Summer 2022 Institute Update
The Wu Tsai Institute marked its first anniversary this past February.
And in May, WTI achieved another significant milestone by successfully recruiting a new faculty member to Yale. Emilia Favuzzi, PhD, will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and a WTI Investigator on July 1, 2023 (and will arrive on campus this Fall). Favuzzi's research focuses on how the brain develops, namely the role of glia in sculpting synapses and circuits to build specialized functions. Favuzzi's addition to the faculty caps what was a new kind of search process for Yale over the past year: university-wide, open-area, open-rank, and centering best practices for diversity and fairness. The Institute will refresh this search in the Fall, aiming for several more recruitments and departmental partnerships in the coming years.
The Institute recently announced the inaugural round of WTI Innovation Grants. The recipients are four new collaborative teams tackling ambitious research questions with outstanding potential to further an integrative and interdisciplinary understanding of cognition. These teams are Arielle Baskin-Sommers and Ifat Levy ("Identifying Neurocognitive Fingerprints of Adolescent Development"); Stephen Strittmatter, Evelyn Lake, Jason Cai, and Takuya Toyonaga ("Multimodal Imaging to Connect Excitatory/Inhibitory Balance and Connectivity"); Philip Corlett, Tamar Gendler, and Brian Scholl ("Varieties of Perspective Taking"); Samuel McDougle and Damon Clark ("Domain-General Neural Algorithms for Motion Detection").
Mentorship and training are a significant part of WTI's mandate, and the Institute has worked diligently across the university to recruit and engage scientists at all career stages. We are incredibly pleased to welcome the inaugural group of six co-mentored WTI Postdoctoral Fellows to Yale, spanning neurology, computer science, psychiatry, psychology, electrical engineering, and neuroscience. Read more about the Institute's 2022 postdoc cohort in YaleNews.
The past year also saw the first admissions cycle for WTI Graduate Fellows through a transparent process open to all PhD programs. We expanded this year's incoming graduate class at Yale by nine students whose research interests intersect with the mission of WTI in areas including neuroscience, psychology, statistics and data science, physics, and biomedical engineering.
Earlier this month, eight Yale undergraduates started as WTI Summer Scholars in labs across the university. They were joined by six undergraduates from other institutions recruited in partnership with the Leadership Alliance to increase opportunities for students underrepresented in science.
Moreover, trainees have been given a seat at the table through a new WTI Student and Postdoc Committee, which organized their first major event earlier this month — a well-attended Sips & Science Social at Gryphon's Pub that included several impressive research talks.
