News from around Yale and the World

In this Q&A, Nature Mental Health speaks to Dr. John Pachankis, a clinical psychologist and professor of public health, psychology, and psychiatry, and the director of Yale’s LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative. His research explores mechanisms, including developmental and biopsychosocial components, that contribute to the elevated burden of mental health disorders observed in LGBT+ people and that may serve as targets for reducing risk and for treatment.

Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Jason Schwartz, an expert in health policy, says that dismissing the current committee that advises the U.S. government on vaccine safety and policy could increase vaccine hesitancy and make government vaccine recommendations less clear.

Two student teams representing the Yale School of Public Health and Yale College have received awards from the Yale-Collaborative Action Project (Y-CAP). The Y-CAP awards enable scholarly endeavors for teams of Yale undergraduate and graduate students working in global health.

The Yale Global HIV/AIDS Research Network (GARNER) and the Yale Global Health Ethics Network (GHEN), in collaboration with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA), recently hosted a virtual panel on open access publishing to accelerate public access to scholarly work.

Public health and policy researchers at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania say that proposed changes to Medicaid and other U.S. health programs could lead to more than 51,000 deaths annually if enacted.

A team from the Yale Department of Psychiatry recently visited rural Uganda as part of the Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF), an initiative organized by Empower Through Health.

The nation’s top public health agency posted new recommendations that say healthy children and pregnant women may get COVID-19 vaccinations, removing stronger language that those groups should get the shots. YSPH Associate Professor Jason Schwartz says the recommendation changes could be confusing to some.

For its fourth round of grants, Yale Planetary Solutions will fund 23 projects—including a new “Constellation”-level project focused on destroying hydrofluorocarbon refrigerant gases.

A combination of an uptake in measles vaccinations and a buildup of natural immunity is likely behind a decline of new measles cases in the U.S., experts say. YSPH Associate Professor Jason Schwartz comments.