School Notes: School of Management
May/June 2024

Vaccine delivery initiative expands in Sierra Leone

A medical vaccine delivery initiative, co-led by Professor Mushfiq Mobarak, is expanding in rural Sierra Leone, thanks to a grant from the Mercury Project, a consortium of global researchers addressing affordable, scalable vaccine interventions.

The $673,000 grant was given to Wageningen University, where Mobarak serves as one of the principal investigators on a team in the ongoing Sierra Leone initiative. In 2022, the team visited remote villages in Sierra Leone as part of a study to increase access to COVID-19 vaccines, published in Nature.

Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health has prioritized a vaccine bundle comprising COVID-19 vaccination, HPV vaccination for girls aged 10–12, and routine immunizations for children aged zero to six for this project.

Student project explores retirement planning in underserved populations

Executive MBA students in the first-year core Customer course last fall undertook a capstone project that explored ways to encourage retirement planning in African American and Latino populations.

Taught by K. Sudhir, the James L. Frank ’32 Professor of Private Enterprise and Management and professor of marketing, Customer helps students recognize that consumer behavior is not uniform across people and invites them to think more inclusively. For the project, students created marketing plans to reach “under-marketed-to segments” in retirement planning.

Scholarship supports students in master’s in systemic risk program

The Volcker Family Foundation has made a multi-year commitment to create the Paul A. Volcker Scholarship, which will enable the school to support students in the master’s in systemic risk program who would not otherwise be able to attend. 

The systemic risk program brings early- and mid-career employees of central banks 
and other financial regulatory agencies around the world to Yale for a year of intensive study. The scholarship is named for Paul A. Volcker, who served two terms as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.