Yale Day (YMUN LI)

+ Daniel Prober — Energy Technology for the 21st Century

Daniel E. Prober received the B.S. degree in physics from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, in 1970 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, in 1971 and 1975, respectively. He has been a faculty member at Yale University, New Haven, CT, since 1975. He is now a Director of Undergraduate Studies, Yale-Weizmann Institute Research Collaboration- Yale Director, and on the Graduate Admissions Committee and the Energy Studies Program Advisory Committee. Dr. Prober has received two Fulbright Fellowships, and the NASA Technical Innovation Award with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the superconducting hot-electron bolometer. He received the Yale Science and Engineering 2019 Award for the Advancement of Basic and Applied Science and the IEEE Council on Superconductivity ‘Lifetime Achievement Award, 2018’ for continuing and significant contributions in the field of superconductive electronics. Dr. Prober is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and CT Academy of Sciences.

+ Valerie Hansen — Chinese Cultural Revolution

Professor Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history. In the course of writing The Year 1000, she traveled to some twenty different countries and was a visiting scholar at Xiamen University in China, University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the Collège de France in Paris. Having lived in China for six plus years, Professor Hansen has visited at least 300 temples, climbed the Great Wall multiple times (once during a lightning storm), and posed next to the Terracotta Warriors eleven times (All this in the company of her husband and three children). Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1279, and Voyages in World History (co-authored with Kenneth R. Curtis).

+ Edward Wittenstein — Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power

Professor Edward (“Ted”) Wittenstein is a Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs and Director of the Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power, a signature teaching and research initiative of the Jackson School that examines how AI has the potential to alter fundamental building blocks of world order. A former diplomat and intelligence professional, Professor Wittenstein teaches undergraduate, graduate, and law courses on intelligence, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, national security decision-making, and the outer space domain. He also serves as Co-Director of the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy and the Yale Cyber Leadership Forum, as well as a visiting faculty fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges. Professor Wittenstein is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. Prior to returning to work for Yale, he held a variety of positions at the U.S. Department of Defense, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of State.

+ Ardina Hasanbasri — Data Analytics and Development Strategy

Ardina Hasanbasri is a Lecturer at the Jackson School of Global Affairs and a faculty affiliate at the Economic Growth Center. She teaches courses on fundamentals of economics and approaches to international development. Prior to joining Yale, Professor Hasanbasri taught in the Economics Department at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interest includes development, labor, property rights, gender, survey methodology and data analytics. Professor Hasanbasri is also a consultant at the World Bank's the Development Data Group focusing on the Living Standard Measurement Study-Plus (LSMS+) Survey.

+ Victoria Hallinan — The Moiseyev Dance Company and Depictions of Gender: A Comforting Message for Americans in a Time of Uncertainty

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. Professor Hallinan 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. Professor Hallinan 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.

+ Maureen Long — “Earth’s Changing Climate, Through Geologic History and Today”

Maureen Long is an observational seismologist who works on problems related to mantle dynamics, with a focus on subduction zone processes, the structure and evolution of continental lithosphere, and the dynamics of the deep mantle. In particular, Professor Long and her group work on the dynamics of subduction systems, using seismic observations and geodynamic models to understand subduction geodynamics, including volatile cycling, the generation and transport of melt, and slab morphology, rheology, and evolution. They also investigate seismic anisotropy and flow in the deep mantle, including the transition zone, uppermost lower mantle, and the core-mantle boundary region. Her research encompasses a substantial field component, with recent or ongoing seismometer deployments in the Pacific Northwest, Peru, the central Appalachian Mountains, offshore eastern North America, and New England. Long has been at Yale since 2009, and teaches courses (both undergraduate and graduate) on seismology, natural disasters, and forensic geosciences. She currently serves as Chair of the EPS department; in the past, she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and chair of the departmental IDEA committee. Professor Long is particularly interested in cultivating diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice within the EPS department and the field of Earth science. She is committed to public education and outreach, and ran the Field Experiences for Science Teachers (FEST) program at Yale, which provided one-week field experiences for Connecticut-based high school science teachers.

+ James Berger — Poetry for Life

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. Professor Berger lives in New Haven and has two daughters in high schools of the New Haven Public School System. Professor Berger has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia U., and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

+ 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. He received an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University and a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Adam Reid Sexton’s writing has been published in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Phoenix, the Mississippi Review, the New York Times, Off Assignment, Post Road, the Village Voice, and other publications. His books include Difficult Listening (forthcoming from Routledge) and Master Class in Fiction Writing: Techniques from Austen, Hemingway, and Other Greats (McGraw-Hill, 2005). With a team of visual artists he adapted four of Shakespeare’s tragedies as manga (Japanese-style graphic novels), and his anthology Rap on Rap was acquired by Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research.

