The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 988. 

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7 and confidential.

To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session here. On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290.  Appointments  with Yale College Community Care can be scheduled here.

Students who are interested in taking a medical leave of absence should reach out to their residential college dean.

Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

On Tuesday, over 300 clinicians, psychiatrists, healthcare workers, social workers and students gathered in person and over Zoom to participate in the first conference of the inaugural Black Youth Mental Health Clinical Case Conference Series.

The clinical case conference series was organized by Amanda Calhoun, a child psychiatry fellow and the chief resident at the Yale Child Study Center. Following introductory remarks concerning the historical and current state of Black youth mental health, Calhoun presented a narrative account of a clinical case, and an expert panel discussed and analyzed the case. 

“In October 2021, experts declared child and adolescent mental health a national emergency,” Calhoun said in her opening remarks. “But Black youth have been in crisis for over 20 years and aren’t showing signs of improvement.”

Calhoun explained that the suicide rate for Black youth is rising faster than any other racial or ethnic group. During the pandemic, suicide rates for other racial and ethnic groups stayed the same or declined, while the Black suicide rate was among only three others that increased. 

Calhoun described how the mental health field is not equipped to care for Black children. According to Calhoun, suicide prediction algorithms are less effective at predicting suicide in Black populations. Similarly, psychotherapy is less effective for Black youth in areas with high anti-Black sentiment. Further, she argued that when medical researchers study Black youth, they often study those in poverty, excluding Black youth above the poverty line.

For Calhoun, all these factors reveal systemic issues with the medical health system’s ability to treat Black youth with mental illnesses.

“Very rarely, if ever, are clinical cases, clinical case reports or clinical case conferences focused on the poor behavior of the medical team,” Calhoun said.

Calhoun hopes to promote discussions about the medical system and Black youth by organizing six case studies for both medical providers and the general public. Traditionally, clinical case studies that are presented to medical professionals focus solely on issues with the patient and contain only clinical and impersonal language. They also rarely emphasize medical staff mistakes. 

According to Calhoun, the Black Youth Mental Health Clinical Case Conference Series contradicts all these rules. At each conference, the presenters will draw attention to medical staffs’ mistakes and any racist actions. 

Calhoun also chose to open up the case conference series to anyone. Instead of using clinical language, each presentation is delivered in a narrative style. 

“I’m going to start, and this is going to be the same structure across all of our clinical case conferences; I’m going to start with a narrative,” Calhoun said.

Calhoun told the story of Christina, a 13-year-old Black girl. White nurses made racist comments about Christina before she arrived at the hospital. Additionally, some doctors assumed that she had anger management issues, even though they did not make the same assumptions for a white boy of a similar age. 

Slowly, Christina began to respond more positively with a Black doctor, who eventually submitted this case for the clinical case conference. 

“Christina [was initially diagnosed]  as a 13-year-old girl with past psychiatric diagnoses of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder,” Calhoun said.

For Calhoun, Christina’s initial diagnosis was a particularly bad sign of treatment. According to Calhoun, Black youth are disproportionately diagnosed with ODD and DMDD. These diagnoses often carry unfavorable stigmas within the medical community and beyond. 

Further, they are difficult to treat with effective medicine. Often, the blanket antipsychotic drugs administered for these diagnoses are not corrective of the underlying issue. Calhoun said she does not diagnose her patients with ODD.

“I think one of the most important things for us to begin with is that our societies learned hundreds of years ago to treat Black people and even Black children differently,” said Carolyn Roberts, an assistant professor of history and African American Studies. “Hundreds of years ago, from the very beginning of encounter, that was the norm.”

Roberts noted that the transatlantic slave trade existed several hundred years before the formation of the United States. According to Roberts, doctors dehumanized Black people during the transatlantic slave trade. Black people were labeled as savages, and Black skin was labeled a kind of leprosy that inhibited the nerves from feeling.

With this history in mind, Roberts argued that Christina’s treatment is nothing new. Black people and children have been mislabeled and dehumanized for centuries. 

“I think the one other thing is the impact that this has had on the psychiatrist,” said Terrell Holloway, a chief fellow of the clinical neuroscience research unit at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. “Within this group of people, you have a psychiatrist that is trying to form a relationship with their patients as a means of treating them, while at the same time meeting resistance from their treatment team.”

