Advisory Group

Sydney Aquilina is a fourth-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, Sydney has reinstated the Native American / Indigenous Medical Student Association 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. Similarly, Sydney is engaged in pain research, such as chronic pain in Indigenous communities. Outside of medical school, Sydney has been working on securing a land recognition landmark in Leesburg, VA, and received a proclamation from the mayor and town council in recognition of her efforts and the land’s original inhabitants. Following her passion in caring for vulnerable populations, Sydney is applying into Anesthesiology residency this year. Directly upon completion of residency, she is committed to serving Native communities in a tribal or Indian Health Service hospital. In doing so, she aspires to use culturally integrated and trauma-informed pedagogy to improve Native healthcare and address barriers to care within tribal communities.

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 is An Associate Professor at Yale School of Medicine, where she serves as Vice Chief for Collaborative Excellence for the Section of General Internal Medicine and Associate Program Director of People & Culture 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 professional development. 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 has been awarded the Connecticut American College of Physicians Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award, along with the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine Inclusive.

Samiksha Chopra (she/her) is a sixth-year MD-PhD student in the Blumenfeld Lab. At YSM, 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. She also serves as the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility, and Belonging (DEIAB) Co-Chair for the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, where she works to foster an inclusive and equitable environment across Yale's graduate and professional communities.

Ada Chung (she/her/hers) is a third-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 led the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine. 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 Harvey is an MD/PhD candidate at Yale University. Tyler is pursuing a PhD in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at the Yale School of Public Health under the mentorship of Dr. Emily Wang within the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. At Yale, Tyler has held leadership roles across health justice initiatives, including serving as a student leader in the US Health Justice elective and as an advisor to the Health Equity Thread. Tyler has also been a research fellow with both the Yale LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative and the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. Tyler served on Yale’s Presidential Search Student Advisory Council from 2023 to 2024 and was named a 2025 Health Policy Research Scholar by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Their scholarship appears in JAMA Network Open, American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science & Medicine, and has informed policy and practice at organizations such as the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the World Health Organization. As a former Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Tyler has published widely on health equity in national media outlets including The Hill and Newsweek. A first-generation college graduate from the rural South, Tyler holds a BA in Urban Studies from Rhodes College and an MPH from the Yale School of Public Health.

Hailey Hoog (she/her) is a third-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 on research 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.

Nicole Mbibi (she/her) is a second-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine. She received her BA from Columbia University in the City of New York, where she majored in Neuroscience and Behavior. At YSM, she is co-president of Yale's chapter of the Student National Medical Association, which supports underrepresented minority medical students. Additionally, she serves on the executive board of YSM’s Skin of Color Working Group, a dermatology interest group dedicated to skin of color research, education, and service. Nicole is also a facilitator for the Making the Invisible Visible program, which utilizes art to explore conversations about justice. Nicole is committed to addressing health disparities in communities of color through her research and future career.

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.

Bilal Nadeem is a second-year medical student at Yale and a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Stanford. His doctoral work examines the afterlives of war and displacement among Muslim refugees in Jordan. By learning from people gravely wounded by the conflicts of the past two decades in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, Bilal hopes to trace how injury and dispossession are registered within the Islamic tradition. In particular, he asks how concepts of the body, suffering, death, hospitality, obligation, and “the good” hold up, or come apart, when both patients and their Muslim clinicians are forced to reckon with devastation on this scale. A Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Bilal previously coordinated the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop in the Medical Humanities and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford. At Yale, he is a co-student leader at the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine, a Downs Fellow, and a Fellow at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard before earning an MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society at the University of Cambridge and an M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Stanford.

Maisie Orsillo, DO is an 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 medical school she worked with the AmeriCorps program as a healthcare access advocate. She then went on to complete her internal medicine residency and a chief resident year with the Yale Primary Care program. She recently completed a medical education fellowship and received a Master of Health Science (MHS) through Yale School of Medicine. She is passionate about disability healthcare, diabetes care, medical education and patient advocacy. 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 believes in fostering diagnostic curiosity and creating a safe learning environment for learners to explore their clinical questions. During her chief resident year, Maisie designed and implemented a novel curriculum for internal medicine residents focused on providing care to patients with disabilities. She expanded this curriculum and studied its impact on resident knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards caring for this patient population. This work was the subject of her MHS thesis. 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 looking forward to expanding educational offerings for residents and medical students on the care of patients with disabilities through her involvement with Yale School of Medicine’s Health Equity Thread Advisory Group.

Marco Ramos, MD, PhD, (he/him) is a historian of medicine and psychiatrist at Yale University. His research focuses on the history of mental healing and harm, with an emphasis on health activism and the history of drugs in Latin America. He is currently writing a book entitled Specters of Justice: Radical Psychiatry, Terror, and Human Rights in Cold War Argentina that is forthcoming with UNC Press in 2027. He has published widely, in both academic and popular journals, on structural oppression and its relationship to health and clinical education. His teaching, at undergraduate, medical school, and postgraduate levels, brings a critical historical perspective to anti-racism interventions in science, medicine, and public health. Specifically, he is the co-founder of the History of Psychiatry Track in the Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. He also is Co-Director of the Community Histories Lab at Yale School of Medicine, which unearths local histories of New Haven and Yale University that promote justice along the lines of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality. Clinically, Dr. Ramos has worked to expand access to mental health care for undocumented, Spanish-speaking residents in New Haven, CT, through the creation of the Behavioral Health Program for Depression at HAVEN Free Clinic. His service work earned him the Yale Graduate School Disciplinary Outreach Public Service Award.

Eva Rest is an M.D.-Ph.D. student pursuing her Ph.D. in Dr. David Hafler's lab. Her research interests include computational and multidisciplinary approaches to heterogeneity in immune responses, autoimmunity, and long-term sequelae of viral infection. She hopes to use her M.D.-Ph.D. training to integrate clinical care for immunological conditions and infectious diseases with data-driven interventions. Eva is passionate about public health, science communication, 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. 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.