A&S physicist Michelle Wang is among four Cornell faculty who were elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in research.
Cornell tech policy research: using AI to write entire messages in representative government appears to be more effective than using AI to generate individual sentences.
Current state-of-the-art instrumentation being sent to Mars to collect and analyze evidence of ancient life may not be sensitive enough to make accurate assessments, says a Cornell-led study.
Assistant professors Debanjan Chowdhury, physics, and Andrew Musser, chemistry, are among 126 researchers in the United States and Canada who this year have received two-year fellowships to advance their work.
New research by Cornell behavioral economists reveals that people who would benefit the most from gentle “nudges” to pay their fines – those who are least responsive to tickets in the first place – respond least to those reminders.
The "Can You Hear My Voice?" project, a collaboration between Arts and Sciences, the ILR School, eCornell and the College of Human Ecology, received one of three Belonging at Cornell innovation grants for 2022.
The universitywide initiative has resulted in the hiring and retention of world-class faculty, millions of research dollars invested, and published research that has helped push science forward and change lives in New York state, the nation and the world.
Referring to police using the legal phrase “objectively reasonable” puts the officer in a more favorable light, regardless of race, according to new research from Neil Lewis Jr. ’13, assistant professor of communication, and doctoral student Mikaela Spruill.
Bruce Lewenstein, professor of science communication in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences, has been appointed Cornell’s 13th university ombudsman.
Seven Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. This year's fellows, 564 in all, will be honored at a virtual event Feb. 19.
Alex Townsend, Goenka Family Assistant Professor of mathematics, is among the 11 Cornell faculty members who have recently received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards.
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Anjan Mani ’23 (left) and Alexander Chung ’21, near the Arts Quad.
Author Ijeoma Oluo, the featured speaker at the virtual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, held March 1, said the white male in America has always enjoyed relatively unfettered passage – usually at the expense of others.
Katherine A. Tschida, assistant professor of psychology, is among four Cornell faculty who have won 2021 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships support early-career faculty members’ original research and education related to science, technology, mathematics and economics.
Seattle-based writer Ijeoma Oluo will give the 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture at Cornell, in a virtual forum on March 1. This year’s event will be a conversation between Oluo and Edward Baptist, professor of history and author of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism."
Mary Beth Norton will discuss her book, “1774: The Long Year of Revolution,” in the next “Book Breaks” discussion, hosted Jan. 31 by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City.
With a growing global population will come increased energy consumption, and sustainable forms of energy sources such as solar fuels and solar electricity will be in even greater demand. And as these forms of power proliferate, the focus will shift to improved efficiency.
David Wilson Henderson, professor emeritus of mathematics, died Dec. 20 in Newark, Delaware, from injuries suffered when he was struck by a vehicle in a pedestrian crosswalk in Bethany Beach, Delaware. He was 79.
According to published reports, Henderson was struck shortly after 5 p.m. on Dec. 19. After being taken to nearby Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, Delaware, Henderson was transported to Christiana Hospital in Newark, where he died the next day.
Innovative research with great impact is one of Cornell’s hallmarks, and to recognize some of the best examples of that work, the Office of the Provost has established an annual award that highlights the depth and breadth of the university’s research efforts.
The inaugural Provost Research Innovation Awards recognize midcareer faculty from engineering, the humanities, life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences.
Nine Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.
What are the biggest threats facing inhabitants of Earth in the 21st century? A two-day symposium will bring together people from across the university for a dialogue on the “grand challenges” of a world that’s both more connected than ever and increasingly fractured.
The maelstrom surrounding the nomination and subsequent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was to be expected, when one justice’s vote could change the country’s moral compass for generations. But looking at the high court over a period of decades, have political leanings been its strongest barometer?
Award-winning senior astronomy research associate Lawrence Kidder, who contributed to the 2016 confirmation of gravitational waves detected in 2015, has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).
Particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) produce massive amounts of data that help answer long-held questions regarding Earth and the far reaches of the universe. The Higgs boson, which had been the missing link in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, was discovered there in 2012 and earned researchers the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.
Titanium dioxide is one of several minerals that are self-cleaning; they use energy from the sun to convert any “schmutz” that lands on their surface to a harmless gas, which then floats away.
Emeritus professor of physics Donald F. Holcomb, who served two terms as chair of the department and championed the cause of improving physics education, died Aug. 9 in his residence at Kendal at Ithaca.
A National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) committee has endorsed the idea of building an electron-ion collider (EIC) in the United States, for the purpose of expanding understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Andrej Singer, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, will lead a three-year project funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science that will attempt to create new quantum states of matter.
