Our thanks to Professor Daniel Pinkel for his support

Professor Daniel Pinkel has recently made an extraordinarily generous gift to the Gilder Lehrman Center as support for the future of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and other work at the Center.  Daniel is Professor Emeritus in bio-physics at the University of California San Francisco where he had a highly successful career, achieving many patents and research breakthroughs, focusing primarily on cancer genetics and genomics.  Since retiring he now lives in New York City, not far from Grant’s tomb and two monuments of Frederick Douglass. Daniel is a very serious reader of history and literature; most recently he has tackled Don Quixote.  At a gathering at the New York Historical Society in 2019, Daniel and David Blight met at a lecture by the GLCDirector. In making this donation to Yale and the Center, Professor Pinkel commented: “I feel fortunate to be able to support the continuation of the Prize and its encouragement of work that brings to life the reality of slavery, especially now, when the very notion of reality is under such challenge.”  At the GLC, we as a staff, as well as the countless historians and writers in our network, wish to thank Dan Pinkel for his gift.  We will carry on our work because of enlightened minds like Dan.  We welcome with a warm heart this distinguished scientist and wonderful citizen of our community of knowledge and teaching.

- David Blight, Director, GLC