Advisory Group

Sydney Aquilina is a third-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and a tribal member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. She is also a member of Alpha Pi Omega, the first and largest Native American Greek letter organization. She graduated with distinction from Duke University in 2021, where she earned her BA in Philosophy with a minor in chemistry and a global health thesis on Adverse childhood experiences and adult diet quality. From there she obtained an MS in Biomedical Sciences from the Duke University School of Medicine, and spent a year working as an EMT. At Yale School of Medicine, she has resurrected the Indigenous Medical student group and advocated for greater attention to Indigenous matters in medical education. She has also continued conducting research on Adverse Childhood Experiences in hopes of informing interventions to help uplift Native communities out of historical and generational trauma. Outside of medical school, Sydney has been working on securing a land recognition landmark in Leesburg, VA, and received a proclamation last November from the mayor and town council in recognition of her efforts and the land’s original inhabitants. While she is undecided on a specialty, she is committed to serving Native communities directly upon her completion of residency. In doing so, she aspires to improve Native healthcare and address barriers to care in tribal communities using culturally integrated and trauma-informed pedagogy.

Aba Black, MD, MHS, received her bachelor?s degree from Princeton University and went on to graduate from medical school at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. She completed her residency at the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Program, where she also served as chief resident. She subsequently earned a Master of Health Science degree in medical education. She currently works as an academic clinician at Yale School of Medicine, where she serves as Vice Chair of Collaborative Excellence for the Section of General Internal Medicine and Associate Program Director of Collaborative Excellence for the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine residency program. Her academic interests focus on enhancing workplace diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. She leads initiatives related to underrepresented in medicine recruitment and retention, as well as spearheading trainee and faculty education on equity-related topics. Clinically, she works as a primary care physician for urban underserved patients. Outside of the hospital, she serves on the board of Project Access-New Haven, an organization dedicated to improving access to medical care and services for underserved patients in the Greater New Haven area. She was recently awarded the Connecticut American College of Physicians Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for promoting physician diversity and inclusion with outstanding achievements in mentoring, leadership development, and role modeling for physicians and medical students from diverse and underrepresented populations.

Samiksha Chopra (she/her) is a fifth-year MD-PhD student in the Blumenfeld Lab. She is a co-leader of the US Health Justice Elective, a student-run course for medical, physician assistant, and nursing students, dedicated to learning about and discussing an array of health justice topics, including mass incarceration, queer health, reproductive justice, and more. Her responsibilities include securing finances, developing curriculum, organizing community service opportunities, and mentoring students. Additionally, she is a student co-leader of Yale School of Medicine’s chapter of Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) to advocate for single-payer national health insurance.

Ada Chung (she/her/hers) is a second-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles where she majored in Political Science and Disability Studies. At the Yale School of Medicine, she leads the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine and is involved with Socially Responsible Surgery. She also serves as the Associate Director of Advocacy and Policy on the National Board for Medical Students with Disability and Chronic Illness. She previously served as a Policy Fellow at the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities (NACDD) and as a Youth Intern for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In her role at NACDD, she has produced COVID-19 fact sheets, support letters, blog posts, and participated in Congress budget conversations. She also worked to create a report on gaps in vaccine allocation and distribution for individuals with developmental disabilities during the pandemic. This report was presented to the Administration for Community Living at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Ada is deeply passionate about using medicine and policy to advocate for inclusive healthcare systems, with a particular focus on asylum health and disability health.

My contributions to education and research during my career have focused on organizing and delivering health-related services for vulnerable populations and training health professionals. With a PhD in Sociology of Medicine, I initially worked on national and international evaluations of HIV/AIDS programs and mental health services. More recently, I've applied my skills to medical education, primarily assisting faculty in assessing trainees and training programs and designing curriculum in health professional education. At Yale School of Medicine, I am a Professor of Psychiatry and serve as the Executive Director of Evaluation & Assessment at the Center for Medical Education. My expertise includes evaluating health professional education curricula; training faculty, staff, and students in feedback methods; improving assessment systems for educators; and consulting on program and curriculum evaluation approaches for scholarly work. I teach curriculum development and evaluation in the Masters of Health Science/Medical Education program and other educational programs. I am chairperson of the School of Medicine's Learning Environment Subcommittee of the Education Policy and Curriculum Committee. Additionally, I integrate LGBTQI-health topics into the curriculum and serve on the Dean's Council for LGBTQI Affairs. In select graduate medical education programs, including my academic department, Psychiatry, I gather and analyze qualitative data for internal reviews of training programs.

