The program, called the Clean and Equitable Energy Development certificate, or CEED, opened applications on April 10. It is designed to train working professionals in how to develop equitable clean energy infrastructure in their communities. Program administrators hope to target clean energy advocates and community leaders, such as church-based facility managers or low-income housing and health clinic workers. 

Gelbotar said they also hope the course attracts clean energy developers who are eager to serve those communities. 

“To make a system work in a way that is fair and just and functional for communities, the environment and the energy system, a lot of things have to change,” said Stuart DeCrew, the executive director at CBEY. “We need people who can teach us what that transition looks like.” 

The online program will consist of two cohorts per year, running for 12 weeks in both the fall and spring. Classes begin on Sept. 2. The program will be conducted entirely online, with a combination of short, asynchronous lectures and other longer synchronous content including panel discussions and office hours, said Coral Bielecki, the online programs director at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. 

Students, who administrators anticipate will come from across the world, are expected to spend about five hours a week on the course.

Based on a pilot cohort that has been testing the course over the past semester, the program directors said they expect that participants in CEED will come from a variety of backgrounds — including school administrators, bishops, energy developers, policymakers and finance professionals, said Michel Gelobter, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice and one of CEED’s lead instructors. 

Graduate certificate programs, which are developed in partnership with the Poorvu Center, exist in several of Yale’s professional schools — including the School of Public Health. DeCrew said they are designed for individuals who may not have the time or resources to attend Yale’s graduate programs full-time but still want to continue their education and “unlock the best Yale has to offer.” 

“We take the best classes from tenured faculty around Yale and condense them into a program that a 45-year-old with two kids and five hours a week could take,” he said. 

The Center for Business and Environment, housed at the School of the Environment, previously developed a certificate program about financing and deploying clean energy in 2019. Since then, DeCrew said, the Center’s staff realized there was a need for a course to teach a step-by-step process for developing clean energy programs.

Gelobter said that CEED’s launch is also timely. He pointed to a recent influx of federal money for fighting climate change in disadvantaged communities — including the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which mandates that 40 percent of nearly $2 trillion in federal investment for climate and clean energy must flow to disadvantaged communities.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $20 billion in grants to create a national financing network for clean energy infrastructure. Another federal program, announced on April 22, earmarked $7 billion in grant funding to deliver solar energy to low-income communities, DeCrew added.

Given the increase in funding available for clean energy projects, Gelobter said he believes that local organizers need to understand how to design clean energy programs that effectively utilize federal money. 

Many of the participants in the program’s pilot cohort have been people who distribute federal funding or who will receive funding at state and local levels, Gelobter said.

“There’s a huge pressure and demand on anyone deploying that amount of money to do it in a way that’s just, fair and equitable,” Gelobter said. “A lot of the audience for this course are people in those positions.” 

Key to the program, instructors say, are principles of environmental justice and energy justice: how climate change can exacerbate economic inequality and how clean energy infrastructure can be distributed fairly across disadvantaged communities.

Students will also learn how to design and implement clean energy programs at a technical level. They will learn how to finance and design projects like solar panel arrays, for instance, and then connect them to existing energy grids.

“If we’re going to get anything done, we have to see ourselves as the change makers and not wait for another generation to do it,” Bielecki said. 

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment was founded in 2006.

The post Two Yale centers partner to launch clean and equitable energy development certificate program  appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In 1969, Yale planned to demolish the Hill neighborhood to build a parking lot. Residents stepped in and protested the proposal. This Footnotes episode examines two urban renewal plans and asks: How did Yale shape the landscape of New Haven in the 1950s and ’60s? And who did these changes serve?

Written and produced by Hannah Mark ’25, with production help and editing from Grace Ellis ’25 and Suraj Singareddy ’25. Special thanks to Simone Felton, whose exhibition “City Rewritten” inspired this episode, and to Sean Davis, who voiced Fred Harris. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

The post Footnotes E3: The Hill and the Highway — Urban Renewal in 1960s New Haven appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In 1969, Yale planned to demolish the Hill neighborhood to build a parking lot. Residents stepped in and protested the proposal. This Footnotes episode examines two urban renewal plans and asks: How did Yale shape the landscape of New Haven in the 1950s and ’60s? And who did these changes serve? 

Written and produced by Hannah Mark ’25, with production help and editing from Grace Ellis ’25 and Suraj Singareddy ’25. Special thanks to Simone Felton, whose exhibition “City Rewritten” inspired this episode, and to Sean Davis, who voiced Fred Harris. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

The post Footnotes E3: The Hill and the Highway — Urban Renewal in 1960s New Haven appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In the full academic year since the launch of ChatGPT, Yale administrators and instructors have altered their guidelines and teaching styles to accommodate for the new technology. Though many remain concerned about plagiarism with respect to AI, some professors have embraced using AI in the classroom. 

Ben Glaser, a professor of English, initially became interested in applying AI to the humanities after he took a summer course for faculty members on natural language processing in 2022. He recalled thinking that AI was going to “transform the writing landscape.”

“I thought, ‘I’ll teach a writing course, because then we’ll be thinking about how to write well, which I do all the time,’” Glaser said. “‘We’ll be thinking about these tools that might hinder or maybe help.’” 

In the fall of 2023, Glaser taught an introductory English seminar titled “Writing Essays with AI,” in which he and his students discussed how artificial intelligence could be applied to writing. They also explored the relationship between authorship, creativity and AI. 

His ultimate goal, he said, was to help his students become better writers.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, the AI can never be creative,’” Glaser said. “And I’m like, ‘Can’t it? Let’s interrogate these distinctions.’” 

Students in the course read AI-generated stories, analyzed the differences between poetry written by humans and written by AI and even practiced using AI to plan essays. For their final projects, they researched how various industries are using AI.

In November 2022, shortly after Glaser designed and proposed the course – roughly a year before he first taught it — the company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, its popular generative AI program. According to Glaser, the release of the chatbot program prompted students and teachers to pay more attention to how AI could transform learning. 

Poorvu Center responds

For the Poorvu Center, the University’s center for teaching and learning support, the release of ChatGPT was a catalyst to develop academic AI guidelines, said Alfred Guy. The deputy director of the Poorvu Center and director of the Poorvu Center’s writing and tutoring programs, Guy has helped conduct workshops on AI and facilitate professor education programs about the technology.

Guy learned of the imminent release of ChatGPT through Facebook, and he immediately felt that the Poorvu Center ought to respond. After the chatbot went public, the Poorvu Center released its first guidelines on AI usage in Yale classrooms in January 2023.

“The very first thing we said is, ‘These tools are powerful, and people are going to use them,’” Guy said. “Everything that comes after this should be thought about in terms of how people are going to use these tools.” 

As AI software like ChatGPT became more mainstream, Guy noted that Yale instructors did not generally react with panic or fear. Still, they wondered how AI would affect them, and whether they needed to take concrete steps of action in their own classrooms. Guy said that the Poorvu Center’s teaching guidelines, which are now overseen by a five-person committee, are aimed at answering these questions.

The current guidelines include suggestions for how instructors can address AI in their syllabi, remind students to correctly cite AI and offer precautions when using AI technologies. Beyond providing links to dozens of articles and webinars on AI, they also encourage instructors to try AI tools for themselves and share their feedback with the center.

Guy said the Poorvu Center’s approach to AI over the past year has changed. Rather than striking a cautionary tone, the Center now encourages hands-on exploration of AI technology. 

“We have shifted very slightly toward AI in our tone and in our attitude,” Guy said. “Even in our specific advice to faculty, we are saying, ‘You really should engage.’” 

Glaser also pointed out that Yale’s open approach to teaching and learning with AI does not necessarily mirror that of other colleges and universities. He said that because of broader institutional support and awareness of the technology, he thinks that AI is not as contentious at Yale as it may be at other universities.

“If we get out of the Yale bubble, the writing landscape looks really different, and AI tools are gonna behave differently,” Glaser said.

AI in the classroom

As one of their class projects, Glaser required the class to revise Poorvu’s suggested AI-use guidelines.

Jared Wyetzner ’27 was a member of Glaser’s class and previously co-founded Myndful-AI, a machine learning chatbot that provides high school students with mental health resources.

Wyetzner said the class generally agreed that AI tools had a role in Yale education.

“What we moved toward is that AI can belong in your classroom,” he said. “There’s just a certain way that should be used to facilitate work.” 

To Wyetzner, AI is best seen as a tool that he compared to the “calculator” of writing. 

“You learn how to do math, addition, multiplication all that, by yourself, and then it gets to the point where you use a calculator and that becomes the standard,” he said. “How can we still learn from our writing and also have AI tools in the process?”

Similarly, tools like a Molarity Calculator serve to streamline complex calculations, allowing learners to focus on understanding core concepts while leveraging technology for efficiency. When preparing solutions, using the Molarity Calc can ensure precise measurements for your experiments.

One Yale course quickly added AI to its classroom: CPSC 100, Yale’s introductory programming class, which is co-taught with Harvard’s CS50 course.

According to Ozan Erat, a Yale computer science professor who helps run CPSC 100, the course used two different AI technologies. The first, a chatbot called Duck Debugger, allowed students to ask questions about the course and helped them debug code. The second, CS50 Duck Bot, was integrated with the online forum Ed Discussion and replied to students’ questions.

