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YCCI Scholars Engaged in Community-Based Research

Approximately 20 percent of the junior faculty selected for the YCCI Scholar Program are conducting community-based research. Moreover, 15 percent (or nearly $7 million) of the total external grants awarded to YCCI Scholars are for community-based projects. Many of these Scholars work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program and other partners in developing and performing their projects. Below are highlights of some YCCI Scholars who have conducted community-engaged research:


R. Douglas Bruce, M.D., M.A., M.Sc.

Chief of Medicine, Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center
Photo by Robert A. Lisak

2007 YCCI Scholar

In his role as Chief of Medicine at Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, Douglas Bruce, M.D., M.A., M.S., uses research to help drive improvements in patient care. “It’s exciting to apply research and a focus on evidence-based care to the health center,” he said.

Dr. Bruce’s research has focused on the intersection of substance dependence and infectious diseases. Early on, the Scholar program offered mentorship from faculty members across the university, an experience that he found to be valuable. “It provided me with access to additional relationships that made my work much easier,” he said. He also found that the exposure to other researchers through the bi-monthly Research in Progress meetings afforded a change in perspective that helped inform his work.

He conducted research for his Scholar project on integrating hepatitis C treatment with methadone maintenance therapy at South Central Rehabilitation Center, one of the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center clinics, his first foray into public health in New Haven. This paved the way to additional work integrating infectious disease and substance abuse treatment, which eventually led to a series of projects in the international arena where he modified what he had learned in Connecticut.

A desire to help create an evidence-public health center prompted his full-time move to the Center, which has 36,000 patients and six major sites in addition to satellite clinics. He maintains ties with Yale and continues to conduct research that informs evidence-based performance improvements. One example is an initiative to photograph the retinas of diabetes patients, facilitate speedy review by an ophthalmologist, and collect data to determine if it’s worthwhile to invest in the program.

Dr. Bruce serves on YCCI’s T3 working groups for asthma and obesity/diabetes and is also exploring funding and other opportunities with Yale that are a win-win for everyone. “The skills I developed at Yale have honed my ability to help move the needle on performance and in doing that I think we can see positive outcomes,” he said. He relishes the ability to work on a larger scale and believes that his efforts can help other health systems in Connecticut and nationally to improve quality and access to health care.

For more on Dr. Bruce, click here.

Peter Morgan, M.D., Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Photo by Robert A. Lisak

Chronic cocaine users may think they’re getting a good night’s sleep, but they are often deficient in “slow wave” sleep, the deep, restorative sleep that helps build physical and mental energy. Peter Morgan, M.D., Ph.D., used his Scholar award to study whether the stimulant modafinil could help reset the homeostatic sleep response – the inner clock that regulates sleep and wakefulness.

His Scholar award became the basis of an R01, allowing him to show that those who respond better to the medication abstain longer from using cocaine. Those who started treatment as inpatients, a setting that ensures both abstinence and a structured sleep schedule – had the highest rate of success. “There are no FDA-approved medications for the treatment of cocaine dependence, so we’re hoping that studies like this one will encourage people to start using it as a treatment,” he said.

Dr. Morgan conducts his research at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), one of the oldest community mental health centers in the country that is a collaboration between the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health & Addiction and the Yale University Department of Psychiatry. CMHC provides recovery-oriented mental health services for thousands of people in the New Haven area each year.

At CMHC, he also conducts research on insomnia in patients with chronic mental illness. He is testing a computer-based intervention that uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help improve sleep for these individuals. “Our clients may be on a number of medications that may affect sleep, so it’s an open question as to whether an intervention that doesn’t involve medication might help them sleep,” he said.

Without the initial award from YCCI, Dr. Morgan would have found it difficult to begin the patient-oriented research that is allowing him to help patients today. “I don’t know what I would have done without that support,” he said. “It really launched my career to start my own research.”

For more on Dr. Morgan, click here.

Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS

Associate Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases); Director, Equity Research and Innovation Center; Director, Center for Research Engagement; Core Faculty, National Clinician Scholars Program; Deputy Director of Health Equity Research and Workforce Development, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation; Director, Yale-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship
Photo by Robert A. Lisak

Growing up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a health professional shortage area, Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS, remembers countless stories of loved ones and members of her community who struggled with their health or died prematurely. That experience led her to pursue a career in medicine and conduct research that focuses on vulnerable populations and their interactions with healthcare systems.

