Yale

The Yale Athletic Department's presentation of the George H.W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award honors alumni athletes who, in their lives after Yale, have made significant leadership contributions in their worlds of governance, commerce, science and technology, education, public service, and the arts and media. The Award has been named in recognition of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States of America, as the living epitome of one who has successfully and selflessly committed a lifetime to address the diverse global leadership demands of his generation. Each honoree is chosen by a broadly representative alumni Honors Committee, based upon the candidates' individual lifetime leadership contributions in their respective fields. All have been graduated for more than 20 years and exemplify Yale's rich athletic heritage as an important component of the undergraduate educational experience. The awards have been presented at the biennial Blue Leadership Ball the night before the Yale/Harvard football game, an event that brings together over 700 alumni and friends of Yale Athletics.

2023 Blue Leadership Ball Highlights



2023 Recipients
 

Dr. Ed Barksdale Jr. '80
 
Dr. Barksdale, an All-American fencer and captain for the Bulldogs, earned an NCAA post-graduate scholarship to medical school upon graduating from Yale with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1980. He went on to get his M.D. from Harvard in 1984.
 
Dr. Barksdale is considered one of the country's leading experts in the field of pediatric surgery. His areas of expertise include short bowel syndrome, in utero malformations and the immunobiology of neuroblastoma.  He is the division chief of Pediatric Surgery, vice chairman of the Department of Pediatric Surgery and division chief of Pediatric General and Thoracic Surgery at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital. He is Surgeon-in-Chief at UH Rainbow, holds the Robert J. Izant, Jr., MD, Endowed Chair in Pediatric Surgery, and is a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He also recently served as president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association.
 
Dr. Barksdale did his general surgery training at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was Chief of West Surgery Service. After a fellowship in pediatric surgery at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, he spent 13 years as a professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an attending pediatric surgeon at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. In 2007 he became the first surgeon in western Pennsylvania to perform in utero surgery on a fetus.
 
Dr. Barksdale has previously been recognized with the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Public Service Award, the Health Cancer Hero Award, the Michael E. Miller Young Investigator Award and the Robert Wood Johnson Career Development Award. He was named by Black Enterprise as one of "America's Leading Doctors" in 2008.
 
Dr. Barksdale has served as co-chair of Project Focus, a youth violence prevention program. He also launched a hospital-based violence intervention program for teens called the Antifragility Initiative.

 

Dr. Christopher Brown '90
 
A football player at Yale, Dr. Brown was an honorable mention All-Ivy League selection in 1988 and was part of the Bulldogs' 1989 Ivy League Championship team. He earned a Rhodes Scholarship and Yale's Roosevelt L. Thompson Award for Community Service as a senior in 1990. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Yale, he went on to earn his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1994.  From 1994 to 1996, he served as a special assistant to Treasury Undersecretary for Law Enforcement Ronald K. Noble.  
 
A professor at Columbia University, Dr. Brown is a historian of Britain and the British empire. His research currently centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, continuing earlier work on the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire. At Columbia he has served as the Director of the Society of the Fellows in the Humanities, Chair of the University-Wide Tenure Review Advisory Committee and as the inaugural Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.  In 2016 he received the Faculty Mentoring Award from the University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for excellence in doctoral teaching and training.  He has worked as an advisor and on-screen commentator for multiple historical documentaries, including the "African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and "Benjamin Franklin," a Ken Burns film.  
 
Dr. Brown's published work has received prizes in four distinct fields of study – American History, British History, Atlantic History and the history of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance.
 
Prior to coming to Columbia in 2007, Dr. Brown spent eight years on the faculties of Rutgers University and The Johns Hopkins University.

 

 

Dr. Terry Light '69
 
Dr. Light, a former Yale wrestler who set the school record with a 15 second pin, graduated from Yale in 1969. He earned his M.D. from Chicago Medical School in 1973 then completed both surgical internship and orthopaedic surgery residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was a faculty member at the Yale Medical School until returning to Chicago in 1980.
 
Currently a professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Dr. Light served as the Dr. William Scholl Professor and Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery for 25 years and as Interim Dean of the Stritch Medical School. A world-renowned surgeon and teacher, he has provided lectures in 28 foreign countries and surgical care in 12 countries. His work overseas focuses on children born with congenital abnormalities of the hand. That effort includes 13 visits to Vilnius Children's Hospital in Lithuania, where he was awarded the Cross of the Knight Medal of Merit for Services to Lithuania by President Valdas Adamkus.  He also made eight visits to the Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Trauma and Orthopaedics, where he was awarded the Ho Chi Minh City Medal for service to the people of Vietnam.
 
Dr. Light has served as president of the American Orthopaedic Association and as president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.
 
Dr. Light's community service includes volunteering as a docent for 20 years with the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park, Illinois. He served as Foundation Board President from 1988 to 1990. He is also a docent for the Chicago Architecture Center.


 

Rear Admiral Carol Lynch, USN, (Ret.) '81
 
Recruited to play basketball, Lynch earned four letters in that sport while also playing on Yale's inaugural softball team. She won Ivy League titles in both of those sports and was a member of the volleyball team. After earning her B.A. from Yale in 1981 she earned her J.D. from Suffolk University Law School in 1984.
 
