Mapping the New Haven religious landscape
Divinity School students will be conducting a
detailed mapping of New Haven religious life. The mapping project aims to
produce an exhaustive inventory of the Elm City's religious communities,
ranging from those that meet in hotel ballrooms and community centers to
traditional churches and synagogues. The effort is being led by Harlon Dalton
’73JD, an Episcopal priest, YDS adjunct professor, and professor at the Law
School.
The mapping project is part of a
larger, three-year initiative to prepare students for social justice
ministries, through a $250,000 grant awarded recently by the Jessie Ball duPont
Religious, Charitable, and Educational Fund. The initiative includes an
intensive course designed to give students the leadership skills necessary to
create change in communities, as well as the development of new curricula at
the Divinity School to groom students for social justice work.
Are we safe? At what cost?
The 2008 Sarah Smith Memorial Conference is grappling
this autumn with questions of how faith can be used constructively to engage
security concerns in new ways. The September 18-19 interdisciplinary event,
entitled "Are We Safe Yet? Vulnerability and Security in an Anxious Age," takes
as a premise that security -- as traditionally pursued -- comes only at an
extremely high price, in human and financial terms. Open to the public, the
conference will bring together pastors, politicians, academics, and business
leaders. Planned participants include Academic Dean Emilie Townes, currently
president of the American Academy of Religion, and former Canadian MP Douglas
Roche, who now heads an international consortium of nonprofit organizations
that focus on nuclear disarmament issues. The annual forum, named after a YDS
alumna with a passion for moral leadership, is co-hosted by the Yale Center for
Faith & Culture.
The Pastor's Study: learning what it's like to serve
the church
One of the perennial challenges of Divinity School
students is how to integrate academic pursuits with pastoral aims. A new weekly
program, The Pastor's Study, aims to expose students to a variety of choices
and experiences. The series of ten luncheon encounters spans the fall term and
features speakers ranging from a local rabbi talking about what Christian
clergy need to know about Jews, to Yale University Chaplain Sharon Kugler
discussing how to build a multi-faith outreach in a diverse academic setting.
The Pastor's Study is part of a new effort, headed by Assistant Dean William
Goettler, to enhance support offered by the school to the roughly 50 percent of
the student body bound for church-related careers. The series began on a more
modest scale last year. During one encounter, homiletics professor Thomas
Troeger, an accomplished writer of hymns and a musician, advised students, "I
have told you what I do, hoping that you may discover in the specifics of my
life what you need for the specifics of your life as a preacher."
School of Drama
James Bundy, Dean
www.yale.edu/drama
Students named Greene Foundation fellows
Brian Hastert ’09, Teresa Avia Lim ’09, Luke
Robertson ’09, and Erica Sullivan ’09 are the first recipients of the Jerome L.
Greene Foundation Fellowship, which underwrites the full tuition and living
expenses of four students in the acting department in their third and final
year of training. The Jerome L. Greene Foundation made a $3.235 million gift in
January to the Yale School of Drama -- the largest single gift for scholarship
ever made to the school -- to establish the endowed scholarship fund.
2008 Yale Drama Series Award
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee has
selected Grenadine by
Neil Wechsler (Yale College ’96) as the recipient of the 2008 Yale Drama Series
Award, an annual award inaugurated in 2007 that supports emerging playwrights.
Wechsler will be awarded the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000; his play will be published by Yale University
Press and will receive a reading at Yale Repertory Theatre. The Yale Drama
Series Award is funded by a gift from the David Charles Horn Foundation, and is
jointly sponsored by Yale University Press and Yale Repertory Theatre. British
playwright David Hare has been named the judge for the 2009 and 2010
competitions.
Yale Rep honored by Connecticut theater critics
The Connecticut Critics Circle, a statewide
organization of theater critics in various media, has recognized the Yale
Repertory Theatre with four awards. The cast of Boleros for the Disenchanted -- Lucia Brawley ’02MFA, Joe
Minoso, Gary Perez, Adriana Sevan, Felix Solis, and Sona Tatoyan -- was named
outstanding ensemble; Riccardo Hernandez won for outstanding set design, in The
Evildoers; Patricia
Kilgarriff was named outstanding actress in a play for her role in A Woman
of No Importance; and Anya Klepikov
’08MFA received the outstanding costume design award for the same production.
School of Engineering & Applied Science
T. Kyle Vanderlick, Dean
www.eng.yale.edu
Electrical engineering professor receives technology
award
Tso-Ping Ma, the Raymond John Wean Professor of
Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2008 Connecticut Medal of
Technology, the highest honor for technological achievement in fields crucial
to Connecticut's economic competitiveness.
