Campus clips

A graduate student in cell biology died on June 20 in what Graduate School dean Jon Butler described as an apparent suicide. Sang-Ohk Shim, a sixth-year PhD candidate from South Korea, worked in a laboratory at the medical school; she had received psychiatric treatment for depression, friends told the Yale Daily News. Shim's death was the third violent fatality in the medical school community in nine months, following the murders of graduate student Annie Le in September and postdoctoral fellow Vajinder Toor in April.

Yale Police found $22,000 worth of lab equipment in a Woodbridge home in June as part of a larceny investigation involving the former director of Yale's Center for High Throughput Cell Biology. Lars Branden, who was hired to help found the new center in 2008 but resigned last year, lived in the house until separating from his wife; she apparently told police about the equipment, which had identification stickers like those used on Yale's West Campus, where the center is located. He told the journal BioTechniques that he had permission to store the equipment at home while the lab was being set up. He has not been charged with a crime.

A Yale sophomore was hit by a university police car on July 18 after he got off a campus shuttle bus. Yonglu Che '13 sustained severe injuries, state police said, but he was expected to recover in time to enroll for the fall term.

For one weekend in July, Yale's Jewish chaplain, James Ponet '68, was the country's most famous rabbi. Alongside a Methodist minister, Ponet officiated at the much-discussed wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky. Ponet told the Yale Daily News that "a number of people" had recommended him to the couple.