From The School of Engineering and Applied Science At Yale University And The Karolinska Institute [Karolinska Institutet](SE) Via “phys.org” : “New technology simultaneously maps gene activity and expression”

Yale SEAS

From The School of Engineering and Applied Science

At

Yale University

And

The Karolinska Institute [Karolinska Institutet](SE)

Via

“phys.org”

3.15.23

Fig. 1: Design and evaluation of spatial epigenome–transcriptome cosequencing with E13 mouse embryo.

a, Schematic workflow. b, Comparison of number of unique fragments and fraction of reads in peaks (FRiP) in spatial ATAC–RNA-seq and spatial CUT&Tag–RNA-seq. c, Gene and UMI count distribution in spatial ATAC–RNA-seq and spatial CUT&Tag–RNA-seq. Number of pixels in E13, 2,187; in human brain, 2,500; in mouse brain (ATAC), 9,215; in mouse brain (H3K27me3), 9,752; in mouse brain (H3K27ac), 9,370; in mouse brain (H3K4me3), 9,548. Box plots show the median (centre line), the first and third quartiles (box limits) and 1.5× interquartile range (whiskers). d, Spatial distribution and UMAP of all clusters for ATAC, RNA and joint clustering of ATAC and RNA data. Overlay of clusters with the tissue image shows that spatial clusters precisely match anatomic regions. Pixel size, 50 µm; scale bars, 1 mm. e, Spatial mapping of GAS and gene expression for selected marker genes in different clusters for ATAC and RNA in spatial ATAC–RNA-seq. f, Pseudotime analysis from radial glia to postmitotic premature neurons visualized at the spatial level. g, Heatmaps delineating gene expression and GAS for marker genes. h, Dynamic changes in GAS and gene expression across pseudotime.

Fig. 2: Spatial chromatin accessibility and transcriptome co-profiling of P22 mouse brain.

a, Design of microfluidic chips for 100 × 100 barcodes with 20-μm channel size. b, Spatial distribution and UMAP of all clusters for ATAC and RNA in spatial ATAC–RNA-seq of mouse brain. Pixel size, 20 µm; scale bars, 1 mm. c, Integration of ATAC data and scATAC-seq data [30*] from mouse brain. d, Integration of RNA data and scRNA-seq data32 from mouse brain. e, Spatial mapping of GAS and gene expression for selected marker genes in different clusters for ATAC and RNA in spatial ATAC–RNA-seq. A list of abbreviation definitions can be found in Supplementary Table 1.
*Reference in science paper.

For further images see the science paper.

A new study published in Nature [below] reports that a technology known as spatial omics can be used to map simultaneously how genes are switched on and off and how they are expressed in different areas of tissues and organs. This improved technology, developed by researchers at Yale University and Karolinska Institutet, could shed light on the development of tissues, as well as on certain diseases and how to treat them.

Almost all cells in the body have the same set of genes and can in principle become any kind of cell. What distinguishes the cells is how the genes in our DNA are used. In recent years, spatial omics have given us a deeper understanding of how cells read the genome in precise locations in tissues. Now, researchers have further evolved this technology to increase knowledge of how tissues develop and how different diseases arise.

A key part of the study is the researchers’ ability to spatially map simultaneously two crucial components of our genetic makeup, the epigenome and the transcriptome. The epigenome controls the switching mechanisms that turn genes on and off in individual cells, whereas the transcriptome is the result of those gene expressions and what makes each cell unique.

Can detect input and output simultaneously

The epigenome can be thought of as a fuse box. You can flip the switches, but if you can’t see whether the lights are turning on, your information is limited. By spatially mapping both the epigenome and transcriptome, the researchers developed a technology in which both the input (switching on or off a gene) and the output (gene expression) can be detected in the same tissue section. This new technology brings unprecedented insights into gene regulation in precise locations in a tissue.

For this study, the researchers adapted and combined their previously developed techniques to map the epigenome and the transcriptome, and applied these techniques to mouse brains and human brain tissue.

“Now that we can combine the two, we can see both the mechanisms of how the genes are switched on and off, as well as the result,” says Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, professor at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the corresponding authors. “This has led us to some unexpected observations, which gives us further insights into how these processes are regulated in different tissue areas and contribute to different cell fates.”

Advancing the field of personalized medicine

The work could bring researchers closer to understanding potential genetic targets for drug therapy, and help advance the field of personalized medicine.

“In the future with this technology, we will be able to really understand in every single patient how those cancer-promoting genes and tumor suppressor genes are being regulated by the epigenetic mechanisms,” says Rong Fan, professor at Yale University and last author of the paper. “The whole epigenetic therapeutics field is just emerging, but I think our technology can potentially empower epigenetic drug discovery.”

Nature

See the full article here .

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The Karolinska Institute [Karolinska Institutet](SE) sometimes known as the (Royal) Caroline Institute in English is a research-led medical university in Solna within the Stockholm urban area of Sweden. The Karolinska Institute is consistently ranked amongst the world’s best medical schools, ranking 6th worldwide for medicine in 2021. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The assembly consists of fifty professors from various medical disciplines at the university.

The Karolinska Institute was founded in 1810 on the island of Kungsholmen on the west side of Stockholm; the main campus was relocated decades later to Solna, just outside Stockholm. A second campus was established more recently in Flemingsberg, Huddinge, south of Stockholm.

The Karolinska Institute is Sweden’s third oldest medical school, after Uppsala University[Uppsala universitet](SE) (founded in 1477) and The Lund University [Lunds universitet](SE) (founded in 1666). It is one of Sweden’s largest centres for training and research, accounting for 30% of the medical training and more than 40% of all academic medical and life science research conducted in Sweden.

The Karolinska University Hospital, located in Solna and Huddinge, is associated with the university as a research and teaching hospital. Together they form an academic health science centre. While most of the medical programs are taught in Swedish, the bulk of the PhD projects are conducted in English. The institute’s name is a reference to the Caroleans.

Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Daniel L Malone Engineering Center

The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School of Engineering and Applied Science At Yale University: “Purifying water with just a few atoms”

Yale SEAS

From The School of Engineering and Applied Science

At

Yale University

Due to their considerable efficiency, catalysts made of just a few atoms show great promise in the field of water treatment. In a new study, researchers looked into how to optimize the performance of these catalysts and make them viable for practical use.

The results of the study, led by Prof. Jaehong Kim, are published in the PNAS [below].

In the last few decades, nanoscale catalysts have drawn much attention in the field of water treatment. Materials at the nanoscale have numerous unique and beneficial properties to offer. More recently, researchers have been exploring the possibilities of single-atom catalysts. Even smaller than nanomaterials, these catalysts can offer even greater efficiency.

“We didn’t have this capability before, but now we are basically loading single-atom metals, atom by atom, onto the substrate,” said Kim, the Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering. “And that’s great, because you can utilize all of the atom.”

Efficiency is critical because the materials that are commonly used for catalysts can be very expensive. For instance, palladium (currently going for about $2,000 per ounce) is a metal that’s often used for catalysts. A quick comparison shows why single-atom catalysts have generated so much interest. In nanoscale form, 50 nanometers of palladium cost about $37 to cover an area of about 250 square meters. Just over 2% of its atoms are exposed at the surface. In single-atom form, in contrast, palladium costs only 17 cents to cover an area greater than 50 football fields. And you can’t beat it for efficiency, with 100% atom exposure at the surface.

One limitation of the single-atom catalysts is that certain conditions can diminish their catalytic performance. As a solution to that, researchers have now begun creating catalysts comprising a small cluster of atoms, known as ensembles. Instead of the thousands of atoms that make up a nanomaterial, these clusters contain just three or four atoms. “But they exhibit properties more like a single atom because they’re such a small cluster, and the atoms are all exposed at the surface,” Kim said.

Because this material design is still relatively new, researchers are still figuring out the best ways to control the properties of these ensemble structures and optimize their performance. For instance, fully isolated single-atom catalysts can be enhanced by the addition of certain elements around the metals. Kim and his research team investigated whether atom ensembles could be similarly manipulated. Their paper is the first to explore the possibilities of doing so.

