E V E N T SF r i d ay, O c TO b E r 1, 5 – 7 p mFirst Friday at Five Happy Hour,Common Room, HGS

m O N d ay, O c TO b E r 4Due date for dissertations to be considered for award of the Ph.D. in December

T u E S d ay, O c TO b E r 5, N O O N a N d 4 p m Wilbur Cross Medalist Lectures See page 6 for details. www.aya.yale.edu/grad/wilburcross

S aT u r d ay, O c TO b E r 9, 8 : 3 0 a m – 1 p mCommunity Service DayMeet at HGS

m O N d ay, O c TO b E r 2 5, 5 – 7 : 3 0 p mCareer Cadence Workshop, Part IRoom 119, HGS

T u E S d ay, O c TO b E r 2 6, 5 – 7 : 3 0 p m Career Cadence Workshop, Part IIRoom 119, HGS

F r i d ay, N O V E m b E r 1 9Fall recess begins, 5:20 pm

m O N d ay, N O V E m b E r 2 9Classes resume, 8:20 am

Full information on events above: http://calendar.yale.edu/cal/gsas

GSaS NEWSoctober /november 2010 volume 13, number 1

Wilbur cross medalists 6

Geology: True polar Wander 8

www.yale.edu/graduateschool

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences – Yale University

University President Richard C. Levin addressed the new students and spoke of his own arrival at Yale as a graduate student more than 30 years ago. He introduced Dean Thomas Pollard, who greeted the students saying, “On this occasion we celebrate the achievements and new responsibilities of each entering graduate student. Your arrival brings new energy to the campus. Your enthusiasm and optimism give us all a lift. Your diverse backgrounds broaden our per-spectives. Your fresh ideas and willingness to take risks stir up the intellectual ferment that makes Yale a top research university.

“You are here to discover something important that advances your field. Your goal is to create new knowledge. You want to be the first person on earth to make a key observation or connect the dots in a novel way that provides insights about a question that matters to your field. Your discovery might emerge from creative experiments in the lab, from thinking deeply about a problem in mathematics or philosophy or from studying materials in a library or in the field.”

The Graduate School welcomed its newest students

on August 26 with a formal matriculation ceremony.

Faculty members and senior administrators streamed

into Sprague Hall in traditional academic regalia, her-

alded by the Yale School of Music Brass Quintet.

The Citations, the Graduate School’s co-ed a capella ensemble, performed three songs: Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Mis-behavin’,” Sammy Faye’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and John Pagano’s “Change in My

Life.” The 15 current members of the Citations are enrolled in ph.d. programs that range from Molecular, Cellular, & Devel-opmental Biology; Chemical Engineering; Political Science and Statistics to English. Following the ceremony, new students and their guests attended a reception in the gardens of the President’s House, where they mingled over iced tea, lemonade and cookies before heading to hgs for a picnic lunch and orientation sessions. Later that afternoon, the Graduate Club and Public Service Fair show-cased the many organizations and volunteer opportunities open to graduate students. Admission to this year’s entering class was extraordinarily competitive, with 10,494 hopefuls vying for 534 places. The new students come from 44 different coun-tries around the globe. Most (318) are from the u.s. The second largest contingent (62) comes from China; 23 students are from Canada; 18 from the uk; 15 from India; and 12 from South Korea. They earned their undergraduate degrees at 268 different col-leges and universities, including Yale, which supplied 18 of the new students. Harvard, Cambridge, University of Chicago and Tsinghua sent nine each; uc Berkeley and Princeton, eight each; and Columbia, nyu, Peking University and Oxford, seven each.

New crop of Graduate Students arrives on campusm a T r i c u l a T i O N 2 0 1 0

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matriculation!Thursday, August 26, 2010 Men

296 238Women

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define life for me seem like non-meaningful sounds to my non-Iranian friends. “Nevertheless, I love being here, and I am determined to adapt. I already enjoy being here almost too much!” Jargalan Burentogtokh (Anthropology) spent six months at Yale in 2009 as a visiting scholar before applying for admission to the Graduate School at the urging of Assistant Professor William Honeychurch. They had

The Graduate School News asked students from a range of countries for their first impressions. Here are some of the responses, provided by students from Mongolia, Bel-gium, China and Iran. Arvin Kakekhani (Physics) did his undergraduate degree in Iran, at the Univer-sity of Tehran. He chose to study in the u.s. “because of the great professors, academic atmosphere and research facilities at universi-ties here. Studying here, you are in an efficient system that lets you be in sync with other scientists and students and use your capabilities and creativity in the most construc-tive way. I experienced studying physics for four years in a system that does its best to suppress students’ talents. There are tons of very smart students in Iran working hard to compensate for the bad environment, but here the story is the opposite: the system encourages you to grow.” Arvin is understandably a bit home-sick, since he doesn’t expect to be able to go home until he completes his degree, due to single-entry visa restrictions. On top of that, he broke his right elbow falling off a bike soon after arriving, but he remains upbeat and enthusiastic. “The differences between u.s. and Iran are huge,” he says. Using food as an example of the cultural gap, he noted that before coming to New Haven he had never tasted sushi, Vietnamese noodles, Indian food, burritos, s’mores or avocados. In his first days here, he had tried them all. Table customs are different, too. In Iran, “We usually eat most foods by using both spoon and fork simultaneously. We also eat dinner at 9–10 pm, not 6 pm, but here almost all the restaurants are closed by 10. Another difference is that in Iran pubs and nightclubs are forbidden by law, so there are no alcoholic drinks, no dance parties, no pub crawls... at least in public! I am enjoying gpscy a lot,” he admits, as an afterthought. “Another difference is that in Iranian universities, we always get up from our seats when professors come into the class, to show our respect. In my first class here I really was surprised when my friends did not stand up when the professor came in.” In the u.s., students show less deference, and that takes some getting used to. Music is important to Arvin, and he longs to share it with new friends. “My personality has been shaped in the melo-dies that are so different from the music here, in a different language, in a different context. My ears are full of Iranian and Kurdish music, my brain, my muscles, my bones are full of these melodies. It’s good to have friends with whom you can share the sounds of your life, but the melodies that

cosmopolitan perspectivesFully one-third of all graduate students come from out-

side the United States. For some newcomers there’s a

fair amount of culture shock and for almost all, there

are surprises, good and bad (but mostly good).

