Epidemiological models have played an influential role in governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yale SOM’s Edieal Pinker takes a look back at one of the most influential models and argues that such rigorous efforts at understanding the likely course of the disease, while imperfect, are critical to good decision making. 

We talked to Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale internist and an expert on the structural barriers to equitable treatment and health outcomes for people of color and other vulnerable populations.

Prof. Mushfiq Mobarak describes the arc of his research on scalable, evidence-based policy responses to poverty and how existing research tools have been applied to fight COVID.

Prof. Rodrigo Canales has spent his career investigating how to transform the institutions that shape our lives. Effective police reform, he says, begins with shifting the focus from deterring crime to helping the whole community feel safe.   

Prof. Andrew Metrick, director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, says that fighting a crisis is different from economic policymaking in normal times; governments need to be exceptionally generous and not get bogged down in stringent processes that keep money from getting to those in need.