Because Vermund, a public health professor, teaches at Yale, he immediately gained access to the full article.

“If you’re at Sacred Heart, or if you’re at the University of Zambia, or if I’m just at home not logged on through Yale, I will get a firewall,” Vermund told the News. “And then it will say ‘If you wish to buy this article, you can pay us fifty dollars.’”

Vermund supports open access, a set of principles where researchers can share their findings immediately and freely with the public. Currently, it costs authors $12,290 to publish an open-access paper in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals. The other route to publication is cost-free for the researcher, but comes at the expense of visibility: the paper remains paywalled, and only Nature subscribers and paying readers can view it.

However, under an August 2022 White House memorandum, dubbed the “Nelson memo,” all federally-funded research will be made publicly available “without an embargo on their free and public release.” Under this motion — which will go into effect in December 2024 — students, researchers and the general public will have free and immediate access to the $171 billion dollars worth of publications and data that the U.S. government funds annually. 

“Part of the drive [for open access] is a vision for an open science future … in which all over the world, we have access to all the research that’s happening, all the scientific tools we need, and they are an equitable resource for everyone,” Eseohe Arhebamen-Yamasaki, the U.S. Head of Communications at Springer Nature Publishing Group, said in a press briefing.

According to Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian at Yale, there have long been equity issues with the “pay-to-play” system of academic publishing, for both researchers and readers. For authors who can’t afford the fee, their paywalled articles receive 84 percent fewer downloads and 30 percent fewer citations than open-access articles. For readers, only those from well-resourced institutions can read and access research in the first place, with universities and government agencies footing tens of billions of dollars in combined subscription fees annually. 

In 2013, the White House published a memo mandating that papers funded by agencies making over $100 million in grants appear open-access. But the Nelson memo dramatically expanded its reach. Now, all federally funded publications — including humanities and social science articles — and datasets must be freely available, and research journals are no longer granted a 12-month embargo period on articles before releasing them to the public.

In a joint statement to the News, Rockenbach and Yale library representatives Daniel Dollar, Sandra Aya Enimil and Lindsay Barnett emphasized their strong support for the Nelson memo’s goal to “equalize the scholarly publishing playing field.” They outlined the library’s commitment to free scholarship and to defending researchers’ rights at Yale and other institutions. 

“In essence, the Nelson Memo has made [Yale Library’s] long-standing value of barrier-free access to information a policy that will require compliance,” Rockenbach told the News. “Our values backed by policy will help us achieve a more open and equitable system of research more quickly.”

In response to calls for open access, commercial publishers have advocated for a shift to “transformative agreements” over subscription systems. Under this model, university libraries would negotiate and pay a transformative agreement — a consolidated contract that includes both article-processing fees and subscription fees — depending on each university’s financial abilities. Individual researchers would be free to publish, at no personal cost, in journals of their choice. 

In a pilot study conducted by Springer Nature, open access articles published under a transformative agreement at the University of California were downloaded over 3.6 million times worldwide — a 120 percent increase from the previous year.

“And that’s the sign there that people desire this research, people want this information to be made public,” Arhebamen-Yamasaki said. 

This is especially valuable for early-stage academics with little funding, who can’t always reach the readership they want. These issues are compounded for women and Black scientists, who, on average, receive fewer grants from the National Institutes of Health. According to Vermund, these individuals often have to publish their articles behind “fiscal firewalls” — or, more dangerously, in illegitimate journals, which falsely advertise open access publication for a cheaper price.

The University has entered into open-access agreements with nonprofits, university presses and scholarly organizations. In their statement to the News, the University librarians expressed their caution to ensure all partner groups be “aligned with our goals of building a cost-effective and globally equitable ecosystem.” Projecting increased costs from greater publishing activity, Yale librarians reiterated their hope that publishing policies remain accessible for less-funded universities, as well as individuals without institutional affiliations.

In a March letter to Office of Science and Technology Policy, co-signed by Rockenbach and representatives from all 13 Ivy Plus universities, the authors emphasized that their goal of an open-access system does not simply shift the financial burden from under-resourced authors to underresourced institutions.

“Equitable opportunity to contribute to scholarly literature is as important for the integrity and usefulness of scholarship globally as is the open accessibility to read,” they wrote. “As representatives of some of the most well-resourced libraries in the country, we are committed to using our resources to promote public access to all research, not just the research our scholars produce.”

They hope future agreements can protect cost sustainability, authors’ copyright, and long-term open access for all individuals.

Beyond the Nelson memo’s local and national consequences, Vermund reminded the News of the global communities also at stake. Many research journals from the Global South still cannot clear their articles for open access, since restricted funding prevents them from meeting national criteria. Vermund pointed to the importance of global partnerships like Hinari, which allows low- and middle-income countries to read and access health literature. Most recently, Springer Nature and the CAPES foundation announced plans in December for the first transformative agreement for both in Brazil. 

The White House memorandum was authored by Dr. Alondra Nelson.

The post White House memo pushes Yale research toward public accessibility appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Since then, he’s moved into a slightly bigger lab at Yale to study telomeres. As a physician scientist and professor of laboratory medicine, pathology and molecular biophysics and biochemistry, Chang also serves as the Yale College associate dean for science & quantitative reasoning education. He founded the Science, Technology and Research Scholars program, or STARS, for underrepresented minorities in STEM, revamped STEM recruitment, teaches first year seminars and diagnoses cancer patients as a pathologist, all while running his NIH-funded lab. 

“When I came to Yale, I knew I always wanted to be a scientist, and that passion never changed,” Chang said. 

Chang immigrated to the United States from Taiwan when was seven. Though he grew up eyeing astronomy, molecular biology ultimately hooked him. He was fascinated by rapid advances in cloning research — as if “a new era of biological science was happening.” He came to Yale College for its Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department, where he met a FroCo pursuing an MD/PhD program. Realizing how physician-scientists could bridge research with clinical application, Chang started on the same path. 

After spending his undergraduate days doing research at two Yale labs, Chang went on to receive his PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University in 1996. A year later, he finished an MD at Cornell University Medical School before a postdoctoral residency in Boston and a medical job at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. After 22 years of country-trotting, he found himself back at Yale, recruited as a professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, where he then spent his days working toward tenure.

“The academic rat race is getting tenure,” Chang said, with a laugh. “But once I got tenured, I felt like I could now have the ability to do … something else.”

So he expanded beyond working with medical students: he helped teach a first-year seminar called “Perspectives in Biological Research,” which brought in professors from STEM fields to talk to students about their research. Realizing his fondness for interacting with undergraduates — especially as a Yale College alum himself — Chang later went on to direct the class.

But Chang also recognized that the Perspectives class was not accessible to everyone. For one, students had to have high school research experience to secure a spot.

“What if you are a late bloomer, what if you never had the ability to do high school research?” Chang asked. “So I said, ‘why don’t I start a class targeting students who…  may not have any kind of research background?’”

In response, he began the class “Topics in Cancer Biology,” an open first-year seminar in which students learn to read scientific papers and write their own grant proposals. This class marked just the beginning of Chang’s journey toward expanding STEM education at Yale. 

When Chang started his deanship, only 70 undergraduates opted to stay at Yale over the summer to conduct research. Over his tenure, he’s expanded that number to around 300. 

Now, over a hundred of those students come from underrepresented backgrounds. Today, Chang’s STARS program aspires to elevate students from diverse, disadvantaged backgrounds — especially those who have never done research. Through STARS, Chang aims to improve performance and persistence rates of historically represented students in STEM through mentorship, research funding, networking and career planning.

“I think the legacy I would love to leave is that for my short time here, I made Yale undergraduate research much more egalitarian,” Chang said.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Chang can be found having an 8 a.m. breakfast at Silliman. He might be joined by a student, or multiple, who sit across from him listening to his animated conversation. Hannah Cevasco ’23, one of Chang’s mentees, emphasized his lighthearted humor during these conversations.

“He bought a bearded dragon from someone on Craigslist,” Cevasco said of Chang, “and it reminded me of Hagrid in Harry Potter when he got that dragon from a guy down at the pub.” 

Cevasco recalled how Chang emailed her about his new pet named “Scar” and urged her to pay a visit to see him. Students characterized his mentor-mentee relationship as one marked by  familiarity and friendliness.

“He’s very approachable to students, and I think that’s why they feel very comfortable [around him],” Donalee Slater — assistant director of science and quantitative reasoning — told the News. 

