When Assistant Professor Kristina Talbert-Slagle, PhD, opened her spring 2026 course, Evidence-Based Decision Making in Global Health, she issued an unusual challenge: instead of the traditional final paper, students could choose to build something different — a public health communication project, delivered to a larger, general audience.

Four students said yes immediately.

“We realized how important health communication is right now, especially within public health,” said Grace Williams, MPH ’26. “And honestly, we were all kind of tired of writing final papers.”

What began as a classroom pivot became Show Me the Evidence, a six-episode podcast on vaccine hesitancy — rigorously researched by Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) students, professionally produced at Yale’s Teaching Studio, and focused on a topic public health greatly needs to reach.

Show Me the Evidence is a direct expression of what YSPH’s strategic plan calls for: research that reaches beyond the classroom and into the world. Instead of publishing a paper, the students created podcast designed to reach vaccine-hesitant audiences with plain language and where they already are on streaming platforms. This kind of public-facing translation to complex health science is central to YSPH’s vision, to educate generations of public health leaders; to enhance trust in public health and science; and to create pathways for translating science so that it benefits communities.

The podcast’s casual, conversational tone belies the structural rigor underneath. As a requirement of Talbert-Slagle’s course, students built what they called an “evidence pipeline” — combing sources from The New York Times policy reporting to peer-reviewed scientific literature, then grading each piece of evidence from low- to high-quality using the course framework. That research then drove every question, every talking point, every episode arc.

“For the assignment, we graded it low- to high-quality evidence,” Williams explained, “but then we also used that to inform the questions and talking points that we wanted to bring to our speakers.”

The target audience was deliberate: people in their mid-20s, on the verge of starting families — curious, skeptical, or vaccine-hesitant, and largely outside the academic world. Williams and Casey Wells, MPH ’26, both went to school in the South, where vaccine hesitancy runs high and, as Wells noted, “friends of mine who are still there are seeing measles firsthand as nurses.”

“There’s kind of a disconnect between the research produced in public health and then translating it to the public,” Bethany Pavel, MPH ’26, said. “We do it in a way that’s easy to relate to,” Williams added. “We encourage them to do their own research.”

The episode structure mirrors the evidence-based framework students learned in class, building from macro policy down to grassroots trust.

Episodes 1 and 6 feature only the four students: Williams, Wells, Pavel, and Olivia McCarthy, MPH ’26. The first episode covers the vaccine landscape on social media, myth-debunking, and facts most audiences bring to the conversation. The finale loops back through every episode’s highlights while introducing new threads — barriers to vaccine access, the HPV vaccine, and a policy update.

Episode two introduces Jason Schwartz, PhD, associate professor of public health (health policy) and a leading vaccine policy expert, to lay out how the U.S. system actually works — the difference between a mandate and a recommendation, how the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) functions within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and how vaccine policy shifts impact an average patient’s conversation with their doctor, and their understanding of the evidence. “He breaks it down one step further,” Wells said.

Episode 3 turns from policy to trust, featuring Marietta Vazquez, MD, a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) at Yale School of Medicine who runs the Yale Hispanic Clinic. Vazquez walks through what a non-judgmental conversation with a parent who is hesitant about vaccinating their child looks like — and why it matters that different cultures bring different values to their children’s care. At Vazquez’s request, the episode was filmed in both English and Spanish, so she can share it directly with her Spanish-speaking patients in New Haven. “One of our most powerful episodes,” Wells called it.

Episode 4 returns to Talbert-Slagle — not as an academic, but as a parent. She talks about navigating vaccine decisions while completing her PhD, the power of anecdotal stories to unsettle even well-informed people, and why she ultimately vaccinated her children without hesitation. “It’s really cool to hear her as a parent,” Wells said, “but then she slowly starts to transition into herself as a public health professional. We kind of grow with her.”

Episode 5 expands the lens globally, with Nicola Hawley, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (chronic diseases), and Dr. Take Nasiri, MBBS, former Director General of the Ministry of Health in Samoa. Together they examine the 2019 Samoan measles outbreak — a decade-long slide in vaccination rates, driven in part by social media distrust, that bottomed out around 60%. “Eighty individuals passed away,” said Pavel, “and the government invested in a mass vaccination campaign and was able to get it back up to the high 90s in just a couple of weeks — which was really a feat in itself.”

Nasiri’s narrative was “Heartbreaking to hear,” Wells said. “He talks about how you’re losing children every day.”

The series then ties Samoa’s experience to emerging domestic warning signs — measles outbreaks in Texas and South Carolina, where even small drops in vaccination rates are beginning to show up in communities. “Almost a warning, in a sense,” Wells said.

For Williams, the six episodes add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. “They all go together so well,” she said.

Recording at the Yale Broadcasting Studio gave the podcast a level of production quality that the students said surprised them. Ryan McEvoy, the studio’s producer, served as their director, videographer, editor, and Spanish dubbing collaborator throughout. “An incredibly patient and kind individual,” Wells said. “We’re very, very thankful.”

The editing process, though, was theirs alone. After each 90-minute recording session, the team had to whittle academic conversation into 20-to-32-minute episodes tight enough to hold a lay listener’s attention. That meant confronting their own habits: the four students were already friends, which made conversation easy but editing harder. After the first episode, they began doing what McCarthy called “media training ourselves” — listening critically to raw footage and cutting anything that didn’t move the conversation forward.

All four hosts graduated from YSPH in May and are transitioning into professional lives. Wells is headed to Rosie’s Place in Boston, Pavel to global health consulting at Linksbridge in Seattle, McCarthy to research at YSPH, and Williams to the Connecticut Department of Public Health. The series is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YSPH’s YouTube channel.

Talbert-Slagle said the podcast was a useful alternative to a final paper — a framework for future students to take on pressing public health questions in formats that meet the public where it is. “I’m so proud of their work,” she said.

“We hope that maybe next year, some other topic in public health that really needs to be touched on could lay as a framework for something new,” Wells said.

The team thanks Ryan McEvoy; Professor Kristina Talbert-Slagle; their guest speakers; Rishab Garg, a Yale undergraduate who did evidence gathering; Alexandra Wells, YC ‘26, who served as translator; and the YSPH Office of Communications and Marketing.