Nine PhD Students named 2024-25 Prize Teaching Fellows

April 24, 2025

Nine PhD students from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) have been named Prize Teaching Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year: Nicholas Berrettini (Film & Media Studies), Ben Card (English), Emily Cox (History of Art), Ilhan Gokhan (Biomedical Engineering), Diana Martinez-Montes (History), Frances Moore (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology), Wulfstan Scouller (History), Amber Sheu (Chemistry), and Lan Wei (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology).

“In addition to their profound impact on Yale’s research mission, graduate students make huge contributions to teaching. I am delighted to honor nine graduate students who are exemplary teachers,” said Lynn Cooley, dean of the Graduate School.

The Graduate School has awarded the teaching prizes annually since 2000. Recipients are nominated by their undergraduate students and the faculty members they assist while serving as Teaching Fellows.

Biographies of the winners are included below.

Nicholas Berrettini (Film & Media Studies)

Nicholas Berrettini is a PhD candidate in Italian and Film & Media Studies. Prior to Yale, he completed a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and earned an MA from Middlebury College. His dissertation, provisionally titled "Touring Italian Exceptionalism," interrogates the relationship between knowledge production, visual media, and Italian tourism. Nicholas’s research interests span modern Italian culture, foreign language pedagogy, media studies, and media literacy. He currently translates the magazine Prometeo liberato (Mondadori) into English. Nicholas has also collaborated with the Italian journals Fata Morgana Web and served on the editorial staff of the film journal Cinema et Cie. His publications and writings have appeared in Italian Quarterly, Scaffale aperto, and Il lavoro culturale.

Ben Card (English)

Ben Card is a PhD candidate in English and Early Modern Studies. His dissertation studies heresy-hunting and its afterlives in 17th century English literature. His scholarship has appeared in Milton Studies and Studies in the Novel, and in 2024 he won the Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching from the Department of English. From 2023-2024 he served as a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Poorvu Center, and in 2022 he received a Teaching Innovation Project grant for "Teaching Yale at Yale." In 2022-23, Ben was a Fox International Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; his research has been supported also by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and Marsh's Library in Dublin. Ben holds an MSt in English Literature, 1550-1700 from the University of Oxford, where he was the Joseph L. Allbritton Scholar at Brasenose College, and a BA from Georgetown University in English and Philosophy.

Emily Cox (History of Art)

Emily Cox is a PhD candidate in the History of Art. She is a historian of modern art and ideas, and her writing has appeared in Art History and Apollo. Her dissertation, Perverse Modernism: 1884-1900, draws a connection between two late-nineteenth-century phenomena: an acceleration of capital, on the one hand, and a remarkable burst of formal experimentation across Europe, on the other. With a novel methodology that tracks four motifs across fine and decorative arts, literature, and philosophy from London and Paris to Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Oslo, her dissertation offers a vision of modernism rooted in a venal transnationalism. Emily holds a BA with Highest Honors from the University of Virginia and an MSt from the University of Oxford, where she held an Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities.

Ilhan Gokhan (Biomedical Engineering)

Ilhan Gokhan is a MD-PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering. He investigates heart disease using tissue-engineered stem cell models, with a special interest in arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition that disturbs heart function and rhythm. Ilhan has served as a TF for Physiological Systems for the past four years, including one year as head TF, and enjoys sharing clinical anecdotes with his students to help them contextualize what they've learned. Ilhan is appreciative of his own mentors in the laboratory and clinic, and hopes to make teaching a key part of a future in academic medicine.

Diana Laura Martinez-Montes (History)

Diana Laura Martínez-Montes is a PhD candidate in History. Her dissertation presents a social political history of mass incarceration, the criminalization of migrants, and migrant protest in New York City from the 1980s to the 2010s. Diana Laura also curates The Bushwick Archive, a Brooklyn-based digital community archive that documents testimonies of dispossession, migrant place-making, and working-class urbanism in her home city. At Yale, she co-leads the Public Humanities Working Group. Prior to pursuing a PhD, Diana Laura worked in the crimmigration legal field where she advocated for incarcerated and migrant New Yorkers in post-conviction criminal proceedings. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in History and Spanish from Swarthmore College.

Frances Moore (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology)

Frances Moore is a PhD candidate in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. She is in the Bahmanyar Lab where she studies lipid metabolism. Outside of research, Frances is committed to making learning accessible and actively works to create spaces where her students can learn without fear of being ‘wrong’. Frances is extremely grateful to be a recipient of this award and wants to thank her students for believing in her. 
 

Wulfstan Scouller (History)

Wulfstan Scouller is a PhD candidate in History, focusing the on the social history and political economy of early America. His dissertation examines King Philip’s War, a late 17th century conflict between the United Colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, and several Native American nations, including the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Wabanakis. It identifies the transatlantic connections of goods, credit, and people that made the war possible, as well as the socio-economic and ecological reverberations around the New England region and Atlantic world. Wulf is from Monmouth, in South Wales.

Amber Sheu (Chemistry)

Amber Sheu is a PhD student in Chemistry. Her research primarily involves complex molecule synthesis. Prior to Yale, she obtained BS degrees in chemistry and biological sciences at UC Irvine, where she developed a passion for learning and teaching organic chemistry.

Lan Wei (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)

Lan Wei is a PhD student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In fall 2024, she was a teaching fellow for Plant Diversity and Evolution taught by Professor Erika Edwards. At Yale, she has also been a teaching fellow for Evolutionary Biology and Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Her academic work is largely driven by an interest in natural history, and her dissertation research explores the evolution and photosynthetic physiology of drought-adapted succulent plants within a comparative, phylogeny-based framework. Lan earned her BSc from the University of California, Berkeley, where she spent four semesters serving as a General Biology peer tutor and teaching a student-run introductory botany course. Having benefited from compassionate mentorship throughout her academic journey, particularly during her undergraduate and graduate studies, Lan aims to create a learning environment where all students feel supported.