Devin Lin ’24 said he was “very lucky” and “truly honored” to have met and learned from Chang — someone he calls a teacher, friend and mentor — through various courses and programs. 

In spring of 2021, Lin took Chang’s course, Topics in Cancer Biology, before participating in the STARS I program and STARS Summer Program. Eventually, Lin became a STARS Mentor in the STARS I program.

“Dean Chang has left lasting influences on me,” Lin said. “His Topics in Cancer Biology class is still one of my favorite classes that I took at Yale. … He achieved what I called a ‘delicate balance’ as an instructor, being able to challenge us and help the students grow, while simultaneously making sure we are not overwhelmed.”

Lin further described the broader impact Chang has made on the Yale community with regard to the STARS programs. The 2022-23 STARS I cohort, he noted, is 200 students — double the number of students from the 2020-21 cohort.

According to Lin, Chang advocated for the expansion of the program and raised funding. As a result, Chang was able to accept around 95 percent of the applications to the Yale College First-Year Summer Research Fellowship in the Sciences & Engineering — a program that provides first-years funding for a summer of research at Yale.

But Chang’s relationships with his mentees run deeper than classes, research programs and advising meetings. 

“He was the first professor I had at Yale that made an outward effort to really get to know his students beyond just the surface level,” one of his mentees, Caitlin Brown ’25, said.

Cevasco emphasized how Chang invites his students to attend basketball games and to grab dinner at Ezra Stiles, his residential college when he was an undergrad. Chang even knew all the players by name, Cevasco remarked. At games, he transforms “from a super intellectual professor to the loudest fan,” and tells his students to remain standing and cheer until Yale scores. 

He was not always this way — Chang described himself as “a geek” growing up, “antisocial” and buried in his microscopes. But college taught him to embrace both the academic and the fun. Chang reflected fondly on the “amazing dance parties,” which he attended every weekend, hosted by the Asian American Student Alliance.

Today, Chang hopes to enliven the STEM community in the same way. From offering pre-med advice over Whale Tea boba, and to weighing in on students’ aspirations at Geronimo, Chang emphasizes how a simple meal can bring people together. 

In fact, Chang met his wife, Anna, while he was working through his MD/PhD and she was in business school. Set up by a mutual friend, they chatted over dinner and then watched a Chinese movie called “Liang Zhu.” Called “The Butterfly Lovers” in English, it’s the most famous Chinese love story, said Chang.

At Yale, he placed into graduate level Chinese and took a course on Chinese poetry. Chang loved reading Wuxia novels and recalled reading the whole selection of Kung Fu books at Sterling Library.

“[My first year], I was totally burnt out before my final exams, so I bought all these Kung Fu novels,” Chang said. “I said, ‘I’m going to read these during reading period, I’m not going to study.’ So, thank God for my roommate, they hid it and said ‘you better go get your work done.’”

Slater described Chang as one of the “most energetic” people she knew. Slater, who has worked alongside Chang for six years, reiterated his dedication to each student’s journey. 

“Students are always asking him, ‘Can you be my advisor?’” Slater explained. “He just makes a huge investment in every student and wants to help them succeed.”

Chang’s office, where his bearded dragon resides, is located in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall at 1 Prospect St. 

The post PROFILE: From Taiwan to Yale, Sandy Chang shoots for the STARS appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The statistic is part of a maternity mortality crisis unfolding statewide. Even though 80 percent of these deaths are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people of color continue to bear the brunt of Connecticut’s dwindling maternity services.

In response to these disparities, S.B. 986 An Act Protecting Maternal Health, introduced by Gov. Ned Lamont in February, seeks to reshape and expand the scope of maternal health care in Connecticut. The bill proposes to license free-standing birth centers for low-risk pregnancies, in addition to implementing nurse home visits for newborn infants and certifying services by doulas — trained professionals who provide emotional and physical support to their clients during childbirth.

The bill was passed out of the Public Health Committee on April 4 and now awaits Senate approval. If signed into law, S.B. 986 could fill in some gaps left by statewide maternity ward closures — which occur overwhelmingly in rural, low-access areas — and offer a more human, intimate birthing experience for expecting mothers.

“This [bill] is just an opportunity to address that issue,” Lucinda Canty, associate professor and director of Health Equity in the Nursing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said to the News. “We’re a small state, but we still have pockets where people don’t have the resources they need when it comes to healthcare.”

Maternity care in crisis

Maternal morbidity and mortality serve as a bellwether of the general population’s health, said Katherine Campbell, associate professor of obstetrics and medical director of labor and birth at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Yet Campbell has witnessed increasing hemorrhage and hypertension in her obstetrical care patients, much of which occurs in the postpartum period — six to eight weeks after birth. She noted that these complications are compounded by diabetes and obesity, which are also on the rise. 

In Connecticut, the issue is worsened by the shuttering of hospital maternity wards over the past three years. Citing low delivery volumes and high costs, medical center operators have been closing their labor and delivery units in northern Connecticut, including Windham Hospital and Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford. 

The closures are part of a larger landscape of consolidation of smaller, often rural hospitals by health system giants such as Yale New-Haven Health System and Hartford Healthcare. 

“[For health systems], maternal health is one of those easier things to cut, because they’re like, ‘Well, it’s just pregnancy. [Patients] can make it to Hartford Hospital, or they can make it to St. Francis.’” Canty said. “They’re not looking at those other pieces that influence and impact women’s lives.” 

Canty — who also serves as a certified nurse-midwife and provides reproductive care at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England — emphasized that “anything can happen” to people in labor during the hour-long drive elsewhere. Aside from the “anxiety and stress” the experience induces, the distance may deter people from seeking prenatal care beforehand.

Nor can people in labor always make it to the nearest hospital in time. When Hartford Healthcare’s Windham Hospital closed its labor and delivery unit in June 2020, rural mother Shantell Jones had to give birth to her son in an ambulance on the side of the road.

The Windham population is 41 percent Latine, with a 25 percent poverty rate compared to the statewide 10 percent poverty rate. 

Campbell explained that the state has adopted some positive measures toward increasing maternity care access. While people enrolled in Medicaid formerly were only covered for six weeks after giving birth, now they are assured health insurance for a full year postpartum. 

This expansion impacts about 40 percent of the maternity population in greater New Haven, according to Campbell. Still, she noted a problem in actually connecting patients to these programs. In underserved areas, individuals may lack awareness about statewide resources which could benefit them. 

“So what is in that area? What’s going to be left for those people who are there, in our rural areas of Connecticut?” Canty asked. “Where are those resources that are going to be right in their community if these things close?”

The historical case for birth centers

Under the first section of the maternal health bill, a licensing category would be created for free-standing birth centers. These facilities would focus on low-risk pregnancies and serve as an alternative to hospital labor and delivery units. Not only would they fill the void left behind by hospital closures, but they would also give pregnant people a choice in the birthing care they receive. 

The bill takes precedent from the Connecticut Childbirth and Women’s Center in Danbury, currently the only standalone birthing center in the state. The center focuses on natural childbirths and is staffed by certified nurse-midwives. 

Canty explained a recent history of midwifery in marginalized communities, in the 1940s, when segregated hospitals turned away pregnant Black people, these people developed their own communal systems of care. 

“Births were done in a home, where people weren’t trained in our formal institutions, but they were trained through apprenticeships,” Canty said. “It was an environment where women felt safe, and there was a sense of community.”

Canty went on to explain that even while access to hospitals and public health knowledge has grown, the disparity has not budged. Nationwide, Black people are three times more likely to die than white people of pregnancy-related causes — the same differential as in the 1940s.

Naomi Rogers, professor in the history of medicine and of history, also pointed to how people of color have historically received second-rate reproductive care. Even in the 1960s and 1970s in urban hospitals which were free and available for inner city populations, medical students could practice on patients “in the worst possible way,” Rogers said. Unknowing patients were even used for clinical research because, according to Rogers, “it was seen that you didn’t really need to ask anybody’s consent.”

While sweeping reforms have since changed the “horrific nature” of these hospitals, Rogers said, public health persists beyond the hospital building.

“Why do people develop certain kinds of health issues? Because of the houses they live in, the places they live in, the lead in the paint?” Rogers asked.

For both Canty and Rogers, these sustained inequities point toward a need for alternative health centers. 

