While on campus to receive the Wilbur Cross Medal, four alumni of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences also delivered lectures about their research to the departments in which they received their academic training.
The Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is awarded annually to distinguished alumni for contributions to scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service. The medal honors the legacy of service set by Wilbur Lucius Cross (Ph.D. 1889), dean of the Yale Graduate School from 1916 to 1930 and later Governor of Connecticut from 1930 to 1939.
The Wilbur Cross Medalists — Ruth Garrett Millikan ’69 Ph.D. (philosophy); Douglas R. Green ’77 B.S., ’81 Ph.D. (biology); Susan M Kidwell ’82 Ph.D. (geology & geophysics); and Urjit Ravindra Patel ’90 Ph.D. (economics) were honored during a ceremony on Oct. 7.
Millikan, who was recognized for her scholarship in philosophy, gave a lecture on “Biosemantics and Definite Descriptions” at Sterling Memorial Library. She has taught at Berea College, the University of Western Michigan, and the University of Connecticut, as well as several foreign universities. She also received prestigious honors in cognitive science, systematic philosophy, and logic. Her most recent book, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information” (2017), is heralded as a “great philosophical achievement.”
Green, the Peter C. Doherty Endowed Chair of Immunology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, presented on “New Tricks for Old Proteins: Non-Canonical Functions of Autophagy Proteins in Inflammation, Anti-Cancer Immunity, and Alzheimer’s Disease” at the Yale School of Medicine. He researches processes of cell survival and death, and discovered LC3-phagocytosis, which links autophagy pathway to phagosome maturation. He is an ISI highly cited researcher and published his most recent book “Apoptosis and Other Cell Death Mechanisms: Means to an End” in 2018.
Kidwell, the William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture on “Our New Understanding of Dead-Shell Assemblages: A Powerful Tool for Deciphering Human Impacts” at Kline Geology Lab. She is a recipient of the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, and is recognized for her work on anthropogenic impacts on the environment and contributions to the fossil record.
Patel, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and honorary fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, spoke to the Department of Economics on “The Cul-De-Sac in Indian Banking: A Dominant Government Sector, Limited Fiscal Space, and Independent Regulation (Is There an ‘Impossible Trilemma’)?” He has extensive experience in monetary policy and financial stability, and is a prolific author and lecturer in the fields of international trade theory, climate change economics, and the global financial safety net.
