professor lunches - fall 2012
Welcome, and thank you for your interest in the Family Weekend 2012 Professor Lunches, benefiting shelters and homeless services in New Haven! This charitable event offers the opportunity for visiting families to enjoy conversations over lunch with some of Yale's most distinguished professors. Please sign up below!
Faculty guests include psychologists Paul Bloom and Marvin Chun, Yale-New Haven Hospital Breast Cancer Center director Dr. Anees Chagpar, diplomat Charles Hill, molecular biologist Joan Steitz, historian John Gaddis, philosophical scholar Shelly Kagan, public health professor Elizabeth Bradley, English professor Amy Hungerford, and more. For more information about each faculty guest, please see the information below this form.
We will continue to add professors until early October. Currently available professors are:
Amy Hungerford – Saturday, October 13, 12:30 pm
Paul Bloom – Sunday, October 14, 12:30 pm
Marvin Chun – Saturday, October 13, 1:00 pm
Charles Hill – Sunday, October 14, 12:30 pm
John Gaddis - Saturday, October 13, 12:30 pm
Shelly Kagan – Sunday, October 14, 12:30 pm
Elizabeth and John Bradley - Saturday, October 13, 12:30 pm
Joan Steitz - Saturday, October 13, 12:30 pm
Anees Chagpar - Saturday, October 13, 12:30 pm
The suggested donation is $30/visitor and $15/student, or $100 for a reservation for four or more individuals. Donations must be made by Wednesday, October 10, to secure a lunch reservation. Donations can be made through our secure online payment system, or by mailing a check made out to “Hunger and Homelessness Action Project,” with “Professor Lunches” in the memo line. Checks should be mailed to YHHAP, P.O. Box 209008, New Haven, CT 06520. Gifts are partially tax-deductible; please see information at the bottom of this page.
Please sign up below or feel free to e-mail us with any questions! For more information about our guests, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.
This event is co-sponsored by Dwight Hall at Yale.
PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the major journals in the field.
Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of four books, including How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.
His newest book, How Pleasure Works, was published in June, 2010.
Biography and photo from Professor Bloom’s web page
CHARLES HILL is a diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale University. He is a career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in a variety of roles such as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Middle East at the State Department, Chief of Staff of the same, and executive aid to former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Dr. Hill has been a fellow at the Harvard University East Asia Research Center, a Clark fellow at Cornell University, and is currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as special consultant on policy to the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. Dr. Hill has collaborated with former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Egypt's Road to Jerusalem, a memoir of the Middle East peace negotiations, and Unvanquished, about U.S. relations with the U.N. in the post–cold war period. He is also the editor of the three-volume Papers of U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, published by Yale University Press. He received an A.B. degree from Brown University in 1957, a J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, and an M.A. degree in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.
Biography and photo from Yale Global Health Leadership Institute
MARVIN M. CHUN is a professor of Psychology and master of Berkeley College. He also carries joint faculty appointments in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neurobiology, and the Yale College Cognitive Science Program. Master Chun is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses functional brain imaging to understand how to improve memory, attention, conscious perception, and decision- making. He received his B.A. from Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, after having spent a junior year abroad at the University of California, Berkeley (!). He earned his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. His research has been honored with a 2006 Troland Research Award from the US National Academy of Sciences, a 2002 American Psychological Association Early Career Award, the 2000 Chase Memorial Award from the Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, and a 1998 APA Division 3 New Investigator Award. His laboratory is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. In Yale College he teaches Introduction to Psychology and a seminar on Mind, Brain, and Society. For his teaching at Yale, he received the Phi Beta Kappa William DeVane Award for Teaching and Scholarship and the Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence.
Biography and photo provided by Professor Chun
YHHAP is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to service and advocacy to end hunger and homelessness in New Haven. Your gift to YHHAP at the Professor Lunches event may be tax-deductible. Please contact Kevin Li at k.li@yale.edu if you wish to receive a donation acknowledgement letter from YHHAP for your tax records. YHHAP’s legal name is Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, Inc. (FEIN: 06-0922620).