Calhoun said that she hopes to use this series to present cases that are focused on how to deliver higher-level care to Black youth. She says that clinical cases of Black youth are all often boxed under one category, and fail to capture the diversity of Black culture. She said she aims to use each case to highlight Black diversity. 

People can sign up to attend one of the next conferences here. 

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Published in the journal PRX Life and led by Yimin Luo, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, the project built a model to describe how cells move together in large groups. Since cells can bend and deform in unusual ways, researchers say, it can be difficult to predict how cells interact with each other and move en masse.

“We noticed that cells tend to align with density when we include more cells in our experiment … [which] made us realize that cell-to-cell interactions exist in our system,” said Xinyi Fang, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara who co-authored the paper. “We wanted to construct a model that included both cell-to-cell interaction and also random movement.”

Cells are categorized as a type of active matter — matter that is composed of individuals that interact with each other but ultimately move in unison, said Luo. The term can refer to animal movement, like flocks of birds and schools of fish, and accurate models of bird and fish movements already exist. 

However, the same models cannot be applied to cells, which deform and bend in unusual ways that disrupt traditional models. 

In the process of designing a new model to address those shortcomings, the team first attempted to use conventional approaches to modeling active matter systems, said Mengyang Gu, a professor of statistics and applied probability at UCSB. 

Their first attempt used a bottom-up model, which attempts to add up all forces occurring in the active matter system. To determine the next position for each cell, researchers would have to know every force acting on a cell at all times. But according to Luo, that process is impractical, since cell movements are prohibitively complex to predict. 

A more accurate model of cell movement, they hypothesized, would contain some level of randomness. 

The second method attempted to use an artificial intelligence model to track patterns in active matter, said Luo. After being trained on sample datasets of cell movement, the AI would try to determine a pattern to predict how individual cells in groups move. 

But, by itself, the AI did not work for cells either. Luo said that there was too much fluctuation in cell movements, and cells move too slowly — factors that introduce too much noise into the system for the model to predict.

Instead, the team opted to use a hybrid of the two models. The team used elements of the bottom-up model to reduce the noise in the training dataset and clarify peculiarities in how cells interact.

For example, when cells move in opposite directions, they slide over each other instead of bouncing off of one another and changing their direction — a case that would confuse the AI model. After factoring in those special cases, the team used AI to model interactions afterward.

According to the researchers, a better understanding of cell dynamics can have wide-reaching impacts.

For Fang, the research can provide key insights into the way that wounds heal. The model can be applied to the way that cells migrate to the area of a wound and start to repair the damaged tissue. 

Luo also believes that his team’s research could help scientists better understand cancer. Most cancer patients who succumb to the disease, Luo said, die from cancer metastasis — the movement of cancer cells from the primary tumor to other parts of the body. The researchers hope their model can advance scientists’ understanding of how those cancer cells move throughout the body.

“Most of this would be applied or would be applicable to cases of cell migration, which is implicated from anywhere like embryonic development to cancer metastasis,” said Luo.

Gu also anticipates the model to be useful in the creation of soft robotics —  a field that includes the creation of artificial cells. According to Gu, this model may aid in that endeavor. But to do so, the researchers hope to make their model more representative of real-life cells.

While the study only models cells in two dimensions, there aren’t a lot of cell interactions in the body that can be accurately described with 2D-movement, Luo added. Only bodily systems like skin or the eyes’ external layer of protective cells can be realistically approximated to a 2D plane. 

“The next step would be taking this to 3D,” said Luo. “There are challenges that we have to overcome, but the 3D model would be more realistic than the 2D model.”

Expanding the model to predict cell movements in three dimensions, however, is not a simple undertaking. According to Luo, one of the biggest obstacles is the challenge of imaging 3D cell movements. 

As it stands, Imaging a 2D system is relatively easy: researchers can illuminate and photograph cells moving. However, illuminating a 3D system would cause lights to bounce off of the various elements in the system, reducing a scan’s resolution to an unusable degree.

The problem of resolution is an important next step in the creation of a more comprehensive 3D model, the researchers said.

“I think understanding how cells interact is important for many,” said Gu. “Understanding how they walk, how they interact, is the first step to develop many new applications and materials.”

The School of Engineering & Applied Science is located at 17 Hillhouse Ave.

