School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
November/December 2019

Alumni honored with Wilbur Cross Medals

The Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is awarded every year to distinguished alumni for contributions to scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and public service. The medal honors the legacy of excellent service set by Wilbur Lucius Cross 1889PhD, dean of Yale Graduate School from 1916 to 1930 and later governor of Connecticut from 1930 to 1939. The 2019 winners are Ruth Garrett Millikan ’69PhD (philosophy), Douglas R. Green ’77, ’81PhD (immunology), Susan M. Kidwell ’82PhD (geology & geophysics), and Urjit Ravindra Patel ’90PhD (economics). The four presented talks about their work during their visit to campus on October 7 to receive their awards.

Ruth Garrett Millikan is recognized for her scholarship in philosophy, having also received prestigious honors in cognitive science, systematic philosophy, and logic. Her most recent book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information(2017), is heralded as a “great philosophical achievement.” 

Douglas R. Green, Peter C. Doherty Endowed Chair of Immunology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, researches processes of cell survival and death, and discovered LC3-phagocytosis, which links autophagy pathway to phagosome maturation. He is an ISI highly cited researcher and published his most recent book, Apoptosis and Other Cell Death Mechanisms: Means to an End, in 2018.

Susan M. Kidwell, William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and recipient of the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the US National Academy of Sciences, is recognized for her work on anthropogenic impacts on the environment and contributions to the fossil record. 

Urjit Ravindra Patel, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Honorary Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, has extensive experience in monetary policy and financial stability. He is a prolific author and lecturer in the fields of international trade theory, climate change economics, and the global financial safety net.