Benjamin Piascik
They of the salmon-pink trim followed a new north star this Commencement. Borne proudly aloft by Professor Shelley Geballe ’76JD, ’95MPH, the School of Public Health’s new mace (left)—created to mark the school’s 2024 independence from the Yale School of Medicine—caught the sunlight in flashes of stainless steel and Yale blue.
It seemed a fitting moment for change. “What does it mean to enter a field that is being rewritten in real time?” asked Dean Megan L. Ranney, a question taken up by keynote speaker Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who reminded the 392 new MPH, MS, and PhD holders that when the school was founded in 1915, average life expectancy was 55 years. Now “your challenge,” Burwell said, “will be how to renew public health at a moment of nearly unimaginable technological progress and unrelenting mistrust.”
The design features human figures encircling a globe blown from borosilicate glass—used for lab wetware—by Yale chemists. Rooted in ideas from a schoolwide survey and strategic plan, it nods to public health’s basis in community, as well as to Yale’s motto and the ways in which science and society are intertwined.
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