Kim created a system with a catalyst using an ensemble of palladium atoms, designed to reduce the carcinogen bromate in water. They introduced the non-metal elements sulfur, nitrogen, and boron to the surrounds of atom ensembles. The overall results suggested an improvement in the system’s catalytic performance. It’s a promising sign, Kim said, especially since water treatment needs to be as cost-effective as possible.

“Ultimately, we are hoping to have a highly efficient device that has this catalyst to destroy pollutants in water, because it is going to be so much cheaper and efficient than other material designs,” he said.

PNAS

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Daniel L Malone Engineering Center
The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School of the Environment At Yale University: “Study Examines Potential Use of Machine Learning for Sustainable Development of Biomass”

From The School of the Environment

At

Yale University

3.7.23
Fran Silverman
Associate Director of Communications
fran.silverman@yale.edu
203-436-4842

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain.

From the science paper
Graphical abstract

Biomass is widely considered a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. Many experts say it can play a critical role in combating climate change. Biomass stores carbon and can be turned into bio-based products and energy that can be used to improve soil, treat wastewater, and produce renewable feedstock.

Yet large-scale production of it has been limited due to economic constraints and challenges to optimizing and controlling biomass conversion.

A new study [Resources, Conservation and Recycling (below)] led by Yale School of the Environment’s Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems, and doctoral student Hannah Szu-Han Wang, analyzed current machine learning applications for biomass and biomass-derived materials (BDM) to determine if machine learning is advancing the research and development of biomass products. The study authors found that machine learning has not been applied across the entire life cycle of BDM, limiting its ability for development.

Yuan Yao-Assistant Professor of Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems

Yao’s research investigates how emerging technologies and industrial development will affect the environment with a focus on bioeconomy and sustainable production. Wang worked in the production of biomaterials during her master’s research. The two researchers said they were interested in pursuing this study to find out if machine learning could help with best practices for creating BDM, a chief component of a bio-based economy, as well as predicting their performance as sustainable materials.

“There are so many combinations of biomass feedstock, conversion technologies, and BDM applications. If we want to try each combination using the traditional trial-and-error experimental approach, this will take a lot of time, labor, effort, and energy. We already generate a lot of data from these past experiments, so we are asking, can we apply machine learning to help us to figure out how we can better design BDM?” Yao explains.

For the study, which was published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Yao and Wang reviewed more than 50 papers published since 2008 to understand the capabilities, current limitations, and future potential of machine learning in supporting sustainable development and applications of BDM. What they found is that while a few studies applied machine learning to address data challenges for life cycle assessment, most studies only applied machine learning to predict and optimize the technical performance of biomass conversion and applications. None reviewed machine learning applications across the entire lifecycle, from biomass cultivation to BDM production and end-use applications.

“Most studies are applying machine learning to just a very small part of the entire lifecycle of BDM,” Yao says. “Our argument is that if you really want to incorporate sustainability into development of this material, we need to consider the entire lifecycle of the materials, from how they are generated to their potential environmental impact. We believe machine learning has the potential to support sustainability-informed design for biomass-derived materials.”

Wang said the study has led to further research on data gaps in machine learning on biomass-derived materials.

“We found a future direction that people have not yet explored in terms of sustainability assessments for BDM. There needs to be a full pathway prediction to enhance our understanding of how various factors regarding BDM interact and contribute to sustainability,” she says.

Resources, Conservation and Recycling

See the full article here .

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The Yale School of the Environment

Vision and Mission

We are leading the world toward a sustainable future with cutting-edge research, teaching, and public engagement on society’s evolving and urgent environmental challenges.

Core Values

Our Mission and Vision are grounded in seven fundamental values:

Excellence: We promote and engage in path-breaking science, policy, and business models that build on a fundamental commitment to analytic rigor, data, intellectual integrity, and excellence.
Leadership: We attract outstanding students nationally and internationally and offer a pioneering curriculum that defines the knowledge and skills needed to be a 21st century environmental leader in a range of professions.
Sustainability: We generate knowledge that will advance thinking and understanding across the various dimensions of sustainability.
Community: We offer a community that finds strength in its collegiality, diversity, independence, commitment to excellence, and lifelong learning.
Diversity: We celebrate our differences and identify pathways to a sustainable future that respects diverse values including equity, liberty, and civil discourse.
Collaboration: We foster collaborative learning, professional skill development, and problem-solving — and we strengthen our scholarship, teaching, policy work, and outreach through partnerships across the university and beyond.
Responsibility: We encourage environmental stewardship and responsible behavior on campus and beyond.

Guiding Principles

In pursuit of our Mission and Vision, we:

Build on more than a century of work bringing science-based strategies, ethical considerations, and conservation practices to natural resource management.
Approach problems on a systems basis and from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Integrate theory and practice, providing innovative solutions to society’s most pressing environmental problems.
Address environmental challenges at multiple scales and settings — from local to global, urban to rural, managed to wild.
Draw on the depth of resources at Yale University and our network of alumni who extend across the world.
Create opportunities for research, policy application, and professional development through our unique centers and programs.
Provide a diverse forum to convene conversations on difficult issues that are critical to progress on sustainability.
Bring special focus on the most significant threats to a sustainable future including climate change, the corresponding need for clean energy, and the increasing stresses on our natural resources.

Statement of Environmental Policy

As faculty, staff, and students of the Yale School of the Environment, we affirm our commitment to responsible stewardship of the environment of our School, our University, the city of New Haven, and the other sites of our teaching, research, professional, and social activities.

In the course of these activities, we shall strive to:

Reduce our use of natural resources.
Support the sustainable production of the resources we must use by purchasing renewable, reusable, recyclable, and recycled materials.
Minimize our use of toxic substances and ensure that unavoidable use is in full compliance with federal, state, and local environmental regulations.
Reduce the amount of waste we generate and promote strategies to reuse and recycle those wastes that cannot be avoided.
Restore the environment where possible.

Each member of the School community is encouraged to set an example for others by serving as an active steward of our environment.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The Wright Laboratory At Yale University: “Wright Lab assembles components for international neutrino experiment”

From The Wright Laboratory

At

Yale University

3.3.23

A team of researchers and technical staff from Yale’s Wright Laboratory (Wright Lab), in collaboration with researchers from the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) Electronic Detector Group, the University of Chicago; and the University of Iowa, has successfully assembled and tested the first Charge Readout Planes (CRPs) at Wright Lab for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota.

Charge Readout Planes (CRPs) at Wright Lab. Yale University.

SURF-Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.

DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/LBNF experiment Argon tank at Sanford Underground Research Facility.

DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota in de velopment.

The readout planes are an integral part of the novel liquid-argon detector to study the interactions of neutrinos. The completed CRP was shipped to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in February, for testing in CERN’s ProtoDUNE facility.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH) [CERN] ProtoDUNE.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH) [CERN] ProtoDune. .

DUNE is the world’s largest neutrino experiment; an international effort aimed at solving some of the open questions about neutrinos. Studies over the past several decades suggest that neutrinos have a small but finite mass and undergo flavor oscillations.

Neutrinos. Credit: J-PARC T2K Neutrino Experiment.

DUNE will explore neutrino oscillation with unprecedented detail and could potentially discover matter-antimatter asymmetries.

DUNE is currently under construction, and physics data taking is scheduled to start in 2028. The experiment will send a high-energy neutrino beam, with an intensity of 1.2 MW, over a distance of 1,300 km through the Earth’s crust from Fermilab in Batavia, IL to SURF in South Dakota. At SURF, neutrinos will be detected in massive 17 kiloton Liquid Argon (LAr) Time Projection Chambers (TPC) equipped with technology to image neutrino interaction and tracks in the detector.

The DUNE CRPs are the basic readout components of the detector modules; the mechanism that translates the data obtained by the DUNE experiment into machine-readable output. They are a crucial component of the detector technology of DUNE.

ProtoDUNE detectors at CERN are designed to test the technologies and techniques that will be used in the full-scale DUNE experiment. The first ProtoDUNE detector started operations in September 2018, and a second prototype detector is now being prepared for testing at CERN.

