 | Among the many educational programs that brought youngsters to campus this summer was the Comer Kids Leadership Academy, sponsored by the Comer School Development Program. Participants from around the country took part in a variety of educational programs on such topics as the human brain, as well as sessions on the importance of taking responsibility for their own learning process. |
The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) will begin construction of a new home that will bear the name of a Yale College alumnus who recently made a major gift to the school.
The new building will be named after Richard Kroon '64, a New Jersey resident who retired in 2001 after 32 years with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. It will be located near Sage Hall, now F&ES's main administrative building, and will cost about $27 million and take four years to complete.
Seven current and one former Yale faculty member were among the new fellows elected in May to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the oldest learned society in the United States.
The Yale honorees were Richard H. Brodhead, then dean of Yale College and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and American Studies, now president of Duke University; Donald Max Engelman, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; Paul A. Fleury, dean of engineering and the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Engineering and Applied Physics; Steven M. Girvin, professor and director of graduate studies in physics and applied physics; Michael J. Graetz, the Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor of Law; Susan Hockfield, Yale provost and the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology; Wayne Meeks, the Woolsey Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies; and Stephen Skowronek, the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science.
The Yale School of Management (SOM) is launching an innovative M.B.A. program designed to provide healthcare executives with the latest management tools.
Titled Yale M.B.A. for Executives: Leadership in the Healthcare Sector, the program will combine resources from SOM and the School of Medicine. It will begin in August of 2005.
In other news, the school's International Center for Finance received a $1.6 million grant to expand its research in behavior finance -- a field of economics that attempts to explain how social and psychological factors, such as bias and emotion, influence economic and financial decision making. The award, the Whitebox Advisors Grant, was presented by Andrew Redleaf '78 B.A., '78 M.A., and his company Whitebox Advisors.
Several Yale scientists were recently recognized for their research. They are:
Sidney Altman, Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, received a three-year Focused Giving Grant by Johnson & Johnson to support his work on coordinated regulation of the protein subunits of RnaseP in HeLa Cells. Altman won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work on RnaseP.
Michel Devoret, professor of physics and applied physics, received one of the most prestigious physics prizes presented in Europe: The 2004 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize, awarded by the European Physical Society. The prize honors his work on superconducting electrical circuits, which may someday be used in quantum computers.
Andrew Hamilton, the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and a native of England, was elected as a member of the Royal Society for his work on molecular recognition, artificial enzymes and enzyme inhibition. The society's members include the most distinguished scientists from the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. (See also item on endowed chairs.)
Benoit Mandelbrot, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, was inducted into the prestigious American Philosophical Society. Mandelbrot has been called the "father of fractals" for his work showing that very simple formulas can generate objects that exhibit a wealth of structure.
Curtis Patton, professor of epidemiology and public health and head of the Division of Global Health, was awarded the Yale Graduate School's Edward A. Bouchet Leadership Award. The award -- which honors the scientist who was both the first African American to graduate from Yale College and the first in the United States to receive a Ph.D. (also from Yale) in physics -- was presented to Patton in recognition of his efforts to spread awareness of Bouchet's contributions, his mentorship to "countless" students and his research on microbial diseases.
Margaret H. Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, was elected as the new alumni trustee on the Yale Corporation in an international ballot of Yale graduates.
Marshall, who graduated from the Law School in 1976, joined the Massachusetts court in 1996 as one of seven justices, and was elevated to chief justice three years later. Among the cases that have come before the court during her tenure is the debate over same-sex marriage.
Fourteen members of the Yale faculty were recently named to endowed professorships. The scholars and their new chairs are:
Anne Alstott, the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation; Charles Bailyn, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy; Jon Butler, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History and Religious Studies; Paul Gilroy, the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Sociology and African American Studies; Andrew D. Hamilton, the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry (see also "Scientists honored for their work" entry); John Hartwig, the Irénée duPont Professor of Chemistry; Dr. Roberta Hines, the Nicholas M. Greene Professor of Anesthesiology; Dr. Margaret K. Hostetter, the Jean McLean Wallace Professor of Pediatrics; Shelly Kagan, the Clark Professor of Philosophy; Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law; Joan Panetti, the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Jr. Class of 1954 Adjunct Professor of Music; Ramamurti Shankar, the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics; Jay Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History; and Keith Wrightson, the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History.
