Members

Basmah Safdar, M.D. is an internationally recognized scholar in sex and gender-specific research with a focus on microvascular health - in the heart, brain and now COVID-19. Funded by a diverse grant portfolio (NIH, CDC, Foundations and Investigator Initiated Industry awards) she has successfully conducted numerous clinical trials and translational research in emergency settings. She leads the Yale CMD (coronary microvascular dysfunction) Registry that intersects with a multi-disciplinary clinical program addressing the systemic nature of microvascular dysfunction including in COVID-19.Dr. Safdar co-chaired the 2014, Society of Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference on “Sex and Gender Specific Research – Investigate, Understand and Translate how Gender Affects Patient Outcomes” leading the advocacy to address disparities in patient care. She teaches and speaks regularly on this topic at regional and national forums. In her capacity as the Medical Director of the Chest Pain Center (formerly leading the Women’s Heart Program at Yale New Haven Hospital), Dr. Safdar adeptly combines a data driven approach with extensive operational and content expertise to drive clinical program advancement, programmatic efficiencies, and champions the implementation of value-based chest pain care through the health care delivery continuum. In her operational and administrative responsibilities, Dr. Safdar applies a systems lens merging her academic expertise with a servant leadership ethos to foster consensus and establish standardized efficient practices. She is deeply committed to cultivating equitable and transparent platforms for patients and physician workforce. Nationally, she recently completed a 3-year term as President of Academy for Women in Academy Emergency Medicine (AWAEM), a national organization for Emergency Medicine and used this platform to collate faculty development resources for early and mid-career women faculty in emergency medicine. She remains committed to teaching and to provide mentorship to undergraduates, medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty at Yale. In her role as Vice Chair, Dr. Safdar leads the faculty affairs, development and mentorship program for the department. In recognition of her service and exceptional leadership, Dr. Safdar was sponsored by the Dean to participate in the 2023-2024 Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine® (ELAM) Program. This prestigious initiative is dedicated to cultivating a diverse cohort of accomplished women leaders poised to make significant contributions to academic medicine's leadership landscape.

Gail D’Onofrio, MD, MS is the Albert E. Kent Professor of Emergency Medicine and was the Inaugural Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine (2009-2021) and Physician-in Chief of Emergency Services at Yale New Haven Hospital EDs with an annual census of approximately 180,000 patients. She is also Professor in the School of Public Health in the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and Professor of Internal Medicine, Core Faculty in Addiction) and is boarded in emergency and addiction medicine.  Internationally known for her work in alcohol and other substance use disorders (SUDs) as well as her research on gender variations in women with ischemic heart disease, Dr. D’Onofrio has extensive experience as a leader, researcher, mentor and educator. Her work (JAMA, 2015) demonstrating that ED-initiated buprenorphine increases engagement in addiction treatment for individuals with OUD, has changed clinical practice, receiving multiple science awards, including awards from the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the Clinical Research Forum and the R. Brinkley Smithers and Distinguished Scientist Award by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (2021), ACEP's Innovation & Excellence in Behavioral Health & Addiction Medicine Award (2022) and Boston University Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient (2022). Dr. D’Onofrio is an independent NIH-funded physician-scientist with over two decades of experience designing and implementing clinical trials in the ED setting related to alcohol and drug use, most notably the initiation of buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, that has changed clinical practice.  She is a MPI of the  NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN) New England Consortium Node, and currently Lead Investigator on several multisite trials testing implementation of ED-initiated buprenorphine and effectiveness of different formulations and dosing of buprenorphine. She is also a Hub MPI of the the NHLBI-NINDS funded SIREN network (Yale-METRO), covering NYC and Northeast sites, that conducts large phase III clinical trials in emergency and critical care.   Dr. D’Onofrio has a long track record of mentoring physician scientists in independent research careers. She is the PI of a NIDA K12 establishing the Yale Drug Use, Addiction and HIV Research Scholars (Yale-DAHRS) program, a Mentored Career Development Program with focused training in prevention and treatment of drug use, addiction, and HIV in general medical settings with scholars in Medicine, Emergency Medicine (EM), Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Pulmonary Critical Care; and she has mentored numerous faculty, at Yale and beyond that have become NIH funded investigators.  She has received several awards which reflect her dedication to mentorship and nurturing careers of junior investigators, including Excellence in Mentoring award from the Association for Medical Education and Research in Substance Abuse (AMERSA 2008), Advancing Women in Emergency Medicine award from the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM 2016) and the Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine (AWAEM) Outstanding Department Award for the advancement of women (SAEM 2018) and the Distinguished Chair Award from the Association of Academic Chairs in Emergency Medicine (2022) Dr. D’Onofrio is a founding Board member of the Board of Addiction Medicine recognized by ABMS as a Specialty, Sub-specialty.  An advocate for individuals with SUD, she is one of the architects of Connecticut Governor’s Strategic Plan to Reduce Opioid Deaths, working with multiple agencies regionally and nationally to change policies and introduce interventions to combat the opioid crisis. She served on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse for the National Institutes of Health and is currently a member of the NIH HEAL Initiative Multi-Disciplinary Working Group.

