An archive discovery by Cornell historian Charles Petersen reported in an August 2021 newsletter prompted Stanford University to establish a task force to investigate its admissions practices for Jewish students in the 1950s.
On Oct. 12, Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued an institutional apology after the task force confirmed that the evidence uncovered by Petersen, a…
Ivan Serediuk/Unsplash
Lutsk, Volyn Oblast, Ukraine
The United States is calling for a United Nations Security Council briefing regarding news that Russia is using Iranian drones for its war on Ukraine.
Paul Lushenko is a doctoral student at Cornell University and co-editor of "Drones and Global Order: Implications of Remote Warfare for International Society.” He is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and senior policy fellow at Cornell’s…
Juliana Hu Pegues, associate professor of Literatures in English has received the 2022 Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association for “Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements.”
The prize recognizes the best first book in American Studies released during 2021. Hu Pegues will be honored during the ASA Annual Meeting, Nov. 3-6 in New Orleans.
…
Britain’s Prime Minister Liz Truss has announced she will resign after 44 days in office. The following Cornell University experts are available to discuss what’s next for the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Daniel Schade, visiting assistant professor of government, studies the politics of the European Union.
Schade says: “The instability of the UK’s political system couldn’t come at…
Jason Koski/Cornell
Members of the Cornell Astronomical Society gave tours of Fuertes Observatory to the public, who were allowed to peer through the telescope during an October 14 celebration of its 100th birthday.
The Fuertes Observatory and its Friday night open houses, where visitors can marvel at the starry sky through “Irv,” the Irving Porter Church Telescope, were bright spots in a dark pandemic freshman year for Gillis Lowry ’24.
“When everything else was bleak, I knew I could count on the observatory and ‘Irv’ every Friday night,” said Lowry, an astronomy major and member of the Cornell…
Wynne Williams-Ceci ‘24 was alarmed when she saw many of her Cornell peers getting sick from vapes and not seeming to get the messages about the dangers of the practice.
So she’s using her classes and lessons from psychology, communications, information sciences, public policy and sociology to develop a senior project that measures whether social media influencers would be a better way to…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Gustavo Quintero, PhD student in Romance Studies (ROMS), teaches Spanish (SPAN) 3020.
Angelika Kraemer, director of the Language Resource Center (LRC) and Emma Britton, LRC Coordinator of Language Learning Initiatives, both in the College of Arts and Sciences, have received a grant from ACTFL for their project “Languages Across the Curriculum: Assessing Reflexivity and Critical Language Awareness.”
“Research is a pillar critical to ACTFL’s strategic plan and essential to the…
Provided
The Plunge co-hosts (l-r) Chi-Min (Mimi) Ho, Liz Kellogg and Mike Cianfrocco
A new podcast and video series hosted by three faculty members from Cornell, the University of Michigan and Columbia University explores what the future will look like as a result of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a Nobel Prize-winning technique for visualizing in 3-D the molecules at work inside cells.
The method opened the door to understanding the function of molecules that previously…
Poet and critic Sandeep Parmar will read from her books of poetry on Thursday, Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall for the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading, created in 2002 by friends and family of Richard Cleaveland ’74 to honor his memory. The reading will be free and open to the public. Copies of Sandeep Parmar’s books will be available for purchase at the…
Six American Sign Language (ASL) poets and storytellers will visit Cornell between Oct. 12 and Nov. 28, in conjunction with this semester’s ASL Literature course in the Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
American Sign Language does not have a standard written form, which leads to an erroneous tendency to discount ASL Literature as not being “real literature,” said…
J.C. Séamus Davis has been awarded the 2023 Oliver E. Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society. The award, which includes a prize of $20,000, recognizes outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics.
In a statement, the award committee said that Davis received the prize for his “innovative applications of scanning tunneling microscopy and…
Researchers working at the nexus of science and the humanities will convene for Art & Science of Thinking, a conference Oct. 21-22 in Goldwin Smith Hall’s Kaufmann Auditorium (G64). All sessions are free and open to the public.
