School Notes: Yale Divinity School
September/October 2008

Mapping the New Haven religious landscape

Divinity School students will be conducting a detailed mapping of New Haven religious life. The mapping project aims to produce an exhaustive inventory of the Elm City's religious communities, ranging from those that meet in hotel ballrooms and community centers to traditional churches and synagogues. The effort is being led by Harlon Dalton ’73JD, an Episcopal priest, YDS adjunct professor, and professor at the Law School.

The mapping project is part of a larger, three-year initiative to prepare students for social justice ministries, through a $250,000 grant awarded recently by the Jessie Ball duPont Religious, Charitable, and Educational Fund. The initiative includes an intensive course designed to give students the leadership skills necessary to create change in communities, as well as the development of new curricula at the Divinity School to groom students for social justice work.

Are we safe? At what cost?

The 2008 Sarah Smith Memorial Conference is grappling this autumn with questions of how faith can be used constructively to engage security concerns in new ways. The September 18-19 interdisciplinary event, entitled "Are We Safe Yet? Vulnerability and Security in an Anxious Age," takes as a premise that security -- as traditionally pursued -- comes only at an extremely high price, in human and financial terms. Open to the public, the conference will bring together pastors, politicians, academics, and business leaders. Planned participants include Academic Dean Emilie Townes, currently president of the American Academy of Religion, and former Canadian MP Douglas Roche, who now heads an international consortium of nonprofit organizations that focus on nuclear disarmament issues. The annual forum, named after a YDS alumna with a passion for moral leadership, is co-hosted by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

The Pastor's Study: learning what it's like to serve the church

One of the perennial challenges of Divinity School students is how to integrate academic pursuits with pastoral aims. A new weekly program, The Pastor's Study, aims to expose students to a variety of choices and experiences. The series of ten luncheon encounters spans the fall term and features speakers ranging from a local rabbi talking about what Christian clergy need to know about Jews, to Yale University Chaplain Sharon Kugler discussing how to build a multi-faith outreach in a diverse academic setting. The Pastor's Study is part of a new effort, headed by Assistant Dean William Goettler, to enhance support offered by the school to the roughly 50 percent of the student body bound for church-related careers. The series began on a more modest scale last year. During one encounter, homiletics professor Thomas Troeger, an accomplished writer of hymns and a musician, advised students, "I have told you what I do, hoping that you may discover in the specifics of my life what you need for the specifics of your life as a preacher."

School of Drama
James Bundy, Dean
www.yale.edu/drama

Students named Greene Foundation fellows

Brian Hastert ’09, Teresa Avia Lim ’09, Luke Robertson ’09, and Erica Sullivan ’09 are the first recipients of the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fellowship, which underwrites the full tuition and living expenses of four students in the acting department in their third and final year of training. The Jerome L. Greene Foundation made a $3.235 million gift in January to the Yale School of Drama -- the largest single gift for scholarship ever made to the school -- to establish the endowed scholarship fund.

2008 Yale Drama Series Award

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee has selected Grenadine by Neil Wechsler (Yale College ’96) as the recipient of the 2008 Yale Drama Series Award, an annual award inaugurated in 2007 that supports emerging playwrights. Wechsler will be awarded the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000; his play will be published by Yale University Press and will receive a reading at Yale Repertory Theatre. The Yale Drama Series Award is funded by a gift from the David Charles Horn Foundation, and is jointly sponsored by Yale University Press and Yale Repertory Theatre. British playwright David Hare has been named the judge for the 2009 and 2010 competitions.

Yale Rep honored by Connecticut theater critics

The Connecticut Critics Circle, a statewide organization of theater critics in various media, has recognized the Yale Repertory Theatre with four awards. The cast of Boleros for the Disenchanted -- Lucia Brawley ’02MFA, Joe Minoso, Gary Perez, Adriana Sevan, Felix Solis, and Sona Tatoyan -- was named outstanding ensemble; Riccardo Hernandez won for outstanding set design, in The Evildoers; Patricia Kilgarriff was named outstanding actress in a play for her role in A Woman of No Importance; and Anya Klepikov ’08MFA received the outstanding costume design award for the same production.

