Marian Miner Cook
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Is There Anything That Every College Student Should Know About Science? A Personal Take From The (Sadly) Short Life Of Yale-NUS College

Mon, February 5, 2024
Dinner Program
Neil D. Clarke

Neil Clarke is Associate Professor of Life Sciences at Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts institution founded by Yale and the National University of Singapore. At Yale-NUS, he and his colleagues were given a clean slate upon which to draw a science curriculum for undergraduates, most importantly those who will never take a science course again. Is there anything about science such students don’t know already, but should? In this talk he will share his perspectives on this question and the approach taken at Yale-NUS.

Before joining Yale-NUS as an inaugural faculty member, Clarke spent more than 35 years in research-intensive institutions, first as a student and then as a researcher and teacher of biochemistry, molecular biology, structural biology, and genomics. His time at Yale-NUS College has been the highlight of his career.

Neil Clarke is Associate Professor of Science at Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts institution founded by Yale University and the National University of Singapore. Among the many roles he has played at Yale-NUS are the five years he served as founding head of Life Sciences and his extensive work on the science Common Curriculum, including chairing the Science Common Curriculum Task Force which substantially revised the Common Curriculum in the sciences after the first couple years. He also served for four years as Rector (head) of Cendana College, one of Yale-NUS’s three residential colleges. Before moving to Yale-NUS, Clarke was Deputy Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, as well as Senior Group Leader for Computational and Systems Biology (2005-2013). He began his career as an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1992-2005).

During the Spring 2024 semester, Neil Clarke is a William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC, and is at Claremont McKenna College at the invitation of the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences. 

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