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.

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.

The daycare center currently operates out of two locations, each located around 10 minutes away from the other by car. Both provide childcare services to employees of the Yale New Haven Hospital, though the daycare located at 110 Davenport St. is larger and operates with greater child enrollment.

On Feb. 13, however, families enrolled at the Yale New Haven Hospital Day Care Center received an email announcing that the Davenport Street location would be closing permanently on June 28, 2024. 

At a Feb. 15 town hall meeting for parents, YNHH administrators informed parents that the remaining YNHH daycare center, on 501 George St., would not have the capacity to include all children currently enrolled at the Davenport Street facility.

“We recognize that there will not be a spot for everyone,” said Melissa Turner, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at YNHH, during the town hall. 

YNHH did not immediately respond to the News’s request for comment on Sunday afternoon.

The closure is occurring amid record losses for the hospital system during the COVID-19 pandemic: for the fiscal year 2023, the Yale New Haven Health system budgeted for a $250 million deficit.

As a cost-saving measure, administrators plan to outsource daycare operations to Bright Horizons, a national organization that provides childcare services, YNHH leaders announced to parents in January. The shift has sparked concern among parents about prospective tuition hikes at the YNHH daycare, which previously cost far less than local comparable daycare facilities due to YNHH subsidies. 

The prospective partnership with Bright Horizons has also prompted alarm about daycare educators’ futures at the center. During a staff meeting with daycare educators, Turner and other YNHH administrators announced that current daycare employees would have to be rehired for their current positions. 

At the town hall, administrators at the YNHH Daycare Center and Bright Horizons attempted to address some of the parents’ concerns about the consolidation of the daycare centers and the new YNHH-Bright Horizons partnership.

Turner reassured parents that YNHH’s partnership does not indicate that the hospital is “selling our daycare and daycare services.”

She also clarified that all teaching staff in good standing would be offered employment at the George Street daycare center. There would be no application and interview, she added — “simply a background check.”

However, Turner announced that there would be limited capacity at the consolidated daycare location, meaning that not every family could be promised a spot.

Parents will be required to complete a “Needs Assessment Survey,” which daycare administrators will use to determine which families will receive spots at the consolidated center. The survey will also be used to determine new hours of operation and tuition rates. 

“No surprise to all of you, we had a pretty substantial subsidy in place up to this point,” said Jodie Boldrighini, the vice president of human resources at YNHH. “We first need to understand the needs assessment and understand the volume of children and teachers at the center and do a market assessment of where rates are.”

The News was able to acquire the survey from parents. Other than family information and demographics, the survey includes two questions. The first asks whether the children currently enrolled at the center are interested in staying, have plans to leave or would be graduating in the fall. The form then asks for “hours needed” from families. It does not include any questions or information about tuition rates. 

The closure and re-assessment process has generated new frustration among parents at the center. Deborah Greig, an educator in New Haven who has two children at the daycare, believes that the daycare consolidation process has broken old promises of a guaranteed spot until they reach the age for kindergarten.

She chose the YNHH Daycare Center in part because it is one of the few facilities that allows children to stay until they are 5 years old without switching locations, she said.

“It is something we intentionally looked for, we want them to feel comfortable at a place,” said Greig. 

Because her child is at a specific age threshold that some childcare systems do not support, the YNHH Daycare Center may be Greig’s only option, she added. 

“I was talking to some daycare places and they said ‘He’s 2 years and 7 months old in August, and he needs to be 2.8,” Greig said “So we just can’t have a spot for him in our Pre-K because he doesn’t make the cut off.’”

Meanwhile, public preschools are not an option for Greig’s family because the cutoff is even higher, at 3 years of age. In addition, most public preschools end at 3 p.m. and do not provide after-school care until she finishes her workday. 

Another daycare parent, a YNHH medical staff administrator who requested anonymity from the News over concerns of employer retribution, described concerns over the consolidation’s impact on her daughter’s sense of emotional stability.

After moving to New Haven two years ago with her daughter, the employee tried other daycare locations where her daughter experienced “a lot of behavioral and emotional difficulties adjusting.” 

However, her child had a smooth transition to the Davenport location of the daycare, she said. The center was also conveniently located for her. 

“I don’t have to worry about finding a place that opens before I go to work,” the employee said. “I don’t have to worry about getting to work on time. The commute is just very seamless.” 

Her biggest fear is that her daughter will not be able to transition into a new environment. 

“I am worried that she would relive the emotional changes or behavior changes just due to the changes of people, routine, or how this other center may run their operations,” she added.

The parents also expressed skepticism about the continued affordability of the daycare center. 

One of the other parents of a child at the YNHH daycare center is an employee at a Bright Horizons center in Connecticut, she said. 

However, because he couldn’t afford Bright Horizons tuition, he opted to send his daughter to the cheaper YNHH center instead.

The current closest Bright Horizons daycare center is located at Yale West Campus at 230 West Campus Dr. in Orange.

The post Davenport Street daycare center closes, YNHH begins transition of operations to Bright Horizons management appeared first on Yale Daily News.

At two separate campuses, the YNHH Day Care Center serves over 100 children from 3 months to 5 years of age. The center operates from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., accommodating hospital workers’ demanding schedules. While all members of the New Haven community can enroll children in the daycare, priority is given to workers at the Yale hospitals and the medical school community. 

“Being able to feel safe leaving my kids somewhere was really powerful,” Feldman-Reich said. “And I always felt comfortable leaving my kids.” 

But on Jan. 18, citing high costs, YNHH leadership told daycare parents over a Zoom call that the center would enter a partnership with Bright Horizons, a national organization that provides childcare services. They offered little information to parents about what that transition would mean for their children. 

Without advance warning, daycare educators were told to reapply for their current positions. In response, many employees have since left, leaving the center short-staffed and at risk of state closure. 

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Connecticut has the fifth-highest infant care cost in America. The News spoke with 12 parents whose children attend the daycare, seven of whom requested anonymity over concerns of employer retribution. They noted that the center, which is subsidized by YNHH, costs half of what other local comparable daycares charge. The center also offers a large discount for families who are looking to enroll another child. 

Feldman-Reich is a special education teacher at a therapeutic day school in Connecticut and is married to a YNHH employee. For her, the YNHH daycare’s low costs are critical.  

“The daycare is the only reason I’m gainfully employed,” Feldman-Reich said. “The other daycares cost my salary.”

The parents also highlighted the daycare educators’ decades of experience: Many of the educators started their careers at the daycare and are now reaching the age of retirement, still working at the YNHH facility.

Now, with the daycare’s educators forced to reapply for their own positions, their future at the facility may be in jeopardy, parents noted.

Cutting costs

On Jan. 18, 2024, Jodie Boldrighini, the vice president of human resources at YNHH, alongside other hospital leaders, held YNHH’s first parent advisory meeting of the year. Like many other parents, Jon West ’20 DRA, whose daughter is enrolled at the daycare, skipped the regularly scheduled meeting, assuming it wasn’t important. 

“It was just seen as the regular kind of parents advisory meeting that happens every month. The agenda items were vague enough that almost no one got on the call,” West said.

Parents who did log on were faced with a surprising announcement. 

The News spoke with a medical researcher at YNHH with children in the daycare who attended the call. She said that Boldrighini told them that the hospital was losing money on the daycare and had been looking for ways to cut costs. As a result, she recalled, Boldrighini announced that the hospital had zeroed in on no longer managing the daycare.

After large losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Yale New Haven Health system budgeted for a $250 million deficit for fiscal year 2023.

According to Deborah Greig, an educator in New Haven who has two children at the daycare, the YNHH program was never meant to be a profitable business, but rather “a benefit for the healthcare community at Yale.” 

During the meeting, Boldrighini and others revealed that multiple outside vendors had been given tours of the daycare throughout late 2023, without informing parents. YNHH leadership ultimately decided that the facility would enter into a new “partnership” with Bright Horizons. 

Though parents in attendance asked for more details, the attendees said that Boldrighini was unclear and did not elaborate on the consequences of the partnership’s implications. 

Parents then asked Boldrighini and others to host a town hall before the process was finalized, though Boldrighini said that she plans to wait to organize the town hall until they had more information. Greig said this lack of a public forum would “give them no voice in this process.” 

On Jan. 22, 95 parents signed and wrote an open letter to YNHH leadership, the Board of Trustees, Human Resources and daycare leadership requesting immediate transparency about how the transition would impact current parents, children and employees at the daycare. The letter also called for administrators to outline a plan to retain current staff members.

In the letter, parents also re-emphasized their request for a town hall, specifically with YNHH leaders Jodie Boldrighini and Melissa Turner, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at YNHH. 

In response, on Jan. 24, Turner sent an email to the daycare parents. In the email, which was shared with the News, she reiterated that YNHH had not yet solidified its plans for the partnership and said that they would host future forums during which they would share updates about the transition when plans are complete. 

“YNHH is not selling its daycare business. We are, however, pursuing a strategic partnership with Bright Horizons,” Turner wrote. 

YNHH declined to comment to the News’ request for comment in time for publication.

“A big surprise”

On the same day, Boldrighini and Turner organized a staff meeting with daycare educators, during which they informed them that they would have to be reinterviewed and then reapply for their current positions. 

During the rehiring process, Boldrighini and Turner said, the staff members would lose their YNHH benefits and paid time off and were further advised to “prepare their resumes.” 

The News spoke with a current daycare educator who has worked at the center for more than two decades. She says that during her career working with YNHH in the daycare industry, she had never encountered a similar situation.

“I’ve never had problems like this, it took us for a big surprise. Still, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

The educator, who has worked in daycares since she was 14 years old, shared sentiments similar to those of many affected parents. She told the News that she was frustrated by YNHH’s lack of transparency to employees who have devoted their careers to the Center. 

“I do it because I love kids — that’s my passion,” she said. “I could care less if they said that I’d get paid $25 an hour or get paid $10 an hour or whatever the case may be. But what I’m not okay with is that we’ve been in there for so long and for us to reapply. Why would I do my resume all over?” 

Boldrighini and Turner also instructed the daycare educators not to discuss the new “partnership” with parents. According to multiple parents and staff members, YNHH leadership threatened to fire daycare educators if they discussed the development with parents.

The next day, on Jan. 25, daycare parents wrote another letter, obtained by the News, to the YNHH administration, which stated that their concerns for daycare staff retention and their wellbeing had been dismissed. The letter argued that if staff members continued to leave, the daycare could be forced to shut down. 

Connecticut state law requires daycares to have a minimum of one educator for every 10 preschool-aged children, and one educator for every four children under age 3.  

“The daycare staff’s lack of confidence in their ability to maintain their jobs and benefits has a direct and immediate impact on our childcare and our roles as employees of this organization,” the letter stated. “There have already been multiple teachers who have left, including two from George Street just this past week. If this trend continues the daycare is in jeopardy of closing due to inability to meet government mandated ratios.” 

Greig, like many other parents who spoke with the News, said that her biggest fear was that one day, the daycare would call parents to pick up their children because the facility had dipped below the state-mandated ratios. 

Greig’s fears were not unfounded. On Feb. 7, center leaders gave parents flyers informing them that some of the daycare’s infant rooms would be combined. West told the News that each classroom previously had three teachers for every six to seven kids. Now, there are two to three teachers for every eight kids. 

Parents also described how the facility’s receptionist and the daycare supervisors were also taking on educator roles to meet the state educator-to-student threshold. Another parent, a YNHH employee who requested anonymity due to concerns about retaliation from YNHH, also said their child was unable to move up to the next age group because the daycare faced a shortage of educators for older kids. 

The developments were a surprising twist for West, who said that the center’s low student-to-teacher ratio was one of the main reasons why he and his family chose YNHH as their daycare provider. 

“Where does that leave me?”

Amid this uncertainty, many parents emphasized the need for stability and shared that the closing could have severe consequences for their livelihoods.

“If one of us has to take a step back from work in order to care for our child, it will be me, just because I make less money,” said a nurse practitioner at the hospital, whom the News granted anonymity also due to concerns of employer retaliation.  

Alongside other parents, Feld-Reichman contended that the Center’s closing would disproportionately affect women, who may have to take leaves of absence to care for their children. Most educators who have been long-term employees at the center are also women of color. 

If the YNHH facility were to shut down, parents highlighted that most local daycares have waitlists over a year long, leaving them with no alternative for childcare.

“I’ve called a couple of daycares in our area, and they kind of laughed at me,” said a healthcare practitioner at YNHH. “I was told that my child could be put on a waitlist for August. So where does that leave me? And my ability to continue to work for Yale New Haven Hospital?”

Parents also noted that Turner and Boldrighini have yet to host a town hall, despite parents’ continued requests. Instead, Turner has called individual parents to reassure them that — contrary to what educators have been repeatedly told  — they would keep their benefits during the transition to the Bright Horizons partnership. 

On Jan. 31, parents of the daycare started a Change.org petition demanding transparency from YNHH leaders. 

As of Feb. 11, the petition has 493 signatures. 

Erin Hu contributed reporting.

Correction, Feb. 12: This article previously noted that staff members were told they would lose “Yale benefits” — however, this should have said “YNHH benefits” as YNHH is a separate entity from the University. This article has been updated accordingly.

The post Parents alarmed by YNHH daycare transition plans, staffing shortages appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Led by biomedical engineering professor Mark Saltzman and radiology professor Ranjit Bindra, the team first administered mice with medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that predominantly affects children. Then, they developed and used drug-carrying nanoparticles to deliver treatment over a sustained period of time. The study showed that mice who received this treatment lived significantly longer than mice who received traditional brain cancer treatment. 

“This treatment is a way to directly target tumor cells in the central nervous system (CNS) with the potential to minimize toxic therapies, like radiation therapy to the CNS, as well as high doses of systemically administered chemotherapies,” Bindra told the News.

Medulloblastoma often begins with a tumor deep inside the brain and spreads along two protective membranes, known as the leptomeninges. While they are located throughout the central nervous system, leptomeninges are most prominent on the surface of the brain and in the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF. Because there are no other organs in the CSF, cancer cells can spread freely and rapidly throughout the CNS.  

Beyond its fast nature, medulloblastoma is also particularly difficult to treat. This is because the CNS in humans circulates the CSF roughly four times a day, often flushing away drugs before they have had a chance to accumulate and have any effect. 

“The central nervous system presents a compelling drug delivery problem that has yet to be fully cracked,” said Minsoo Khang, lead author of the study and a former graduate student in Saltzman’s lab. “As a field, we have a small arsenal of small molecule drugs that we know are brain-penetrant to some degree. However, many newer modalities face significant delivery limitations, hinting at the potential for substantial enhancements in drug efficacy through improved delivery methods.”

Khang explained that for many drugs that target the brain, often only small quantities reach targeted sites. 

Bindra first thought of the idea of using nanoparticle technology to address this problem while treating his pediatric patients. Most patients with medulloblastoma undergo a treatment called cranial spinal radiation, which delivers radiation to the entire CNS system, even though the tumor is often localized. 

“I was thinking more and more that it just seems wild that we give whole CNS radiation to the brain and the spine just to get to the CSF,” Bindra said. “It’s a lot of dose to the small children. So that inspired me to give Dr. Saltzman a call and say, ‘Is there some way that we could inject drug-encapsulated nanoparticles that could allow us to use much lower radiation doses or maybe even no radiation to that kind of spinal access and keep our focus on the CSF?’”

Dr. Bindra believes that this treatment can be expanded to other types of cancer. Though medulloblastoma is a rare type of cancer, he said that this treatment’s direct delivery into the CSF has potential to be applied to other types of cancers, too. While the treatment currently targets primary tumors, he believes that this treatment has the potential to target secondary tumors — tumors that have traveled from other parts of the body to the brain — too.  

Still, the team must face many challenges before reaching the clinical trial stage. Unlike oral drugs, which must go through a simpler approval process involving pharmaceutical sponsors and patient testing, Bindra said there are many technically challenging aspects of administering this treatment in nanoparticles. 

Now, the team is working to develop the treatment in a biotech start-up setting, since there has been little research on using nanoparticles for direct drug delivery in the CSF. 

Bindra and Saltzman have each “started a few companies,” according to Bindra, and the pair is “pretty excited about the prospect” of a new start-up. 

Saltzman echoed Bindra’s sentiment, sharing that his ultimate goal is to personalize cancer drug treatment. 

“I am most excited that we could get to the point where every person with cancer is treated as an individual — truly personalized medicine — where treatment is matched to the tumor, and the treatment is administered in a way that only the tumor cells are exposed to the therapy,” Saltzman told the News.“In some cases, we are not so far away from that potential, but making it available for every person with cancer is my dream.”

This research is a collaboration between the Yale Biomedical Engineering program and the Yale Cancer Center’s Department of Radiation Oncology.

The post Yale biomedical engineers develop nanoparticle brain cancer treatment appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Fellowship Grant is awarded to early-career scientists and engineers with funding and support to pursue innovative and high-impact research in their respective fields. Each year, 20 fellows are selected to receive individual grants of $875,000, distributed over five years. 

Liu’s research focuses on creating thin-film semiconductors and optoelectronic materials — which can detect light and convert it into energy — for applications in energy harvesting, communication and information technologies.

“We can explore new ways to capture, convert and store energy from renewable energy sources,” Liu said. 

Liu’s research group is also developing new materials and device concepts to increase the energy conversion efficiency, which is the measure of how effectively a device can convert one form of energy into another.

A device that has a high conversion efficiency can convert more of the input energy into the desired form of output energy. Lower efficiency implies that the device wastes more energy as heat, noise or other forms of energy that the device can’t use.

“There still exists a knowledge gap in understanding the mechanisms behind the conversion of one form of energy into another.” Liu adds, “With these insights, we are able to engineer innovative materials and conceive novel device concepts.” 

Understanding the mechanisms of converting one form of energy into another would help develop more energy-efficient devices, Liu said. Ultimately, she hopes to create more efficient “actual devices,” a term that refers to physical gadgets, machines or tools that derive energy from sources like solar panels and batteries. 

Liu is a member of Yale’s Energy Sciences Institute and is the second person in the institute to become a Packard Fellow. The Energy Sciences Institute is directed by Gary Brudvig, a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

“The Institute is focused on basic research aimed at alternative energy, and of course, the goal is to be able to transition from fossil fuels to renewables and carbon neutral or carbon free energy sources,” Brudvig said. “In order to do that we need to develop new devices, new processes, new chemistry and physics.” 

The Institute is made up of 14 lead researchers from six different physical sciences departments all working in the same open space, creating an interactive, interdisciplinary and collaborative environment, Brudvig said. 

The setup is different from that of most universities, he added, where departments are “fairly siloed” and located in different buildings.

“Energy is, of course, a huge problem and it requires many different approaches and disciplines.” Brudvig continued, “In order to really make important progress in this, it’s important for people with different expertise to collaborate. So that’s made much more facile when having a space where everybody is in the same area working together.” 

Liu believes that the Packard Grant would give her more freedom to explore intersections in different fields. She is also excited to create cutting edge techniques with the freedom to be more experimental with her methods — all while collaborating with more of her colleagues in the Energy Sciences Institute. 

“The support from Packard Fellowship provides us more flexibility,” Liu said. “This will allow us to delve into more challenging research areas and also initiate new collaborations.”

Liu also plans to use the grant to expand her research group and recruit new graduate students and postdocs. Her current students are excited about taking upon an explorative approach to research with the Packard Grant. 

Mingwei Ge, a doctoral candidate new to the electrical engineering department who joined Liu’s group in 2023, also expressed his excitement to explore new fields and learn new fundamental techniques. 

“In my undergrad, I majored in chemistry and now I’m a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering,” Ge said. “Before I only did some lab experiments but I never cared about the mechanism. But now I get to explore a deeper understanding of different fields.” 

Yale’s Energy Sciences Institute is located on Yale’s West Campus.

The post Yale professor wins Packard Fellowship appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Compared to traditional approaches in the field of geroscience — which studies how to treat aging-related diseases — Yale’s new initiative hopes to focus on the underlying mechanisms that drive aging, rather than treating specific diseases linked to growing older. The initiative provides grants to labs across scientific disciplines that are interested in studying aging processes, even if they do not usually study the geroscience fields. 

“We want to develop agents that specifically slow down the aging process and that would ultimately affect diseases across the entire spectrum, not just heart disease, not just arthritis,” Thomas Gill, director of the Yale Program on Aging and the initiative’s founder said. “By slowing down aging, there would be benefits in reducing the occurrence of these new conditions or delaying the onset of these new conditions.” 

According to Gill, the initiative emphasizes the distinction between lifespan and “healthspan,” healthy life with a good quality of living.

He believes that elongating someone’s lifespan does not necessarily mean bettering a patient’s quality of living. 

“If we ask most people what is most important to them, they say, ‘I want to maintain my health, I want to maintain my function,’” Gill said. “It’s not like I want to live until 150, because you can live until 150 but be completely debilitated with a dozen diseases. That is not necessarily fun.” 

Currently, caring for elderly patients focuses on treatments targeted towards specific diseases, Gill said. But oftentimes, as one treatment for a disease begins to work, a patient might develop another disease — a byproduct, he said, of aging. Through the initiative, he said that hopes to target the aging process itself, rather than the symptoms of aging. 

By delaying the onset of the aging process and the onset of these diseases, scientists can improve the healthspan of an aging population. 

For scientists like Heidi Zapata, an infectious disease specialist at the School of Medicine, the difference in lifespan and healthspan is key in her research of age and HIV infection.

“The HIV aging population is going to be an issue,” Zapata said. “With [HIV] drugs, people are no longer dying the way they were. They are living longer and basically have normal lifespans, but not really longer healthspans.” 

To target aging processes, the researchers interviewed told the News, the initiative provides grants to scientists who might not ordinarily study the connections between aging and their field. One of the requirements to apply for the grant is for a proposed study to span at least two departments.  

For Ruth Montgomery, an immune system specialist and Professor of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, collaboration across departments is already a common practice. To study aging specifically, she said, independent researchers could benefit from collaboration across departments.

“Whatever their interesting area was, bring aging into it to broaden the focus,” Montgomery said.  “That is a very tangible way to increase the studies of aging around campus. It gives a very tangible message in terms of the financial support for the pilot grant to encourage people to undertake these projects.” 

The grant can also be an efficient way for scientists to choose what they want to pursue next.

“One of the things about scientists is that we’re very curious,” Montgomery added. “All over the Yale campus are people with great ideas. But we can’t act on every idea. So having the support of the dean and department chairs to help you initiate the experiments is huge.”

The researchers the News interviewed said they believe that studying the aging process is particularly relevant today. They said they are skeptical about the ability of the American healthcare system to handle a growing aging population. 

Mitigating those healthcare consequences, they said, could help. 

“The pandemic hit the healthcare system really hard and I think it is still recovering from that,” Zapata said. “The increasing aging population is going to be an issue, we have to think about that.”

Gill said that he hopes geroscience research can help improve patients’ “healthy longevity.”

In turn, he said he believes that studying aging in the health care system can help accommodate an aging population.

“Older people can contribute and continue making important contributions to society,” Gill said “It may be that they retire from their long term position, but they take a part time position in an area that they’ve become interested in, or they’re doing volunteer work. They can become more involved in their grandchildren’s lives and even become great-grandparents.”

The School of Medicine was founded in 1810.

Correction, Nov. 11: A previous version of this article contained an error in a quote from Ruth Montgomery due to a grammatical transcription error.

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At the event, Luberoff discussed his educational path before attending Yale and how his college experiences shaped his interest in starting Desmos, a free web-based graphing calculator application. At the time, Luberoff felt that expensive graphing calculators were making mathematics education inaccessible to many students. 

With his multifaceted educational background, Luberoff sought to create a tool that reduced barriers to mathematics instruction.  

“It started as an experiment to see if a graphing calculator can work on a browser,” Luberoff said. “I also wanted to reduce inequities and make public education better.” 

Luberoff initially described his complicated education route. When he was young, he never stayed in the same educational institution for more than two and a half years. After having one particularly antagonistic teacher, Luberoff’s family placed him in the education system in Amherst, Massachusetts. 

A curious kid, Luberoff described how he left his middle school to take classes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was first introduced to higher-level math and physics.  

“I dropped out of middle school because I wanted to try college,” Luberoff said.

After attending classes at both his local high school and college, Luberoff enrolled at Yale. However, his Yale journey did not come without challenges. After two and a half years, Luberoff felt burned out and withdrew from college. After support from his mother, Luberoff eventually returned to Yale and completed his degree in Mathematics and Physics. 

Even with his tumultuous educational history, Luberoff emphasized that he does not think that education is broken.  

“I don’t agree with the idea that education is all broken and that we should flip it on its head, privatize it all and figure out a way to customize it to individual students,” Luberoff said. “I very much have the opposite approach. I think that an incredible part of a well-functioning society is the education system. How can I try to make it better?”

Before founding Desmos, Luberoff created Tutor Trove, a tutoring software company that developed various tutoring tools. 

However, Luberoff found himself spending much of his spare time on creating a graphing calculator tool, which eventually became Desmos. 

“I found that the only part of Tutor Trove that really impacted my students’ understanding was the graphs with the sliders that helped them visualize what they were learning,” Luberoff said. 

In 2011, Luberoff launched Desmos at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. Luberoff discussed how he was disappointed at how many people focused on its technological mechanisms rather than educational functions. He said that he later found educational conferences to be much more useful, as he learns how best to serve educators and students. 

For example, Luberoff cited that users have long requested an interactive three-dimensional graph, Desmos’s most recent innovation. For him, the company’s commitment to education has allowed Desmos to continue being an accessible educational platform. 

Emilie Ma ’25, who interviewed Luberoff at the event, first met him at a 2009 alumni reunions event. She felt that his efforts to improve Desmos were evident.

“He came up to us and asked us if anyone knew what Desmos was and if any of us have areas of suggestion and improvement,” Ma said. “I was super excited because I love start-ups and entrepreneurship.” 

Still, Luberoff also recognizes the need for top-down approaches to change education for everyone. Desmos has been working with the College Board for the last six years to designate the software as a permitted tool on standardized tests. Luberoff noted that now, after gaining popularity among teachers and students, Desmos is the official calculator on the SAT. 

Kelvin Yip ’24, an organizer of the event, appreciated Luberoff’s candor when discussing the difficulties in creating a start-up. 

“It is really amazing to hear from a Yale alum who has done it before,” Yip said. “He made me realize that I want to jump into start-ups for tools that people would be able to use.” 

Even with Desmos’s increasing presence in everyday learning, Luberoff recognized that overreliance on technology in the classroom can be dangerous. 

Every piece of technology, Luberoff said, has a time and a place.

“If you understand how to graph a parabola on your own, then using Desmos is an asset and not a cost,” Luberoff said. “But if you use us too early, it would prevent someone from learning.” 

The name Desmos emerged from a naming contest he had with his friends and family, Luberoff explained. 

When asked whether Desmos was named after the Yale senior society, Desmos — which is responsible for organizing the month-long, senior-only series of social events known as “Feb Club” — Luberoff emphatically said no.

“Hell no,” he said, “[the society] was a bit defunct while I was here.” 

Today, 75 million people use Desmos, which means “to bond” in Greek. 

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