RSVP: Email cend@berkeley.edu
Welcome the fall semester with an urgent talk on August 25th at 4pm by Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, PhD, MPH. Dr. Chou will be joined by UC Berkeley's Arthur Reingold, MD and Claudia Polsky, JD.
What: A talk and panel followed by a reception
Where: 245 Li Ka Shing, UCB campus
When: Tuesday, August, 25th at 4:00pm
Why: Censorships and attacks on academic research have spurred a new generation of resistance in defense of science, academic freedom, and democracy. Inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH), civil servants organized and released the Bethesda Declaration in June 2025, an open letter raising concerns over the damage caused by the Trump administration’s policies and practices. Their whistleblowing and advocacy efforts have intensified since then. In this forum, Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou (SPH, class of 2008), a former NIH program official, health communication scholar, and a Bethesda Declaration organizer and signer, will discuss the perils facing health research in and outside the NIH, highlighting opportunities to resist censorship (or anticipatory compliance), engage in honest conversations, and defend academic freedom. Dr. Chou will share personal reflections and lessons learned on building and growing a community in collaboration with media, legislative, and academic partners.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Martina at cend@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible (at least 5 days in advance of the event).
Speaker Biographies
Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, PhD, MPH served as a Program Director at the National Cancer Institute for nearly 16 years. Dr. Chou is a prolific health communication researcher with over 125 publications. Her works have been widely cited and her research on social media and end-of-life discourse have been referenced in major outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. An expert on the spread of health misinformation, she has published extensively on relationship-centered approaches to health communication research.
During her tenure at the NCI, she managed a portfolio of over 200 grant awards at the intersection of cancer control, technology, and health communication. She has co-authored over more than 10 funding initiatives. As a program official and a mentor to many pre- and post-doctoral fellows, Dr. Chou has guided generations of multi-disciplinary researchers seeking and receiving federal funding
support. In 2023, she served as the scientific lead for a $154 million trans-NIH Common Fund Program on the topic of “Advancing Health Communication Research and Practice”. This initiative was approved by NIH Council and fully developed, but abrupted “paused” due to political interference.
In 2025, Dr. Chou was an organizer and signer of The Bethesda Declaration, where she joined hundreds of NIH colleagues in voicing their dissent the harmful policy changes they witnessed. The group has worked to organize civil servants and scientists nationwide, with the goal of uphold the integrity of government-sponsored research. Dr. Chou resigned from the NIH in protest in January of 2025, and has remained outspoken in defense of science and democracy in the media and through her writings. She is currently working on a book about the Bethesda Declaration movement and other resistance efforts across the federal government and academia.
Dr. Chou holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MPH from UC Berkeley. Before joining the government service, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship as part of NCI’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program.
Arthur L. Reingold, MD is a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Professor Reingold has worked for over forty years on the prevention and control of infectious diseases both at the national level, including eight years at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as with numerous low income countries around the world. He has directed or co-directed the CDC-funded California Emerging Infections Program since its inception in 1994.
His research interests include vaccine-preventable diseases; respiratory infections, including influenza; bacterial meningitis; disease surveillance; and outbreak detection and response. He has published almost 400 original research papers on these subjects and teaches a wide variety of courses on related topics at the University of California, Berkeley and at numerous other universities around the world. Among other honors, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
Claudia Polsky, JD, M. Appl. Sci., is a Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, and the initiator of the Thakur v. Trump lawsuit that has restored more than 1000 unlawfully terminated grants and over $700 million to the UC system. Prof. Polsky is the founding director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Berkeley Law, which trains law students through live-client pro bono service. Her own research focuses on the regulation of toxic chemicals and other threats to environmental health. Her scholarship also encompasses the issue of academic research freedom. See, e.g., Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers (66 UCLA L. Rev. 208 (2019)).