The Yale Alumni Association Public Service Awards, formerly know 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 three Yalies – a Yale College student, a graduate or professional school student, and a member of the alumni body – all of whom have demonstrated service that draws on the Yale community and benefits the world beyond Yale.
This year the Yale Alumni Association honors three deserving candidates, Yalies who have given back and paid it forward, for their commitment to public service, and passion for helping others.
The 2024 YAA Public Service Award recipients are Titilayo Omotade ’17 MPhil, ’20 PhD, Houngan Collin Edouard ’23 MA, ’27 PhD, and Olivia Ang-Olson ’24. The winners will be honored on September 19, 2024, at a ceremony hosted at Rose Alumni House.
Titilayo Omotade ’17 MPhil, ’20 PhD
Yale is honoring Dr. Titilayo Omotade for pioneering historical systemic change to advance educational equity and DEI in STEMM. The original model she created has been heralded as the “first of its kind” - and the movement she catalyzed and spearheaded “advanced DEI by decades,” according to senior leadership members at Yale University. Titi spent five years creating and developing an original DEI model, strategy, and institutional organization to revolutionize the DEI landscape at the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) called the Yale BBS Diversity and Inclusion Collective (YBDIC). As the Founding Director she achieved deep systemic change and made unprecedented initiatives to humanize the PhD training experience for students, especially students from marginalized groups. She originated and pioneered an ambitious two-pronged system that was designed to tackle the impact of racialized systems in STEMM at the systems level and the student level – in tandem.
Dr. Titilayo Omotade has been nationally recognized for her significant contributions towards advancing equity in STEMM and as an accomplished microbiologist. She has initiated and directed programs to increase the representation of minority groups in STEMM for over 13 years. Before she joined the Ph.D. program at Yale, she had already established a strong and impactful track record of fighting for the next generation of scientists. She was awarded a competitive fellowship – four years in a row – by The Department of the Army. In her senior leadership roles, she spearheaded new STEMM initiatives and programs to provide access, training, and holistic support to over a thousand minority students and students from low-income households from D.C.
Before she created her model and launched YBDIC, DEI efforts were largely siloed, decentralized, and under-resourced. Students from marginalized groups were experiencing the effects of racial battle fatigue, painful isolation, and disempowerment. Thus, negatively affecting their performance, persistence, mental health, and well-being. The institution was not equipped to address broader systemic issues that were perpetuating inequities, and she knew that deep reform and innovation were required to achieve sustainable systemic change and deliver long-delayed justice to students from marginalized groups. She knew that solutions and strategies would be insufficient – rather a sustainable system was needed to uproot the deeply entrenched barriers to institutional reform and student belonging. Her ‘Collective Model’ was designed to unite everyone and ultimately shift the academic landscape for all students.
She took her model – and solely authored an original grant to secure funding, created a new student leadership model and fellowships, conceived over 25 original initiatives, earned buy-in from senior leadership at YSM, recruited and led a team of 14 student leaders and eventually secured a historical amount of funding from The School of Medicine. Due to her exceptional ability to formally unite all departments under her original DEI model, the historical positive impact she had towards student recruitment, retention, professional development, and outreach - Yale BBS adopted it as their primary DEI platform. In recognition of her impact and legacy she is the first alumna in recent YSM History to be endowed with a permanent named lecture series for achieving unprecedented and historical DEI reform at Yale University and beyond.
Her impact has gone beyond Yale – at the national level she serves as a trusted advisor to leading organizations, at the institutional level her model has already been replicated by other institutions and she has inspired students – especially minority students to achieve systemic change to advance DEI and feel empowered to pioneer new paths to justice. She recently was invited as the guest of honor by senior leadership at The Center for the Advancement of Science Leadership and Culture at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In their words, Dr. Omotade “exemplifies the type of leadership that [they] strive for and she has been recognized for pioneering new paradigms and embodying the future of scientific leadership. She continues to serve as a national leading expert and partner with institutions to achieve deep systemic change. In recognition of her institutional and national contributions towards advancing DEI in STEM she was recently awarded the “Titan Award” from Vanderbilt School of Medicine.