A collaborative effort at Wright Lab

Wright Lab is one of the CRP assembly sites in the international DUNE collaboration. The recent CRP assembly effort at Wright Lab has been a collaboration between Yale University, the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)-–which has a strong research partnership with Yale, including a long-standing collaboration in the physical sciences-–the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa; led by Principal Investigator Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale, chair of the Yale Physics Department, and Director of Wright Lab.

Heeger said, “Wright Lab’s unique facilities and infrastructure–including high bay assembly space, expert technical professionals, and dedicated support personnel–were critical for the recent successful work for DUNE”.

In addition to Heeger, Wright Lab’s Govinda Adhikari, postdoctoral associate; James Wilhelmi, research support specialist; Lee Hagaman, graduate student; Jeff Ashenfelter, operations director; and research technicians Tom Hurteau, Frank Lopez, and Craig Miller participated in this effort.

Adhikari said, “I am pleased with the hands-on experience and lessons learned from setting up a clean room, conducting the assembly, and testing of CRPs in various temperatures. Wright Lab is equipped with the necessary resources, and provided an exceptional environment for the successful production of one of the vital components of the far detector for the DUNE experiment.”

Adhikari continued, “Our team has developed the necessary competencies and confidence to consistently produce charge readout planes, which is critical in meeting the goals of the collaboration.”

Collaborators from other institutions include Augie Hoffman, Hanjie Liu, and Matt Worcester from BNL; Chris Macias from the University of Iowa; and Avinay Bhat, a recent Wright Lab postdoctoral alumnus who is now at the University of Chicago.

Assembly

Assembly of the DUNE charge readout planes at Wright Lab. Images courtesy of Yale Wright Laboratory/James Wilhelmi.

Charge Readout Planes (CRPs) are assembled with perforated printed circuit boards (PCBs) and attached to a composite frame that provides mechanical support and planarity. Warm and cold test electronics and cables are mounted, and the whole assembly is placed inside a “cold box” for testing at both room and cryogenic temperatures. Once the tests are successful, the CRP is packaged and sent to CERN for testing at the ProtoDUNE facility. The team is eagerly anticipating the test results from the ProtoDUNE setup at CERN.

Photos from the assembly process can be found on Flickr here.

See the full article here .

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The Wright Lab is advancing the frontiers of fundamental physics through a broad research program in nuclear, particle, and astrophysics that includes precision studies of neutrinos; searches for dark matter; investigations of the building blocks and interactions of matter; exploration of quantum science and its applications for fundamental physics experiments; and observations of the early Universe. The laboratory’s unique combination of on-site state-of-the-art research facilities, technical infrastructure, and interaction spaces supports innovative instrumentation development, hands-on research, and training the next generation of scientists. Wright Lab is a part of the Yale Department of Physics and houses several Yale University core facilities that serve researchers across Yale’s Science Hill and beyond.

Mission

The mission of Yale Wright Laboratory is to advance understanding of the physical world, from the smallest particles to the evolution of the Universe, by engaging in fundamental research, developing novel applications, training future leaders in research and development, educating scholars, and enabling discovery.

Wright Lab supports a diverse community of scientists, staff, and students who advance our mission and fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations across Yale University and worldwide.

Climate Statement

The Yale Wright Laboratory is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion among all students, staff, and faculty. The goal of our lab community is to provide a safe and supportive environment for research, teaching, and mentoring. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core principles of our work place and part of the excellence we aim for.

Resources

Wright Lab, the Yale Department of Physics, and Yale University offer a number of resources on topics of climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition, the Committee on Climate and Diversity in the Physics Department is a point of contact for all questions and concerns. Please visit the following links for more information and a list of resources.

Collaboration

With its on-site core facilities and research program, Wright Lab fosters cross-disciplinary research collaborations across Yale University and worldwide. Wright Lab works with the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC) on novel solutions to the research computing challenges in nuclear, particle and astrophysics, and collaborates with the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (YCAA) on understanding dark matter in the Universe. Quantum sensors and techniques jointly developed with the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI) are used for axion searches at Wright Lab.

Wright Lab also has strong, interdisciplinary partnerships with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Yale Pathways to Science.

Funding

Wright Laboratory gratefully acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Department of Energy, Office of Science, High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the Krell Institute; the National Science Foundation; and Yale University.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School of the Environment At Yale University: “Mussels and Other Aquatic Animals Provide Critical Coastal Ecosystem Protections”

From The School of the Environment

At

Yale University

3.9.23

By Ken Best

Media Contact
Fran Silverman
Associate Director of Communications
fran.silverman@yale.edu
203-436-4842

Yale Carbon Containment Lab scientists are working with a team of researchers on Sapelo Island, Georgia, to improve our understanding of complex wetland ecosystems. Photo: Collin Portals.

A new study focusing on 750,000 acres of U.S. coastal areas finds that mollusks act as ecosystem engineers, helping sustain salt marshes in the face of climate change.

Faunal organisms such as the humble mussel often play an underappreciated yet important role in protecting and building coastal ecosystems, according to a new study [Nature Communications (below)] led by the Carbon Containment Lab at the Yale School of the Environment.

Above: Sinéad Crotty holds an Atlantic ribbed mussel, one of the more than 200,000 mussels that were moved during a large-scale field experiment measuring the effects of animals on marsh accretion. Photo: Christine Angelini.

“As sea levels rise, coastal ecosystems have to adapt and evolve to changing conditions,” says Sinéad Crotty, associate director of science at the CC Lab and lead author of the study. “This study shows that small and innocuous animals that live within an ecosystem can play a critical role in helping coastal systems persist in the face of climate change.”

Mussels (Geukensia demissa) serve as “ecosystem engineers” — organisms that directly or indirectly drive habitat construction and control the availability of resources to other organisms, according to the study’s findings. Mussels are considered indicators of water quality, helping to keep streams and rivers clean by absorbing heavy metals and filtering harmful silt and particulates as they feed and breathe in aquatic ecosystems. Their shells also provide habitat and nesting sites for insects, small fish, and plants. In addition to these valuable characteristics, mussels also deposit large volumes of material on marsh surfaces through their feeding process. This contribution of sediment helps marshes grow through a process called accretion, which is the natural action of sand, soil or silt washing up to the land from the seashore or river.

The study focused on 750,000 acres of expansive salt marsh systems in the U.S. along the coastal area known as the South Atlantic Bight, a region stretching over 150 miles from Cape Fear, North Carolina to Cape Canaveral, Florida and examined research on a variety of fauna including crabs, lugworms, and ghost shrimp. Field research for the study, which was recently published in Nature Communications [below], included surveys of mussel cover across the South Atlantic Bight. More detailed field measurements were taken on Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the coast of central Georgia.

In addition to measurements taken across seasons and tidal phases, the researchers deployed three experiments designed to test mussels’ impact on accretion from small, local scales to whole landscape scales. The largest experiment involved moving over 200,000 mussels by hand from one landscape to another and measuring changes to the marsh elevation over three years.

“We found that, in reality, the effects of mussels are far greater than predicted by the models, and occur at large, landscape scales,” Crotty says.

Similar trends are likely to occur with other fauna engineers, such as bioturbating crabs or worms, the authors note. Including ecosystem engineers in future modeling and ecosystem management will be important as sea levels continue to rise, the study’s authors say.

“This study can help us think through how we prioritize certain marsh areas for protection,” Crotty says. “Given that mussels are disproportionately important in driving accretion and other ecosystem functions, we should prioritize their protection, or outplanting, as a means to promoting all of their associated benefits.”

The study’s co-authors include researchers from the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida School for Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research, and Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University.

Co-author Tjeerd J. Bouma, senior scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, says the study provides important data on salt marshes and climate change.

“The present study provides new insight into the mechanisms by which coastal ecosystems that are highly valuable for flood defense, such as salt marshes, can cope with sea-level rise,” he says.

Nature Communications

Fig. 1: Conceptual figure outlining the spatial and temporal scale of all field components and associated hypotheses.

