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 While Carroll’s report is not yet peer-reviewed and does not include real participants, it compares reported memory loss symptoms to existing scientific research on short-term amnesia.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.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes motor and cognitive decline. In the United States, over one million people live with Parkinson’s. Although scientists suspect that the disease derives from both genetic and environmental factors, its causes are not fully known. 

Current treatment for Parkinson’s usually involves waiting for neurologic disease to progress until debilitating symptoms develop, then giving symptom-oriented medications focused on reactive rather than proactive care. Existing therapies generally do not target the underlying causes of the disease. 

To make Parkinson’s treatment more proactive, the new center aims to identify and target specific disease drivers with the goal of predicting and preventing the disease in the first place. 

“It has the potential to become a home base and a ‘moving force’ for research, and that’s something that is new for Parkinson’s disease research at Yale,” said David Matuskey, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging. “My hope is that it really becomes the centerpiece of Parkinson’s research all across Yale, including genetics, basic science, clinical research, neuroimaging and other modalities to tie them together.”

The Center will be led by Clemens Scherzer, a neurology professor and the current director of the Center for Advanced Parkinson’s Research at Harvard. In 2024, Scherzer will arrive on Yale’s campus and become academic chief for the Division of Movement Disorders in the Department of Neurology. 

Dennis Selkoe, a professor of neurologic disease at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, emphasized that Scherzer’s previous work experience will help spur future research. 

“Yale is fortunate to have recruited Clemens Scherzer, a world leader in basic and translational science of Parkinson’s disease,” Selkoe said. “[The Center] will help identify targeted therapeutics aimed at precision medicine for this common and difficult neurodegenerative disorder, which currently lacks disease-modifying drugs. This is an approach that Dr. Scherzer has excelled heretofore.”

For Scherzer, this new center is a trailblazing initiative to invent the healthcare of the future for Parkinson’s through precision neurology. His mission is to have a tangible impact on people with Parkinson’s disease.

To make this vision a reality, Scherzer wrote to the News that the Center’s researchers hope to “identify the genetic variants driving Parkinson’s disease onset and progression, and reveal the mechanisms through which genetics and environment cause disease in target cells.” 

Scherzer’s goal aligns with the idea of personalized medicine, a medical model in which physicians treat the specific patient rather than the disease. In this framework, physicians recognize that diseases manifest themselves differently in different people.

Research designed for personalized medicine will help physicians get in front of Parkinson’s diagnosis and treatment, according to Scherzer.

“We want to get new medicines that are tailored to patients,” Scherzer said. “Some of these are going to directly stop or slow disease progression, and some are directed to pathways that lead to complications, such as hallucination or cognitive function.”

According to Scherzer, the center has three broad platform goals. The first is to create a ‘human/cell atlas’ of Parkinson’s disease by compiling millions of brain cells to map the integrated circuits of human brains affected by the disease. This will involve mapping brain cells in a process called spatial genomics and could help with the identification of cell targets for slowing, curing or preventing the disease. 

Second, the Center will design predictive algorithms using big data and artificial intelligence to help identify genes and cells that could be targets for treatments, taking into account genetic variance and population health in terms of genomics. The Center’s third platform seeks to research and develop tailored RNA medicines to correct the glitches in genetic code identified during the Parkinon’s brain cell or gene identification journey.

Researchers will pursue these goals across six hubs. While four of the hubs will primarily focus on research — specifically, human brain cell research, computational neuroscience and AI — the other two hubs are designed for patient care in clinics alongside training and educational outreach, respectively.

For Sreeganga Chandra, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at the School of Medicine, this combination of research and clinical practice is especially exciting. 

“This will make us a major center of Parkinson’s research, which we haven’t been historically, so this is a good move,” Chandra said. “There will be a lot of synergies both clinically and research-wise.”

In an email to the News, Mel B. Feany, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, expressed optimism about the Center’s future. 

“The new center will add critical clinical diagnostic and research capabilities to the thriving Parkinson’s research already underway at Yale,” she told the News. “The combination promises to engage patients as partners in Parkinson’s disease research in the short term and bring innovative new therapies to the broad community of Parkinson’s patients in the long term.”

The Parkinson’s Disease Research Center will be located at 101 College St., with doors opening in 2025.