The post Yale-led research models cell movements appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Led by Shu Hu, assistant professor of chemical & environmental engineering, the device proposal submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, is one of 22 projects receiving a total of $42 million in funding from the agency. All the projects contribute to the DOE’s goal of reducing the cost of green hydrogen to one dollar per one kilogram in one decade. 

“We’re building, essentially, an unprecedentedly large device,” said Hu. “It’s a device that is the size of a laptop. And previously, it was very small, like the size of a coin. It’s at least 10 times, or even 100 times bigger than [current hydrogen producing devices].”

Scaling the size of existing hydrogen producing devices would reduce the devices’ efficiency, Hu said. Existing devices are also impractical to manufacture at scale, so efficiently producing large amounts of green hydrogen required a ground-up redesign. 

The device manufactures green hydrogen in roughly three steps, Hu said. First, photo-absorbers — a type of semiconductor material — take in sunlight. The photo-absorbers generate charges from the sunlight and transport these charges to the catalyst. Finally, the catalyst uses the charges to split molecules of water into hydrogen and oxygen, the desired fuel and a harmless byproduct.

Hu’s team is a part of the Yale Energy Sciences Institute located on Yale’s West Campus. The group also collaborates with Purdue University, which helps to synthesize and stabilize the new materials, and other national labs, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Designing the device required new innovations to both increase the scale of hydrogen production and to make the device manufacturable en masse.

In the process, Hu’s team had to design new materials to capture light. Materials in previous devices were inefficient at large scales, Hu said — a problem his team’s new photosensitive material hopes to resolve.

Hu’s team faced the challenge of On-Site Sandblasting and Painting for the device to prevent corrosion and breakdown within minutes. Remarkably, their efforts paid off, as tests revealed that the innovative coating not only safeguarded the device but also extended its operation for thousands of hours. This achievement underscores the importance of seeking assistance from professional industrial coatings services such as the industrial coatings Perth to enhance the durability and performance of critical equipment.

But both tasks are proving to be a challenge. The team has faced challenges in controlling defects in the materials and making them stable. While they’ve generated theoretical solutions to these problems, the materials created have not yet yielded any hydrogen.

According to Hu, the new DOE funding should help the team overcome these challenges. 

The group will now have greater access to testing and benchmarking: they’ll be able to send more samples to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to test for efficiency and durability. They’ll also be able to test the new materials and coatings under different lighting and weather conditions for weeks at a time to evaluate their effectiveness when generating hydrogen. 

“[Green] hydrogen holds significant potential as a clean energy alternative,” wrote electrical engineering professor Mengxia Liu in an email to the News. “It can be used to power cars, generate electricity, and act as a heat source for buildings and industrial processes, all with zero greenhouse emission.”

One of the biggest challenges in replacing fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though, is an intermittency issue, said chemistry professor Gary Brudvig.

For instance, solar panels only work during the day, while wind farms only work with a strong enough breeze. Although these energy sources might produce enough energy in total, there are periods of time in which they will provide no energy because of weather conditions. According to Brudvig, green energy solutions need to be able to store energy and generate energy, even without the right conditions. 

Brudvig imagines that hydrogen could become this intermittent source, since it is easily stored and converted back into usable energy.

Another advantage of green hydrogen is its potential ease of production, Brudvig added. Hu’s device can create hydrogen with just sunlight and water; two things that can be found nearly anywhere in the world. 

“[The device is] very much analogous to a solar panel, except that it doesn’t just make electricity, it makes hydrogen,” said Brudvig. “This can then be stored for a long time, as opposed to electricity, which is instantaneous. This kind of approach would really be a breakthrough.”

Yale West Campus is located at 100 West Campus Dr. in Orange.

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Wei is one of this year’s four alumni who came to campus to receive the Wilbur Cross Medal. Wei’s event was also part of the Dean’s Invited Speaker Series, which organizes discussions with prominent industry leaders in engineering and adjacent fields.

While the session was originally intended to be a conversation between Wei and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo LAW ‘98, Raimondo was unable to attend due to obligations in Washington, D.C. 

Instead, Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Jeffrey Brock ’92 facilitated the discussion, which centered on Wei’s time at Yale, his transition from academia to industry and the role of the United States in semiconductor manufacturing. 

“So many of our alums have made their way to the top of the industrial world, in one role or another, that have incredible stories,” Brock said when introducing Wei at the event. “Our guest today really implemented that probably more than any of our alums.” 