1a–c Landscape assays of sediment deposition (i.e., 9 cm filter papers; 57) were distributed across 13 area types over four 24 h tidal deployments. We hypothesized that sediment deposition atop mussel aggregations would be as high as deposition on levee crests. (2a, b) Experiment 1 involved tracking the fate of fluorescently tagged previously-settled and newly ejected biodeposits from mussel aggregations (24 h deployments). We hypothesized that sediment would be rapidly redistributed across marsh platforms from these local hot spots of deposition. 3a, b Experiment 2 involved the deployment of seven treatments containing a range of mussel and cordgrass biomass. Treatments were deployed at the creekhead and on the marsh platform in sediment catchment devices, designed to capture all sediment deposited throughout the 1-month deployment. We hypothesized that mussel biomass would drive sediment deposition at this intermediate temporal and spatial scale. (4) Experiment three involved the removal of mussels from one tidal creekhead and the transplantation of these mussels to another proximate creekhead. We hypothesized that the removal of mussels inhibits accretion at the landscape scale, while addition increases it relative to an unmanipulated control. Locations of each experiment are highlighted in the panels at left. Numbers and colors correspond to the experiment of relevance.

Fig. 3: Filter paper results.

a Summer neap, b summer spring, c winter neap, and d winter spring tide results are presented across 13 marsh location types (n = 15 filters/location/tide). Mean sediment deposition is presented as gray bars (mean ± SE) on each marsh location, with letters denoting statistically significant differences among treatments (Season*Tide*Location: F 12, 825 = 4.7; p < 0.0001). For ease of interpretation, Tukey HSD post hoc analyses are conducted separately for each season using a corrected p-value of p < 0.001. Results collected from atop mussel aggregations are presented as gray bars with a black border (at 0 m, 10 m, and 20 m from the tidal creekhead). Results from locations not associated with mussel aggregations (i.e., all other marsh location types) are presented as gray bars with no border.

For further illustrations see the science paper.

See the full article here .

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The Yale School of the Environment

Vision and Mission

We are leading the world toward a sustainable future with cutting-edge research, teaching, and public engagement on society’s evolving and urgent environmental challenges.

Core Values

Our Mission and Vision are grounded in seven fundamental values:

Excellence: We promote and engage in path-breaking science, policy, and business models that build on a fundamental commitment to analytic rigor, data, intellectual integrity, and excellence.
Leadership: We attract outstanding students nationally and internationally and offer a pioneering curriculum that defines the knowledge and skills needed to be a 21st century environmental leader in a range of professions.
Sustainability: We generate knowledge that will advance thinking and understanding across the various dimensions of sustainability.
Community: We offer a community that finds strength in its collegiality, diversity, independence, commitment to excellence, and lifelong learning.
Diversity: We celebrate our differences and identify pathways to a sustainable future that respects diverse values including equity, liberty, and civil discourse.
Collaboration: We foster collaborative learning, professional skill development, and problem-solving — and we strengthen our scholarship, teaching, policy work, and outreach through partnerships across the university and beyond.
Responsibility: We encourage environmental stewardship and responsible behavior on campus and beyond.

Guiding Principles

In pursuit of our Mission and Vision, we:

Build on more than a century of work bringing science-based strategies, ethical considerations, and conservation practices to natural resource management.
Approach problems on a systems basis and from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Integrate theory and practice, providing innovative solutions to society’s most pressing environmental problems.
Address environmental challenges at multiple scales and settings — from local to global, urban to rural, managed to wild.
Draw on the depth of resources at Yale University and our network of alumni who extend across the world.
Create opportunities for research, policy application, and professional development through our unique centers and programs.
Provide a diverse forum to convene conversations on difficult issues that are critical to progress on sustainability.
Bring special focus on the most significant threats to a sustainable future including climate change, the corresponding need for clean energy, and the increasing stresses on our natural resources.

Statement of Environmental Policy

As faculty, staff, and students of the Yale School of the Environment, we affirm our commitment to responsible stewardship of the environment of our School, our University, the city of New Haven, and the other sites of our teaching, research, professional, and social activities.

In the course of these activities, we shall strive to:

Reduce our use of natural resources.
Support the sustainable production of the resources we must use by purchasing renewable, reusable, recyclable, and recycled materials.
Minimize our use of toxic substances and ensure that unavoidable use is in full compliance with federal, state, and local environmental regulations.
Reduce the amount of waste we generate and promote strategies to reuse and recycle those wastes that cannot be avoided.
Restore the environment where possible.

Each member of the School community is encouraged to set an example for others by serving as an active steward of our environment.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School Of Public Health At Yale University: “Litigator and environmental advocate Rob Bilott discusses threat of PFAS ‘forever chemicals’”

From The School Of Public Health

At

Yale University

2.28.23
Colin Poitras

Rob Bilott

Veteran litigator Rob Bilott has been fighting to raise awareness of the public health threat created by so-called “forever chemicals” (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS) for over 23 years. His novel and complex class action lawsuits against some of the nation’s largest chemical companies have resulted in over $1 billion in compensation for people impacted by PFAS. Bilott’s story and landmark case against chemical giant DuPont were recounted in his book, “Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont,” and served as the inspiration for the 2019 motion picture “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo.

In addition to his legal advocacy work, Bilott is a lecturer with the Yale School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He recently visited Yale to speak to Professor Vasilis Vasiliou’s Toxicology class. “In addition to being an expert in environmental law and the real-life implications of environmental exposure to PFAS, Mr. Bilott serves as a role model for our students in demonstrating the values of perseverance and caring for impacted populations, and the importance of being able to help laypeople understand scientific concepts,” Vasiliou said. “I am proud to have him associated with our department.”

Prior to his lecture, Bilott, a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize,’ sat down with YSPH Communications to discuss his work, the extraordinary challenges he’s faced, and the role he sees public health taking in protecting people and the environment from the threat of PFAS.

YSPH: Rob, you’ve been fighting against PFAS for over 20 years primarily through lawsuits and other legal channels. What advice do you have for public health students interested in tackling this issue?

R.B.: One thing I’ve learned over this long process is that you have to take a multi-faceted approach. You can’t address this through just the legal system, the scientific process, or the regulatory system. When I started doing this, I was filing things in court and making things available in legal briefs, but I realized the information wasn’t getting out to the public or the scientific community. So, I started reaching out, trying to educate regulators and lawmakers about these chemicals. There were scientists who were also working on this, but it wasn’t getting translated over to the legal and regulatory communities. So, my advice to students is we really need to step outside of our silos. It’s really important for scientists and folks working in the public health sphere to understand how their data gets used in the court system and how it translates in the regulatory field. We’ve got to find ways to cross-communicate when we’re dealing with a huge public health threat.

YSPH: Public health addresses many large and complex issues like systemic racism, climate change, and gun violence. Your fight against PFAS is also on a massive scale, how do you successfully navigate this challenge?

R.B.: What we’ve done, I think, is a great example of how one person can stand up, speak out, and put into motion things that result in global change. That’s the story that is depicted in the film Dark Waters. All it took was a farmer in West Virginia who said, “I may have one of the largest corporations on the planet on the other side of me, I may be going up against the entire U.S. legal system and many massive agencies, but things like this shouldn’t be happening. And even though this is the way it’s always been, that can be changed.” It may take a long time and there may be bumps along the way, but sticking to the facts, and getting the story out about what’s happening, that’s what generates change. We’re now seeing laws starting to be changed globally. The European Union just announced that it’s proposing a total ban on this entire class of chemicals. And the original manufacturer of these chemicals just announced they’re going to stop making them by the year 2025. So, these are incredible changes that started with one person.

YSPH: Your first case against DuPont started with a phone call from that West Virginia farmer. You listened to his complaint and trusted his experience that something was wrong. We teach our students the importance of local collaboration and listening to the people with whom they work. What are your thoughts on the importance of communication?

R.B.: Keeping an open mind and understanding the importance of communication is absolutely critical. When [the West Virginia farmer] Mr. Tennant first called, I was representing big chemical companies at a large law firm. I had preconceived notions. But I was willing to sit down with him and listen and I really paid attention. Farmers like Mr. Tennant have incredible skills and understanding of what is going on and what is happening. I also needed to understand where the folks on the other side were coming from. On an issue like this, it’s incredibly important to know the whole story, what people’s concerns are, and what issues they’re dealing with on both sides. That’s how you come up with innovative solutions. That’s how you figure things out. You learn something new. But you can’t do it unless you’re actively listening to both sides.