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Bradley was on campus to be honored as one of this year’s four recipients of the Wilbur Cross Medal, which is the highest honor bestowed on Graduate School alumni. She is also one of the eight people that the News identified last week as possible replacements for University President Peter Salovey, who intends to step down in June. If tapped, Bradley would be the first woman to head the University in a non-interim capacity.

Established in 1966, the Wilbur Cross Medal was created to honor former Graduate School Dean and Connecticut governor Wilbur Lucius Cross. Cross was a member of the Graduate School’s class of 1889 and served as a professor at the Sheffield Scientific School — which predated the Graduate School — and as dean of the Graduate School from 1916 until 1930. 

The three other recipients this year include professor of philosophy and African American studies at Columbia Robert J. Gooding-Williams ’75 GRD ’82, University of Delaware psychology professor James M. Jones GRD ’70 and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company vice chairman and chief executive officer Che-Chia Wei GRD ’85.

“The dean’s committee that helps make these decisions about who gets honored intentionally looks across the many different disciplines at the Graduate School,” Deborah J. Jagielow, the associate director of engagement and alumni relations at the Graduate School, told the News.

Cross medal recipients are nominated by peers in their field and then reviewed and selected through an internal review process at the Graduate School. Once chosen, the recipients return to Yale, where they are hosted by their respective departments and attend an award ceremony and evening gala dinner with Lynn Cooley, Dean of the Graduate School, and Salovey.

In her lecture, Bradley talked about the power of embracing opportunities and the importance of learning through research and career pivots. She described her own storied trajectory in professional leadership, from her academic scholarship to a decade of work in global health — including collaboration with the Clinton Foundation — to co-authoring a book about the impact of social determinants of health. 

“I actually love transitions, though they are also very unsettling,” Bradley said. “The reason I love them is because they allow for a time of disengagement and then re-engagement, and, in that moment … all things are free, all things are unencumbered, full of potential, open to what might be new.” 

After graduating from the Yale School of Public Health, Bradley became an assistant professor at the school and went on to lead the Health Management Program. She later became the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and was the founder and faculty director of the Yale Global Health Leadership Initiative. 

As the first director of Yale’s Global Health Leadership Initiative, Bradley also spearheaded education and research programs. 

“Her influence on GHLI is still felt today, as our team works with health care professionals across the U.S. and around the world to drive changes in management, leadership and organizational performance, shaping progress toward all kinds of public health goals,” said Leslie Curry, professor of public health and management. 

Bradley collaborated with the Clinton Foundation and former Ethiopian Minister of Health Kesetebirhan Admasu to strengthen hospital and health systems in 2012. She emphasized how evidence-based research creates the foundation for effective teaching and advancing the overall health and well-being of populations. 

Bradley said that her career transitioned again in 2012, when she co-wrote “The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less” — a text that describes the impact of social determinants on population health outcomes. 

“[Bradley] has been leading conversations way before their time, and before their wide recognition and acceptance,” said Marcella Nunez Smith, a professor of internal medicine, epidemiology and public health at the medical school, about Bradley’s research on the improvement of quality of care within hospital settings. 

Bradley continued to publish research and later became the head of Branford College. 

Throughout her time at Yale, Bradley began to realize that translating research into practice and speaking publicly about it was very meaningful to her.

“I felt drawn to the basic questions of creating and sustaining learning communities that are free to question the status quo, open up to new ideas, and empower voices that have important contributions to make but for any number of reasons have been marginalized,” Bradley said. 

In the lecture, Bradley discussed how effective leadership and culture drive organizational performance. 

For her colleagues at Yale, this intellectual curiosity and leadership made her a strong mentor and adviser.

“It was an absolute delight and privilege to welcome Dr. Bradley back,” Megan Ranney, dean of the School of Public Health, said. “She exemplifies so many of the best characteristics of our school, ranging from inclusivity to scientific rigor to a commitment to real-world impact.”

Bradley also described herself as a philomath, someone who loves to learn. 

Throughout the talk, she emphasized the importance of mentorship and continued learning.

“Students have always been at the center of change,” Bradley said. “Listening to those voices, if we are to scholars and educators, is so fulfilling, as the learning goes both ways.” 

