This year the Yale-Collaborative Action Project (Y-CAP) provided two awards to student teams representing the Yale School of Public Health and Yale College. The first award went to Kelly Hagadorn (PhD), Megha Nair (PhD), and Giselle Geering (BA). Team two included Paloma Carcamo (PhD), Elisabeth Nelson (PhD ‘27), and Juan Borrego (BA ‘26/MPH ’27).
The Y-CAP award enables scholarly endeavors for teams of Yale undergraduate and graduate students working in global health. Funded projects bring together students to address challenging problems affecting the health of disadvantaged populations globally.
“The Y-CAP award represents the best of what Yale can offer in global health – interdisciplinary student-led projects that are committed to ethical engagement with communities. I’m incredibly proud of this year’s awardees for their thoughtful and ambitious proposals, which tackle pressing public health challenges in low- and middle-income countries through collaborative action and deep local partnerships,” said Kaveh Khoshnood, PhD, MPH, Faculty Director, Yale Collaborative Action Project (Y-CAP) and Associate Professor, Yale School of Public Health.
This year’s student recipients are team members of labs led by Amy Bei, Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and Albert Ko, Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases). Hagadorn, Nair, and Geering will focus on evaluating novel tools to tackle a convergence of threats to malaria elimination in Senegal. Their project aims to develop innovative strategies to combat malaria, a disease that affects the most vulnerable populations. Carcamo, Nelson, and Borrego will focus on investigating barriers to successful Wolbachia introgression in Brazil. Their research will contribute to understanding disease transmission and control, with potential implications for global health initiatives.
Malaria remains a major public health challenge. Reaching the goal of malaria elimination demands the development and validation of novel tools and inherently requires multidisciplinary, global team approaches. Our project will test novel drugs and vaccine-induced monoclonal antibodies against circulating Plasmodium falciparum clinical isolates in Senegal to determine the antimalarial activity of these therapeutics. We are thankful for the research funding support from Y-CAP to complete this important, cutting edge field-based research in an endemic setting in Senegal, in collaboration with our Senegalese colleagues.
Team Kelly Hagadorn (PhD), Megha Nair (PhD), and Giselle Geering (BA)
Our Y-CAP project focuses on investigating several potential barriers to successful Wolbachia introgression in Brazil, including partial and complete Wolbachia curing, small-scale genetic structures in mosquito populations, and doses of released mosquitoes. Through the Y-CAP Fellowship, we have been able to travel to Brazil and work directly with colleagues and collaborators from Instituto Rene Rachou and World Mosquito Program Brazil to address these important research questions.
Team Paloma Carcamo (PhD), Elisabeth Nelson (PhD ‘27), and Juan Borrego (BA ‘26/MPH ’27)
The Maureen and Antoine Chiquet Fund for Global Health supports the Y-CAP.