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Engineering lessons from Ben and Jerry
November/December 2007
by Jessica Marsden '08
When Kyle Vanderlick, Yale's incoming dean of engineering, was
searching for a way to teach engineering to non-science majors at Princeton,
she went no farther than the freezer. Her freshman seminar The Engineering of
Ice Cream used the frozen dessert to explain everything from heat transfer to
the chemical composition of milk. Vanderlick says making her field accessible
to non-engineers will be a top priority when she comes to New Haven in January.
"We need to be there for all of Yale, not just for the engineering students,"
she says.
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Today, 30 percent of Yale's engineering majors are women. |
Vanderlick is currently the chair of the chemical engineering
department at Princeton, where she has taught for ten years. Originally from
Massachusetts, she received bachelor's and master's degrees from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and a PhD at the University of Minnesota. Her research
focuses on the interactions between surfaces and has applications in
nanotechnology and biology.
Vanderlick, who will succeed outgoing dean Paul A. Fleury, will be the
first woman to head Yale's engineering programs. While some engineering
disciplines -- including chemical engineering -- are approaching gender
parity, the field as a whole is still largely male-dominated. Today, 30 percent
of Yale's engineering majors are women, with nearly half of those in biomedical
engineering. But the gap is not as severe as it was when Vanderlick was at
Rensselaer in the late 1970s: then, she recalls, just one-tenth of the student
body were women.
Yale engineering is much smaller and lower-ranked than many of its
peers, but the university has put money and resources into engineering in the
last decade and developed discrete areas of strength. The Faculty of
Engineering is well positioned for growth, says Vanderlick: "The stars are very
much aligned for Yale engineering."
Honored
Playwright Lynn Nottage '89MFA, a visiting lecturer at the School of
Drama, is one of 24 people awarded a $500,000 fellowship from the MacArthur
Foundation this year. Nottage is best known for her plays Intimate Apparel and Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which was staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in
1998. The foundation praised her "rich poetic imagination" and "complex
characters." Also receiving one of the foundation's so-called genius grants was
alumna Cheryl Hayashi '88, '96PhD, a biologist at the University of California-Riverside
who has done influential research into the structure and function of spider
silks.
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences conferred the Wilbur Lucius
Cross Medal on four alumni on October 9. The recipients are Carol Christ '70PhD,
a scholar of English literature and the president of Smith College; Paul
Friedrich '57PhD, a poet and professor of anthropology, linguistics, and Slavic
languages; Anne Walters Robertson '84PhD, a classical pianist, music professor,
and University of Chicago administrator; and John Suppe '69PhD, a geology
professor at Princeton University and an expert on earthquakes. The Cross medal
is the Graduate School's highest honor.
The Association of Yale Alumni has chosen five alumni to receive the
Yale Medal in recognition of their service to the university. The honorees are Victor
E. Chears '74, AYA secretary from 1991 to 1992 and the former chair of the
board of the Afro-American Cultural Center; Samuel D. Kushlan '32, '35MD, a
longtime volunteer instructor at the School of Medicine; John E. Pepper Jr. '60,
a former member of the Yale Corporation who served two years as the university's
vice president for finance and administration; Jon E. Steffensen '68, AYA
secretary in 1987 and the chair of the Scholarship Trust of the Yale Club of
Boston; and Vera F. Wells '71, a dedicated fund-raiser for the Afro-American
Cultural Center and the Women Faculty Forum. Medal recipients will be honored
at the AYA Assembly in November.
Appointed
Steven Girvin and Judith Chevalier '89 have been named deputy provosts
of the university. The two will each take over a share of the portfolio of
former deputy provost Kim Bottomly, who left in the summer to become president
of Wellesley College. Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and
Applied Sciences, is now deputy provost for science and technology, and Chevalier,
the William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics, is deputy provost
for faculty development. Chevalier's responsibilities include increasing
faculty diversity. 
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