Morse Fellows
Morse College is a vibrant community. We would love to count you among us. The Fellows meet a few times per semester at the Head of College’s house, to interact with friends from all parts of the University and from the broader community. Many play the role of Advisor for a student or two. We extend invitations to student functions such as performances and college-wide social events, welcome participation at intramural sports, provide dining privileges in the college at lunch or dinner, all so you can meet with students, faculty and friends. Please join us - we welcome you!
David Lawrence Morse
Writer and Director of the Writing Program, Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale
Biography
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.
Interests:
In his spare time, Morse likes to renovate old houses, play tennis, go rock climbing with his daughter, and toss the frisbee for his border collie, who is the best athlete in the family.
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Hani Mowafi
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine Chief, Section of Global Health and International Emergency Medicine
Biography
Interests:
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Global Emergency Care
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Trauma and Injury in Low and Middle Income Countries
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Humanitarian Health
Katie Murphy
Senior Technical Advisor for Early Childhood Development
Biography
Robert Musco
Emeritus Medical Interpreter at Yale-New Haven Health & Amity Regional High School Librarian
Biography
Robert Musco has recently retired from his position as school librarian at neighboring Amity Regional High School, and from his work as a medical interpreter at Yale-New Haven Health. Together with his companion Sonny the Yellow Lab, he is currently living in Gijón, on Spain’s Cantabrian coast, in the region of Asturias.
After graduating from Cornell University, he studied stage and costume design in New York University’s MFA program, afterwards working as a wardrobe supervisor in opera, on Broadway, and in television and film production. His first career change led him to Barcelona, where he taught business English and worked as a staff translator for a global consulting company. He later built and operated a cafe-bar in Barcelona’s then-burgeoning Raval district.
After returning to the States, he earned an MS in secondary education and ESL (Albright College) and taught high-school Spanish for ten years, before receiving an MLS (Southern Connecticut) and making the switch to librarianship.
He is enthusiastic about helping students navigate and make sense of the morass of information available today, empowering them to make the decisions that will make their lives happier and the world more liveable.
Interests:
Robert enjoys learning about and sharing the company of dogs. He is also fascinated by uncovering family secrets through genealogical research.
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Brandon Nappi
Executive Director of Leadership Programs
Biography
Brandon Nappi, DMin, has over 20 years of experience as a contemplative teacher, guide, and mindfulness practitioner. Brandon is the founder of Copper Beech Institute, a global mindfulness community and training center which has shared research-based and transformative wellness practices with over 50,000 people from over 50 countries. He is currently the Executive Director of Leadership Programs at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and is a lecturer at Yale Divinity School. Brandon is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and holds a Master of Divinity degree from Yale University. His doctoral research explored Christian-Buddhist dialogue, mysticism, and Zen meditation. He has also received extensive mindfulness training from Zen Mountain Monastery and the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness.
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Laura Newburgh
Assistant Professor of Physics
Biography
Interests:
Laura is interested in studying the past 13 billion years of cosmic history through measurements of the CMB and 21cm emission from faraway galaxies. Her work involves building instruments that go on telescopes in Chile and Canada. She enjoys running (not that she’s had a chance to do that recently), hanging out with scientists (because she only knows scientists), and using natural selection to build stronger plants through abject neglect.
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Giulia Oskian
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Biography
Giulia Oskian is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She specializes in political theory and her research interests include early modern and modern political thought, constitutionalism, democratic theory, the history of ideologies, and political psychology. Her book Tocqueville and the Legal Basis of Democracy was published in Italian and is now being translated into English. Currently, she is working on a new project, which explores the role of emotions in political life, studying how emotions inform political judgement and internally curb rationality. She holds a Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore and, before coming to Yale, was a postdoctoral fellow at Science Po Paris and at Queen Mary University of London, and a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University.
Nikhil Padmanabhan
Faculty, Assoc. Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Biography
Nikhil Padmanabhan received his BS from Stanford in 2001 and his PhD in Physics from Princeton in 2007. Professor Padmanabhan came to Yale in 2009 and is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests are in cosmology, specifically in understanding the “dark energy” that appears to dominate our universe. He is working with some of the largest astronomical surveys available and thinks about astronomical “big data.”
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Ivona Pankova (Morse, ’13)
Senior Administrative Assistant, Yale Fellowships and Funding Office
Biography
Ivona received her B.A. in Global Affairs and East Asian Studies from Yale University in 2013, and her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge in 2018. She studied abroad in Japan as an undergraduate student and pursued independent research at the University of Tokyo after graduation. Ivona returned to Yale in 2022 to join the Fellowships and Funding Team and support Yale students in their academic and professional pursuits.
Interests:
East Asian Studies, Balkan Studies, creative writing, study abroad, international relations, diplomatic studies.
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Henry Park (Morse, ’07)
Radiation Oncologist and Associate Professor, Yale School of Medicine
Biography
Henry Park is an alumnus of Yale College (Morse ‘07, double-majoring in music and MCDB with neurobiology concentration), Yale School of Medicine (‘12), and Yale radiation oncology residency (‘17), with a brief sojourn to Boston from ‘11 to ‘13 for a master’s degree in public health and an internal medicine internship. He works as a radiation oncologist treating lung cancer and head and neck cancer, serving as chief of thoracic radiotherapy. He directs an active clinical research program and enjoys mentoring students, residents, and junior faculty in his role as vice chair for clinical research. He is experienced in medical school and residency selection as a long-time admissions committee member and former associate residency program director. Most importantly, he is a husband and a dad of two young children and a Yorkie.
Interests:
Music (violist in Yale Symphony Orchestra, pitch of Redhot & Blue, and inaugural assistant conductor of Davenport Pops Orchestra), professional and Yale sports.