Campus clips

A Yale police officer has been placed on leave pending an investigation into a shooting in New Haven on April 16. Officer Terrance Pollock responded to a request for assistance from a Hamden officer to stop a car as part of an investigation of an attempted armed robbery. Both Pollock and the Hamden officer fired their weapons, injuring a passenger in the car, Stephanie Washington. Neither she nor the driver was charged with a crime; Washington was released from the hospital after being treated for her injuries. The state’s attorney’s office is investigating the incident. Yale vice president Janet Lindner wrote in a message to the Yale community that the university is conducting its own investigation and has hired a consultant “to conduct an assessment of Yale’s policing policies, practices, and training.”

The College Board is introducing a new metric to help colleges assess the disadvantages applicants have faced. Yale was one of 50 colleges that field-tested the Environmental Context Dashboard (referred to in the media as an “adversity score”) that takes into account factors such as high-school quality, neighborhood crime rate, and family income and education level. The information is provided to colleges along with students’ SAT scores. Dean of undergraduate admissions Jeremiah Quinlan ’03 told the Wall Street Journal that the new tool “is literally affecting every application we look at. It has been a part of the success story to help diversify our freshman class.”

Yale New Haven Hospital will build a new $838 million neurosciences center to focus on treating and researching Parkinson’s disease, ALS, strokes, and other disorders. The new center will be built at the hospital’s Saint Raphael campus and is scheduled to open in 2024. Yale School of Medicine dean Robert Alpern noted at the announcement of the new center that Yale is number one in the country in NIH funding for neuroscience research.