Yale Explores Boston addresses the future of cancer treatment, highlights collaboration

The newly minted “Yale Explores” series made its second stop May 15 at the Museum of Science in Boston for an evening connecting alumni, parents, and friends with three esteemed members of the Yale faculty and President Peter Salovey ’86 Ph.D.

The theme for the event was the “The Quest for Better Therapies.” It included a panel discussion led by award-winning New York Times columnist and Yale adjunct professor Carl Zimmer ’87 and featuring professors Akiko Iwasaki (immunobiology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology), Mark Saltzman (chemical and biomedical engineering), and Peter Schulam (urology).

The program was bookended by a pair of networking receptions where alumni, friends, and Yale faculty and staff could meet and talk over food and drinks.

“The Quest for Better Therapies” came roughly a month after the first-ever Yale Explores, which was held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and focused on urbanization as part of a discussion titled “The 21^st-Century City and Society.” The Yale Explores events are designed to bring together the greater Yale community by offering an interdisciplinary exploration of the current challenges facing our world.

“Interdisciplinary collaboration,” said Salovey, “shows how you can take a groundbreaking invention and move it from the clinic to the bedside to improve the lives of patients and their families.”

The May 15 session focused on just that. Before a crowd of 200-plus, Zimmer and the panelists considered the future of cancer treatment, immunotherapy, the key role of preventative care and early detection, and above all, the importance of combining their varied talents to combat cancer and other pressing medical concerns. Salovey followed the panel with a talk examining Yale’s role in this timely conversation.

“Yale is a complete university,” said Saltzman. “It has a great School of Engineering, a great School of Medicine, and a great School of Public Health, in addition to a great Law School, School of Management, and so many others. But it also has a culture of all these different units working together.”

Yale Explores will move to New York and Philadelphia in the fall, followed by events held in California in March 2019.