Graduate Policy Fellows

Kim Gannon (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Yale School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management. Her research explores drug policy, particularly punitive policies passed as a reaction to the fentanyl-driven overdose crisis. Specifically, she studies the influence of public opinion on formation and implementation of these policies, as well as their unintended consequences on the health and well-being of people who use drugs, particularly in communities of color, once implemented.

Katy Maldonado Dominguez is a Honduran first-generation PhD candidate in American Studies. She received her bachelor’s degrees from UCLA in Chicana/o Studies and Geography. Her research interests are shaped by her experiences as a Central American immigrant from Honduras and DACA recipient. Her dissertation explores how Central American students think about identity, belonging, and kinship within a context of displacement. She challenges the homogenization of Latine student experiences by highlighting the specific lived academic realities of Central American students.

Emily Ritchie is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology. Her research focuses on the psychology behind attitude change, aiming to understand when and how we can change people’s attitudes toward individuals, groups, and policies. In her dissertation, she shows how spacing out new information (v.s. consuming it all at once) can more effectively change both implicit and explicit attitudes, hoping to inform the design of public interventions, such as anti-bias efforts and health campaigns.

Adora Svitak is a PhD student in the joint program in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is interested in gender, power, and intimate life, particularly relationships as processes of contestation over justice and social structures. Her research projects have touched topics including discourse about female orgasm, “heteropessimism” in contemporary literary fiction, and police officers’ wives on Instagram. Prior to Yale, she worked in communications for the non-profit that operates Wikipedia. She received her B.A.