“I don’t think it’s just the hospital’s fault, but maybe it’s the current structure of care … with medical professionals and the way they treat women,” Rogers said. “Maybe rather than trying to deal with that, you just set up a different environment. You just build a new house.”

At home in the “new house”

At the Labor and Birth Unit of Yale New Haven Hospital, expectant parents are welcomed by walnut-colored wood paneling, plush carpets and soft dim lighting. But Rogers recalled how the cabinets slid back, and out came “the equipment, all the equipment… just you name it.” 

“I’ve never forgotten the sort of total transformation of the birthing space,” Rogers said.

These hyper-medicalized spaces and apparatuses are a growing reason for fear among people, explained Rogers. Birthing centers — without all the “bells and whistles,” as Canty described it — would instead focus on patient-centered care. People would not be attended by doctors and white coat-clad surgeons, but rather certified nurse midwives and doulas, with whom they develop intimate relationships.

Canty also explained that while birthing center staff are trained to screen and respond to medical complications, they aim to make birth feel like a natural process. In that vein, Canty described heightened focus toward helping a patient feel listened to.

“The way that we approach and develop relationships with those we care for helps create an environment where people feel like they’re a part of the team,” Canty said. 

Feeling listened to is not just a matter of emotional satisfaction, emphasized Rogers. When Black people’s symptoms are overlooked and dismissed, the consequences can be life-threatening. 

Rogers alluded to the “Serena Williams problem,” in which the then-pregnant famous tennis player had to fight her nurses and doctors to pay attention to her shortness of breath. While her physicians originally ignored her requests, a CT scan eventually revealed deadly blood clots in her lungs.

Even though Williams’ life was likely saved by this intervention, Rogers stressed that “even wealthy women of color find that hospital staff, nurses and doctors don’t really pay attention to them, when they mention health problems during childbirth.” For other people of color, that power to self-advocate is less present, explained Canty. 

“Women have told me, ‘[my doctors] make me feel like I’m exaggerating, or they don’t listen, or they make me feel like I’m wasting someone’s time,” recalled Canty. 

Thus, Canty pointed to the “holistic environment” of birthing centers. Not only would the physical space be more inviting, but people would have check-ins and regular meetings with their nurse midwives well before the pregnancy, to “feel good and feel welcomed” with their providers.

She also emphasized having a “no-rush” birthing process — rather than hospitals, which may be swamped with patient volumes, birthing centers can afford to wait and take their time with each patient. Canty described her own experience of evaluating the patient, sending them home if necessary, checking in and waiting for the childbirth to occur at a “natural pace.” 

“That’s what I would love to see right away — that someone leaves and says, ‘they listened to me, and I felt my body was respected in this process,’” Canty said. “I want […]  people just to be able to have trust in our healthcare system again. 

Ensuring patient safety

Without the “bells and whistles,” however, some raise concerns about maternal safety as compared to hospitals. 

In its testimony to the Public Health Committee, the Connecticut Hospital Association pushed back on the lack of regulation established around the new centers. 

“Before any birthing center is approved, clinical thresholds and protocols, mandatory clinical guidelines, stakeholder review, public oversight and transparency must be in place – and accomplished in a way that would meet typical standards of administrative procedure,” Connecticut Hospital Association wrote in its testimony. 

Connecticut Hospital Association also included a list of questions about what guidelines birthing centers would be subject to, citing safety standards, HIPAA guidelines, statewide Certificates of Need and data collection by the Department of Public Health.

Canty views extensive oversight as something that would detract from these centers’ mission. She acknowledged that guidelines were necessary to protect people’s safety. Still, she emphasized her hope that state and hospital intervention will help people feel “safe” and supported, rather than scrutinized by rules and regulations. 

“Talk to women, and look at their experiences of care,” Canty said. “There are women who are terrified. We have to make sure [the state] is not putting that medical model that we’re trying to run from because it’s causing harm.”

Rogers bolstered Canty’s perspective, emphasizing that a patient’s emotional wellness is often mirrored by their physical health. 

A patient feeling that “they’re in a safe place, that people are listening to them,” as Rogers puts it, can already lower their risk of complications. Hypertension, for example, commonly poses risk during pregnancy and is caused by high stress. For an individual about to give birth, in an unfamiliar environment, that may be enough to drive up their blood pressure. 

“The health of the patient is profoundly caught up with their mental state,” Rogers reiterated. “One of the reasons that alternative health center birthing centers are seen as likely to work is that they will create an environment that will help a woman feel cared for.”

Even so, Campbell cautioned that there are a multitude of pregnancy-related complications that can arise suddenly, some of which can be fatal if not properly attended to. Hypertension is sometimes unavoidable, as is postpartum hemorrhage, which arises in 7 to 9 percent of the patients she attends. Campbell also pointed toward necessary interventions for shoulder dystocia, in which the baby’s shoulder becomes stuck during childbirth, and Cesarean sections. 

“There does have to be some regulated system to make sure that all the unpredictable nature of obstetrics is there, ready and able to support that patient if they were to need it,” Campbell said. “For a freestanding birth center, that’s going to be a hospital that’s prepared to receive a complex obstetrical patient who no longer can safely remain at the freestanding birth center.”

Campbell also spoke to the cruciality of care in the postpartum period, during which pregnancy-related complications often strike. 

According to Campbell, existing Yale New Haven Health programs already draw upon the hospital’s extensive resources to support patients after childbirth, such as a blood pressuring monitoring program and Family Centered Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome Program, which assists opioid-dependent pregnancy patients. Programs also offer personalized consultants and lactation classes.

“A lot of effort has been put into these infrastructures at hospitals across the state,” Campbell explained, in reference to YNHH’s resources. “My recommendation would be to listen to patients’ needs, and let’s see how we can use our existing resources and infrastructure to meet those needs. Could we lean on our existing infrastructure and expand?”

Ultimately, Campbell expressed overwhelming support for the birth centers for low-risk pregnancies, but explained that existing hospital systems can — and should — help patients when unforeseen health issues occur. 

“How can we collaborate and work together?” Campbell asked. 

Toward community health

S.B. 986 is scheduled to go before the Senate. In the meantime, Campbell, Canty and Rogers hope that, if signed into law, the bill will establish birth centers as long-standing fixtures in communities statewide.

Canty reiterated that she hopes centers would not just exist when “a woman pops in to give birth,” but rather as integrated forms of community healthcare. They could provide routine people’s health checks as well as postpartum care. 

They could also serve as easier points of access — a person seeking care would only have to check-in at the center in her town, rather than setting up an appointment at a distant hospital location.

“That’s a wonderful vision of better healthcare,” Rogers explained. “Because if they are seen by the community and used by the community, as a welcoming place, women would be more likely to go to be checked out to have critical prenatal visits.”

From their experience with patient care, Campbell and Canty spoke to the importance of medicine which broaches the “human side of care,” particularly in reproductive health. 

“Every woman deserves a beautiful birth,” Canty said. “I think any birthing person that delivers should have access to quality care should feel safe, from beginning to end.”

The United States is 55th in the world for the World Health Organization’s maternal mortality rate rankings.

The post Inside Governor Ned Lamont’s bill to expand maternal healthcare appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Last year, an article by the News titled “Going to the doctor when you’re Asian in America” explored the complexities of how Asian Americans experience healthcare. The piece focused on patient perspectives, noting cultural challenges which prevent Asian American individuals from seeking medical specialists and from communicating empathetically with their families. However, there is little consideration into the opposite side of the discussion: how Asian American physicians and healthcare workers navigate the medical profession. 

The case exists that Asians are already overrepresented in medicine, comprising 7 percent of the national population but 17 percent of all active physicians in 2018. More simply, as one blog post by James Allen — former medical director of Ohio State University East Hospital — asked in its title, “Why Are There So Many Asian Physicians in the U.S.?” 

Like larger discourses about affirmative action, arguments for enhancing diversity in medicine remain vague about Asian Americans. A 2001 report from the National Academy of Medicine — which focused on addressing diversity problems in the medical profession — grouped Asians with other “minorities” in its introduction. However, the report mostly omitted them in its actual discussions of institutionalized racism as medical schools — barriers which did not seem to apply to Asians, the report implied. 

The report eventually turned to using “URM,” for “under-represented minority,” to describe the challenges faced by medical professionals of color. This left Asians to be a “non under-represented minority,” an oxymoronic phrase which physician-writer Pauline Chen equated to a “gaslighting double-negative.” 

