Two on faculty assume new leadership roles

The new academic year has seen a shifting of roles within Yale’s largest graduate program with the appointment of its director, Lynn Cooley, Ph.D., as dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (GSAS).

Cooley, the C.N.H. Long Professor of Genetics, stepped down as leader of the Combined Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) July 1 to assume the deanship of GSAS. She is succeeded as BBS director by Anthony J. Koleske, Ph.D., professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of neurobiology.

Cooley, also professor of cell biology and of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, had served as BBS director since 2001. She received her B.A. from Connecticut College, and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas for research carried out with Dieter Söll, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and professor of chemistry. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where she established new methods using transposable elements for genetic and molecular analysis of genes in the fruit fly Drosophila.

Koleske has served as director of graduate admissions for the BBS Program’s Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry track and its successor, the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology track. He is a member of the executive committees of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and the Cellular and Molecular Biology Training Program.

Koleske earned his Ph.D. and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. His research is focused on the mechanisms underlying cell adhesion and how these processes break down in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.