Led by Eric Song, an associate research scientist and resident physician at the School of Medicine, the researchers found that injecting vaccines directly into the eyes of mice can activate an immune response, potentially protecting mice from brain infections caused by the herpes simplex virus. According to Song, their findings demonstrate that physicians could use the eye’s immune response to help fight bacteria and tumors. 

“We hear this phrase a lot: ‘the eye is like a window to the brain,’” Song told the News. “That’s kind of centered around this idea that the eye is central nervous system tissue, like the brain.” 

Song explained that when diseases affect the neurons, they are often observable in both the brain and the eye’s retina. His study demonstrated that immune reactions in the retina mirror those in the brain. His team discovered that stimulating the immune system in the retina can also protect the brain against diseases and tumors. 

“I think it’s important because this opens up a new anatomical avenue that hasn’t been described before,” Song said. “Our paper is the first to really show that there’s functional lymphatic vessels.” 

Song and his team primarily study “immune privilege,” a concept initially proposed in the 1940s which suggests that immune responses are significantly reduced in the brain and eyes. For a long time, the scientific community believed that these organs were immune-inactive, Song said. However, infections and autoimmune diseases still occur in these sites, which indicates that there is a present immune response distinct from other parts of the body. 

Song and his team previously discovered that the brain and eyes lack traditional lymphatic vessels, which help drain proteins and fluids. However, they identified that the membrane tissues surrounding these organs do contain lymphatic vessels, and physicians can manipulate these vessels to enhance immune responses.

The eye’s anterior and posterior compartments have different drainage systems to the lymph nodes, parts of the immune system that filter substances in the lymphatic fluid and contain white blood cells to help the body fight infections. 

In this study, Song and his team found that the posterior compartment drains through the optic nerve, which can be enhanced or inhibited to affect immune responses. Lymphatic vessels at the back of the eye and those surrounding the brain are interconnected and drain into the same lymph node, which facilitates a coordinated immune defense.  

They also discovered that blocking the lymphatic system’s communication in the optic nerve can reduce the immune system’s reaction to adeno-associated virus. This virus is often used in gene therapy, a technique that modifies a person’s gene to treat or cure a disease. 

They found that when the herpes vaccine is injected into the eye, it induces an immune response. By blocking this response, gene therapy could be more effective, as the vector viruses will not be attacked by the immune system, enabling the modification of genes. 

Ellen Foxman, a professor of immunobiology at the School of Medicine, noted that one of the initial FDA-approved gene therapies for a genetic eye disease had little effect because the body created an immune defense against the virus used to deliver the gene therapy. But now, Song and his team’s study offers a method to suppress this immune response, potentially enhancing gene therapy’s effectiveness. 

“It’s really exciting because there’s sort of a lore that the eye is an immunologically privileged site,” Foxman said. “It’s just that you don’t have any immune responses against things in the eye and the brain. But this challenges that dogma and says, ‘Well, let’s see, is that really true?’”

According to Akiko Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at the School of Medicine, certain individuals have mutations or deficiencies in gene expression that lead to eye diseases. But gene therapy can compensate for these missing genes and introduce them to the body via viral vectors. While previously these vectors were quickly eliminated from the eye, Song’s findings suggest that scientists could obstruct this draining and prevent an immune response that would typically flush out this vector. 

“It’s significant because [the study] has many clinical implications,” Iwasaki said. “Now that we understand this new lymphatic drainage system, and [Song] manipulated it to enable gene therapy more efficiently. Other drugs can also benefit from this new knowledge and strategy of either blocking or enhancing the posterior eye drainage.”

Iwasaki also said that Song’s technique could be leveraged to use for gene therapy in the eye. 

The discovery opens up new avenues for treating a variety of eye-related diseases. Currently, Song and his team are investigating how their findings could be useful for treating other diseases that affect the eye, such as glaucoma and macular edema. He said that he will continue to look at other features of the nervous system and if there are other barriers to allowing effective immune responses.

“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in order for anything to be translational,” Song said. “It should be our job and other labs to really focus down on specific diseases of the eye or the brain and see how this applies in those settings.”

Iwasaki also said scientists should conduct clinical trials to ensure the techniques are both effective and safe before applying their discoveries to human therapies. Nevertheless, Iwasaki said he is optimistic for its use in future clinical practice. 

“I suspect that translation of this finding is relatively straightforward,” Iwasaki said. 

The concept of gene therapy first arose in the 1960s. 

The post Yale researchers discover new immunological capabilities of the eye appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Tappe, who worked as an administrator at New York University before Yale, orchestrated the fraud scheme during her employment at NYU. She rerouted $3.5 million earmarked for university equity programs to two fictional shell companies. Using the companies, she stole over $660,000 to cover personal expenses, including an $80,000 swimming pool and over $500,000 in renovations to her home in Westport, Connecticut.

Tappe had previously been charged by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with one count of first-degree money laundering, one count of second-degree grand larceny, two counts first-degree offering a false instrument for filing and two counts of first-degree falsifying business records. In January 2023, the DA’s office said that she had pleaded not guilty to all four counts of the indictment. 

However, in late February, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced that Tappe pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree grand larceny.

According to a press release from the office, Tappe will be sentenced to five years’ probation, will sign a written waiver of her right to appeal and provide full restitution totaling $663,209.07 in advance of sentencing.

“Cindy Tappe shamelessly used her high-ranking position at NYU to steal more than $660,000 in state funds,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “Her actions … deprived student programs of key resources meant to aid children with special needs and young English Language Learners.”

Before coming to Yale, Tappe was the director of finance and administration for NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and Transformation of Schools. During her time in the position, she redirected money from a pool of $23 million in New York state funding. The funding was allocated to administer two state educational programs that help school districts improve results for English language learners and address disparities in special education.

