Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘New Haven’

Janitor to Doctor

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 22, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Shay Taylor-Allen.
Shay Taylor-Allen recently matched as a resident as Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. “For a decade,” says the Washington Post, “Taylor-Allen worked as a janitor there.“

I’ve followed a guy on Instagram for some years who made the journey from janitor to doctor. It took hard work, hope, and a very supportive wife. Today I learn about a woman who is making that same transition. Sydney Page at the Washington Post has the story.

“For about a decade, Shay Taylor-Allen walked the halls of Yale New Haven Hospital pushing a janitor’s cart. She mopped patient rooms, disinfected surfaces and emptied the trash.

“Soon, she’ll walk the halls of the hospital again, this time wearing a white coat.

“Taylor-Allen, 32, recently matched into an anesthesiology residency at Yale New Haven Hospital — where she spent most of her adult life working as part of the cleaning staff. …

“Taylor-Allen’s connection to Yale New Haven Hospital started in October 1993, when she was born in the hospital’s maternity ward. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and was raised by a single mother of three. She graduated from Wilbur Cross High School in 2010 and was in the top 10 percent of her class, she said. …

“Taylor-Allen said she had little guidance at school, and since no one in her family had gone to college, she wasn’t sure how to approach applying. … She applied for a few positions at Yale New Haven Hospital and landed a job as a janitor when she was 18.

” ‘It was a lot of busy work,’ she said. But it was also rewarding, she said, because she enjoyed connecting with patients.

“ ‘I think a lot of patients come in with mistrust of doctors and nurses, so they build trust with service workers because they feel like they’re one of us,’ Taylor-Allen said. “Sometimes they just needed somebody to talk to about anything else in the world other than their sickness.’ …

“But she was sure it would not be her long-term career.

“ ‘I knew I wanted to do something other than be a janitor, I just didn’t know what that was,’ Taylor-Allen said.

“She started college in 2013 at Southern Connecticut State University and continued her janitorial job full time. Her mother had become ill, so Taylor-Allen was also helping look after her younger brother.

“Shortly before Taylor-Allen started college, her family home caught on fire, and for years after, her mother had difficulty breathing.

“ ‘She explained that it was like breathing through a straw,’ Taylor-Allen said.

“She repeatedly took her mother to Yale New Haven Hospital, and doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. ‘They would just write it off as mental illness,’ Taylor-Allen said. ‘This was my first time learning about a health care disparity.’

“She decided to email Marna P. Borgstrom, then the chief executive of Yale New Haven Hospital, as she had cleaned her office before. She knew the chances of getting a response were slim.

“ ‘She emailed me back within that day,’ Taylor-Allen said, adding that Borgstrom arranged several appointments for Taylor-Allen’s mother with a new medical team, and they diagnosed her with vocal cord dysfunction, a condition that obstructs the airway.

“ ‘She advocated for my mom,’ Taylor-Allen said of Borgstrom. ‘Seeing advocacy first-hand truly pushed me to want to do it as well.’

“She decided to apply to medical school. When she told her college adviser her goal of becoming a doctor … “I just don’t see it for you,” ‘ Taylor-Allen recalled him saying.

“Taylor-Allen was undeterred. She got her master’s degree at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University to bolster her science background — all while keeping her job as a janitor.

“When it came time to apply to medical school in 2019, she was initially rejected from the more than 20 schools she applied to. That’s when she connected with Gena Foster, an assistant professor of medicine in hematology at Yale School of Medicine, and Foster became Taylor-Allen’s mentor. …

“Foster helped Taylor-Allen restructure her medical school application.

“ ‘It’s impossible for somebody to get into medical school and become a physician without mentorship,’ Foster said. …

“Taylor-Allen was waitlisted at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., but eventually was accepted and began classes in 2021. …

“During medical school, Taylor-Allen said she always hoped to return to New Haven and complete her residency at Yale. She did a rotation in anesthesia last November, and it solidified her desire to work there. …

“ ‘I still can’t really talk about it without tearing up,’ Foster said. ‘She’s going to be my colleague. It’s so cool. I’m so excited.’ ”

More at WaPo, here.

