The Yale Alumni Association Public Service Awards, formerly known as the Yale-Jefferson Awards for Public Service, are presented annually, recognizing sustained public service that is individual, innovative, impactful, and inspiring. The recipients are all those who have demonstrated service that draws on the Yale community and benefits the world beyond Yale.
This year, the Yale Alumni Association honors four deserving candidates, Yalies who have given back and paid it forward, for their commitment to public service, and passion for helping others.
The 2025 YAA Public Service Award recipients are Matt Dolan ’82, Katrina Dietsche ’27 MD, Jason Weinstein ’27 MD, Zaharaa Altwaij ’25. The winners will be honored at a ceremony hosted at Rose Alumni House on Thursday, September 18th, 2025 at 4:30pm.
Matt Dolan ’82
Yale is honoring Matt Dolan for his work as founder and CEO of the Global Teaching Project, which provides promising high school students in rural and underserved areas access to advanced STEM courses they need to achieve their full potential, but which their schools otherwise may not be able to offer, due to limited resources and a chronic, and worsening, shortage of qualified teachers.
For the past nine years, Matt’s focus has been on rural Mississippi communities that are among the most impoverished in the nation. GTP has worked with nearly 50 public high schools to offer AP courses in four subjects—AP Biology, AP Computer Science Principles, AP Physics 1, and AP Statistics—to thousands of students, free of charge. As detailed in a recent article in Yale News, GTP’s Advanced STEM Access Program utilizes a blended instructional model that includes both in-person and remote instruction, teacher training, lesson plans, pedagogical support from AP-certified teachers, tutoring from STEM majors at over two dozen universities, university-based residential instructional programs, physical textbooks, online resources, classroom supplies, and ancillary activities such as college guidance and guest speakers.
As College Board, which administers the AP program, recently wrote to the U.S. Department of Education, GTP "has proven uniquely successful in addressing disparate access to AP STEM courses, an issue of critical national importance." Nationally, in the 50 highest poverty rural school districts, the only schools that offer AP Physics, and the majority of those that offer AP Biology, AP Statistics, or AP Computer Science, do so through GTP, according to recent U.S. Census and College Board data.
Matt’s work to expand educational opportunity for underserved students dates back to his time at Yale, when he tutored at New Haven’s Augusta Troup Middle School. Prior to founding GTP, Matt, an attorney who practiced law in the private sector and on the U.S. Senate staff, served in a volunteer capacity for many charitable, philanthropic, and public service entities. For over 25 years, Matt has been a board member, including terms as chair, of a Washington parochial high school that focuses on serving students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Matt also helped establish a mentoring program at his law firm for D.C. public high school students. In addition, he was a board member of Washington Catholic Charities Immigrant Services, which provided medical, vocational, and other support to recent immigrants and others. Matt also served four years on the Maryland State Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, a gubernatorial appointment.
Matt is a past president and board member of the Yale Club of Washington, for which he had a lead role in implementing the Club’s Community Service Summer Fellows program, which sponsored Yale undergraduates to serve local charities.
Matt graduated from Yale College cum laude with distinction in the History major, and earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. Matt and his wife, MaryEllen, live in Maryland and have four children.
Katrina Dietsche ’27 MD
Yale is honoring Katrina Dietsche for her commitment to reducing the burden of food insecurity in New Haven. She currently serves as the Director and Founder of the HAVEN Food Pharmacy, a new initiative partnering with HAVEN Free Clinic that provides free, healthy groceries to patients experiencing food insecurity. The Food Pharmacy addresses not only immediate nutritional needs but also the long-term prevention of chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity—diseases deeply tied to socioeconomic status and unequal access to healthy food. Since its founding, the program has distributed healthy groceries with recipes and educational material, all while engaging patients to tailor these offerings to reflect their cultural and family traditions.
Katrina first developed an interest in the connection between nutrition and health as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, where she earned a B.S. in Cellular and Organismal Physiology and a minor in Nutrition. She deepened this focus while working at the National Institutes of Health, where she researched pharmacological interventions for youth-onset type 2 diabetes and helped grow a multidisciplinary free clinic for young adults living with the condition from just ten to over 100 patients. In this setting, Katrina worked to improve patient follow-up by developing programs that addressed transportation barriers, collaborating with schools, and designed research protocols that better highlighted this vulnerable patient population. It was during this work that she was first inspired by the concept of a food pharmacy as a healthcare intervention.
