School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
January/February 2015

Soros Fellow works for two degrees

First-year student Daniel Kim (MD/PhD) has been awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans to support his graduate studies at Yale. He is one of 30 graduate and professional students in the US to receive this highly competitive honor, which recognizes immigrants and the children of immigrants who show extraordinary potential. 

Daniel was born in California to Korean parents. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he was copresident of Harvard Red Cross and conducted research on skin cancer. At Yale, he is one of the leaders of the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association and does health screenings at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK). Daniel plans to study targeted therapies for cancer as his dissertation project and work as a physician-scientist.

Studying the evolution of the universe

Astronomy graduate students Erica Nelson and Joel Leja are part of a team that is teasing out the early history of the Milky Way by studying other galaxies through the world’s most advanced telescopes. The stars they observe are so remote that their light has traveled for billions of years before it reaches Earth, meaning that astronomers see these galaxies as they were in the distant past. 

Their findings offer important clues about a time when “the universe was forming incredibly dense galaxies, and forming them really, really rapidly,” Erica says. “The universe was a far hotter, more turbulent place, and these galaxies were boiling cauldrons, forging stars.” 

New books by recent history alumnae

Kathryn Gin Lum ’10PhD (history), assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford, is author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her book analyzes how the widespread belief in hell influenced Americans’ perceptions of themselves and the rest of the world during the first century of nationhood. Catherine McNeur ’12PhD (history), assistant professor of environmental and public history at Portland State University, has published Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard University Press, 2014). The book traces how New York City, in the decades before the Civil War, was transformed from a health hazard to an emerging world city.