Handsome Dan XIX, named Kingman, was announced as Yale’s new mascot on Mar. 18, 2021. He currently lives in Silliman College with his caretaker, Kassandra Haro ’18, and goes for daily walks around campus.

Haro, a program administrator at the Yale Visitor Center, said Commencement Weekend in May was one of Kingman’s favorite events out of the many he has attended throughout the past year. 

“He got to see all of Yale and participate in festivities, including the procession,” Haro said. “It was all very fun and exciting for him. We also did some really great senior portraits preceding commencement week and that was an exciting new tradition that we plan on continuing.” 

As Handsome Dan’s caretaker, Haro is responsible for escorting the bulldog to events, running his social media, reinforcing his training sessions, taking him to the vet and making sure he gets his rest. 

Per Haro, Kingman’s favorite activities include attending sporting events, playing with his “doggy friends,” watching squirrel videos on YouTube and going to his favorite pet supplies store — NorthPoint Pets in Cheshire, Connecticut. Haro also noted that Kingman’s favorite time of day is early afternoon when he often takes naps on his outdoor bed in Silliman. 

More recently, Haro and Handsome Dan participated in campus Halloween events. 

“We had a great Halloween interacting with students this year,” Haro said. “Handsome Dan … dressed as a pumpkin and handed out candy and Handsome Dan Halloween-themed stickers.” 

Students have enjoyed seeing Kingman at games and performances, as well as around campus in general. 

“Whenever I see Dan, it fills me with Bulldog pride,” said Nicholas Strickler ’26. 

On the day of Tuesday’s midterm elections, Kingman spent the day walking around campus, woofing at students to encourage them to go vote. 

Haro elaborated on Kingman’s upcoming plans, noting that the upcoming Yale-Harvard football game will be his first time in Boston. 

 “Coming up this December we will continue his second annual Handsome Holiday Grams,” Haro added. “We also have a special secret project in the works.” 

Athletes have also enjoyed Dan’s presence as a whole in the school community, as he regularly attends Yale sporting events. 

“Handsome Dan creates fun school morale,” said Andrew Farr ’26, a sprinter on the track and field team. 

Students can keep up with Handsome Dan through his various social media accounts. The mascot’s online presence includes accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Students can get Handsome Dan stickers whenever they see him around campus. 

Kingman will turn 2 years old on Jan. 2, 2023. 

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A collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, the Yale-Boehringer Ingelheim Biomedical Data Science Fellowship Program recently entered its second year, accepting four new postdoctoral students to be paired with mentors from the pharmaceutical giant. 

“The postdocs supported by this program will be able to work with joint mentors from [Boehringer Ingelheim] and have access to their expertise and resources,” Hongyu Zhao, the program’s principal investigator, wrote to the News. “There will be symposia that bring Yale and [Boehringer Ingelheim] researchers together either at Yale or at BI to share results and explore further collaboration opportunities.” 

The new fellows — Chuanpeng Dong, Dylan Duchen, Rong Li and Shubham Tripathi — will be given greater exposure to industry professionals and will have the chance to develop their own research project. 

Tripathi’s project, for example, focuses on gene expression. 

“The research I proposed was the development of a mechanistic input which would allow us to analyze data from [experiments],” Tripathi said. “So now we have technologies that allow us to profile gene expression … that is a huge amount of information, which makes it very hard to obtain useful, actionable insights.” 

The fellows submitted their initial proposals in the summer and, after their selection for the program, began work on their projects in the fall. 

The datasets Tripathi works with are often massive in size, and thus developing a tool to help analyze the sets would be valuable, both to researchers like Tripathi as well as pharmaceutical companies such as Bohringer Ingelheim. 

“There are a lot of open questions that we are going to have to address as we go forward,” Tripathi said. “One huge issue, [which] is the key to my proposal, is how do we get useful information out of these experiments.” 

The program was initiated in May 2021, with a previous cohort of fellows having recently completed a full year of work with their respective Boehringer Ingelheim mentors. The fellowship itself lasts three years. 

Dhananjay Bhaskar is a fellow currently in his second year of the program. 

“I’m involved with the drug development project,” Bhaskar said. “We have built our own drug discovery pipeline [and] we have a model that can generate new compounds.” 

The program itself is based at the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science, located in New Haven. The center is situated within the School of Medicine and houses over 100 members dedicated to researching topics within and related to the field of biomedical science.

