School Notes: School of Management
May/June 2023

Lab tackles New Haven social issues

In Professor Teresa Chahine’s Social Entrepreneurship Lab, students work together to generate solutions to social and environmental issues. They often start by training their efforts on problems facing their neighbors in New Haven. The course attracts students from across Yale looking to make an impact.

Students form teams around a social or environmental topic of their choice and then devise solutions to related problems. Every year, students focus their research in New Haven communities, working with local nonprofits and other organizations. “Everyone has something to learn from social entrepreneurship that they can apply in their life and their future job to create social change,” Chahine said.

Professors honored for mask study

Jason Abaluck, professor of economics, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics, are among the winners of the 2023 Top Ten Clinical Research Achievement Award.

Abaluck and Mobarak were honored for their study “Impact of community masking on COVID-19: A cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh,” the first randomized trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection in a real-world community setting. The study, a collaboration with the research and policy group Innovations for Poverty Action and scholars from Stanford University, the University of California–Berkeley, and other universities, involved more than 340,000 people in 600 villages. Their research led to the adoption of the study’s model for promoting mask usage—known by the acronym “NORM”—in multiple countries, with support from governments and major donors.

The Top Ten Clinical Research Achievement Award is presented by the Clinical Research Forum, a national organization dedicated to promoting research and its translation into clinical care.