For Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala, the definition of innovation is pretty simple.
“‘Innovation’ isn’t just about discovering something new, it’s about taking what we already know works and translating it to reach people at scale,” said Yelpaala ’06 M.P.H., senior fellow and lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). “The real gap isn’t only knowledge; it’s translation and scale.”
Yelpaala practices what he preaches. The global entrepreneur and public health practitioner has spent decades working across the public and private sectors in the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean, specifically in digital health and health care innovation.
After spending years designing and scaling public health programs internationally, Yelpaala turned to a private-sector, tech-enabled approach to extend the reach of his work. In 2018, he launched InOn Health, a venture-backed digital health company that uses digital communication channels and consumer insights to expand access to health care services in the U.S. Earlier, he founded access.mobile International, one of the first venture-backed digital health companies focused on the African health sector, which developed solutions to improve access to health information and services in 13 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.
“The common thread across the companies I’ve built, whether in the U.S. or emerging markets, was using technology, data, and consumer insight to improve access to care at scale,” Yelpaala said. “That often meant working with and through the private sector to serve populations that are difficult to reach and engage.”
Not every public health leader needs to, or should, found a startup,” he said. “But every organization will benefit from people who know how to apply innovation thinking to complex health problems.
Now, Yelpaala is bringing this experience to his new role as faculty director for YSPH’s Future of Health Innovation Hub, an initiative translating science into scalable solutions for healthier societies. The hub aims to do four things: redefine population-level health entrepreneurship and innovation; equip students and faculty members with critical innovation skills; build sustainable partnerships across academia, industry, government, and philanthropy; and advance interdisciplinary collaboration.
“Here at the Yale School of Public Health, we believe that identifying and solving health problems requires an all-of-society approach,” YSPH Dean Megan Ranney said. “So, guided by our new strategic plan, we are creating rooms where lots of different people from lots of different perspectives are together. That creates this mishmash of ideas, approaches, and perspectives that allow us to truly innovate, to come up with out-of-the-box solutions or new ways of implementing what we know works.”
Students at the cutting edge
The hub may be new, but a spirit of innovation has long existed at the professional school. It builds upon YSPH’s history of social entrepreneurship, including InnovateHealth Yale (IHY). Launched in 2013, the program focused on supporting public health students and advancing their entrepreneurial ideas around public health innovation. Yelpaala also served as the IHY faculty director.
Through IHY and similar programs, YSPH has funded 52 startups operating in 30 countries so far, and awarded more than $400,000 in impact grants and internship funding for a broad array of student ventures. Plus, the school has coached more than 300 students on public health innovation and collaborated with 10-plus startup/innovation hubs at Yale in order to further support student and faculty innovation. YSPH alumni have gone on to be funded and supported by Techstars, MIT Solve, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google and leading venture capital firms.
Here at the Yale School of Public Health, we believe that identifying and solving health problems requires an all-of-society approach.
“Innovation has, in many ways, always been at the core of public health,” Ranney said. “What we do in public health is identify, discover, and measure health problems in communities and then work in partnership to develop solutions that actually work at scale.”
Some of the solutions supported or incubated by YSPH include Khushi Baby, a digital health nonprofit working on maternal health and child health in India; Pills2Me, a startup increasing access to medications for people who have challenges getting to a pharmacy; and SpringHealth, a technology-augmented mental health startup that has already reached “unicorn” funding.
While student entrepreneurship remains an important pathway, Yelpaala emphasized, innovation in public health extends well beyond founding new organizations.
“Not every public health leader needs to, or should, found a startup,” he said. “But every organization will benefit from people who know how to apply innovation thinking to complex health problems.”
The new hub will continue to spur student innovation through a Future of Health Fellows program. Beginning with a first cohort this summer, the program will create experience-driven pathways for graduate students pursuing careers that enhance population-level health and well-being across diverse sectors and organizational models. This includes internships and project collaboration with companies like Cityblock Health, Junction Health, Pear Suite, and Plug and Play Tech.
Faculty with real world impact
Students are at the heart of the new Future of Health Innovation Hub, but the initiative will also help faculty members translate their research findings into real-world benefits.
“Innovation often is thought of as methodology or how we assess risk factors or diseases,” said Melinda Irwin, associate dean of research and Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases) at YSPH. “But we can also think about innovation in translating science to practice and policy. There are real opportunities in the translation process to meet community needs and inform policy.”
Faculty generate extraordinary knowledge. The challenge, and the opportunity, is translating that knowledge into products, services, or other solutions that can be delivered to the population in real-world settings.
The hub works in close collaboration with Yale Ventures to help faculty move from knowledge creation to implementation, whether through new ventures, applied technologies, or partnerships that extend research beyond the academy.
Yusuf Ransome, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at YSPH and chair of the hub’s faculty steering committee, sees faculty innovation as essential to the future of public health.
“Faculty generate extraordinary knowledge,” Ransome said. “The challenge, and the opportunity, is translating that knowledge into products, services, or other solutions that can be delivered to the population in real-world settings.”
Ransome is leading an interdisciplinary project that embodies this approach: an AI-enabled spiritual support chatbot designed to promote mental well-being. By integrating evidence-based mental health practices with spiritually informed support, the project examines how large language models can complement traditional care and expand access to mental health care, particularly for people who may not otherwise seek formal services. Supported through the hub and the Yale Ventures network, the work reflects growing interest in applied AI as a public health tool.
Other YSPH faculty are similarly advancing translational innovation. Jeffrey Townsend, the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics at YSPH and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is the founder and scientific advisor of MultiTarga, a biotech company that bridges data science with biomolecular assay design to improve sequencing across the life sciences. (The company recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to support its Host-Pathogen platform, with applications spanning infectious disease research, surveillance, and diagnostics.)
And Brian Wahl, assistant professor of epidemiology of microbial diseases at YSPH, is leading work to develop AI-enabled screening tools for early detection of rheumatic heart disease, an often-overlooked condition that affects millions globally. By combining digital stethoscopes with custom software and machine-learning models, Wahl’s team aims to enable community-based screening in settings where access to echocardiography and specialized clinicians is limited. The work is currently being tested in India, with aspirations to expand elsewhere, including in the Caribbean, to identify disease earlier and prevent avoidable deaths.
Together, these projects illustrate how YSPH faculty, supported by the new Future of Health Innovation Hub and in partnership with Yale Ventures, are translating public health research into scalable solutions.
“This is about meeting people where they are,” Ransome said, “and ensuring that the science we produce doesn’t stop at publication, but moves into practice, policy, and systems that improve health.”