“This program has already stimulated more and in depth interactions [sic] between Yale and BI both in biomedical data science and the broader research areas covering all phases of drug development and evaluations,” Zhao wrote. “It is likely that more collaborations between Yale and BI will develop in different forms in the near future.” 

The Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science is located at 300 George St. 

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The Perfect Pitch Competition is an annual contest in which participants make a 90-second pitch describing their own research. The competition ran from Sept. 20 to Sept. 21. Researchers that make it to the final round of the competition — like Mazurowski — present in front of a panel of judges that include not only industry-affiliated judges but also experts from the venture capital world. 

“The point of the competition [is to] train people [on] how to give the pitch,” Mazurowski said. “[The pitch] is supposed to be a well-organized, 90-second pitch that is able to convey the what, where, when, why of your research and why someone else should invest in it.” 

There are a total of 17 other NSF Engineering Research Centers across the nation that hosted local competitions, with one finalist from each being given the opportunity to advance and present their fine-tuned pitch at the national level.

According to the NSF website, competitors must answer three specific points in their pitch: “what real-life problem their research addressed,” “how they solved it in a unique way” and “what impact it would have for society.”

Mazurowski’s presentation focused on recovering copper from industrial waste streams to then reuse in future manufacturing. 

“We globally want to transition into a de-carbonized world,” Mazurowski said. “To do that, we are going to have to manufacture a lot of batteries and components for energy storage … and those things require some select elements, like copper, lithium, cobalt and [more].” 

The local engineering research center that Mazurowski is a part of, the Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment Systems Center, or NEWT, is based out of Rice University in Texas but has partnered with Yale in a $18.5 million effort to provide clean water and streamline U.S. energy production. 

More specifically, the center focuses on mobile water treatment solutions, providing low-resource communities with efficient water treatment solutions without the need to invest in expensive water treatment facilities. 

“We’re a part of a research center … that is funded by the National Science Foundation,” Ryan DuChanois GRD ’23, a 6th year doctoral student working in the same field as Mazurowski, said. “My PhD research looks at how to separate metals that are almost identical to one another … so some of the principles that I have identified in my PhD [formed] the basis of [Mazurowski’s] pitch.” 

DuChanois and Mazurowski have worked together to engineer membranes designed to separate copper from other metals in waste streams, thereby increasing the availability of copper. 

“We tried to make a membrane that is selective [for] copper,” said Mazurowski. “In my first year, I worked with [DuChanois] … [who] was my mentor for this work.” 

NEWT also has educational collaborators from Arizona State University and the University of Texas at El Paso, as well as industrial collaborators including Shell, Baker Hughes, UNESCO, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and NASA. 

Julianne Rolf GRD ’24, a doctoral student at Yale in the department of chemical and environmental engineering, competed in an earlier round of the competition. 

Rolf said she saw the competition as a way to develop her communication skills. 

“I [wanted] to improve my communication skills as much as possible before graduating,” Rolf wrote to the News. “This pitch competition was the perfect opportunity.” 

Past winners have included doctoral students from the University of California, Berkeley, Texas A&M University and others.

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This year’s Ivy Intercollegiate was hosted at the Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, New Jersey, which has hosted two PGA tournaments. The intercollegiate featured all six Ivy League golf programs, as well as six from the Atlantic Coast Conference for a total of 12 teams. The men’s team played the Georgetown Intercollegiate in Jersey City, New Jersey, and featured Duke University, Princeton University, Columbia University and Boston College, among other teams. 

“I think the team struggled a bit on the first day,” Ami Gianchandani ’23 said. “The rain we got this week prevented us from actually using the practice facilities and the greens at Baltusrol are significantly faster than the greens at Yale right now.” 

Gianchandani was Yale’s highest finisher and tied for 17th overall. The Bulldogs finished ahead of 11th-place University of Pennsylvania and 12th-place Dartmouth. However, the squad was still below all the Atlantic Coast Conference teams that played the tournament. 

“The course was very tough and we played against great competition,” Alexis Kim ’25 said. “Although we definitely feel that we left some shots out there, we really enjoyed the experience at this championship course.” 

The Ivy Intercollegiate is one of a few instances where Ancient Eight teams compete against non-league programs. 

The first day of the competition was centered around 36-hole stroke play that determined seeding whereas the second day was match play. Match play differs from traditional stroke play as golfers win by having the least strokes on each individual hole as opposed to having the least strokes overall. 

The Bulldogs were still able to secure strong wins on the second day, with Kim coming out two ahead of North Carolina State University’s Vania Simon while squadmate Kaitlyn Lee ’23 beat Clemson University’s Melena Barrientos four-up. 

