Honoring outstanding faculty mentors
The Graduate Student Assembly and GSAS collaborate each year to name three Graduate Mentor Award winners, nominated by students for their exceptional professional, scholarly, and personal support. This year’s winners were alumnus Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan’96PhD (anthropology), David Blight, and Derek Briggs.
Sivaramakrishnan is the Dinakar Singh Professor of Anthropology and professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of History and professor of African American studies and of American studies, and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Briggs, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, is former director of the Peabody.
Two Soros fellows at the Graduate School
GSAS students Mayesha Alam (political science) and Lorenzo Rakesh Sewanan (MD/PhD, biomedical engineering) have been awarded Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. This year, out of 1,775 applicants, only 30 students nationwide were chosen to receive the fellowship, which honors outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing advanced degrees. Seven students in Yale’s professional schools also won Soros Fellowships this year.
Born in Bangladesh, Alam moved with her family to Jakarta as a child. They lived under the repressive Suharto regime and witnessed Indonesia’s transition to democracy. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s degree from Georgetown University, both in international relations. She is author of Women and Transitional Justice: Progress and Persistent Challenges in Retributive and Restorative Processes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Sewanan was born in Suriname to Indo-Caribbean parents who migrated there from Guyana to escape the economic and political unrest of the socialist regime. He attended Trinity College as a QuestBridge College Match Scholar. His current research explores the biomechanics of inherited diseases of the heart muscle.
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