Fellows

Janet Henrich

Associate Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences; Co-Founder, Faculty Advisor, Yale College Living Hisotry Project; Co-Founder, Women’s & Gender Health Education Program, Internal Medicine; Assistant Chair for Women and Gender Equity, Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Medicine; Director, Women’s and Gender Health Education Program, Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Medicine. 

Kimberly Hieftje

Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Yale Pediatrics and Director of XRPeds, which focuses on the development and evaluation of videogame interventions using extended reality (virtual reality, augmented reality, etc) for health prevention and promotion, behavior change, and education in adolescents and young adults. She is currently involved in the development and testing of several health behavior change XR and game-based interventions and has published frequently on developing, evaluating, and implementing serious games. She has worked on games that have focused on topics including vaping/e-c-cigarette prevention, tobacco use prevention, risk reduction in adolescents, HIV/STI prevention, HIV/STI testing, empowering girls around healthy decision making, bystander intervention, LGBTQ bullying, school climate, and alcohol harm reduction.

Dr. Hieftje was a K12 Scholar in the Yale Implementation Science program (YSIS), where she focused on understanding the factors associated with successful implementation of videogame interventions in schools.

Dr. Hieftje is also the editor-in-chief at the Games for Health Journal.

Elizabeth Holt

Elizabeth Holt is a New Haven native. She attended Barnard College for undergraduate, where she majored in biology. Dr. Holt earned her M.D. and Ph.D. (Cellular and Molecular Physiology) at Yale. She did her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Johns Hopkins. She returned to Yale in 2002 to join the faculty in the Endocrinology Section of the Department of Medicine. Dr. Holt is currently an Associate Professor. Most of her time is spent doing patient care and teaching.

Jeff Hughes

Jeannette Ickovics

Jeannette R. Ickovics is the Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She served as the Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College from 2018-2021, and was a Visiting Professor during the 2017-2018 academic year. Yale-NUS is a partnership between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. It is a selective college of liberal arts and sciences in Asia committed to training global leaders to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. As Dean of Faculty, she was responsible for faculty development and curriculum across the Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Her legacy is marked by the recruitment of world-class faculty, establishing a multi-tiered mentoring program, and building research infrastructure as well as a culture of research at the College.

At the Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Ickovics was Founding Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health (2002-2012), and Founding Director of CARE: Community Alliance for Research and Engagement as part of Yale’s inaugural Clinical and Translational Science Award (2007-2017). She was also Deputy Director for the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS where she was Director of an NIH training program for pre- and post- doctoral fellows for 15 years (now in its 22nd year). Dr. Ickovics’ research investigates the interplay of complex biomedical, behavioral, social and psychological factors that influence individual and community health. She uses this lens to examine challenges faced by those often marginalized by the health care system and by society. She has expertise in running large, scientifically rigorous clinical trials in community settings. Her community-based research – funded with more than $40 million in grants from the NIH, CDC, and private foundations – is characterized by methodological rigor and cultural sensitivity. She has held important academic and community leadership positions for the past decade, honing her leadership skills and expertise.

As Director of CARE, she was seen as a trusted and respected collaborator. Through her work at CARE, she secured New Haven as the first US site of Community Interventions for Health, a multi-national, multi-sectoral research collaborative focused on the prevention of chronic diseases worldwide. She was founding Chair of the Adherence Committee of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (NIAID), responsible for the adherence portfolio across 27 AIDS Clinical Trials Units nationwide. In addition to other grants, she has been PI on two multi-site NIH-funded randomized controlled trials on an innovative model of group prenatal care, demonstrating a 33% reduction in preterm birth and other positive health outcomes for mothers and babies. Based on these results, The United Health Foundation funded a dissemination study of group prenatal care in Detroit MI and Nashville TN, with an eye toward national scale-up. Dr. Ickovics also was PI of a public-private evaluation with Merck for Mothers (evaluating the use of community health workers for pregnant women with chronic disease), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, and an NIH-funded randomized controlled obesity prevention trial at 12 middle schools in collaboration with the Rudd Center and the New Haven Public Schools. She is author of more than 220 peer-reviewed publications,

Dr. Ickovics is recipient of national awards and recognition, including most recently the Strickland-Daniel Mentoring Award from the American Psychological Association (2018), and elected a member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (2020).

Clarice Jackson

Clarice Jackson graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and is a member of the Trumbull Class of 2018. As an undergraduate, she participated in the Trumbull College Mellon Forum and conducted her senior thesis research on individual and interpersonal factors that affect perceptions of a shared positive event. Clarice is an independent educational consultant and works to help support students in their educational and personal trajectories. She is originally from Southern California. Her hobbies include reading, listening to a wide range of music, art, (slowly) learning the violin, and exploring restaurants and craft breweries.

Adriane Jefferson

James Jekel

James Jekel, the emeritus C.-E.A. Winslow Professor of Public Health, research focused on teenage pregnancy, outcomes for teenage mothers and their babies, cocaine abuse as well as high fevers in infancy and intrauterine growth retardation. Jekel was director of medical studies and acting head of the Division of Health Services Administration, director of the School of Medicine’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program and assistant director of its Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Program.

Michele Johnson

Michele H. Johnson, MD, specializes in treating aneurysms, strokes and vascular malformations in conjunction with neurosurgery. She is director of Interventional Neuroradiology at Yale Medicine. Neurointerventional radiologists image and treat different conditions affecting the brain using minimally invasive techniques.

As a young child, Dr. Johnson grew up watching the television series Quincy, M.E., a medical mystery drama based in Los Angeles. In each episode, the main character, a medical examiner, resolved complicated scenarios using forensics and lab tests. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and I planned to specialize in pathology after medical school,” Dr. Johnson says. Those plans changed later when she witnessed the finesse of a radiologist who made two diagnoses based on a single patient X-ray image.

Dr. Johnson easily recounts stories from her own diagnoses made over more than two decades at Yale. “A patient I treated when he was 8 years old for an embolism (blood clot) sent me a card in his 20s because he had just learned that I did his operation,” she says. “You know that you touch lives.”

At Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Johnson is professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and of neurosurgery and director of interventional neuroradiology.