School Notes: Yale College
January/February 2010

Junior faculty honored

In October, the Yale College dean’s office announced the 2009–2010 recipients of three annual awards for outstanding junior faculty—the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research, the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research, and the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

The Greer Prize was awarded to Jack Harris, associate professor of physics, for his pioneering work in mesoscopic quantum systems. An innovator of research methods in this emerging area, Harris has successfully devised and implemented the use of tools that enable breakthrough study of previously unresolved problems in the field.

The four recipients of the Heyman Prize are Milette Gaifman (assistant professor of history of art) for her soon-to-be-published work, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity; Aaron Gerow (associate professor of film studies and East Asian languages and literatures) for his book A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan; Edward Rugemer (assistant professor of African American studies and history) for his first book, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War; and Caleb Smith (assistant professor of English) for his recent publication, The Prison and the American Imagination.

The Poorvu Award was given to Thierry Emonet, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, for his leadership role in fostering scholarship in computational biology through his course, Systems Modeling in Biology; and to Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, associate professor of religious studies, for his interdisciplinary teaching of modern religion, including his co-teaching (with Professor Charles Bailyn of the Department of Astronomy) of the Shulman Seminar, Religion and the Big Bang.

All three prizes are conferred in the form of research funds to support the recipients’ further scholarship and research. The award winners also were honored at a dinner in November at the Graduate Club.

Student journalists receive national honors

Several current and recently graduated Yale College students were recognized in the past year for their submissions to national writing competitions. Six students were among those honored by the Norman Mailer High School and College Writing Awards for creative nonfiction—Laura Gottesdiener CC ’10 and Jerry Guo TD ’09 were finalists in the competition, while Alice Baumgartner BK ’10, Anthony Lydgate DC ’10, Aditi Ramakrishnan TD ’09, and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin TD ’11 were named as semifinalists.

The Rolling Stone College Journalism Competition recognizes annually the single most outstanding work of nonfiction published in a college student newspaper or magazine. The 2009 winner was Isaac Arnsdorf DC ’11, for his September 10, 2008, Yale Daily Newsarticle, “The Man Who Duped the Ivy League.” A history major and current managing editor of the Daily, he received a cash prize of $2,500 for his winning entry. To read the story, visit www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2008/09/10/the-man-who-duped-the-ivy-league/.