School of Engineering & Applied Science
T. Kyle Vanderlick, Dean
www.eng.yale.edu

Electrical engineering professor receives technology award

Tso-Ping Ma, the Raymond John Wean Professor of Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2008 Connecticut Medal of Technology, the highest honor for technological achievement in fields crucial to Connecticut's economic competitiveness.

Early in his career, Ma did research at IBM on advanced silicon device technology and ionizing radiation effects in metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices. He joined the Yale faculty in 1977, where his research and teaching have focused on microelectronics, semiconductors, MOS interface physics, ionizing radiation and hot electron effects, advanced gate dielectrics, flash memory device physics, and ferroelectric thin films for memory applications.

Ma's ongoing research has had a major impact on the high-tech industry and many of his students have gone on to leadership positions in the semiconductor and computer hardware field. He has served as the principal investigator of joint R & D projects with numerous companies worldwide, including IBM, Intel, Motorola, Lucent Technology, GE, Hughes, Rockwell Semiconductors, Philips, Siemens, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi Electric.

Tang selected for symposium

Hong Tang, professor of mechanical and electrical engineering, has been selected to participate in the 2008 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. The three-day event, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering, brings together engineers who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The symposium will be held September 18-20 at Sandia National Laboratories at the University of New Mexico and will examine emerging nanoelectric devices, cognitive engineering, drug delivery systems, and understanding and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The participants -- from industry, academia, and government -- were nominated by fellow engineers and chosen from a large pool of applicants.

Professor named neural networks pioneer

Kumpati Narendra, the Harold W. Cheel Professor of Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Neural Networks Pioneer Award, recognizing his contributions to the theory of identification and control using artificial neural networks.

The Pioneer Award recognizes significant contributions to early concepts and developments in the neural networks field. The contributions have to be made at least 15 years prior to the award date. Narendra's paper entitled "Identification and Control of Dynamical Systems Using Neural Networks" was published in the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks in March 1990, and essentially started the field of neurocontrol. The paper has been cited more than 3,000 times since publication.

School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
James Gustave Speth, Dean
www.environment.yale.edu

Americans willing to pay more for "green" products

Many Americans, including those who are enduring financial hardship, are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products, according to a survey conducted by the environment school and GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media. "Many American consumers, even in the face of economic uncertainty, express a willingness to pay more for environmentally friendly products," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. "Toyota can't make the Prius fast enough to meet consumer demand, to cite just one example, and many see 'green' products as the wave of the future."

Half of the respondents to the survey said they would "definitely" or "probably" pay 15 percent more for eco-friendly clothes detergent (51 percent) or for an automobile (50 percent). Forty percent said they would spend 15 percent more on "green" computer printer paper and 39 percent would do the same for "green" wood furniture. Americans who said their current financial situation is "fair" or "poor" were just as willing to spend 15 percent more on environmentally friendly detergent or wood furniture as those Americans more confident of their current financial situation.

Environmental problems require shift in values

Successfully confronting today's environmental and social challenges requires a re-examination of the values and worldviews that shape our perceptions of nature and society, according to an environment school report, "Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities." The report synthesizes the insights and recommendations of more than 60 leaders in the natural and social sciences, philosophy, communications, religion, public policy, business, and the creative arts, which were generated during a conference organized by the environment school last fall in Aspen, Colorado.

The first section of the report seeks to identify and understand the contemporary worldviews that pose barriers to grappling successfully with environmental and social needs. The second addresses the changes in values needed to strengthen human ties with each other and with the natural world, and identifies steps toward realizing these goals. The report can be found at http://environment.yale.edu/newconsciousness.

New Internet tools promote faculty research

Visitors to the Yale University and environment school's websites, as well as to entertainment portals such as YouTube and iTunes, can now access faculty research in audio and video.

To date, the environment school has created four video and eight audio podcasts that aim to inform and educate the public about pressing environmental issues. These can be downloaded to cell phones, MP3 players, and computers.

The videos feature faculty discussing their research in such areas as the discovery of hermaphrodite frogs in the suburbs of the Connecticut River Valley and predator-prey relationships in the meadows of Yale-Myers Forest. Audio segments cover such stories as the effects of "green" practices on a business's bottom line and how agriculturally based countries in middle and low altitudes will suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change.