Morse Fellows

Scott Miller received his B.A. (1989), M.A. (1989), and Ph.D. (1994) from Harvard University, where he worked as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Subsequently, he traveled to the California Institute of Technology where he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Robert Grubbs until 1996. For the following decade, Professor Miller was a member of the faculty at Boston College, until joining the faculty at Yale University in 2006. In 2008, he was appointed as the Irénée duPont Professor of Chemistry. From 2009-2015, he served as the Chairperson of the Chemistry Department, and from 2015-2017 as the Divisional Director for Science.

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. 

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.