School Notes: School of Public Health
November/December 2019

YSPH student receives humanitarian award

Shadrack Frimpong, an MPH student in the Yale School of Public Health’s Advanced Professional Program, received a 2019 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for his work opening a school and medical clinic in his native village, Tarkwa Breman, a remote cocoa-growing community in western Ghana. The award is given to just six individuals, age 30 and under, who serve as advocates, activists, and role models in transforming communities and bringing about positive change in the world. With the support of a $150,000 grant from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, Shadrack, through his startup Cocoa360, developed a ten-acre communal farm that supports a tuition-free school attended by 150 girls, and a clinic that has served over 4,000 people from eight communities. 

NIH grant will support study of fungal evolution

Elihu Professor of Biostatistics Jeffrey Townsend has received a five-year, $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the role of fungal evolution in spreading disease. The findings could lead to new vaccine candidates for the prevention of endemic fungal diseases. Approximately 300 fungi cause disease in humans, and some can be fatal to people with weakened immune systems. Townsend, lead principal investigator on the grant, and colleagues will investigate how shifts in gene expression over time allowed certain fungi to evolve, making them more likely to cause infection.

Students spend summer learning about environmental health sciences

Undergraduate students from as far away as China, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates spent part of their summer learning about the latest trends in environmental health sciences at YSPH. In the Summer International Program in Environmental Health Sciences, or SIPEHS, students learned about the origins of human disease; how climate and energy impact our health; green chemistry solutions; and novel approaches for assessing exposure to harmful environmental pollutants. In a separate program known as the Summer Research Experience in Environmental Health Sciences or SREEH, ten students conducted research while paired with faculty mentors from four professional schools at Yale.