Morse Fellows

Dr. Linda Mayes is the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology and Director of the Yale Child Study Center. She is also Special Advisor to the Dean in the Yale School of Medicine focusing on scientific conduct and academic integrity. A graduate of the Sewanee: The University of the South as a member of the first class of women, Dr. Mayes received her medical degree from Vanderbilt University where she also completed a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in neonatology.   Dr. Mayes joined the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine in the Yale Child Study Center where she established a research laboratory focusing on the neuropsychological development of young children growing up in adverse circumstances.  She has followed children exposed to drugs prenatally for over two decades well into these individuals becoming parents themselves.  Given her work with children at significantly high-risk for developmental impairments because of exposure to biological and environmental adversity, Dr. Mayes also studies how adults transition to parenthood, especially when substance abuse is involved, and the basic neural circuitry of early parent-infant attachment. She and her colleagues have developed a series of interventions for parents including an intensive home-based program called Minding the Baby. Dr. Mayes’s research programs are multidisciplinary, not only in their blending basic science with clinical interventions but also in the disciplines required including adult and child psychiatry, behavioral neuroscience, obstetrics, pediatrics, and neuropsychology.   Her work is published widely in the developmental psychology, pediatrics, and child psychiatry literature.   Dr. Mayes is also trained as an adult and child psychoanalyst and provides clinical care to young children and their parents.  She teaches and supervises clinical fellows in child psychiatry, social work, psychology and pediatrics as well as mentors research fellows work in her laboratory, many of whom have gone onto their own research and clinical careers in academic centers.  Finally, Dr. Mayes is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor in psychology at Sewanee: The University of the South where she is working on intervention programs to enhance child and family resilience and teaches about child and family development in rural Appalachia.

Emily Miller is the Assessment and Collections Analysis Librarian for central Sterling Library.  Her work primarily consists of creating and maintaining collections specific reports and supporting large library initiatives as a member of the central Assessment and User Experience team. She runs and compiles annual usage and statistics reports that are reported on the national and international scale and supports all Yale libraries with their reporting and analysis needs.  

A native of Connecticut, Emily grew up down the coast from New Haven and loves getting out on the water in the summer.  She has two BS degrees in Computer Science and Interactive Media and Game Development from Worcester Polytechnic, and a Masters of Library Information Science from Drexel.  Prior to completing her Masters and switching to academia, Emily worked for United Health Group as a Project Manager for Cyber Security for 8 years, before working as a Project Manager for Sales Analytics for IDEXX.  

Originally from south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse is a fiction writer, playwright, and the director of the Writing Program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale.  His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere.  His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in July 2023.  The stories in the collection tend toward the fantastic and the speculative—fables that dramatize our era’s crisis of faith in the nature and meaning of reality.  It is a concern with language and its ability to distort or capture reality that animates his teaching at the Jackson School, where as a writing instructor he offers courses on policy writing and on disinformation and the craft of persuasion.  Prior to coming to Yale, he taught for nearly twenty years at the University of Michigan, where in addition to a variety of writing classes he also taught courses on utopianism and the politics and ethics of lying.  His first play, Quartet, concerning Beethoven’s composition of the late string quartets, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.