A capacity crowd turned out to celebrate a mathematical epidemiologist who received the first new endowed professorship at the Yale School of Public Health in nearly 50 years.
Colleagues and friends from Yale and beyond on Tuesday packed the Anlyan Center Auditorium (with overflow available at the Yale School of Medicine) to recognize the scientific achievements of Alison P. Galvani, Ph.D., and to hear renowned panelists discuss wide ranging scientific and social topics.
Galvani was named the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Public Health earlier this year. Her research focuses on applications of epidemiology and evolutionary ecology in the study of numerous diseases. She is the youngest faculty member ever appointed to a named professorship in the history of the Yale School of Medicine. Galvani was 38 years old when the endowment was announced.
Dean Paul Cleary described Galvani’s work as “pioneering” and said that an endowment is the highest honor that Yale can bestow on a faculty member. Galvani earned it through remarkable research and public health achievements that started when she came to the School of Public Health in 2004. The endowment ensures scientific research in perpetuity and Cleary thanked the Burnett and Stender families for their generosity and foresight.
“We are so glad to see Alison’s accomplishments recognized,” he said.
Galvani provided a brief overview of her research and the resulting changes in public health policy that have occurred as a result in widely different settings.
Galvani and colleagues analyzed rotavirus in the United Kingdom, rabies transmission in Tanzania and schistosomiasis and HIV transmission in Zimbabwe. More recently, Galvani’s team worked with colleagues in Liberia on the Ebola epidemic that ravaged that country and several others in western Africa. Two members of her research team traveled to Liberia at the height of the outbreak and helped create a mobile app to slow the spread of the deadly virus.
“I am very fortunate to work with an exceptional group of highly collaborative people,” Galvani told the gathering.
Galvani is the director of the recently formed Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis (CIDMA) at Yale. She has published over 135 articles in journals including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Lancet. Her research, in turn, has stimulated many important studies and subsequent articles by others, as well as improved national and international public health policies.
Three other panelists with widely different backgrounds and perspectives joined Galvani Tuesday. Richard Dawkins, an emeritus fellow at Oxford University, questioned whether a Darwinian perspective has a place in modern medicine; Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, outlined the march toward social justice (and public health progress) and predicted more to come; and Hernando de Soto Polar, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, discussed global politics and the role that poverty plays in social unrest.
Prior to the endowed professorship, Galvani received numerous awards for her work, including The Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists from the New York Academy of Sciences (2013); The Bellman Prize (2013), a fellowship from Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (2007); the MacMillan Award (2007); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award (2006); and the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Prize (2005).