In his opening remarks, Brock commented on Wei’s tie, which was navy blue and covered in white Yale logos. Wei said that the event was the only time he could wear the tie with pride, joking about possible complaints from other schools’ alumni if he wore it to work. 

In the beginning of the discussion, Wei described his educational journey. After attending college in Taiwan, Wei said he was drawn to Yale in part to work with his graduate mentor, Professor Tso-Ping Ma. Wei said that Ma greatly influenced him and taught him how to research and write well. 

“[Ma] was very patient and very instructive,” Wei said. “He also showed me how to write a good paper.” 

After earning his PhD from Yale, Wei worked for various semiconductor companies, eventually joining Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in 1998. Over the next decade, he climbed the company ladder and was appointed CEO in 2018.  

In his discussion, Wei reflected on his transition from managing transistors as an engineer to managing people as CEO. After pointing to the large number of policy and industry leaders that Yale has produced, Wei cited President Peter Salovey’s research on emotional intelligence as essential reading for future leaders. 

“I like to manage the machine because it doesn’t protest,” Wei said. “Managing people is way tougher.”

Wei also talked about the importance of semiconductors in the modern age. 

Wei said that there are important applications for semiconductors in autonomous driving, medical operations and artificial intelligence. 

“[The] semiconductor is the center of every technology,” Wei said.

Following Brock’s interview questions, undergraduate and graduate students asked Wei questions about his career and present-day issues related to technology. 

One student asked about why TSMC recently decided to build a semiconductor production plant in Phoenix, Arizona. Wei said TSMC chose to locate the plant in Arizona where there was the larger pool of skilled workers, a practical limitation that TSMC faced in Taiwan. 

“To tell the truth, the U.S. is the country with the most talented and innovative people, especially for the Ivy League student,” Wei said. 

He said that the U.S. government’s commitment to helping TSMC build this plant might encourage the construction of more American factories in the future. 

Another student asked about TSMC’s role in an era of rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. Wei declined to comment, though he noted that China is the company’s second largest customer.

Several students told the News that were excited to hear about Wei’s experiences, especially about his enthusiasm for Yale and the importance of semiconductors.  

“I thought the talk was insightful about Yale and international trade,” Connor Flood ’26 said. 

In the event, Wei offered advice to students about how to achieve success after graduating school. Wei emphasized the importance of enjoying one’s work, no matter the industry. 

“You have to find passion in your work,” Wei said. “If you cannot find passion, don’t do it. Change to another company, or change your boss.”

TSMC was founded in 1987.

The post Taiwan Semiconductor CEO C.C. Wei speaks at the Yale Science Building appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Moiré material is a type of material that exhibits different properties than its original material. Though researchers recently discovered the materials in 2018, they have quickly become a topic of interest, spawning a new branch of research known as “twistronics.” 

“Visually, the material looks very different from the traditional material, its parental form,” said Fengnian Xia, a professor of electrical engineering and an author of the study. “Because of the composition, how it is organized is very different from traditional materials. As a result, moiré materials have very different properties from the parent materials.”

Moiré materials are defined both by how they are formed and the properties they exhibit. Initially, moiré materials were constructed by stacking anatomically thin sheets at small relative angles.  

Xia and his team found a new way to grow these materials by stacking misaligned layers of van der Waals materials to create lattice structures. By placing successive sheets on top of one another at different angles, the researchers established a more thermodynamically stable configuration. Previously, the materials tended to rotate back to their “ground state,” which is the rotationally aligned configuration.

To visualize this process, Xia said to imagine that the materials are like hands stacked on top of one another at different angles. The various angles that result between the hands act in the same way that moiré materials are formed.

For Matthew Fortin-Deschênes, a postdoctoral fellow in Xia’s lab and the primary author of the paper, moiré materials’ unknown properties are exciting. He said that they could currently be used in many applications, including optics and electrical engineering. 

Benjamin Remez, a postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department, studies theoretical condensed matter physics. His research focuses on the novel physics that occurs when many particles are brought together. Even though Xia’s study is not directly related to his work, he believes it has powerful implications. 

“It is important to know what is within reach for experimentalists to probe,” Remez said. As the field of materials science advances in synthesizing new materials with new methods that allow scientists to have more tunability and control over the growth, the collaboration between theory and experiment becomes more prominent.

Similarly, Nemin Wei, a postdoctoral fellow who studies condensed matter theory, said that Xia and his team’s findings are a critical first step in controlling the electronic and optical properties of the material. 