Ever since her arrival at Yale as a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program (CSP), Dr. Nunez-Smith has been on a mission to develop ways of addressing health and healthcare inequities wherever they are found: in patient settings, in the healthcare workforce, and in medical education. As a 2006 YCCI Scholar, she gathered preliminary data for what is now known as PreDict (Patient-Reported Experiences of Discrimination in Care Tool). PreDict is a tool that assesses the patient care experience and measures hospital performance with the goal of improving the quality of care delivery. “The Scholar award was tremendously helpful because it allowed me to launch a line of inquiry that was new and then provided me with the resources to complete the preliminary work that allowed us to be competitive for major NIH grants,” she said.

Dr. Nunez-Smith went on to develop the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a collaborative multi-million dollar research study funded by the National Institute for Minority Health Disparities (NIMHD). ECHORN examines the risk factors and prevalence of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease in the Eastern Caribbean, a region for which such data are lacking.

Both ECHORN and PreDict – which has spurred several related projects undertaken by her mentees – are now incorporated into the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC), for which Dr. Nunez-Smith serves as director. ERIC builds on the local, national, and global experience of Dr. Nunez-Smith and 60 team members that are involved in research aimed at narrowing health and healthcare inequities, as well as disparities in the healthcare workforce and medical education.

As a former YCCI Scholar, Dr. Nunez-Smith appreciates the benefits of mentorship and serves as academic advisor to Yale School of Medicine students. She also continues her involvement with the CSP as a core faculty member of the Scholars Program and co-director of Community Research Initiatives. “I’m working towards synergy across all of these programs so they’re not siloed,” she said. “The idea is to think about core elements of knowledge for our faculty for population health and health equity and engage stakeholders in our work.”

For more on Dr. Nunez-Smith, click here.

Julie Womack, M.A., M.S.N., Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Yale School of Nursing

2012 YCCI Scholar

Most older adults who experience fragility fractures don’t typically have osteoporosis; most of the fractures they experience are the result of a fall. Most of the HIV infected patients that Julie Womack, M.A., M.S.N., Ph.D., works with are in their mid 50s or younger, yet this population also experiences fragility fractures.

This led her to study falls in HIV-infected patients at the Yale AIDS Program’s Nathan Smith Clinic and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. Her Scholar award allowed her to collect quantitative and qualitative data to explore risk factors and ways to prevent falls in these patients.

The award was especially helpful in allowing her to use natural language processing to identify falls in clinical progress notes and radiology reports and conduct patient interviews at the clinic for the qualitative analysis. She learned that interventions designed to prevent falls among the elderly may not translate to the HIV population because of population differences between the elderly, who have been the focus of most falls studies, and younger, HIV infected patients. For example, while antipsychotic use, and drug and alcohol use have not, thus far, been common in elderly populations, they are important concerns among HIV infected groups. She also found that the qualitative research she was able to conduct was a great opportunity to get input from patients regarding the issues they face. She is now starting to identify modifiable risk factors for falls, as well as interventions.

Combining informatics and qualitative analysis allowed Dr.Womack to achieve a balanced view of the problem at hand. Big data sets, particularly in clinical epidemiology, provide invaluable information, but don’t tell the whole story. “I think there’s a lot that you miss if you just look at the numbers,” she said.

As a Scholar, she was interested in learning about research being conducted by other Scholars at the Research in Progress meetings and appreciated being able to delve into her research in a new way. “I couldn’t have done my research without it,” she said.

For more on Dr. Womack, click here.


