Scholars

Drew Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Public Health (Health Policy) in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS) at the Yale School of Public Health. He is a health economist whose research focuses on the evaluation of health and development programs in resource-poor and low- and middle-income country settings. In these settings, he studies the role of targeted subsidies to increase the future demand for goods associated with health benefits, the use of 'nudges' to improve health seeking behavior, and costing and cost-effectiveness analytic methods that address demand- and supply-side constraints. His work has typically focused on child growth and early childhood development, water sanitation and hygiene, HIV/AIDS, health in carceral settings, rural development and the quality of primary care. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Puget Sound, an MA in International Development from the American University School of International Service and a PhD in Health Policy from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.

Julie Flom, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology in the division of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy, Immunology & Sleep Medicine and specializes in treating children with allergic disorders and immunodeficiencies. Dr. Flom earned her medical degree at the New York University School of Medicine and her MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She completed her pediatric residency training and her allergy and immunology fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Flom’s clinical and research interests include understanding early life risk factors and underlying mechanisms for development of pediatric allergic diseases including food allergy, asthma, eczema, and environmental allergies, and applications to prevention and treatment of allergic disease.

Dr. Feder is an Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Nursing. Dr. Feder received her undergraduate degree in nursing from Florida State University and her Masters and Doctoral degree in Nursing from the Yale University School of Nursing. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University in 2019. Dr. Feder started her nurse practitioner career in 2010 working with a hospitalist service. She has been practicing as a palliative care nurse practitioner since 2013. She is an Advanced Certified Palliative and Hospice Nurse. Dr. Feder joined the Yale School of Nursing as an Assistant Professor in 2019.

Dr. Lu was trained in epidemiology and global health, with a particular focus on cardiovascular diseases. She obtained both of her ScD and MSc Degrees in Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. She works in the intersection of cardiovascular disease prevention, health equity, and digital health, using implementation science methods to resolve real-world issues. Her long-term goal is to improve care, outcomes, and equity of cardiovascular diseases by designing and implementing technology-based interventions. She successfully completed an NHLBI K12 career development award in implementation science. During this award, she harnessed electronic health records from the Yale New Haven Health System to identify patients with persistent hypertension and designing decision support systems to improve their care. Currently, Dr. Lu serves as the Principal Investigator for an NIH R01 grant, where she leverages real-world data from five electronic health record databases encompassing over 100 million US adults. The goal of this endeavor is to generate evidence that informs decisions regarding hypertension treatment escalation. In addition to her domestic contributions, Dr. Lu has engaged in groundbreaking collaborative projects between Yale University and the Chinese National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing. These include the Millions Persons Project that assembles remarkable population health and biomedical resources from 5 million individuals across China. Moreover, she has collaborated with the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) on global analyses examining the impact of risk factors on the worldwide burden of cardiovascular diseases. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including first author articles in leading journals such as The Lancet, JAMA, Circulation, and BMJ, and her work has been cited more than 40,000 times. Dr. Lu is the recipient of the 2022 John H. Laragh Research Award of the American Journal of Hypertension for her contribution to the field of hypertension.

Dr. Saria Hassan is an Instructor in General Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. She is core faculty at the Equity Research Innovation Center. She is certified in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and spent her early years as a Primary Care Physician for the under-served in New Haven, CT. She is now the Deputy Director of the Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine, where she hopes to continue her work with under-served populations by addressing the important issue of health disparities. Her research interest is in using implementation science and implementation science frameworks to design, implement and evaluate interventions to reduce cardiovascular risk disparities in the US and globally.Dr. Hassan is also the Director of the Pediatric Global Health Track for residents in the General Pediatrics department. Please visit the Pediatric Global Health Track website for more information.

Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Yale Pediatrics and Director of XRPeds, which focuses on the development and evaluation of videogame interventions using extended reality (virtual reality, augmented reality, etc) for health prevention and promotion, behavior change, and education in adolescents and young adults. She is currently involved in the development and testing of several health behavior change XR and game-based interventions and has published frequently on developing, evaluating, and implementing serious games. She has worked on games that have focused on topics including vaping/e-c-cigarette prevention, tobacco use prevention, risk reduction in adolescents, HIV/STI prevention, HIV/STI testing, empowering girls around healthy decision making, bystander intervention, LGBTQ bullying, school climate, and alcohol harm reduction.Dr. Hieftje was a K12 Scholar in the Yale Implementation Science program (YSIS), where she focused on understanding the factors associated with successful implementation of videogame interventions in schools. Dr. Hieftje is also the editor-in-chief at the Games for Health Journal.

Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes earned her PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences from Emory University. She also holds an AB in Sociology from Brown University and a SM in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Rhodes just completed a fellowship at the Centre for Chronic Disease Control in New Delhi under the mentorship of Dorairaj Prabhakaran, MD, DM, MSc and K. M. Venkat Narayan, MD, MSc, MBA. Her research focused on the appropriateness, feasibility, and sustainability of a worksite-based lifestyle intervention to address diabetes in India. Dr. Rhodes is interested in reducing health disparities by developing, testing, implementing and scaling up nutrition interventions and bridging the gap between research and practice. Previously, Ms. Rhodes was an ORISE Fellow in CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity where she managed a national initiative to support early care and education providers in adopting evidence-based practices to prevent early childhood obesity. Dr. Rhodes also has experience conducting research, writing knowledge summaries, and developing case studies to facilitate the translation of knowledge into global policy and practice through her work as a consultant for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health at WHO and the UN World Food Programme.