YSPH: You are currently pursuing a class action in the state of Ohio representing a population of about 12 million people potentially impacted by PFAS. How do you stay focused working at such a massive scale, and do you ever feel frustrated or overwhelmed?

R.B.: When I first sat down with Mr. Tennant back in 1998, I thought this was a pretty small matter involving one farm where something was injuring some cows. I had no idea we would be dealing with a global contamination problem. I had no idea that what we were dealing with was a chemical that was in the water and in the soil and in the air all over the planet. The first thing was just learning and processing exactly what we were dealing with. And then it became, how do I get this story out? How do I let others know what’s happening here? How can I make people understand that something this toxic, this persistent, and this pervasive had been completely ignored and gone under the radar of lawmakers and regulators for decades?

We had very skilled adversaries who were doing their best to keep this covered up, claiming there was no science supporting any of this, and that these chemicals are perfectly safe. Overcoming that was a long process, and there were a lot of bumps in the road. We were doing things that nobody had ever done, setting up these massive studies that took seven years during a severe economic meltdown and while people were continuing to get sick and dying. There was a lot of stress and a lot of times when you’re getting incredibly frustrated. Will this work? Will people ever actually see what’s happening here and take steps to do something about it? But you’ve got to keep your eye on your ultimate goal. It can be done. You just have to stick to it and be convinced that that truth will come out and it’ll make a difference. I think back to Mr. Tennant who told me, “When people see these facts, they’ll see for themselves that this is wrong.”

YSPH: One of the ways you’ve brought attention to the health threats of PFAS is through your book, “Exposure”, and obviously the movie Dark Waters. What impact did they have on your cause?

R.B.: We were dealing with something that didn’t resonate easily with the public, like lead poisoning or arsenic. We were dealing with chemicals people couldn’t even pronounce. You couldn’t smell them, taste them, or touch them. I believe it was critically important to work with people, like screenwriters, that have this different skill set of being able to take very complicated legal issues, scientific issues, and regulatory terms and convey them in a way visually that has an emotional impact on people. Once the movie and the book came out, the public finally started to see what was happening. People were saying, “Whoa, wait a minute, this stuff is in our water, too? And it’s in our blood, too? How do we fix this?” It all started to sink in, and that’s when a lot of policymakers, regulators, and people who had the ability to make these changes, began realizing this was something that needs to be tackled. So, it was absolutely critical [the publicity around the movie and book]. I can’t over-emphasize how important all of that was.

YSPH: You’ve encountered a lot of opposition to your campaign against PFAS. What advice can you share about dealing with misinformation and other obstacles as an advocate?

R.B.: There is an entire industry out there whose job it is to, and I’m borrowing the term here, ‘manufacture doubt.’ Their goal is to perpetuate the idea that we don’t know enough and that we need more studies, more science, and more time. And it’s incredibly effective. Papers are written and presentations are made by these quasi-scientific sounding groups. But it’s very important to understand who’s funding these things and to know who’s behind these groups. You have to make sure you have a truly independent analysis. And to me, a lot of public health officials and regulators don’t have a lot of time to be scouring through all of this background information. They’re looking at the final results. But this background is critically important.

YSPH: You’ve become an expert on PFAS and environmental contamination as a result of your legal work. Based on what you have learned, what worries you the most these days?

R.B.: What is really disturbing to me is when you look back at this story and realize we only know about this massive category of man-made chemicals because a farmer had cows dying in West Virginia and we were able to get into these corporate records and find out that there was information known going back decades that was withheld. So, the question becomes, what else do we not know about existing chemicals? That’s certainly a concern.

But one thing that disturbs me, even more, is that with PFAS or at least with PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid), we do have the science now. We’ve got the most comprehensive studies and data that you could ever want, massive amounts of animal data and human data, and yet we still are not able to get these chemicals fully regulated at the federal level. We are still waiting to have a national drinking water standard for that one chemical. It’s been 20 years since this information’s been provided. Regulators have been working on it. There have been, I think, three or four different action plans announced by different administrations, none of which have ever gotten us across the goal line of saying, “We have an enforceable, national drinking water standard now.” It’s incredible to me that we are still waiting. And to me, that’s the really scary part, because how do we ever address any of these chemicals in our current system — the regulatory, legal, scientific process — if you can have all this data and still not be able to do what needs to be done to protect people?

YSPH: Some say public health officials and scientists need to be more outspoken in advocating for change to improve public health. As a lawyer and environmental advocate, what advice can you share about environmental advocacy?

R.B.: As a lawyer, I’m trained to advocate for people. And I think folks within the public health field need to also be advocates and not be intimidated by folks who may challenge them. We’ve seen this in other well-publicized chemical contamination cases, where the public health officials who spoke out were painted as junk scientists. I understand a lot of folks don’t want to be that lightning rod that’s attacked by the other side. But you know, it takes somebody speaking up and standing up to bring attention to these issues because that’s what gets things moving. Agencies like the EPA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and various state agencies are often overwhelmed with so many issues that you’ve got to find a way to bring things to their attention. It’s got to be elevated so that they feel like they need to pay attention, that they need to act, and that they can’t just ignore it. We saw that with PFAS. Unfortunately, folks were feeling fairly comfortable just ignoring it and allowing this issue to stay in the background for decades. But I think we finally have gotten past that point because of the movie and because there are vocal advocates out there now in different sectors that are demanding this be addressed. You can’t just ignore it and hope it’s going to go away. It’s incredibly important to make sure public health is protected.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The School Of Public Health was founded in 1915 by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow and is one of the oldest public health masters programs in the United States. It is consistently rated among the best schools of public health in the country, receiving recent rankings of 3rd for its doctoral program in epidemiology. The School Of Public Health is both a department (established in 1915) within the School of Medicine as well as an independent, CEPH-certified school of public health (established in 1946).

The Yale School of Public Health provides a public health education program with a low student to faculty ratio. The Yale School of Public Health awards Master of Public Health degrees as well as Master of Science and Ph.D degrees through the Yale Graduate School. Programs of study include biostatistics, chronic disease epidemiology, environmental health sciences, epidemiology of microbial diseases, health care management, health policy, and social and behavioral sciences. The Yale School of Public Health also offers concentrations in global health, public health modeling, climate change and health, and US health and justice as well as tracks in maternal child health promotion and regulatory affairs, which are taken in conjunction with one of the core programs. The school also offers a one-year Advanced Professional MPH program for students who have already attained an advanced degree, an online Executive MPH program, a 22-month joint MPH and MBA with the Yale School of Management, and a five-year BA/MPH program for students of Yale College and Yale-NUS College. In addition, the School of Public Health offers joint degrees in divinity (M.Div./MPH and MAR/MPH), forestry and environmental studies (MF/MPH, MFS/MPH, MESC/MPH, and MEM/MPH), law (JD/MPH), management (MBA/MPH), nursing (MSN/MPH), international and development economics (MA/MPH), international affairs and cultural studies (MA/MPH with the MacMillan Center), and physician associate studies (MMSC/MPH).

Yale School of Public Health students may take classes at the college and several of the University’s graduate or professional schools if they find them relevant to their course of study. This includes the Yale Divinity School, Yale Law School, Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale School of Nursing, Yale School of Drama, and Yale School of Management.

Founded in 1915, Yale’s School of Public Health is one of the oldest of the nationally accredited schools of public health. It began when, in 1914, the University received an endowment from the Lauder Greenway Family to establish a chair in public health at the Yale Medical School. This chair was filled a year later by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, who was and is still considered to be the “founder of public health” at Yale.

