Fellows of SOM: Tina Loarte-Rodriguez ’27, Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership at Yale

Why did you pursue this fellowship, and what does it mean to you?

I came to Yale SOM with a clear objective stemming from a problem I have been living with for years. As an Afro-Latina nurse leader, I have spent my career watching talented Latine nurses hit invisible ceilings—not for lack of skill or drive, but for lack of the leadership infrastructure that would have allowed them to advance. I have navigated those same barriers myself in clinical practice, nursing education, and executive leadership, often as one of the few and sometimes the only in the room.

During COVID, I went looking for a book that reflected my identity and my experience as a nurse. When I couldn’t find one, I wrote it. What began as a personal act of healing has grown into the Latinas in Nursing book series and national platform, a community of nurses who finally see themselves represented. But visibility alone doesn’t change systems. I need the business and management tools to build something that will scale and last.

The Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership at Yale University is the only fellowship I know of that sits at the intersection of business leadership and health equity. That alignment is not incidental. It reflects a truth I have come to believe deeply: that advancing health equity requires not just clinical expertise or moral clarity, but the strategic, financial, and organizational fluency to change systems at the root. This fellowship allows me to pursue that training without leaving my community behind.

How does your status as a fellow impact the way you engage with your community and contribute to your overall SOM experience?

I arrived at SOM with a community already built. The Latinas in Nursing platform has connected me to nurses, educators, advocates, and health systems leaders across the country. The fellowship gives that existing work a new kind of credibility and a new set of tools.

From the beginning, the people in and around this fellowship shaped how I showed up. Lou Hart ’25 and Liany Arroyo ’26 offered the kind of guidance and warm welcome that made a difference before the academic year even fully began. Throughout the year, Carrie Bridges ’26 has been a grounding force.

What distinguishes the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship from other fellowships is its institutional partnership with one of the most widely cited sources of health system performance research in the U.S., the Commonwealth Fund. Joseph Betancourt and Laurie C. Zephyrin, leaders at the fund, have motivated us with their genuine investment in this work.

The intellectual community the fellowship creates has been equally formative. Akshar Abbott ’26 and I have had conversations I can only describe as utopian, the kind where you talk about what health equity could actually look like if the structural conditions were different, if institutions were designed around the people they serve rather than around their own preservation. Strategizing alongside Nia Heard-Garris ’23, Karen Orjuela ’24, and Cece Calhoun ’21 has pushed my thinking in ways I didn’t anticipate. Each brings a different perspective, and the combination of those perspectives has sharpened the edges of my own project.

Being a fellow has sharpened how I carry myself in SOM spaces more broadly. I show up not just as a student learning about business, but as a health equity practitioner who is here to translate between two worlds. When conversations in class turn to workforce strategy, organizational behavior, or systems change, I bring the lens of someone who has seen what those conversations look like, or don’t look like, in the communities most affected by inequity.

What lessons have you learned that will help you contribute to business and society at SOM and beyond?

The most clarifying lesson I have learned is that access alone is not enough. Advancement must be intentional. Nursing has spent decades increasing diversity at the entry level without asking why those same nurses are not advancing into leadership, faculty roles, or executive positions. The pathway is not broken further downstream, where mentorship, sponsorship, structural support, and leadership preparation should exist but don’t. That gap is not an accident. It reflects a systemic failure to treat leadership development as infrastructure.

SOM has helped me see that framework more clearly and given me the language to make the case to institutions. I have also learned the importance of staying close to the people your work is meant to serve. Strategy divorced from lived experience produces elegant plans that don’t work in the real world. My most grounding moments at SOM have been the ones where I brought my community’s reality into a classroom conversation or a case analysis, and watched it shift the thinking in the room.

What's one highlight of this experience?

It is difficult to name just one. Policy Day in New York City was one of the most enlightening days. Being in the room with health policy leaders, advocates, and decision-makers collapsed the distance between the academic work we do at SOM and the systems we are trying to change. It was the kind of day that makes the whole fellowship feel concrete.

Connecting with Amon Rodgers ’25 in California at the Social Mission Alliance Conference stands out as one of those moments that reminded me why community is the whole point. There is something particular about finding a fellow traveler outside your usual geography, someone working toward similar things from a different institutional position, and realizing that the work is bigger than any one program or organization.

I survived the first year alongside my cohort-mates, Joanne Fernandez-Booker ’27 and Denise Anderson ’27. No one outside of it fully understands what the first year demands. Now, welcoming the Class of 2028, I feel the satisfaction of having made it through and being able to give back.

The clearest highlight has been watching my capstone take shape. My project, a curriculum titled “Leadership as Infrastructure: Scaling Advancement Pathways for Nursing,” began as a conviction and has become a concrete plan. The Latinas in Nursing book series gives nurses a mirror. The curriculum will give them a map.

What advice do you have for other students interested in this fellowship?

Don’t arrive as an empty vessel waiting to be filled. The fellowship is designed for people who have already identified a problem, lived inside it, and felt the urgency of it. The fellowship amplifies work that is rooted in something real. If you are considering applying, start with the problem you cannot stop thinking about, not the credential you want to earn.

Also, do not underestimate the expertise you carry into this building. SOM will teach you finance, strategy, organizational behavior, and operations. What it cannot teach you is the years you spent in community, in clinical practice, in advocacy, or in systems that failed people in front of you. That knowledge is not background noise. It is the asset. Bring it into every room you enter here.