Fellow:Sarah Graf

Sarah Graf is a University Innovation Fellow and an MBA student at the Yale School of Management (SOM). She is focusing her studies at Yale on innovation and human-centered design in the healthcare industry. Sarah is passionate about health, justice, and human behavior. She grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and earned her undergraduate degree from Emory University with a double-major in chemistry and anthropology. Following her undergraduate studies, Sarah began her professional career in 2014 as a management consultant for PwC supporting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. She spent four years working on CDC projects spanning from laboratory quality management for the National Tobacco Lab to strategic operational support for the Chief Operating Officer during the height of the Ebola epidemic. Before coming to Yale, Sarah joined the pharmacy product innovation team at CVS Health and had the opportunity to apply design thinking to improve patient care. She fell in love with the process of uncovering solutions through empathy and better understanding of patient needs, and she helped to create the CVS Design Lab, an internal innovation unit focused on human-centered design and innovation across the enterprise.

At Yale, Sarah is a club leader for the Yale SOM Design + Innovation Club where she helps to educate other students on the power of design thinking mindsets, process, and methods. She is passionate about awakening the inner creative thinker in others as well as supporting entrepreneurship in underrepresented communities.

In January 2020, Sarah joined CVS Health as a Strategic Product Development Advisor in the CVS Design Lab. She leads product incubation for new retail pharmacy services, business model innovation, and enterprise strategy for Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)