Three Clinicians Join Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership
The incoming fellows include two physicians and a nurse practitioner, all working to advance health equity across the U.S. healthcare system.
Last month, Yale SOM welcomed the newest recipients of the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership for a two-day immersion at Evans Hall, marking the start of their Yale education.
The fellowship provides mid-career healthcare professionals with the leadership and management tools needed to tackle major inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. Fellows complete 22 months of study in Yale SOM’s MBA for Executives program and receive specialized training and mentorship from experts on healthcare disparities. During the immersion, fellows learned about each other’s backgrounds, connected with SOM faculty, and discussed their goals for the program.
The new fellows are Cherisse Berry ’28, Jessica Horstmann ’28, and Desmond Sutton ’28. They joined their EMBA classmates for orientation and a 12-day residency this week.
Berry, a trauma surgeon and health equity researcher, is vice chair of academic affairs and professor of surgery at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She is also the director of research for the Eric Muñoz Trauma Center at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
“I came to the fellowship because I have seen that passion and evidence are not enough on their own,” Berry said. “The equity work that lasts is the work that becomes part of how an institution allocates its resources.”
At SOM, Berry said, she hopes to gain the business tools to make health equity financially sustainable. “When the business case is real, the work no longer depends on the political moment or on who holds the leadership,” she said.
Horstmann, a nurse practitioner, enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe, and mobile health clinical lead at the Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had considered several paths for deepening her impact, including advanced degrees in public health, nursing, and business. She said the fellowship at SOM offered the combination she was looking for: a foundation in public health, a clinical perspective, and the operational tools needed to enact change.
“Our communities need people who can identify and move the levers that drive structural inequity, not just treat what is broken,” she said.
Sutton is an obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine specialist, associate chief medical officer for process improvement, and director of obstetric quality and patient safety at Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai Morningside, both hospitals in New York City, and an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine. His work focuses on reducing disparities in maternal health outcomes.
“I believe that when we build systems that truly work for the most vulnerable, we improve them for everyone,” Sutton said.
During the two-day immersion, he and his co-fellows learned from healthcare executives at organizations including Hartford HealthCare and Centene Corporation. “Hearing how each one approached equity through health enterprise and payor strategy made clear the quality of training I was embarking on,” Sutton said.
Fellows also built connections with each other and across the SOM community.
“What moved me most were my co-fellows—hearing the personal moments that brought each of us to this work and realizing how deeply interconnected our journeys are,” Berry said. “These are relationships I will carry well beyond the fellowship.”
Prospective students can learn more about the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership and register for a pre-assessment to get personalized feedback from a member of the admissions team.