“We want to open a robust dialogue between humanists and scientists around the very notion of ‘thought’ and ‘thinking,’ with a particular emphasis on philosophy …
When ruptures, fissures and breaks can no longer be ignored, it’s time for repair, this year's Society for the Humanities annual theme.
The Society's annual fall conference will address the theme of Repair over the course of two days, Oct. 20-21, in 10 brief talks and two longer keynote lectures. The conference serves as the second event in the 2022-23 Society for the Humanities year of…
Vishnu Mohanan/Unsplash
Parts used in semiconductor manufacture
The Biden administration has announced new export restrictions aimed at curbing China's advanced computing and chip production capabilities.
Sarah Kreps, professor of government at Cornell University and director of Cornell’s Tech Policy Lab, says the catch is whether the U.S. unilateral actions can lead by example.
Kreps says: “Today the administration rolled out an updated and even more…
by Michał Józefaciuk/ The Chancellery of the Senate of the Republic of Poland , Creative Commons licsnese 3.0
Belarusian political activist Ales Bialiatsky, speaking in Poland
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Belarusian political activist Ales Bialiatski, as well as two human rights organizations, Memorial in Russia and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.
Associate professor Valzhyna Mort, a poet born in Belarus, can speak to the political repression in Belarus and the significance of Ales Bialiatski’s activism on human rights.
Mort says that the…
Mark Malkin
A scene from a Teatratoller production of "Diamantina rosa"
A series of special events, including visits from alumni involved in theatre, film and television, is being planned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Teatrotaller, a theatre troupe formed to promote Spanish, Latin American and Latino culture.
Isabel Ramos ’96 started the group her sophomore year and never imagined it would still be around today.
“I wanted to create a theater that…
Chris Kitchen
Degarmo, left, and Bjerken, played together during a Sept. 13 concert in Barnes Hall.
Whether he was taking a break from his premed classes as an undergrad, processing what he was learning in medical school or taking some down time after a stint in the emergency room, Noah DeGarmo ’00 has always turned to music as a key part of his life.
Now that he has an established career as an emergency medicine physician, DeGarmo has taken his dedication to the piano to an even greater…
Provided
Mug shots of members of The Janes from their 1972 arrest
Tia Lessin ’89 began working on her movie about a team of clandestine 1960s-70s abortion providers long before this summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade. So, the release of “The Janes” on HBO Max this summer only weeks before the decision wasn’t planned. But, its release seems eerily prescient.
Lessin, who co-directed the film with Emma Pildes, will be on campus Oct. 13…
Wen Zhang, an organic chemist, has harnessed electrochemistry to promote reactions of carbon-based compounds without relying on rare materials historically used in chemistry.
Xiaolong Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in physics, and Wen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry, both in the College of Arts and Sciences, have received 2022 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences. The winners each receive a $30,000 unrestricted prize and will be honored at the 2022 New York Academy of…
Chris Kitchen
Anna Shechtman leads a publication workshop for graduate students writing about literature
It’s exhilarating for media scholar Anna Shechtman to see who shows up on the first day of an introductory media studies class: students from literature and theater, but also from computing, information science, East Asian studies, religious studies and other diverse majors.
“I’ve come in at the start of the course when that question of what media is and what media studies studies is on the…
Matter can arrange itself in ingenious ways; in addition to the solid, liquid and gas phases that are familiar in classical physics, electronic phases of matter – some of them exotic and some useful – are made possible by quantum mechanics.
In the Fall 2022 Hans Bethe Lecture, physicist Charles Kane will explain how mysterious features of quantum mechanics can be harnessed for future…
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, known for its exceptional performances and its extensive, multi-award-winning recordings, will perform with violinist Nicola Benedetti in the next Cornell Concert Series (CCS) concert, Saturday, Oct. 15 at 3 pm in Bailey Hall.
BBC Music Magazine has called the Orchestra “one of the finest ensembles of its kind in the world today.” A reviewer in The Courier…
The first round of Brazil’s elections on Oct. 2 will see former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva face off against right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Gustavo Flores-Macias, professor of government and Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs, is an expert in Latin American politics.
