Two members of the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) faculty have been appointed to the Board of Advisers of the Vaccine Integrity Project, a new initiative launched by the University of Minnesota that provides trusted, science-based information on vaccines.
Dr. Jason L. Schwartz, PhD, associate professor of public health (health policy), and Dr. Anne Zink, MD, a lecturer and senior fellow in health policy, join a prestigious group on the project’s board. Other members include Dr. Bill Frist, MD, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader; Dr. Bruce Gellin, MD, former Senior Vice President and Chief of Global Public Health Strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation; Dr. Peggy Hamburg, MD, former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); Asa Hutchinson, former Arkansas Governor; and Sara Despres, former counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Dr. Schwartz’s research examines vaccines and vaccination policy, decision-making in medical regulation and public health policy, and the structure and function of scientific expert advice to government. His work focuses on the ways in which scientific evidence is interpreted, evaluated, and translated into regulation and policy in medicine and public health. He holds a secondary appointment in the Section of the History of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and is also affiliated with Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Dr. Schwartz's publications have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The American Journal of Public Health, BMJ, The Lancet, and Health Affairs. He is also an author of the chapter titled “Ethics” in Plotkin's Vaccines, the leading textbook of vaccine science and policy, and editor of Vaccination Ethics and Policy: An Introduction with Readings.
Dr. Zink is also affiliated with the YSPH Department of Health Policy and Management and is nationally recognized for implementing data-driven health care solutions and advocating for health improvements at local, tribal, territorial, state, and national levels.
From 2018 to 2024, she served as the Chief Medical Officer for the State of Alaska, where she led the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and achieved exceptional vaccination rates. Dr. Zink has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Policy Pioneer Award from the American College of Emergency Physicians.
At YSPH, Dr. Zink is a founder and co-director of PopHIVE, a new online platform that puts near-real-time, reliable health data directly into the hands of the public. PopHIVE (Population Health Information and Visualization Exchange) is free, easy to use, and designed to help people see and act on population health trends.