worked together in Mongolia, Jargalan’s home country. Jargalan wanted to earn his degree in the u.s. because the discipline of anthropology is more inclusive here, incor-porating archaeology, linguistics, social and biological anthropology. The educational system in Mongolia is based on the former Soviet system, he says, adding that archaeology falls under the discipline of history there. “In other words, archaeologists do studies in order to expli-cate the history of a specific region or place. Archaeology in Mongolia does not have a theoretical base, as it does here.” Another thing that impressed him was the way students and faculty interact.“American students express their ideas and thoughts freely, and they even eat and drink in the classroom. In Mongolia you can be kicked out of a class if you argue with the teacher: I had this experience in one of my classes when I tried to ask about an issue from a different perspective.” Academic life is off to a good start, he says: “I don’t know the atmosphere in other departments, but I think I am very lucky to be a part of the wonderful community called the Anthropology Department. Professors and other students are very friendly, and I feel their support all the time in courses and

daily life. I am ready for new challenges and eager to make new discoveries in archaeology.” Jargalan’s wife and young sons are with him, and he reports that they are all enjoying New Haven, “with its parks, the East Rock and people who always smile.” Valerie LeClercq (History) comes from Belgium. She had taken a trip to the West Coast with her family in 2009, and what she saw encouraged her to apply to graduate school in America. She wanted to engage in “intensive reading and intense debates and discussions,” which wouldn’t have been available to her in Europe, where the educational system is very different, she notes. “A regular university cur-sus is five years (b.a. + m.a.) and most people stop there. After that, you would pursue a doctorat, which generally consists of four years without courses, entirely dedicated to your research. At the Free University of Brussels, our b.a./m.a. courses are mostly lectures,

except for a few research seminars that focus on archival and historical source analysis and not so much on theory.” Students get together informally to talk about the readings, but there’s almost no opportunity to discuss course material during classes. In addition, Yale offers a program she couldn’t duplicate at home, since “the History of Science and Medicine, as a field, hasn’t really been integrated into the Belgian academic landscape yet.” Valerie is pleased with her department and happy that it is small. She feels that “people seem to really care for and support each other.” Valerie has observed that, “Yale takes itself very seriously (and has every reason to) but still manages to keep an informal, relaxed and friendly atmosphere.” Socializing is more casual here, she says: “What always surprises me in the u.s. is how easy it is to interact with other people; how you can meet people on the street or in a grocery store, how you can easily start talking to a stranger, and this mode of relating to others seems so much more natural! I think Europe (or at least the part I’m from) would definitely have something to learn from the States. The insistent use of people’s first names is also a surprising habit to me.”

On the down side, she finds it difficult to buy fresh groceries without a car and feels a bit frustrated by “the fact that I can’t walk alone at night.” One of the unexpected pleasures of life in New Haven for Valerie is “seeing squirrels everywhere on my way to class, jumping down trees, crossing the streets carelessly, nibbling acorns on the sidewalk! They are untamed and virtually invisible in Belgium and France.” Liangbin Cai (Computer Science), who is from China, reports that his “first impression of New Haven is that this place is so beautiful and so green. The archi-tecture of Yale, the greenery, the blue sky, all of those things attract me a lot.” He’s concerned that his program is small, but he’s made a lot of friends and found the orientation activities “very helpful and exciting, especially the social activities.” He was surprised by the overwhelming number of extracurricular options open to him, saying, “the opportunities and activi-

ties here are too many to follow.”

According to Liu (Leo) Siyu (Statistics), “Obviously, everything is quite different from in China. When I went to the very first class, I did not expect students to be as diverse as I saw. There were students from different races, countries, grades and majors sitting in one class-room…. During the class, professors encour-aged students to challenge them, which inspired students in a very positive way.” Outside of the classroom, he has noticed other differences, too. “Although New Haven is a small city, I am able to be exposed to American food, Indian food, Thai food, Mexican food, etc. There are plenty of social activities, like the block party at the oiss, where I talked with a nhpd policeman. I got to know their real life might not be as cool as I thought from see-ing Hollywood movies. Rather, it is bravery and a sense of responsibility that drive them to protect the city. Hearing these stories and observing the differences between life here and in China give me a breath of fresh air. I am really enjoying studying at Yale.”

“What always surprises me in the U.S. is how easy it is to interact with other people.” vAlerie leclercq

“there are tons of very smart students in iran working hard to compensate for the bad environment, but here the story is the opposite: the system encourages you to grow.” Arvin KAKeKhAni

“my first impression of new haven is that this place is so beautiful and so green. ” liAnGbin cAi

“American students express their ideas and thoughts freely, and they even eat and drink in the classroom.” JArGAlAn bUrentoGtoKh

“When i went to the very first class, i did not expect students to be as diverse as i saw.” liU SiYU

Map background

“In the course of my career, I’ve spent a lot of time working on graduate education, setting up new graduate programs and interact-ing with terrific graduate students,” he says. “This new role is a good fit for me. What makes the job reward-ing is that all the people at the Graduate School are responsive and capable, from the front office to the associate and assistant deans and everyone in the McDougal Center. The students are a pleasure. The Graduate School is a wonderful place to contribute.” During his tenure as Dean, Pollard aims to strengthen mentoring of students, using best practices from around the university. A major priority is to raise the endowment to expand support for gradu-ate students. He also hopes to improve childcare opportunities for the Yale com-munity and increase the nominations of faculty for external awards and honors. Pollard came to Yale in 2001 as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. He also has appointments in the departments of mb&b and Cell Biology. He served as chair of mcdb from 2004 to 2010 and became a Sterling Professor in 2005. Raised near Los Angeles, he became fascinated by both politics and science and started dating his wife Patty at San Marino Public High School. His three younger brothers also went into science: Dave, profes-sor of Geology at Stanford; Jim, a chemical physicist at the Aerospace Corp.; and Steve, a number theorist at Truman State Univer-sity in Missouri. At Pomona College, Tom earned his b.a., cum laude, in chemistry and zoology while serving as president of his fraternity, captain of the cross country and track teams and athletic commissioner in the student government.