Although the study’s primary goal was to find a new way to create moiré materials, Xia and Fortin-Deschênes both plan to continue their research. They have successfully grown moiré materials to roughly 50 microns. Still, the researchers would like to grow these materials consistently at a higher scale. Further, they would like to apply their new method of material growth on different base materials. 

Electronics, photonics and nanodevices is a research concentration in the Electrical Engineering Department. 

The post Researchers discover new way to arrange materials to exhibit unique properties appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Although at least two faculty members are pleased with the progress made in renovating the building, a variety of issues — including inadequate privacy and meeting spaces — plague the new construction, impacted faculty said. Still, they remain hopeful for continued solutions.

Kline Tower, formerly known as Kline Biology Tower, was closed for over three years as it underwent renovations that began in November 2019. The updates — originally set to finish in summer 2022 — were set back a year by COVID-19 pandemic but finished this summer. The mathematics, statistics and data science and astronomy departments, as well as a portion of the physics department, moved into the renovated tower before the start of the 2023-2024 school year.

For years, opinions on the tower — and its redesign — have been mixed.

The renovations reimagined the internal layout of the building: workers repiped the plumbing system, changed bathroom locations, removed ceiling ventilation and tore down many non-load bearing structures, astronomy professor Sarbani Basu said. The resulting space, according to Basu, is much more visually appealing than its predecessor. 

According to biology professor Joel Rosenbaum, who worked in the tower before its recent renovations, the old building did not facilitate faculty communication.

“It was a difficult building to work in,” Rosenbaum told the News. “Right from the start, the building had some major problems built into it. Sometimes you could go for weeks without seeing a colleague. Scientists like to talk to each other.”

Rosenbaum explained that the old building spanned 14 floors, with only two or three researchers working on each floor. Researchers on different floors rarely saw each other, and slow elevators were a common inconvenience.

The old tower’s distilled-water piping system was made of glass, and if the weak glass piping broke — particularly on upper floors — water would flood the entire building. According to Rosenbaum, such flooding events happened two to three times per year.

It was also difficult for faculty to teach in the tower. Rosenbaum said that it had very few spaces to teach anything larger than a seminar. 

Accordingly, faculty members such as astronomy professor Priyamvada Natarajan are pleased with the redesign, which sought to address these issues and more.

For Natarajan, one of the new building’s unexpected benefits is its significant amount of natural light.

“They’ve done magic,” Natarajan told the News. “It’s just beautiful, very positive, and [I’m] literally gushing about the natural light in the buildings because I really did not anticipate it would be like this.”

The new building is covered with glass panels and white walls, Basu added, giving the building a cleaner and more modern appearance. 

Basu also said that the renovation seems to have addressed the flooding issue. She told the News that no flooding has occurred since the renovation.

The redesign also incorporated Rosenbaum’s concerns about communication by adding staircases known as triplets. While the building’s central staircase does not allow occupants to reenter floorspace once they are in the stairwell, the triplet staircases stretch three floors through departments. They are intended to allow researchers to move more freely throughout different floors of the building.

It’s an idea that Natarjan described as “just brilliant” to connect researchers on different floors. 

“It’s just fantastic to be co-located,” she said. “The future possibilities for collaboration, communication and building a sense of community … [are] gonna be fantastic.”

However, many of the issues faculty raised about the old Kline Biology Tower still afflict the new Kline Tower. According to Basu, elevators remain extremely slow. 

She also described a significant decrease in office space from her previous location. Basu was once able to hold small meetings in her office on a meeting table, but her new office within Kline Tower is not large enough to accommodate one.

However, two issues stand out most for faculty. Both Basu and Natarajan independently listed privacy and space for a colloquium as prime concerns.

Since many internal walls are constructed out of thin glass, there is little to no soundproofing in the building and conversations are easily heard through walls. Even the building’s designated Zoom rooms for online meetings lack soundproofing: Zoom conversations can be heard through the glass walls and external conversations can disrupt the Zoom calls, Basu and Natrajan told the News.

“For me, particularly as chair [of Astronomy], this is deeply troubling,” Natarajan said. “It’s very difficult for all the faculty members because … we cannot have a private Zoom conversation anywhere. They are not at all soundproof. They’re completely unusable.”