Lynch was appointed as a U.S. Navy Rear Admiral in October of 2016. She served on active duty in the Navy Judge Advocate General Corps from 1986 to 1993 and went on to serve as Deputy Judge Advocate General (Reserve Affairs and Operations) (DJAG) and Deputy Commander of the Naval Legal Service Command and retired with over 33 years of service. As the DJAG, she oversaw a multi-million-dollar budget, providing worldwide legal services to military commanders, Sailors, and their families. She leveraged technology to ensure legal assistance was provided to those in remote locations, ensured legal representation for sexual assault victims as part of the Victims' Legal Counsel Program, executed the first-ever inter-agency support mission to the Department of Justice, prioritized legal support to the Office of the Military Commissions, and molded long-term policy to ensure legislative proposals preserved veterans' retirement benefits and the transferability of GI Bill benefits for Reserve members. Throughout her career, she sought out, and was assigned to, the most challenging duties, including serving on the USS LEXINGTON (AVT-16), at the time, the only aircraft carrier in which woman were allowed to serve. Exhibiting the team concept she honed at Yale, she mentored countless female judge advocates and other personnel on the opportunity to meet the rigorous challenges and corresponding career benefits of sea duty. She was selected to serve as Commanding Officer of two legal reserve units, charged with developing and implementing military justice policy and providing Appellate Defense service to military members. Her numerous honors include the Distinguished Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal (four-time recipient), the Navy Commendation Medal (two-time recipient) and the Navy Achievement Medal (three-time recipient).
 
Lynch serves in a civilian capacity in the Department of the Navy as Counsel, Naval Education and Training Command, the Navy's largest shore command, and is licensed to practice law in Florida and Massachusetts.

 

 Frank Shorter '69
 
A three-time All-American, cross-country captain and part of Yale's 1968 Ivy League champion outdoor track and field team, Shorter won the NCAA six-mile run championship and the Ivy League 5,000 meter run championship in outdoor track and field as a senior in 1969. He then went on to a prolific running career that included a pair of Olympic medals in the marathon (gold in 1972 and silver in 1976). He also medaled at the Pan American Games multiple times, earning gold in both the marathon and the 10,000 meter run in 1971 and bronze in the 10,000 meter run in 1979. He was ranked as the No. 1 marathon runner in the world by Track and Field News for three years and was in the top five in their 10,000 meter runner rankings for four years.
 
Shorter's impact on the sport of running goes well beyond the track.  He worked with President Bill Clinton's administration to help create the United States Anti-Doping Agency and served as its chief executive officer. He also was a pioneer of legislation that allowed amateur and professional athletes to compete at the Olympics.
 
Shorter founded the Bolder Boulder 10K, which – with more than 60,000 participants – is one of the two largest races in the United States. He also founded the Frank Shorter Race4 Kids' Health 5K. He has been a vocal advocate for children's rights along with their mental and physical health. He also has served as a television commentator for the Boston Marathon.
 

 

Peter Salovey '86 Ph.D.  
 
Peter Salovey has spent 11 transformative years as president of Yale University. Since he took office in 2013, Yale has made significant strides toward the vision he articulated upon his appointment as president — a vision he has continually reinforced of "a more unified Yale, a more accessible Yale, a more innovative Yale, and an even more excellent Yale."
 
During President Salovey's presidency — which has followed his service as provost, dean of Yale College, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and chair of the Department of Psychology — Yale has added 2.2 million square feet of teaching and research space and raised $7.2 billion to support Yale's academic mission and impact on the world. It has undertaken a thorough, university-wide effort to sustain a thriving educational environment in which faculty, students, staff, and alumni can do their best work, and it has launched a project to shed light on Yale's historical ties to slavery.

President Salovey has authored or edited more than a dozen books, translated into 11 languages, and published hundreds of journal articles and essays. With John D. Mayer, he developed a broad framework called "emotional intelligence," the theory that just as people have a wide range of intellectual abilities, they also have a wide range of measurable emotional skills that profoundly affect their thinking and action.

In addition to teaching and mentoring scores of graduate students, President Salovey has won both the William Clyde DeVane Medal for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College and the Lex Hixon '63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Pretoria (2009), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2014), National Tsing Hua University (2014), Harvard University (2015), McGill University (2018), University of Haifa (2018), and Vytautas Magnus University (2019). In 2013, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
 
Under President Salovey, Yale varsity teams have won 20 national championships, 38 Ivy League championships and six Ivy League Tournament championships. The Bulldogs have had nearly 300 Academic All-Ivy League honorees, nearly a dozen College Sports Communicators/College Sports Information Directors of America Academic All-America Award winners and two Rhodes Scholarship winners.

President Salovey currently serves as the Ivy League representative on the NCAA Division I Board of Directors. He also attended the 2018 Women Leaders in College Sports National Convention and participated in the president's panel that was titled "President's Perspective: Why we hire who we hire".

"Through sport, students learn to deal with failure, work as a team, be disciplined and resilient. In short, Athletics are central to our Yale mission." – Peter Salovey, President
 

 

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