After completing his m.d. at Harvard Medical School, Pollard did an internship in internal medicine and then fulfilled his military service doing basic research at the

National Institutes of Health. During this time he “discovered several interesting things about cellular movements” that changed the course of his life. He originally intended to

pursue a career in neurology, but friends at Harvard Medical School recruited him to the basic science faculty, where he spent five years. In 1977 he founded and directed the first Department of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was also the inaugural director of the Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine. He spent nine sum-mers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole teaching and later directing the “Physiology Course,” a research course for graduate students and postdocs that has

been offered continuously since 1892. From 1996 to 2000, he was president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. And then, at the urging of fac-ulty friends at Yale, including three of his former graduate students (Enrique De La Cruz, David Rimm and John Sinard) and former post-doc (Mark Mooseker), he came to New Haven in 2001. Pollard starts his busy day in his lab on Science Hill, where he and his team use biochemical, biophysical and cellular methods to study cellular motility and cell divi-sion. He teaches a popular under-graduate course in cell biology and a graduate course in biochemical and biophysical methods. The second edition of his textbook Cell Biology (with William C. Earnshaw) was published in 2007. His research earned him the 2004 E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society of Cell Biology and the 2006 Gairdner Interna-tional Award (with Alan Hall of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) for “discov-ering the molecular basis of cellular motility

and the mechanism of its regulation”—information critical to our understanding of embryonic development, the spread of malignant tumors in our bodies, and how humans defend against infections. Pollard is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. The Dean served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology and of the Biophysical Society and chaired the Commis-sion on Life Sciences of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. For more than two decades he has provided leadership in his scientific societies in advo-

cating for support of biomedical research, including direction of a nationwide grassroots network of more than 4000 biologists. Avid lovers of classical music, Tom and Patty attend concerts at Yale most weeks dur-ing the academic year and enjoy the Metro-politan Opera in New York City. They are loyal fans of the Horowitz Piano series, the chamber music series, the Yale Philharmonia, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Schola Cantorum and Yale Opera. He doesn’t watch television or go to movies, but reads The New York Times, the New England Journal of Medi-

cine and nonfiction. This year, he enjoyed two books: Yale economist Robert Shiller’s newest volume, The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Hap-

pened, and What to Do about It, and Haruki Murakami’s autobiographical essay collec-

tion: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Like Murakami, Pollard is a dedicated runner. He has run daily for nearly 18 years and in a typical year he cov-ers 1800 to 2000 miles. After college,

he ran competitively through 1996, and was part of a world record for the 100-man/100-mile relay set by his running club in Baltimore in 1981 that wasn’t broken and which stood unbroken for 16 years. Tom, Patty, and their two children

(Katie, associate professor of computational biology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Dan, a post-doctoral fellow in population genetics and genomics at nyu) are enthusiastic hikers. Last year they spent time together in Costa Rica and this sum-mer they took a four-day backpacking hike near Big Sur. They ski in winter and take their canoe, kayaks and sailboats out on Long Island Sound in summer. “We like to get wet when we sail,” the Dean says, noting that they have small boats, not a yacht. Living on the shoreline in Branford makes it easy for the Pollards to go out for an hour of sailing, when time and weather permit. “The ocean is in the back yard!” he says. With energy and discipline, Pollard combines research, teaching, academic admin-istration and professional commitments with recreation and family. He models a life that balances work and play.

“What makes the job rewarding is that all the people at the

Graduate School are responsive and capable, from the front

office to the associate and assistant deans and everyone in the

mcdougal center. The students are a pleasure.” d E a N p O l l a r d

introducing dean pollard

Excerpts from dean pollard’s matriculation address

my focus today is on asking good questions. Good questions are a prerequisite for defining priori-ties, setting a course of action and reaching goals. The best questions for scholars do not have answers, since they address issues far beyond our reach, so each of you will need to reach a bit to find your special ques-tion that will guide your research and generate the excitement and energy that you will need to reach your goals.

to begin, each of you should ask the question: why am I here in graduate school? ... The answer for scholars is that you are here to discover something important that advances your field. Your goal is to create new knowledge. You want to be the first person on earth to make a key obser-vation or connect the dots in a novel way that provides insights about a question that matters to your field.

the academic community rewards explorers, those who find something new where others have failed to look or failed to appreciate what they were observing. Ideally your discovery will have growth potential, so you can use your discov-ery to build your career, and so you and others can drive knowledge in your field to a higher level.

but, you will ask, how can I discover something important? My advice is to start with a good question.

Thomas D. Pollard, M.D., Sterling Professor of Molecular,

Cellular & Developmental Biology, and professor of

Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and Cell Biology,

became Dean of the Graduate School on July 1.

2010m

ed

al

w i l b u r c r o s s

does not feature Professor Wender’s chem-istry,” wrote Scott J. Miller, the

Irénée du Pont Professor and Chair of Chem-

istry, in his letter of nomination. A member of the National Acad-emy of Sciences and a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

Wender has also won teaching prizes at Stanford.

jon butler Butler, who served as dean of the Graduate School for six years, is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of

American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at

Yale. He is currently on a one-year leave to work on God in Gotham, a history of religion in Manhattan from the Civil War to

the election of John F. Kennedy. In 2010

he received the Byrnes-Sewall Prize for Teaching

Excellence in Yale College and the Edward Bouchet Leadership Award for Diversity

and Equal Opportunity. He grew up in rural Minnesota and earned his

b. a. (1964) and ph.d. (1972) from the University of Minnesota. His books include Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denomina-tional Order (originally published

in 1978 and reissued in 2009); The Huguenots in America: A Refugee Peo-

ple in New World Society, which won the Soloutos Prize and the Chinard Prize; Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, which won the Outler Prize and the aha Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History; Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776; and Religion in Ameri-can Life: A Short History, co-authored with Grant Wacker and Randall Balmer.

