Psychologist, community leader receives Yale’s highest honor

Roslyn Milstein Meyer, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine, is one of five recipients of the 2008 Yale Medal, awarded by the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA). A 1971 graduate of Yale College who received her doctorate in clinical psychology in 1977 from Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Meyer is well known in the New Haven area for her leadership of a wide array of programs and a long-standing commitment to Yale and the university’s environs.

Most recently, Meyer has supported research and treatment programs at Yale for melanoma, one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. With a gift of $10 million to the school last spring, she and husband Jerome H. Meyer, M.D., lecturer in psychiatry, are helping to establish the Milstein Meyer Center for Melanoma Research and Treatment, which will enable the development of more investigator-initiated clinical trials and improve Yale’s ability to design new treatments for the often-fatal illness.

The Meyers’ gift builds on the medical school’s strengths: Yale’s immunobiology research and dermatology programs are widely viewed as among the very best in the nation, and the last three years have seen the development of a strong program in medical oncology that has attracted nearly a dozen new faculty members with expertise in all the major cancers.

Known to friends and colleagues as “Roz,” Meyer is a trustee of Yale-New Haven Hospital, a patient advocate for Yale’s NIH-funded Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Skin Cancer and a co-founder of both New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas and the Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership (LEAP) program. She has served as a member of the Volunteer Council for Women’s Health Research at Yale, as a board member of the Yale University Art Gallery and as a trustee for Yale’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life.

Inaugurated in 1952, the Yale Medal is the highest award presented by the AYA and is conferred to recognize and honor outstanding individual service to the university. Since its inception, the Yale Medal has been presented to 267 individuals who exemplify the university’s ideals and who have given outstanding service to Yale as a whole or to one of its many schools, institutes or programs.

Other recipients of the Yale Medal this year are Edward A. Dennis ’63; Linda Koch Lorimer, J.D. ’77, vice president and secretary of Yale; Don T. Nakanishi ’71; and William H. Wright II ’82.