+ Rasheed Tazudeen — Climate, Race, and Colonialism

Rasheed Tazudeen’s work is focused broadly on the intersections between ecology, race, and sound in 20th- and 21st-century literature and music. His first book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024), explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, he analyzes inhuman modernist literatures as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism’s planetary aesthetics as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come. Professor Tazudeen, alongside Sunny Xiang, co-founded and co-led the Yale English department’s Antiracist Pedagogy Reading Group from 2020 to 2022, and continues to be interested in antiracist teaching, thinking, and scholarship. He recently developed a research guide for the English department’s writing programs, Oral History as Decolonial Research Methodology, designed for both instructors and student researchers. The project centers oral histories and other forms of knowledge from Indigenous and community Elders and knowledge-keepers as essential to the academic research process. The main goals are to challenge existing norms that tend to further the silencing of Indigenous and Black diasporic voices within the academy and to create spaces for further dialogue between oral and written forms of history, knowledge, and thought.

+ Shelly Kagan — Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem

Shelly Kagan is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, and received his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1982. Before coming to Yale, Professor Kagan taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Kagan’s research focuses on normative ethics. Among other topics, he has published articles on the nature of well-being, Kantian ethics, the role of game-playing in utopia, and the use of moral intuitions in moral philosophy. His first book, The Limits of Morality, was a philosophical attack on two widely held views about the demands of morality, and his textbook, Normative Ethics, is a systematic survey of the field. His most recently published book, The Geometry of Desert, uses graphs to reveal the hidden complexity of the concept of moral desert. He is currently writing a book on Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics and another on animal ethics. Professor Kagan is a popular lecturer at Yale, where his two introductory classes, Intro Ethics and Death, have often attracted more than two hundred students. A book based on one of these classes, Death, has been a national bestseller in South Korea, and the lectures from this course, which have been viewed around the world, are particularly popular in China and Korea.

+ 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. Professor Scholl 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 Professor Scholl 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, Professor Scholl 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).

+ Joshua 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. Professor Gendron 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. Professor Gendron's 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.

+ Lester Oberg — How America Can Slay Its Next Fight…A Tactical Perspective

Colonel Les Oberg is the Commander of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Detachment 009, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Colonel Oberg is responsible for the education and training of ROTC cadets from Yale University and seven associated crosstown universities and colleges during their four-year officer education and training programs. Colonel Oberg also serves as a member of the Yale faculty as the Professor (Adjunct) of Aerospace Studies. Colonel Oberg entered the Air Force in 1996 after earning his commission from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He completed Intelligence Officer Training at Goodfellow AFB, Texas, in 1998 and is a career intelligence officer. He has commanded at the Squadron and Group levels and served in a variety of positions within Combatant Commands, Joint Staff, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Colonel Oberg combat deployments include Camp Ilidza, Bosnia Herzegovina in 1999 supporting Operation JOINT FORGE; and various Middle East locations in 2001, 2003, 2005 2007, 2009, and 2010 supporting Operations ENDURING FREEDOM and IRAQI FREEDOM.

+ Yale Math Competitions

Yale Math Competitions (YMC) is a club run by Yale undergraduates which hosts two high school math competitions each year. Through these events, YMC strives to provide fun, engaging problem-solving experiences for students with any level of math background as part of a greater mission of providing accessibility to pursuing passions in math and STEM. YMC will be hosting an estimathon during Yale Day. Attendees will then work in teams in an "estimathon" and there will be prizes for the team with the best set of estimates. We look forward to seeing you on Yale Day!

+ Yale Hemispheres

Hemispheres (called "Hemi" for short) is a free international relations teaching program serving students attending public high schools in the local New Haven community. On Fridays on Yale's campus, Hemi hosts lessons on international relations and related academic topics taught by Yale undergraduates. During lessons, students participate in discussions on current events and receive mentorship on college applications and professional development. Over the past few years, Hemi has established a consistent teaching program with over 40 students, travelled to 2 continents, and participated in many MUN conferences. In this workshop, attendees will learn more about Hemispheres, its mission and lessons, educational philosophy, and how to foster international relations education within their own communities.

+ Yale Brazil Club

Olá, Brasileirada! The Brazil Club at Yale (BCY) is a cultural organization dedicated to promoting Brazilian culture across campus. The BCY represents 72 Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students at Yale. It organizes weekly dinners, cultural events, and various lecture series to celebrate Brazil's rich heritage. The BCY also leads a volunteer initiative, "Yale Dream," to support Brazilian high schoolers in the college application process. During the workshop, BCY members will discuss the activities and projects BCY hosts, as well as cultural life at Yale. Attendees are encouraged to prepare their questions (e.g. on U.S. university applications, Yale's academic and social life, and the experience of living in the U.S.) in advance for an interactive Q&A session near the end. Até já!