More news of Yale people

Michael Marsland

View full image

Remembered

Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, died on May 5. He was 66. Reed was a pioneer in nanotechnology and quantum computing, with 33 patents for molecular devices and other innovations. He came to Yale from Texas Instruments in 1990 and was on the faculty until his death.

Stephen Parks ’61, a noted figure in the book world who curated the Beinecke Library’s Osborn Collection of English manuscripts from 1967 to 2004, died on July 22. He was 81. The librarian at the Elizabethan Club for 44 years, he was active in bibliographic pursuits at Yale and beyond, and he was a mentor to many book-loving students.

Honored

Eight writers have been honored with the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, a $165,000 award inaugurated in 2013 and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This year’s winners in fiction are Dionne Brand (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago) and Renee Gladman (US); in nonfiction, Kate Briggs (UK/Netherlands) and Vivian Gornick (US); in poetry, Canisia Lubrin (Canada/Saint Lucia) and Natalie Scenters-Zapico (US); and in drama, Nathan Alan Davis (US) and Michael R. Jackson (US). The recipients will participate in the Windham-Campbell Festival, which will be held online this fall, and their work will be featured in an issue of the Yale Review. 

Appointed

Five faculty members have recently been named to a Sterling professorship, Yale’s highest faculty honor. They are Francesco Casetti (humanities and film and media studies), Ronald Coifman (mathematics), Menachem Elimelech (chemical and environmental engineering), Christine Hayes (religious studies), and Matthew Jacobson (American studies and history). Up to 40 active professors can hold Sterling professorships, which were endowed by a 1918 bequest from John W. Sterling.

Lynn Leong will be head coach of both the men’s and women’s varsity squash teams. Leong, who played on two national championship teams at Trinity College, joined the Yale coaching staff in 2017. She was named interim head coach earlier this year upon the retirement of Dave Talbott.

Also joining the ranks of varsity head coaches is Rachel Kahan, whose appointment as the Swensen-McMahon Head Coach of Women’s Tennis was announced in July. Kahan, who had a successful college tennis career of her own at Duke, was most recently head coach at Middlebury, where she led the team to the NCAA semifinals in 2018 and 2019. She succeeds Danielle McNamara.

Manisha Juthani, an infectious-diseases physician at Yale, has been appointed commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health. Juthani, who is an associate professor in the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, has been active in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic at Yale and beyond. She will take a public-service leave from the university to assume her new post.

John Whelan became the university’s vice president for human resources on August 1, succeeding Janet Lindner. Whelan comes to Yale from Indiana University, where he was named chief human resources officer in 2014 and vice president for human resources in 2018. Earlier, he held HR positions at Gillette Company, Bristol Myers Squibb, the University of Notre Dame, and Baylor University.

The deans of three professional schools have each been appointed to serve a second five-year term: Deborah Berke of the School of Architecture, Indy Burke of the School of the Environment, and Ann Kurth ’90MSN of the School of Nursing.