The funding agreements require that a certain percentage of subcontractors on grant-related projects are awarded to minority- and women-owned business enterprises — or MWBE — to comply with New York state law, the statement said. At NYU, Tappe distributed over $3.5 million of the funding to three certified MWBE subcontractors to provide services related to the grants. 

However, none of the companies worked on the contracts. Instead, according to the district attorney’s office, they acted like “pass-throughs”: Each company took 3 to 6 percent of the invoiced amounts as overhead and sent the remaining $3.25 million to two shell companies she created: High Galaxy Inc. and PCM Group Inc. Tappe also drafted fictional invoices on company letterhead to justify the payments.

Although Tappe used some of the routed funds for NYU payments and employee reimbursements, she kept more than $660,000 for personal expenses, such as renovations to her Connecticut home that included an $80,000 swimming pool. 

“Ms. Tappe strongly regrets her misconduct,” wrote Deborah Colson, Tappe’s lawyer, in an email to the News. “She accepted responsibility for her wrongdoing in open court and will pay the restitution in full prior to sentencing. She looks forward to putting this case behind her.” 

Tappe was confronted by NYU leadership in 2018, before leaving the school. She was hired by Yale in 2019 as the School of Medicine’s operations director; following Tappe’s indictment, Yale initially placed her on leave and later fired her. 

“Yale University terminated Ms. Tappe’s employment after learning of the indictment,” University spokesperson Karen Peart wrote to the News. “Like all Yale employees, she underwent pre-employment screening, including reference and background checks.”

Bragg emphasized that Tappe’s schemes were harmful for the minority groups that grant funding was intended to support.

“Her fraudulent actions not only threatened to affect the quality of education for students with disabilities and multilingual students, but denied our city’s minority and women owned business enterprises a chance to fairly compete for funding,” Bragg said in a press release. 

Tappe was fired from Yale in 2023.

The post Former School of Medicine administrator pleads guilty to $3.5 million fraud scheme appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The alliance, known as CARE, is a joint partnership between the School of Public Health and Southern Connecticut State University that uses community-engaged research to help improve the health of low-income and marginalized communities. This is the second consecutive five-year grant from the CDC’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health program, which funds various initiatives that target health disparities across different racial groups. 

According to Alycia Santilli, the director of CARE at SCSU, the alliance hopes to use this new funding to expand access to healthier foods, support breast-feeding accommodations and strengthen transportation infrastructure.  

“In New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods — predominantly communities of color — we see wealth disparities that are staggering; 34 percent of residents live below the federal poverty threshold, compared to 26 percent across New Haven and 10 percent in [Connecticut],” Santilli wrote in an email to the News. “More than 30 percent of [households] in these neighborhoods experience food insecurity. Wealth disparities drive health disparities.” 

CARE directs multiple initiatives that address different health issues, including vaccine outreach, chronic disease prevention and health education in New Haven Public Schools. In 2019, CARE founded Supporting Wellness at Pantries, or SWAP, a health advocacy program that seeks to improve the community’s overall nutrition by increasing the selection of healthier food options at New Haven food pantries.  

Sofia Morales, a program manager of research and evaluation at CARE, said the program hopes to expand to 12 additional food pantries across the city.  

“If we really want to increase the access to healthy foods at food pantries, we need to change the system,” Morales said. “We need to work with the regional food bank and others at the policy level to make healthy food accessible so pantries can procure more nutritious options for community members.” 

The new grant will also allow CARE to form a working group to help identify and implement policy changes in the food access system. Morales said members of the working group will include food pantry workers, leaders from community-based organizations, representatives from regional food banks and those with lived expertise of food insecurity.  

Along with SWAP, CARE hopes to expand two other initiatives. The first is the ​“Support Breastfeeding Anytime, Anyplace” campaign, which seeks to provide more breastfeeding accommodations in community spaces. The second is the “Roots of Racial Inequities in Breastfeeding” program, which offers healthcare providers cultural competence training to target breastfeeding disparities among Black and Brown patients.  

Further, CARE hopes to reinforce its “Safe Routes For All” active transit plan, which, in collaboration with the New Haven government, seeks to expand the city’s walking, biking and transit infrastructure. The plan also is looking to promote road safety measures to make New Haven safer for walkers and bicyclists.  

Jackson Higginbottom, a program administrator for health and vaccine communications at CARE, pointed to how CARE listens to community members who have advocated for greater support for maternal care and road safety. 

“I really hope that as long as we are continuing to support and listen to our community, and our priorities are in alignment with theirs, we will have the impact that we are hoping for,” Higginbottom said. 

Morales emphasized that CARE prioritizes input from community members who have endured socioeconomic inequities to inform their approaches to current health disparities in New Haven.  

To expand its outreach and impact, CARE relies on the partnerships it has formed across different cities to help provide input on pertinent local issues, Santilli said.  

“This work should not ever be done in a vacuum,  but in close collaboration with folks on the ground who are deeply tied to — and experiencing — health inequities every day,” Santilli wrote to the News. 

CARE was founded in 2007 at the School of Public Health. 

The post Yale and SCSU community health program awarded grant to fight health inequities appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Iwasaki, an immunobiology professor at the School of Medicine, and Krumholz, a cardiology professor at the School of Medicine, founded the project in 2022. The LISTEN Initiative, which stands for Listen to Immune, Symptom and Treatment Experiences Now, works with patients enrolled in Hugo Health, a program founded by Krumholz that allows individuals to centralize their healthcare information — from their medical history to data from their personal wearables, like smartwatches.

Once patients with long-COVID symptoms consent to share their data with the LISTEN initiative, researchers analyze the data to identify common symptoms that are understudied in the medical community. At the same time, patients discuss their symptoms on Kindred, a network where patients and researchers can share their long-COVID stories.