One reason why the discourse dwindles when it comes to Asian American physicians is the belief that a doctor is a “dream” profession for Asian kids. Indeed, a quick Google search with Allen’s query proliferates articles about meritocracy, financial stability and parental expectations.

“There’s definitely a very common stereotype of the Asian child pushed by their parents to go to medical school, to meet a very specific idea of success,” Sarah Ho MED ’26 said in an interview with the News. 

However, that stereotype is dying — if not dead already — for Justin Zhu MED ’24. Zhu explained that what drew him toward medicine was the feeling of mentorship: as the oldest child in his family, he had grown up teaching and playing with his two younger siblings. Later, when he started working as a physics tutor in his junior year of college, he recognized that teaching had always brought him fulfillment.

“Being able to connect with other students and be a part of their journey was really rewarding to me,” Zhu said. “In my mind, medicine was a way to do that with patients longitudinally.”

Zhu also noted that both his parents were physicians, and he grew up exposed to medicine, but he never took it for granted as a career he should pursue. 

“My parents were never like, ‘You have to do medicine,’” Zhu emphasized. “In fact, seeing some of the things that they did — working really long hours, being stressed about their job — were kind of turn-offs about medicine.’”

None of the other individuals interviewed by the News cited parental expectations or financial stability as influences toward their decision to pursue medicine, though Jason Wang ’26 posited that it may have played a subconscious role. 

Nevertheless, the perceived motivations that Asian Americans may go into medicine for “wrong” or non-altruistic reasons — parental pressure or prestige— still abound. 

One study found that reviewers of Medical Student Performance Evaluations  are more likely to characterize Asian students using “grindstone” traits — “hardworking,” “conscientious” and “diligent” — compared to white students, who prevailed in adjectives demonstrating compassion, such as “caring” and “empathy.” 

Zhu referenced a statistic that Asian American medical students tend to score lower during their clerkship years, when they are placed on clinical rotations and allowed to interact with patients firsthand.

“During that one year of hospital shadowing experience, the grades suffer,” Zhu explained. “One aspect of it is that Asian Americans can be perceived as passive, disinterested or not engaged with the team.”

With this statistic in mind, Zhu recalled having to act “extra proactive” and “go above and beyond” during his clinical rotation, speaking up whenever possible and making phone calls after rounds to connect with families. 

The struggle for proof of leadership capacity persists past graduate education for Asian Americans. Across all U.S. medical schools, the number of deans of Asian American descent has increased from zero to one in the past twenty years. In 2015, less than 1 percent of hospital chief executive officers were of Asian descent.

“I do have concerns of when I’m attending as a full doctor eventually, ‘Will I be taken as seriously as a white male counterpart?’” Ho asked. 

Like Zhu, Ho explained that medical school was never an expected path. The financial allure of a medical career has waned, noted Ho, with soaring tuition and debt costs. 

At Yale, the 2022-2023 tuition costs to attend the School of Medicine exceeded $100,000, summing to $522,723 over five years. These financial factors have fueled anxiety for prospective pre-medical students.

“There was a big fear I had [that] if I do this whole pre-med thing and go to medical school and pay so much money — what if I end up hating it?” Ho told the News. 

Ho entered college with a general interest in neuroscience, but without definitive career goals. She had been choosing between a Ph.D., M.D. or MD/Ph.D. program. It was not until she experienced the human-centric aspects of care that she felt drawn toward a career as a physician. While she was conducting an undergraduate research project that required her to meet with patients and to facilitate interviews for qualitative data collection, the opportunity for patient interaction resonated with her most deeply. 

“I liked having that chance to connect with people and learn about their life stories,” Ho said. “It was very affirming that I loved talking to people and helping them.”

Such a relationship, according to prospective pre-medical student Anjali Dhanekula ’26, is “something you can’t get anywhere else.” 

Dhanekula, who grew up watching medical television series including Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med, was initially allured by the high-drama shows. Being interested in medicine, she said, just felt like “hopping on the bandwagon” at first. 

It was not until Dhanekula shadowed a plastic surgeon, specializing in reconstructive breast surgery, that she was struck by how a doctor could change someone’s life.

“He made them look and feel as close to how they felt before their cancer,” Dhanekula explained. “And after he’d do these surgeries, he’d follow up with them again, and make more appointments and it’s just a special relationship.” 

These stories — in which individuals found value in supporting and empathizing with others — are commonly cited reasons for why people choose medicine, but rarely the perceived reason for Asian Americans.

Instead, pervading explanations argue that medical school is appealing for Asian Americans because it is meritocratic. With the academic standardization created by the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC, which includes rigorous MCAT and board exams, it appears that the “best and brightest,” as measured solely by competency and grit, can be rewarded with a white coat.

“Whenever I told people that I wanted to go to medicine, it didn’t seem like it didn’t seem like they were surprised,” Dhanekula said. “It felt like they were saying, ‘Oh, yeah, that makes sense.’”

However, such a defense for the “studious Asian” stereotype overlooks the disparities within the 11,000 Asian individuals who apply to U.S medical schools annually. Underrepresentation remains a problem for varying ethnic groups within the Asian American community. Laotians, Cambodians and Indonesians, for instance, each make up less than 0.4 percent of these applicants. There is no public data about representation of these Asian subgroups beyond U.S. residency, either. 

Asian Americans are still vying for legitimacy in medicine, Ho reiterated. But both Ho and Zhu said they believed their cultural identities and experiences help them be more empathetic to patients, not less. More specifically, Zhu described learning the nuances of communicating with patients of non-English speaking backgrounds, while Ho said she hopes to be especially attentive toward patients who may have been socialized to be more passive or quiet with doctors.

“At the end of the day, in medicine, if you’re going to put yourself through fifteen years of med school, you’ve got to have something genuine inside of you,” Wang said.

The post Finding “something genuine inside” for Asians in medicine appeared first on Yale Daily News.

At the forefront of the battle against Angelman Syndrome is Professor and Chief of Medical Genetics Yong-Hui Jiang’s lab in collaboration with international parent advocacy organization Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics, which has fundraised $5.8 million toward a cure — $800,000 of which has gone to Jiang’s lab. On March 31, School of Medicine researchers came together with FAST affiliates to look toward the future of a cure against Angelman Syndrome. 

“We want to go back to our donors and say, ‘Hey, we were at Yale, we saw and heard from the researchers and saw the work being done, and we stand by it.’” Edberg — FAST director of community engagement — said in an interview with the News. “We want to tell them ‘We believe it and we need your help for our loved ones, to be able to have a more promising future.’”

Angelman Syndrome is caused by silencing of the maternal chromosome’s UBE3A gene, usually by its deletion or mutation. Current research seeks to rescue the maternal gene, as well as to re-express the paternal version of UBE3A, which is otherwise suppressed. Three therapies for Angelman Syndrome are currently undergoing clinical trials, one of which is funded by FAST, to temporarily prevent paternal silencing. More critically, FAST’s goal is now to “make the technology permanent,” according to Allyson Berent-Weisse, chief science officer at FAST. 

“The data in the permanent solution is almost more promising than anything else we’ve ever seen,” Berent-Weisse said in an interview with the News. 

The day-long event on March 31 invited FAST’s top fundraising families, all of whom are parents with children who live with Angelman Syndrome, from across the country to experience firsthand the impacts of their donations — and glimpse the hope on the horizon. Fundraisers, FAST board members, Jiang lab members and Yale collaborators came together to witness and learn about ongoing research. 

The agenda opened at the Stem Cell Center, where invitees watched and participated in a Jiang lab meeting and discussion. Presentations by Associate Research Scientists Xiaona Lu, Kun-Yong Kim and Yunhua Bao underscored new research findings within and outside the Jiang lab. The lab members debated the merits of a paper presented by Kim, positing a novel CRISPR method, while parents interjected with questions and ideas.

“[This is] the combination of amazing, committed parents who believe in a cure for their kid and amazing, committed scientists who … are discovering those cures,” Berent-Weisse told the News. “[We’re] putting it all together in a way that’s digestible, logical and strategic, to make it all work.”

The lab meeting was followed by a tour of the Giraldez and Jiang labs, both of which collaborate on Angelman Syndrome research, as well as a walk around the Zebrafish Phenotyping Core — a facility containing 1500 tanks of zebrafish in which human diseases can be modeled. The FAST families noted appreciation and excitement about witnessing “science in action.”

“To be able to see all of the details that go into the scientific process to get these therapies from the lab to humans … is eye-opening,” Edberg said. 

For Jiang, the event was inspiring both personally and academically. Twenty-five years prior, during his doctoral training at Duke University, Jiang had created the first animal model for Angelman Syndrome. Due to limited knowledge and resources at the time, however, research into Angelman’s Syndrome came to a standstill.

Now, Jiang points to rapid advancements which have made possible a formerly elusive cure. He noted that his lab’s progress has been “miraculous.”

“Sometimes scientists just come to the perfect time, perfect location, perfect people,” Jiang said. 

One of these “perfect people” includes Lu, who had originally been a craniofacial plastic surgeon, operating on children with abnormal skull fusions. But these anatomical treatments were painful and insufficient, Lu said, as she recalled having to perform surgeries again and again as the children grew up. 

“You cannot cure this patient’s sickness, no matter how many surgeries you put on them,” Lu said. “I wanted to start with a genetic way to cure these young babies from the very beginning … so [that] when they are born, they won’t suffer so much.” 

Today, Lu is one of the lead researchers against Angelman Syndrome in Jiang’s Lab. She generates mouse models with different manifestations of Angelman Syndrome — some of which take generations and generations to breed, according to her lab meeting presentation. As Lu shared during the March 31 meeting, she has been able to rescue these Angelman-afflicted adult mice from their gene deletions via genome editing — a critical step toward a cure, which she hopes can soon be replicated in larger animals.

Edberg noted her gratitude for the work and motivation of Jiang’s lab. Even though Jiang works as a physician-scientist, interacting with patients with Angelman Syndrome in the clinic, neither he nor his lab members have children with Angelman Syndrome. 

“Seeing these incredible researchers have a passion, without necessarily having a child with Angelman Syndrome, is truly touching,” Edberg said. “It’s not just driven by publications or egos or status. Everyone’s really here for the right reasons.”

In her closing remarks, Berent-Weisse also noted the importance of research driven by “children not mice.” As a fundraising gift, the FAST members presented the lab members with a fundraising gift — a photobook with pictures of all their children. 

Even as Lu and Jiang debated new data arising from Lu’s mice, and as lab members and parents alike considered new ways to deliver the best molecular target treatment, Jiang emphasized his patient-centered research approach above all.

“After you interact with these patients and their families, you realize, ‘Oh my goodness, my research becomes so critical,’” Jiang said. “We’re going to change people’s lives.”

FAST was founded in 2008.

The post School of Medicine researchers and parent advocates collaborate for Angelman Syndrome patients appeared first on Yale Daily News.

On March 7, the Connecticut Hospital Association, which represents hospitals and health-related organizations across the state, released an analysis of the pandemic’s impact on the financial health of the hospitals they represent. Commissioned by the American Hospital Association, the report revealed that the median operating margin dropped nearly 67 percent from pre-pandemic levels across Connecticut hospitals, compared to a national average decline of 20 percent.

“This is not a sustainable situation,” Syed Hussain, chief clinical officer of Trinity Health of New England, told the News. “Ultimately … we will be forced to look at programs and offerings and initiatives that we’re currently able to offer to the community and say, ‘Okay, what can we not offer?’ Because we can’t continue running in the red.”

Trinity Health of New England, Yale New Haven Health System and Hartford Healthcare are the three largest health systems in Connecticut, controlling the majority of acute care hospitals in the state. Citing the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Connecticut Health Association explained how plateauing revenues and soaring labor expenses have resulted in unprecedented financial strain for these health systems. 

While Connecticut Health Association leaders argued that under-reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare, inflation and expensive temporary labor were to blame for the losses, health policy experts weighed in with alternate perspectives on the situation. 

First year of deficits

After 50 years of profit, Yale New Haven Health System faced their first financial deficit in FY 2022. Last year, former YNHH vice president Vin Petrini said that YNHH was budgeting for a $250 million deficit in 2023. Dana Marnane, YNHH director of public relations and communications, confirmed that Yale New Haven Health System projected a deficit for FY 2023, but declined to comment on the specific estimate. 

“I cannot speculate at this point on how the year might end, but we are working hard to reduce costs to mitigate the deficit,” Marnane said.

According to Marnane, Yale New Haven Health System’s mitigation efforts include reducing the numbers of more expensive traveler employees, such as traveling nurses. She also cited the Prospect acquisition of three hospitals as an example of the health system’s investment in long-term growth and expansion of their clinical services across a broader geography. Some health advocates have expressed concern about this hospital consolidation, while Yale New Haven Health System continues to seek state approval of the transaction. 

Marnane cited COVID-19’s negative impact on the hospital system’s finances, pointing to increases in labor costs, supply costs, average lengths of stay in the hospital and medical complexity of patients who may have deferred care during the pandemic. 

However, Paul Kidwell, Connecticut Health Associations’ senior vice president of policy, explained that hospitals negotiate commercial contracts to acquire pharmaceuticals, medical supplies and goods like electricity on a three to five year basis, meaning quick rises in inflation are not immediately factored in.

Additionally, hospital losses were driven by the erosion of federal relief funds. While government policymakers formerly provided hospitals with CARES act funding and disaster relief payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, relief funds have now “dried up,” according to Hussain. 

In the case of Trinity Health, the Catholic health system operating 92 hospitals nationally, total revenue from the Provider Relief Fund grant decreased from $618 million in 2021 to $141 million in 2022. Kidwell emphasized that the lack of federal assistance will continue to drive margins downward in 2023. 

Trinity Health of New England, which is housed under the national organization and comprises four Connecticut hospitals and one Massachusetts hospital, emphasized challenges with workforce retention. Trinity’s dependence upon contract labor has been costly — traveling nurses, according to Hussain, can be paid up to three times the salary of normal nurses. 

While revenue has remained mostly flat, increased costs associated with sicker patients, labor shortages and inflationary supply chain costs have taken their toll on the hospitals’ operating margins.

Hussain declined to provide the specific deficit amount for Trinity Health of New England. Nationally, Trinity Health’s FY 2022 audit reported a net loss of $1.4 billion, compared to its $3.8 billion net profit in FY 2021. 

Hussain emphasized the need to invest in workforce growth and retainment. Leveraging newer forms of health delivery, such as telehealth and home-care service, has allowed Trinity Health of New England to supplement and support its current workforce. Hussain also pointed to a recent partnership with local colleges and schools to create a stronger recruitment pipeline. However, such investments require collaboration with the larger communities they serve, Hussain said. 

“We need all folks at the table to be able to ensure that we’re able to continue to invest in our healthcare systems and services and programs that ultimately benefit the community,” Hussain said. 

Hartford Healthcare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Some health policy experts expressed skepticism about the factors cited by Yale New Haven Health System and Trinity Health of New England. One study attributed the bulk of hospitals’ financial struggles to poor investment performances. As the economy declined in 2022, large health systems, which invest heavily in stock markets, faced similar losses. Nationally, Trinity Health, which saw positive returns of 26.0 percent in fiscal year 2021, ran a negative 8.4 percent investment return in fiscal year 2022. 

As a result, the Health Affairs report urged caution in pursuing large-scale policy decisions to offset health systems’ losses from “risky” investments, which it stated will likely be recovered in future years.

Hospitals, policy experts debate Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement

According to the Connecticut Health Association’s report, Connecticut hospitals lost $1.12 billion from Medicare and $993 million from Medicaid, with Medicaid paying hospitals “68 cents on the dollar” for healthcare costs. In a press release, Connecticut Health Association further argued that Medicare and Medicaid payment updates are not matching inflation rates, while commercial insurance contracts will take years to catch up to increases in expenses post-pandemic. 

Nonetheless, Henry Dove, lecturer in health policy and former director of Yale University-West Haven Veterans Health Services Research program, cautions against taking the Connecticut Health Association’s numbers at face value. While Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements indeed pay less than those of private insurance companies, the discrepancy may be “overstated” in the report, according to Dove.

As Dove explained, each hospital sets a gross charge for each service provided to a patient, which they tally in the bill submitted to insurers. However, insurers have their own allowed amount that they negotiate with the hospital, representing the maximum amount they are willing to pay. As a result, the gross charge is hardly ever paid in full — it becomes a “meaningless number,” Dove said, which hospitals can set arbitrarily. 