Jim is a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at YMS. As a biostatistician at Yale since 2002 he has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles with a diverse group of Yale investigators. Dr. Dziura also serves as the Deputy Director of both the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS) and the Yale Data Coordinating Center (YDCC) in the Yale School of Public Health. He has been active in training young investigators, both individually (as a mentor and statistical resource for K-awardees, post-doctoral fellows, residents and Master’s students) and in the classroom (where he has developed a graduate-level course and several workshops on biostatistics in clinical research). His primary research interests are in the coordination of multicenter clinical trials. Over the past ten years he has overseen data coordinating and biostatistical efforts for several trials. Notably, he served as the PI of the data coordinating center for the RUPP Autism Network study of Guanfacine for the treatment of hyperactivity. He is the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT), a multicenter longitudinal study developing reproducible experimental biomarkers (e.g. from EEG, eye tracking) for use as stratification factors and outcomes in clinical trials.He is a senior biostatistician (and unblinded statistician for the DSMB) for the Data Coordinating Center of a large pragmatic cluster-randomized trial for the prevention of serious fall injuries (STRIDE) in 6,000 older persons from 86 health care practices.

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. Wang is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on combining genetics, genomics, immunology, and statistical modeling to answer biologically important questions in genetic epidemiological studies. Dr. Wang's statistical expertise lies in longitudinal data analysis, varying coefficient models, mixed effects models, kernel machine methods, mediation analysis, machine learning methods, and network analysis. She develops statistically innovative methods and computationally efficient tools in large-scale genetic and genomic studies to identify genetic susceptibility variants and advance the understanding of the etiology of complex diseases including breast cancer, alcohol and drug abuse, asthma, autism, obesity, lung and cardiovascular diseases. Current studies include using next-generation sequencing data to detect rare genetic variants in longitudinal genetic studies, combining knowledge in genomics and immunology to understand the risk of breast cancer survival, addressing statistical challenges in single-cell RNA sequencing data and spatial transcriptomics, and machine learning for risk prediction in electronic health records data.

Cristiana Baloescu graduated from the Yale Emergency Medicine Residency Program in 2017. She completed medical school at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine in 2013. During residency, she conducted research in disaster preparedness, applications of machine learning in point-of-care ultrasound interpretation, and served as the resident director of medical student education. After graduating from residency, she pursued further training in point-of-care ultrasound fellowship, as well as a Masters degree in public health at Yale. Her goal is to advance the field of point-of-care ultrasound, establish programs in developing countries. She is from Bucharest, Romania, and attended Wesleyan College in Macon, GA. An avid international travel, she met her husband, also a physician-scientist, during an academic exchange program in Germany.

Anirudh Goyal is a dedicated researcher and public health professional with a diverse background in dentistry and public health. He holds a Master of Public Health from the University of New Haven and a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from Rajasthan University of Health Sciences, India. Anirudh's research interests span various topics, including the association between dating app use and body image, unhealthy weight control behaviors among sexual minority men, Coronary Microvascular dysfunction, Tobacco use cessation. He has presented his work at prestigious conferences such as the Society of Behavioral Medicine Annual Meeting and the FDI World Dental Congress.

Allison is a clinical research professional with over five years of experience in managing clinical trials across various stages, from clinical trial recruitment to study close-out. She has expertise in neurology, oncology, and medical devices, having contributed to bringing multiple medical devices to FDA approval and guiding them to market. Allison holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Central Connecticut State University. Outside of work, she is an avid traveler and culinary enthusiast, always seeking new destinations to explore or recipes to try.

Kim recently graduated from the University of Connecticut with bachelor's degrees in Biological Sciences and Psychological Sciences. Her research background includes work in neuroscience with animal models at UConn, as well as clinical research focusing on emergency medicine and chronic pain & obesity at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Kim plans to spend a few gap years gaining additional clinical research experience before applying to medical school. She is particularly interested in neuroscience and emergency medicine research.

Dr. Afsheen Nasir is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Yale University with enriched interests in health disparities related to gender, race, and socioeconomic status in cardiac and aortic diseases. As a co-investigator for Women's Health Research at Yale, she has led pilot projects examining sex-based disparities in elective and emergent aortic surgery outcomes along with the underlying causes, including gendered patterns of surveillance using big data from Yale Imaging Centers. Her curiosity extends to the role of pregnancy and female reproductive hormones in the progression of cardiac diseases. Dr. Nasir’s work has been showcased at many conferences including American Heart Association, American Association for Thoracic Surgery, Eastern Cardiothoracic Surgical Society, and Women in Thoracic Surgery meeting. She also serves as a peer-reviewer for scientific journals. Her work is deeply informed by the healthcare disparities she observed while working in clinical setting in her home country. Dr. Nasir spends her free time either expanding consciousness around deconstructing and deprogramming from the colonial conditioning or entering timeless joy at the local gym.

Ivan has a Masters of Science in Law and brings a wealth of experience with his prior role as a full time ED technician as well as certified Emergency Medical Technician (National, Florida, Connecticut). In addition to pursuing research, Ivan likes to volunteer and give back to the community.

Arda Yigitkanli holds a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an interest in pursuing emergency medicine upon matriculating into medical school. He has prior experience working as a clinical coordinator for the Emory HOPE Vaccine Clinic and has previously created and patented a cardiovascular retrieval device which operates as a safety net for those with cardiac devices implanted within their body such as pacemakers. In addition to his clinical interests, Arda volunteers with outreach groups and clinics around New Haven that target underrepresented groups in healthcare.