Pictured: Abe Prescher starts in New Haven this summer alongside another Yale hospital fellowship winner, left, his wife, Lt. Cmdr. Lindsey Prescher, a Navy surgeon.

Abraham Prescher, BU ’14, was selected as the lone 2016 recipient of the prestigious Yale- New Haven Health System Administrative Fellowship last year from more than 100 applicants around the country. Prescher now resides in California, where he is a forms management officer for the Naval Medical Center San Diego. He and his wife, Lt. Cmdr. Lindsey Prescher, a seven-year U.S. Navy veteran, will move to Connecticut this summer with their two children, Elsie, 2, and Nels, 6 months. Lindsey, a general surgeon, will commence a cardiothoracic fellowship at Yale-New Haven Hospital in July.

In the two-year fellowship, Abe Prescher will first spend two months working with leadership teams on corporate finance, human resources, strategic operations and other administrative functions. He then will have five-month rotations in each of the network’s three Connecticut medical centers – Yale-New Haven Hospital, Greenwich Hospital and Bridgeport Hospital – shadowing leadership personnel and working on his own strategic-direction-aligned projects in exploring clinic integration, outpatient medical services and environment of care standards.

Prescher began his career moving up through various management roles in big-box retail organizations before landing a civilian job in the military hospital in 2010. After deciding to go full bore into the somewhat abrupt career change, he enrolled in the Brenau online health care management Master of Business Administration program on the advice of U.S. Navy Capt. Joel Roos, BU ’09, former deputy commander of the San Diego facility who would subsequently serve as deputy chief of the entire U.S. Navy Medical Corps. (Roos currently is the Navy’s Seventh Fleet surgeon, based in Yokosuka, Japan.)

Brenau helped Prescher “bridge the gap,” he said, between military and civilian medical management. He said the program’s leader, Dr. David Miller, see “The Doctor is In (and On the Air),” made the online studies “like being in a classroom, even though I was thousands of  miles away.” He also credits Miller’s letter recommending him to the Yale program for his selection as one of the 16 semi-finalists. Following telephone interviews with the 16, Yale narrowed the field to three who were selected for in-person grilling by key hospital system administrators.