Because of Duck Debugger, Erat says attendance at CS50 office hours dropped by roughly 30 percent. He said that this was a positive development, as students with easier questions could ask Duck Debugger at home while those with more in-depth questions could receive more attention during office hours. 

Though Erat was initially worried about academic dishonesty, he said that by the end of the semester there was not an “excessive use of cheating.” He noted that the percentage of students referred to the University’s Executive Committee did not drastically change, and the CS50 instructors plan to continue to use Duck Debugger and Duck Bot as part of the course. 

Plagiarism worries

The News spoke with Mick Hunter, the Chair of the Yale College Executive Committee, about students using AI to commit plagiarism and academic dishonesty. He said the Committee began to see cases related to AI shortly after the launch of ChatGPT. In response, the University added a section on AI use to its academic integrity guidelines. 

While the use of AI was “clumsy” in these first cases — students generating false citations for a paper, for example — now the cases are “less blatant,” Hunter said.

“We’re still seeing students who are breaking the rules and using AI in ways that are not allowed, but it seems students are either learning to cover their tracks or use AI more responsibly,” Hunter added. 

However, Hunter estimated that the Executive Committee has received around 10 cases related to AI since November 2022, placing them “in the minority” of academic dishonesty cases. 

By virtue of his job in the Poorvu Center, Guy considers himself “just short of an expert” on pre-AI plagiarism.

Though Guy acknowledged that AI could contribute to plagiarism in writing, he expressed optimism about different ways instructors could help limit it. 

Guy referred to multiple research studies which demonstrate that rates of plagiarism decrease when instructors require students to write low-stakes responses to class material, set interim deadlines for larger assignments through the semester and foster conversations where students describe their ideas. 

Changing assignments to include requirements beyond the capacity of a language-generating AI model, he proposed, could also reduce instances of plagiarism. 

Glaser and his students also discovered that using chatbots for writing comes with its own challenges. Due to its capacity for error and “idiosyncratic” responses, students need a type of “literacy” to interpret AI outputs and screen for errors. 

“We quickly realized in the classes that to get anything good out of them, you actually have quite a bit of a dialogue,” he said. 

By the time the students finish writing ChatGPT a good prompt, assessing the quality of its response and incorporating the response into their writing — not to mention citing it — the process might be more effort than it is worth, Glaser pointed out. 

“By the end of that process, I’m not worried about plagiarism,” Glaser said. “I’m just wondering, ‘Was that actually efficient or useful? Did it make you a better writer?’ I think the answer is sometimes yes.”

Yale established the Poorvu Center in 2014.

The post AI and the classroom appeared first on Yale Daily News.

With the geographical closeness of a small campus and proximity to people who are of similar ages with common interests, dating inside the Yale bubble makes sense. Some of us are looking to experiment with sexuality, some of us are searching for romance and companionship, and some of us are crippled by the fear that once we graduate, move to a big city and begin our careers, our odds of finding love all but vanish and we are therefore determined to leverage our 17 percent chance of meeting our future spouse in college to its fullest potential. 

Some Yalies indeed meet their future spouses on campus. Take, for example, Tara Falcone ’11, who shared the story of meeting her husband over email. 

“I met John at a Kappa-ADPhi get-together in February of our freshman year,” Falcone wrote to the News. “We locked eyes across the table during a round of flip cup (non-alcoholic of course), then spent the rest of the night chatting. He sent me a private Facebook message the next day (the early days of DMs – scandalous).”

After a lunch shared in Commons, the couple started dating and they’ve been together ever since. Assignment aced. 

But not everyone can be Tara and John. 

Matchmaking services like Marriage Pact seek to alleviate the fear of being forever single — albeit in a lighthearted manner — by using an algorithm to pair undergraduates with potential future spouses, but the worry of being a love-lacking graduate is only strengthened by a quick peek at the classifieds of any Ivy League alumni-magazine. There, you’ll find dozens of personal ads for people who are professionally successful, but still searching for love. 

In those same classifieds, you’ll also find a handful of dating and matchmaking services, all targeted at single graduates of prestigious schools. There’s Elegant Introductions, a matchmaking service that describes itself as “elite matchmaking for select singles,” The Right Time Consultants, a curated matchmaking service for “top shelf clients,” or the Ivy Plus Society, an alumni networking event which the New York Times called a “meet market for the pedigreed.”

I have to wonder, are these services really about companionship? Or are they selling a chance at power, wealth and prestige? 