AMY HUNGERFORD's research and teaching focuses on American literature, especially the period since 1945. She studies how literature helps form the cultural imagination around subjects such as genocide, religion, social networking, and the status of the book in the internet age. In various editorial roles (for Yale Studies in English, the new Post•45 series at Stanford University Press, and Contemporary Literature), and as a founder of Post•45 (a professional association for scholars working in post-45 literary and cultural studies) she helps bring the work of other scholars to larger audiences. Dr. Hungerford has reached out beyond the academy with recent work on American Public Media’s radio digest “Weekend America,” ongoing blog posts for The Huffington Post, a free online course, “The American Novel Since 1945” (available on Open Yale Courses and Academic Universe), and book reviewing for The Yale Reviewand DoubleX.com. She also serves as the acting master of Calhoun College.
Biography and photo provided by Professor Hungerford
SHELLY KAGAN, a scholar of ethics, social, and political philosophy, is the Clark Professor of Philosophy. As a Luce Scholar, he has held joint appointments in the philosophy department and in ethics, politics and economics, and he has taught courses at Yale on subjects such as normative ethics, utopia, and death. His main research interests lie in moral philosophy, in particular normative ethics. More particularly still, much of his work centers on the debate between consequentialist and deontological moral theories. His first book dealt with two common objections to consequentialism, that it is too demanding, and that it fails to recognize that certain types of acts are morally forbidden—even when performing those acts would bring about the best possible results. Since then, much of his work has been devoted to trying to arrive at an adequate theory of the good (to incorporate into that consequentialist framework), with publications on (among other things) the nature of well–being, the concept of intrinsic value, and problems involving ranking worlds with infinite amounts of utility. For the last several years he has been working on the nature of moral desert. He argues that desert is a far more complex topic than has been previously appreciated, but that we can make progress in better understanding the alternative possible views that are available here by representing these views in graphs (hence the title of his main work in progress, The Geometry of Desert).
Biography and photo provided by Philosophy Department website
JOAN STEITZ is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Since earning her Ph.D. under James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, Professor Steitz has become one of the leading scientists in her field for her pioneering work in RNA. She discovered and defined the function of small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA—the earliest product of DNA transcription—and was the first to learn that these cellular complexes (snRNPs) play a key role in processing messenger RNA by excising noncoding regions and splicing together the resulting segments. Her breakthroughs into the previously mysterious splicing process have clarified the science behind the formation of proteins and other biological processes, including the intricate changes that occur as the immune system and brain develop.
She has received numerous awards including the National Medal of Science (1986), the Weizmann Women and Science Award (1994), the Novartis Drew Award in Biomedical Research (1999), and the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (2002).
Biography and photo provided by the Yale Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
ELIZABETH BRADLEY is faculty director for the Global Health Initiative and the Global Health Leadership Institute at Yale, professor of public health and director of Global Health Initiatives at the Yale University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on health delivery systems and quality improvement and has contributed important findings about organizational change and quality of care within the hospital, nursing home and hospice settings. She has been involved with several projects regarding health systems strengthening in international settings, including China, Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Previously, she was director of the health management program and co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. She also served as hospital administrator at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Bradley is a graduate of Harvard University, has an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in health economics and health policy from Yale University. She also serves as the Master of Branford College.
Biography and photo provided by the Yale School of Public Health website
JOHN BRADLEY is the executive director of Liberty Community Services, an organization that works to end homelessness in greater New Haven by offering services and case management to individuals who live with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and addiction. In addition to this role, he serves as the Associate Master of Branford College (of which he is also an alumnus) and contributes to YHHAP as a member of its Board of Advisors.
Photo provided by the Liberty Community Services website
ANEES CHAGPAR is the Director of the Breast Center -- Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine. Born and raised in Canada, she completed her BSc and MD at the University of Alberta and her general surgery residency training and MSc at the University of Saskatchewan. She went on to complete the Susan G. Komen Interdisciplinary Breast Fellowship at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, an MPH at Harvard School of Public Health and an MA in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Louisville. She has taken on leadership positions in a myriad of professional organizations, and her clinical practice and research interests are dedicated solely to breast cancer. She participates in investigator-initiated and cooperative group clinical trials, and holds an R21 grant for clinical prediction rule development for non-sentinel node metastases in women with sentinel node positive breast cancer.
Biography and photo provided by the Yale School of Medicine Department of Surgery website
JOHN GADDIS, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History, is one of the nation’s most prominent historians of the Cold War and a leading authority on national security and international relations. At Yale, he is also the director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and professor of political science. He received a National Humanities Medal in 2005, and his new book “George F. Kennan” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
Photo provided by the Yale Department of History. Biography provided by Yale University News.
