Four Yale faculty members have been named recipients of this year's Poorvu Family Fund for Academic Innovation Award. The award recognizes faculty whose teaching strengthens Yale College's undergraduate curriculum through intellectual rigor, creativity, and interdisciplinary engagement. Supported by the Poorvu family, the prize is awarded in the form of a research fund intended to support recipients at a formative stage in their academic careers.
This year's recipients, Julia Leonard, Elleza Kelley, Jorge Méndez Seijas, and Sigrid Nachtergaele, were honored yesterday at an event hosted by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis.
Julia Leonard is an assistant professor of psychology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Her research examines the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's effort allocation, with a particular focus on how these decisions are shaped by the social environment, including parenting practices. Leonard's research interests closely align with her teaching, which centers on how people become motivated, lifelong learners. She teaches "Developmental Psychology" and "Translating Developmental Science into Educational Practice," a course cross listed in psychology and education studies.
Elleza Kelley is an assistant professor of English and Black Studies in FAS and an affiliate faculty member in the American Studies program. She works on African American literature, with an emphasis on Black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her forthcoming book, "Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space," (to be published in December 2026 by Duke University Press) examines how literature and visual art index Black spatial thought and practice through experimentations with form, genre, and media, with particular attention to how Black people have engaged U.S. geographies of racial enclosure. At Yale, Kelley teaches courses including "Black Geographies: Space & Place in African American Literature," and "Counternarratives," which explores contemporary Black historical fiction alongside the histories and archival materials that inspire it. Her classes emphasize reading at the edges of literature, engaging students with visual art, archives, architecture, and scholarship from across disciplines.
Jorge Méndez Seijas is a senior lector II in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Spanish Language Program. With an academic background in linguistics, his research interests include second language acquisition and instruction, heritage language education, curriculum design, and second language phonetics and phonology. Since joining Yale, Méndez Seijas has conducted research on program articulation and placement testing, using that work to make Spanish instruction across all proficiency levels more engaging and effective. His courses include "Languaging in Latino America," "Policies and Politics in the Spanish Speaking World," "Latinx Digital Cultures," and "Principles of Language Teaching and Learning."
Sigrid (Siggy) Nachtergaele is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology in FAS. Her laboratory uses approaches rooted in biochemistry and cell biology to study how chemical modifications regulate the function of a variety of RNA types. The overarching goal of her work is to understand how RNA chemical modifications regulate physiological processes and how disruptions to these processes contribute to disease. She teaches courses on introductory biochemistry and on biochemical research approaches.