Their other concern about the building is the lack of a space to hold a colloquium — a meeting of approximately 70 people featuring a guest speaker from a different university. According to Natarajan, colloquiums are “crucial” to share scientific information and stay up-to-date on recent findings.

Other lecture spaces on campus, Basu added, would be undesirably large as well.

“Colloquium is a fundamental part of the intellectual work of every department at Yale,” Natarajan said. “We were promised a space.”

According to Natarajan, the Astronomy department was initially promised a space on the 14th floor, but the University later opted to assign the space to Yale Conference Services. In order for the Astronomy department to access the 14th floor space, it would need to pay a fee of $2,500 per colloquium to Yale Conference Services.

Because the Astronomy department holds 26 colloquia each year, Natarajan explained, the annual fee would sit at around $67,000, a price that is prohibitive for the department.

Despite these issues, faculty within the building are optimistic about their resolution.

“I’m actually very enthusiastic about the official inauguration and excited to give everyone an opportunity to walk through,” said Natarajan. “I am completely convinced that [the issues with the building] will be resolved”

Kline Biology Tower is located at 219 Prospect St.

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The program, which is supported by a $3 million grant from the NSF and led by faculty at the School of Engineering & Applied Science, is an effort to develop advanced research and studies in materials science. Quantum materials is a smaller field of study focusing on materials that do not follow the classical laws of physics, such as complex magnets, superconductors and ultra-cold atoms. Alongside new classes and research opportunities, the program will also include professional skills training and internship opportunities at partner companies such as Meta and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“The research program is not dissimilar from what is already being carried out at Yale in individual laboratories, but what is quite new is the ability of a large number of researchers to work collectively on one set of quantum materials problems,” Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, a SEAS professor and a co-investigator for the grant, wrote to the News. 

Ismail-Beigi explained that Yale does not currently have a standalone doctoral degree program in materials science. The new program is designed to train more than 30 doctoral students to work toward their doctorate in departments such as Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science while also completing the requirements for a Quantum Materials Science and Engineering, or QMSE, certificate.

Participating students take a one-semester introductory course on quantum materials as well as classes on quantum mechanics, solid-state physics and data science. Students will also be able to research the growth, structure and electronic properties of quantum nanowires grown at Yale with the help of machine learning.

“This program will also catalyze the formation of a Ph.D. degree-granting program in materials science and engineering,” Corey O’Hern, co-principal investigator for the grant, explained. “It will enable the formation of a strong cohort of doctoral students, who are trained to tackle cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research questions in quantum materials science and engineering via coursework, professional skills development and interactions with industry.”

The program will favor applications from students who are underrepresented in STEM. Ismail-Beigi predicted that the program will be able to continue to favor applications from underrepresented groups despite the recent affirmative action Supreme Court decision. 

“This NRT program is aimed at graduate students and not about college admissions so, perhaps, due to the different policies, evaluation criteria and approaches for graduate versus undergraduate admissions the direct recruiting of underrepresented STEM applicants may not be affected,” Ismail-Beigi wrote to the News.

The program will also teach skills such as mentoring, outreach, team building and science communication. This supplemental skills training is intended to guide students toward more successful careers in STEM. 

Emma Carley, the program’s coordinator, explained that program activities would include “workshops about best practices in science writing and presentation, outreach events with local K-12 students, and networking opportunities with scientists from a range of careers in QMSE-related fields.” 

Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science is located at 17 Hillhouse Ave.

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Whereas before, only select systems of the engine were examined individually, last Sunday’s test marked the team’s first time testing the engine as a whole. The team — led by Jonah Halperin ’26 and Henry Demarest ’25 — is currently in the process of refining some of the subsystems of the engine and hopes to conduct another test before the end of the year. 

“A lot of people in YUAA and a lot of Yale engineers in general are interested in space exploration, and the aerospace industry,” Demarest said. “And most modern rockets use liquid propulsion. So we wanted to bring that technology and get more familiar with the technology while we’re in undergrad.”

The project was started by Ryan Smithers ’25 in Fall 2021. Since then, the team has grown to over 30 members. The team currently works on the engine within one of the storage spaces of the Mann Engineering Student Center in Dunham Laboratory.

The engineers hope to create a rocket engine able to theoretically output 200 pounds of force if loaded with rocket fuel. According to Demarest, this number, while not comparable to the rocket engines corporations or governments can produce, is significant because the engine could theoretically lift most people. The team currently has no plans of testing the rocket with combustible fuel, but hopes to prove the engine’s capability with water tests.

