Mara McAdams ’96 is a doctor, medical educator, and administrator in Singapore who has seen how global collaborations can improve community health at scale. But some of her strongest memories of working as a team come from her Yale College days on the varsity women’s ice hockey squad.
“The team was a small squad that had to fight hard against often stronger teams,” McAdams says. “Yet we practiced and trained hard all week to prepare for our games. I learned how to enjoy the journey of working as a team to do our best in the face of significant challenges.”
Today, McAdams and her husband, David Hand ’96, have endowed the McAdams-Hand Family Fund for the Yale Institute for Global Health (YIGH) in service of the institute’s mission to foster interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex global health challenges.
“We can’t use our skills and successes to serve only our own communities,” McAdams says. “Giving to YIGH allows Yale to research, design, and implement initiatives that will create meaningful change in the world. I am particularly excited to see how Yale can integrate global health into the wider university to influence and benefit from Yale’s diverse faculty across the university to create collaborations that will find more creative and more adaptive solutions to the health and wellbeing problems we are facing.”