2022-2023 College Advisers

Nathaniel Adam

Lecturer, Department of Music

I teach classes on popular music analysis, classical music theory, and musicianship skills, and am particularly eager to answer any questions about taking music classes here at Yale (or studying music generally). I was born in New Haven, studied music theory and piano at Eastman School of Music (BM) and the University of Michigan (PhD), and my connection to Davenport goes all the way back to my great-grandfather, Emerson Tuttle, who was the original Head of College. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2016, I taught at Western Connecticut State University, the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, and the New York State Summer School for the Arts. In addition to teaching and theorizing, I am a composer, choral conductor, pianist, harpsichordist, and music editor. I have a house in the woods in Hamden with my wife, Laura, who works in Yale’s Office of Institutional Affairs. In my free time I enjoy film, hiking, and the beach.

Saed Alizamir

Assistant Professor of Operations, Yale School of Management

Professor Alizamir’s research interests include policy design for sustainable operations, healthcare service operations, operations-economics interface, as well as supply chain management.

Laurie Benton

Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law

I grew up in Baltimore and lived in New York, New Jersey, Spain, Uruguay, and Nashville before coming to New Haven and Yale. My research focuses on the legal history of European empires and global history. 

Julia Bourque

Office of Career Strategy Assistant Director, International Internships Program

Having been born in Connecticut, raised in Vermont, and after attending college in Massachusetts, I call myself a true New Englander.  Currently, I provide general career counseling for Yale undergraduates and manage the International Internships Program in the Office of Career Strategy.  I received a BA in History and French from Boston University, and an MA in International Education from the SIT Graduate Institute.  I’ve been fortunate to have several international experiences, teaching in France and working in Italy, and am excited to be working with international employers and alumni to bring international internship opportunities to Yale students.  In my free time, I enjoy spending time with friends and family, traveling (both internationally and locally!), and snowboarding and wakesurfing in my home state of Vermont (#ilovermont).

Lincoln Caplan

Lecturer, Yale Law School

I am delighted to continue as a freshman adviser, as I have been for the past 15 years, and to be a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School, where I was on the faculty as a journalist from 1998 to 2006. I am also a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar, for which I write regularly, and a contributor of journalism to other publications. In addition, I am Davenport’s writing tutor and look forward to working with D-port students and students in other colleges. 

Deborah Chung

Ned Cooke

Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art

Professor Cooke focuses upon American material culture and decorative arts. His books include Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Johns Hopkins Press, 1996) and Inventing Boston: Design, Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World, 1680–1720 (Yale University Press, 2019), both of which focus upon the context of craftsman-client relations in colonial North America. He has also written extensively on modern craft, historicizing and explicating more recent forms of production.

At Yale, Cooke teaches lecture courses on American material culture from the fifteenth century to the present as well as an introductory course on global decorative arts and offers seminars on a variety of topics including material culture theory, material literacy, the American interior, American furniture, and modern craft. He has also taught seminars on craft and design in India and in Australia.

He served as the Chair of the department from 2000 to 2006 and from 2012 to 2016. Since his arrival at Yale in 1992, he served as Director of the Yale Center for the Study of American Art and Material Culture, a group of interested Yale faculty, graduate students, and museum professionals who meet weekly during the semester for presentations on the theme of that academic year. 

Emily Erikson

Joseph C. Fox Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship Associate Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, School of Management

Emily Erikson is the Joseph C. Fox Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship and associate professor of sociology and the school of management (by courtesy). She works on the emergence and development of global networks, organizations, and the institutions of capitalism and democracy. Her award-winning book, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company (Princeton University Press, 2014) shows how the autonomy of agents in the East India Company fostered informal information sharing and organizational flexibility that were key to the Company’s long-term success.

Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociology Theory, The Journal of Economic History, and Social Science History, among others. She serves on the council for the economic sociology section of the American Sociological Association, the editorial board for Social Science History, the editorial committee for the Relational Sociology Series. She is a founding member of the advisory board for the Journal of Historical Network Research and sits of the executive council of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. 