Dating in the Ivy League is implicitly swayed by the fact that we’re dating potentially famous or powerful people: lawyers, doctors, actors, authors, politicians. Beyond academic or professional success, the carefully curated pool of Ivy League admits are also far more likely to be in the top wealthiest 1 percent. When options are purposely limited to this small, elitist pool, perhaps dating becomes less about falling in love and more about securing a future. 

So, would Yalies use these Ivy-only dating services?

Friends and peers who weighed in on the idea had mixed feelings. 

“I wouldn’t date any of those pretentious hoes,” said one anonymous senior, who met his long-term girlfriend at Yale. 

Others were uncomfortable with the elitism of these services and reasoned that going to the same school doesn’t guarantee you’ll have anything in common. 

But some suggested that, after graduation, a similar schooling background might provide common interests and a source for shared ambition with a potential partner. 

“I don’t mind dating at Yale,” said another senior who requested to remain anonymous. “I met my girlfriend at Yale. And my other girlfriend. And my other other girlfriend.”

Dating (and not dating) at Yale is, in short, whatever you make of it. And if you don’t find a special someone in your bright college years? Well, you can always place your own ad in the classifieds. 

The post Bulldogs and Puppy Love appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In 2021, Sofia Noori, an instructor at the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and a graduate of Yale’s psychiatry residency program, founded the platform Nema Health. The program uses intensive therapy, delivered virtually, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Noori said she hopes that the virtual model, coupled with intensive, standard-of-care therapy options that few mental health providers offer, could make headway in making trauma care more accessible.

“By doing it remotely, we’re trying to take away one more barrier for a patient to come and do trauma therapy,” Noori said. 

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a debilitating psychiatric illness that millions of Americans suffer from each year, including veterans and survivors of sexual violence. The condition often goes undiagnosed and untreated, even though many patients experience psychological distress, nightmares and intense flashbacks, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Individuals experiencing PTSD might try to avoid reminders of their trauma which also makes it difficult for them to seek out help, said Noori.

As a daughter of refugees who survived the Vietnam War, and as a survivor of sexual assault in college, Noori knows firsthand how trauma can impact health. Based on her own experiences, she acknowledged how difficult seeking treatment can be for survivors. 

During her psychiatry residency at Yale, Noori looked for ways to combine healthcare innovation with evidence-based trauma treatment. However, while there were effective treatments for PTSD, it was nearly impossible to find providers who offered them, she said.

Then, as the pandemic forced mental health care to shift online, Noori realized a virtual model could be an answer to delivering accessible, effective care to community members. As the first chief resident of digital psychiatry at Yale, she helped found the Center for Digital Psychiatry at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, which focuses on integrating digital health into treatment for patients with serious mental illness. 

Shortly after she graduated from residency, she started Nema Health. 

Noori said that Nema Health’s clients experience relief from PTSD symptoms in as little as two weeks. By program completion, she pointed out that nearly 80 percent of patients no longer meet the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis.

But these impressive results, Noori pointed out, are not unique to Nema’s program: PTSD is a highly treatable condition with long-term results.

“Treatments for PTSD are actually super effective,” Noori said. “They generally take 10 to 12 sessions to complete. And they lead to generally permanent recovery.”

Nema Health uses what Noori refers to as one of the “gold standard” PTSD treatments: a method called Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT, in which therapists guide patients to challenge and reframe harmful thought processes linked to their trauma. But according to Noori, many providers don’t offer CPT, creating a scarcity of therapy options for patients. 

As an evidenced-based treatment, Noori said, CPT has been shown to be highly effective when delivered virtually — just as Nema Health intends to do. 

The program uses an “intensive model:” instead of meeting once a week, the program advertises that Nema clients are matched to a dedicated therapist with whom they meet for three to five sessions per week over three to four weeks. 

After the initial course of treatment, Nema continues to provide regular check-ins, medication management and peer mentorship, said Noori.

“If you actually look at the research, Nema’s outcomes are consistent with what people see,” she added.

Right now, Nema Health operates in three states: New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, though Noori’s goal is to expand its teletherapy coverage to all 50 states.

The cost of Nema’s virtual therapy can be prohibitive, admitted Mariam Malik, co-founder and COO of Nema. Without insurance coverage, the program costs $400 for an initial evaluation and $250 for each individual session according to Nema’s website, though Malik clarified in an email to the News that these services are offered on a sliding fee scale for those who cannot afford to pay full price.

Nema’s treatment is currently covered by a few health plans in the Trisdate area, including United Healthcare, Optum, ConnectiCare and Oxford. According to Malik, the company is working to expand coverage to other insurance providers, including Medicaid, though negotiating pricing with insurance providers has proved time-consuming.

“A lot of people who need our care wouldn’t be able to afford it out of pocket,” said Malik. “Our care needs to be accessible, especially with people who struggle from complex trauma. Being covered by their health benefits is part of Nema’s mission.” 