In its early years, Winslow’s Department of Public Health at Yale was a catalyst for public health reform in Connecticut, and the health surveys prepared by him and his faculty and students led to considerable improvements in public health organization. He also successfully campaigned to improve health laws in Connecticut, as well as for the passage of a bill that created the State Department of Public Health. Drawing on principles and expertise in existing departments at the School of Medicine to supplement public health courses, Winslow focused on educating undergraduate medical students in the context of preventive medicine. He established a one–year program leading to a Certificate in Public Health and a comprehensive non–medical program that graduated eighteen students with a Certificate in Public Health, ten with a Ph.D., and four with a Dr.P.H. by 1925. His students specialized in administration, bacteriology, or statistics. Due to three decades of Winslow’s leadership and innovative foresight and commitment to interdisciplinary education, the department’s academic programs earned recognition as a nationally accredited School of Public Health in 1946.

In 1946, the Yale School of Public Health received its inaugural status as an accredited “school of public health.” Because of this accreditation, Yale is in a unique situation of assuming the identities of both a department of the Yale School of Medicine and an autonomous school of public health. In the 1960s the Yale Department of Public Health merged with the Section of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, a unit within the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical School, resulting in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health (EPH). In 1964, EPH moved into its own building, the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Public Health (LEPH), which was designed by Philip Johnson and continues as the primary location for teaching and research.

In 1964, the Arbovirus Research Unit of the Rockefeller Foundation moved to the Yale School of Public Health. It was at the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) that Jordi Casals discovered and named the Lassa virus in 1969. He went on to describe and classify over a thousand viruses, and was considered an authority in viral taxonomy.

Interdisciplinary Research, Special Programs, and Affiliated Centers

Yale Institute for Global Health
Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric, and Environmental Epidemiology
Emerging Infections Program
Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center
Yale Cancer Center
Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS
Center for Nicotine & Tobacco Use Research at Yale
Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Century
Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science (C2S2)
The John B. Pierce Laboratory
The Yale Program on Aging
Yale University Center for Genomics & Proteomics
Yale Center for Analytical Sciences
Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science
Community Alliance for Research and Engagement
Humanites, Arts and Public Health Practice at Yale (HAPPY)
InnovateHealth Yale

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From Yale University: “R&D Investment Can Have Multiplier Effects—If It’s Made in the Right Industries”

From Yale University

2.27.23
Song Ma

Sean David Williams

In his State of the Union remarks in February, President Joe Biden celebrated the federal government’s recent efforts to boost the semiconductor industry in the United States. The development of semiconductor chips, now used in phones, cars, TVs, and household appliances, is “a story of American genius and possibilities,” he said. The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law last August, will pour more than $50 billion into the industry, including funding for R&D.

The initiative was motivated partly by the need to control more of the supply chain. But a new study co-authored by Song Ma, an associate professor of finance at Yale SOM, suggests that the move also could also support future innovation in a variety of fields.

Ma and Ernest Liu, now at Princeton University, wanted to determine the best way for countries to allocate R&D funds among scientific fields. The key consideration in their approach is that investing in one area could have ripple effects years or decades later on innovations in other fields. “They are intertwined with each other,” Ma says. For instance, an advance in chemistry might not initially seem useful in other industries. But it could later enable new developments in biotechnology, which in turn could jump-start pharmaceutical improvements.

“You do not necessarily see immediate payoff,” he says. “But down the road, they could be really, really important.”

Ma and Liu created a model formalizing the role of “innovation network,” accounting for both short-term and long-term benefits of R&D, and analyzed data on millions of patents and R&D expense records from around the world. Their findings suggest that the United States could reap substantial benefits from adjusting its distribution of R&D funds—including more investment in fields such as alternative energy, biochemistry, and yes, semiconductors.

It’s useful to think not only about increasing money for R&D, but to “put the right money in the right place,” Ma says.

Read the study [below].

Ma and Liu started by creating a model to represent the innovation network in mathematical terms. Each advance could yield immediate benefits for consumers, and it could trigger a cascade of future inventions in other sectors. “It keeps exploding,” Ma says.

The model also captured knowledge flow across borders. Countries could piggyback off research in other countries to kickstart their own technological advances.

Next, the researchers obtained two sets of real-world data. First, they gathered information about consumer preferences in 43 countries—essentially, how much people bought products from each sector. This data helped the team estimate the benefit to consumers when innovations in those sectors appeared.

Second, the team retrieved details from Google Patents about more than 36 million patents around the world. For each invention, the researchers checked whether it had been cited by other patents—an indication that the later advance had built upon the earlier one.

The innovation network analysis suggested that medical science, computing, semiconductors, and electric communication technology were among the most central fields in the network. In other words, they tended to have the most impact on other sectors’ innovations. And among countries, the United States was the most central, followed by Japan; other countries frequently cited their patents.

Ma and Liu then calculated the optimal R&D allocation for each country. The goal was to maximize welfare, meaning the value that consumers received from the goods they purchase, combining both consumption in the short run and long run.

How well did these ideal scenarios line up with reality? To figure out each country’s actual allocation, the researchers examined data on R&D expenditures across different sectors in different countries. In an analysis of 10 countries with the most patents from 2010 to 2014, they found that Japan allocated its funds the most efficiently, followed by Germany, South Korea, the U.S., and China. In Russia, France, the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands, allocations were farther off the mark.

Next, the researchers wanted to know how much consumers would benefit if countries improved their R&D allocation strategies. They estimated that if the U.S. had allocated funds as efficiently as Japan did in 2010, the value that American consumers received would increase by 20%, “which is a huge potential improvement,” Ma says. In other words, products would have 20% higher quality, on average, or consumers could buy 20% more products with the same amount of money. The United States could improve its allocation by investing less in phone and wireless communication and more in semiconductors, biochemistry, and green technology such as alternative energy. That doesn’t mean that the former are not important, Ma notes, but that the latter are particularly central to the long-term innovation and growth of the economy.

Finally, Ma and Liu tried to figure out why some countries were better at allocating funds than others. For the industrial research they were analyzing in this study, government agencies weren’t necessarily the ones deciding how money should be distributed; those decisions were often happening at firms, as each company selected projects to pursue.

The team found that countries with efficient R&D allocation, such as Japan, also tended to have more of their research activity concentrated in big firms that operated across multiple sectors. The stronger the presence of these “innovation hub” companies, the less a country tended to misallocate money. The large firms might be more motivated to invest in fundamental research because those advances could later benefit other departments within the same company.

In other words, some countries might allocate R&D funds better because they “have more of those firms that can take the long view,” he says. If R&D funds aren’t being well-allocated at firms, the government might need to step in to boost investment in critical areas—for instance, by offering subsidies or tax breaks.

Using a less-than-ideal allocation strategy doesn’t mean a country isn’t innovative. The United States produces a lot of high-impact patents “even though the country doesn’t allocate particularly efficiently,” Ma says. The situation is analogous to an extremely wealthy family that hasn’t optimized their budget. But if the U.S. did distribute its R&D money better, the country could realize “a lot of gains,” he says.

The study

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Stem Education Coalition

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School of the Environment At Yale University: “Yale Alumni Academy Trip to Chile – Land of Contrasts” Photo Essay

From The School of the Environment

At

Yale University

2.7.23

Dean Indy Burke’s description of a two-week trip with the Yale Alumni Academy in Chile, including remarkable opportunities to learn more about Chile’s climate and environment, observe the effects of climate change firsthand , and engage with a wonderful group of alumni and oh yes, great and plentiful food and wine!

Dean Indy Burke and her spouse Professor Bill Lauenroth in front of Grey Glacier in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park.

Average monthly temperature and rainfall for Santiago, Chile.

Map of the tour route.

Satellite Image of Chile’s terrain.

Locating the stops on a precipitation / average temperature / ecosystem-type graph.

Change in average sea level (1986-2005 to 2081-2100).

Average monthly temperature and rainfall for Valparaiso, Chile.

Average monthly temperature and rainfall for Calama, Chile.

A view of the desert, with very few if any plants, due to low precipitation.

Sand dunes of the Atacama.

An active geyser.

Thermophiles in the hot springs.

Vicuñas and an Andean flamingo.

Laguna Miscanti.

Average monthly temperature and rainfall for Puerto Montt, Chile.

Volcano Osorno (left) and Volcano Calbuco (right), as seen across Lake Llanquihue.

