News & Announcements

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.

Frankie Barrett ’25 PhD (American Studies) recently completed her graduate studies in December 2025. Her dissertation research focused on the history of corporate dollar stores and the political economy of the U.S. South. In a new Q&A, the Asheville, North Carolina native talks about how she first became interested in the ubiquitous discount retailers.

In her recent Tanner Lectures at Yale, historian Jill Lepore ’95 PhD (American Studies) argued that fears of a robot apocalypse — shaped by science fiction like “The Terminator” — reflects humanity’s destruction of the natural world.

José Aravena ’25 PhD (Public Health) recently completed his graduate studies in December 2025. His dissertation research focused on reducing dementia risk by identifying and promoting social determinants. In a new Q&A, he talks about how he first became interested in aging and brain health and shares some surprising findings from his fieldwork in southern Chile.