Sills, Yole Granata, April 14, 1979

Yole Granata Sills (November 22, 1917 - December 7, 2015) was born in Greenwich Village, NY to Italian immigrant parents. She received her bachelor's in language and literature from Brooklyn College in 1939 and her master's in French and Italian Literature from Columbia University in 1940. She then served on the Italian desk of the Voice of America in the Office of War Information as a broadcaster for four years. In 1946, she was offered to go Japan as an Information Officer with the Office of War Information, where she provided the Allied Press with information about the Occupation. While in Japan, she married David Sills, another civilian employee in the occupation, in 1948. The couple returned to the United States in 1950 and moved to New York, where she went back to work for the Voice of America and the later for the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. While at the Bureau, Sills conducted research on medical education, helping to change how medical students were trained. She later became an adjunct teacher of medical sociology. In the 1980s and 90s, she also conducted research on the AIDS pandemic, publishing her research in 1994. In 2015, Yole Granata Sills passed away at the age of 98.