Gabriella Pollack
Gabriella Pollack is a senior at Yale University pursuing a BA in Sociology with a concentration in Health & Society. She is interested in the social determinants of health, particularly the impact of the carceral state and neighborhood divestment on health outcomes, as well as in designing community-rooted health interventions. For her senior thesis, she plans to examine housing programs in New Haven to assess whether Housing First or Treatment First models are more effective in improving mental health and substance use disorder outcomes.
Through the SUMR program, Gabriella works on two research projects focused on expanding equitable access to care for marginalized populations. With Dr. Cedric Bien-Gund, she conducts and analyzes interviews to identify barriers and facilitators to implementing pharmacist-led HIV testing and PrEP delivery, while also helping pilot a program in community pharmacies located in Philadelphia neighborhoods with high HIV burden.
For her second project, Gabriella works with Dr. Maggie Lowenstein to examine the effectiveness and implementation of Hospital-to-Housing, a large-scale intervention that provides medically supported transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness and opioid use disorder following hospitalization. Her work focuses on qualitative data collection and analysis exploring the program’s implementation, strengths, and challenges for both participants and staff.
At Yale, Gabriella works as a study coordinator in the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab (EHPL) under social psychologist Wendy Berry Mendes. Most recently, she has helped design and pilot the lab’s newest study, CIRCLE. Additionally, Gabriella is the co-founder of the Yale Student Collective for Abolition, Resistance, and Education (YCARE), a student organization that critically engages with carceral systems and promotes non-punitive, community-based responses to harm grounded in care, accountability, and abolitionist principles.
In her free time, Gabriella enjoys social dancing, making Caribbean dishes, and acting in student productions.