Global Mental Health Leadership

Yang Jae Lee, MD is a psychiatrist and global mental health researcher focused on reducing mental illness stigma and strengthening community-based mental health care systems in low-resource settings. He holds an adjunct appointment at the Yale School of Medicine and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Since 2015, he has worked in the Busoga region of Uganda, where he co-founded Empower Through Health, a 501(c)(3) organization that integrates healthcare delivery, research, and education. His research examines stigma reduction, pathways to care following mental health crises, and the integration of traditional and biomedical mental health systems, with a focus on community-based recovery and social reintegration. Dr. Lee also directs the Global Health Experiential Fellowship, a predoctoral training program that pairs Ugandan and American students for immersive, community-based global health research.

Dr. Altalib is the Chief of Neurology at the Veteran Administration (VA) Connecticut Healthcare System. He also serves as the Northeast Regional Director of the VA Epilepsy Centers of Excellence. He helped established a VA Neurobehavioral clinic, which provides clinical care for Veterans who suffer from emotional distress and/or behavioral problems associated with neurological conditions (such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, and epilepsy). At Yale University he also provides care for people with neurological injury that impact emotional processing. For instance, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, movement disorders (and their treatments) can affect brain circuits and chemistry and lead to mood, anxiety, and even psychotic disorders. Furthermore, neuropsychiatric conditions such functional movement disorder and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures are managed in his clinic. Dr. Altalib is also the Director of the Yale Epilepsy Outcomes Research Program, in which he oversees clinical trials and cohort studies related to epilepsy interventions. In addition to seizure control outcomes, his research explores psychiatric co-morbidity of neurologic disease. He is currently the primary investigator of a studies examining the neurologic substrates of depression in people with epilepsy; the burden of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures in the Veteran population; and measuring coordination of health care using social network analysis methods.

Michelle Silva is a licensed clinical psychologist and Director of the Connecticut Latino Behavioral Health System, an academic-community partnership designed to expand access to behavioral health services for the monolingual Spanish speaking community of greater New Haven. Dr. Silva’s work bridges practice, education, and clinical research, and she engages in multidisciplinary collaborations designed to promote health equity among vulnerable and underserved communities. Based at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, Dr. Silva provides clinical services to individuals affected by immigration-related trauma at the Hispanic Clinic, and treats children, adolescents, and families at the West Haven Mental Health Clinic. She serves as a supervising psychologist for fellows in the Department's Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology, and faculty advisor to health professional students in the Behavioral Health Department of the Yale HAVEN Free Clinic.