After a 20-year tenure at Yale, Bradley left the University in July 2017 to serve as Vassar College’s 11th president; she said during the lecture that she sought to bring her advocacy for inclusive leadership and learning to her new post. In that same year, Bradley was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Prior to receiving a graduate degree in health economics from Yale, Bradley graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics from Harvard University in 1984 and received a business degree in 1986 from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in health administration and organizational behavior. 

The post Elizabeth Bradley delivers the Yale School of Public Health Dean’s Lecture appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Wangmo, the only female minister in Bhutan’s cabinet, was previously the president of the World Health Assembly, a position Bhutan had assumed for the first time since it became a member of the WHO in 1982. As a guest lecturer for the Yale Institute for Global Health’s Global Health Seminar, Wangmo described the close relationship between Bhutan and Yale and Bhutan’s efficient public health system and pandemic response.

“We managed to vaccinate 94 percent of our population in four days,” Wangmo said.

Bhutan’s national COVID-19 response strategy revolved around four central ideas: prevention, containment, protection and routine surveillance.

Speaking about behavior change under the response strategy, Wangmo recounted that, “during COVID, suddenly we saw a huge impact [from the effects of handwashing].” 

She said that the observation led her to realize the importance of consistent messaging around disease prevention, especially for “small, resource-challenged countries.”

“In Bhutan, wearing a mask was not a political statement, washing our hands was not a political statement — it was public health,” Wangmo said.

Under the containment strategy, Bhutan sought to control the pandemic and break the chain of disease transmission. Faced with a vast shortage of nurses, Wangmo described how the country recruited and deployed second- and final-year health professional students to help combat the virus.

Furthermore, Bhutan had only one doctor equipped to work in an intensive care unit. But according to Wangmo, Bhutan’s relatively small population of just over 785,000 was also a collective strength toward the country’s response agility.

“We reached out to all of our periphery health facilities for an efficient referral system, so anyone who required ventilative care would be moved to the capital,” Wangmo explained.“We were able to do this because we were a small population.” 

Thritha Anand SPH ’25 is studying environmental health sciences with the global health concentration at the School of Public Health. 

Anand was inspired to apply to Yale due to the University’s strong focus on global health.

“[The lecture] gave me a perspective on solidarity and how in small countries it is easier to develop that than in more politically-unstable countries,” Anand said. “I really appreciated that perspective that was not U.S.-centric because public health is a global issue; it is not restricted to one country, and it is not restricted to the United States.”

School of Public Health faculty — including Kaveh Khoshnood, an epidemiology professor, and Mary Alice Lee, a health policy professor — have a relationship with Bhutan that spans a decade.

Khoshnood iswil also the co-director of the Global Health Ethics Program. In an interview with the News, he explained that Yale places emphasis on forming an “equitable partnership” that is “not just one-directional.”

For Khoshnood, a long-standing partnership with a collaborating country establishes the necessary trust for the collaborator to express their priorities.

“If we are going to conduct a research project, it should be beneficial on both sides,” Khoshnood said. “One of the silver linings from this terrible pandemic is that global health gets much more attention … We need to care for the health of populations around the globe.”

Michael Skonieczny, deputy director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, told the News that Wangmo’s lecture can inspire students to learn about and make an impact on global health. 

Both Skonieczny and Wangmo look forward to further partnership opportunities. 

“Since the Minister (Dechen Wangmo) is an alumna of the School, it also gives the students an example of what they can become, and the impact they can have in global health,” wrote Skonieczny.

Wangmo outlined some goals for Bhutan’s road ahead regarding health security, social security and economic security. She is working to bolster Bhutan’s health system and workforce and to foster a resilient public service system.

Currently, Bhutan does not have a medical school, and many students attend medical schools in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. However, these countries have limited seats for Bhutanese students. 

Wangmo sees American schools as another opportunity for these students.

“We need to invest, as a country, in the capacity and the competency of our own people,” Wangmo said. “That is why we want to work with the Yale School of Public Health.” 

Wangmo was sworn in as minister for health in 2018. 

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Researchers developed an AI model that allows wearable devices to more effectively detect left ventricular systolic dysfunction, a heart condition associated with more than an eight-fold increase in heart failure risk. The research team published their model in July. 

