Finding the stories in fossils
January/February 2008
by Bruce Fellman
"I've always liked museums -- there are extraordinary things in museum drawers," says Derek E. G. Briggs, who in July will become the 16th director of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. "And there's always the possibility of making an
exciting discovery with something that appears out of nowhere."
Briggs would know. When he was a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s, Briggs, a fellow student, and their professor reanalyzed 510-million-year-old fossils from British Columbia that had been lying in museum drawers. Their findings overturned conventional thinking about
the early evolution of life.
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"We're planning make imaginative use of Yale's new West Campus." |
Originally from Ireland, Briggs held several teaching positions in English universities before joining the Yale geology and geophysics faculty in 2003. In his work here he has analyzed, and created digital models of, the internal anatomy of a group of 425-million-year-old seafloor invertebrates whose soft tissues were unusually well preserved in fossils. He serves as curator of the 4 million to 5 million specimens in the Peabody's invertebrate paleontology collection and director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, a center for training
and research in the environmental sciences.
Briggs was named to head the Peabody when the current director, Michael Donoghue, decided not to seek a second term. Briggs plans to move forward on Donoghue's initiatives to build new public and exhibit space, update existing displays, and expand the museum's outreach efforts. "We're also planning make imaginative use of Yale's new West Campus to enable some of our collections to be more accessible and better preserved, as well as to use the site's outdoor areas for environmental education programs," says Briggs. "This museum has a lot of
important contributions to make."
Appointed
The university hired Gwendolyn Sykes away from NASA last fall to become Yale's first-ever chief financial officer. Sykes, who was named one of Black Enterprise magazine's 50 most powerful women in business in 2006, spent four years as NASA's CFO, where she oversaw the financial management of the $16 billion agency. At Yale, she is responsible for
the budgeting, accounting, and financial reporting processes.
Best-selling novelist Jonathan Safran Foer will be a visiting professor in the English department this semester. Foer, the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything Is Illuminated, will teach a course in intermediate fiction writing and advise a handful of creative writing students. His September master's tea drew a standing-room-only crowd, and admission to his seminar -- which is capped at 15 students -- is expected to be a hot ticket in the
spring.
Selected
Yale students Ben Eidelson '08 and Isra Bhatty '10JD are headed for Oxford next year as part of the newest class of Rhodes Scholars. Eidelson, a former North American Parliamentary Debate champion, will study philosophy. Bhatty, a graduate of the University of Chicago, will take a two-year leave from the Law
School to study evidence-based social intervention programs.
Honored
Yale College's Chinese-speaking debate team won the International Varsity Debate series in Beijing in November, holding forth in Mandarin on issues ranging from bullfighting to college admissions. Debaters J. T. Kennedy '09, Adam Scharfman '08, Nick Sedlet '08, and Austin Woerner '08, none of them native speakers of Chinese, made it to Beijing by outdebating Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard
earlier in the fall.
Remembered
Eugene Waith '35, '39PhD, an emeritus professor of English, died October 25 at the age of 94. Waith was a scholar of Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama, and his research focused on the development of early modern dramatic genres. Except for a stint in the army during World War II, he taught at Yale from 1939 until he retired in 1983. He received the DeVane Medal for distinguished teaching in
1984.
History of art professor emeritus George Hersey '54MFA, '64PhD, an expert on Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture, died October 23 at the age of 80. Hersey first came to Yale in 1954 to study drama, but soon realized his true interest lay with art history. He returned in 1959 to pursue a doctorate, and
taught at Yale from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. 
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