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Retired

Squash coach Dave Talbott (left) announced his retirement in January after 38 years at Yale. Talbott had coached Yale’s men’s team since 1983 and the women’s team since 2004. His men’s and women’s teams each racked up three national championships during his tenure; the men won six Ivy titles and the women two. Associate head coach Lynn Leong has been appointed interim head coach, but the teams are not competing this season due to the pandemic.

Honored

The Graduate School Alumni Association will award the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal—given annually for “outstanding work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration”—to four alumni in October. The awardees are: economist Anat Admati ’83PhD of Stanford; engineer and game theorist Tamer Basar ’72PhD of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; biologist and bioengineer Donald Ingber ’77, ’84PhD, ’84MD, of Harvard; and art historian and former Yale College dean Mary E. Miller ’81PhD, director of the Getty Research Institute.

Appointed

Yale-NUS College in Singapore has appointed David Post, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, as its next dean of faculty. Post, an aquatic ecologist, will serve a three-year term at Yale-NUS beginning July 1; his portfolio will include faculty development, research, and curriculum. He succeeds School of Public Health professor Jeannette Ickovics, who will return to teaching at Yale after three years at the Singapore college.

Remembered

Thomas Whitaker ’53PhD, the Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English and Theater Studies Emeritus, died on December 24 in Middletown, Connecticut. He was 95. Whitaker distinguished himself in two areas of scholarship: modern poetry and modern drama. A native of Michigan, he studied at Oberlin and Yale. After teaching at Oberlin and the University of Iowa, he joined the Yale faculty in 1975, serving six years as chair of the English department before his retirement in 1995. He was also a writer and adviser for the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute.