Yale Day (YMUN 50)

+ Josh Gendron — Illuminating the Plant Calendar

Professor Gendron has 25 years of experience studying the genetic and molecular basis of how organisms react to environmental cues. He performed his Ph.D. in Dr. Zhi-Yong Wang’s lab at Stanford University/ Carnegie Institution for Science where he studied the brassinosteroid signaling pathway in Arabidopsis with an emphasis on discovering and mechanistically describing signaling pathway components. In addition, he described how brassinosteroids control growth and organogenesis. He performed his post-doctoral research in Dr. Steve Kay’s lab at the University of California, San Diego and University of Southern California where he investigated transcriptional networks in the circadian clock of Arabidopsis. He was funded by a Ruth L. Kirchstein NRTSA award from the NIH. Furthermore, he spent one year as a visiting scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Bennett at University of California, San Diego studying mammalian protein degradation mechanisms and learning mass spectrometry techniques and analysis. As a professor at Yale University, he runs a research program that reveals the interplay of protein degradation and daily timing mechanisms in eukaryotes using reverse genetics and biochemistry in the model plant Arabidopsis. His work impacts our understanding of how plants sense and respond to environmental cues with the goal of making crops robust to rapidly changing climates. The work in the laboratory is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

+ Victoria Hallinan — The Moiseyev Dance Company: An Apt Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Weapon for an American Audience

Victoria Hallinan is Lecturer in the Humanities and Program Manager for the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs at Yale University. Her training is as an historian, receiving her bachelors in Cultural History and Musicology from Boston University, her masters in Comparative History from Brandeis University, and her PhD in World History from Northeastern University. Her teaching experiences include undergraduate and graduate courses in history, theory, methods, writing, and communication, and she has served in a variety of roles in higher education, including as faculty and administrator. Her current research and writing is split into two areas: continuing research on Cold War cultural exchange, especially between the United States and Soviet Union in the form of music and dance, and pedagogy and issues in higher education. She recently published her book The Moiseyev Dance Company Tours America: “Wholesome” Comfort during a Cold War in the Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond series at University Masschusetts Press.

+ Anibal Gonzalez-Perez — A Tale of Two 'Booms'

Aníbal González-Pérez (Ph.D. Yale University, 1982) is Professor of Modern Latin American Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. The recipient of a 2001 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, he is the author of seven books of literary criticism. His areas of interest include: Modernismo; Latin American Literature; Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean; interrelations of journalism and literature; literature and ethics; science-fiction, fantasy, and horror in Latin America.

+ Helen Siu — China-Africa Encounters: Navigating Across Inter-Asian Waters

Helen F. Siu is a professor of anthropology at Yale University and a former chair of the Council on East Asian Studies. She has conducted decades of fieldwork in Southern China, exploring agrarian change and the nature of the socialist state. Her recent focus has been on rural-urban interface in China, inter-Asian connections, China-Africa encounters, popular culture, and new political space in Hong Kong. Siu founded the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong to promote inter-disciplinary and inter-regional research. She has served on funding and research assessment committees in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her recent publications include a three-volume study Asia Inside Out (Harvard U Press, 2015, 2019) and Tracing China: A Forty-year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong U Press, 2016), and articles “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (Nov 2017), and “Financing China’s Engagements in Africa: New State Spaces along a Variegated Landscape,” in Africa 89 (4), 2019. Siu is also the executive producer of a documentary film on a Cantopop diva and Hong Kong political activist Denise Ho, entitled “Denise Ho: Becoming the Song” (Kino Lorber 2020).

+ Woo Kyoung-Ahn — Confirmation Bias: When is the last time you have changed your mind about something?

Woo-Kyoung Ahn is the John Hay Whitney Professor of Psychology at Yale University. After receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she was assistant professor at Yale University and associate professor at Vanderbilt University. In 2022, she received Yale’s Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence in the social sciences. Her research on thinking biases has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, and she is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

+ Joanne McGovern — Public Health, Disasters and Humanitarian Emergencies: Preparing for the Worse in a Changing World.

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Joanne E. McGovern is a highly decorated combat veteran and a Medical and Public Health Plans, Operations, and Intelligence executive with over forty years of disaster, humanitarian, and complex emergency experiences in both domestic and international settings.

For 34-years, Joanne served as a member of the United States Army, where she participated in combat missions, peacekeeping operations, disasters, and humanitarian responses around the globe in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, as well as here at home.

Since her retirement from the Army, she served as a senior advisor at the Yale New Haven Health System Center for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Response (YNHHS-CEPDR) whose mission is to reduce loss of life, injury, and illness by developing and delivering services across the nation and around the globe. She also served as a Program Director for the Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, on programs that addressed the needs of the elderly, and another that looked at the challenges surrounding opioid abuse. During the COVID pandemic, she served as the Program Director for Yale’s Contact Tracing and Outreach Program.

Currently LTC (R) McGovern reports to Yale’s Senior leadership on health threats that could impact the University and its community. She lectures on Crisis Communications, and on Medical and Public Health Disasters and Humanitarian Planning and Operations, at the graduate level, for both the Yale School of Public Health and the Defense Medical Readiness Training Institute. She has written extensively on the importance of emergency medical planning, mass casualty evacuation, decision making in a crisis, prehospital triage for mass casualties, mass fatality management and has been published in several journals and textbooks.

In her spare time, she is a member of Team Rubicon, an international non-profit disaster response organization that unites the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responder, to rapidly deploy emergency response teams, free of charge, to communities affected by disasters.

+ Robb Rutledge — The Neuroscience of Happiness

Robb Rutledge is an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University and a member of the Yale Wu Tsai Institute. He completed his PhD in Neural Science at New York University. Before joining the faculty at Yale, he was a Group Leader at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research at University College London. His lab uses smartphone games (https://happinessquest.app) to study what determines the decisions we make and the happiness we feel as a result of those decisions.