At Yale, Katrina has translated these insights into action through the Food Pharmacy while also serving as a leader of the Food is Medicine interest group and conducting research on pediatric health system improvements for obesity. She hopes to continue a career at the intersection of medicine, policy, and community advocacy, with a focus on improving child and maternal health.
Jason Weinstein ’27 MD
Yale is honoring Jason Weinstein for his commitment to advancing health equity through community-driven innovation. He is the Co-Founder of The Food Pharmacy, a program that provides free, medically tailored groceries to patients experiencing food insecurity in New Haven.
Since beginning his studies at Yale School of Medicine in 2023, Jason has co-led The Food Pharmacy from vision to implementation. With his leadership, the initiative has served up to 10 patients weekly with plans to expand to 30, mobilized 30–40 volunteers, and secured generous donations from the Hellman Foundation and the New Haven County Medical Association Foundation, enough to sustain the program’s mission for the next three years. The Food Pharmacy aims to address food insecurity as a core driver of preventable illness, bridging care from the clinic to the home.
Beyond The Food Pharmacy, Jason has been an academic tutor with the Yale Prison Education Initiative, supporting students incarcerated at McDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in earning their high school and college degrees. He is also an active member of the Meng Impact Investment Fund, where he sourced mission-aligned healthcare ventures, including startups advancing women’s maternal health, AI-enabled clinical efficiency, and mental health access for underserved communities. As First-Year Class President at Yale School of Medicine, Jason has championed wellness, connection, and advocacy for his peers.
Jason writes: “My old teacher from Burkina Faso used to quote an African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’ That’s what community service has been for me. I’ve worked alongside amazing people, some at Yale, some in New Haven, some across the country, and I’ve realized that the more people work together, the greater the impact we can make for those who need it most.”
Jason is an M.D. Candidate at Yale School of Medicine, Class of 2027. He hopes to continue developing initiatives that reduce preventable disease, keep people healthy and out of the hospital, and extend hope and high-quality care to everyone, especially those too often left behind.
Zaharaa Altwaij ’25
Yale is honoring Zaharaa Altwaij for her advocacy and empowerment of refugee families in the New Haven community. For 3 years, she served as the Health and Wellness Coordinator for Elena’s Light, a local refugee-run non-profit organization providing health, education, and social services to refugee women, children, and families. Through this role, she focused on organizing health workshops for refugee families, organizing donation drives distributing hygiene and health supplies, and disseminating relevant health-related research to broader circles. She received various grants aimed to uplift refugee families and thus introduced pilot opportunities, such as a campaign to educate families on the importance of preventative vaccination.
Zaharaa’s service to the New Haven community began with her involvement in the Dwight Hall Urban Fellows program. In this capacity, Zaharaa worked alongside other fellows to alleviate the most pressing issues facing New Haven through direct work supporting local placement sites. Through Urban Fellows, she was able to implement best practices for public service. In her junior year, she also began coordinating the Urban Fellows program, overseeing placements for 20+ fellows and ensuring that community supervisors and fellows were content in their partnership.
Zaharaa also volunteered as a Patient Navigator for newly arrived families navigating the Yale-New Haven health system and as a Patient Health Education Counselor at the HAVEN Free Clinic, a student-run clinic serving predominantly low-income families. Through interactions with hundreds of patients, Zaharaa has been able to understand, in practice, how the social determinants of health influence community well-being. By securing transportation, housing, and food stamps for dozens of families in New Haven, she has intended to relieve substantial barriers related to accessing healthcare.
Her interest in health equity stemmed from her work at Health Outreach Partners, a non-profit organization focused on alleviating barriers to quality healthcare access and delivery. Through a summer internship in 2022, she worked to prepare training modules for medical and public health students or practitioners in training. Her project focused on structural competency, a framework to analyze and address social determinants of health and health disparities. In the aftermath of COVID-19, many communities remained underserved in the public health and medical spheres, and Zaharaa brought these health disparities to light through her research.
Through her experiences spanning patient care, clinical research, and health advocacy, Zaharaa has sought out a largely interdisciplinary approach for enhancing health equity and hopes to continue doing so throughout the rest of her journey in healthcare.
Zaharaa graduated from Yale College in May 2025, with a B.A. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. She is currently working as a Medical Assistant for a local obstetrics-gynecology clinic while seeking admission to medical school.