Read Full Post »

Carbon Capture from Sewage

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 18, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: Jonathan Wiggs/Globe.
A New Haven, Connecticut, carbon-capture start-up is testing its concept at this sewage facility in Fall River, Massachusetts. Limestone gets mixed in with waste water at the bottom of the tank to draw out carbon.  

Nowadays most of us don’t think much about sewage. Out of sight, out of mind. But I regularly read novels that were written before indoor plumbing, and I often think about how awful those chamber pots and outhouses must have been. I feel grateful for the people who do think about sewage today.

Kate Selig reports at the Boston Globe about a New Haven, Connecticut, company turning sewage into a tool for fighting climate change.

“At the edge of a picturesque bay in this historic city,” she writes, “a deep waste water tank harbors an unlikely climate experiment.

“Near the base, a narrow tube spits out a milky stream that’s as thick as roux. The liquid, a mix of treated waste water and a naturally occurring mineral, is swirled in with the sewage. The combination kick-starts chemical reactions that pull carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change, into a harmless bicarbonate ion.

“CREW Carbon, a startup founded in New Haven, is betting that this simple combination could turn dirty water into a powerful climate solution. It has partnered with waste water treatment plants along the East Coast, including the facility in Fall River, to put this approach into action. As a bonus, municipalities often find that limestone is a cheaper and more effective way to treat waste water than conventional methods. …

” ‘We don’t need massive new infrastructure or subsidies,’ said Joachim Katchinoff, the company’s cofounder and CEO. ‘And because our process delivers real operational and cost benefits, it creates a win-win for utilities and for the planet.’ The company grew out of research at Yale and was founded in 2022 by Katchinoff and Noah Planavsky, a geochemist and Yale professor. …

“When the water flows out of the plant, the company says, the dissolved ions eventually make their way to the ocean, where they can be stored for thousands of years. Katchinoff estimated that a single treatment plant can remove thousands to tens of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide annually. The startup sells carbon removal credits, a way for companies to pay to offset their climate pollution. CREW Carbon is one of the first companies to deliver credits in New England.

“The municipalities benefit as well. Some waste water treatment plants see cost savings and increased safety for workers by using limestone instead of chemicals for controlling pH. The limestone also can yield cleaner water flowing out of the plant. And in some cases, CREW Carbon is sharing revenue with the treatment facility from the carbon credits it sells. …

“The company’s first partnership was with the local utility in New Haven. Since then, it has grown to have six full-scale projects, most located on the East Coast. It delivered its first carbon credits in the spring, making it the first company in the world to have done so using waste water alkalinity enhancement, as the method is known. Alkalinity is a measure of the water’s ability to neutralize acids.

“In the coming years, the startup has committed to delivering about 70,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal, the equivalent of taking over 16,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year, to a coalition of companies that includes Alphabet and McKinsey. …

“On a recent day, Jonathan Mongie, a project manager for Inframark, which operates the Fall River plant, leaned over a tank where waste water treated with limestone was being disinfected.

“ ‘I can see deeper than we’ve ever seen before,’ he said, observing the clarity of the water. The limestone increased the amount of solid particles in the waste water separated out using gravity. The plant was already meeting stringent discharge standards, Mongie said, but the limestone has improved the cleanliness of the water flowing into the bay. …

“Planavsky, the Yale professor, said CREW Carbon’s approach is not a silver bullet for the climate crisis. Instead, he said, it could be part of a future integrated approach where many industries each do their relatively small part. (Though Planavsky is a cofounder, he does not receive any money from the company.)

“Some scientific questions remain about waste water alkalinity enhancement, especially what happens after the water leaves the treatment plant. Tyler Kukla, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions, said the chemical reactions that occur within the waste water plant are well understood and take place within a closed system, making them easier to monitor. However, he said, it is less clear what happens to the carbon as it travels out to the ocean.

” ‘This is a work in progress,’ he said. ‘We can make measurements that we feel very confident about in many cases, but there is still a part of the system that is a little bit fuzzy to us.’ “

More at the Globe, here.

Read Full Post »