Deborah Fried

Deborah Fried came East from southern California and changed from an outdoor modern dancer to a research, and then clinical, physician via Hampshire College, the National Institutes of Health, and medical school and residency in NY, a research fellowship at Penn and then the Yale faculty as of 1987. She is lucky to be able to still dance, and enjoy the kayak, hiking, paddle boarding, musical and theatrical offerings of our fair New Haven. Her children went to Yale (D’port 12+, and Branford ‘14) and continue to guide her as parent, professional and advisor.

Eric Friede

Interim Assistant Director, Acquisitions and Collections Control Unit | Head, Acquisitions | Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Eric Friede is Head of Acquisitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He manages a department that supports curators in acquiring printed material for the library, including research into materials prior to acquisitions, as well as receiving and accessioning materials.

Elizabeth Gardner

Assistant Professor, Orthopaedic Surgery (Sports Medicine); Yale School of Medicine and West Haven Veterans Hospital

After being raised in New Hampshire and attending St. Paul’s School, I came to New Haven as a member of the Davenport Class of 2001. I played field hockey and captained the women’s lacrosse team, as well as IM squash.  Following a 2-year stint as a boarding school teacher Oundle School (UK), and medical school at Emory University in Atlanta, I returned to Yale for my orthopaedic surgery residency.  That was followed by sports medicine fellowship at the University of Michigan, where I had the opportunity to work with their athletes.  In 2013, I resettled in New Haven (for good, I think!), where I am thrilled to be able to work with the Yale community and our student-athletes.  I am excited to rejoin Dport as a freshman advisor and fellow.

Basie Gitlin

Director of Development, Yale University Library and Yale Collections

A long-term Yalie and proud D’porter, I grew up outside New Haven and attended Choate Rosemary Hall before coming to Yale College, graduating with a B.A. in history in 2010. I was active in Davenport, serving as a FroCo, manager of the Davenport-Pierson Press, co-captain of IM squash, and lead organizer of the Mellon Forum. I then pursued an M.Phil. in early modern history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, before returning to work in fundraising at Yale more than a decade ago. These days, I lead development efforts for Yale’s libraries, as well as some related areas such as Yale University Press and the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Elsewhere at Yale, I also serve as Librarian of the Elizabethan Club and Co-Chair of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize Committee. In my spare time, I enjoy collecting books and manuscripts, rowing and playing squash, traveling, honing my cocktail-making skills, and of course being a part of the Davenport community!

Jay Gitlin

Lecturer; Associate Director of Howard R. Lamar Center on the Study of Frontiers and Borders

I am a proud member of the Class of 1971—the first Yale class with women and the next-to-last class required to wear a coat and tie for dinner in the dining hall. I majored in history and have always been interested in cities and urban life, which explains why I wound up specializing in the fur trade, the frontier, and the French experience in North America. I am from New York (Long Island: Mets and Jets fan) and joined the musicians’ union at the age of 12.  I love used bookstores and am writing a book on the “Rise and Fall of Modern Shopping.” I have a degree from the Yale School of Music as a percussionist, but mostly play piano in the Bales-Gitlin Band with my wife, Ginny Bales. Our son Basie (Davenport 2010) was a freshman counselor and has recently returned from Cambridge with an M.Phil. in Early Modern History.  A cold glass of milk and chocolate thin mints (any variety of dark chocolate) will bring an instant smile to my face, in case one is not already firmly planted there. 

Anjelica Gonzalez

Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Faculty Director of Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, Head of Davenport College

Anjelica’s work is centered on the development of artificial human tissues, but spans a range of applications from drug discovery to medical device development.  Anjelica spends a lot of her time writing scientific articles, opinion pieces on topics of diversity in STEM and creating ways in which Yale students can launch their own start-ups and explore their own innovative pathways. These are all related to the classes Anjelica teaches that are related to development of biotechnology with ethics, culture, politics and affordability as the central tenants of appropriate design. Beyond her academic work, Anjelica is eager to engage the Davenport community through intellectual and cultural events in the college’s common room.

Karin Gosselink

Assistant Director, Yale College Writing Center

Despite living in the East for fifteen years, I still identify as a Midwesterner—I was born and spent most of my childhood in Illinois (and am a die-hard Cubs fan as a result). I won a scholarship to a small college in central New York, where for one of my many campus jobs I was a peer writing tutor. This led to my first post-college job coordinating a Writing Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  I discovered I had a talent and passion for teaching writing, and for working with the recent immigrant and international students that made up most of our clientele.  I combined my interests by earning a Ph.D. in global Anglophone literature while teaching for the writing program at Rutgers.  In 2006, I arrived at Yale as a lecturer, and became an Assistant Director at the Yale College Writing Center in 2010.  My other talents include ice-skating, grassroots political organizing (I run an awesome phone bank), and expanding my knowledge of American movies of the 1930s and 40s.  When I’m not on campus, I’m enjoying time with my husband, Phil, a nurse practitioner, and parenting my two young boys, Will and Oscar.

Eduardo Groisman

Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis 

I am a geneticist who studies the mechanisms that enable bacteria to cause disease and to further human health. I received a MS in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD from the University of Chicago. After spending 20 years in the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine, I joined the Yale School of Medicine in 2010. For 19 years, I was a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Decades of experience as a mentor and adviser have brought me great professional as well as personal pleasure

Karsten Heeger

Roy Herbst

Ensign Professor of Medicine, Chief of Medical Oncology, Deputy Director for Clinical Affairs, Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital, Assistant Dean for Translational Research, Yale School of Medicine

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD is Deputy Director for Clinical Affairs and Chief of Medical Oncology for Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital. He is Ensign Professor of Medicine and Assistant Dean for Translational Research at Yale School of Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Physicians, an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, and an elected member of the boards of directors for both AACR and the IASLC.

Dr. Herbst is a pioneer of personalized medicine and immunotherapy to identify biomarkers and bring novel targeted treatments to patients, serving as principal investigator for trials leading to approval of several therapies revolutionizing the field and greatly enhancing patients’ lives. He has more than 300 publications to his name, and his work published in Nature was awarded Clinical Research Forum’s 2015 Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award.

The NCI Lung SPORE Dr. Herbst leads has identified new mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance to immunotherapy. His work on “umbrella” trials, such as Lung MAP, has galvanized the field by developing public-private partnerships to conduct large clinical studies. He is a major proponent of efforts to promote tobacco control and regulation (including e-cigarettes), authoring multiple policy statements and leading frequent Capitol Hill briefings, and he chairs the AmericanAssociation of Cancer Research’s Tobacco Task Force.

For his lifetime of achievement in thoracic cancer research, Dr. Herbst was awarded the 2016 Paul A. Bunn, Jr. Scientific Award by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer at their World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria.

Albert Ko

Associate Professor, Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) Division Head - Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases

I was raised in New Jersey by parents who emigrated from Korea and after finishing my undergraduate education at MIT and medical training at Harvard, set off with my wife Delphine to Salvador, Brazil where I have worked for the past 16 years on the health problems of urban slum communities.  We returned to the US last year with three kids, Tongil (16), Aline (13) and Minjae (10), who despite their French mother and American father, grew up to be typical baianos.  I spend my spare time wandering around book stores and doing a not very good job of kicking the soccer ball with my children

Kate Krier

Assistant Dean for the Arts, Director of Production

I discovered theater when I played the dormouse (a silent role) in my elementary school production of Alice and Wonderland.  By high school, I had discovered that being backstage was more fun than being onstage and I have been working there ever since.  I was born in Connecticut, but grew up in Florida, and eventually found my way back for college (Wesleyan) and then again for grad school (Yale School of Drama).  At Yale, I oversee Undergraduate Production (the office that supports all undergraduate theater, dance, opera, and comedy), the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and the Yale Ensembles (Bands, Glee Club and Yale Symphony Orchestra). Outside of Yale, I love cooking/eating, gardening, and reading, and I volunteer at a cat rescue organization in North Branford.

Bluma Lesch

Assistant Professor of Genetics

luma (Bibi) Lesch works on the genetics and epigenetics of reproduction and development, with a special interest in the evolution of epigenetic and chromatin states in mammals. Understanding the evolution of gene regulation in gametes requires integrating information across a wide range of biological scales, from the regulation of molecules to the development of individuals to the evolution of species. Dr. Lesch’s work brings together these divergent approaches to thinking about biology.

