School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
November/December 2008

Matriculating class encouraged to wonder

President Richard C. Levin welcomed 576 new graduate students "to the ancient and honorable company of scholars" at the beginning of the semester, and Dean Jon Butler encouraged them to cultivate their capacity for wonder. "The world of advanced knowledge, and of the graduate study you are here to pursue, is far more a world of questions than it is a world of answers. And the best questions -- the questions that unlock secrets we could not have imagined and the questions that will move your careers for decades -- are the questions wonder unfolds for us." The incoming students joined over 2,000 continuing students.

Competitive class represents some 50 countries

This year's entering class includes 449 doctoral and 127 master's degree students. They were selected from 8,766 candidates for admission, making 2008 one of the most competitive years in the history of the Graduate School. The most popular fields of study for doctoral students are biology and biomedical sciences (76), engineering and applied science (41) and chemistry (33). International students represent a significant minority of the entering class, which has 378 students from the U.S. and 198 from abroad. The countries sending the largest contingents of students are China (68), Korea (15), Canada (11), India (10), Japan (9), and Germany (8). In all, new students at the Graduate School hail from more than 50 countries. Doctoral students previously attended 218 different undergraduate institutions, with Yale sending the largest cohort (17), followed by Cornell (14), UC-Berkeley (13), Notre Dame (9), Peking University (9), and Brown, Stanford, Tsinghua, and Chicago (8 each).

Alumni receive Wilbur Cross medals

Five distinguished alumni received the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal -- the Graduate School Alumni Association's highest honor -- on October 7. This year's medalists are Robert Axelrod ’69PhD (political science), Stephen Emerson ’80MD/PhD (cell biology/immunology), Yoriko Kawaguchi ’72MPhil (economics), David M. Kennedy ’68PhD (American studies), and Laura Kiessling ’89PhD (chemistry). The medals, given every year since 1966, are named for Wilbur Cross (1862-1948), who was dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930.

Axelrod is the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. He is author of The Evolution of Cooperation, which has been translated into a dozen languages and cited in thousands of scholarly articles. Emerson became the 13th president of Haverford College in 2007. A clinical hematologist/oncologist specializing in the treatment of bone marrow stem cell disorders, his research has had a major impact on the field. Kawaguchi is a senator in the House of Councillors, Japanese Diet. She was the first female foreign minister of Japan. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and editor of the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Kiessling is the Hilldale Professor of Chemistry and the Laurens Anderson Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies carbohydrate-mediated biology, a field she pioneered.