Chilean Patagonia’s National Parks Network. The system’s 18 national parks cover 9 million hectares (34,750 square miles) in the region. (Map from the Pew Charitable Trusts)

Many Magellanic penguins. Note the red around the eye, and not under the chin. These are making a racket, singing! Also see the starfish, below.

A guanaco, the second camelid. This young one was an exhibitionist.

Sunrise at Torres del Paine.

A spectacular view in Torres del Paine.

See the full article with accompanying text here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Yale School of the Environment

Vision and Mission

We are leading the world toward a sustainable future with cutting-edge research, teaching, and public engagement on society’s evolving and urgent environmental challenges.

Core Values

Our Mission and Vision are grounded in seven fundamental values:

Excellence: We promote and engage in path-breaking science, policy, and business models that build on a fundamental commitment to analytic rigor, data, intellectual integrity, and excellence.
Leadership: We attract outstanding students nationally and internationally and offer a pioneering curriculum that defines the knowledge and skills needed to be a 21st century environmental leader in a range of professions.
Sustainability: We generate knowledge that will advance thinking and understanding across the various dimensions of sustainability.
Community: We offer a community that finds strength in its collegiality, diversity, independence, commitment to excellence, and lifelong learning.
Diversity: We celebrate our differences and identify pathways to a sustainable future that respects diverse values including equity, liberty, and civil discourse.
Collaboration: We foster collaborative learning, professional skill development, and problem-solving — and we strengthen our scholarship, teaching, policy work, and outreach through partnerships across the university and beyond.
Responsibility: We encourage environmental stewardship and responsible behavior on campus and beyond.

Guiding Principles

In pursuit of our Mission and Vision, we:

Build on more than a century of work bringing science-based strategies, ethical considerations, and conservation practices to natural resource management.
Approach problems on a systems basis and from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Integrate theory and practice, providing innovative solutions to society’s most pressing environmental problems.
Address environmental challenges at multiple scales and settings — from local to global, urban to rural, managed to wild.
Draw on the depth of resources at Yale University and our network of alumni who extend across the world.
Create opportunities for research, policy application, and professional development through our unique centers and programs.
Provide a diverse forum to convene conversations on difficult issues that are critical to progress on sustainability.
Bring special focus on the most significant threats to a sustainable future including climate change, the corresponding need for clean energy, and the increasing stresses on our natural resources.

Statement of Environmental Policy

As faculty, staff, and students of the Yale School of the Environment, we affirm our commitment to responsible stewardship of the environment of our School, our University, the city of New Haven, and the other sites of our teaching, research, professional, and social activities.

In the course of these activities, we shall strive to:

Reduce our use of natural resources.
Support the sustainable production of the resources we must use by purchasing renewable, reusable, recyclable, and recycled materials.
Minimize our use of toxic substances and ensure that unavoidable use is in full compliance with federal, state, and local environmental regulations.
Reduce the amount of waste we generate and promote strategies to reuse and recycle those wastes that cannot be avoided.
Restore the environment where possible.

Each member of the School community is encouraged to set an example for others by serving as an active steward of our environment.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The Wright Laboratory At Yale University: “Moore group seeks to detect neutrinos with quantum sensors”

From The Wright Laboratory

At

Yale University

2.8.23

Image credit: SIMPLE/Thomas Penny.

Wright Lab associate professor of physics David Moore and his collaborators Daniel Carney (Physics Division, The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Kyle Leach (Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University) have proposed mechanical quantum sensor technologies to make ultra-sensitive measurements that can detect elusive particles known as neutrinos.

The group has published a paper in PRX Quantum [below] (chosen as an “Editor’s suggestion”) that demonstrates that “a single nanometer-scale, optically levitated sensor operated with sensitivity near the standard quantum limit can search for heavy sterile neutrinos in the keV-MeV mass range with sensitivity significantly beyond existing constraints” and explores the “possibility that mechanical sensors operated well into the quantum regime might ultimately reach the sensitivities required to provide an absolute measurement of the mass of the light neutrino states”.

The SIMPLE search for heavy neutrinos

Since neutrinos interact so weakly, typical neutrino detectors require very large (and therefore also very expensive) experimental setups, such as in the 170-ton MicroBooNE experiment, developed in part due to Wright Lab’s contribution to the technology and analysis of the experiment, and the multi-ton experiment nEXO that the Moore group is currently involved in developing.

In contrast, one of the Moore group’s experiments, Search for new Interactions in a Microsphere Precision Levitation Experiment (SIMPLE), is a tabletop experiment that fits in a room at Wright Lab, but, as demonstrated in the paper above, can also be used to study interactions involving neutrinos. SIMPLE uses “optical tweezers,” in which a laser optically levitates, controls, and measures micron-sized spheres (“microspheres”). By measuring the motion of the microsphere, the group can precisely detect extremely tiny impulses (smaller than 1 quadrillionth of the momentum transferred by a feather landing on your shoulder). This sensitivity is sufficient to measure the momentum recoil of the entire particle if even a single neutrino escapes following the decay of a nucleus inside a nanoparticle with diameter around 100 nanometers.

The Moore group, including postdoctoral associate Thomas Penny, who is setting up the next-generation SIMPLE “trap,” are working to optimize SIMPLE’s search for the neutrino by implanting nuclei that decay by emitting neutrinos in the nanoparticles trapped in SIMPLE. Existing traps for nanoparticles of this size have now demonstrated sensitivity at the “standard quantum limit”, where measurement constraints from quantum mechanics provide the main uncertainty in the measurement. Future extensions beyond this ‘limit’ may even be possible using quantum “squeezing” technologies for the experiment’s sensors, analogous to those used in the sensors of Wright Lab’s HAYSTAC experiment that searches for dark matter, another mysterious phenomenon in physics. This squeezing effect allows quantum uncertainty to be moved into a variable that does not affect the result of the experiment, allowing the sensitivity to be even further improved.

Moore said, “Researchers in Europe have recently demonstrated the ability to use nanometer-scale optically levitated sensors like those of SIMPLE to do quantum measurements; our group is proposing to apply these quantum technologies to nuclear physics.”

How it works – measuring momentum with mechanical sensors

While SIMPLE will not directly detect the neutrino itself, momentum conservation requires that when the neutrino escapes the nanoparticle, the tiny momentum recoil of the entire particle allows for reconstruction of the total momentum of all emitted particles, including the neutrino and other neutral particles that may escape detection in traditional detectors.

Moore explained that the recoil effect is similar to when “you are standing on a skateboard and throw a baseball; you go backwards because of the conservation of momentum”. This backward movement is measurable and would allow you to determine properties of the baseball, without measuring the baseball itself.

State-of-the-art techniques using mechanical sensors now allow the measurement of the momentum of a levitated nanoparticle in the quantum regime. These techniques are now sensitive enough to measure the momentum of a single neutrino emitted from such a nanoparticle. If an anomalous momentum were measured for even a tiny fraction of such decays, it could indicate the existence of a previously undetected heavy type of neutrino.

SIMPLE will observe and measure the momentum transfer of nuclei that decay by decays emitting neutrinos (such as nuclear beta decay), by implanting these nuclei in tiny nanoparticles and shining a laser at the nanoparticle during the decay process. When the neutrino is emitted, the entire nanoparticle moves by a tiny amount, and the nanoparticle motion can be detected through precise measurements of the photons bouncing off of it from the laser. Since the photons used to measure the sphere also carry momentum (and they also push on the nanoparticle), the act of measuring the nanoparticle position provides the limiting uncertainty on its recoil, as required by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. However, measurements of the nanoparticle recoil at the level given by Heisenberg uncertainty would allow properties of the neutrino to be inferred, including whether any decays emit neutrinos with a larger mass than expected.

A single trapped nanoparticle containing specific isotopes of interest for such decays could provide world leading searches for heavy neutrinos in only a month of integration time.

The future potential of these techniques is significant. Extending the same ideas to large arrays of nanoparticles could probe many orders of magnitude beyond the reach of existing searches for heavy neutrinos. While beyond the state-of-the-art, future extensions of these ideas may allow even the masses of the lighter neutrinos to be determined with similar techniques.