Dr. Lesch earned her B.S. from Yale University in 2003. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 from Rockefeller University and her M.D. in 2011 from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA, from 2011-2017, where she was awarded an NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellowship and also named a Hope Funds for Cancer Research postdoctoral fellow. She received a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists in 2015, and returned to New Haven to join the Yale faculty in 2017.

Louisa Lombard

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

I am a cultural anthropologist who studies African borderland areas where the state is largely absent, and a range of actors govern. My research locales, primarily the remote and little-populated eastern reaches of the Central African Republic (C.A.R.), are further marked by violent histories that continue into the present. How, in such contexts, do people navigate fragile relationships of trust and claim access to resources and authority? My main fieldwork interlocutors are among the region’s men-in-arms, such as anti-poaching guards and rebels.

In addition to introductory and theoretical approaches to socio-cultural anthropology, I teach classes on sub-Saharan Africa, and especially African politics; anthropology and law; international development and humanitarianism; war, violence, and conflict; conservation and the management of “wilderness”; and the social and historical aspects of inter-species categorization.

Reina Maruyama

​Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Professor Reina Maruyama is exploring new physics in nuclear and particle astrophysics, in particular, in dark matter and neutrinos. Her group is carrying out direct detection of dark matter experiments in terrestrial-based detectors and searches for neutrinoless double beta decay. The current experiments include COSINE-100 located at the Yangyang Underground Laboratory in South Korea, DM-Ice, and IceCube located at the South Pole, and CUORE, located at Gran Sasso, Italy.

Kelly McLaughlin

Director, Study Abroad
Deputy Director of the Center for International and Professional Experience
Assistant Dean for Assessment

As Director of Study Abroad, and with oversight of Yale Summer Session Programs Abroad, Kelly focuses on promoting and documenting students’ experiential learning outcomes. This work has been informed by his tenure both as Chair of the Outcomes Assessment and Research Committee and as Chair of the Council for the Forum on Education Abroad, which is recognized as the Standards Development Organization (SDO) for the field of education abroad. As Assistant Dean for Assessment, Kelly is also responsible for coordinating Yale University’s accreditation reports to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). Kelly joined Yale’s Fellowship Programs in 2002, overseeing the advising, funding, and assessment of student experiences around the world and domestically. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from UCLA in English Literature before working in South Korea’s Higher Education sector for five years, culminating with a position at the Fulbright Commission in Seoul.

Yair Minsky

Professor of Mathematics

Yair Nathan Minsky is an Israeli-American mathematician whose research concerns three-dimensional topology, differential geometry, group theory and holomorphic dynamics. He is known for having proved Thurston’s ending lamination conjecture and as a student of curve complex geometry.

Srinivas Muvvala

Rob Nelson

Robert Lehman Professor Emeritus in the History of Art

Originally from Texas, Rob Nelson is an emeritus professor of History of Art with a specialty in the Middle Ages.  Currently he is writing a book about the long history of a particular illustrated medieval manuscript from its creation in medieval Constantinople to the present with chapters about Renaissance Rome and Florence and the Italian Enlightenment.  In collegeHe went through five or six majors, because everything seemed so fascinating, and he still enjoys learning about the wide interests of Yale students, especially those fields in which he could not major.

Margaret Olin

Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Religious Studies

In her teaching career at Yale, spent primarily in the Divinity School and History of Art, Margaret Olin specialized in visual theory. Her career alternates between scholarship and the practice of art. An English major as an undergraduate, she studied photography as a graduate student, and, several years later, earned an interdisciplinary PhD in History of Culture. Her courses at Yale combined her eclectic interests, centering on the visual culture of witnessing, remembrance, and social justice, theories of perception, the visualization of communities, and religion and the performance of space. Her current projects are on notions of attentiveness in art and two books of photographs and texts about Israel/Palestine. She has always enjoyed advising Yale undergraduates and hearing about their interests.