Noori acknowledged that virtual therapy can’t fix every gap in mental health access, and it might not be the appropriate approach for every patient facing mental health challenges. 

For Walter “Stan” Mathis, a former colleague of Noori’s and a clinical psychiatrist who directs the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s Assertive Community Treatment team, telehealth options are incompatible with the needs of clients he treats each day.

Mathis works primarily with clients who have psychotic disorders — visiting them in their homes or out in their communities. For people who are experiencing psychosis and have trouble differentiating what is reality, he said, virtual care is seldom a good option. 

“There’s a real fantasy of treating mental illness homogeneously,” Mathis said. “But person to person is different, and there are big picture diagnostic differences.” 

Beyond differing treatment needs, there are also technical and structural barriers that make accessing virtual care difficult. At the Center for Digital Psychiatry in 2019, Noori and Mathis helped develop an initiative to teach clients to use their smartphones for telehealth. 

But instead, the program ended up teaching clients basic technology literacy skills.

“Our training sessions were like, how to charge your phone, and that’s what they wanted to talk about,” Mathis said. 

Still, Mathis said he believes that programs like Nema Health are a great way to increase the availability of mental health care. 

“I think we’ll end up using telehealth as a way to make the spectrum of care have more options,” he said. 

The Connecticut Mental Health Center was founded in 1966. 

Update, Feb. 12: This article has been updated to reflect the correct definition for avoidance in PTSD, offer more information about Nema Health’s sliding payment system and clarify that Nema Health offers virtual therapy — not psychiatry.

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In this episode of Footnotes, we explore the controversial career and personal life of Yale graduate Lee de Forest, who is best known for inventing the part that made early radio and television possible. Was he really the “father of radio” or was he just a great storyteller?

Hosted by Hannah Mark ’25. Produced by Hannah Mark ’25 and Grace Ellis ’25.

Music:
Delicates by Blue Dot Sessions
Tall Harvey by Blue Dot Sessions
Etude 9 Stefan by Blue Dot Sessions
Coulis Coulis by Blue Dot Sessions

The post Footnotes E2: Mythmaking and the Father of Radio appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Led by researchers at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and the Yale School of the Environment, the project also hopes to develop tools to measure the effectiveness of natural carbon capture methods, which researchers believe is crucial for addressing the issue of climate change. 

The project’s funding comes from a $5 million grant as part of the DOE’S Earthshot Initiative, an agency-led effort to increase decarbonization and help the United States reach its goal of a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. 

“There’s no time to sit around and twiddle our thumbs,” said David Bercovici, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences and co-director of the YNCC. “This project is really connecting the models for soils and enhanced weathering to rivers and estuaries and all the way to oceans.”

In 2010, the United Nations agreed that global warming caused by greenhouse gasses needs to be contained to below a 2 degrees Celsius increase from temperature levels before the industrial revolution. If the global temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, scientists warn that heatwaves, drought, extreme weather and rising sea levels could cause mass-extinction events. 

However, according to Matthew Eisaman, a professor of Earth and Planetary Studies and a researcher at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions are not enough.

“We need billions of tons of direct removal of carbon dioxide from the air in the next coming decades,” he said. 

Eisaman, who is on the Yale research team for the study, said the project’s goal is to create models to examine how carbon flows through natural systems: from the soil, to rivers and eventually to the ocean. The modeling could inform how natural methods of carbon removal, such as enhanced mineral weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement, can be used on a larger scale.

Enhanced mineral weathering relies on using natural rock weathering to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. When rain falls, raindrops mix with carbon dioxide and form an acid that weathers silicate rocks — which make up the majority of the Earth’s crust — and create bicarbonate ions. These bicarbonate ions then wash into soil and rivers. 

The chemically-basic bicarbonate runoff from this process can also help de-acidify the ocean, which is a large sink for carbon dioxide on Earth. Acidic oceans absorb less CO2 and are harmful for animal and plant life, the researchers said. Bicarbonate entering the oceans can decrease its acidity and increase the amount of CO2 that they can absorb from the atmosphere. 

Projects like that of the Yale team can help scientists understand the cycles through which carbon dioxide is drawn out of the atmosphere: how it moves through the soil into waterways and what chemical reactions occur during the process. 

“There is the need to track the flow of this carbon to its long term storage in the ocean as there are processes that can lead to ‘leakage’ or the loss of the captured CO2 during transport,” wrote study-leader Peter Raymond, senior associate dean of research at YSE, in an email to the News. 

Models play a “key role” in verifying how much carbon dioxide has been removed from the atmosphere through methods such as enhanced rock weathering or ocean alkalinity enhancement, said Eisaman.