  • Deepa Camenga, MD, MHS, FAAP

    Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine; Associate Director of Pediatric Programs, Yale Program in Addiction Medicine

    Dr. Deepa Camenga is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Section of Research at Yale. She is a Physician-Scientist who is board certified in pediatrics and addiction medicine with expertise in adolescent addiction. Her research aims to improve the identification and treatment of substance use and substance use disorders among youth in pediatric settings. She is also the Associate Director for Pediatric Programs for the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. In this role, she is one of a very few clinicians in the state that prescribes medication treatment for adolescents with opioid use disorder. She also leads an innovative addiction medicine tele-consult service for local school-based health centers and treats adolescents and young adults at the APT Foundation. In 2017, Dr. Camenga was elected to serve on a national American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Use and Prevention, tasked with protecting and improving the health and well-being of children and adolescents throughout the country.Dr. Camenga completed her medical education and residency training at the University of Rochester, NY. Dr. Camenga completed a fellowship in health services research through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale.
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  • Sreeganga Chandra, PhD

    Associate Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience

    Sreeganga S. Chandra received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Purdue University. In her postdoctoral research, she pursued her interest in neuronal cell biology and neurodegeneration in the lab of Thomas C. Südhof at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience.
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  • Sandy Chang, MD, PhD, BS

    Yale College Associate Dean for Science & Quantitative Reasoning Education, Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Pathology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; Associate Director, Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory

    Dr. Chang graduated with a BS from Yale College in 1988, and obtained his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD from Rockefeller University in 1997. He completed residency in Clinical Pathology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and did his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ronald DePinho at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, before joining the faculty at Yale Medical School as a tenured Associate Professor in 2010. Dr. Chang's research interests focuses on how telomeres, protein/DNA structures at the ends of chromosomes, are properly maintained to protect chromosome ends from engaging a DNA damage response. Dr. Chang is the recipient of numerous awards, including those from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Ellsion Medical Foundation, the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Ellis Benson Award from the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists. He was elected into the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2009.Beginning in 2017, Dr. Chang is also the Associate Dean of Science Education and Quantitative Reasoning and Undergraduate Research at Yale College.
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  • Forrest W. Crawford, PhD

    Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Associate Professor of Management, and Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science; Co-director, Public Health Modeling Concentration

    Forrest Crawford's work focuses on mathematical and statistical problems related to discrete structures and stochastic processes in epidemiology, public health, biomedicine, and evolutionary science.
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  • Charles Dela Cruz, MD, PhD

    Associate Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Director, Center for Pulmonary Infection Research and Treatment (CPIRT)

    Dr. Dela Cruz completed his research training through an MD/PhD program in the area of immunology and virology from University of Toronto and Yale. Clinically, he is trained in internal medicine, and specializes in pulmonary and critical care medicine and is currently an Associate Professor at Yale University in the same department. He is also the founding director for the Center for Pulmonary Infection Research and Treatment (CPIRT). www.cpirt.yale.edu. His laboratory is interested in studying the role of respiratory infection in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic lung diseases. Specifically, his work focuses on how lung infection contribute to inflammation, injury and tissue repair in the lung. This has allowed the lab to carefully study the molecular and cellular responses of several novel mediators in the lung.His laboratory focuses on two main research programs. (1) Studying novel immune regulators in the lung during respiratory infections. (2) Studying the effects of cigarette smoke (CS) exposure in the pathogenesis of airway and lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) using preclinical genetic mouse models and human biosamples. The goal of the lab is also to be able to confirm and translate the findings using biospecimens from the established and establishing cohort of human patients with various lung diseases.COPD is a composite entity that includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is a leading cause of death in the world, and is a disease that is in need of new treatments. One of the goal of our laboratory is to investigate the interaction between CS and respiratory virus infection in the pathogenesis of COPD and identify novel therapeutic targets for this respiratory disease. It has been long thought that the frequent respiratory infections in COPD patients are due to their depressed immune function. Our studies have revealed that CS-exposed hosts have an over-exaggerated immune reaction to viral infections. Frequent acute COPD exacerbations correlate with increased rate of disease progression and more loss of lung function in COPD especially if it is due to viral infections. Our studies have shown that CS exposure has an impressive ability to regulate the innate immunity in the lung after influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection. CS enhances the inflammation, alveolar destruction and airway fibrosis caused by influenza virus and RSV. These effects are mediated by type I interferon and RIG-like helicase antiviral innate immune pathway. CS exposure also results in the induction of interleukin-15 in the setting of these respiratory infections. We hypothesize that these novel mechanistic pathways may explain the heightened inflammatory response and worsening lung functions in COPD patients with multiple virally-induced exacerbations, and the chronic lung inflammation seen in stable COPD patients. We have also translated our findings by studying these immune mediators in patients infected with various respiratory viruses and have thus far collected >300 human biosamples.YCCI Scholar 2011
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  • Leora Horwitz, MD, MHS
    Leora Horwitz, MD is a general internist who studied social science as an undergraduate and is now a clinician researcher focused on quality and safety in healthcare. In particular, she focuses on systems and practices intended to bridge gaps or discontinuities in care. She has studied shift-to-shift transfers among physicians and among nurses, transfers from the emergency department to inpatient units, and the transition from the hospital to home. She is currently adjunct faculty at Yale; her primary work is at NYU Langone Health, where she directs the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science and the division of healthcare delivery science in the Department of Population Health. Her current work is focused primarily on developing a learning health system through innovations in clinical delivery and in data capture and analysis.
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  • Joanne Iennaco, PhD, PMHNP (BC), APRN