“I think we showed that, even on a bad day, we can still hang in there,” Gianchandani said. 

The men’s team finished fourth out of 12 teams, finishing ahead of Columbia and Princeton and only finishing behind champion Duke, Boston College and Penn State. Highlights from the match included a three-way tie for seventh place for Blake Brantley ’25 and a two-way tie for 11th place for Gabriel Ruiz ’24. 

Brantley ended the competition with an even score at 216. 

“Personally, I was happy with how I played,” Ben Carpenter ’25 said. “There is always room for improvement, but I put together many solid rounds.” 

Carpenter finished tied for 23rd with a score of 223, or seven above par while classmate Robert You ’25 tied for 11th with a score of 222, or six over par. The Bulldogs had the second-best par-5 average of any team with a statistic of 4.68, finishing behind only winners Duke in this category.

Brantley, Carpenter and You earned the second, fourth and fifth highest par-5 averages with a range of 4.42 to 4.58. 

“We were all happy with our team performance at the tournament, and hopefully we keep the ball rolling when February comes around,” said Carpenter. 

Both of Yale’s golf teams are rounding out their respective fall seasons. The women’s team will compete in their last tournament from Oct. 17 through 19 at the Southern in Savannah, GA. The Georgetown Intercollegiate was the last competition for the men’s fall season. 

Both teams will play a spring season that will begin next semester. 

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SAAC’s membership consists of student-athletes and the organization aims to represent this community at Yale. More specifically, this means advocating for student-athletes at conferences, organizing community service events to increase engagement, as well as providing a platform and channel for players to voice their concerns. The News spoke with some of SAAC’s members in order to better understand the organization’s function both as a part of the athletic department and as a group at Yale in general. 

“My goal for this year is to support our president, [Chelsea Kung ’23], as best I can and work with administrators and other leaders within athletics to foster a community where student-athletes are proud to represent Yale,” SAAC vice president and football player Bennie Anderson ’24 said. “We have a great group and I’m excited to work alongside this talented group of leaders.”

Over the summer, Anderson and Kung worked to develop plans and goals for the SAAC executive board and the school year. Kung, a women’s tennis player, is in her second term as SAAC president while Anderson served as the DEI subcommittee chair last year. 

This year, field hockey player Rachel Brown ’24 will serve as events chair while women’s golfer Ashley Au ’24 will serve as communications director. Also representing women’s golf, Ami Gianchandani ’23 is SAAC’s representative to the NCAA DI leadership while track and field runner Kaity Chandrika ’25 is the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, or DEIB, Council Chair. 

“I’ve always wanted to be more involved in the leadership of the athletic department, so I thought the [SAAC] would be a good opportunity,” Bharathi Subbiah ’24, the Bulldog Cup and Community Service Chair and women’s track and field team member said. 

The Bulldog Cup is a yearly competition in which individual athletes complete tasks to collect the most points. Historically, tasks have been centered around fostering inter-team bonding, with an example task being attending another team’s game and posting images online.

However, Subbiah aims to pivot this year’s Bulldog Cup to focus on community service given the large number of athletes on campus.

Helen Tan ’25, a member of the women’s fencing team, is the SAAC’s Ivy League representative. The Ivy League functions as an independent sports league, with its own governing body and regulations on top of DI NCAA regulations.

“My main role is to attend meetings with other Ivy League [teams] and representatives in order to talk about new legislation concerning student athletes around the country,” Tan said. 

Tan’s focus also includes bringing concerns that other student-athletes have had to these conferences to ensure that their voices are heard at the highest level. At a fundamental level, Tan aims to “be an approachable spokesperson for all student athletes at Yale and advocate their ideas at these meetings and conferences.”

While the SAAC focuses on helping teams at Yale develop, its director of administration is responsible for helping the SAAC itself run smoothly. This year, gymnast Sherry Wang ’24 will take on the role. Her duties include “being the main point of internal communication among the SAAC members and communicating all relevant information.”

In 2020, the SAAC launched a new project titled YUMatter to promote mental health. Women’s lacrosse player Marymegan Wright ’25 is leading this initiative and hopes to increase its presence.

“Over the course of the year, I hope to mobilize the student athlete community to amplify mental health advocacy across campus, provide student athletes with mental health resources and create initiatives that reinforce the importance of prioritizing mental health,” Wright wrote to the News. 

The first iteration of a Student-Athlete Advisory Committee was an association-wide organization that was launched by the NCAA in 1989.

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