“The hospital will claim ‘Oh, this patient cost $20,000,’” Dove explained. “It makes it look like they lost a ton of money on these patients … While they truly did lose money on the Medicaid patients, whenever they count up their losses, they often use gross charges, which is a fictitious number.”

According to Connecticut Health Association’s March 7 press conference, Connecticut ranks 48th in the nation for Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements. Kidwell argued that hospitals compensate for financial loss to Medicaid/Medicare by negotiating with commercial insurers to subsidize the deficit. As Dove explained, they depend heavily upon these privately-insured individuals to turn a profit. 

However, this means that hospitals that cater to underserved patient populations find it more difficult to cover their costs, according to Hussain. He noted that the problem would worsen with the May 11 expiration of the federal Public Health Emergency, declared under Section 319 of the Public Health Service Act, as some individuals auto-enrolled in Medicare may lose access to insurance altogether.

“We need increases both from a payer side, as well as other key players that are part of this problem,” Hussain said. 

However, Ted Doolittle, the state healthcare advocate, said that “significant scholarship” has shown that increasing the price of Medicaid “does not ever” result in a decrease in commercial prices. He cited an article that showed that a 10 percent reduction in Medicare rates in a given region reduced private insurance prices.

Further, unlike commercial reinsurance rates, Medicare reimbursement rates are “rooted” in the hospital costs, Doolittle argued. Medicare sets its rates based on annual cost reports filed by all hospitals in the program. 

“It is very often the case that [when] negotiating rates, the insurance companies really don’t care that much about the hospital costs,” Doolittle said. “In fact, the insurance companies generally, by the larger systems, get dictated what the price will be.”

Kidwell additionally emphasized the impact of low reimbursement rates on access to care. Specialists, for example, may not accept Medicaid patients based on pay, he explained. Kidwell reasoned that patients without access to specialty care may end up using emergency departments more frequently as opposed to seeking a continuum of care at the hospital.

“For a long time, the state has very proudly talked about how they have limited the growth of their Medicaid program,” Kidwell said. “And that means really restricting payment for hospital and specialty care. That’s how you maintain such a low spending rate in your Medicaid program.”

The deficit continues

Kidwell said the first fiscal quarter of 2023 is “not looking better” than 2022. Hussain alluded to having to cut programs and initiatives in the future, if the deficit were to continue indefinitely. However, he said that Trinity Health of New England has not made any immediate changes because of the deficit. 

YNHH wrote to the News that they have made significant investments in “recruitment and retention” as a result of staffing shortages, but did not specify if the deficit had forced them to change operations in any way. Likewise, Connecticut Health Association called for financial assistance to meet workforce needs across the state’s healthcare systems.

Kidwell emphasized that a positive margin allows systems to go beyond just maintaining current operations. Prolonged deficits threaten the ability of hospital systems to expand services offered to the community, he said. 

However, Doolittle called the extent of the financial strain into question, pointing to the raft of new facilities that continue to be built across the state.

“Does that scream of a system that is strapped for cash? I don’t think so,” Doolittle said. “If I start seeing ‘for sale’ signs in front of those buildings, then I’ll start to believe that there’s a financial strain that they are coming under.”

Doolittle said he regarded skyrocketing healthcare prices as a problem in itself, noting the heightened revenue expectations of large systems. He contrasted this with the small independent hospitals in the state that run their hospitals “more efficiently” while charging lower prices. While large hospital systems may emphasize their deficits, Doolittle urged them to learn from these smaller institutions. 

The Connecticut Hospital Association represents 27 of Connecticut’s acute care hospitals.

Correction 3/27: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that financial figures from the national Trinity Health system were from Trinity Health of New England.

The post Connecticut hospitals face record financial losses appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Called RefleXion X1, this technology combines positron emission tomography, or PET scanning and radiation therapy in a novel treatment called SCINTIX. It was cleared by the FDA for clinical use against bone and lung metastatic cancers — tumors which have traveled beyond their location of origin — in late February, showing promise in the fight against late-stage cancers. While the machine is currently being vetted and checked for quality, Smilow staff look forward to treating their first patients with this technology by April.

“We are trying to test whether this technology will make it easier, safer and more effective in treating lung and bone tumors,” Henry Park, associate professor of therapeutic radiology and chief of the thoracic radiotherapy program, wrote to the News. “Especially for patients with metastatic disease, but also for those with earlier-stage disease. 

Cancer clinics have long used radiotherapy — a treatment that uses ionizing radiation to kill harmful cells — but the strategy is not without drawbacks. The biggest challenge of radiotherapy is targeting lethal radiation to malignant cells while ensuring protection of normal body cells. 

Though PET scans, which visualize a tumor’s location, have helped hone radiotherapy targeting, they take far too long to generate an image, according to RefleXion cofounder and chief technology officer Samuel Mazin. Tumors are not stationary, moving with a patient’s breathing, digestion and other bodily motions. In the minutes it takes to generate a PET scan, a tumor may have already shifted away from its original location. This results in a “collateral damage,” as Mazin described it, that can increase the toxicity of treatment.

“Imagine if the tumor was like a car on a racetrack,” Mazin said. “[You can] basically illuminate the entire racetrack to make sure that you’re always hitting the car… but you are also getting a lot of other stuff that you don’t want to hit.”

Though Mazin was compelled by the idea of PET imaging, he hoped to make it occur faster. He wondered if he could target the earliest clusters of PET signals, which are emitted by radio-labeled glucose taken up by fast-metabolizing cancer cells, before they have rendered a final image. This could occur on the order of milliseconds, allowing radiation to be delivered almost in real-time. 

“When this idea popped in my head, it all of a sudden shifted my whole life,” Mazin said. “I could do nothing else but think about it.”

The query propelled him out of academia, where he had been working as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and into the realm of biotechnology. He co-founded RefleXion in 2009.

The SCINTIX treatment, which was pioneered by RefleXion, combines PET imaging with radiation delivery. A patient lies down in the Reflexion X1 device, which rotates around them rapidly at one revolution per second to collect PET signals while shooting radiation beams along the same path. The company and machine are named after this idea of “reflecting” radiation toward its point of origin. 

“You just really want these signals to turn tumors into their own beacons, their own kind of active transponders,” Mazin said. 

Such precision will allow SCINTIX to be used safely alongside other cancer therapies. Both Mazin and Sean Shirvani, chief medical officer at RefleXion, expressed interest in combining the treatment with other whole-body therapies like surgery, chemotherapy and immunotherapy.  

These combinations can be dangerous without advanced radiation technology, said Shirvani, especially when treating multiple tumors in a patient’s body.

“In [this] case, you really want to be very accurate, so that the patient doesn’t have too much toxicity preventing things like drug therapy, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy from being part of the dance,” Shirvani wrote in a statement to the News. “With SCINTIX, we use the tumor to guide its own treatment, thereby hopefully achieving that precision that then opens the way to safe and effective combinations with other cancer therapies.  

Now that RefleXion has been cleared by the FDA for clinical use, the Smilow Cancer Hospital looks forward to its implementation. Park hopes the technology will make it easier to treat patients with multiple tumors, or those in the later stages of lung or bone cancer. He expressed his wish that such patients will experience improved quality-of-life, alleviated side effects and more effective disease control following their treatment. 

Park is also hoping to create a registry which will capture patients’ data for their treatment with the machine. He alluded to several clinical trials, involving existing and novel radiotracers, which can be tested in conjunction with SCINTIX. He emphasized that implementing the machine will require time and adjustment, but he hopes to find how to “most optimally harness the power of the technology.”

“Using SCINTIX is certainly expected to slow down the workflow, especially in the beginning,” Park wrote. “However, we believe that this is very much worth it in order to offer our patients such a novel tool to treat their cancers.”

So far, the technology has only been approved for lung and bone cancers, though Mazin is optimistic about expanding RefleXion into a general cancer treatment device. He envisioned it being able to “treat almost every solid tumor case and cancer at any stage.” 

Mazin also mentioned trying to implement SCINTIX at the community level, beyond large healthcare systems like YNHH. He noted the economic challenges that accompanied making SCINTIX accessible and appealing to such cancer centers, however, and declined to answer if RefleXion would cut costs to improve access for community-based clinics.

“We’re always looking to make it work with every center,” Mazin said. “And so, we’ll just leave it at that, because it’s a really complex project to get these machines installed in sites.” 