Flores-Macias says: “Polls suggest Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva enjoys a sizable advantage…
Jacopo Maia/ Unsplash
Fruits and vegetables for sale
The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a new system and set of guidelines for labeling food packages as “healthy,” sparking debate about what constitutes healthy food and questions around whether manufacturers and consumers will get behind the proposal.
Adrienne Bitar is an expert in the history and culture of American food and the author of “Diet and the Disease of Civilization” — the…
Louis Moore, acclaimed sports historian and podcaster, will give this semester’s Seymour Lecture in Sports History. His talk “Black Bombers: Doug Williams, Vince Evans and the NFL’s Most Important Game,” will be on Oct. 6, at 4:30 p.m. in the Kaufmann Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall on the Cornell University campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
“Louis Moore is one of our…
Todd Hyster, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has received the National Fresenius Award from Phi Lambda Upsilon, the national chemistry honor society. The award honors outstanding early-career chemists.
Hyster’s organic chemistry lab develops new biocatalytic methods to address long-standing reactivity and selectivity challenges in organic synthesis. The lab specializes…
This fall, Professor Linda Nicholson took on the position of faculty director of the Office of Undergraduate Biology (OUB) and she has lots of plans for innovative ways to support students in the major.
Nicholson takes over from Professor Cole Gilbert, who served as the Hays and James M. Clark Director of Undergraduate Biology for seven years.
“We’re working to shift the culture within…
“I find infinity beautiful and thrilling,” says mathematician Steven Strogatz in the trailer for the new Netflix program in which he is featured, “A Trip to Infinity,” being released Sept. 26.
“The main idea of the film involves an exploration of infinity from several perspectives: mathematical, physical, philosophical, theological,” says Strogatz. “I think the big question is whether infinity…
The pandemic put a pause on group singing, but with the easing of Covid restrictions, the Cornell University Chorale “is most emphatically back,” says Michael Henry Poll de Bien, Chorale music director and Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.
“We welcome singers from any department of the university and from the community,” Poll says. “We…
Italy will vote for a new national government on September 25. The outcome of the parliamentary elections could have dramatic effects on the country and European Union. Mabel Berezin is a comparative sociologist at Cornell University whose work explores fascist, nationalist and populist movements in Europe and associated threats to democracy.
Berezin says: “On Sunday, right-wing…
Margaret Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Emerita Professor of the History of Science, has been awarded the 2022 Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society (HSS).
“This is the highest award the society grants. It honors a lifetime of scholarly achievement,” said Suman Seth, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science and chair of Science and Technology Studies.
Rossiter…
Cornell will host an archaeology conference in October focusing on ethics and social justice in the archaeological sciences – the areas of archaeology that utilize techniques and approaches from STEM.
“Frontiers in Archaeological Sciences 3: Rethinking the Paradigm” will take place Oct. 7-9 and feature a keynote address by Dr. Kisha Supernant, director of the Institute of Prairie and…
… Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan …
Chris Kitchen
Matthew Zipple uses an RFID scanner to identify a mouse living in an outdoor enclosure. By briefly catching and releasing the mice Zipple and colleagues are able to take repeated measures of animal's body mass as they develop.
The effects of social connections ripple through a lifetime for both humans and nonhuman animals, many studies have shown. Animal behavior scientist Matthew Zipple wants to know more.
“I’m interested broadly in social relationships, but my focus is on how an animal’s mother can impact a wide range of outcomes: in childhood, adulthood, and even between generations,” said Zipple, a Klarman…
Philippine Presidential Museum and Library
The second inauguration of President Ferdinand Marcos on December 30, 1969
Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the late President Ferdinand Marcos imposing martial law on the Philippines.
Christine Bacareza Balance is an associate professor of Asian American studies. Her current book project, “Making Sense of Martial Law,” analyzes former President Marcos and First Lady Imelda Marcos during their 21-year dictatorial rule.
Balance says: “This year’s anniversary…
Elizabeth H. Kellogg, the Robert N. Noyce Assistant Professor in Life Science and Technology in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, College of Arts and Sciences, will receive the 2023 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society.
