Donors Making a Difference
The need for excellence in public health education and research could not be more urgent. Thanks to generous philanthropists, Yale School of Public Health is able to realize its mission to catalyze health for all through science, learning, and action.
Following are stories of visionary donors who believe that now is the essential time to invest in public health.
YSPH is deeply grateful for these and so many other donors whose partnership we welcome in our efforts to sustain faculty and students as they work to improve health around the world.
Donor Stories
For Lisa Ragen Ide, MD ’89, MPH, Yale has always been a place of possibility. “Yale provides such an outstanding education and such exceptional experiences for anyone who attends that it feels like it makes anything possible. The opportunities there are just extraordinary. People end up with the perspective that they can make a difference in the world,” she says.
- When asked to help Connecticut navigate its way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the first things former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi did was schedule a meeting with Yale School of Public Health Professor Dr. Albert Ko.
- When Mary Palshaw, MPH ’75, went to work as an epidemiologist at Stauffer Chemical Company, most of the other women she encountered on the job were secretaries. Men flat-out told her that they did not want to work for a woman.
- For Yale College alumnus Gregory Hicks ’72, the School of Public Health wasn’t the obvious choice when he was considering a gift to Yale. However, after hearing about an opportunity to maximize impact at the school, he discovered that the work done at YSPH has profound connections to his own passions.
- Dr. Subasree Srinivasan, MPH ’98, together with her husband, established the Subasree Srinivasan, MD, '98 MPH, and Sunil D’Cunha, MD, FACP Scholarship Fund to give future students the opportunity to follow a more direct path to their own dreams.
- Toshio Kimura, MPH ‘02, and Nicole C. Quon, MPhil ’05, PHD ’07 are numbers people. They met in a biostatistics class at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). Now married, the couple are endowing a scholarship at the school.
- Tony Award-winning actor and producer Michael Shulman appreciates the power and potential of artist-driven work.
- The Yale School of Public Health’s ongoing efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion received a substantial boost with a generous donation from Dr. Pilar Vargas and her husband, Dean Sten H. Vermund.
- A record number of students at the Yale School of Public Health received scholarship aid in 2021, thanks in part to a generous gift from two long-time supporters of the school.
- When COVID-19 emerged as a global health threat, scientists at the Yale School of Public Health immediately began investigating the virus in an attempt to stop its spread and save lives.
When Dr. Rock Positano pursued his Master of Public Health degree he already had a vision for making podiatric medicine and orthopedics a holistic practice.
- When students graduate from the Yale School of Public Health they go to work in fields that are crucial for the well-being and vitality of communities around the world.
- As a combat medic in Vietnam, Jan Abshire, MPH ‘89, fell in love with health care. After being discharged, he became a respiratory therapist, married and started a family in his native Oklahoma.
- When Naya Kehayes, M.P.H. ’93, learned she had been accepted by the Yale School of Public Health, she was recovering from reconstructive surgery for a connective tissue problem.
- Former Dean Paul Cleary knows well the tremendous potential of the cancer research underway at the Yale School of Public Health, in addition to the terrible toll that cancer continues to take.
- When Robert Steele ’71 MPH, ’75 Ph.D. graduated from the Yale School of Public Health more than thirty years ago, a combination of federal and Yale-based student aid allowed him to receive his diploma debt free.
- As a student in the late 1960s, Richard Skolnik '72 BA traveled to a small village in the Philippines to teach science and biology. The year–long internship left a lasting impression upon Skolnik, who returned to earn his bachelor’s in 1972.
- H. Husnu Okvuran '94 BA attributes his decision to donate to the Yale School of Public Health in part to a recent meeting he had in Dubai with a senior member of the school’s faculty.