In a letter to Yale's international students and scholars, President Richard C. Levin noted that he is working with other university presidents and academic leaders to bring about improvements in the United States' visa procedures.
"Protecting the nation from those who would enter it in order to do harm is a legitimate and essential objective," wrote Levin. "But the United States can have secure borders while maintaining access for international students, fellows and faculty."
Levin noted that he and his colleagues are working to bring about the following changes: granting students visas for the length of their academic program and allowing travel to and from the United States during that time; making the process of background checks speedier and removing the 12-month expiration date on such clearances; and allowing students to apply for visa renewals while still in the United States.
Several major grants supporting important medical research were announced this summer. They include:
Parkinson's disease. Dr. D. Eugene Redmond, professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at the School of Medicine, received a $5.5 million federal translational grant to develop two promising vector systems for delivery of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease.
HIV in India. The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS was awarded a $2.1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support HIV prevention research among high-risk populations in India.
Autism in infants. James and Marilyn Simons of The Simons Foundation awarded researchers in the Child Study Center at the School of Medicine $2.6 million to advance autism research and to establish a new laboratory for children at risk for autism.
Spinal cord injury and MS. Dr. Stephen G. Waxman and Jeffrey D. Kocsis of the Department of Neurology received $4.5 million from the Veterans Administration Rehabilitation Research and Development Service to continue their internationally recognized research training program focused on restoring function in spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis (MS).
Lyme disease. Durland Fish, professor of epidemiology in the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the School of Medicine, was awarded a $2.9 million, four-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control to develop a detailed map depicting human risk of infection in the eastern United States from the spirochetal bacteria that causes Lyme disease.
David W. Blight, a preeminent scholar of the history and legacy of the American Civil War, is the new director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
Blight, who holds joint appointments in history and African American studies, succeeds the center's founding director, David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History. An award-winning scholar, Blight is author of "Frederick Douglass' Civil War" and "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory."
A survey of 1,000 adults nationwide conducted by the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies showed that Americans are seriously concerned about the country's environmental health and want more political action on the environment.
According to the poll, three out of five Americans rate their quality of the country's environment as "only fair" or "poor." Of those surveyed, 84% said the environment will be a factor in their vote in November, while 35% considered it a "major factor."
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and was poet laureate of the United States 1991-1992.
The archive includes 6,000 pages of autograph and typed manuscripts, thousands of pages of rare samizdat (underground publications) and hundreds of letters to and from Brodsky -- including missives from writers Peter Viereck, Czeslaw Milosz and Stephen Spender -- as well as annotated books from the poet's library, photographs and a collection of video and audiotapes.
A number of important discoveries and studies by Yale researchers were announced this summer. The full stories about these findings are available online at the Yale Bulletin & Calendar website: www.yale.edu/opa/yb&c:
Blue skin. Blue coloration, which is rare among mammals, occurs when light scatters off highly ordered arrays of parallel collagen fibers in the skin (May 21).
Diabetes study. Yale is one of 11 medical centers across the country taking part in a study comparing three treatments of type 2 diabetes in children and teens (May 21).
Nerve damage in MS. Molecules that underlie nerve fiber degeneration have been identified in patients with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (June 4).
Teen obesity. Nearly half of all obese teens and adolescents have pediatric metabolic syndrome -- a group of risk factors that includes obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension and other metabolic abnormalities -- and the condition increases with worsening obesity (June 25).
Asthma-protein link. An unusual protein called acidic mammalian chitinase (AMCase) may play a role in the development of the type of lung inflammation found in asthma (June 25).
Attitude about attitudes. How people describe their attitudes affects the strength, quality and stability of those attitudes (June 25).
Breast cancer in Korea. Korean women have one of the lowest rates of breast cancer worldwide, even though they show a surprisingly high incidence of a genetic mutation known to contribute to the disease (June 25).
Identifying suspects. The ability to recognize people encountered during highly stressed situations is poor in the majority of individuals (June 25).
Illuminating MCH neurons. Yale scientists discovered a new way of illuminating MCH neurons -- which play an important role in regulating appetite and body weight -- by using a virus that was genetically engineered not to replicate as a "shuttle" to inject a jellyfish gene that glows green into the cell (June 25).
