Samuel Byrd 
Samuel, or Sam (any pronouns), is a Gender & Sexuality educator, consultant, and national board-certified counselor originally from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. As a first-generation professional, Samuel works to expand access to education, support mental health and wellbeing, and dismantle systems of oppression. Over the years, Samuel has served as a public school teacher, college lecturer and counselor, chaplain, lobbyist, community activist, and drag performer.
Samuel currently directs the Yale LGBTQ Center, serving students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Yale University, and is the Center’s inaugural Stonewall Librarian—an evolving role that has sparked a growing passion for library science and the preservation of queer, banned, and DEIB-related literature. This commitment extends to Samuel’s work beyond Yale, where they are building progressive faith-based resources in rural Appalachia to support spiritual formation and community empowerment.
Whether in the halls of Vatican City, on Capitol Hill, in the streets, or in the classroom, Samuel advocates for underrepresented communities and promotes social transformation through radical and enthusiastic practices of inclusion. Their current research interests include Queer, Womanist, and Postcolonial Theology.
Outside of work, Samuel loves exploring new places, thrifting, getting involved in the arts and local community, and spending time with their feline sidekick, Percy Jackson. An avid Dolly Parton fan, Sam can often be found on a mountain adventure in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Sam is also fascinated with ancient civilizations, cults, and cataclysms and is an aspiring doomsday prepper.
As a Resident Fellow of Trumbull College, Sam delights in creating a warm, welcoming space where students feel seen, heard, and part of something bigger—whether that’s over tea, a trip to the thrift store, an upcycling project, or an impromptu Dolly Parton singalong.
Dina Francesca Haynes 
Dina Francesca Haynes is the executive director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Lecturer in Law and Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School.
She has been a practicing international human rights lawyer living in Chad, South Africa, Botswana, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Afghanistan with the UN (UNHCR and OHCHR), as well as the OSCE. She returned to the US when she was pregnant with her daughter. Since returning to the US, she has been a professor of law, teaching constitutional law, public international law, human rights courses, and courses related to immigration, refugee and asylum law, migration, gender, labor exploitation and human trafficking. Because she enjoys legal practice and thinks of the law as a helping profession, she has also continued to engage in extensive pro bono law practice, representing hundreds of refugees, asylum seekers, detainees, victims of human trafficking and other human rights cases in US and international legal systems. She also started a non-profit dedicated to filling the gaps in direct legal services for refugees and providing policy advice to nations.
Dina received her B.A. in English Literature and International Studies from the University of Denver. Before law school, she was in the Peace Corps (Chad). She received her J.D. from the University of Cincinnati where she was an Urban Morgan Human Rights Fellow, a judicial clerk to Senior Judge Nathaniel Jones of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Honorable Unity Dow in Botswana, and a law clerk with the American Civil Liberties Union. After receiving her J.D., she clerked on the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa and was an Honor Graduate Attorney with the US Department of Justice, before moving to the United Nations as a Department of State secondee. She received her L.L.M. from Georgetown Law, where she was a Fellow in the Center for Applied Legal Studies.
You can find her at Trumbull, where she lives with her cat, Galileo Figaro (Figgy) and is visited by her daughter, Isa, a graduate student at Smith College School of Social Work.