Christine Ngaruiya

Dr. Christine Ngaruiya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) at Yale University, and was the DEM Wellness Officer and the Director of Global Health Research until July 2023. She is currently an adjunct faculty in the Department. She completed the Global Health and International Emergency Medicine fellowship in the DEM in 2015, also matriculating with a Master of Science and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at that time. She is also a graduate of the NIH Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH) program, which she was competitively selected for from a national pool of applicants for the 2019-2020 cohort. Her research interests center on: Non-communicable Diseases, barriers to care, and community-based interventions with a particular focus on Africa. She joined faculty at in the Yale DEM as Assistant professor in Fall 2016. Her past professional work has focused on health disparities amongst minority populations in the U.S. and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR).

Some past honors include: the Emergency Medicine Resident’s Association (EMRA) Augustine D’Orta Award for outstanding community and grassroots involvement, Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance Associate and the 2014 Harambe Pfizer Fellow Award for social entrepreneurship, the 2016 University of Nebraska Outstanding International Alumnus award, the 2018 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Global Emergency Medicine Academy Young Physician award, and the 2019 Yale School of Medicine Leonard Tow Humanism award. In 2020, she was selected as 1 of 24 women nationally as part of the Stanford-affiliated, Gates Foundation funded WomenLift Health Leadership Cohort.

She has held several national and international leadership positions including with: the American Medical Students’ Association (AMSA), the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA), the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine’s (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy, the Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) conference committee and the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) Research Committee. She was a member and regular contributor to the Young People’s Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN). She is also a founding member of the Yale Network for Global Noncommunicable Disease (NGN) with an inaugural cross-campus symposium in 2016, which continues to plays a role as a hub for global NCD work involving the Yale community. Additionally, she served on the research pre-symposium committee for the African Conference on Emergency Medicine in 2014, on the Scientific Committee in 2016, and as the chair for the research pre-symposium committee in 2020. She has sat on a number of NIH panels related to global NCD topics, and has lectured both nationally and internationally on the same.

She was a senior contributor to the first ever national study on NCDs in Kenya using the WHO STEPs tool in collaboration with Kenya Ministry of Health, was awarded one of five 2017 Yale Global Health Leadership Institute Hecht-Albert junior faculty pilot awards to do an ED-based study on NCDs in Kenya, was one of two 2019 Yale Institute for Global Health faculty network awardees to assess the role of Natural Language Process in heart attack patients in Pakistan, and a recipient of two NIH awards (NHLBI and NIDA) in 2021 to conduct NCD research on ED populations in Kenya. Her work has also been funded by USAID, the World Bank and the Gates foundation, among others.

She was selected as one of twenty Yale Public Voice Fellows for 2015-2016 from across campus with around 30 publications in outlets such as Time, Huffington Post, Medium, and The Hill since that time. She continues to teach on the topic as the faculty advisor for the Yale OpEd and Advocacy course, a 5-year old program that was co-led by an interdisciplinary team of residents, and which has trained or mentored more than 150 trainees (residents and fellows) at YSM to date.