They can also help scientists find new ways to accelerate the process of natural carbon capture.

“[These models] are something that’s needed if these approaches are going to scale to the billions of tons per year that we need,” Eisaman said.

Created in 2021, and co-directed by YSE professors David Bercovici and Liza Comita, the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture supports research projects that tackle climate change — solutions that range from the ocean floor to local farms. 

Calling for collaboration between researchers, Bercovici emphasized the urgency of the climate crisis. The YNCC must create multi-pronged solutions, to seek ways to capture carbon on land, in farms and the ocean, he said.

According to Bercovici, carbon capture solutions are only one facet of climate change, and other measures must be pursued, including eliminating dependence on fossil fuels and becoming a renewable economy. 

“Carbon capture is not the panacea that’s gonna solve it. There’s no way, the problem is way too big. We have to be doing everything,” Bercovici said. 

The DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot was announced on Nov. 5, 2021.

The post Yale team awarded $5 million from Department of Energy to combat climate change appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Loved ones, medical staff, and the patients themselves doubt the reality of their symptoms. Doctors struggle to offer them explanations.  

At the Yale Multidisciplinary Long Covid Clinic, however, medical workers try to unravel the mystery of long COVID. The center is directed by Lisa Sanders, associate professor of general medicine, who is no stranger to medical mysteries like long COVID. She currently writes the “Diagnosis” and “Think Like a Doctor” columns for the New York Times, and she previously published two medical books,“Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis” and “Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries.” 

In her role as director, Sanders is essentially a detective in a white coat. When a patient is referred to the clinic, Sanders first investigates whether the culprit is long COVID. This process involves ruling out other factors that may cause similar symptoms. For example, if a patient reports feeling fatigued, she checks that the patient does not have sleep apnea. According to Sanders, by repeating this process, the researchers remove some uncertainty from a long COVID diagnosis. 

From there, Sanders told the News, she tackles the downstream effects of the disease. Because the symptoms of long COVID are known and treatable, Sanders said she can treat the effects, despite not understanding the root cause.

“If you can’t treat the actual disease, just treat the symptoms that are tormenting people and reassure them that at least some people get better,” Sanders said. “Depending on who you read, 80-plus percent of people don’t have symptoms after a year.”

The Yale Multidisciplinary Long Covid Clinic is on the third floor of Yale New Haven Hospital’s St. Raphael Campus. Patients enter a waiting room adorned with long COVID support group flyers and prints of beach paintings. A narrow hallway connects Sanders’ office, an examination room and a physical therapy room.

Sanders said that next month the Center will move to a larger space.

“Our patients say ‘oh my god, this is such a small room, this is such a small space.’ Like really?” Sanders said. “It’s gonna be so luxurious.”

Despite its small size, the Center provides each patient with help from social workers, physical therapists and Sanders. 

Early in the pandemic, this level of treatment was not available to long-haulers, a colloquial term for people with long COVID. Instead, patients in New Haven with long COVID symptoms had to seek out specialists in separate departments that best aligned with their symptoms, Sanders said. Sanders said that eventually, specialists realized that the best way to help people with long COVID was not with specialty care, rather, it was with a specialized long COVID Center. Sanders was immediately interested in leading the center.

“The thought that I could learn about this, and maybe help people with it seemed appealing,” Sanders told the News.

Part of this learning is trying to define long COVID. 

Characterized by persistent symptoms long after initial infection, long COVID remains a puzzling challenge for patients, healthcare professionals and researchers. However, common symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, cough and shortness of breath after their initial COVID-19 infection, Sanders told the News. For many patients, these symptoms can become physically and emotionally debilitating, Sanders said.

“You had COVID, and then something bad happened,” Sanders said. “But that’s all we can say now because we have no idea what the pathophysiology is.”

Parallels to polio

COVID-19 is not the first epidemic to leave a wake of people experiencing lingering symptoms, said Naomi Rogers, a history professor at Yale who studies 20th and 21st-century medicine and disability. 

In the middle of the 20th century, the United States weathered a series of polio outbreaks, a virus that primarily affects children and can, in rare cases, cause long-term paralysis. One 1955 polio epidemic infected 3,950 people in Massachusetts. Of those infected, 2,771 were paralyzed, some for a few weeks or months and some permanently.

“Polio was seen as a really scary disease because of its disabling effects,” Rogers said. “Everybody feared that if their child got it, they would never be able to work independently or live independently.” 

According to Rogers, some patients with polio also developed “post-polio” syndrome. These people had polio as children and fully recovered, but then, decades after their illness, became paralyzed.

Rogers pointed to similarities between post-polio syndrome and long COVID. Like patients with long COVID, people with post-polio syndrome continued to have symptoms of the disease long after the actual infection had passed, Rogers said. Some patients with post-polio were dismissed by their doctors because the doctors had never heard of the disease, according to Rogers. People with post-polio syndrome, like those with long COVID, Rogers said, had to advocate for themselves in medical settings and seek ways to alleviate their symptoms outside of traditional medicine. 

Rogers also highlighted similarities between long COVID and diseases such as chronic Lyme and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For people with these conditions, she said, it is difficult to make friends, family or doctors aware that there is an actual disease behind what she said are relatively vague symptoms. 

“You can’t see pain. You can’t see weakness. There are a lot of chronic responses that are not visible,” Rogers said.

In addition to vague symptoms, Rogers said that long COVID is complicated because nobody knows exactly what it is or how to think about it. 

Unlike other chronic diseases such as cancer or AIDS, she explained, long COVID is too recent for the public to have a clear picture of what it is like. 

“When we say long COVID, we don’t have in our minds what long COVID looks like,” Rogers said. 

Studying Long Covid

A group of interdisciplinary researchers at Yale are working to uncover what long COVID is and how it can be treated. 

During the pandemic, researchers at Yale, including Akiko Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of immunobiology at the School of Medicine, noticed that some patients who had COVID-19 developed chronic symptoms that lasted for a long time after their infection. Iwasaki and her lab also noted that some people who got the COVID-19 vaccine had an immune response.

As the pandemic progressed, Iwasaki established a network of researchers studying COVID-19 who also wanted to understand the unusual immune responses caused by COVID-19. This collaboration became the Center for Infection and Immunity, or CII, which opened in August 2023. 

The center, which Iwasaki directs, seeks to understand how chronic diseases develop and uncover links between infection and chronic disease. It also tries to connect immune responses to factors such as sex, genetics, age and environment, and develop therapies for treating chronic disease.

Iwasaki said that, because post-acute syndromes, such as long COVID, are difficult to understand and quantify, studying them requires an interdisciplinary approach.

Patient-centered approach

In studying chronic disease, the CII seeks to include patients as full participants in their research. CII partners with the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, or CORE, to enhance their patient-centered research approach.

“We’re trying to create a different spirit around the research,” Harlan Krumholz, a professor at the School of Medicine and the director of CORE told the News. Krumholz is also on the CII leadership team. 

Krumholz said patients with post-acute syndromes are “desperate for answers.” 

But because chronic syndromes like long COVID are poorly understood, he said many patients feel “abandoned” by doctors, caregivers and the medical system. 

“There’s not one evidence-based therapy,” Krumholz said. “We even have trouble defining the condition, because there aren’t any diagnostics.”

To combat this feeling of neglect, CORE and CII developed a new model for doing patient research which Krumholz called “highly participant-centric.”

One way the researchers study long COVID is through the Yale LISTEN study, which stands for Listen to Immune, Symptom and Treatment Experiences Now. The LISTEN study follows a pool of participants with long COVID who share health data and specimens like blood or saliva with researchers. 

People participating in the LISTEN study can opt to participate in different research projects. For example, the CII is also conducting a trial on the effect of Paxlovid — an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19 — on long COVID. 

The trial is being conducted virtually, to make it easy for people to participate in research. Patients involved in the study receive drugs or placebo pills by mail, then fill out surveys online and electronically transmit their data to researchers. 

The trial organizers also hold regular town hall meetings, where study participants can ask questions and suggest changes. When researchers learn new information through their research, they share it with the participants. 

New long COVID study gives hope to researchers, patients 

In September, researchers from the CII and Mount Sinai Hospital published a paper in Nature that identified biological markers associated with long COVID. By analyzing blood samples, the researchers found that hormonal dysfunction, exhaustion of certain immune cells and the reactivation of latent viruses are key factors in long COVID. 

“To us, that means that there is an immunological underpinning to this disease,” Iwasaki said. 

According to Iwasaki, the evidence that long COVID is a biological disease is an important discovery not only to understand the disease but also to validate patients’ struggles. People suffering from long COVID and other chronic diseases are often perceived as inventing or exaggerating their illness, Iwasaki said. 

The idea that patients are making up their symptoms, Iwasaki said, is one of the major misconceptions that the CII seeks to debunk. Iwasaki added that the identification of biological markers helps dispel the belief that long COVID is only a psychiatric illness. 

Sanders said she believes there should have never been a need to prove long COVID patients had an actual disease. 

“I never thought they needed any validation. I thought that people who saw it as psychiatric alone were nuts,” Sanders told the News. “Eleven million people have long COVID in the United States alone, and there’s so many more than that in the world. Over a million people don’t just come up with the same problem.” 

