Advisers honored at Commencement
Three extraordinary faculty members were given the Graduate School’s Mentor Award at this year’s Commencement Convocation on May 20. The award recognizes superb teaching, advising, and mentoring of graduate students, and signals the commitment of the university and the Graduate School to effective and empathetic student guidance. Awards are given in each of the three academic areas: humanities, social sciences, and sciences, based on anonymous nominations from grateful students. This year’s recipients were Katie Trumpener, the Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English; William Wright Kelly, the Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies and professor of anthropology; and Hemant Tagare, associate professor of electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, and diagnostic radiology. Each spoke at the convocation.
Career options for PhDs
The Graduate School Alumni Association and Graduate Career Services hosted a program, “Where Do I Go from Yale?” to encourage current PhD students to broaden their horizons when considering careers. A committee chaired by Rebecca Peabody ’06PhD (history of art and African American studies; now head of research projects at Getty Research Institute) organized alumni and others to speak about their work in academic administration, cultural organizations, private-sector research labs, government, and policy-making institutes. “You can do anything with a Yale PhD!” said Valerie Hotchkiss ’90PhD (medieval studies), who moderated one of the panels. She is director of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois.
Findings on nerve cell development
Ryan Christensen ’10MPhil (cell biology) has identified a mechanism controlling the growth of neurons during neural circuit formation in the brain, using the nematode C. elegans in Daniel Colon-Ramos’s laboratory. Ryan examined how the C. elegans version of a human gene called PTEN is involved in neuronal development. “I found that when this gene didn’t work, the neurons failed to grow correctly,” he explains. “I identified the pathway that this gene was acting in and, with collaborators at Harvard, determined that another element of the pathway had a similar effect in rats.” His findings were published in a major paper in the journal Development.
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