD research on ED populations in Kenya. Her work has also been funded by USAID, the World Bank and the Gates foundation, among others. She was selected as one of twenty Yale Public Voice Fellows for 2015-2016 from across campus with around 30 publications in outlets such as Time, Huffington Post, Medium, and The Hill since that time. She continues to teach on the topic as the faculty advisor for the Yale OpEd and Advocacy course, a 5-year old program that was co-led by an interdisciplinary team of residents, and which has trained or mentored more than 150 trainees (residents and fellows) at YSM to date.

Dr. Reid specializes in Emergency Medicine and Global health, with specific focus on emergency medicine development and global palliative care. Her research is centered on defining the conditions and the context that make palliative care an essential, cost-efficient yet missing component of care in humanitarian and low-resource settings. She is collaborating with international partners on projects at the intersection of palliative care and Emergency Medicine development in Ethiopia, Uganda, Puerto Rico, Peru and Greece. Dr. Reid is an Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Emergency Medicine. She is a graduate of Brown University, received her MD from Albany Medical College, and completed her emergency medicine residency at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospitals. Dr. Reid is a graduate of Yale's Global Health and International Emergency Medicine Fellowship, which she now directs, and received her MSc from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her PhD from University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She co-directs the Yale-Uganda Faculty Network. Dr. Reid holds a faculty appointment in the Yale University School of Medicine and is affiliate faculty of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Carine J. Sakr is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, adjunct, at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Sakr earned her medical degree from Saint Joseph University in Beirut, Lebanon and her public health degree from Yale. She completed her Internal Medicine Residency at Cooper Hospital, University Medical Center in Camden, New Jersey and her Occupational and Environmental Medicine Fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine. She is American Board certified in Internal Medicine and Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Dr. Sakr conducted many research studies evaluating occupational and environmental exposures and their adverse health effects among different populations. She was the program director of the Yale Occupational and Environmental Medicine Fellowship training and lectured at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Sakr was the Occupational Health Services Chief at VA CT Healthcare Center and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale (Occupational & Environmental Medicine). She subsequently worked at the Ministry of Health and Prevention of the United Arab Emirates, where she was the acting director of the Visiting Consultants Office and a consultant in Occupational Medicine.In January 2018, Dr. Sakr relocated to Lebanon and joined the American University of Beirut (AUB) where she is currently the Director of Employee Health and an Associate Professor of Medicine. Her research interests include environmental and occupational exposure assessment as well as occupational health and safety of healthcare workers. In February 2020 she was appointed as the chair of the Expert Committee on COVID-19 at AUB. She was later appointed as the co-chair of the COVID-19 Vaccination Group and was heavily involved in the University and Medical Center’s preparedness and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the Principal Investigator of a USAID funded project at AUB: a Nation Wide Approach to Respond to the COVID-19 Spread in Lebanon. Dr. Sakr is a Co-PI on the AUB-Yale NIH funded Global Environmental and Occupational Health Research and Training Hub for the MENA Region (GEO-Health MENA).

Dr. Shapiro received a B.A. with a major in English Literature from Yale College in 1970 and an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, in 1976.  He completed a residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1979 and a two-year fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1981.  He completed another two-year fellowship in clinical epidemiology (Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program) at Yale in 1983.  He has been on the faculty at Yale since 1983, where he sees patients, teaches, and conducts research.  He is currently Professor of Pediatrics, of Epidemiology and of Investigative Medicine and is Vice Chair for Research of Yale’s Department of Pediatrics.  He is also Deputy Director of Yale’s PhD Program in Investigative Medicine, is Co-Director of Education and Director of Child Health Research for Yale’s Center for Clinical Investigation and is Director of Grant Writing and Evaluation for Yale's Office of Physician-Scientist and Scientist Development.  Dr. Shapiro is board certified in both Pediatrics (1980, unlimited) and Pediatric Infectious Diseases (1994, 2000, 2008).  He served a 6-year term (2 years as Chair) as a member of the Infectious Diseases sub-board of the American Board of Pediatrics.  This is the group that writes the questions for the certifying examination. Dr. Shapiro has more than 250 publications (more than 150 in peer-reviewed journals), most of which are studies related to vaccines. He has been the principal investigator of many clinical studies, a number of which have been funded by highly competitive R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  He has also received funding from private foundations and from industry, including from Connaught, from Pasteur Merieux and from Merck Laboratories.  Dr. Shapiro has been a consultant to the World Health Organization (for both the Department of Vaccines and Biologicals and for the Acute Respiratory Infections Control Programme) and was Chair of the Advisory Group for the Epidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Health and Human Development. He also served as a Special Advisor to the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Advisory Committee.  He has been either Chair or a member of the Data Safety and Monitoring Boards for numerous clinical trials, including clinical trials of the efficacy of vaccines, many of which were (or are currently) funded by the National Institutes of Health. He has served as a member of a permanent NIH study section for a 4-year term and has been an ad hoc reviewer for the NIH many times.  He has also served as a reviewer for grant proposals and/or awards for the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development, the Department of Health of the United Kingdom, the University of Amsterdam, the Czech Health Research Council and the Karolinska Institute. In 2014, Dr. Shapiro received the Stanley A. Plotkin Lectureship in Vaccinology Award for career achievement for research in vaccinology.  In 2017, he received the Pediatric Diseases Society Distinguished Physician Award for “an extensive and distinguished career in pediatric infectious diseases.”

Donna Spiegelman was appointed the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health in 2018; she is also Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University. Dr. Spiegelman founded and directs the Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS) and she also leads the Global Oncology program at Yale Cancer Center. As one of the few people in the world with a joint doctorate in biostatistics and epidemiology, she can freely speak the languages of both disciplines and switches between these two professional cultures, playing the role of interlocutor for each. She is interested in problems arising in epidemiology that require resolution, at least in part, through biostatistics. The emerging field of implementation science is among Dr. Spiegelman's major areas of interest. This field examines barriers to the implementation of evidence-based interventions, as well as the factors that facilitate uptake of these tools. She founded CMIPS to develop tools for implementation science as well as to further the field's deployment to improve public health. The Center comprises 4 tenure-track full-time faculty members in biostatistics, social science and health economics; many additional faculty at YSPH and YSM; and PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and master's degree students. With colleagues at CMIPS, she studies the design and conduct of implementation studies and pragmatic trials. Topics include stepped-wedge and cluster randomized trials; positive spillover effects; two-stage designs; causal inference for large-scale public health interventions, including causal mediation analysis; correction for biases related to non-adherence and measurement error; and external generalizability; among others. CMIPS also focuses on developing methodsfor learning health care systems. One of CMIPS' primary goals is to develop new statistical methods for implementation science. One such innovation is the Learn as You Go (LAGO) design, which allows researchers to repeatedly adapt ongoing trials in response to new trial data. Such designs help to prevent “failed trials." They can also optimize combination treatment regimens and inform cost-effective health promotion programs. Other biostatistical methods Dr. Spiegelman has developed relate to a wide range of topics, including meta-analysis, measurement error and misclassification, gene-environment and other interactions, smoothing, study design, and population-attributable risk. Before coming to Yale, she served as professor, mentor, and expert statistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for nearly 30 years.

Andrew Taylor MD, MHS is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Emergency Medicine, and Biostatistics at Yale, where he founded and leads the Yale Interdisciplinary AI & Medicine Lab (Y-IAML). Y-IAML is a pioneering collaborative research group dedicated to advancing the field of AI in Medicine through a unique cross-disciplinary approach focused on harmoniously blending AI with healthcare delivery. Y-IAML brings together experts in design, cognitive science, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, implementation science, ethics/philosophy, and decision theory to develop innovative AI solutions that are not only technically robust but also ethically informed and practically implementable. By bridging the gap between diverse fields of study, Dr. Taylor and his team aim to create AI technologies that are deeply attuned to the complexities of healthcare, focusing on patient-centered outcomes and transformative healthcare solutions. Dr. Taylor's goal is to lead the way in interdisciplinary AI research, fostering a new era of healthcare innovation that is inclusive, effective, and profoundly impactful. Dr. Taylor's work is generously supported by a diverse group of funding agencies including multiple NIH Institutes (NIDA, NIA, NIMDH, NLM), AHRQ, SIDM, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as well as industry partnerships. Dr. Taylor earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Mississippi. He completed medical school at Emory University School of Medicine and Emergency Medicine residency at the University of Connecticut. Most recently he completed fellowships in point-of-care ultrasound and Masters in Health Science with an informatics focus from Yale University. He lives in Durham, CT with his wife and four kids.

Dr. Venkatesh is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University. He is also Scientist at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He has been funded by the NIH, AHRQ, and the Emergency Medicine Foundation to study health system outcomes and efficiency, and he is supported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as co-Principal Investigator of the Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL) and for the development of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. He has received over $6 million in grant funding and published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and is senior editor of The Evidence book series. He is national leader within ACEP and SAEM and he serves on expert panels for the National Quality Forum (NQF), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and CMS. His work is also funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Addiction Policy Forum to advance the quality and delivery of emergency and acute care for opioid use disorder. Dr. Venkatesh earned his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University. He went on to earn an MBA from Ohio State University before completing medical school at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Most recently he completed Emergency Medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program here at Yale University. He is originally from Dayton, OH and resides in New Haven.

Ambrose Wong, MD, MSEd, MHS, is a physician-scientist in the Department of Emergency Medicine, with a focus on teamwork, patient safety, behavioral health, and healthcare disparities. He is the Research Director and Simulation Fellowship Director at the Yale Center for Healthcare Simulation. He also has expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods techniques for health services research. Dr. Wong applies healthcare simulation technology to address workplace violence and improve behavioral care in the emergency setting. He has authored over twenty-five peer-reviewed publications on behavioral emergency care and has received funding from multiple federal agencies and foundations including NIH, YCCI, AHRQ, and PCORI.