ture, 8th edition, and former president of the Modern Languages Association. “Greenblatt has shaped a generation’s methodology and put literature’s relation to culture and history at the center of interdis-ciplinary debate in the Humanities,” says Langdon Hammer, professor of English and American Studies. “It would be hard to name another literary scholar of comparably wide and deep influence in the American academy over the past thirty years.” According to David Scott Kastan, the George M. Bodman Professor of English, Greenblatt “pioneered what has come to be called the ‘New Historicism,’ a reorienta-tion, even a rejuvenation, of traditional criti-cal practices that has moved literary studies over the last quarter century toward a subtle understanding of how literature engages the historical world in which it is written and read.” “Through the force of his writing, as well as his charisma as a teacher and speaker, Stephen Greenblatt has achieved the fame and status of a public intellectual. He has worked to save the lives of scholars at risk in countries beset by war or politi-cal intolerance. He has also reflected hard on the state of his own profession, on its publish-or-perish policies in a time of con-tracting academic publishing,” wrote David Quint, the Sterling Professor of English in his nominating letter.

fred I . Greenste InGreenstein, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, has been a leader in the field of political psychology. In the

course of his career, he taught at Yale (1959–62) and Wesleyan (1962–73), before joining the faculty of Princeton, where he taught for many years and served as the director of the Research Program in Leadership Studies at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. He held several leadership roles in the International Society of Political Psychology and served as its president in 1996–97. Greenstein’s 10 books include Leadership in the Modern Presidency, the eight-volume Handbook of Political Science (with Nelson W. Polsby), The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton and The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment. “One of the most distinguished alumni

Each of the alumni medalists will give a pub-lic lecture, meet with current students and faculty, and attend a festive dinner hosted by Dean Thomas Pollard and the Graduate School Alumni Association on October 5. stephen Greenblatt Greenblatt is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. One of the world’s leading literary scholar-critics, he is author of 13 books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Greenblatt is general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Litera-

The Wilbur Cross Medal, the Graduate School’s highest

honor, will be awarded to five outstanding academicians:

former Dean Jon Butler, Stephen Greenblatt ‘64 B.A., ‘69

Ph.D. (English), Fred I. Greenstein ‘60 Ph.D. (Political Sci-

ence), Timothy J. Richmond ‘75 Ph.D. (Molecular Biophysics

& Biochemistry), and Paul Wender ‘73 Ph.D. (Chemistry).

Wilbur cross medalists

of the Yale Political Science Department, Greenstein has been a major contributor to the systematic study of political psychology and its application to presidential decision-making and leadership,” says Peter Swenson, the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science. “In the study of politics, possibly nothing is more important than the subject of leadership. In recent times, no one in American political science has given more life to that subject than Fred Greenstein. Where does leadership come from? What has it been? What could it be? What should it be? These have been Green-stein’s questions.”

tImothy j . r Ichmond Richmond has been a professor at eth Zur-ich’s Institute for Molecular Biology and Bio-physics since 1987. Genomic dna is packaged in chromatin, which plays a fundamental role in the regulation of gene activity. Richmond is best known for defining the classic structure of the nucleosome, a subunit of chromatin com-posed of a short length of dna wrapped around a core of histone proteins. His work provides a basis for integrating decades of biochemical, physical and genetic studies of chromatin. “I believe that Tim Richmond combines skill and creativity in both x-ray crystallo-graphic and biochemical approaches to under-standing macromolecular assemblies at a level that is not exceeded by any other laboratory,” wrote Nobel Laureate Thomas Steitz, the Sterling Professor of mb&b at Yale. “His focus has been to establish the atomic structures of large macromolecular assemblies, particularly those involved in protein-dna complexes and to relate these structures to the biological pro-

cesses of chromatin assembly and transcrip-tion regulation. These structures are vital to understanding the structure of chromosomes and how this packaged storage form of dna can be activated to allow the expression of the genes it encodes.” Richmond’s many honors include membership in the Academia Europae, the National Academy of Sciences and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher. He was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize in Medi-cine in 2002 and the Marcel Benoist Prize in 2006 for his contribution to elucidating the structure of nucleosomes, the basic building blocks of chromosomes, at an atomic level.

paul Wender Wender is the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry at Stanford and a world leader in the field of “green chemistry”—chemistry with a minimum of impact on the environment—and “function-oriented synthesis,” which has made major contributions to interdisciplinary research, especially in chemotherapy. “Paul Wender has exhibited extraor-dinary creativity in the synthesis of complex natural products, often using remarkable transformations that introduce much struc-tural complexity into one step,” says William L. Jorgensen, the Sterling Professor of Chemistry. “On a personal side, Paul is a model scientist with the highest standards and integrity.” Wender began his career as a synthetic chem-ist, with a special expertise in “the most daunting molecular architectures to be presented by the natural world,” wrote Gary Brudvig, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemis-try. “Wender continues today as perhaps the world’s

pre-eminent molecular architect for complex molecule assembly. In so doing, his name has become synonymous with mol-ecules such as taxol, phorbol, resiniferatoxin and a host of others that inspire awe in every laboratory concerned with synthesis.” His concept of “the Ideal Synthesis” has “inspired generations of chemists to design remarkable chemical transformations that achieve complex structures instantaneously. There is not a serious graduate course on chemical synthesis, probably world-wide, that

S T E p h E N G r E E N b l a T T “Shakespearean Autonomy”4 pm, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 102, 63 High Street

F r E d i . G r E E N S T E i N “The Study of Political Psychology: An Autobiographical Perspective”Noon, 77 Prospect Street, Room A001

T i m O T h y J . r i c h m O N d “Structure and Mechanism of the Chromatin Remodeling Factor ISW1a”4 pm, Hope Building, Room 110, 315 Cedar Street

p a u l W E N d E r “Nature’s Inspirations: First-in-Class Molecular Approaches to the Eradication of HIV/AIDS, Treating Alzheimer’s Disease, and Overcoming Resistant Cancer”4 pm, Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, Room 110, 225 Prospect Street

Wilbur cross medal Talks

October 5

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british merchant-adventurers in china

China was “arguably the oldest, most developed and strongest civilization in the world at that time,” Jessica says, but it was extremely conscious of potential breaches in security. China and Britain had no official diplomatic relations until 1792. It was illegal for foreigners to reside permanently in China.