In a recent research paper published in Nature, a group led by physics professors David Muller and Sol Gruner claimed a world record for electron microscope resolution using a high-powered detector and a technique called ptychography. Their technique was shown to measure down to 0.39 ångströms or 0.039 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter).
Fuel cells could someday power numerous devices – automobiles and mass transit systems, buildings, and virtually any type of portable electronic device.
Unlike batteries, which eventually run out of power (and thus need to be recharged), a fuel cell will continue to generate electrical energy as long as it has a fuel – usually hydrogen – and oxygen or some other oxidant necessary for the complete electrochemical reaction.
Jerrold Meinwald, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus and a 2014 winner of the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest honor for achievement in science and engineering, died April 23 in Ithaca. He was 91.
Enzymes are nature’s best nanoscale catalysts, and often show what’s known as catalytic allostery – that is, reactions at one site affecting reactions at another site, typically a few nanometers away, without direct interaction between the reactants.
Assistant professors Brett Fors, Karthik Sridharan and Jin Suntivich have been named recipients of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowships. These awards support early-career faculty members’ original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance.
Say you’re the coach of a basketball team that’s trailing by two points in the dying seconds of a game. Your team has the ball and you call a timeout to set up a play.
Or imagine your football team has just scored a touchdown with three seconds to play to pull to within one point. Instead of immediately sending out the placekicker for the point-after, you call your final timeout to discuss your next move.
Two new studies led by Hening Lin, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, offer new insights into oncogene RAS, the most frequently mutated gene of its type in human cancer.
In 2016, Yimon Aye, Howard Milstein Faculty Fellow and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, introduced the world to “T-REX” – a chemical method for targeting and modulating single proteins to analyze and screen for specific oxidation-reduction (redox) events, which are vital to many basic functions of life.
An unfortunate church dinner more than 100 years ago did more than just spread typhoid fever to scores of Californians. It led theorists on a quest to understand why many diseases – including typhoid, measles, polio, malaria, even cancer – take so much longer to develop in some affected people than in others.
Fundamental processes that occur along strands of DNA, including RNA transcription and DNA replication, commonly encounter obstacles – or “roadblocks” – that can impede progress and ultimately result in mutations and/or DNA damage.
The Keck Foundation announced in early July that it had awarded $1 million to a Cornell cross-campus collaboration of professors in engineering and physics aimed at turning theory into reality – namely, creating a specific topological superconducting material that could help pave the way to quantum computing.
Imagine walking through the Northwest wilderness, camera phone at the ready, hoping to catch at least a faint glimpse of Bigfoot, and instead returning home with an Ansel Adams-quality picture of the mythical beast as he lumbers past you.
That’s kind of what a team led by physics professor Paul McEuen has done in research into the optical properties of single-atom-thick layers of graphene.
Until last week, if students in Itai Cohen’s research group wanted to perform advanced measurements on a fluid – such as applying both rotation and sinusoidal oscillations to gauge whether the flow disruption was hydrodynamically or contact-mediated – they’d have to drive 330 miles east.
Radiation therapy has been proven effective for the treatment of cancer, but its side effects can be severe depending on the patient and the location of the tumor.
The concept of “valence” – the ability of a particular atom to combine with other atoms by exchanging electrons – is one of the cornerstones of modern chemistry and solid-state physics.
“Think differently” – it’s been a central theme at Cornell for more than 150 years and a driving force behind numerous educational initiatives including the new Cornell Tech campus, which opened this fall on Roosevelt Island in the heart of New Yor
Conventional wisdom has said that when molecules known as monomers band together to create a polymer chain, that creation takes place steadily as the chain forms, like spaghetti out of a pasta maker. But a Cornell research collaboration shows that’s just not the case.
A cellular biology “mystery” is closer to being solved, thanks to sleuthing in the lab of Jeremy Baskin, assistant professor and Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology.
A group led by Rob Shepherd, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is using the cephalopod as inspiration for a method to morph flat surfaces into three-dimensional ones on demand.
The Cornell Center for Materials Research – which through research and education is enhancing national capabilities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and materials research at all levels – has been has been granted $23.2 million for the next six years from the National Science Foundation.
One of the goals of personalized medicine is to be able to determine which treatment would work best by sequencing a patient’s genome. New research from the lab of Yimon Aye, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, could help make that approach a reality.
Solitary waves – known as solitons – appear in many forms. Perhaps the most recognizable is the tsunami, which forms following a disruption on the ocean floor and can travel, unabated, at high speeds for hundreds of miles.
