Graduate School honors four exceptional alumni with 2025 Wilbur Cross Medal

On October 20, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) awarded Wilbur Cross Medals to four outstanding alumni, whose scholarship and other contributions were celebrated during a series of campus events.  

This year’s honorees are: 

• Acclaimed cultural historian Philip J. Deloria ’94 PhD (American Studies), the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University
• Modern linguistics pioneer Samuel Jay Keyser ’62 PhD (Linguistics), professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor in chief of the journal Linguistic Inquiry
• Physicist Andrew J. Lankford ’72, ’78 PhD (Physics), Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine
• A leader in personalized cancer medicine, Jeffrey Settleman ’89 PhD (Genetics), the chief scientific officer for oncology research and development at Pfizer 

The Wilbur Cross Medals, the highest honor the Graduate School bestows on its alumni, are given annually by the GSAS Alumni Association for exceptional teaching, scholarship, public service, or academic administration. The awards celebrate the legacy of service and achievements of Wilbur Lucius Cross 1889 PhD, who served as dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930 and was Connecticut’s governor from 1930 to 1939. 

“Our Wilbur Cross Medalists exemplify Yale’s mission to lead in the preservation, advancement, application, and dissemination of knowledge. They represent the highest achievements in their fields,” said Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley in her remarks.

“Their successes as Graduate School alumni inspire our students and benefit all of humankind and have powerfully changed the world for the better,” she added.

Yale President Maurie McInnis also spoke during the ceremony. 

"Our honorees… work will nourish generations of scholars, and sustain the acceleration of progress in their fields, long into the future. You embody the highest fulfillment of Yale’s mission to solve the most urgent challenges of our day, and to serve society with light and truth," McInnis said.  

Other university leaders in attendance included Scott Strobel, university provost, and Steven Wilkinson, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.   

Short profiles of the honorees follow: 

Philip J. Deloria ’94 PhD, American Studies  
Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context. His books include “Playing Indian,” “Indians in Unexpected Places,” “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” and “American Studies: A User’s Guide” (with Alexander Olson). 

Deloria served as a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where for many years he chaired the Repatriation Committee. He is former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians. His honors include election to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Samuel Jay Keyser ’62 PhD, Linguistics  
Samuel Jay Keyser is a theoretical linguist who studies the history and structure of the English language and linguistic approaches to literary criticism. An early collaborator with Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, who reshaped modern linguistics studies, Keyser has made key contributions to the field. He is the founder and long-serving editor in chief of the journal Linguistic Inquiry, a premier publication in the field, and the Linguistics Inquiry Monographs, which recently published its 90th volume. 

Keyser taught at Brandeis University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also served as a top administrator, including as special assistant to the chancellor. He is currently professor of linguistics emeritus at MIT. Since retiring, Keyser has written about the history of ideas in the arts in “The Mental Life of Modernism” and “Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts.” Outside academia, Keyser is also a poet, travel writer, memoirist, and jazz trombonist. 

Andrew J. Lankford ’72, ’78 PhD 
Andrew J. Lankford is a particle physicist who has searched for new fundamental particles and new phenomena at colliding beam accelerators around the world. He was deputy spokesperson of the international ATLAS Collaboration during the inaugural years of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, a long-sought-after fundamental particle. He shared the 2013 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society for the discovery. He also shared the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the successful research program conducted at CERN since the Higgs discovery. 

Lankford is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine. He has served on and led numerous national and international advisory panels in the fields of particle physics, nuclear physics, and cosmology. As chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, he oversaw the development of a U.S. strategic plan for particle physics. 

Jeffrey Settleman ’89 PhD, Genetics 
Jeffrey Settleman is an internationally recognized leader in molecularly targeted cancer therapeutics, the epigenetics of cancer drug resistance, and personalized cancer medicine. He has held numerous positions in both academic research and drug discovery and is currently chief scientific officer for oncology research and development at Pfizer, where he leads all oncology research from the beginning stages of discovery to proof-of-concept clinical studies. 

Settleman was a professor at the Harvard School of Medicine for 18 years and during his tenure was named the Laurel Schwartz Professor of Oncology. During that time, he also served as director of the Center for Molecular Therapeutics, was scientific director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and led the Cancer Cell Biology program of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Prior to joining Pfizer, he was a head of oncology research at Calico Life Sciences and led Discovery Oncology at Genentech.