For 500 alumni and their guests, a return to New Haven

At this year’s reunion, alumni donned hard hats for a tour of the Congress Avenue Building and put on their thinking caps for a seminar on admissions that asked them to decide the fate of a hypothetical medical school applicant.

More than 500 alumni and their guests attended reunion, which started Friday, June 1, with a discussion of the admissions process, a welcome from Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., and the traditional evening clambake. Across town, at the New Haven Lawn Club, alumni in public health were honored for their service to their communities.

The admissions discussion Friday afternoon in the Jane Ellen Hope Building included an interactive exercise that offered the audience a chance to review the qualifications of various applicants and make their own selections.

The next day discussion turned to “The Last Frontier: Understanding the Brain, Curing its Disorders,” with a panel that comprised Bennett A. Shaywitz, M.D., professor of pediatrics and neurology and in the Child Study Center; Patricia Goldman-Rakic, M.D., the Eugene Higgins Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry and Neurology; Jeffery D. Kocsis, Ph.D., professor of neurology and neurobiology; Dennis D. Spencer, M.D., chair and the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neurosurgery; and Stephen G. Waxman, M.D., Ph.D., chair and professor of neurology. Topics ranged from dyslexia, including discussion of such famous dyslexics as Harvey Cushing, M.D., to memory loss and epilepsy.

At the alumni meeting that followed the brain symposium, Jocelyn S. Malkin, M.D. ’51, received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award for her contributions as a teacher of students and residents, her advancement of the field of psychoanalysis and her commitment to the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine.

Vincent T. Marchesi, M.D. ’63, Ph.D., director of the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine, also received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award, for his commitment to Yale and his research into the proteins of the red cell membrane, discoveries that are featured in student textbooks.

Following the alumni meeting, Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., led alumni on a tour of the Congress Avenue Building, still under construction. Alumni climbed stairways to floors strewn with piping and wiring, while Kessler and John H. Bollier, executive director of facilities development and operations at the medical school, outlined the building’s progress.

On Friday, the School of Public Health observed the Yale Tercentennial by honoring 50 outstanding alumni who have had exemplary careers in government or community organizations. The 50 were named to the EPH Alumni Public Service Honor Roll at a luncheon at the Lawn Club in New Haven.

This year’s Distinguished Alumni Award went to James Hadler, M.D., M.P.H. ’82, director of the Connecticut Department of Public Health’s Infectious Disease division for almost 20 years. “I have one of the best jobs in the world,” Hadler said in his address to alumni. Although he acknowledged the “dark side” of working in government—the politics that sometimes interfere with programs—he said his work gives him “the ultimate reward, the feeling that what I do makes a difference to society.”