+ Catherine Yeckel — Dissecting the Challenges of Health Communication

Catherine Weikart Yeckel, MS, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). She received a Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Pittsburgh and a Doctoral degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston in Preventive Medicine and Community Health, specializing in human metabolism and nutrition. Her research interests are largely in cardiometabolic health issues associated with obesity and diabetes, especially the protection afforded by healthy lifestyle. Dr. Yeckel developed and currently instructs an integrative course for YSPH, Physiology for Public Health. She co-directed the Art of Public Health projects between graduate students of YSPH and Yale School of Art. She serves as a reviewer, scientific advisor, and consultant for diverse entities, including academic research groups, government agencies, museums, health practices, and companies.

+ Adam Sexton — What is a Story?

Adam Reid Sexton is a Lecturer in the English Department at Yale University and a Critic in Yale’s School of Art. His books include Master Class in Fiction Writing and the forthcoming Difficult Listening.

+ Matthew Morrison — Realist Medicine: Middlemarch, Bovary and Ivan Ilyich

Matthew Morrison, M.D. is an Emergency Physician in New York, and has been a lecturer at Yale in the Medical Humanities since 2019. He is a graduate of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (2012), and the Mt. Sinai-Morningside Emergency Medicine Residency (2015). He has taught with Yale's Prison Education Initiative, Warrior-Scholar Project, and the New York Botanical Garden, and he has contributed writing to Film Comment, Singh’s Case-Based Neurology, and Mattu’s Avoiding Common Errors in the Emergency Department. His interests include the “two cultures” of Rationalism and Romanticism; physician-writers – including Bulgakov, Chekhov, Henry Marsh, Lisa Sanders, and Oliver Sacks; philosophy of science – particularly Feyerabend and Karl Popper; phronesis; medical ethics; and ‘prosaic Romantic’ thinkers – including Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, William James and Mikhail Bakhtin.

+ Arielle Baskin-Sommers

Dr. Arielle Baskin-Sommers is an Associate Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Law and a licensed clinical psychologist at Yale University. Her work focuses on identifying and specifying the cognitive, emotional, and environmental mechanisms that contribute to antisocial behavior. She examines these mechanisms in a wide variety of individuals, including those who suffer from substance use disorders, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and those who chronically engage in risky behavior. A guiding principle of her research is that focusing on the behavior alone may be misleading, and that understanding the underlying mechanisms associated with specific behavioral expressions is needed to precisely conceptualize and intervene in antisocial behavior. Dr. Baskin-Sommers has published over 100 articles in top-tier journals, such as Biological Psychiatry, PNAS, and Psych Science, and has been the recipient of several awards, including Early Career Awards from the American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Baskin-Sommers also has spoken with media, community, and national and international organizations interested in more humane (and scientific) approaches to mental health and crime.

+ Brian Scholl — 6 Reasons That What (and How) You See is More Fascinating Than You Think!

Brian Scholl is Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Cognitive Science Program at Yale University, where he also directs the Perception & Cognition Laboratory. He and his research group (funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, and the Templeton Foundation) work on several topics in cognitive science, with a special focus on how we see and how we think, and how perception interacts with (and provides a foundation for) other aspects of our mental lives. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and the Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award, both from the American Psychological Association, and is a past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He has also lectured for One Day University, and has been featured regularly on Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel. At Yale he has also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Cognitive Science, and has great fun teaching the 'Introduction to Cognitive Science' course. He is currently the only faculty member at Yale to have received both the major prize from the Graduate School (the Graduate Mentor Award) and the major prize in the social sciences from Yale College (the Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences). Before coming to Yale, he received a B.A. in Computer Science from Carleton College, a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Rutgers (working with Zenon Pylyshyn), and did postdoctoral work at the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory (working with Ken Nakayama).

+ Rasheed Tazudeen — Climate, Race, and Colonialism

Rasheed Tazudeen is Lecturer in English at Yale University. He teaches and researches in the fields of 20th and 21st century literature and music, Global Modernism, Environmental Studies, Black Diasporic and Caribbean Studies, and Sound Studies. His first book project, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (forthcoming from Cornell University Press in July 2024), explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. He is at work on a second book project, The Musicked Earth: Towards a Decolonial Sound Ecology, which examines the sound-based environmentalisms emerging from the diasporic and decolonial imaginaries of Black Atlantic, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean novelists, poets, and musicians including Sylvia Wynter, Alice Coltrane, Maryse Condé, and Cyril Dabydeen. Courses he has taught at Yale include “Black and Indigenous Ecologies,” “Hearing the African Diaspora,” “The Grotesque,” and “Global Sound.” He is an avid classical and Bach-obsessed violinist, sometime percussionist, and amateur cellist, and loves listening to and experimenting with a wide range of musical genres. He believes in empowering students by helping them towards deeper forms of engagement and communion with the beings, places, communities, ancestors, and worlds surrounding them.

+ James Berger — Why Did Cassandra Fail?: Paths and Impasses Toward a Livable Future

James Berger is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale. He is author of two academic books (After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity); three books of poetry (Prior, Under the Impression, and The Obvious Poems and the Worthless Poems); and he is conduit and midwife of The OBU Manifestoes, vols. 1&2. He lives in New Haven and has two daughters in high schools of the New Haven Public School System. James has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia U., and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

+ Yale Math Competitions

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+ Yale Daily News — Journalism 101

The Yale Daily News is the nation's oldest college daily newspaper and has been financially and editorially independent since 1878. Hear from YDN and learn how to write articles, navigate media coverage, and much more in the world of Journalism

+ Yale Review of International Studies

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