Tyler D. Harvey is a social scientist and MD/PhD candidate at the Yale School of Medicine. Previously, Tyler was a Thomas J. Watson fellow where they completed an international fellowship across six diverse low-income countries titled, "Embodied Poverty: Experiences and Voices of the Poor, Sick, and Surviving." As a graduate student in public health, Tyler served as the Executive Director of HAVEN Free Clinic, a student-run primary health care clinic that partners with Yale to provide services to the New Haven community free of charge. Most recently, Tyler was the Center Administrator at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, an academic center focused on addressing the health harms of mass incarceration. At Yale, Tyler is a student leader of the US Health Justice elective and a student advisor to the Health Equity Thread within the Yale School of Medicine curriculum. Tyler is also currently a research fellow with the Yale LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative and the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at the Yale Law School. Between 2023 - 2024, they served as a representative on the Presidential Search Student Advisory Council for Yale's next President. Tyler sees medicine and science as tools to liberate and uplift the most marginalized communities. Specifically, their research examine structural determinants of health and evaluates clinical and public health interventions aimed at eliminating health inequities for LGBTQ+ populations. This work has been published in leading medical and public health journals, such as JAMA Network Open, LGBT Health, and Social Science and Medicine and has been used alongside work with local and international agencies, including the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and World Health Organization. Tyler was previously a Public Voices Fellow with TheOpEdProject in partnership with AcademyHealth, publishing numerous opinion pieces on health equity in top media outlets, including The Hill and Newsweek. Originally from the rural South, Tyler is a first-generation college graduate and holds a BA in Urban Studies from Rhodes College and MPH from the Yale School of Public Health. yler D. Harvey is a social scientist and MD/PhD candidate at the Yale School of Medicine. Previously, Tyler was a Thomas J. Watson fellow where they completed an international fellowship across six diverse low-income countries titled, "Embodied Poverty: Experiences and Voices of the Poor, Sick, and Surviving." As a graduate student in public health, Tyler served as the Executive Director of HAVEN Free Clinic, a student-run primary health care clinic that partners with Yale to provide services to the New Haven community free of charge. Most recently, Tyler was the Center Administrator at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, an academic center focused on addressing the health harms of mass incarceration. At Yale, Tyler is a student leader of the US Health Justice elective and a student advisor to the Health Equity Thread within the Yale School of Medicine curriculum. Tyler is also currently a research fellow with the Yale LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative and the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at the Yale Law School. Between 2023 - 2024, they served as a representative on the Presidential Search Student Advisory Council for Yale's next President. Tyler sees medicine and science as tools to liberate and uplift the most marginalized communities. Specifically, their research examine structural determinants of health and evaluates clinical and public health interventions aimed at eliminating health inequities for LGBTQ+ populations. This work has been published in leading medical and public health journals, such as JAMA Network Open, LGBT Health, and Social Science and Medicine and has been used alongside work with local and international agencies, including the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and World Health Organization. Tyler was previously a Public Voices Fellow with TheOpEdProject in partnership with AcademyHealth, publishing numerous opinion pieces on health equity in top media outlets, including The Hill and Newsweek. Originally from the rural South, Tyler is a first-generation college graduate and holds a BA in Urban Studies from Rhodes College and MPH from the Yale School of Public Health.

Hailey Hoog (she/her) is a second-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine. She received her BS from the University of Arkansas, where she majored in Biomedical Engineering. At YSM, she is involved with the Native American and Indigenous Medical Student Association and the national Association of Native American Medical Students. She previously served as an intern with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and Arctic Investigations Program (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) In these roles, she worked on various projects aimed at addressing health disparities in Alaska Native and Native American communities, both through community-level interventions and broader health policy recommendations. Further, she was named a Harry S. Truman Scholarship Finalist with an application that focused onresearch ethics in Indigenous communities, and conducted research on the origins and future directions of Tribal health policy as a Presidential Fellow at the Center for Study of the Presidency and Congress. Hailey is passionate about using medicine and policy to improve access to healthcare in Indigenous communities. She also firmly believes in the value of including Indigenous perspectives in the curriculum at Yale, as well as promoting educational opportunities for Native American and Alaska Native students interested in medicine.