“There has been amazing development of sensors available on wearable devices,” Rohan Khera, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and a senior author on the paper, wrote to the News. “Given how widespread these devices are, this can transform how we identify people with diseases, especially earlier in their disease course.”

The risk of LVSD can be mitigated through early detection of cardiovascular diseases via an electrocardiogram machine, or ECG, which records the electrical activity of the heart. ECGs can be handheld or wearable as a portable device.

While ECG data from wearables can be a promising screening tool, there is often “noise” — not sound, but rather erroneous data — that obscures the “signal,” which is the useful information.

In this context, noise includes factors such as poor electrode contact with the skin, movement and muscle contraction during the ECG recording and external electrical interference.

Using 385,601 ECGs from the Yale New Haven Hospital between 2015 and 2021, the researchers developed both a standard and noise-adapted AI model. The latter was trained with custom noise recordings in different frequency ranges that emulated real-world noise sources.

They found that the noise-adapted model detected LVSD significantly better.

“This is very impressive work and an excellent demonstration of the power of big clinical data and wearables,” Lawrence Staib, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging who was not involved in the study, wrote to the News. “Their noise augmentation approach is powerful and the results are impressive. While there is still work to be done, it looks like the hope and promise of wearables is coming to fruition.”

According to the researchers, deep-learning algorithms can help automate the detection of structural heart disorders and their early warning signs, some of which are not the primary health concern of the screening. However, noisy ECG results may hinder the forecasting reliability of AI for detecting LVSD in the real world.

“This paper underlies the importance of developing and testing AI models prior to their deployment in health care,” Jun Deng, a professor of therapeutic radiology, wrote to the News. “[There is an] often-encountered situation where the AI models developed in the lab cannot contextualize the situation and frequently break when dealing with the noisy real-world data different from the data used in training”.

Until now, AI’s ability to diagnose health conditions was worse in real-world wearable ECG data compared to the more ideal clinical settings. These findings contribute to detecting heart conditions like LVSD using wearable devices.

According to Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine in cardiology at the School of Medicine, AI detection tools helps patients avoid adverse health events. “The application of this AI to wearable devices will unlock access for patients to actionable information and empower them with meaningful information about their health,” Krumholz wrote the News. 

The School of Medicine is located at 333 Cedar St.  

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As an undergraduate at Yale, Silverberg was a student in Trumbull College and went on to attend medical school at the University of California San Francisco. He currently serves as the director of pediatric ophthalmology at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and a volunteer clinical instructor at the University of California Los Angeles’ Stein Eye Institute. He is also a volunteer for Surgical Eye Expeditions and has performed eye surgeries in Kenya, India, Fiji and Vietnam.

In addition to practicing medicine, Silverberg also successfully ventured into entrepreneurship and invented Upneeq — the first FDA approved and non-surgical treatment for ptosis, which is when the upper eyelid droops over one or both eyes. This condition can limit or completely occlude vision, and occurs when the muscles that raise the eyelid are not strong enough to function properly.

“Healthcare and innovation are symbiotic and a natural fit for each other because healthcare lends itself to innovation,” remarked Silverberg.

According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, ptosis can be acquired at birth or acquired in adulthood, the latter being most commonly brought on by age. In most cases, ophthalmologists can correct ptosis through eyelid surgery for both children and adults, with the goal of improving vision

However, not everyone is a candidate for surgery.

Upneeq, invented by Silverberg, is an eye drop that contains oxymetazoline hydrochloride or a combination of oxymetazoline and phenylephrine as active ingredients. Oxymetazoline is the same drug found in the nasal spray Afrin, but is formulated to be safe for long-term use in Upneeq. This contracts the Müller’s muscle — a muscle which helps to open the eyelid — to widen the eye.

Upneeq has also appeared on the cover of Vogue for providing an awake and alert cosmetic effect, given that ptosis can cause an appearance of sleepy or tired eyes. The drug creates a lift that lasts about six hours and occurs within minutes.

In his talk, Silverberg described three entrepreneurial projects he engaged in during his time at Yale College. In accordance with the title of his talk, he presented a “pearl” and a few “pitfalls” for each. For example, Silverberg started a singing telegram service, with the pearl being his “unbridled enthusiasm” and a pitfall being that this venture was not in his area of expertise. 

