More news of Yale people

Appointed

Pianist Emanuel Ax will teach in the School of Music next year as a visiting professor of piano. One of the world's leading pianists, Ax has been on the faculty at Juilliard since 1990. But he also has ties to Yale: he has taught master classes at the music school, he received an honorary doctorate from the university in 2007, and his children Joseph and Sarah graduated from Yale College in 2001 and 2005, respectively.

Robert J. Alpern has been appointed to a second five-year term as dean of the School of Medicine. A nephrologist who came to Yale from the University of Texas, Alpern has overseen an expansion of programs and facilities at the school in his first term. Two major initiatives, the expansion of research programs at Yale's new West Campus and the Smilow Cancer Hospital, are now in progress.

Scholar and conductor Masaaki Suzuki will be the new conductor of the Yale Schola Cantorum, a chamber choir supported by the School of Music and the Institute of Sacred Music. Suzuki, known for his conducting as well as his scholarship on J. S. Bach, founded the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990. At Yale, he will also be a visiting professor of choral conducting. He succeeds Simon Carrington, who founded Schola Cantorum in 2003.

Elected

Poet J. D. McClatchy '74PhD, who edits the Yale Review and teaches at the university, has been elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society for artists and writers whose membership is limited to 250 people. McClatchy succeeds composer Ezra Laderman, a professor in the School of Music.

Honored

Economist Robert J. Shiller, who accurately predicted collapses in both technology stocks and the housing market in the last decade, will receive the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics this September in Frankfurt. Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, is the third recipient of the biennial prize. Jury members cited Shiller's work on the volatility of asset prices and the Case-Shiller housing price index he co-created.