News & Announcements

The program includes remarks from President Maurie McInnis, Dean Lynn Cooley, University Chaplain Maytal Saltiel, and a performance by student a cappella group The Yale Citations.

The students were chosen for the five-year fellowship because their research is on the path to making significant advancements.

A Yale-led study has found that night lizards, small reptiles that inhabit North and Central America, survived the extinction event that wiped out most life on Earth — despite living near ground zero. The lead author is Chase Brownstein, a PhD student in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.

Ana Fernández-Blázquez, a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, was selected for the Sigma Delta Pi and Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas’ Ana María Matute Award, which is given to a graduate student who has excelled in their courses in Spanish and is an exemplary university citizen.

The cohort includes 11 PhD students and one professional school student. The two-year fellowship supports students advancing the YPS mission to catalyze all that Yale is, and all that Yale does in pursuit of planetary solutions.

Emily Yankowitz PhD ’25 (History) received two departmental awards and the university’s the John Addison Porter Prize for her dissertation on American citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment. In a new Q&A, she talks about how she first became interested in this timely topic.

A new Yale study advances the ability of genome engineers to edit multiple DNA sites by threefold, and helps prevent unwanted mutations in the process. PhD student Anabel Schweitzer is the first author of the study, which was published in Nature Communications.

Matthew Dudley PhD ’25 (History) received the university's Theron Rockwell Field Prize for his dissertation on the early modern Cairo Geniza, a trove of historical documents dating back to 950 CE. In a new Q&A, he shares insights from his analysis of hundreds of legal and state documents in the collection.

Michael Grunst PhD ’25 (Microbiology) received the university's John Addison Porter Prize for his dissertation on viral Spike proteins. We sat down with Grunst to learn more about his research process, his journey to Yale, and what’s next in his career.

Mitchell Herrmann, a PhD student in the History of Art, has been named a 2025 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow, one of only 20 selected. Herrmann studies modern and contemporary art with particular interests in ecology and the environment, media and technology, and critical theory. His dissertation focuses on the theme of biological life in contemporary art.