He then shared his innovation journey with Upneeq, starting with a goal in 2010 and a commitment to “listen to the patient and solve an unmet clinical need.”

Silverberg is no stranger to pivots, having majored in philosophy at Yale College. During his talk, he touched on his engagement with the liberal arts at Yale, given the University’s strong reputation for the humanities, and reflected on his own experience as a liberal arts major.

When asked by an audience member how his liberal arts background helped with studying medicine, Silverberg replied that “it makes you a better doctor … and it gives you a depth of humanity you can’t get from a chemistry textbook.”

Cara Chong ’26 said that she had previously been trying to decide between pursuing a humanities or more medicine-focused major, but that this talk “helped [her] commit 110 percent in majoring in the humanities and the arts.”

Silverberg further engaged attendees with a call-to-action, emphasizing that the next generation of graduates will be leaders who will come up with new ideas on how to deliver better healthcare.

The talk appealed to students from a wide range of majors. Caleb Samson ’25, an ethics, politics and economics major, said that he “learned a lot about the entrepreneurial spirit and to be strong in the face of adversity.”

When asked how it felt to be back at Trumbull College as a speaker at Trumbull Tea, Silverberg replied that it felt “fantastic.”

“This was a dream of mine; I remember when I was an undergraduate going to teas and hearing these speakers and being so inspired and awed by the accomplishments of the alumni … I feel so grateful and fortunate that I have something to share,” Silverberg said.

Noah Silverberg ’26, who is considering a pre-medical educational track, described it as “a cool feeling” to see his father presenting at their shared residential college, a generation later.

The Trumbull Head of College House is located at 100 High St.

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Levine is the assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the first transgender woman to hold the position. She has served as a physician in pediatrics and adolescent medicine, as Pennsylvania’s Physician General and as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health. 

During the event, Levine discussed the legal and societal barriers to gender-affirming care, including the role physicians play in advocacy and addressing misinformation. Among those in attendance were Yale students from the Law School, School of Medicine and School of Public Health, alongside other Yale faculty and community members.

“I firmly believe that none of us make progress unless we all make progress,” Levine said. “Reducing disparities in LGBTQI+ communities must take intentional account of systemic racism and implicit bias in the intersectionality of health disparities.”

Levine described gender-affirming care — which includes puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormones and surgical procedures, among other interventions —  as “safe,” “effective” and “medically necessary.” 

Levine described how transgender and nonbinary youth are disproportionately burdened by mental health challenges. She noted that gender-affirming interventions are associated with lower odds of depressive symptoms, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Given this, Levine said, gender-affirming care has been life-saving for thousands of young LGBTQI+ people across the country.

“The political landscape in the US is not kind to trans individuals and families; in some states it’s not enough to have allyship in physicians,” wrote Ellery Neiderer SPH ’24 , an aspiring physician and policymaker. “It’s extremely heartening to have someone like Admiral Levine … her presence [is a] powerful and visible beacon of resiliency toward LGBTQ health equity.” 

David Zhu SPH ’24 said that one of the most impactful moments of the event was when the mother of a transgender child shared the story of moving from Texas to Connecticut because of the stigma that her child had been experiencing in school. 

“Hearing her stories brought me to tears because it captured the reality of the social, legal and health disparities that transgender youth are facing in America,” said Zhu.

As the mother teared up, the room applauded in support. Zhu lauded the “sense of social solidarity and community support” in the room. 

This is the kind of conversation that Yale Law professor and professor of internal medicine Abbe Gluck — founding faculty director of the Yale Solomon Center for Health Law & Policy— sought to foster. 

“I was also struck by [Levine’s] statement that the health needs of LGBTQI+ individuals have yet to be truly integrated into general medical training — that is, as something all doctors, not just specialists should have basic familiarity with,” Gluck said. “That seems like an area in which academic institutions can help lead the way.” 

According to Gluck, it was an “enormous privilege” to have Levine share her work at the “cutting edge of healthcare and health law.”

The Solomon Center is located at 127 Wall St.

Correction 2/22: This story was updated to reflect Professor Gluck’s language in a statement to the News.

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