School Notes: Faculty of Arts & Sciences
May/June 2024

Five win Sloan Fellowships

Five FAS faculty members received Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships, an award recognizing outstanding research by early-career scientists and social scientists. Eduardo Dávila, assistant professor of economics; Zhou Fan, assistant professor of statistics and data science; Stavroula Hatzios, associate professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and of chemistry; Ryota Iijima, associate professor of economics; and Junliang Shen, assistant professor of mathematics, were recognized for achievements that position them as members of the next generation of scientific leaders. 

Illuminating the unseen

FAS faculty members Steve Lamoreaux, professor of physics, and Reina Maruyama, professor of physics and astronomy, have brought the Axion Longitudinal Plasma Haloscope (ALPHA) collaboration to Yale.  ALPHA involves physicists around the world in the search for dark matter, an unseeable substance that structures the universe. In partnership with their colleagues, Lamoreaux and Maruyama are using a small but powerful superconducting magnet to search for particles of dark matter. This project exemplifies the efforts of FAS scientists to pursue curiosity-driven questions.

Advancing public-facing humanities

FAS faculty are leading projects that bring humanities scholarship to new audiences. 

Citizens, Thinkers, Writers (CTW), founded by Bryan Garsten, professor of political science and humanities; Stephanie Almeida Nevin ’21PhD, postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the humanities; and Kathryn Slanski, senior lecturer in humanities and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is a tuition-free summer program that offers New Haven high school students opportunities to read foundational texts by thinkers ranging from Socrates to W.E.B. Du Bois, and to connect them to the present moment. Universities across the country have introduced programs that follow the CTW model. 

In April, the FAS’s public humanities program hosted the North Eastern Public Humanities Symposium. With events hosted at the New Haven Museum, the New Haven Free Public Library, art gallery NXTHVN, as well as on campus, the symposium highlighted the power of the humanities in communities beyond the university.