It was illegal for them to learn to speak Chinese. Whatever deal-ings the Smiths had with local merchants was done through interpreters. The Qing dynasty emper-ors, who ruled from 1644 to 1911,

“were not anti-foreigner per se, and employed a number of European Jesuits in their court to advise on astronomy, for instance, but they were concerned that foreigners running around freely in China might cause disturbances, and that their conspiring with native Chinese might lead to rebellion or social and cultural unrest.” On the other hand, “there was a lot of money

to be made quickly,” she says, so men like the Smiths took risks and willingly faced obstacles in the hope of making their fortune. Foreign businessmen were permitted to trade in China, but only in Canton and only

Although scholars sometimes conflate the two, they were, in fact, very different. One Smith lived illegally in Portuguese Macao and loaned money at exorbitant interest rates to cash-strapped Chinese business-men, moving silver through the East India Company’s treasury between Canton, India

and London for over ten years in the 1770s and 80s until he was expelled by the East India Company during a financial crisis caused by bad loans. The other Smith was a trader who settled in Madras and later in Bengal and trafficked in pepper, cotton, tea, camphor, opium and other goods within India and across the Indian Ocean as far as China. His troubles began in 1784, when the private ship he hired, the Lady Hughes, accidentally killed two Chinese officials in the course of firing a salute to signal its arrival at the port of Canton. “Amazingly, he survived being taken hostage by the Chinese for a couple of days and admits that he was treated very well, but they only let him go once they had their hands on the gunner of the ship who was responsible for firing the salute. The Chinese promptly and quietly strangled the gunner. So George Smith managed to return to India where he lived out his days in Bengal until he died in 1791,” Jessica says.

during a specific “trading season.” After that, they had to leave the country. The tensions that would ultimately lead to the Opium Wars were always just beneath the surface. “This period was a prelude to the violent imperial actions that followed,” she says. “It troubles me that at the

micro-level, individual desire for wealth and status—or even a comfortable living—drives people to do awful things, with huge consequences.” By following the lives of two men, her project “aims to demonstrate how the economic and social motives of individu-

als drove major developments like international commerce, global capitalism and imperialism in the early modern (1500–1800) period,” she says. Entrepreneurial British traders influenced politics back in Britain in the process of devel-oping British-Chinese relations, while trying to make money for themselves, she points out. “Thus the project is a cross between a macro- and micro-history. And it’s unique in that I am using Chinese documents to tell the story from a Chinese perspective, something few scholars have done before.” Jessica came to Yale intending to do her dissertation on a topic that involved Ger-many and England, but Jonathan Spence, the Sterling Professor of History (now Emeri-tus) said something in an undergraduate lec-ture she attended that piqued her curiosity. He mentioned that little was known about the relationship between Britain and China in the years leading up to the Opium Wars, and she realized that she wanted to explore that unknown territory.

At the time, she knew no Chinese: a serious disadvantage for someone intending to read obscure primary sources stored in Taiwanese and Chinese archives. She sat in on William Zhou and Jianhua Shen’s first-year language classes, and later spent a year studying in Taiwan. She studied ancient (classical) Chinese with Paize Keulemans, a professor of East Asian Languages and Literature, and is currently taking what she calls “an amazing Chinese contemporary literature class” with Professor Su Wei. “Probably one of the greatest resources I have had at Yale is the Chinese language department. I don’t believe a foreigner can every truly master Chinese,” she says, but her skills are considerably stronger now than when she first came to campus. The University’s libraries have also proven to be rich resources for her project. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s collections include a journal writ-ten by another young private trader who lived in India and sailed to China during the period she is studying, as well as a manuscript copy of Lord Macartney’s Jour-nal, written before and during his mission as Britain’s first-ever ambassador to China. Access to these materials is “amazing,” she says. In addition, the East Asian Collection in Sterling Memorial Library has many volumes of Chinese Imperial documents that are helping her tease out the historic relationship between China and the Brit-ish Empire, and she is especially happy to have access to a microfilm copy of the East India Company’s China Factory Records (the originals are available in the British Museum). Her advisor is Keith Wrightson, the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History. “He has been incredibly supportive

and encouraging throughout the long and sometimes arduous ph.d. process,” she says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better advisor.”

Jessica Hanser’s research explores the political and com-

mercial links between Britain and China in the second half

of the 18th century through the misadventures of two British

merchants, both named George Smith.

Saturday, October 9

yale day of ServiceSign up at www.tinyurl.com/ydos2010.

breakfast at hGS 8:30 – 9:30 am. Volunteer opportunities at food pantries, ymca youth center, columbus house, New haven reads, iriS, Eli Whitney museum, and more. help make our community a better place!lunch at 1 pm at hGS.

by following the lives of two men, her project aims to demon-

strate how the economic and social motives of individuals drove

major developments like international commerce, global capital-

ism and imperialism in the early modern (1500 –1800) period.

“i am using chinese documents to tell the story from a

chinese perspective, something few scholars have done

before” J E S S i c a h a N S E r

Jessica in a buddhist temple in Taiwan. below, left, with her Taiwanese “parents” (mrs. chen and mr. Xiao).

STudENT rESEarch

british merchant-adventurers in chinaJessica Hanser’s research explores the political and com-

mercial links between Britain and China in the second half

of the 18th century through the misadventures of two British

merchants, both named George Smith.

china was “arguably the oldest, most developed and strongest

civilization in the world at that time but it was extremely

conscious of potential breaches in security. ” J E S S i c a h a N S E r

0 ˚ E

Early Cambrian

Middle Cambrian

to come up with some pretty novel explana-tions,” Ross says. The scientific community has been debat-ing the role of tpw versus plate tectonics in defining the motions of Earth’s continents has been going on in the scientific community for decades, Ross said. In fact, it was a 1997 Science article on the controversy, co-authored by his

current advisor, that first got him interested in geology as an undergraduate. Gondwana’s massive rotation caused the area that is now Chile to move rapidly from close to the southern pole toward the tropics, affecting environmental factors such as carbon concentrations and ocean levels and impact-ing evolution. “There were dramatic environmental changes taking place during the Early Cambrian, right at the same time as Gondwana was undergoing this mas-sive shift,” Ross says. “Apart from our under-standing of plate tectonics and true polar wander, this could have had huge implications for the Cambrian explosion of animal life at that time.” Much of the work Ross and Taylor did for this study was conducted in the lab at Yale, analyzing samples that Evans collected as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Australia in Perth. But getting the samples is an adventure.

Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that con-stituted the entirety of the Earth’s landmass before it broke up into the separate con-tinents that exist today. The team studied the paleomagnetic record of the Amadeus Basin in central Australia, which was part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Based on the direction of the ancient rocks’ magnetizations, they determined that the entire Gondwana landmass underwent a rotational shift, with some regions moving at a speed of 16 (+12/-8) cm/year or more. By com-parison, the fastest shifts that occur today by continental drift are at speeds of about eight cm/year. This was the first large-scale rotation that Gondwana underwent after forming, said Ross, who is first author of the article about their study, published in the August issue of the journal Geology. Their findings go a long way to dem-onstrating that Gondwana’s movement was caused by “true polar wander” (tpw) and not by the dynamics of plate tectonics, as was previously thought. Plate tectonics are the individual motions of continental plates with respect to one another. tpw happens when the Earth’s solid land mass (down to the liquid outer core almost 3,000 km deep) rotates with respect to the planet’s rotational axis, changing the location of the geographic poles, Ross explains. Since the rates of Gondwana’s motion exceed those of “normal” plate tectonics as derived from the record of the past few hun-dred million years, “If true polar wander caused the shift, that makes sense. If the shift was due to plate tectonics, we’d have

According to new evidence uncovered by three Yale

geologists: Geology & Geophysics graduate students

Ross Mitchell and Taylor Kilian and their advisor, David

Evans, the Gondwana supercontinent underwent a rapid

60-degree rotation across Earth’s surface during the

Early Cambrian period, more than 525 million years ago.

Welcome to a new year at Yale! Whether you are a new or returning student, the Graduate Stu-dent Assembly (GSA) is here to repre-sent your needs to the Graduate School and University. In case you’re not familiar with us, the GSA is an elected body of graduate students representing all departments and degree-granting programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We work closely with Yale administrative offices to improve graduate students’ academic, social and living experiences at Yale. The Assem-bly’s goals are to identify the needs and concerns of graduate students, consider possible solutions and present these to the Dean and other administrators. We also discuss and advise on possible changes to Graduate School policy proposed by the administration. The Assembly provides a means for communication and delib-eration both among graduate students and between graduate students and other members of the Yale community. In recent years the GSA worked on many important issues: we helped secure year-round funding for Humanities and Social Science students, were involved in the reaccreditation of the Univer-sity, worked with Graduate Housing and executive administrative offices to preserve as many units of Yale family housing as possible, helped achieve guar-anteed medical insurance during leaves of absence, limited section sizes for TFs, created new transit routes, successfully achieved the elimination of summer gym fees, and countless other initiatives. The GSA also created and administers the Conference Travel Fund, which allocates $45,000 per year to support graduate students presenting work at conferences. In addition, we organize Mentoring Week in February. During Mentoring Week, we host events geared toward identifying and understanding the characteristics of the mentoring rela-tionship students need as they progress as scholars and researchers. Panels and talks present examples of exceptional mentoring in all disciplines and discuss the transition towards becoming mentors as future faculty members. If you have any concerns or thoughts about any aspect of graduate school life, please contact your depart-mental representative or one of the GSA officers. Also, if our work sounds inter-esting to you, I encourage you to get involved. Elections to fill vacant seats will be held in the coming weeks. For more information on the GSA and to find out if there is a vacancy in your department, please visit our website (gsa.yale.edu).

pau l c . p e a r l m a n ( electrical engineering)chair, Graduate student assembly

G S a u p d aT Ehttp://gsa.yale.edu

“The Amadeus Basin is proper Out-back,” Ross says. “Kangaroos, no clouds, dried up rivers (a sure bet for firewood), and a red Mars-like landscape. The sedi-mentary rocks of the Amadeus are beauti-fully exposed in the McDonnell Ranges that run east and west of Alice Springs with dramatic gaps and gorges—the ideal targets for geological exposures. Because the strata dip almost 90˚ (that is, vertically instead of horizontally), the geologic record can be seen in essentially its true thickness as you traverse. It’s basically like seeing the basin in cross-section.” To reach the study site, they travel by 4x4—and change tires a lot, due to the rough terrain. They camp “in the middle of nowhere, right on the outcrop or close by, when we can,” he says. Camping is primi-tive, either with tents, or—weather permit-ting—directly under the bright constella-tions of the Southern Hemisphere. The researchers drill out finger-sized cores using a modified commercial chain saw. “We slide a sheath with a compass and a sundial over the drilled core, to document the orientation of the core. We collect hun-dreds of cores in the field and then measure them over the course of several months in the lab. At Yale we are able to measure many more samples than the average paleomag-netics lab because we have an automated sampling-changing system—a Caltech-designed conveyor belt that measures 180 samples with the push of a single button.” Scrambling over boulders in the wilderness is not without its dangers. As an undergraduate, Ross did fieldwork in the Amadeus basin, but in rocks a few hun-dreds of meters below his current research area and almost 300 million years older. “The field season was very produc-tive, but an accident occurred which cost me half of my right thumb,” he recalls. “We had spent several days working on the slope at, ironically, Ross River. At a section where all fours were required, I was search-ing out a left foothold when a torso-sized ledge started rolling towards me. Luckily I had a small shelf to my right, so I was able to pivot my body out of the way as the whole thing came loose. Unfortunately my right hand did not get out of its handhold in time. Nick [Princeton graduate student Nick Swanson-Hysell] wisely had chosen his own path up the slope and was luckily far from the trajectory of the loose rock that would have otherwise surely taken his life. Nick quickly bandaged what was left of my thumb and the two of us started our descent down to the field vehicle. With adrenaline, I was sure-footed. We only had

a two-hour drive west to the Alice Springs emergency room. Had the accident hap-pened in our previous locality, we would have been a half-day’s drive away. My operation in Alice Springs went well, and we even got a little more fieldwork done afterwards.” Back in New Haven, Taylor is currently processing the last of Evans’ archived samples from the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. His findings should resolve just how fast the Early Cambrian rotation took place—“a definitive test of rapid tpw,” says Ross.

STudENT rESEarch

True polar Wander

According to new evidence uncovered by three Yale

geologists: Geology & Geophysics graduate students

Ross Mitchell and Taylor Kilian and their advisor, David

Evans, the Gondwana supercontinent underwent a rapid

60-degree rotation across Earth’s surface during the

Early Cambrian period, more than 525 million years ago.