Clifford J. Earle, professor emeritus of mathematics, whose nearly 40-year tenure at Cornell included three years as chair of the math department, died June 12 at Hospicare in Ithaca. He was 81.
Born Nov. 3, 1935, in Racine, Wisconsin, Earle earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1957, and his master’s (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University.
Assistant professors Jeremy Baskin, from the College of Arts and Sciences, and Pamela Chang, from the College of Veterinary Medicine, are among eight assistant professors across the nation to be named a Beckman Young Investigator, a prize is given to promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences.
Mathematicians often struggle with the idea of communication – to the rest of the world, and even with each other – but a recently secured grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help math “evangelist” Steven Strogatz and his colleagues tackle that problem.
Next-generation solar cells made from organic compounds hold great promise in meeting future energy needs, but researchers are still striving to gain a deep understanding of the materials involved – including the efficiency with which they convert light into mobile charge, known as photocapacitance.
Water is the Earth’s most abundant natural resource, but it’s also something of a mystery due to its unique solvation characteristics – that is, how things dissolve in it.
Yimon Aye, a Howard Milstein faculty fellow and assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences with a secondary appointment at Weill Cornell Medicine, is one of six winners of this year’s Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research, which supports New York-based scientists exploring innovative avenues in the fight against cancer.
Geoffrey W. Coates, the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, is one of 84 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced May 2.
Robert E. Hughes, Ph.D. ’52, who taught chemistry at Cornell for 16 years and was co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM), died at his home in Round Hill, Virginia, April 2.
The experimental realization of ultrathin graphene – which earned two scientists from the University of Manchester, U.K., the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 – has ushered in a new age in materials research.
Assistant professors Ilana Brito, Guillaume Lambert, Kyle Lancaster and Nilay Yapici have been named recipients of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowships that support early career faculty members’ original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance.
Cornell assistant professors Yimon Aye and Robert Shepherd are among 33 scientists selected from among 360 applicants to receive Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) awards, which support early-career academic scientists and engineers.
Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics and a recognized expert on nuclear arms control, has been awarded the 2016 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Using a novel chemical procedure developed in her lab, Yimon Aye and her group are helping to blaze a trail in the emerging field of precision medicine by targeting and modulating single proteins to achieve desired responses.
All materials found in nature – even the most “perfect” diamond – contain defects, since the atoms inside them are never arranged in perfect order.
Such structural disorder causes complex force distributions throughout the material. Measuring these forces is critical to understanding the material’s behavior, but these force measurements have been impossible to perform through conventional techniques, which only determine average responses to stress.
When cells die, whether through apoptosis or necrosis, the DNA and other molecules found in those cells don’t just disappear. They wind up in the blood stream, where degraded bits and pieces can be extracted.
The enzyme sirtuin 6, or SIRT6, serves many key biological functions in regulating genome stability, DNA repair, metabolism and longevity, but how its multiple enzyme activities relate to its various functions is poorly understood.
In the early 1970s, in the basement of Clark Hall, the Cornell team of professors David Lee and Robert Richardson, along with then-graduate student Douglas Osheroff, first observed superfluid helium-3. For that breakthrough, the catalyst for further research into low-temperature physics, the trio was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics.
Jason Lefkovitz invited his high school history teacher, David Miles, to join him at the 28th annual Merrill Presidential Scholars Convocation luncheon.
He also invited Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, as each of the 33 Merrill scholars was asked to bring to the event two teachers who have made a great impact on their lives, academic and otherwise. Nine of the scholars are Arts & Sciences students.
Once a popular pastime, bee hunting involves capturing and feeding wild bees, then releasing and following them back to their hive.
The practice is little-known today, but bee expert Thomas D. Seeley – the Horace White Professor in Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and author of several books on honeybees – has just published a book that offers insights into the history and science of bee hunting.
Cornell researchers, working in collaboration with scientists in Switzerland, have identified a strong connection between a protein, SIRT5, and healthy heart function.
Like the gravitational forces that are responsible for the attraction between the Earth and the moon, as well as the dynamics of the entire solar system, there exist attractive forces between objects at the nanoscale.
Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of electronics 60 years ago, a group of Cornell researchers is hoping its work with quantum dot solids – crystals made out of crystals – can help usher in a new era in electronics.
Hands and feet are two examples of chiral objects – non-superimposable mirror images of each other. One image is distinctly “left-handed,” while the other is “right-handed.” A simple drinking glass and a ball are achiral, meaning the object and its mirror image look exactly the same.
