School Notes: School of Public Health
July/August 2026

A model collaboration

Professor Nicole Deziel is bringing Yale’s public health science to a community in crisis by partnering with residents and advocates to monitor air and soil quality following a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. In return, Deziel’s conversations with East Palestine community members have informed her own research. By showing up in person, earning residents’ trust, and allowing community voices to shape her research, Deziel secured an NIH grant to study the long-term environmental health impacts of the disaster—demonstrating that the most rigorous science begins not in the lab, but by listening.  

Reimagining health data for all

PopHIVE, a community-driven platform created by scientists at the Yale School of Public Health, transforms complex datasets—from childhood immunizations to injury and overdose—into actionable insights. Through partnerships with organizations ranging from Epic (a nationwide electronic health records system) to Metopio (a national community health data automation platform), PopHIVE is making health data easier to use in decisions that affect patients, families, and communities. PopHIVE is proving that when health data is open, timely, and easy to use, it becomes a powerful tool for all. Try it at pophive.org. 

They came to YSPH to do the work, and the world noticed

Two senior undergraduate students at Yale, each of whom conducted extensive research in labs at the Yale School of Public Health, were recent recipients of prestigious awards for postgraduate study. August Rios, who studied housing justice, policy, and tenant housing conditions in the Housing and Health Equity Lab, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Isabel Rancu, who applied computational methods to understand the transmission and evolution of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the Ted Cohen Lab, was awarded a Marshall Scholarship.

At Oxford, Rios will pursue a two-year master’s in philosophy in comparative social policy with a concentration in housing policy. As a Marshall Scholar, Rancu will pursue a master of research in bioinformatics and theoretical systems biology at Imperial College and a master of science in applied infectious disease epidemiology at University College London.