Image of RNA splicing. A team from the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry revealed the crystal structure of the first described enzymatic RNA -- both how it looks and how it reacts (June 25).
Marijuana and schizophrenia. The principal active ingredient in marijuana causes transient schizophrenia-like symptoms, ranging from suspiciousness and delusions to impairments in memory and attention (June 25).
Olfactory system. Full development of the sense of smell in mammals is dependent on functional activity during critical periods in development (June 25). In another study, scientists, working with a fruit fly model, discovered how odors are encoded by the olfactory system into the complex messages that are sent to the brain (Aug. 27).
Salmonella's replication. Scientists have identified a fundamental mechanism that Salmonella bacteria use to replicate within a body's cells and cause disease without being endangered by the body's defenses (July 23).
Productivity during drought. Contrary to what was previously believed, during a drought, the amount of growth per unit of precipitation is the same in a rainforest as it is in a desert (July 23).
Bone marrow transplants. A study revealed that a bone marrow donor's epithelial cells normally do not fuse with that of the recipient (Aug. 27). In a separate study, scientists detected donor-derived endometrial cells in biopsy samples from four women who received bone marrow transplants to treat leukemia (Aug. 27).
Hepatitis C enzyme. Research has revealed how a protein from Hepatitis C -- helicase NS3 -- unwinds RNA, potentially allowing it to be copied (Aug. 27).
Race and cancer. A genetic mutation related to a more aggressive form of breast cancer occurs four times more often in African-American patients than their white counterparts (Aug. 27).
Air travel for cardiac patients. The vast majority of individuals with cardiovascular disease can travel safely on airlines, provided they follow a few basic guidelines, such as carrying an ample supply of medication or waiting two weeks after a cardiac procedure (Aug. 27).
Blocking fibrosis. Blocking a kind of cell death known as apoptosis in fibrotic diseases of the lung also blocks the fibrosis, opening new ways of looking at treatment for lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis (Aug. 27).
Alzheimer's-related protein. A team of investigators have for the first time described the atomic structure of the human precursor protein, which has been linked to Alzheimer's disease (Aug. 27).
Maintaining weight loss. Women who maintained a weight loss of 15 to 144 pounds for at least one year and as long as 27 years followed similar patterns leading to consistent behavior change (Aug. 27).
Value of beta-blockers. While some physicians worry about prescribing beta-blockers because they may cause side effects, a study showed that heart failure patients who undergo beta blocker therapy tolerated the treatment well and had less heart failure deterioration than placebo drugs (Aug. 27).
Avoiding side effects. When given a choice, many older patients with knee osteoarthritis are willing to forego a potentially effective treatment for a lower risk of side effects, even if the safer option doesn't work as well as other medications (Aug. 27).
Biology of depression. In the brain, low levels of the inhibitory transmitter GABA and high levels of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate appear to be strongly associated with a particular type of depression (Aug. 27).
Pamela George, assistant dean in the Yale College Dean's Office and director of the Afro-American Cultural Center, was honored in May with the first Richard H. Brodhead Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising.
The new prize -- named for the former Yale College dean who is now president of Duke University -- was created by the Yale College Council to recognize the important role that advisers play in the lives of undergraduates. George, who serves as a freshman and sophomore adviser to students of all backgrounds in Yale College, is director of the Beckman Science Scholars Fellowship and the Ethnic Counselor Program and co-director of the Science, Technology and Research Scholars Program.
Among the other appointments announced over the summer were the following:
Shinik Hahm, who has wielded his baton for nearly 10 years as conductor of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, has taken up a new post: as music director of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale at the School of Music. Hahm has conducted major orchestras and opera companies throughout the world and received the Korean Cultural Medal, that nation's highest civilian honor.
Robert Black, who has been instrumental in the development of over 100 American plays, will serve as the interim chair of the School of Drama's Playwriting Department for the 2004-2005 year. Black has been artistic director of Sundance Theatre Labs since 1997 and was a co-founder of the revived La Jolla Playhouse.
Jill Westgard has been appointed director of development at the Yale Art University and Susan Greenberg has been named the gallery's first Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, a newly funded endowed post. Westgard was formerly with the Neurberger Museum of Art, Purchase-College State University of New York; Greenberg has been at Yale since 2002.
