Members

Basmah Safdar, MD, is an emergency medicine physician and internationally recognized scholar in sex-specific research with a focus on microvascular health – in the heart, brain, and COVID-19. In July 2025, Safdar became Director of Women’s Health Research at Yale, the university’s interdisciplinary research center committed to improve the health and well-being of everyone by studying the health of women and examining health differences between and among women and men. Funded by a diverse grant portfolio including the NIH, CDC, foundations, and investigator-initiated industry awards, Safdar has successfully conducted numerous clinical trials and translational research in emergency settings. The Safdar Lab leads the Yale CMD Registry (examining coronary microvascular dysfunction), committed to patient monitoring through an integrated, multidisciplinary clinical approach. In her capacity as the Medical Director of the Chest Pain Center at Yale New Haven Hospital, 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. Previously, she led the Women’s Heart Program at Yale New Haven Hospital from 2009 to 2013. In 2014, she co-chaired the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference, which formalized sex as a critical variable in emergency medicine research. Safdar applies a systems lens merging her academic expertise with a servant leadership ethos to foster consensus and establish standardized efficient practices in her operational and administrative responsibilities. She is deeply committed to cultivating equitable and transparent platforms for both patients and physicians. Nationally, she completed a 3-year term as President of the Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine (AWAEM) and used this platform to coordinate faculty development resources for early and mid-career women faculty in the field. She remains committed to teaching and provides mentorship to Yale undergraduates, medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty. In recognition of her service and exceptional leadership, Safdar was sponsored by the Yale School of Medicine 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 a Professor of Biostatistics, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on statistical modeling of omics and healthcare data. Dr. Wang’s statistical expertise spans kernel machine methods, mixed effects models, correlated and longitudinal data analysis, machine learning, and network analysis. She develops innovative statistical methods and computational tools for large-scale biomedical studies and electronic health records data, including disease risk prediction, genetic susceptibility variant identification, and single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data analysis, with application in mental health, addiction, cancer, autism, lung and cardiovascular diseases, contributing to the understanding of disease pathogenesis.

Nora Al-Roub, MD is a Master of Public Health candidate at Yale University, specializing in chronic disease epidemiology. With a background in cardiovascular outcomes research and a focus on health equity, Nora brings experience in clinical research, data analysis, and health policy. Her current work centers on leveraging clinical trial data to examine sex-specific outcomes in heart failure interventions. She is also interested in integrating artificial intelligence and implementation science to inform equitable, evidence-based care, with a focus on how digital technologies can bridge gaps in health education, combat misinformation, and improve patient outcomes.

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.

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.