    Professor, Clinical Track; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Psychiatric-Mental Health Specialty

    Joanne DeSanto Iennaco is an Associate Professor of Nursing and Psychiatry at Yale University, and Director of the Clinical Doctor of Nursing Practice program at Yale School of Nursing. Professor Iennaco holds a PhD in chronic disease epidemiology from Yale University’s School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the effects of aggression exposure on workers in inpatient psychiatric and hospital settings. Professor Iennaco is the US lead on the PERoPA-Study (Perceptions of Patient and Visitor Aggression in Healthcare Organizations), an international study of nursing managers in Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.   She was a clinical interventionist leading CBT for insomnia groups for Professor Nancy Redeker’s randomized controlled trial, the Heart Sleep Study, and she has worked with Yale’s Occupational and Environmental Medicine research team studying the effect of psychosocial aspects of the workplace on health. Professor Iennaco is a psychiatric nurse practitioner with dual certification as both a family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and an adult psychiatric mental health clinical nurse specialist. She was recently awarded the 2016 Nightingale Award for Excellence in Nursing. Professor Iennaco was a 2010-2012 Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) Scholar, her project was on the Effects of Aggression Exposure in Psychiatric Settings on Employee Health and Work Outcomes. She was also honored with the St. Joseph’s College Outstanding Faculty Award in 1999 and with a Faculty Service-learning Award in 1998 from the Maine Campus Compact. She is currently the President of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association New England Chapter, a member of the American Public Health Association, the European Violence in Psychiatry Research Group (EviPRG), the International Research Collaboration in Clinical Aggression (IRCCA), Sigma Theta Tau International, and the Society for Epidemiologic Research.  Professor Iennaco also serves as a Trustee of the Yale-China Association and on the Board of the Connecticut Health Policy Project. Research Interests/Clinical PracticeResearch InterestsDr. Iennaco’s current research focuses on workplace violence in healthcare settings, aggression measurement and the impact of aggression exposure on healthcare workers.  Her interests more broadly include psychiatric epidemiology and occupational mental health. Specific areas include depression, anxiety, stress, suicide, aggression and violence, and the interface between mental and physical health. Clinical PracticeProfessor Iennaco’s clinical work focuses on Young Adults and Adults with complex mental health needs. She works as an outpatient provider at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC).  In the past she has held management and staff roles in adult inpatient psychiatric, admissions, emergency department, day treatment and outpatient settings, and as a visiting mental health nurse. YCCI Scholar 2010Project: 07/01/10 - 06/30/12Effects of Aggression Exposure in Psychiatric Settings on Employee Health and Work Outcomes
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  • Manisha Juthani, MD

    Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases); Masters in Health Sciences Director in Infectious Diseases, Internal Medicine; Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists (FRCS), Co-Director, Internal Medicine; Internal Medicine Students Thesis, Co-Chair, Internal Medicine; Program Director, Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program, Internal Medicine; Associate Program Director for Career Development, Traditional Internal Medicine Residency Program, Internal Medicine; Director of Internal Medicine Fellowship Programs, Internal Medicine

