Gratitude

To the YSM Community:

Pride, humility, gratitude—these are a few of the emotions I have been feeling lately as I witness the response of our faculty, staff, and students.

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to round in the emergency department and ICU, including the newly opened 15th floor of Smilow. Our teams are adapting in real time to an unfamiliar disease, to resource constraints that require creativity and innovation, and increasingly, to difficult ethical dilemmas. Still, you are stepping up to support each other. For instance, the Yale Department of Psychiatry is offering virtual Stress and Resilience Town Halls over Zoom that are open to all faculty, residents, and staff at the school and Yale New Haven Health. Since introduced a week ago, over 350 participants have dialed in.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, our admissions team hosted a Virtual Second Look Visit for over 150 prospective medical students. Many of our faculty presented their work, and participated in “speed-dating” sessions, as well as sessions on the curriculum, financial aid, student organizations, research, and more. Director of Admissions, Ayaska Fernando, and Associate Director of Admissions, Barbara Watts, coordinated this tour-de-force. The student videos are worth watching.

Earlier this week, the Office of Communications launched a comprehensive new website to provide data resources, pre-prints, connections with investigators, access to clinical protocols, and much more in our fight against COVID-19. On Tuesday, over 1,000 people attended a virtual Dean’s Workshop on COVID-19 in which clinicians, epidemiologists, geneticists, and immunobiologists shared their work. This Friday at 1:00 p.m., Ruth Montgomery and Gina Della Porta will host a grant-writing workshop.

All that remains to say are two words: thank you.

Sincerely,

Nancy J. Brown, MD
Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Medicine
C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine