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Student Spotlight – Mike Yepes

January 30, 2018
by Denise Meyer

When Mike was growing up, he wasn’t worried about where to play after school or wondering where his family was going on vacation during school breaks like other kids. Instead he was stressed about understanding physicians, teachers and administrative personnel well enough to translate complex jargon from English to Spanish for his parents who immigrated to the US from Colombia. Through his schooling and early career, he has followed a steady, albeit not linear, path toward a career in public health. Everything he does is motivated by a commitment to social justice in health care and addressing health disparities in communities of color.

In his prior school and work life, Mike worked in a neurobiology laboratory and a respiratory diseases clinical research center at Rhode Island Hospital while completing his undergraduate studies at Brown University. After college, Mike worked as a clinical research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital and as a bilingual sexual health counselor at Fenway Health, Boston’s premier provider of LGBT healthcare. Today, Mike is a first-year MPH candidate in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at YSPH.

“I’ve picked up on things that affected me growing up,” says Mike who is now infusing his love of biology and epidemiology with aspects of social and behavioral health. “Yale was the only MPH program that allowed me to combine these passions through its diverse curriculum.”

In addition to his course work, Mike is the project coordinator for ESTEEM-conneCT studying the impact of a group therapy intervention on mental health and sexual risk behaviors among queer men of color. He is also Co-Director of Social Services for the student-run Haven Free Clinic in New Haven, serving uninsured and marginalized patients, many of whom struggle with English and need assistance with food, transportation and other issues outside of the clinical care setting that affect their health.

To raise awareness for social justice and health equity issues, Mike is also involved in the 2018 Yale Healthcare Conference programming as a member of the executive planning committee and also serves as the student ambassador for the Yale School of Public Health’s Diversity Committee.