Smilow Cancer Hospital is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Connecticut.

The post YNHH’s Smilow Cancer Hospital pioneers new radiotherapy technology appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This case was one of many shared at the New Haven Go Red for Women initiative, an annual campaign to support women’s heart health in Connecticut. Chaired by assistant professor Lisa Freed — director of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Women’s Heart & Vascular Program — in partnership with the American Heart Association, the campaign has raised $75,000 for the AHA so far.

This year marks Go Red for Women’s return to an in-person gathering after two years of virtual programming. At the signature event, “Heart Smart Ways to Celebrate Your Life,” physicians, nurses, patients and community members joined together for an evening of educational speaker and fundraising events, while learning from each other’s experiences related to heart disease. 

“Whether it’s a doctor telling me one of these events, or another just human being with human experiences telling you — it makes it real,” Freed said in an interview with the News. “And it makes you take it seriously, which women don’t always do.”

Cardiovascular disease has not traditionally been thought of as a women’s disease, noted Freed, and the discourse around it differs from other diseases such as breast cancer, which has created a robust awareness campaign nationwide.

Until recently, most of the foundational research on heart disease — its symptoms, treatments and medications — were based on data from men. Yet cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death for women: the illness is responsible for about one in every three female deaths, according to the American Heart Association.

“The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement empowers women to take charge of their heart health while raising funds and awareness,” Adria D. Giordano, executive director of AHA Connecticut, wrote to the News. “Along with local supporters like the Heart and Vascular Center at Yale New Haven Health, we can truly make a difference in our fight to save lives.” 

At the start of her career, Freed noted a lack of basic treatment and prevention methods in medical care for women with heart conditions. Women in hospitals often are not educated about how to manage risk factors of heart disease, such as getting their lipids checked or blood pressure treated.

This drove Freed and other women’s care physicians toward a new mission: to inform women about their risk, prevention and treatment options for the overlooked disease. As part of this push, the inaugural New Haven Go Red event was held in 2017.

“We started to say, okay, at least one day a year, we’re going to inform women in an educational setting and make people aware,” Freed said. “And then the other 364 days … [I’m] going out to healthcare clinics, churches, … community centers, women’s business associations and speaking in front of them.”

Moreover, as noted by Francine LoRusso — a critical care nurse who currently serves as senior vice president and executive director of the Heart & Vascular Center and Transplantation Center across the Yale-New Haven Health system — heart disease is complex because it involves a multitude of factors, including diet, exercise, genetics and environment. It is easy to miss a major symptom without a holistic context of a patient’s life. 

As such, LoRusso pointed to the cruciality of putting a face and a story behind each patient — and teaching them to advocate for themselves.

“When you have a multitude of patients that are presenting to any of our hospitals or within our ambulatory sites, we need to listen and take all the elements around,” LoRusso told the News. “Do they have a good diet? Are they in an environment where they’re getting the care they need? Is transportation an issue?”

The signature event of the Go Red initiative was held at the New Haven Lawn Club on Feb. 8. Speakers included Gina Barreca, humorist and English professor at the University of Connecticut, who delivered a keynote address framing heart disease prevention as an opportunity for women to uplift each other. Barreca’s speech was followed by a moderated conversation with three cardiologists, who explored the stories of three fictitious women across three generations with cardiovascular disease. The panel touched upon sex differences in heart attack symptoms, risk factor management strategies and pregnancy-related complications. 

The event also featured a Tai Chi class led by Shifu Shirley Chock, in which all participants stood up and tried out basic moves. Afterward, Alisa Bowens led the attendees in a salsa dance workshop. 

150 guests attended the Feb. 8 event, but Freed emphasized that she hopes to welcome and educate anyone who has a connection to heart disease, or is simply interested in learning more. Through the Go Red initiative, cardiologists, nurses, internists, obstetrician-gynecologists, hospital staff and community members are encouraged to connect. 

“It’s an enormous range of educational levels, expertise and knowledge base,” Freed said. “So it’s a real range from literally the president of the hospital, who’s a physician, to a community person, who doesn’t know anything about heart disease”

Beyond sharing expert opinions, however, both Freed and LoRusso placed emphasis on storytelling from average people and patients. In a segment of the signature event, one woman shared her story of experiencing and surviving a heart attack, a narrative which LoRusso described as “illuminating.” 

According to LoRusso, these anecdotes are critical to helping women remember and learn from each other’s experiences. 

“If I’m educating you about heart disease, I’m giving you facts … [and] we tap into our heart and vascular cardiologist, or CT surgeons or others to share their experience as a physician,” LoRusso said. “But when you’re hearing the patient perspective, or a family member perspective, that’s much more powerful.”

Indeed, both Freed and LoRusso described social determinants which drive women to minimize their symptoms. Not only does heart attack present more subtly in women — fatigue and back pain are common symptoms that go unnoticed — but women’s complaints are more frequently glossed over by doctors as well. 

Freed recalled how only 8 to 10 percent of cardiologists were women when she started her medical training. Although the number has increased slightly and most large university hospitals have adopted special women’s heart care centers, there are still strides to be made. Freed recalled being the only community female cardiologist in a town when she started her practice.

“I basically came to town, and these women flocked to my practice,” Freed said. “They were like, ‘I’ve been having chest pain for years. Nobody’s listening to me, can you figure out what’s wrong?’”

Looking forward, the Go Red campaign hopes to continue to expand equitable cardiovascular care and awareness. Future programs include a mentorship for girls aspiring toward STEM careers, forthcoming in May, as well as broader educational programs. Freed is also working on clinical research to investigate how heart diseases present uniquely in women. 

However, health does not only start with hospital care, Freed and LoRusso emphasized. Equally important is for women of all ages to cultivate beneficial lifestyle habits. LoRusso pointed to the holistic nature of care, emphasizing how various demographics may experience environmental factors differently. She noted how Hispanic individuals in the Fairfield-Bridgeport area and the African-American population in the New Haven area have been disproportionately impacted by restricted access to care. 

“We need to be better about that,” LoRusso said. “We need to really look at the whole patient, and we need to listen to the patient.”

Fundraising for this year’s Go Red for Women campaign ends on June 30.

The post New Haven, YNHH members raise $75,000 for women’s heart health appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Held during the lunar Yuanxiao Festival, the event spotlighted the work of students involved in the Chinese Program, featuring pre-recorded performances made by each Mandarin class and brushstroke calligraphy created during weekly club workshops. Attendees ranged from current Mandarin students and graduate students to curious teachers and family members.

The event also marked the first in-person Lantern Festival celebration of its kind by the program. This made the event especially special for Rongzhen Li, the director of the Yale Chinese Program and a senior lector in Mandarin. 

“I hope everyone can remember that awe in seeing a student dance, or the happiness of winning the raffle, or the excitement of winning a raffle and taking a lantern back home,” Li told the News. “I wanted to let people ring in the New Year together and experience our students’ creations.”

For the day, Dow Hall — which usually houses the Center for Language Study — had been transformed to resemble a traditional festival setting, adorned with riddle-covered hanging lanterns, brushstroke calligraphy and red banners promising good fortune. In line with Yuanxiao tradition, individuals who answered the riddles correctly would be allowed to take the lanterns home.

Previously, the program held annual Lunar New Year gatherings at Great Wall Restaurant, where a limited number of students could wrap dumplings together. When the festival moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event became large enough to accommodate anyone who wanted to come. Students and teachers watched pre-recorded videos by each Mandarin class, while raffles and performances occurred over Zoom. 

Although Li spoke positively of the pre-pandemic dumpling events, she emphasized the fulfillment of seeing everyone able to participate together online. After three years of virtual celebration, the Chinese Program wanted to host a similarly large-scale gathering in-person. 

“What the Chinese department really wanted to do was create a space for all people from different levels of the Chinese class programming to meet each other,” said Ritik Chamola ’24, a student organizer for the event. “More than that, it’s just really an opportunity to celebrate our work.”

Besides exhibiting student videos, Chamola and the organizers planned an array of other events, including Mahjong, crafts and paper-cutting. In one room, students experienced an authentic tea-tasting ceremony run by a tea house, learning about the flavors and origins of freshly brewed tea. Further down the hall, students karaoked to popular Chinese songs.

Louie Lu ’23, who was a former production and design editor for the News, discussed the spirit of immersion and collaboration at the event. As he listened to students singing karaoke, he pointed out how many of them sang in regional dialects in Cantonese, Taiwanese and Yue. 