Ira Mellman, Sterling Professor of Cell Biology and Immunology and chair of the Department of Cell Biology, was named scientific director of the Yale Cancer Center, and Dr. Edward Chu, professor of internal medicine and pharmacology at the School of Medicine, was named chief of the center's Section of Medical Oncology.
The Yale University Art Gallery has acquired a collection of 4,100 coins from one of Europe's most renowned numismatic scholars, Peter R. Franke.
The collection, amassed by Franke over the course of a lifetime, includes coins from throughout the Mediterranean basin, with a principal focus on Greek coins of the Roman period.
Yale employees can save money when purchasing computers for their personal use through an agreement forged by the ASSET (Administrative Services and Support Enhancement Team) program and Dell Computers.
Complete information on the deal, which can save employees $200 to $300 off similar packages at retail stores, can be found by visiting the website at www.yale.edu/dellpc or by calling toll-free (888) 987-3355.
Several members of the Yale community passed away this summer. They are:
I. Richard Savage, emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Statistics, died on June 4 at age 78 in New Haven. Professor Savage was a world-renowned expert in the use of statistics in public affairs, such as AIDS diffusion, DNA fingerprinting, human rights and national defense.
Edmund Slocum Crelin Jr., emeritus professor of anatomy in the Department of Surgery at the School of Medicine, died on June 21 in Branford, Connecticut, at the age of 81. Professor Crelin pioneered the establishment of the Physician Associate program at the medical school and was instrumental in creating the world-renowned neo-natal and ultrasound units at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Shizuo Kakutani, the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, died on Aug. 17 in New Haven at age 91. Professor Kakutani invented several important mathematical tools, including the Kakutani skyscraper, a way to organize random processes, such as coin flipping.
President Richard C. Levin has appointed a committee to advise him in the search for a successor to Jeffrey E. Garten, who will step down as dean of the School of Management (SOM) when his second term ends on June 30.
The committee will be chaired by Sharon Oster, the Frederick D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship. The other members are SOM professors Judith Chevalier and Ravi Dhar; Jonathan Ingersoll, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of International Trade & Finance at SOM; Edward Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences at SOM and professor of public health; Alan Schwartz, Sterling Professor of Law; and Jacob Thomas, professor of accounting at SOM.
Members of the Yale community are encouraged to contact the President or any of the committee members directly with their nominations and comments concerning the search for a new SOM dean.
T H I S
While You Were Away:
The summer's top stories revisited
Alumnus' gift will help fund new home for F&ES
Eight professors named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
SOM launches new M.B.A. program,wins grant to study behavioral finance
Scientists honored for their work
Alumni elect new trustee
Faculty appointed to endowed chairs
Levin calls for U.S. to change its student visa policies
Grants to advance research on important health issues
Historian David Blight to direct Gilder-Lehrman Center
The environment is a major concern for voters, says poll
Library acquires papers of Nobel laureate poet Brodsky
News on the science and medical front
New Brodhead Award honors undergraduate advisers
Other appointments announced
Gallery acquires coin collection
ASSET-Dell deal provides discount on home computers for employees
Obituaries
Search committee for SOM dean appointed
W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
Yale welcomes new freshmen
Hockfield is appointed as MIT president
Changes to improve campus shuttle's efficiency
China's education leaders learn about Yale
FRESHMAN ADDRESSESNursing dean Catherine Gilliss accepts dual post at Duke
Law student makes wrestling history . . .
Graduate School's 522 new members welcomed . . .
Yale to be test site for national study on childhood epilepsy
In Focus: Studying the Near East
Desert expeditions challenge previous notions
about early societies
Year's first Chubb Lecture to explore ethical issues and Olympics
Studies demonstrate role of cilia in kidney disease
Yale researchers' studies of mental illness win grant support
Historic events in psychology to be celebrated
Jewish philosopher Maimonides is the subject of conference
Film Fest New Haven to feature four works by Yale alumni
While You Were Away: The summer's top stories revisited
Welcome to Yale
Yale United Way Campaign sponsoring 'Day of Caring' book drive
In Memoriam: Mathematician Walter Feit, advanced finite group theory
Memorial Service for John Rodgers
Symposium honors Dr. Charles Radding
Historian is term member of foreign relations council
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