PRX Quantum

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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The Wright Lab is advancing the frontiers of fundamental physics through a broad research program in nuclear, particle, and astrophysics that includes precision studies of neutrinos; searches for dark matter; investigations of the building blocks and interactions of matter; exploration of quantum science and its applications for fundamental physics experiments; and observations of the early Universe. The laboratory’s unique combination of on-site state-of-the-art research facilities, technical infrastructure, and interaction spaces supports innovative instrumentation development, hands-on research, and training the next generation of scientists. Wright Lab is a part of the Yale Department of Physics and houses several Yale University core facilities that serve researchers across Yale’s Science Hill and beyond.

Mission

The mission of Yale Wright Laboratory is to advance understanding of the physical world, from the smallest particles to the evolution of the Universe, by engaging in fundamental research, developing novel applications, training future leaders in research and development, educating scholars, and enabling discovery.

Wright Lab supports a diverse community of scientists, staff, and students who advance our mission and fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations across Yale University and worldwide.

Climate Statement

The Yale Wright Laboratory is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion among all students, staff, and faculty. The goal of our lab community is to provide a safe and supportive environment for research, teaching, and mentoring. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core principles of our work place and part of the excellence we aim for.

Resources

Wright Lab, the Yale Department of Physics, and Yale University offer a number of resources on topics of climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition, the Committee on Climate and Diversity in the Physics Department is a point of contact for all questions and concerns. Please visit the following links for more information and a list of resources.

Collaboration

With its on-site core facilities and research program, Wright Lab fosters cross-disciplinary research collaborations across Yale University and worldwide. Wright Lab works with the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC) on novel solutions to the research computing challenges in nuclear, particle and astrophysics, and collaborates with the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (YCAA) on understanding dark matter in the Universe. Quantum sensors and techniques jointly developed with the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI) are used for axion searches at Wright Lab.

Wright Lab also has strong, interdisciplinary partnerships with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Yale Pathways to Science.

Funding

Wright Laboratory gratefully acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Department of Energy, Office of Science, High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the Krell Institute; the National Science Foundation; and Yale University.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The School of Medicine At Yale University: “Researchers decode targets for hundreds of signaling enzymes”

From The School of Medicine

At

Yale University

2.14.23
By Mallory Locklear

Media Contact
Fred Mamoun
fred.mamoun@yale.edu
203-436-2643

Kinases are essential for cell signaling. A new study matches hundreds of kinases to their targets enabling a deeper understanding of biological processes.

A kinase bound to an amino acid chain. (Image courtesy of the Turk lab)

When cells in the human body sense a change in the environment, molecules known as kinases can help them respond: these specialized enzymes activate proteins, propagating signals within a cell that ultimately alter its function. Yet if scientists want to understand the role of a specific kinase — and there are hundreds of them — they must first understand which protein it targets. In most cases, this is not known.

In a new analysis of more than 300 kinases in the human body, Yale researchers revealed new insights into which proteins these enzymes are more likely to target. What they found, they say, will lead to a deeper understanding of human biology and identify targets for disease treatment.

The findings were published in Nature [below].

Kinases are enzymes that facilitate a process called phosphorylation. Essentially, a kinase recruits a little piece of a molecule called a phosphate group, which consists of a phosphorus atom and four oxygen atoms, and helps attach it to a specific area of a protein known as a phosphorylation site.

“When a protein gets phosphorylated by a kinase, that flips a switch that can change the protein’s activity or where it goes in the cell. It can change the protein’s function in any number of ways,” said Benjamin Turk, an associate professor of pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine and co-senior author of the study. Other co-senior authors are Michael Yaffe at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lewis Cantley at Weill Cornell Medicine.

There are over 500 kinases in the human body that act on hundreds of thousands of phosphorylation sites. That variety, Turk said, speaks to how essential phosphorylation is to cellular processes.

“But not knowing which kinases go with which phosphorylation sites is a huge gap in knowledge,” he added.

To fill that gap, Turk and his colleagues focused on how kinases recognize their targets. Proteins are made up of amino acids, of which there are 20; kinases recognize short strings of amino acids that surround the phosphorylation site. For the study, the researchers put together different amino acid strings, using all of the possible amino acid combinations, and measured how quickly different kinases phosphorylated each of the amino acid strings.

“By looking at which chains are phosphorylated fastest and slowest, it tells you which sequences of amino acids are favored or disfavored by a particular kinase,” said Turk.

In an interesting finding, Turk said, the researchers discovered that some phosphorylation sites scored poorly for their known kinases. But they scored much worse for the other kinases.

“We think in cases like this it’s possible the phosphorylation site evolved to evade the wrong kinases rather than to increase recognition by the right kinase,” he said. “This tells us more about how specificity arises in these systems.”

The new study yielded an online resource that can now be used by other researchers. Those who want to know what their kinase of interest might phosphorylate — or what kinase their protein of interest is phosphorylated by — can use a search engine that produces a ranked list of possible options based on the study’s findings.

The results have also informed another project in Turk’s lab in which researchers are exploring a small group of kinases called mitogen-activated protein kinases, or MAP kinases. Each of these kinases has a very different role in the human body despite being quite similar to each other molecularly.

In a second study published in Science Signaling, Turk and his colleagues — including lead author Guangda Shi, who conducted the research as a graduate student in Turk’s lab and is now at the University of Pennsylvania — describe how different MAP kinases target their proteins and their varied effects. The work, they say, helps clarify how signaling pathways in cells can be as specific as they are and could have implications for understanding and treating diseases like cancer.

“Certain MAP kinases are frequently hyperactivated in cancer and they have become drug targets for treatment,” Turk explained. “Understanding how and where kinases act will help us understand their signaling pathways more deeply. And that will give us insight into all sorts of biological functions and where they go wrong in disease.”

Nature

Fig. 1: Profiling the substrate specificity of the human serine/threonine kinome.

a, Experimental workflow for the PSPA analysis and representative results. The schematic was created using BioRender. Z denotes fixed positions containing one of the 20 natural amino acids, or either phosphorylated Thr (pThr) or phosphorylated Tyr (pTyr). X denotes unfixed positions containing randomized mixtures of all natural amino acids except Ser, Thr and Cys. Darker spots indicate preferred residues. b, Dendrogram of the human protein kinome, highlighting the Ser/Thr kinases analysed in this study.

Fig. 2: Phosphorylation-site motif tree of the human Ser/Thr kinome.

Hierarchical clustering of 303 Ser/Thr kinases on the basis of their amino acid motif selectivity (PSSMs). Kinase names are colour labelled according to their phylogenetic relationships (top right)[2]

Fig. 3: Phosphorylation motifs for the human Ser/Thr kinome enable comprehensive scoring and annotation of the human phosphoproteome.

a, Schematic of the substrate-scoring process4. b, Results for Ser15 on glycogen phosphorylase alongside PSSM and the substrate motif logo of its established kinase glycogen phosphorylase kinase. c, The results for Ser15 of p53 alongside its established kinase ATM. d, Annotation of the human Ser and Thr phosphoproteome by percentile scores from 303 Ser/Thr kinases performed as shown in a. A total of 89,752 phosphorylation sites that were identified using high-throughput approaches4 and/or low-throughput approaches [3] were sorted along the x-axis by their numbers of kinases with percentile scores higher than 90. On the y-axis, kinase percentile scores were sorted by rank separately for each site and represented in the heat map. Examples of well-studied kinase–substrate relationships are highlighted (yellow squares). Inset: phosphorylation sites on the left end of the plot scored favourably for many kinases, whereas sites on the right end scored favourably for fewer kinases.

See the science paper for further illustrations.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813.

The primary teaching hospital for the school is Yale New Haven Hospital. The school is home to the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, one of the largest modern medical libraries which is known for its historical collections. The faculty includes 70 National Academy of Sciences members, 47 National Academy of Medicine members, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

U.S. News & World Report currently ranks the Yale School of Medicine 10th in the country for research and 59th in primary care. The M.D. program is highly selective; for the class of 2022, the school received 4,968 applications to fill 104 seats. The median GPA for the class was 3.89, and the median MCAT was 521.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.