School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
May/June 2013

Colloquia offer hands-on training

Many graduate students begin developing the professional skills they will need as faculty members by organizing and participating in scholarly colloquia at Yale. Colloquia—sometimes called brown bag lunches, forums, working groups, workshops, or reading groups—meet on a regular basis and host talks by students, faculty, and guest speakers. The students who coordinate these programs gain experience defining interdisciplinary themes, inviting speakers, soliciting and selecting student papers, promoting events, and networking with scholars at Yale and other campuses. This year, the Dean’s Fund is providing financial support to 43 such groups.

Diversity in higher education

The Graduate School’s Office for Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO) hosted “Then and Now: Historicizing the Contemporary State of Diversity in Higher Education,” the tenth annual Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education, April 19–20. University of Texas (Brownsville) president Juliet Garcia, the first Mexican-American woman to head a college or university in the US, delivered the keynote address and received the Bouchet Leadership Award. The conference is named for Yale alumnus Edward Alexander Bouchet who, in 1876, became the first African American to earn a PhD in any discipline from an American university and the sixth person ever to earn a doctorate in physics in the western hemisphere.

Student will study lipid metabolism

Nora Kory (cell biology) has won a predoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association to study how cells metabolize fat to generate energy. This process is important to understand, because when it doesn’t work properly, it can lead to diabetes and heart failure. Nora’s work involves determining the function of an uncharacterized enzyme present on lipid droplets, the fat storage sites of cells. She conducts biochemical and cell biological studies as well as physiology experiments using a genetically engineered mouse in which collaborators at UCSF have inactivated, or “knocked out,” the gene encoding this enzyme. Her goal is to understand the role of lipids in cell function and energy metabolism.