More news of Yale people

Allie Barton

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Appointed

The Yale Corporation, the university’s board of trustees, has selected Marta L. Tellado ’02PhD (left) as its new senior trustee. Tellado, who was president and CEO of Consumer Reports from 2014 to 2024, has been a trustee since 2022. She succeeds Joshua Bekenstein ’80 as senior trustee, a position the university describes as “a primary link between the trustees and the president.” The Corporation has also appointed Carter Brooks Simonds ’99 to a six-year term as a successor trustee. Simonds, who is managing partner of the private investment firm Four Pines Partners, has been a member of the Yale Investment Committee since 2011. 

Sunil Amrith, a history professor who also teaches in the School of the Environment, has been appointed vice provost for international affairs. Amrith, the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, studies human migration and environmental history. He is currently director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, a position he will retain. As vice provost he succeeds Steven Wilkinson, who became dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in January.

Stepping down

Law School dean Heather Gerken stepped down in August to become president of the Ford Foundation. Gerken was three years into her second five-year term as dean. In a message to the Yale community, President Maurie McInnis ’96PhD and provost Scott Strobel praised Gerken for her accomplishments as dean, among them the expansion of access to legal education through need-based aid and programs for veterans. Yair Listokin ’05JD, the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law and a deputy dean of the school, is serving as interim dean. 

Honored

The Yale Alumni Association will award its highest honor, the Yale Medal, to five alumni in a ceremony this fall. This year’s medalists are Robert Bildner ’72, a longtime volunteer for his class, the University Council, and development committees; Donna L. Dubinsky ’77, a former senior trustee of the university and cochair of the For Humanity fundraising campaign; Akosua Barthwell Evans ’90JD,a former board member of the YAA and YaleWomen and an active volunteer for the Yale Club of Michigan; Jerry W. Henry ’80MDiv, a former YAA board chair and active Divinity School alum; and William J. Poorvu ’56, who has served on the University Council and the Investment Committee and whose Poorvu Family Fund supported the creation of the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. The medal honors “extraordinary devotion to Yale’s ideals.”

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Remembered

Wen-Tao Cheng, a noted Taiwanese poet who taught at Yale from 1973 to 2004, died in New Haven on June 13. He was 91 years old. Cheng (left), who wrote his poetry under the pen name Zheng Chou-yu, was born in eastern China and moved with his family to Taiwan in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War. He came to the US and earned his MBA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At Yale he taught advanced Chinese classes in the East Asian languages and literature department as a senior lector and writer in residence. Taiwan’s TVBS News wrote that Cheng was “one of Taiwan's most celebrated literary figures, whose lyrical verses captured the melancholy of displacement and the tenderness of memory.”