“if true polar wander caused the shift, that makes sense.

if the shift was due to plate tectonics, we’d have to come

up with some pretty novel explanations.” r O S S m i T c h E l l

“The amadeus basin is proper Outback. Kangaroos, no clouds, dried up

rivers (a sure bet for firewood), and a red mars-like landscape.” r O S S m i T c h E l l

The paleomagnetic record from the amadeus basin in australia (marked by the star) indicates a large shift in some parts of the Gondwana supercontinent relative to the South pole. (illustration: ross mitchell/yale university)

written up in his paper, “Rapid antidepres-sant effects of ketamine: role of vascular endothelial growth factor.” Nanxin and his colleagues work in the lab of Ronald S. Duman, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychia-try and Pharmacology. Duman is Nanxin’s

dissertation advisor and senior author of the article. The team found that ketamine not only quickly ameliorates depression-like behaviors but actually restores connections between brain cells damaged by chronic stress. “It’s like a magic drug—one dose can work rapidly and last for seven to 10 days,” says Duman. Ketamine has been used as a general anesthetic for children, but a decade ago researchers at the Connecticut Mental Health

The Science article, “mtor-Dependent Syn-apse Formation Underlies the Rapid Anti-depressant Effects of nmda Antagonists,” describes observations made by Nanxin and his lab colleages (including Neuroscience graduate student Jason M. Dwyer), showing that the drug ketamine acts on a pathway that rapidly produces new synaptic connec-tions between neurons—a process known as “synaptogenesis.” In addition, they were able to pinpoint a critical enzyme in the pathway, mtor, which controls protein synthesis necessary for new synaptic connections. These findings may speed development of a safe, rapid and easy-to-administer ketamine-like drug, but without the side effects and abuse potential. In a related achievement, Nanxin won the Albert Bandura Graduate Research Award, given by Psi Chi—the international honor society in psychology—in conjunc-tion with the Association for Psychological Science (aps), for the best overall research in the field of psychology. The prize recog-nizes his work on the ketamine project as

These findings may speed development of a safe, rapid, and

easy-to-administer ketamine-like drug, but without the side

effects and abuse potential.

Yale researchers have discovered the mechanism that

allows one antidepressant to take effect in hours, rather

than in the weeks required for most antidepressants cur-

rently on the market. The findings were described in the

August 20 issue of the journal Science, and graduate stu-

dent Nanxin Li (Psychology) was first author.

Center found that, in lower doses, the drug seemed to give patients relief from depression. In these initial clinical studies, which have been replicated at the National Institute of Mental Health, almost 70 percent of patients who were resistant to treatment with all other forms of antide-pressants were found to improve within hours after receiving ketamine. Ketamine has been tested as a means to treat people with suicidal thoughts, a benefit usually not seen until weeks of treatment with traditional antidepressants. Its clinical use has been limited, however, because it has to be delivered intravenously under medical supervision and in some cases can cause short-term psychotic symptoms. It has also been used as a recreational drug, known as “Special k” or sometimes just “k.” Nanxin earned his b.s. in psychology at Peking Univer-sity in China.

“I am extremely pleased with my experience here at Yale,” he says. “I am deeply indebted to my disseration advisor Ronald Duman, my dgs Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, my lab mates and colleagues

in the Division of Molecular Psychiatry of the Medical School and in the Behavioral Neuroscience Program of the Department of Psychology.” Nanxin’s wife Wei Zhang is also a graduate student at Yale. Her field is Cell Biology.

JULIA FAWCETT Julia Fawcett (English) was awarded the Katherine Macaulay Prize, given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the best graduate student paper on a feminist topic pre-

sented at that organization’s annual conference. Her paper, “Charlotte Charke and the Over-Expression of Gender,” explores the autobiographical performances of the eighteenth-century actress, celebrity and transvestite Char-lotte Charke. The paper argues that Charke used spectacular costumes and exaggerated performances of gender to make her personality unreadable and to protect her privacy despite her celebrity status. This paper is part of Julia’s dis-sertation, advised by Joseph Roach and Jill Campbell, which traces similarly “over-expressive” performances in eighteenth-century celebrities like Colley Cibber, David Garrick and Mary Rob-inson. Julia earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University.

RANIN KAZEMI Ranin Kazemi (History) has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow for the 2010-11 academic year. The New-combe Fellowships, under the aegis of

the Woodrow Wilson National Fel-lowship Foundation, are considered the nation’s most prestigious awards for Ph.D. candidates in the Humanities and Social Sciences addressing ques-tions of ethical and religious values. Ranin’s dissertation, “We Are Not Indians or Egyptians: Shi’i Populism in the Making of the Anti-Tobacco Régie Movement in Qajar Iran,” explores the sociopolitical dynamics that led to the earliest manifestation of civil protest and political Islam in a broadly-based political movement across late nineteenth-century Iran. As the first bottom-up account of this social movement, his dissertation explicates the ways in which Shi’i ethos provided the necessary language and symbols of mass mobilization. His dissertation advisor is Abbas Amanat. Before coming to Yale, Ranin earned his bachelor’s degree in history and English at Middle Tennessee State University and his master’s degree in history at Ohio State University. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Council of American Overseas Research Centers Multi-Country Research Fellowship.

K u d O SSTudENT rESEarch

relieving depression

Nanxin li and his advisor ronald duman in their lab.

V O l u m E 1 3 , N u m b E r 1, O c T. / N O V. 2 0 1 0

Yale Graduate School News is a publication of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Thomas Pollard, dean; Gila Reinstein, editor; Bjorn Akselsen, design/production; Yale P&P, production supervision; Michael Marsland, Harold Shapiro, photography.

Send us news and notification of upcoming events. Email: gila.reinstein@yale.edu.

Cooler days and longer nights herald the end of another summer

and the beginning of a new academic year. For many Yale graduate

alumni, autumn means a return to the classroom (on the other side

of the desk, of course), but nearly all of us find ourselves thinking

back, however briefly, to our alma mater. This is certainly true for those of us on the Graduate School Alumni Association (gsaa), as we gear up for another year as well. This year, the gsaa will be chaired by Rahul Prasad (ph.d. 1987, Engineering) with the help of Vice-Chair Valerie Hotch-kiss (ph.d. 1990, Medieval Studies). This year’s Secretary and Treasurer are Anthony Sabatelli (ph.d. 1984, Chemistry) and

Mary Ann Carolan (ph.d. 1989, Italian), respectively. The gsaa Executive Commit-tee will also enjoy the continued advice of Immediate Past Chair Carlos Riobo (ph.d. 1998, Spanish and Portuguese). With this able new leadership and 20 additional voting mem-bers, the gsaa looks forward to an exciting year of working with alumni and serving the broader Graduate School community.