“The LISTEN study created a community of what we call a kindred,” Mitsuaki Sawano, an associate research scientist on the LISTEN team, told the News. “[It] is kind of like a social media group itself.”

Sawano said that Kindred allows researchers to see live documentation of patient symptoms, or “monitored diaries,” where patients discuss with other patients and researchers to better describe their shared symptoms. Many experts have noted that long COVID presents differently in different patients, making treatment complicated.

For Sawano, this active communication is crucial for the LISTEN team. After highlighting common trends, Krumholz and Iwasaki host town halls with patients to discuss their findings and avenues for future research. 

According to Krumholz, LISTEN’s holistic approach — encompassing all patient data from personal wearable devices to medical history — gives researchers a fuller understanding of the patient’s health.

“A one-time office-based blood pressure is not as good as a daily blood pressure measurement that you could get from a patient’s wearable,” Krumholz said. 

For Krumholz, current methods of data collection pose a limitation to research studies. Many doctors struggle to understand the daily and long-term conditions of a patient’s health because they often obtain data during regularly scheduled visits.

Due to long COVID’s varied nature, the LISTEN initiative seeks to use more consistent data to learn how the disease manifests in different people.

“The major choke point is that we’re unable to do enough research studies fast enough to learn quickly enough about what works,” Krumholz said.

In addition to using quantitative healthcare data from patient profiles, the LISTEN study also conducts surveys to evaluate what patients are experiencing. Crucially, the surveys are created with patient symptoms in mind. 

If patients report a new symptom, Krumholz, Iwasaki and others can study its prevalence and mechanisms.

“Then, somebody may say to us, ‘one of the things we’re experiencing is not on any questionnaires,’” Krumholz said.

In fact, one of the LISTEN initiative’s key studies came from patients describing a symptom that was not widely recognized as a sign of long COVID.

Patients told the researchers that they were experiencing “internal tremors,” a symptom that wasn’t listed on any of their evaluative surveys or well-described in medical research.

“We found that the internal tremor is contributing to the loss of quality of life in the patient’s eye in a significant way,” Iwasaki said. “We know of patients who really took their lives because of internal tremors. It’s a debilitating condition.”

Krumholz added that patients also contributed to the research process by describing what alleviates or worsens the tremors. During subsequent town halls, researchers and patients discussed potential research directions to help find adequate treatment options.

Krumholz contrasted patients in the LISTEN initiative with those participating in other studies. Krumholz found that many patients, especially those with long COVID, feel that physicians dismiss their symptoms, suggesting that this could be due to the fundamental way physicians are trained. 

“Doctors are trained in pattern recognition,” Krumholz said. “When doctors are confronted with something that doesn’t fit the pattern that they’ve been taught about, then they often feel that it either doesn’t exist or they don’t know how to process it.”

According to Bornali Bhattacharjee, an associate research scientist who works in Iwasaki’s lab, the LISTEN initiative tries to combat these traditional medical biases by crowdsourcing patient experiences via Kindred and obtaining continuous patient data. The LISTEN researchers organize and highlight the severity of many unofficially-recognized symptoms. 

Bhattacharjee said that without widespread holistic data, many patient symptoms remain under-researched.

“In order to validate an actual symptom of something, there needs to be a mass categorization to prove that something is actually occurring,” Bhattacharjee said.

Still, Sawano and Krumholz both noted that the initiative’s biggest challenge is deciding where they should continue to pursue research.

“The interpretation of science still has subjectivity associated with it,” Krumholz said. “Science needs to drive [research], but you’re still trying to mediate different opinions about what the science means.”

However, they see this disagreement as a necessary process to better understand a patient’s health. 

“It’s a team effort, and it does involve a lot of going back and forth and communication,” Sawano said. “But I think that’s part of the process. And I think that’s going to improve science.”

Patients in the Kindred network who are 18 or older can participate in the LISTEN study

The post Diving into the LISTEN Initiative appeared first on Yale Daily News.

IVF is the most widely used type of assisted reproduction — methods used to help patients who struggle to conceive. For Molly McAdow, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the School of Medicine, it’s a procedure she sees frequently.

“I take care of many, many, many patients who have undergone IVF,” McAdow said. “Most families that use IVF use it because they want to have a family, they want to have children, and they are unable to do that spontaneously on their own. They choose to do that in order to have children that are more biologically related to them.”

The IVF process involves a combination of egg retrieval, fertilization in a lab and the eventual transfer of an embryo to the uterus. First, a patient usually takes medication to stimulate the ovaries to release eggs, which doctors can collect. These eggs are fertilized in a lab using sperm cells from a partner or a donor. These resulting embryos are cultured in the lab until they are ready to be implanted back into the patient’s uterus, where they develop into an infant.

According to McAdow, some families also opt for IVF when pregnancy poses a health risk due to medical conditions, such as polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis or autoimmune disorders. Through IVF, people with those conditions can create embryos that can be implanted into a surrogate’s womb that can carry the embryo until birth — safeguarding the patient’s health or preventing the worsening of their medical condition during pregnancy. 

IVF also offers the possibility to screen embryos for severe genetic disorders like Huntington’s disease, McAdow added, saying that it ensures that debilitating genetic diseases are not passed on to a young child.

Alabama’s contentious Supreme Court case stems back to December 2020, when a hospital patient wandered into a storage area — a “cryogenic nursery” — containing frozen embryos at a fertility clinic. The sub-zero temperatures, however, freeze-burned the patient’s hand, causing the patient to drop the embryos on the floor and kill them, according to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion.

Even though the parents had already conceived children through IVF, the IVF process typically produces more embryos than can be implanted into a patient’s uterus. The fertility clinic had cryopreserved those extra embryos so that if the parents would later decide to have another child, they would not have to repeat the long process of hormone therapy and surgery. 

After the resulting destruction of their embryos, the parents filed lawsuits against the clinic and the hospital. But at a trial court in Mobile, Alabama, the lawsuit alleging wrongful death under an Alabama statute was dismissed. The court ruled that in vitro embryos do not qualify as children or people under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a statute that allows parents of a deceased child to seek damages for their child’s death. 

After the plaintiffs appealed the decision, however, Alabama’s Supreme Court reversed the ruling. As a result, the Supreme Court decision extends legal recognition of personhood to in vitro embryos, as well.

“The central question … is whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children — that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the Court’s majority opinion. “Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children”

Mark Mercurio, the director of the Program of Biomedical Ethics at the School of Medicine, said he recognizes that many people believe that human rights begin at conception and consider embryos as human lives. 

“I see why someone might come to that conclusion,” Mercurio said. “I don’t personally agree with it.”

For several fertility experts, the News spoke with, the decision sounded alarm bells. For McAdow, the pressing concern for providers and patients isn’t the philosophical question of when life begins. Rather, she raised concerns about individuals’ ability to start families through IVF, when otherwise, they might be unable to conceive.

“I think this idea of life beginning at embryo when an egg is fertilized just isn’t the point to me,” she said. “This decision would really significantly hinder the ability of families who want to be loving parents to be able to have children. I disagree with the concept.”

Sandra Ann Carson, the section chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the School of Medicine who oversees the IVF program at the Yale Fertility Clinic, also raised concerns about the decision and its impact on how IVF clinics operate. The court’s decision to grant embryos the same rights as minor children, she said, might leave physicians and clinics liable for criminal charges in cases where embryos are lost or discarded. 

The ambiguity as to whether IVF physicians, clinics or parents would be held accountable for the embryo’s destruction raises a maze of legal questions for healthcare providers — and some have already reacted. In light of this recent ruling, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a major public health provider in Alabama, has paused IVF procedures. 

Carson said she is concerned that if IVF procedures are paused, physicians and clinics might not resume services due to legal uncertainties surrounding embryo management and responsibility in case of damage. She also said she believes that the precedent could leave patients in Alabama who need IVF without fertility options. 

“If those embryos are destroyed, that would be like destroying a minor child,” Carson said. “That’s why [clinics] have paused IVF because they don’t quite understand what that would mean in reality. I think it’s probably not a good idea for many reasons, the least of which is that women or couples who need in vitro fertilization are probably going to be put in a very difficult position.”

McAdow expressed concerns about the disparities of access for those seeking IVF. In particular, she noted that wealthier individuals are more able to afford out-of-state options, while poorer people may be stuck, she said. 

According to McAdow, the decision will especially affect women for whom pregnancy poses health risks and were considering using a surrogate. These patients might then seek surrogacy services outside their state. However, the disparity is exacerbated by the fact that many individuals don’t have the financial capability or access to surrogacy options elsewhere, McAdow said.

“Some of those people who have the most access to resources will be able to travel out of state and will find an alternative,” McAdow said.  “The more affluent and well-connected individuals in Alabama will be able to go elsewhere to grow their family.”

Both Carson and Mercurio questioned the legal implications of considering the embryos as children. 

“You could say everything from if you decide that fertilized eggs have the same rights as children, so can folks write them off on their taxes?” Mercurio asked. “Do they count as you determine congressional representation? I mean, do they count in the census? If they’re children, then they can’t be considered property.”

For Mercurio, this issue is a part of the broader U.S. “culture war.” He said that those advocating for fertilized eggs to have the same rights as born children will struggle to adapt their beliefs to the opinions of others. 

“If you have that belief, it’s going to be very hard to reconcile that with the way so many other people in society feel,” Mercurio said.

The first IVF birth occurred in 1978.

The post University scholars react to Alabama IVF ruling appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Released on Thursday, the HRL produced the report as part of the Conflict Observatory — a U.S. State Department-funded program that collects and analyzes evidence of atrocities using open-source data and satellite imagery.

The report identifies 223 instances of damage to power generation and transmission infrastructure over seven months in the past year. According to the research, the damage appears consistent with a “widespread and systematic effort to cripple vital power generation and transmission infrastructure across Ukraine.”

“The report is a critical first step toward accountability for Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure — attacks that have affected the lives of ordinary Ukrainians throughout the country,” Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and a contributor to the report, wrote to the News. “It sets out a roadmap for prosecutors, which they will be able to use as they build their cases.”

The Yale researchers focused on the period between Oct. 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, when Russian officials claimed that a wave of attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure was in retaliation for an explosion at the Kerch Bridge in Russian-occupied Crimea on Oct. 8, 2022. 

Damage to civilian energy infrastructure — which controls electricity and heating for Ukrainians — is particularly dangerous to civilians during Ukraine’s cold winter months, the report says. 

According to the report, the timing and location of the attacks, along with statements from Russian public officials, are consistent with a deliberate attempt to destroy power infrastructure across Ukraine. But the attacks that the HRL report documented are not concentrated in active military zones.

Instead, the attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure are spread across nearly all of Ukraine’s administrative regions, including in regions that are removed from the frontlines of combat. The report also determined that the Russian military had targeted power infrastructure beyond the extent needed to achieve a military advantage.

As a result, the researchers believe that Russian attacks may violate international humanitarian law, which requires combatants to take “all feasible precaution to minimize injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects,” the report says. 

The researchers also documented statements from Russian officials that described the attacks as political retaliation and intended to cause widespread civilian suffering, motives that might place the Russian attacks in violation of international law, including the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

“These statements, together with the aggregate data, indicate that Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power generation and transmission infrastructure may constitute deliberate targeting that is inconsistent with international humanitarian law,” the report said.

To obtain the data, HRL used what they describe as a “fusion methodology,” which combines open-source data analysis and high-resolution satellite imagery to document conflict-related damage to power generation and transmission infrastructure. 

These tools use artificial intelligence models to filter through large sets of data and flag imagery that might indicate damage.

To dig through large quantities of data, the researchers feed the AI approximate parameters for imagery — like that of tanks or an explosion — that they expect to find. Attaching these general characteristics to pinpoint a target, Raymond said, is a lot like describing a stolen bike to the police.  

“Say you had your bike stolen at Claire’s Corner Copia and had to do a police report to the police department,” Raymond said. “What make or model was it? What color was it? What are other attributes about the bike? That’s going to help us find it.” 

In the two years since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the HRL has produced reports that have documented alleged Russian war crimes and humanitarian atrocities in the public eye. Their research has been cited by over 4,000 media outlets, the United States House of Representatives, the U.S. Department of State and the International Criminal Court. The ICC has used their findings as the basis of prosecutions of senior Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Last February, Raymond and Kaveh Khoshnood, an associate professor of epidemiology and the faculty director of the HRL, authored a report that documented the systematic, forced transfer and deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia across a network of 43 re-education and adoption facilities. They presented their results, including that the Russian deportation network could constitute a violation of international human rights law, at a United Nations summit later that month. 

Since then, the HRL has documented the deportation of children to Belarus by the Lukashenka regime, has located detention facilities for Ukrainian civilians, assessed the destruction of Ukraine’s crop storage infrastructure and identified mass graves. Raymond’s team has documented damage to hospitals and schools, mapped torture and detention facilities and tracked the forced passportization of Ukrainians — mandating that civilians adopt Russian nationality —  in occupied areas.

Producing these reports, Raymond told the News, is a paradoxical experience. 

“If you do it right, you feel two things at once. One is an immense professional satisfaction on having achieved, hopefully the highest scientific standard of assessment of an incident or trend that can be done through these methods,” Raymond said. “The other feeling is the exact opposite: it is a mixture of horror at what happened and frustration, often about a lack of response to it.”

Raymond’s journey to the HRL began with firsthand experiences in disaster response. As an aid worker during Hurricane Katrina, he said he noticed a lack of remote data and communication networks for disaster response. The absence prompted him to begin developing fusion methodologies integrating open source and remote sensing data, just as the HRL used in Thursday’s report. 

By 2011, Raymond moved to Harvard University, where he directed the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Satellite Sentinel Project, a program backed by actor George Clooney that used satellite imagery to create an early warning system against mass atrocities in Sudan and South Sudan. The next year, he helped establish Harvard’s Signal Program on Human Security and Technology, which began developing ethical and technical standards digital atrocity monitoring.

Having been at Yale since 2018, Raymond leads the HRL’s efforts to navigate a deluge of data. His team of researchers includes linguists, imagery analysts and epidemiologists to parse information and identify monitoring objectives. Developing these methodologies, Raymond said, is like being a professional golfer.

“My job is to figure out: do we use the nine wood? A putter? A five iron? And on some holes, you may use multiple golf clubs,” Raymond said. “The ability to know how to select the clubs is as important as swinging, and that comes from the experience of having tried to get a lot of different types of targets in a lot of different ways.”

For Raymond, the objective of digital atrocity monitoring is not to replace witness testimony. Instead, by cross-corroborating sources and creating a “scientifically validated” record of events with high confidence, he said he hopes to elevate witness testimony of humanitarian atrocities. 

“I am deeply grateful for their science-informed approach to action,” Megan Ranney, Dean of Yale School of Public Health, wrote in an email to the News.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine started on Feb. 24, 2022.

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The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Initially established by physician-writer Abraham Verghese as a one-off event, the workshop has gained prominence within the School of Medicine for training new doctors across specialties to hone the craft of writing.

“We teach medicine as stories,” said Lisa Sanders, the co-director of the workshop and a professor at the School of Medicine. “It’s not like medicine is just science. It’s always about that intersection between human beings, sickness or death, and science. And if you just focus on the science, you’re missing a lot.”

The Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop is open to all medical residents at Yale’s internal medicine department and other fields, including psychiatry, surgery and emergency medicine. A few months before the workshop, residents submit a 1200 maximum creative or personal essay as part of their application, said Anna Reisman, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and the co-director of the program.

Selected participants bring those pieces to a two-day workshop where they refine and revise each others’ pieces. The residents also learn writing techniques under the guidance of the program directors, who themselves are physician-writers and creatives. Reisman is also co-director of the program for humanities in medicine, and Sanders created and authors the New York Times Magazine’s “Diagnosis” column — the inspiration for the television show House M.D.

At the end of the program, the writers read aloud their final pieces to students and faculty. Their essays are published in an online zine titled “Capsules.”

“The objective really is for us to teach the craft of writing,” said Reisman. “We teach residents who take part to learn some of the elements of writing, learn how to tell a story and learn how to write a personal essay. We talk about good verbs, writing with precision, all the basic craft lessons, and we spend time doing some writing exercises.”

This experience has proved integral for residents like Effie Johnson, a workshop participant and editor for “Capsules,” who felt tentative about her writing abilities as a medical student.

“I had a lot of impostor syndrome,” said Johnson. “The opportunity to just talk about writing, get feedback on my writing, and have the opportunity to grow is something that really attracted me. Writing is part of the way that we can solidify what is important to us, using it as motivation, especially those emotional experiences.”

Justin Dower, another resident who participated in the program, said he was also excited at the prospect of working with the workshop leaders and the other participants. Learning about the diversity of experiences that each of the new doctors wrote about, he added, was informative.

As a healthcare provider, Dower said he also believes that studying the medical humanities has improved his ability to connect with his patients.

“The humanities gives us a way to get better … by studying the experiences of writers in the past, writers in the present, learning from patients, and also other practitioners,” Dower said. “By reading what they have written, we can really get a better understanding of how to meet the people that we’re trying to serve and how to connect with them.”

The News interviewed several additional participants in the workshops, many of whom spoke about how the workshops helped them reflect on their experiences as physicians and healthcare providers. 

Morgan Goheen, an infectious diseases fellow in the School of Medicine’s division of infectious diseases who participated in the workshop, said she plans to spend most of her time as a physician-scientist in the lab. As an academic researcher, she said she hopes that improving her writing will allow her to communicate her research more effectively.

Writing has also been a tool to better connect and communicate with her patients, Goheen added. 

“It’s a way to express and appreciate what lies before me, whether it’s an individual patient or discussion of a global disease burden like malaria,” said Goheen. “Having the skills to notice and appreciate things that are affecting my day-to-day work has been an important part of letting me process and be better at working with people that are really different from me.”

Not every writer’s piece in the workshop centered around medicine. Caroline Raymond-King, for instance, wrote about her partner, their chickens and their dog.

“It’s hard in residency, but when you have a story to tell, it’s nice to have the skills to be able to write it,” Raymond-King said. “Writing really gives me the space and time to think about what I really care about.”

That space to reflect has been critical for some of the participants to reflect on challenging experiences they’ve encountered during their medical training, several told the News. In her piece for the workshop, Lara Rotter wrote about her experience treating a victim of domestic violence while still in medical school. 

Rotter said she believes that many people in the medical field harbor stigma around experiencing hardship during clinical practice. Doctors, she said, are often expected to remain emotionally unperturbed, even when encountering traumatic cases like domestic violence and abuse. 

“In medicine, we often fall into the trap of connecting professionalism with being unemotional and not encountering any difficult situations,” she said. “Often when difficult situations are encountered, we think this means we are too vulnerable or not perfect enough.” 

But through her writing, Rotter said she hopes to open up about doctors’ emotional and mental well-being as they navigate challenging patient experiences.

“We just really want to share stories to normalize things that are happening, that we all experience these things, and that we all have these difficult encounters with patients,” said Rotter.

For Matthew Morrison, an emergency medicine physician in New York City and a lecturer of medical humanities at Yale College, the quality of a physician’s writing might not even matter. Rather, he said he believes that having a creative outlet is a necessity for doctors.

“Doctors, who are occasionally ourselves human, need artistic and creative outlets for what we experience,” Morrison wrote in an email to the News. “The vast majority of us will write abominable poetry, and that is perfectly fine. But we need to remember that we are entitled to our experiences. Only a human — and not an algorithm, not a computer, not an LLM — can see the gestalt.”

The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop was established in 2003.

The post Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop celebrates 20th anniversary appeared first on Yale Daily News.

According to Alla Vash-Margita, a Ukrainian-American and a professor of gynecology at the School of Medicine, she and many of her colleagues were stunned by the war’s outbreak. Hoping to help, they initially began to donate money to international organizations like the Red Cross and Razom. 

“We couldn’t just sit and watch the news and cry,” Vash-Margita said. However, Vash-Margita and others didn’t know if their donations were making a substantial impact. They had little information on where their money was going and how it was being used. 

Within months, Vash-Margita and other physicians who attended these meetings founded Doctors United for Ukraine, or DU4U, which aims to provide health support to Ukrainians amid the war. Since 2022, DU4U has sent over $1.1 million of medical aid to doctors in Ukraine.

“Here at Yale, we decided to create an NGO that would operate on a smaller scale, but would identify needs in Ukraine from Ukrainian physicians that we are in direct contact with,” Vash-Margita, the Co-President and Director of DU4U, told the News. “And then we would try to match those needs.”

Vash-Margita said that the DU4U physicians have contacts in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city, and throughout the rest of the country. She herself contacted her medical school — Uzhgorod State University Medical School, located in Western Ukraine — and other physicians working in Ukraine closer to the front lines. 

For Vash–Margita, the DU4U physicians’ personal connections have helped create a network of hospitals and doctors, and they can identify the direct needs at specific hospitals. 

“There’s an advantage for most of us,” Vash-Margita said. “We speak Ukrainian or Russian if we need to. We can pick up the phone and call doctors in Ukraine, which we do all the time.” 

Rather than trying to provide supplies for the entirety of Ukraine, DU4U tries to fill in the gaps and provide supplementary resources to an existing network of physicians.

According to Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the School of Public Health, this is exactly what a country like Ukraine needs. He noted that because Ukraine already had a high standard of care prior to the full-scale invasion, it did not need a full overhaul of its healthcare system.

“In many cases, groups like Doctors Without Borders and World Health Organization offer to come in because there is no pre-existing health care system or that health care system has been fully destroyed,” Raymond said.

According to Andrey Zinchuk,  a professor at the School of Medicine and the vice president and director of DU4U, the nonprofit has three major branches, each with distinct goals. 

The first branch, Zinchuk said, seeks to supply targeted precision aid, which includes ventilators, breathing machines, heart valves and kidney devices. DU4U purchased these devices and coordinated their dispersal to various hospitals across Ukraine, including the five major regions of military hospitals. 

Vash-Margita noted that, in one instance, this division provided aid to maternity hospitals in Odessa, Ukraine. After hearing reports of women undergoing preterm labor due to stress and inadequate nutrition, DU4U purchased tocolytics, a type of drug that slows or suppresses preterm labor, and sent it to the maternity hospitals.

The second branch helps support mental health providers. For Raymond, it is difficult to transplant mental health workers into other areas, due to language barriers and cultural differences.

“You can bring in heart surgeons or burn specialists from anywhere, and they can operate in multiple contexts intraoperatively,” Raymond said. “However, bringing in outside mental health specialists often can cause more harm than good.” 

He also noted that many specialists aren’t properly trained to treat trauma-victims.

“Even if you have local capacity to be able to provide large scale mental health interventions, it does not mean that that local capacity is trained to do it with a population that is now conflict affected,” Raymond said.  

In response, DU4U has worked to train mental health providers in Ukraine on how to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  

In one instance, Shelley Amen and Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, both Yale psychiatrists who work at Veterans Affairs, traveled to Ukraine and conducted training sessions for Ukrainian psychologists and psychiatrists on how to treat PTSD.

Raymond said that DU4U also supported social works and psychologists through Christian Medical Association Ukraine to provide care for 200 displaced families. By working with existing humanitarian organizations, such as Unbroken and Superhumans, DU4U continues to help those impacted by the war.

“We trained 24 of the psychologists in Warsaw, Poland, a year ago, and then in the fall, we had a trip back again to Unbroken and Superhumans, where we trained psychologists in acute mental trauma and PTSD care,” Zinchuk said. 

The third and final branch  provides skills and exchanges ideas with Ukrainian physicians. 

In 2023, a sponsorship from the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies brought three Intensive Care Unit  doctors and three obstetrician gynecologists  to Yale to train for a month. Zinchuk said that D4U4 is planning on inviting ten more physicians to train at Yale this summer.   

Still, Zinchuk said that running the organization has not been easy. He noted that as the war has persisted, donations to DU4U have steadily decreased. 

“Initially, finances were not as much of an issue, because in the beginning of the war people were shocked and opened their resources to share with us, so, we were able to raise a lot of money very quickly,” Zinchuk said. “[However], as [the war] loses attention in the world, there’s a downtrend of donations. That’s probably been a key challenge for us.”

Nevertheless, Vash-Margita emphasized the importance of DU4U’s work and its overall impact. 

“We cannot save the entirety of Ukraine. We hope, we wish, we could,” Vash-Margita said. “But these small sorts of targeted projects allow us to fulfill their needs and our goals.”

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, 2022.

The post After two years, Doctors United for Ukraine continues its work appeared first on Yale Daily News.

But there’s one problem: Berger said she doesn’t actually remember much from the show. When she thinks back, she said that she blanks on the specifics, like the outfits, the dances and the speeches. 

“If I didn’t have the set list beforehand, I would’ve had no idea what she actually said,” Berger said. “In the moment, it was like having an out-of-body experience.”

Berger is not the only Swiftie to report lapses in memory during the singer’s performances, with many fans documenting mysterious memory gaps during shows on social media and in the press. But Nathan Carroll SPH ’24, a resident psychiatrist at Jersey Shore University Medical Center and a second-year student in the School of Public Health’s Executive Master of Public Health program, might have an answer. 

In a pre-published literature review titled “Here And Then Swiftly Gone: Taylor Swift-Induced Amnesia,” Carroll and a team of researchers investigated the scientific basis behind those reports of memory gaps among concertgoers. While Carroll’s report is not yet peer-reviewed and does not include real participants, it compares reported memory loss symptoms to existing scientific research on short-term amnesia.

Behind Swifties’ memory loss, the researchers believe, could be a type of amnesia linked to heightened emotion and excitement.

Carroll’s team focused specifically on post-concert amnesia associated with Swift’s Eras Tour, which debuted on March 17, 2023. Anticipation for the tour was palpable from the onset: Following Swift’s announcement that she was going on tour for the first time in five years, Ticketmaster’s website experienced unprecedented demand, leaving many fans unable to snag tickets in time.

Carroll recounted watching his fellow residents trying to secure tickets on Ticketmaster when the platform crashed. While they were eventually able to get tickets and attend the concert, Caroll said he noticed that they returned with gaps in their memory for portions of the concert.

“I remember trying so hard to remember everything because I spent a lot of money and a lot of time,” said Gabriela Mendoza Cueva SPH ’24. “I think I just had so much adrenaline from being hyped up that I don’t remember a lot of things.”

Swift fans’ loss of memory sparked Carroll’s interest. How was it possible, he recalled thinkimg at the time, that people could forget concerts they’d been so passionate about?

But that passion, Carroll and his colleagues now hypothesize, might be behind fans’ lapse in memory — a phenomenon that Carroll said he believes shares similarities with a condition called transient global amnesia, or TGA.

TGA is a type of short-term memory loss often triggered by highly emotional experiences, such as physical exertion, emotional stimulation, high-stress events and migraines. While the condition involves an inability to form new memories, it does not result in a loss of consciousness or self-awareness, and memory issues last for less than 24 hours. Individuals experiencing TGA may also encounter symptoms like disorientation around people and places, agitation and anxiety, and occasionally, headache, dizziness or nausea.

Though TGA has been well-documented in scientific research among older individuals between the ages of 50 and 80, post-event amnesia has not been as extensively studied in younger people, Carroll said — making the process of finding published literature on TGA in younger populations challenging. 

“The overlap between the Taylor Swift concertgoer population and the traditional population seen with TGA don’t share a tremendous number of characteristics,” he said. 

But Taylor Swift’s shows might fit the bill for an emotional, TGA-linked event. For fans, Carroll described the event as a “three-hour concert of non-stop excitement.”

During highly emotional or strenuous events, Carroll said, the body begins to release the stress hormone cortisol, a natural chemical that alters heart rate and blood pressure. Researchers believe that, in TGA, those changes in blood pressure affect the brain’s hippocampus, a portion of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory. 

“These fluctuations in blood pressure are thought to affect the ability of your brain to record episodic memory, giving rise to transient global amnesia,” Carroll said.

Carroll and his team note in their review that, given that the number of young people with TGA in scientific literature is small, it’s an important and unexplored area of research. And since TGA symptoms are temporary, many who experience it don’t report memory loss to health professionals.

“Since the memories do come back, a lot of people don’t seek treatment for it either, so it’s missed all the time,” he said.

However, not all researchers think that Carroll’s theory about Swifties’ amnesia and TGA answers the question.

According to Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, memory loss at concerts is not a brand-new phenomenon.

“I worry that we scientists try a little too hard to be current sometimes,” Corlett said. “I think the phenomenon itself is perhaps not so novel — people have been having extreme emotional responses to pop stars since Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” 

Corlett also questioned whether Swift fans were experiencing TGA at all since many typically didn’t end their night in a characteristic “fugue state” — where people become temporally or spatially disoriented. 

But that doesn’t diminish the impact that music can have on the brain, said Corlett.

“We remember music because it is a really potent combination of stimulus features that render it very memorable,” Corlett said. “It is characteristically structured like a story.” 

For concertgoers, Carroll and his team’s review recommends some prevention mechanisms to avoid amnesia, including staying hydrated, being mindful of breathing and excitement levels and avoiding recording the concert while watching.

Those recommendations resonated all too well with some Taylor Swift fans. 

A few months after Madelyn Dawson ’25 saw Swift’s Red Tour in 2013, she said she couldn’t remember any details. Dawson chalked up the lapse to the show’s overwhelming nature and competing mental priorities between experiencing and documenting the show.

“It’s hard to both live in the moment and experience shows while you’re there and also trying to have an archival collection of them,” she said. 

But for Shivesh Shourya SPH ’25, who went to an Eras Tour concert twice and saw the tour’s film, avoiding his phone helped him remember more of the performance. By the time he watched his second show, a new mindset improved how he remembered moments from the experience.

“I remember most of the concert simply because I wasn’t … trying to capture every moment on video and being more present,” said Shourya. “When I went to go see the Eras movie, I had great memory at that point.”

The Eras Tour set the record as the first tour to gross over one billion dollars. 

The post ‘Blank Space’ in memory? Researchers investigate Taylor Swift-induced amnesia appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Organized by its Committee on Canadian Studies, the MacMillan Center’s “Smoke from Canada” conference explored the aftermath of the fires earlier this month. The hybrid event included presentations from School of the Environment researchers and a keynote presentation delivered by guest speaker Pierre Minn, an anthropology professor at the University of Montreal.

“We conceived of our symposium in the aftermath of last summer’s wildfires in Canada and the ensuing smoke that blanketed much of the eastern United States,” Brendan Shanahan, MacMillan Center postdoctoral associate and panel moderator, wrote in an email to the News. “But as we saw with the wildfire smoke last summer, the effects of climate change in Canada are not confined within the country’s geographical boundaries.”

The interdisciplinary event invited School of the Environment researchers to speak about the relations between climate change, wildfire and public health.

Jennifer Marlon, a lecturer at the School of the Environment, addressed the ongoing gaps between wildfire impact and their perception. Even though the Canadian wildfires contributed to roughly 25 percent of global carbon emissions last year, she explained that recent work by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests growing but still largely inadequate responses from the public. Per Marlon, only 47 percent of Canadians and Americans believe that climate change would harm them personally.

Sebastian Block-Munguia, a research affiliate at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, discussed how wildfires can also initiate deadly ripples throughout the ecosystem, as their pollutant can be toxic to vegetation by inhibiting plant photosynthesis.

Beginning as early as March 2023, Canadian wildfires picked up during the summer months. Wildfire smoke drifted across America and brought days of hazy smoke throughout stretches of the Northeast and the Midwest. Farms across states hard-hit by the wildfire smoke reported slower-than-usual corn growth last year.

Researchers added that prolonged exposure to smoke comes with a steep toll on human health as well.

“The wildfire smoke is really a public health problem,” Kai Chen, a professor at the School of Public Health, said at the event. “We need government policies to help regulate and help reduce the air pollution.” 

Chen, who studies the impacts of climate change on human health, explained that wildfire smoke is rich in fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5. These 2.5 micrometer-sized particles — ranging between 1/20 and 1/30 the diameter of a human hair — can have deadly effects on the nervous system and lungs, he said. Chen added that previous studies have linked PM 2.5 exposure to diseases such as asthma, lung cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

While long-term health assessments have to follow subjects for years and decades after the wildfires, Chen said that preliminary work is already revealing high costs to public health. Research Chen conducted in collaboration with Columbia University — which has access to records of New York City’s near real-time emergency system asthma visits — detected a 44-percent increase in asthma syndrome visits across all age groups during the days when smoke blanketed the city.

“Climate change is making forest fires worse by extending the length of the fire season, making the weather warmer and drier,” Block-Munguia said. “But also, fires contribute to climate change.” 

Per Block-Munguia, fires kickstart a vicious cycle: they release significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which compounds global warming effects and contributes to drier, less predictable weather conditions. Plants — which rely on CO2 for photosynthesis — could also grow in excesses due to this increase in CO2 release, making them more vulnerable to catching fire.

Even so, he added that fossil fuels remain the overwhelming contributor to PM 2.5 exposure, and enable some of the climate change-related effects responsible for last year’s wildfires. In 2019, PM 2.5 was responsible for 4.1 million global deaths — roughly 1 million of which were caused by fossil fuel combustion, according to Block-Munguia. By comparison, that smoke was responsible for 0.2 million deaths, Block-Munguia said.

Despite its forest growth and natural resources, Canada has been lagging behind peer nations in climate mitigation efforts, Block-Munguia added. He cited recent reports that revealed chronically underreported CO2 emissions from the nation’s oil centers.

According to the panelists, last year’s El Niño cycle likely compounded the scale of the Canadian wildfires. El Niño, during which a warm Pacific Ocean shifts the flow of jet streams, often leads to drier, hotter weather across the Pacific Northwest — perfect conditions for a wildfire, Marlon said. Marlon added that Canada might not expect fires of last year’s size for at least another five to seven years.
Roughly 7,300 forest fires burn through Canada each year.

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