News & Announcements

The theme of this year’s conference was “Historic Milestones and Future Directions: Innovative Strategies to Empower the Next Generation of Scholars.” Attendees included students, faculty and administrators from 28 institutions across the country.

Cole Jensen, a PhD student in computational biology and bioinformatics, was recently awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) F31 grant. Jensen is a computational biologist with experience in epidemiology, statistics, and evolutionary biology. His research interests include developing computational, evolutionary, and graph-based methods to study B-cell biology.

During their three-day visit in March, the group held 82 meetings with Congressional staff, think tanks, agencies, and other key stakeholders. Among the concerns that the group addressed were the Scientific Integrity Act; funding for the physical sciences; protections for lab animals; and wildfire prevention.

The Graduate School will hold a Diploma Ceremony for its MA, MS, MPhil, and PhD degree recipients on Monday, May 18, at noon in Woolsey Hall. The ceremony will be livestreamed.

The Graduate School hosted its annual 3-Minute Thesis Competition on March 26. Seven PhD students presented their research to the public. First prize went to Mitchell Rogers, a 4th-year PhD student in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, for his presentation, “Cozy Fires to Catastrophes: Revealing the Extensive Role of Wood Smoke on Air Pollution.”

Through a combination of stipend support and research funding, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) Graduate Policy Fellowship allows graduate students to spend a full year developing projects that speak to urgent policy debates. The program emphasizes translating research into usable insights, and past fellows have emerged with substantial written work — from dissertation material to publishable academic articles.

Hadas Dabas ’25 PhD (Genetics) is one of 32 early career researchers named as a 2026 Schmidt Science Fellow. The program allows emerging research leaders to pursue an ambitious “interdisciplinary pivot” by embarking on postdoctoral research in a new field of study from their PhD. Dabas will pivot to climate science, with a focus on engineering fungi to create self-sustaining biological carbon sinks to combat climate change.

Arin Korkmaz ’25 PhD (Psychology) completed his graduate studies in December 2025. A social psychologist, his dissertation research focused on the role of learning and memory processes in impression updating, or how and when we change our minds about others.

Sierra Cantway, a graduate student in physics and Yale’s Wright Lab, recently presented her thesis work at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). Cantway, a member of CERN’s A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), also supported detector operations during the visit. She contributes to the data-taking operations of the ALICE detector through her work on its ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMCAL), a subdetector designed to measure energetic photons, light neutral mesons, electrons, and jets that are produced through high-energy collisions of particles in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. 

Dalton Meyer ’25 PhD (Earth and Planetary Sciences) recently completed his graduate studies in December 2025. A vertebrate paleontologist, Meyer was part of a team that identified a new species of lizard during his dissertation research. The finding expands scientists’ knowledge of early gecko evolution and where these reptiles sit in the evolutionary family tree.