Joy Rankin
Joy is delighted to be pursuing her doctorate at Yale. She graduated from Dartmouth College, where she double-majored in mathematics and history. Her history senior project analyzed Thomas Power's thesis in his book Heisenberg's War that physicist Werner Heisenberg actively sabotaged the Nazi efforts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. After college, Joy enjoyed a successful career launching educational programs ranging from an online ESL website to online Advanced Placement courses for high school students, a career that brought her from Boston to Portland, Oregon to Durham, North Carolina. Most recently, Joy launched Duke University's doctoral program in Public Policy while attaining her master's degree there. At Duke, Joy investigated the social history of the community at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, as well as the development of open source biology. Her master's thesis employed three documentary works about J. Robert Oppenheimer - a play, a film, and an opera - to examine American attitudes about living in the Atomic Age. At Yale, Joy studies the history of biology, focusing on the post-World War II era in the United States. She is also interested in science education, science policy, and maps of all kinds.