    Dr. Juthani is an Infectious Diseases physician at Yale School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, attended Cornell University Medical College, completed residency training at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Campus, and was a Chief Resident at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She arrived at Yale School of Medicine in 2002 for Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training and joined the full-time faculty in 2006. She assumed the role of Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program Director in 2012. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been instrumental in leading the ID efforts at Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital. Her federally funded research has focused on infections in older adults, specifically urinary tract infections and pneumonia. Most notably, she was the Principal Investigator of an R01-funded research project that resulted in the 2016 JAMA publication entitled, “Effect of Cranberry Capsules on Bacteriuria Plus Pyuria Among Older Women in Nursing Homes: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” This publication received widespread attention in the lay press, including The New York Times and CNN to name a few, and achieved an Almetric Attention Score of 1546, placing it in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. In December 2016, The New Yorker identified this research as one of the most notable medical findings of 2016, and Dr. Juthani was interviewed and featured in the GeriPal and Gastropod podcasts. Additionally, in her parallel work with pneumonia prevention, she was the first author on the 2015 Clinical Infectious Diseases publication entitled, “A Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial of a Multicomponent Intervention Protocol for Pneumonia Prevention Among Nursing Home Elders.” In addition to her academic responsibilities, Dr. Juthani enjoys talking and writing about medical topics in the lay press. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been featured on CNN, WTNH, ABC's 20/20, CT Public Radio/NPR, BBC's News Hour, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and CGTN. Her written pieces have been featured in The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, and Next Avenue. Her most recent area of research interest is at the interface of infectious diseases and palliative care, specifically the role of antibiotics at the end of life. Additional areas of interest include antibiotic resistant organisms, the emergence and spread of resistant organisms, hospital epidemiology, and medical education.
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  • Nancy Kim, MD, PhD

    Senior Medical Director, Care Signature; Associate Clinical Professor, General Internal Medicine

    Dr. Kim is a Board-certified internist and hospitalist trained in health services research. She is the Senior Medical Director of Care Signature for the Yale-New Haven Health System. She has served in the past as the Associate Director of the Office of Student Research at the Yale School of Medicine and the Measure Lead for the CMS Episode of Care Payment Measures for Acute Myocardial Infarction, Heart Failure, Pneumonia, and primary elective hip/knee arthroplasty at Yale CORE.  In her role as the Senior Medical Director, she evaluates the impact of Care Signature clinical pathways on processes of care, clinical outcomes, and provider satisfaction in the hospital setting. With her extensive clinical experience, Dr. Kim has a unique “front line” perspective regarding the daily operations of a hospital. This clinical lens brings to her research an understanding of a hospital’s work environment, structure, and patient throughput which may otherwise be unobserved by traditional metrics.
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  • Grace Kong, PhD

    Associate Professor of Psychiatry

    Dr. Kong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology with Specialization in Child and Adolescent Psychology. Her research is focused on preventing youth tobacco use using a variety of methods, such as qualitative and quantitative strategies, including social media analytics to understand tobacco use and promotional trends to inform policies and to develop novel prevention/cessation interventions. She is also dedicated to preventing tobacco use among marginalized youth, such as youth from low-income and communities of color who may experience disproportionate levels of tobacco-related cancer and other illnesses due to tobacco use in the future. Dr. Kong has served as a Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on multiple NIH-funded studies, and she is committed to training the next generation of independent researchers to use social media to prevent tobacco use and other addictive behaviors to promote positive health behaviors.
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  • Kasia Lipska, MD, MHS, BS

    Associate Professor of Medicine; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

    Dr. Lipska is an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine and a Clinical Investigator at the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). Her research program seeks to better understand the balance of benefits and harms of glucose-lowering therapy in older adults with type 2 diabetes. Her current research projects are primarily focused on severe hypoglycemia. She is investigating trends in admissions for hypoglycemia among the elderly Medicare population; race, sex, and age disparities in these admissions; using qualitative research methods to explore reasons for hypoglycemia admissions; examining key risk factors for hypoglycemia; and developing prediction models for hypoglycemia. Based on these data, she seeks to develop and implement decision support tools to help clinicians and patients make better decisions about their care. Her overall goals are to generate data that patients and clinicians need—data which currently do not exist—so that they can make better, smarter treatment decisions.In addition, Dr. Lipska works at CORE on the development of ambulatory care quality measures for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). She is currently leading the development of an outcome measure of care quality among people with diabetes mellitus. YCCI Scholar 2013Project: 11/01/13 - 10/31/15Treatment-Related Determinants of SevereHypoglycemia in Type 2 Diabetes
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  • Karen Dorsey Sheares, MD, PhD

