Introducing the inaugural cohort of YPS Doctoral Fellows
June 25, 2025
On June 18, Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) announced the 12 recipients of the Stella M. Hammond Planetary Solutions Fellowship, which was launched this spring in partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This inaugural cohort of YPS Doctoral Fellows includes 11 PhD students and one professional school student.
The multidisciplinary fellowship supports students advancing the YPS mission to catalyze all that Yale is, and all that Yale does in pursuit of planetary solutions. The participants’ research interests and perspectives are diverse, bringing exciting opportunities for trans-disciplinary collaboration.
Over the course of the two-year fellowship, the cohort will build community, learn together, and make positive impacts across a wide range of challenges. YPS Doctoral Fellows receive a supplemental stipend and research funding as well as trainings in areas such as leadership, grants management, systems thinking, and more.
The GSAS student fellows and research topics include:
Lucas Bertucci (Chemical Engineering)
Research Focus: recycling solar panel waste into photocatalytic devices which mitigate methane emissions through chemical capture and conversion via sunlight.
Cole Brookson (Epidemiology)
Research Focus: detection, estimation, and prediction of the effects of climate and climate change on infectious disease.
Ari Lerner (Management)
Research Focus: using mathematical modeling and optimization to guide conservation planning decisions
Victoria Meola (Chemical Engineering)
Research Focus: the design, synthesis, and analysis of polymer-based antiscalants to inhibit silica scaling for the improved efficiency of water treatment membranes.
Ella Milliken (Earth and Planetary Sciences)
Research Focus: the applications of carbon dioxide removal techniques (i.e., biochar, enhanced weathering, and manure transport optimization) in working land communities, aiming to develop optimized quantification methods for scaled deployments.
Tobias Muellers (Environment)
Research Focus: the intersection of safer chemical design and machine learning to design comprehensive frameworks to predict chemical and material properties, hazards, and functions.
Prajna Cauvery Kotera Pooviah (Environment)
Research Focus: examining how energy transitions unfold in everyday life in the Global South to understand how infrastructure, behavior, and policy interact to drive household-level decarbonization and development co-benefits, including the adoption of efficient appliances.
Luis Prieto (Spanish and Portuguese)
Research Focus: exploring the intellectual and institutional histories of Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Rob Rioux (Environment)
Research Focus: investigating how Critical Zone structure and hydrologic processes govern the effectiveness of enhanced rock weathering amendments for carbon dioxide removal, using novel monitoring, modeling, and field-based approaches across event, catchment, and continental scales.
Hayley Serpa (History of Science and Medicine)
Research Focus: examining how “population” emerged as a racialized and gendered tool of governance in the human and life sciences in Peru and the Andes-Amazon, and how it was contested by radical, feminist, and subaltern actors
Jay Zou (Applied Physics)
Research Focus: developing scalable inverse design methods to create efficient, high-performance photonic and complex physical systems for computation, communication, and sensing.