Stephanie O’Malley

Adina Popescu Berk

Kailasnath Purushothaman

Director of Residential College Science/Math Tutoring

Kailasnath Purushothaman (GRD’ 93) is an aerospace and mechanical engineer whose research focuses on medical applications. His projects have included predicting patients’ tolerance to carotid sacrifice, examining the rupture probability of cerebral aneurysms, using radiotracer kinetics to study myocardial blood flow patterns, and evaluating outcomes in the external beam radiotherapy of prostate cancer. The broad theme is how to combine engineering models and statistical physics. Kailas’s interest in teaching was sparked during his secondary studies in India. While a graduate student he was a Residential College Mathematics and Science Tutor, and he has taught Mechanical Engineering at Yale for 20 years. For the CTL, he supervises most tutoring in mathematics and science, including the course-based peer tutoring, the Residential College Mathematics and Science Tutoring, and the QR tutoring programs. Thus working with the CTL is an important evolution of his prior experience.

Yu-Lin Saussy

Chinese Program Senior Lector, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures

Martha Schall

Deputy Secretary and Senior Director of Corporation Affairs

Martha Schall joined the Office of the Secretary in February 2015. In her role, she supports the Secretary and Vice President for Student Life in the areas of institutional governance, and university traditions and events. Martha leads the teams that support the work of the Yale Corporation, the University Council and University-wide events. 

Prior to joining the Office of the Secretary, Martha was President of the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center Foundation. Previously, Martha served in a variety of roles in the Yale Office of Development, including as an Associate Vice President for Development and as the Managing Director of the Yale Alumni Fund. She earned a B.A. in History from Yale University, and an M.B.A. in Finance and Management from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Candace Skorupa

Sr Lector French; Lector Comparative Lit

Candace Skorupa loves to teach first-year students of French in FREN 110, 120, and 121, as well as advanced students in FREN 150 and 151.  In the department of Comparative Literature, she is the Senior Essay Coordinator and guides the seniors through their senior essay projects.  She has been a lector at Yale since 2005.

She received her Ph.D. (2000), M.Phil. (1996), and B.A. (1992) in Comparative Literature from Yale University.   Her dissertation, “Music and Letters: Correspondances of Notes and Narrative from Berlioz to Proust,” was directed by Peter Brooks. 

She has taught French at Harvard University (1999-2002) and at Smith College (2002-2005), and she taught English at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Lyon, France, with the Fulbright program (1992-93). 

Jason Strong

Associate Athletic Director, Compliance at the Yale Athletic Department

Jason Strong oversees of the Athletics Compliance Office, education and monitoring, amateurism, recruiting processes, and waiver requests of Ivy League and NCAA regulations.

Strong has sport oversight over Yale’s gymnastics, rowing and squash programs and serves as a member of Yale Athletics’ Education & Workshops Committee.

Prior to Yale, Strong served as the assistant athletic director for compliance at Oregon State University from 2014-2018. His responsibilities at OSU included education and monitoring, personnel, amateurism, recruiting processes, playing and practice season schedules, and writing waiver requests at both the Pac-12 Conference and NCAA levels.

Strong spent four years as the director of compliance at Boston University of the Patriot League from 2010-2014.  While at Boston University, Strong helped the Terriers’ transition from the America East Conference to the Patriot League. He was responsible for all NCAA and league compliance interpretations.

Michael Warner

Graeme Wood

Lecturer in Political Science

Graeme Wood is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State (Random House, 2017) was a Foreign Affairs “Best Book of the Year” and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, and Arabic.

Wood was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2015-2016), a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House (2018), and a lecturer at The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. He is a non-resident fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has taught at Yale since 2014.

Weimin Zhong

Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Dr. Zhong earned his PhD at Rockefeller University. His current interests are in the molecular and cellular mechanisms that govern the behavior of stem cells, in particular how they balance the needs for self-renewal and differentiation during mammalian organogenesis and tissue maintenance. 

Zhong’s laboratory studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing how stem cells balance the competing needs of self-renewal and differentiation during mammalian organogenesis and tissue maintenance. He uses the mammalian Numb proteins, Numb and Numblike (Numbl), as entry point, and neurogenesis in the developing neocortex and mammary gland development in mice as model systems, to probe the contribution of two modes of cell division – symmetric vs. asymmetric – in regulating stem cell behavior, in particular how changes in cell division pattern affect organ development, tissue regeneration and tumor formation, as part of an effort to achieve a key goal of stem-cell research to repair tissues and organs damaged by disease, injury or aging.