She is currently a Senior Project Director and Principal Investigator at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Houngan Collin Edouard ’23 MA, ’27 PhD
Yale is honoring Houngan Collin Edouard (Li/He), for his activism and his work uplifting marginalized people. His journey, rooted in Haitian Vodou, led him to champion anti-racist and decolonized practices within and beyond higher learning institutions and K-12 settings. He is a beacon of inspiration, foregrounding the voices and bodies of Indigenous people and uplifting marginalized communities and their sacred practices. He is a junior Kosanba board member, Phi Beta Kappa New York board member, former co-chair of the Grant Hagan Society (2023-24), and a proud child of Sosyete Nago.
Collin travels to Mardin, Turkey, to help teach music to children going through the refugee crisis. His work goes beyond teaching music—he encourages the children to utilize their musical skills as a form of cultural identity and resistance against oppressive forces. Sahba Aminikia, TED Fellow, Composer, and Founder of the Flying Carpet Festival in Mardin, Turkey, reflects on Collin’s interactions with the children in Turkey. “What inspires me the most about Collin is his dedication to social justice and his sense of empathy for marginalized communities that he does not seemingly belong to. From another perspective, activists like him belong to a larger global community of artists that fights for justice and for decolonization and democratization of arts, of which many indigenous communities have been deprived due to economic or social status.”
Collin believes that all students should have equal access to study music. After learning about the limited resources in Mosul, Iraq, he started a music book drive called "Music for Mosul" in 2022 to deliver music books to students and help rebuild their music library. Saif Al-Taie, a music teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts in Mosul, Iraq, said, “I met my friend Collin after the war in my city with ISIS. I told Collin how ISIS destroyed my city and burned all the music books at the institute. Since then, I have been teaching my students without music books. Collin was very moved by this and immediately started a donation campaign for books in the USA and collected many, many wonderful music books for me, and sent them to me via FedEx to Mosul. Then I invited Collin to Iraq, and he accepted my invitation to see life in Iraq and the historical monuments in my city. Thank you, Collin, for helping my students.” To encourage more positive content about Iraq, Collin created a mini-documentary titled Across Mountains, surveying the music experienced in the region he visited.
Collin organizes several Yale University events to foster inclusive participation from underrepresented voices. His efforts contribute significantly to Yale's ongoing commitment to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across the university and its local neighborhoods. Through his co-sponsorships with Yale’s Schwarzman Center, the Department of Music, the School of Music, Davenport College, The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M), Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration (RITM), Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY), Yale's Comparative Literature department, and Yale’s Oral History of American Music (OHAM), he invites attendees from within and beyond Yale to learn about, interact with, and connect as a diverse community led by the invitees.
Olivia Ang-Olson ’24
Yale is honoring Olivia Ang-Olson for her commitment to improving health access in the New Haven community. She currently serves as the Executive Director of HAVEN Free Clinic, a student-run primary care clinic that provides free healthcare to hundreds of uninsured and most vulnerable patients in the New Haven region.
Olivia’s dedication to the health of New Haven has remained a foundation since 2020, when she joined the Yale community as an undergraduate. As the Yale Policy Institute’s Public Health Center Director, Olivia worked with New Haven residents to understand and quantitatively analyze how vaccination information and resources have reached community members unevenly, even within Connecticut, a state with generally high vaccination rates.
Olivia also volunteered for three years with Hypertension Awareness Prevention Program at Yale (HAPPY), serving as its Co-President in 2023, through which she oversaw hundreds of volunteer shifts to provide free and regular hypertension screenings for New Haven’s homeless population. In this context, she has obtained a vivid understanding of the receding health supports for the un-housed, disabled, and undocumented in the city.
In turn, through HAVEN Free Clinic, Olivia has worked to address these same social determinants and multifaceted aspects of healthcare for New Haven’s most vulnerable. In 2022, she served as HAVEN’s Social Services Director, personally conducting appointments with patients regarding financial, rent, and food insecurity. She also secured a $25,000 grant to support the HAVEN Social Services Department, which enabled the Department to provide emergency financial assistance to patients in critical, health-threatening situations.
In January 2024, Olivia began her term as an Executive Director of HAVEN Free Clinic, overseeing 55 department directors across 21 departments and 400 volunteers. “I am grateful to have the opportunity to serve the New Haven community. What moves me, day in and day out, is seeing how the steps we each take — together — directly impact health in so many ways. I find this quite meaningful, that in the pursuit of high-quality healthcare access for all, we can have a personal hand in building that critical bridge.”
Olivia graduated from Yale College in May 2024, with a B.A. in Political Science, and will be continuing her studies at the Yale School of Public Health pursuing her M.P.H. in Health Policy & Management.