Kelsey Martin, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Hematology where her clinical practice is dedicated to patients with classical and malignant hematologic disease. She is focused on the role of sex and gender on health outcomes and health advocacy for patients. She serves as Women’s Health Research at Yale’s Associate Director for Medical Education in Women’s Health. Through this role, she works as a mentor for Yale undergraduate students to investigate and integrate data on women and sex and gender into the Yale School of Medicine curriculum. She is the prior Vice Chair and Advocacy Subcommittee for the Sex and Gender Health Collaborative of the American Medical Women’s Association. Dr. Martin is a member of the American Society of Hematology’s Committee on Practice where she advocates for health equity issues for hematology patients and in this role serves as a delegate to the American Medical Association. She participated in the American Society of Hematology Advocacy Leadership Institute advocating for her patients on Capitol Hill. Regarding health equity medical education, Dr. Martin is passionate about teaching patient communication and patient-centered interviewing. She is an active member of Yale’s Women Faculty Forum and Yale School of Medicine’s Status of Women in Medicine.

Dr. Moeller currently serves as the Associate Dean for Curriculum for the MD program, and this role is responsible for oversight of the 4-year MD curriculum, including design, implementation and evaluation. He is also Vice-Chair of Education in the Department of Neurology, and served as program director of the adult neurology residency program from 2014 to 2025. Clinically, he provides neurological care in the inpatient and outpatient settings, is extensively involved in the supervision of trainees (medical students, residents and clinical fellows), and has a subspecialty focus in epilepsy and EEG. His scholarly focus is in education, with specific interests in assessment and curriculum design. He has worked on several collaborative projects to develop and evaluate tools and resources for asynchronous learning in neurology and other aspects of medical education.

Maisie Orsillo, DO is a current medical education fellow and instructor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine. Maisie completed her bachelor’s degree in Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University and received her doctorate from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine. Prior to starting medical school she worked with the AmeriCorps program as a healthcare access advocate with St. Joseph’s Neighborhood Center, a non-profit dedicated to caring for those without health insurance. She then went on to complete her internal medicine residency and a chief resident year with the Yale Primary Care program. She is passionate about preventative health, diabetes care, medical education and patient advocacy. As a type one diabetic Maisie particularly enjoys supporting individuals living with diabetes through comprehensive medical and lifestyle counseling. Her research, focused on patient outcomes through the Yale Primary Care program’s diabetes clinic, earned her the Johns Hopkins Barker-Kern GIM Research Award. Her commitment to comprehensive excellence in primary care was acknowledged by her receipt of the Yale University School of Medicine Rosenbaum Primary Care Recognition Award. Her current clinical work consists of both inpatient and outpatient general medicine, where she regularly works in a teaching capacity with residents. Educating residents and medical students is one of Maisie’s most rewarding activities. She strongly believes in fostering diagnostic curiosity and creating a safe learning environment for learners to explore their clinical questions. As a chief resident focused on community engagement and advocacy, Maisie designed and implemented a novel curriculum for internal medicine residents focused on providing care to patients with disabilities. She has expanded this curriculum and is currently studying its impact on resident knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards caring for this patient population. She is uniquely positioned to teach others in this topic area as a long-standing advocate and caregiver for her sister who lives with autism. Maisie is committed providing longitudinal primary care to individuals with complex medical conditions, especially those living with disabilities.

Marco Antonio Ramos, MD PhD, is a historian, psychiatrist, and Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. His research focuses on the intersection of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and political imagination across the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His first book Just Dreams: Radical Psychiatry, Terror, and Human Rights in Cold War Argentina (under contract with UNC Press) draws on the personal archives of survivors and physician-activists to recover the radical, if fleeting, visions of an anti-capitalist and liberatory psychoanalysis that ?disappeared? amid the fascist terror of the last dictatorship in 1970s Argentina. His award-winning writing has appeared in clinical, academic, and popular journals, including the American Historical Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Boston Review. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Psychiatric Association. Along with Dr. Ayah Nuriddin, Dr. Ramos is also co-director of the Community Histories Lab (CHL) at Yale School of Medicine. The CHL aims to unearth local histories of New Haven and Yale University that promote justice along the lines of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality.