    Associate Research Scientist in Pediatrics (General Pediatrics); Director, CORE

    Karen D Sheares, MD, PhD is a Director at the Yale New Haven Hospital, Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) and an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale University . Dr. Sheares earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and medical degree at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed training in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian and matriculated to the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University. She subsequently earned a doctorate in Investigative Medicine from Yale University. Dr. Sheares began her research career focused on the relationship between obesity and physical activity in children before joining CORE in 2012. As a Director of the Quality Measurement Program at CORE, she oversees development and implementation of new measures with expertise in digital measures that use data from electronic health records. She also oversees CORE's Digital Transformation Strategy for federal projects and federal new business development.
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  • Frederick Shic, PhD

    Director, Technology and Innovation Laboratory (TIL); Co-Director, Yale Early Social Cognition Laboratory (YESCog)

    Frederick Shic, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. Dr. Shic's current research interests include applications of eye-tracking and neuroimaging techniques (e.g. near infrared spectroscopy and magnetic resonance spectroscopy) to the study of the social and cognitive development in infants, toddlers, and children with ASD, and the exploration of new technologies and methodologies for enriching both our understanding of ASD and the lives of children with ASD and their families. Prior to his appointment, Dr. Shic was an associate research scientist under Dr. Katarzyna Chawarska, director of the Infant and Toddlers Developmental Disabilities Clinic and the Yale Early Social Cognition Laboratory. Prior to this, Dr. Shic completed an NIMH T32 training program in childhood neuropsychiatric disorders led Drs. James Leckman and Elena Grigorenko. Dr. Shic received his doctorate in Computer Science from Yale University and an undergraduate degree in Engineering and Applied Sciences from the California Institute of Technology. During his graduate work, Dr. Shic developed computational and mathematical approaches for analyzing eye-tracking data, with a focus on what these techniques can tell us about the social and cognitive development of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Prior to this, Dr. Shic was software engineer at the Sony Interactive Studios of America, and, later, a researcher at the Huntington Medical Research Institutes, where he conducted research in 1H and 13C magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), developing techniques for quantifying and visualizing brain metabolism and neurochemistry.YCCI Scholar 2012Project: 07/01/12 - 06/30/14Teaching Prototypical Monitoring of Others and their Activities to Toddlers with ASD using Perceptual Augmentation and Gaze Contingent Technology
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  • Emily Wang, MD, MAS

    Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and of Public Health (Social and Behavioral Sciences); Director, SEICHE Center for Health and Justice

    Emily Wang is a professor in the Yale School of Medicine and directs the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. The SEICHE Center is a collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School working to stimulate community transformation by identifying the legal, policy, and practice levers that can improve the health of individuals and communities impacted by mass incarceration. She leads the Center's research program, the Health Justice Lab, which receives National Institutes of Health funding to investigate how incarceration influences chronic health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and opioid use disorder, and uses a participatory approach to study interventions which mitigate the impacts of incarceration. As an internist, she has cared for thousands of individuals with a history of incarceration and is co-founder of the Transitions Clinic Network, a consortium of 40 community health centers nationwide dedicated to caring for individuals recently released from correctional facilities by employing community health workers with histories of incarceration. Dr. Wang has served on the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine’s Health and Incarceration Workshop, Means of Violence Workshop, and the Steering Committee on Improving Collection of Indicators of Criminal Justice System Involvement in Population Health Data Programs. Her work been published in the Lancet, JAMA, American Journal of Public Health, and Health Affairs, and showcased in national outlets such as the New York Times, NPR, and CNN. Dr. Wang has an AB from Harvard University, an MD from Duke University, and a MAS from the University of California, San Francisco.
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