Saria Hassan, MD

Instructor
Yale School of Medicine

Saria Hassan is an instructor in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. She completed her Medical Degree at Harvard Medical School and a combined Medicine-Pediatric residency training at Yale School of Medicine. She subsequently spent 4 years working in community health centers in New Haven, CT; this experience as a primary care physician working with underserved, minority populations gives her important perspective as she designs research questions and implementation science projects to address important questions of disparity, access, and equity. Her research interest is in using implementation science tools to design, implement, and evaluate interventions to reduce cardiovascular risk disparities in the U.S. and globally. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Yale-Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine (Yale-TCC), located at Yale University, where she co-leads the implementation core and its demonstration project program. Her current NHLBI-sponsored K12 career development award applies an implementation science framework to evaluate the contextual factors that influence the effectiveness and sustainability of diabetes prevention intervention in the Caribbean. Her forthcoming project is a result of her experience implementing this diabetes prevention intervention during hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. These devastating events shifted the focus of our stakeholders to the reduction of morbidity and mortality after natural disasters, which were largely due to poorly managed chronic diseases. The upcoming project uses mixed methods and systems dynamic modeling to improve the management of NCDs in the setting of a natural disaster.