New Whitney Center director named Sterling Professor
Professor of French Alice Kaplan ’81PhD, recently named director of the Whitney Humanities Center, has a new honor to add to her already distinguished CV: Sterling Professor. Kaplan, a three-time National Book Award nominee, member of the French Legion d’Honneur, former Guggenheim Fellow, and the author of seven books on French history and literature, has served on the Yale faculty since 2008. The Sterling Professorship is the highest honor that Yale can bestow on faculty members, and is reserved for those who stand at the pinnacle of their fields. A legendary teacher, acclaimed author, and distinguished university citizen, Kaplan exemplifies the values celebrated by the Sterling Professorship.
Honors for early-career faculty
In 2019, tenure-track faculty members in chemistry, physics, and geology and geophysics received national and international recognition for their pathbreaking research.
In chemistry, Sarah Slavoff was recognized by the Falk Medical Research Trust and the Smith Family Foundation for her high-impact work on the human genome; Tim Newhouse was honored for excelling as a teacher and scholar by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and was named an Arthur C. Cope Scholar by the American Chemical Society; and Hailiang Wang’s research on nanotechnology earned him a Sloan Research Fellowship. Physicists Meng Cheng, Nir Navon, and Eduardo da Silva Neto also received Sloan Research Fellowships: Cheng for work on condensed matter theory, Navon for research on quantum particles and da Silva Neto for investigations of superconduction. Da Silva Neto also received a Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and physicist Benjamin Machta was named a Simons Investigator for his work on the role of physical laws in biological systems. In geology and geophysics, Noah Planavsky took home the International Geobiology Society’s George S. Pemberton Award. Planavsky’s research uncovers the history and effects of the rise of oxygen on Earth.
All of these outstanding faculty received their PhDs within the last decade and represent Yale’s investment in recruiting and supporting world-class faculty across the sciences.
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