Yale University has announced a new named professorship for public health, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor in Public Health. In recognition of distinguished scholarship in the area of disease modeling and significant contributions to public health, the Yale Corporation has appointed Dr. Alison Galvani, to the position.

[Photo: Dr. Alison Galvani]

At 38 years old, Dr. Galvani is believed to be the youngest faculty member ever appointed to a named professorship in the history of the Yale School of Public Health. External reviewers who assessed her credentials indicated that she ranks one of the leading mathematical biologists in the world.

“An endowed chair is one of Yale’s highest honors and a wonderful affirmation of the important research that Alison has done, and continues to do,” said Dean Paul Cleary. “This chair, which is the first new chair at YSPH in almost 50 years, will ensure support for important research on infectious diseases in perpetuity.”

Dr. Galvani, who is director of the newly formed Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis or CIDMA, has interdisciplinary and wide-ranging research interests. She has published over 135 articles in top 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.

In 2014, Dr. Galvani and members of her team at CIDMA published a series of papers in quick succession on the unfolding Ebola outbreak in western Africa. The papers addressed strategies for containing the outbreak and preventing further death. Her research in collaboration with the Liberian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare guided policy decisions and included the design of technologies that were instrumental to ending the outbreak.