Halperin notes that through the building process, the team is focused on the application of mechanical engineering. He said that the mechanical engineering program at Yale is very theory focused.

“[Theory is] great, obviously, to know how to design things,” Halperin said. “But when you start going on to Master’s degrees, and you’re saying what’s an NPT versus SAE fitting? What is the correct sizing? And just starting to understand how you take those theoretical ideas and put them in a practical application. So the idea for this club is that we’re able to do something really cool, build a rocket engine, and learn stuff that is going to be even cooler.” 

Project Liquid consists of four smaller subteams: test stand, electronics and control, feed system and thrust chamber. 

The test stand subteam builds the metal frame structure that physically contains the components of the rocket engine. The electronics and control team connects all of the wiring for the engine, as well as the electronic sensors, and writes the programs for the engine. The feed system subteam deals with the plumbing of the engine — routing the engine fuel and the highly pressurized gas used to pressurize the engine. The thrust chamber team designs the injector and the portions of the engine that would need to handle extreme heat if tested with real rocket fuel.

“Progress has really picked up this semester and it’s really motivating, especially for the incoming class of 2027,” Kidus Abebe ’26, the thrust chamber subteam lead, said. “When we present our project during Bulldog Days and again during the extracurricular bazaar, I think it’s going to be really motivating.”

Great enthusiasm was shared amongst many of the engineers in the project. Abebe, Halperin, Demarest, Jack Griffin ’26, Cayden Cerveny ’26 and Aaron Cope ’26 all shared their passion for the project and the group’s camaraderie. 

According to Halperin, the project would not have been possible without the support received from Yale. Many members of the faculty have individually supported the project in areas such as part acquisition, procuring space to work and securing equipment. Yale Environmental Health and Safety has also helped to manage project safety.

“We’re a group that’s doing something awesome; we’re building a rocket engine,” Halperin said. “There is no person who can’t walk out of that room right now and say, ‘I didn’t contribute something,’ because everyone has been able to help … Continuing to build and giving undergraduates a chance to really understand what industry is like, understand what engineering can be, and even just what good teamwork is, [that’s] something that we’re looking forward to.”

Dunham Laboratory and the Mann Center are located on Hillhouse Avenue.

Correction 4/14: A previous version of this article mistranscribed a quote from Halperin. 

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For each job category, the tool presents data on core tasks, employment trends, top employers, education levels, annual earnings, technical skills, core competencies and job titles. The different jobs can be navigated by selecting keywords or by filtering for industry and occupation. Data is available by state and by county, and the site is updated quarterly. 

“Our hope is that many people will use [the tool] and find value in it,” said OCS Director Jeanine Dames. “But our particular target audience is, obviously, our students, certainly faculty and staff and our alumni.”

Users are not required to have access to Yale CAS in order to utilize the Job Market Insights tool. It is available to everyone, regardless of Yale affiliation.The data hosted on the website is not Yale-specific, but focuses on the national job market as a whole.

OCS staff hope that a wide variety of people will make use of the tool. According to Dames, the tool will aid its viewers in finding salary information, searching job data by geographical area and targeting certain employers.

The OCS often uses the tool during in-person advising sessions, Dames said. The tool can aid students in finding the right job and employer, as well as help make sure that the student is proficient in the right areas of expertise for the job. 

“The interesting thing about the tool is it provides information on jobs and career tracks,” Dames said. “It also provides information on specific geographic area.”

Job data can be broken down by state and county. If a student is interested in working in a specific location, the tool can help determine job availability in that area. If demand for a certain job is exhibiting a downward trend in a particular area, the student can then search in other counties and compare employment trends between locations. 

All data points for each county are refreshed and surveyed quarterly. The data for the statistics is sourced from a company called Lightcast, which in turn sources its data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It gives the user a way to stay on top of trends,” said Laurie Coppola, senior associate director of OCS. “Like for mechanical engineers, it’s a 5.85 percent increase [in job availability], but some others, like a quant finance job, it’s more than a 9 percent increase, you know, which is more in demand.”

The employment trends statistic is a graph that shows the popularity of a particular job, containing data on the number of positions over time. Data starts in 2020 and projections are forecasted up to 2032. 

Just below the employment trends graph sits the education levels pie chart, which details the education level of employees working within a particular job. This data is broken down into four categories: a bachelor’s degree, an associate degree, some college and a high school diploma. The data for this graph is provided by O*NET, the Occupational Information Network.

The site also contains a list of the technical skills most associated with a given career. These technical skills are determined by gauging the number of times a certain skill is required by a job post. Examples of technical skills include budget analysis, accounting, changing oil, law enforcement and electrical wiring. 

Next to this list is an array of core competencies. These competencies are also important skills for a given career, but are broadly focused instead of technical. Examples of core competencies include active listening, reading comprehension, critical thinking and coordination. 

The site also dedicates a graph towards annual earnings. The data is broken down by a defined set of percentile ranges: 10, 25, 50, 75 and 90 percent. The listed earnings figures include the base pay rate, cost of living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous duty pay, incentive pay, on-call pay and tips. Data from this graph is taken from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. 

“It can give people information about not just the students, but what people across the country are doing,” said Kristin McJunkins, director of health professions advising and STEM Connect at OCS. “So, you know, when students are thinking about locations or industries or things like that, it just gives them broader touch points for information, which is valuable.”

Yale OCS is located at 55 Whitney Ave. 

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The report evaluates data from a survey administered in April of 2022. The survey was sent to 1,448 graduates and completed by 1,241 of them, representing an 85.7 percent knowledge rate. All data was recorded within six months of graduation. The report contains data on post-graduate plans, summer choices, location, salary and further degrees pursued, among other factors. The report was published on the OCS website, and the entire report with all of its data can be obtained by email request to the office.

“This is obviously a very interesting class, because they were hit with two summers of COVID,” said Jeanine Dames, director of OCS. “What was interesting during COVID was that there were things like language study and summer abroad that just shut down. There was not a huge pullback in job opportunities.”

During the summer of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 18.4 percent of respondents reported that they pursued language study, including study abroad programs. The following summer of 2020 saw language study fall to 3.2 percent, and the summer of 2021 saw an even lower slump of 1.6 percent.

Inversely to language study, participation in paid internships rose over time. During the summer of 2019, just 13.9 percent of respondents spent the summer in a paid internship. In the summer of 2020, however, this number nearly doubled to 26.4 percent, increasing again to 42.2 percent in 2021.

No other surveyed categories of summer choices showed a notable fluctuation in participation over time.

The report also details data on the size of the current employer workforce. The size of the organizations that 2022 graduates have joined is broken down by employee groups of more than 500, 500-251, 250-101, 100-51, 50-11 and 10-1. The over-500 category held the majority of graduates, with 53.7 percent of employed respondents falling into this category. The only other category to break a 10 percent share of respondents is the 50-11 employee category, encompassing 17.1 percent of employed respondents.

According to Laurie Coppola, senior associate director of OCS, one possible reason for such a large percentage of graduates working at companies with between 11 and 50 employees is due to changes in the tech industry. Coppola said that, taking into account recent layoffs, jobs in the tech industry still exist for Yale graduates, but possibly not in larger companies.

According to the report, only 8.7 percent of graduates now reside outside of the U.S. This is lower than the percentage of students that originated from outside of the U.S., Dames said. Dames added that many of these international students who are choosing to stay in the U.S. may be doing so only short term — they may have received the Optional Practical Training extension of their F-1 status, she said, and will reside in the US for a couple of years with the intention of returning to their home country.

“Particularly for STEM students, if they receive the OPT, they can stay in the United States for two years,” said Kristin McJunkins, director of health professions advising and STEM connect at OCS. 

Other than the 8.7 percent of respondents that chose to move abroad, 88.9 percent of respondents have chosen to remain within the United States. Of these respondents, 73.4 percent chose to live in either New York, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts or Washington D.C. Other top locations post-graduation included the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, Canada and China. 

The report also ranked the most popular industries of employment for graduates — finance, academia, technology, consulting and healthcare being the top five and accounting for 67 percent of the class of 2022. These categories represent the industry a graduate works for, and not the specific job role of the graduate.

“There’s another reason that education rates as number two, and one of the first ones is the research,” Dames said. “Students have relationships with the faculty already here. Many times we’ve already worked with them.”

Finance, consulting, laboratory research, software development and policy/academic/literary research were the top five functional employment categories, which represent the specific job function of the graduate. 

The Office of Career Strategy is located at 55 Whitney Avenue.

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