In order to accomplish its mission, the gsaa forms a number of committees, each with specific mandates. Our Communica-tions Committee seeks the best ways to communicate with alumni across the globe, overseeing our newsletter column and web-site, as well as looking into the possibility of a gsaa presence on social-networking sites. It also advises the aya and Graduate School on communications with alumni. Our Regional Outreach Committee works to create a strong alumni presence in local areas and encourage alumni to partici-pate actively in local Yale clubs, ensuring that the unique Graduate School perspective is included among the other voices of Yale alumni. In addition, the Regional Outreach Committee hopes to encourage Graduate School alumni participation, already not insignificant, in the Global Day of Service. This year, we will also be reaching out beyond mother Yale through our newly formed Best Practices and Standards Com-mittee, which hopes to form relationships

Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2009). Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Kosek traces the impact of Richard Gregg and several other radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice. This group’s “acts of conscience”—sit-ins, boycotts, and conscientious objection to war—blended Christian ideals, Gandhian strategy, and novel uses of mass media. Kosek joined the faculty at George Washington University as an assistant professor of American Studies in 2005. He was awarded a 2007–08 John W. Kluge Fel-lowship at the Library of Congress to finish researching and writing the book, which evolved from his dissertation, “Spectacles of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and the Transformation of American Democ-racy, 1914–1956.” The dissertation won the 2005 Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians as the best-written dissertation in the field of American history. Jean-Christophe Agnew was his advisor and Jon Butler and Michael Denning were on his committee. “Acts of Conscience is truly ground breaking,” says Agnew. “No one before Kip Kosek had grasped the degree to which the movement-culture of the Fellowship of Reconciliation—its transnational, nonviolent and interracial practice of fellowship—had remodeled the Social Gospel in such a way as

Outstanding alumni For alumni news, see www.aya.yale.edu/grad

m.s.l. degree at Yale Law School in 2007, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities and coordi-nated the Yale Legal History Forum. His dis-sertation, advised by David Blight, “Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and America’s First Civil Rights Movement, 1857–1883,” examined the ways in which the United States Supreme Court impaired African Americans’ access to juries, voting booths and public spaces after the Civil War. With Peter P. Hinks and John R. McKivigan, he edited The Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition (Greenwood Press) and has published articles and book reviews in several journals. Williams’ honors include the Raoul Berger Legal History Fellowship at Harvard Law School in 2008, the Samuel Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at New York University School of Law and the Fletcher Jones Fellowship at the Huntington Library. At Yale, he held the Legal History Fellow-ship at the Law School and was the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department. J O S E p h K i p K O S E KJoseph Kip Kosek (ph.d. 2004, American Studies) has won the Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize from the American Academy of Religion for Acts of Conscience:

O W E N W i l l i a m S Owen Williams (ph.d. 2009, History) took office as president of Transylvania Univer-sity this past summer. He is the twenty-fifth president of the 230-year-old liberal arts college in Lexington, Kentucky. “Owen Williams was the presidential search committee’s unanimous choice from a sizable pool of exceptionally qualified can-didates,” said William T. Young Jr., chair-man of Transylvania’s Board of Trustees. “His educational background, his manage-rial experience, his ability to relate to people of differing backgrounds, his drive, curios-ity and enthusiasm, and his dedication to an excellent liberal arts education are all factors that influenced our decision.” Williams, 58, earned an a.b. in phi-losophy from Dartmouth College in 1974, an m.a. in intellectual history from Cam-bridge University in 1976, and then spent 24 years on Wall Street as director of the government bond department at Salomon Brothers, executive director at Goldman Sachs and chairman of Bear Stearns Asia. He lived and worked in Tokyo for more than a year and spent three years in Hong Kong. A decade ago, Williams enrolled at Yale to prepare for a second career. While earning his ph.d., he also completed an

alumni associationNotes from the yale Graduate School

Online: www.aya.yale.edu/grad

Joseph Kip Kosekowen Williamsto infuse the Civil Rights movement with a new and morally energizing ethos of civil disobedience. And, the book’s a great read!”

F r a N z i S K a b l E i c h E r T Franziska Bleichert (ph.d. 2010, Genet-ics), a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at u.c., Berkeley, was one of three recipients of this year’s Stanford Biochemistry Found-ers’ Award for Doctoral Excellence. She was invited to speak on her research at the scientific symposium convened in connec-tion with the award. Her talk was titled “A dimeric structure of archaeal methylation guide ribonucleoproteins.” At Yale, Bleichert studied ribosomes in Susan Baserga’s lab. Ribosomes are the factories that synthesize proteins within cells. Ribosomes contain many chemical modifications in their nucleic acid compo-nents, the rnas. These modifications are added by small rna-protein complexes. One such rna-protein complex (rnp) guides and carries out the methylation (addition of a methyl group) of ribosomal rna during the synthesis of ribosomes. In the process of doing that, it also helps the ribosomal rnas fold into the correct structure. “We have used electron microscopy to directly visualize these methylation-guide rnps for the first time and were able to determine their three-dimensional structure,” she explains. “The structure—surprisingly—shows that methylation-guide rnps are assembled quite dif-ferently from what had been assumed previously, and it suggests new ways in which they perform their function.” Before coming to Yale, Bleichert earned her m.d. from the University of Leipzig, Germany.

with the graduate alumni boards of other Ivy Plus schools. Finally, as every year, six members of the gsaa will serve on the Wilbur Cross Medal Selection Committee along with the Dean and four members of the faculty. In November, the gsaa will meet in New Haven. While our primary focus is alumni, the gsaa also looks for-ward to interacting with current gradu-ate students, faculty, administrators and alumni of other Yale schools. This year, we especially look forward to working with Tom Pollard, the new Dean of the Graduate School.

Franziska bleichert