Four graduate alumni receive 2023 Wilbur Cross Medals

Four alumni of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were recently awarded Wilbur Lucius Cross Medals in recognition of their outstanding work and service.

Awarded annually by the GSAS Alumni Association, the Wilbur Cross Medal honors exceptional work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration. It is the highest honor that GSAS bestows on alumni.

This year’s recipients are:

• Elizabeth Bradley ’96 Ph.D. (Public Health) for her leading scholarship in public health, and her unwavering commitment to the health and well-being of local and global communities;
• Robert Gooding-Williams ’75 ’82 Ph.D. (Philosophy) for his significant contributions to the fields of philosophy, political theory, and race theory;
• James M. Jones ’70 Ph.D. (Psychology) for his transformative scholarship in the study of race, racism, and diversity in the last 50 years; and
• Che-Chia Wei ’85 Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) for technological innovation, including the miniaturization of integrated circuits, and leadership in the semiconductor industry.

The four honorees returned to Yale on Oct. 2 for a series of campus events, concluding with a dinner and awards ceremony.

The medal is given in honor of the legacy of service and excellence inaugurated by Wilbur Lucius Cross Ph.D. (1889), who served as dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930, and governor of Connecticut from 1930 to 1939.

Here are brief profiles of this year’s honorees:

Elizabeth H. Bradley, who has served as president of Vassar College since July 2017, is an unabashed supporter of liberal arts education and is deeply engaged with research on the performance and quality of higher education institutions in the United States. Under her leadership, Vassar has established partnerships to develop models of liberal arts higher education in India, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom. In addition, Vassar has collaborated with Columbia University to create a five-year Bachelor of Arts/Master of Public Health program. Bradley has served on the New York Governor’s Task Force on Re-Opening during the pandemic, the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council, the board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the board of Nuvance Health.

Bradley was on the Yale faculty for more than 20 years before moving to her role at Vassar. She directed the Health Management Program in the Yale School of Public Health and co-directed the RWJF Clinical Scholars Program. As head of Branford College, she mentored more than 50 pre- and post-doctoral fellows and hundreds of Yale College undergraduates. The first director of Yale’s Global Health Initiative, Bradley helped to create the first Masters of Health Administration on the African continent in partnership with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and pioneered a model to scale that up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Most recently, she was the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy, and faculty director of the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute.

Bradley has published about 325 peer-reviewed papers and 35 book chapters, and has co-authored three books, including “The American Healthcare Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less.” She is the 2018 recipient of the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017. She is a member of the Council of Foreign Affairs.

Bradley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University with a bachelor’s in economics, earned an M.B.A from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in health economics from Yale. Bradley is married to her husband of 37 years, John, with whom she has three adult children.

Robert Gooding-Williams, a professor at Columbia University, is a major figure in contemporary philosophy of race, a leading historian of Afro-modern social and political philosophy, a Du Bois scholar, and a Nietzsche scholar. His writings demonstrate a sophisticated ability to interpret complex social phenomena and to parse the nuanced interplay of race, class, gender, nationality, and other social positions. Drawing on European and American philosophical traditions, Gooding-Williams analyzes inherited racial narratives both to criticize racial injustice and to illuminate the ideological content of racial representations. In his work, he engages topics of immediate social concern and shows how philosophically literate social criticism can contribute to public debate.

He is the author of the books “Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism” (Stanford, 2001),

“Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics” (Routledge, 2005), and “In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America” (Harvard, 2009). In 2010, “In the Shadow of Du Bois” won two book prizes: one, for the best book on race, ethnicity, and political thought awarded by the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American

Political Science Association (APSA); and the second, an honorable mention citation for the David Easton Award, awarded by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the APSA. In 1998, Gooding-Williams’s influential essay “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy” was selected for publication in the Philosopher’s Annual, a collection comprising what the volume’s editors judged to be the 10 best articles to appear in a journal of philosophy that year.

Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. In 2020, Gooding-Williams received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2021 he was the inaugural recipient of the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Social Philosophy.

He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale, and is currently the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and professor of philosophy and of African-American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University. During his career, Gooding-Williams has also taught at Simmons College, Amherst College, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. He will return to Yale, as a professor of philosophy, in July 2024.

James Jones is the Trustees’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Africana Studies, and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity at the University of Delaware. He is former executive director for public interest and director of the Minority Fellowship Program at the American Psychological Association.

Jones published “Prejudice and Racism” in 1972 and a second edition in 1997. In 2014, he published “The Psychology of Diversity: Beyond Prejudice and Racism” (with John F. Dovidio and Deborah L. Vietze) and is currently working on a revision. Jones co-edited two books: “Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education” (with Stephanie L. Kerschbaum and Laura T. Eisenman); and “A Compelling Interest: Weighing the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education” (with Mitchell Chang, Daria Witt-Sandis and Kenji Hakuta).

Jones has also published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. His work focuses on culture and systemic racism. In 1973, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Calypso humor in Trinidad. This led to his psycho-cultural TRIOS Model (Time, Rhythm, Improvisation, Orality, and Spirituality), which reveals that adopting a TRIOSic self has positive consequences for psychological health and self-esteem in African Americans and others.

Jones served as president of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. His numerous awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnicity, Culture, and Race; the Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; the Distinguished Psychologist Award from the Association of Black Psychologists; the Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the American Psychological Association; and the Morton Deutsch Award for Social Justice from the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia Teachers College. In 2023, Jones was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Jones earned a B.A. from Oberlin College, an M.A. from Temple University, and his Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale. He was a faculty member in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and Social Relations from 1970 to 1976.

C.C. Wei, chief executive officer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Inc. (TSMC), has demonstrated a unique ability to connect with savvy top customer executives and enthusiastic entry-level employees alike.

Since joining TSMC, widely acknowledged as a pillar of the global technology community, in 1998, Wei has held roles of increasing significance, including vice president of south site operations, senior vice president of mainstream technology business, and senior vice president of business development. In March 2012, Wei was named co-chief operating officer, and then, in November 2013, the company’s president and co-CEO. In 2018 he was named CEO.

Before joining TSMC, Wei held leadership positions in technology and semiconductor companies. He was senior vice president of technology at Chartered Semiconductor, and senior manager for logic and SRAM technology development at ST Microelectronics. Prior to that, Wei contributed to the Texas Instruments R&D organizations as a member of technical staff. Wei earned his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Chiao Tung University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University.