“Dr. Kellogg is renowned for her expertise in structural biology,” said Gail Robertson, president of the Biophysical Society and professor…
Major figures in world economics will gather in Ithaca Sept. 15-17 to re-think the foundations of economics and the nature of regulation – with particular care for the environment during “100 Years of Economic Development,” a conference hosted by the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
“From roughly the…
Photograph taken by Julian Calder for Governor-General of New Zealand
Queen Elizabeth II in the Blue Room of Buckingham Palace.
Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, died Thursday after 70 years on the throne. Her 73-year-old son Prince Charles automatically became king upon her death.
Alexandra Cirone, assistant professor of government, is an expert on European politics. She says that “Prince Charles will be a distinctly different monarch than Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Charles has faced…
Professor Héctor D. Abruña, the E. M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $8.3 million to further his group’s research related to fuel cells and advanced battery technologies.
“Prof. Abruña’s work is at the forefront of research into energy conversion and storage, underscoring the leadership of the College…
As Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program celebrates its 50th year, it’s also celebrating the news that a new Jewish studies major has been approved by the state and the Cornell Board of Trustees.
Plans for the major received strong support from students, faculty and alumni, said Deborah Starr, professor of modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and a…
Physicist Kurt Gottfried, Cornell professor emeritus, author of a classic text on quantum mechanics and co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), died Aug. 25 at the age of 93.
“Professor Kurt Gottfried was a great physicist and a wonderful human being,” said Tung-Mow Yan, Cornell professor emeritus in physics, who co-authored a second edition of the textbook with Gottfried. “He…
ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Mrk (Markarian) 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo.
Cornell astronomers Anna Y. Q. Ho, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, visiting professor of astronomy, are part of the mission team for the UltraViolet Explorer (UVEX) mission, which has advanced toward a 2028 launch with NASA.
Four astrophysics mission proposals to study stars, galaxies and some of the most violent explosions in…
Robert Barker, Cornell University
Frank Drake speaks at the 2017 40 Years of Cosmic Discovery: Celebrating the Voyager Missions and Humanity's Message to Space Panel.
Frank Drake BEP ’51, former Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, died on Sept. 2. He was 92.
“Frank Drake was a pioneer of radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using radio telescopes,” said fellow astronomer Jonathan Lunine. “During his tenure at Cornell, Arecibo became a true astronomical observatory and planetary radar facility which went on to make profound…
Provided
Milo Vella spent time at the Big Pine Paiute Tribal Environmental Department and the Indian Water Commission in Owens Valley, Calif.
Like many students who had an amazing summer, Milo Vella ’23 is starting the semester thinking about how he will incorporate that experience into his senior thesis.
Vella, a Robert S. Harrison College Scholar in the College of Arts & Sciences, spent his summer gardening for the Big Pine Paiute Tribal Environmental Department and the Indian Water Commission in Owens Valley, Calif. His…
Prominent journalists with expertise in Europe and Russia will join Cornell professors to discuss the global implications of the war in Ukraine during an upcoming event hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences.
“Aftershocks: Geopolitics since the Ukraine invasion,” will take place Sept. 22 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Kiplinger Theatre of the Schwartz Center, 430 College Ave. The event is free…
This year, 15 new faculty are bringing innovative ideas in a wide range of topics to the College of Arts & Sciences’ nexus of discovery and impact, including climate change, astronomy, identity studies and the economy.
Click here to explore profiles of all the new faculty members.
The kindness of his deceased son Peter inspired John McMurry, chemistry professor emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, to offer the 10th edition of his bestselling organic chemistry textbook as a free open educational resource (OER) through OpenStax, an educational technology initiative of Rice University.
“If Peter were still alive, I have no doubt that he would want me to work on…
NASA/ESA/CSA and A. Pagan (STScI)
This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope: purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 3.00 micrometers, blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 micrometers, yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.4 micrometers, and red shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 15.5 micrometers. These images look different because of the ways the different Webb instruments capture light.
For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable.
NASA released the image, as seen through four different light filters, on Sept. 1. The release shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds…