Long COVID is not the CII’s only focus. Researchers at the Center also study diseases such as chronic Lyme disease, which is a disease spread by ticks, and myalgic encephalomyelitis chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS.

While post-acute syndromes are complex and tricky to study, long COVID provides a unique research opportunity, Iwasaki said. People with the disease became ill around the same time and from the same virus, which allows researchers to simultaneously study a large number of people who have a similar chronic illness. 

Iwasaki said that it is difficult to find this kind of continuity with other post-acute viral syndromes because most chronic diseases occur in small numbers and at different times. 

Research developments often come up in conversation during visits to the Long COVID Clinic. Patients frequently tell Sanders about new research they have encountered, and Sanders will follow up on it. Sanders even has a Google alert that sends her every online publication that has to do with long COVID.

Like Iwasaki, Sanders views long COVID as a unique opportunity to develop our understanding of chronic illness.

“It would be terrible to waste this and not learn anything from it, like we have done with so many other infections,” Sanders said. “We have the technology and the curiosity. God only knows what other factors allowed this to be an active area of research, but I’m so glad it is.”

Adults aged between 35 and 49 exhibited the highest prevalence of experiencing long COVID.

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Last month, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization co-founded and co-led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, announced the launch of a new biomedical research hub in New York City that connects researchers from Columbia, Rockefeller University and Yale. Called the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York, or CZ Biohub NY, the center will be located in Manhattan, with satellite sites on the campuses of Columbia and Yale. 

According to researchers involved, the Biohub hopes to invest resources into long-term biomedical research. 

“The idea of these Biohubs is to bring people together from multiple disciplines, and tackle challenges that will take 10 to 15 years of risky work,” said John Tsang, the director of Yale Center for Systems and Engineering Immunobiology, who is on the leadership committee for the CZ Biohub NY and wrote the original research proposal for the project.

CZ Biohub NY is the latest research institute in the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network. 

While each of the four institutes in the CZ Biohub Network focuses on different projects, the general goal of the research is to understand the mechanisms of disease and develop technology to help diagnose and treat diseases. 

The CZ Biohub NY will focus on studying and bioengineering immune cells. As a systems immunologist, Tsang told the News he is interested in using the Biohub to explore how immune system cells detect and monitor disease in the body, even before disease symptoms are visible through outward observation. 

“The immune system has been implicated in basically all diseases, because it’s the system where you have cells that go around your whole body, and the cells are monitoring what’s going on,” Tsang said. 

Part of the Biohub’s work will be to understand how immune cells travel through the body and how they respond to new biological information.

The Biohub team will also work to engineer immune cells to detect abnormalities in tissues and repair damage before it leads to disease, according to Tsang. Tsang told the News that this kind of technology could be applied to predict and treat diseases including cancer and autoimmune conditions such as type one diabetes. 

“It’s really like getting the Magic School Bus to work,” Tsang said. “That’s really super exhilarating in my mind.” 

According to Andrea Califano, the president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York and the former chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, this kind of research is not being done anywhere else. 

Califano pointed to two major characteristics that make the Biohub’s goals achievable: its funding structure and collaborative model.

“It’s an entire new level of science that has to be achieved,” Califano said. 

Funded through philanthropy, the Biohub operates on a predetermined budget, said Califano, allowing it to conduct high-risk research that would not typically be funded through public research grants such as the ones awarded through the National Institutes of Health. This funding allows the Biohub to do research far beyond the scale of a university lab, Califano said. 

Califano said the Biohub draws together three complementary research institutions that have strengths in different areas of biology, immunology and data science to create a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary collaboration. 

“When I initially was brought into the idea, I thought it was a little bit sci-fi, but then when I started working with my colleagues, we realized that all the main ingredients were actually there,” Califano told the News. “This is science that no university in isolation could perform.”

This scale of research is ambitious because there is still a lot about the immune system that scientists do not understand, said Andrew Wang, a physician and professor of rheumatology at the School of Medicine, who is not affiliated with the CZ Biohub New York. 

The same immune cell can behave differently depending on the situation and location in the body, Wang added — a phenomenon that still baffles researchers. As a result, Wang said that the kind of research the Biohub will do will need to be a “simultaneous dive” into all aspects of the immune system. But Wang said he is optimistic about what the initiative could accomplish. 

“It’s efforts like this that end up making big impacts,” he added. “I’m excited to see what comes out of it.” 

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network program was announced by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Dec. 7, 2021. 

Update, Nov. 11: This article was updated to reflect Andrea Califano’s current title. It was also updated to clarify language regarding the CZ Biohub Network and its leadership.

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