Eva Rest is a 4th year M.D.-Ph.D. student. Her research interests include computational approaches to heterogeneity in immune responses to infection, the biology of infectious diseases, vaccine efficacy, and public health. Eva hopes to use her M.D.-Ph.D. training to integrate clinical care for infectious diseases and immunological conditions with data-driven interventions. Eva earned her M.S. in Global Infectious Disease at Georgetown University where she studied respiratory disease dynamics and spatial heterogeneity in vaccination patterns in the lab of Dr. Shweta Bansal. Previously, she researched harm reduction strategies for substance use disorders at the University of Illinois Chicago's Institute for Health Research and Policy. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University studying global health and health policy. Eva is passionate about disability representation and accessibility in medicine. She co-founded and co-leads Medical Students with Disability and Chronic Illness (MSDCI) at Yale and is involved with disability and accessibility advocacy and research.

Bassel Shanab is a fourth-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Biochemistry and Biophysics; and Global Health Studies from Northwestern University graduating with distinction. His academic interests include cardiovascular health, social determinants of health, health disparities, health policy, and healthcare administration. Upon completion of his clerkships, during his Advanced Training Period, Bassel has been a Sarnoff Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health conducting research on Medicare beneficiaries with cardiovascular disease, aiming to characterize the evolving insurance coverage ecosystem, key patient and plan-level information that drives enrollment, and impact of insurance plan choice on quality of care and outcomes. In addition to serving as a member of the Health Equity Thread Advisory Group, he has served as co-leader of the Yale School of Medicine's chapter of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and the First-generation, Low-income medical student affinity group (YFLI). He currently serves as his cohort's Financial Aid representative, as well as a representative to the American Association of Medical College's Organization of Student Representatives (AAMC OSR). Outside of the Yale School of Medicine, he held an elected position as the Northeast delegate for the AAMC OSR's Community and Diversity Committee. Such positions follow an active undergraduate presence where he focused student leadership efforts on campus affordability (i.e., lower course costs), campus accessibility (i.e., student-centered transportation), and campus health. At the Yale School of Medicine, he works in collaboration with other student leaders to enhance undergraduate medical education for transgender and gender-diverse patients, currently working on a gender-expansive patient simulation workshop. Moreso, Bassel alongside other members of the Food Insecurity Student Taskforce have worked to address unmet basic needs of medical students at Yale, in addition to, medical students across the country.

Yetsa A. Tuakli-Wosornu, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Yale School of Public Health, Physiatrist, and Executive Director of the Sports Equity Lab. As a clinician-scientist, her passion is developing sophisticated solutions to clinical and social challenges. Purposefully elevating the voices of disadvantaged individuals and leveraging her background in global athletics and medicine, she is actively engaged in local and international sports communities, particularly focused on athletes with disabilities and those who have experienced trauma. Her research has won numerous awards and is regularly featured on local and international podcasts, including the 2019 American Medical Society for Sports Medicine Best Overall Research award, and the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Centre for Sport and Human Rights, JAMA Open Network, and Madame Athlete podcasts. In all of her work, she emphasizes the role of sports, recreation, and play for individual and collective healing. Additional leadership and advocacy roles include: Chair, International Olympic Committee (IOC) Global Safeguarding ConsensusChair, International Society for Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (ISPRM) Task Force on Physical Activity for Persons with DisabilitiesCo-Chair, American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Policy Statement on Youth Athlete SafeguardingCo-Chair, Safe Sport International (SSI) Research CommitteeMethodological Expert, Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)Associate Editor, British Journal of Sports Medicine Perhaps most importantly, between 2006 and 2016, Dr. Tuakli competed in the long jump for the Ghana National Team training at IMG Academy (Bradentdon, FL) under Coach Loren Seagrave. She currently resides in Accra, Ghana.