Early in his career, Ma did research
at IBM on advanced silicon device technology and ionizing radiation effects in
metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices. He joined the Yale faculty in 1977,
where his research and teaching have focused on microelectronics,
semiconductors, MOS interface physics, ionizing radiation and hot electron
effects, advanced gate dielectrics, flash memory device physics, and
ferroelectric thin films for memory applications.
Ma's ongoing research has had a
major impact on the high-tech industry and many of his students have gone on to
leadership positions in the semiconductor and computer hardware field. He has
served as the principal investigator of joint R & D projects with numerous
companies worldwide, including IBM, Intel, Motorola, Lucent Technology, GE,
Hughes, Rockwell Semiconductors, Philips, Siemens, Hitachi, Toshiba, and
Mitsubishi Electric.
Tang selected for symposium
Hong Tang, professor of mechanical and electrical
engineering, has been selected to participate in the 2008 Frontiers of
Engineering Symposium. The three-day event, hosted by the National Academy of
Engineering, brings together engineers who are performing exceptional
engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The
symposium will be held September 18-20 at Sandia National Laboratories at the
University of New Mexico and will examine emerging nanoelectric devices,
cognitive engineering, drug delivery systems, and understanding and countering
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The participants -- from
industry, academia, and government -- were nominated by fellow engineers and
chosen from a large pool of applicants.
Professor named neural networks pioneer
Kumpati Narendra, the Harold W. Cheel Professor of
Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Computational
Intelligence Society (CIS) Neural Networks Pioneer Award, recognizing his
contributions to the theory of identification and control using artificial
neural networks.
The Pioneer Award recognizes
significant contributions to early concepts and developments in the neural
networks field. The contributions have to be made at least 15 years prior to
the award date. Narendra's paper entitled "Identification and Control of
Dynamical Systems Using Neural Networks" was published in the first issue of
the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks in March 1990, and essentially started the field of
neurocontrol. The paper has been cited more than 3,000 times since publication.
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
James Gustave Speth, Dean
www.environment.yale.edu
Americans willing to pay more for "green" products
Many Americans, including those who are enduring
financial hardship, are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly
products, according to a survey conducted by the environment school and GfK
Roper Public Affairs & Media. "Many American consumers, even in the face of
economic uncertainty, express a willingness to pay more for environmentally
friendly products," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on
Climate Change. "Toyota can't make the Prius fast enough to meet consumer
demand, to cite just one example, and many see 'green' products as the wave of
the future."
Half of the respondents to the
survey said they would "definitely" or "probably" pay 15 percent more for
eco-friendly clothes detergent (51 percent) or for an automobile (50 percent).
Forty percent said they would spend 15 percent more on "green" computer printer
paper and 39 percent would do the same for "green" wood furniture. Americans
who said their current financial situation is "fair" or "poor" were just as
willing to spend 15 percent more on environmentally friendly detergent or wood
furniture as those Americans more confident of their current financial
situation.
Environmental problems require shift in values
Successfully confronting today's environmental and
social challenges requires a re-examination of the values and worldviews that
shape our perceptions of nature and society, according to an environment school
report, "Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural
Communities." The report synthesizes the insights and recommendations of more
than 60 leaders in the natural and social sciences, philosophy, communications,
religion, public policy, business, and the creative arts, which were generated
during a conference organized by the environment school last fall in Aspen,
Colorado.
The first section of the report
seeks to identify and understand the contemporary worldviews that pose barriers
to grappling successfully with environmental and social needs. The second
addresses the changes in values needed to strengthen human ties with each other
and with the natural world, and identifies steps toward realizing these goals.
The report can be found at http://environment.yale.edu/newconsciousness.
New Internet tools promote faculty research
Visitors to the Yale University and environment
school's websites, as well as to entertainment portals such as YouTube and
iTunes, can now access faculty research in audio and video.
To date, the environment school has
created four video and eight audio podcasts that aim to inform and educate the
public about pressing environmental issues. These can be downloaded to cell
phones, MP3 players, and computers.
The videos feature faculty
discussing their research in such areas as the discovery of hermaphrodite frogs
in the suburbs of the Connecticut River Valley and predator-prey relationships
in the meadows of Yale-Myers Forest. Audio segments cover such stories as the
effects of "green" practices on a business's bottom line and how agriculturally
based countries in middle and low altitudes will suffer disproportionately from
the effects of climate change.
loading
Print
Email