“The Chinese department is really a way to promote not only Chinese culture, but a culture that has influenced — and has been influenced by — different cultures in East Asia and Southeast Asia,” Lu said.  

Li highlighted the cultural ethos of each activity; mahjong, for instance, is about “rendering order out of disorder.” Similarly, she said, students who tried calligraphy, in copying down traditional idioms, learned character-writing and philosophical values. One paper bore brushstrokes reading “上善若水” — that one should be adaptable as water. 

The event’s main show began with an exhibition of the videos — including skits, singing and musical performances — which students in each Mandarin class had recorded. Afterward came a live traditional dance and performance on the guzheng, a Chinese string instrument. 

For Li, seeing an audience of 200 gathered for the show was the most gratifying aspect.  

“I was touched seeing such a large crowd, all of them hushed, watching this student dance, or attentively watching the other student play the guzheng,” Li said. “It made me a little emotional.”

A raffle followed the performances, in which prizes, including calligraphy by instructor Wei Su and Chinese Program merchandise, were given to lucky students. 

“You can tell [the Chinese Program] puts a lot of effort into these events, so they’re always really fun,” Sophie Price ’25 told the News.  

Price, who had come with the rest of her L4 class, was one of many attendees at the event who were not of Chinese heritage. Given that many Mandarin classes are filled by individuals simply curious about the language, organizers and guests spoke approvingly of the diverse turnout, which also included international students and graduate students. Many teachers from the Center for Language Study also came in support of their colleagues. 

As an individual born and raised in China, Xianda Huang GRD ’24 came to the event hoping to re-experience a traditional national festival. The experience “exceeded expectations,” Huang said, because of the diversity of people represented. 

“People from different backgrounds are all here, not just ethnically Chinese individuals,” Huang said in an interview with the News. “That makes me really happy.”

Li and Huang’s comments have been translated from Mandarin.

Lu also pointed out how such a festival can “transcend[s] political disputes.” He acknowledged ongoing tensions between China and the U.S., but emphasized the importance of events such as this one in facilitating cross-cultural understanding. 

“There’s a lot of politicization today of simply being anti-China because of the totalitarian government,” Lu said. “I think this community is very much focused on culture and unity, instead of division.”

This feeling of inclusivity is one which runs beyond the Lantern Festival. Three students interviewed described the tight-knit nature of their Mandarin classes. Other attendees also praised the dedication of their teachers, who motivated them to come to the celebration. For Chamola, this was part of what drove him to engage more with the Chinese Program.

“People who are part of the Chinese department, whether as students or as teachers, are like a family,” Chamola said. 

The 2023 Lantern Festival was sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies.

The post The Chinese Program hosts first large-scale, in-person lantern festival appeared first on Yale Daily News.

When I walk in on a lazy autumn Friday, four graduate students sit near the entrance. They are speaking in Mandarin. Yoon-ock Kim scrubs dishes behind the counter. She is vibrant and lively, rifling through cardboard boxes while punching in my order for one plain bibimbap. 

Kim’s easy grace is the product of thirty-seven years of business ownership. She’s been running the Pantry since shortly after her immigration from South Korea in 1977. When Kim arrived in New Haven and began working as a teacher, the city had only one Asian grocery store, a tiny Chinese market catering to the small population of East Asian Yale students, including four Korean couples who, like Kim and her husband, had come to New Haven for graduate school. 

“But four became eight the next year, and sixteen the year after that,” Kim explains from behind the counter, where she flattens and arranges lettuce leaves. 

She and another Korean-born classmate shared the desire to start their own grocery store to serve the growing Asian population. Her friend established the business under her name, and in 1985, the Oriental Pantry opened its doors. For two and a half years, Kim helped her friend co-manage the store while she held a job at the Yale School of Medicine. Then, when her friend moved back to Korea, Kim quit her job and took over the store full-time. 

Kim explains this career shift matter-of-factly, as if it requires no justification. She glides from the cash register, to a customer searching for ingredients, to the sizzling beef on the stovetop. Back at the counter, she takes an occasional break to lean over and address me directly. 

Located a mile north of central campus, Oriental Pantry is a universe away from The Shops at Yale. There are no price barcodes, only colored index cards that mark the products and their prices in neon highlighter. Some of them have been re-marked, taped over, crossed out. Kim’s handwriting covers everything in soft, even curves. Time crawls.

“SOBA is good for the Summer. It cool down your heat,” reads one cloud-shaped, lime-green label. A price card for Tonkatsu sauce is accompanied by hand-written cooking instructions for pork katsu (“Deep Fry & Serve with sauce & finely sliced cabbage.”) Kim tells me she wrote the labels to educate customers about how to use different products. She even used to hold cooking lessons on Korean and Japanese cuisines for international students.

I can picture Kim ten years ago writing these note cards—tracing out the Hangul for international visitors, writing English messages for American students, a paper trail of her history across every wall.

While we talk, a Muslim man sifts through the shelves, interrupting every once in a while to ask Kim about her inventory. He wants to know if she carries udon noodles (she does), and if she can help him translate the Hangul characters on a different product (she can). After he checks out, Kim explains to me that she never intended Oriental Pantry to be exclusively for Korean students, or for students of Asian heritage. She loves teaching non-Asian guests about different foods and cultures. 

Still it’s Yale’s international students for whom Oriental Pantry means the most.

The restaurant’s student regulars sometimes forget to pay after finishing their meal, Kim tells me. A few moments later, they always run back into the store, apologizing. Kim laughs when she describes this, and I wonder if she sees her younger self reflected in them—displaced from home, and seeking something that resembles it. 

Earlier, Kim had said teaching and shopkeeping were vastly different roles. As I think about the notecards, her cooking lessons, the graduate students chatting at the entrance, I’m not so sure. Everyone who comes to Oriental Pantry, it seems, takes away more than their weekly groceries. 

When I ask her about retirement, she entertains it briefly. “I’ll probably have to retire soon,” she says, “but not until I find someone who can run this place like me.”

What does she mean by “like me”? Well, the Oriental Pantry leans into its mismatched inventory: shelves of Japanese snacks beside Korean skincare, kids toys beside kitchen utensils. She doesn’t care about image curation or marketing—in fact, she doesn’t even take heed of the argument that “Oriental” is an offensive term because it exoticizes and generalizes all of East Asia.  Like a remnant of a time when Yale had fewer than twenty East Asian graduate students, the store is colored by its intercultural customer base. It caters to anyone who comes craving a taste of Asia, and it welcomes them with indiscriminate warmth. 

On the last day of classes in the fall semester, a friend and I passed in and out of Asian-owned shops on Chapel Street. We sipped lavender lattes and split a cheesecake at the French-Korean bakery Tous les Jours, picked out gifts at the Asian homegoods store UniLife. And as we walked through fluorescent-lit aisles of shoeboxes, she said what we were both thinking: “It’s so… sterile.” 

I thought of an Eric Yip poem that ends with him eating rice at an American dim sum restaurant: “Steamed, perfect, white,” he wrote. To me that line captures it perfectly—the too-clean, too-perfect branding of Asian businesses at Yale and across the United States. The eco-conscious, minimalist, Marie Kondo-esque Muji store in Midtown. The trendy, millennial, matcha-with-oat-milk-half-sugar boba shop, complete with the glow of LED lights and notes of 88rising. If these enterprises are meant to remind America’s Asian diaspora of home, that home has been thoroughly commodified, westernized, and sterilized. 

When Kim told me she quit her job to run the store, I couldn’t understand what it meant to love a place enough that you’d give up a career to hold onto it. But some time later, I realize that her love pours into every nook of Oriental Pantry, from the fortune cats promising good grades to plastic boxes of hand-rolled kimbap.

Tomorrow is Saturday. The store will fill with students buying groceries, sharing bits and pieces of their lives with Kim in conversation over the counter. As she replies, she’ll sometimes cross over the counter to shelve new goods or run to the register to get the bill. Oriental Pantry’s website claims that the store comprises three sections: gifts, grocery, and cafe. From the inside, where Korean face masks are crammed next to strawberry Pocky boxes and the footprints of all of its guests past linger in the aisles, I don’t think those divisions really exist. Everything just feels like home.

The post At Home in the Oriental Pantry appeared first on Yale Daily News.