Score one for Mandi Schwartz ’11! Doctors announced Sunday that the hockey player’s cord blood transplant appears to have successfully engrafted into her bone marrow. Schwartz now has healthy white blood cell and neutrophil counts and an “almost normal” bilyrubin count.

After seven years at the helm of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, executive director Melina Shannon-DiPietro announced that she is stepping down in a Monday YSFP newsletter. Effective Nov. 1, she will become director of food programs at Friends of the High Line, a non-profit that maintains a Manhattan public park.

New Haven education reform got a high profile shout-out Friday. In an interview with PBS program “Need To Know,” director of the education documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” David Guggenheim praised the efforts of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for working on behalf of school reform in the Elm City.

In other (less flattering) high profile news, Literary Review, the British monthly literary magazine, nominated Tony Blair’s memoir “A Journey: My Political Life” for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The magazine’s deputy editor Tom Fleming told British daily The Guardian that the “Faith and Globalization” professor’s passage is the first piece of nonfiction ever nominated for the award and that he is a “strong contender.”

Yale paleontologist Nicholas Longrich has found evidence that Tyrannosaurus rex may have actually fed on each other 65 million years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke in Stamford Monday on behalf of Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73. Obama reminded the 1,600 people in attendance of why they voted for her husband two years ago. According to CT News Junkie, she told the attendees “We’re not just here because we support Dick … We’re here to restore that dream.”

Tired of waiting for the shuttle? Paul Hammer SOM ’85 has started a pedicab business in New Haven, the New Haven Register reported Monday. Proceeds go to Hammer’s Bicycle Education Entrepreneurship and Enrichment Programs, a nonprofit promoting healthy lifestyles through cycling.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1965 Republican mayoral candidate Joe Einhorn assails the University for its failure to maintain the relationship between town and gown. “Yale has been a luxury to New Haven and one that we can ill afford,” he said. “It has not accepted its obligations to the community.”

YALE DAILY NEWS