Destiny Malloy ’21 had a sweet internship lined up this summer near New York City, working in data analytics at L’Oreal. After COVID-19, it was converted to unpaid and remote. Adam Spaulding-Astudillo ’20 was in interviews for a job using his degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, but companies stopped hiring.
Witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust and other acts of genocide are dwindling in numbers, but their faces and voices will live on through Cornell University Library’s recently acquired permanent access to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA).
Cornell thought leaders discussed the balance between public health and economic health, and the role government plays in finding a path forward during this worldwide crisis.
In this great big universe we call home, we are dependent on each other to get through this crisis, writes Ray Jayawardhana, Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of astronomy, in an op-ed article in USA Today.
As a college senior stuck home during quarantine with an interest in infectious diseases and past experience with the World Health Organization (WHO), Dalton Price ’20 thought it was completely obvious that he would sign up to help in any way he could during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before the Ithaca campus closed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, members of Cornell’s Asian American community enjoyed strong connections to each other.
Beloved emeritus professor and scholar David Bathrick, who taught theater arts, German studies and Jewish studies at Cornell for 20 years, died April 30 at his home in Bremen, Germany. He was 84. Bathrick taught and inspired countless students and colleagues over a colorful and successful career in his chosen fields.
Raven Schwam-Curtis ’20 had seen the coronavirus coming: She visited China and South Korea on a research trip over winter break, when the first cases were being reported there. But she was still confronted with financial and emotional disruption when the pandemic forced Cornell to abruptly suspend classes in mid-March and switch to remote learning April 6, following spring break.
In February, Longsha Liu ’21 was well aware that COVID-19 was coursing through China and around the world. His mother had been giving him regular updates about the virus’s spread in China, where most of his immediate family live – including his 77-year old grandmother, who continued to practice as a physician.
Christine “Xine” Yao, M.A. '13, Ph.D. '16, was named one of the 2020 BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The program, now in its 10th year, affords early career academics a platform to share their ideas via BBC Radio 3 and other outlets. “It is an amazing opportunity to work with the BBC to share my expertise and hopefully provoke different ways of understanding the world,” Yao said.
The COVID-19 virus arrived in Latin America later than Europe and the United States, but it is currently spreading across the region, with peaks expected to come later in May. Brazil, the continent’s most populous country, has the largest numbers of cases so far. This week, the country’s Senate is expected to vote on an economic package for states and cities to compensate for economic losses.
In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology, says the effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be imprinted on the personality of the United States for a long time.
Doctoral students Sri Lakshmi Sravani Devarakonda and Cheyenne Peltier have been named winners of the 2019-20 Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
Festival 24, the semiannual student-run theater festival from the Cornell University Department of Performing and Media Arts, is launching online under a new title, Festival 24.0. The Festival, which is normally held at the beginning of each semester, will happen on Saturday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m. EST via Zoom to provide a performance opportunity for students while in-person theater events are suspended.
In his poetry, fiction and essays, and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of English, asks why tensions endure between Africans and African Americans despite a history of common political struggle. In this Cornell Research article, he talks about his first encounters with what it meant to be Black in the United States——in his father’s library in Kenya, reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright and issues of Ebony and Jet.
The monumental scroll stretches nearly 60 yards around the Bartels Gallery in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art – an immersive calligraphy experience by Tong Yang-Tze, one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers working today. The scroll’s subject – and title – is “Immortal at the River,” referencing a poem by 16th century Chinese poet Yang Shen.
Two weeks before the first annual CCAT-prime collaboration meeting was scheduled to be held April 7 at the University of Waterloo, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a switch to an online format. Because the telescope is an international project with scientists in wildly disparate time zones, conference organizers faced major challenges.
The next generation of powerful Earth- and space-based telescopes will be able to hunt distant solar systems for evidence of life on Earth-like exoplanets – particularly those that chaperone burned-out stars known as white dwarfs. The chemical properties of those far-off worlds could indicate that life exists there. To help future scientists make sense of what their telescopes are showing them, Cornell astronomers have developed a spectral field guide for these rocky worlds.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held arguments by phone on Tuesday in a case pitting the Trump administration against the House of Representatives over the latter’s power to enforce a subpoena for former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony.
Rachel Beatty Riedl, an expert in international studies, says Africa is the first place to look for an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, given Africa’s success in dealing with the Ebola virus.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers hopes to shape Congress’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage a less divisive – and more productive – climate in Washington, a pair of members said during a Cornell forum April 23.
Faced with a devastating and unresolved pandemic, governments worldwide are grappling with how to begin re-opening their economies, while protecting the health of their citizens. And many are looking to the smartphones in our pockets as a contact tracing tool to keep tabs on the coronavirus and limit its spread.
Historian Lawrence Glickman says the simultaneous public health disaster and economic meltdown may lead us to rethink the country’s values. However, “given … how rare it is for fundamental transformations to happen, my money would be on this pandemic not fundamentally altering our basic structures of society,” he says.
The coronavirus pandemic's fast-moving destruction has pushed Republicans to rely on the Affordable Care Act, the Obama-era legislation that was once the Republican Party's nemisis, writes Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, in a Washington Post op-ed.
Margaret Washington, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, was recently featured in the History Channel documentary “Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution,” and will appear in a CNN program focusing on women’s history.
Two 21st-century works for recorder and orchestra by Cornell faculty composers are included in a recent feature by New York City classical radio station WQXR.
China’s role in the Covid-19 outbreak has elicited a growing backlash, including dueling campaign ads from Democrats and Republicans, writes Jessica Chen Weiss, associate professor of government, in a Washington Post op-ed.
After spotting a curious pattern in scientific papers – they described exoplanets as being cooler than expected – Cornell astronomers have improved a mathematical model to accurately gauge the temperatures of planets from solar systems hundreds of light-years away.
by :
Amy R. Krosch
,
Scientific American Blog Network
African-Americans are already afflicted disproportionately by COVID-19, but economic collapse could make things even worse, writes Amy Krosch, assistant professor of psychology, in an op-ed in Scientific American Blog Network.
Cancer cells not only ravage the body – they also compete with each other.Cornell mathematicians are using game theory to model how this competition could be leveraged, so cancer treatment – which also takes a toll on the patient’s body – might be administered more sparingly, with maximized effect.
Political scientist Gustavo A. Flores-Macías compares the economic consequences of COVID-19 to the 2008-09 recession. The pandemic, he says, will result in a poorer and more unequal U.S. society, and it highlights the importance of solutions that require collaboration across borders.
Interdisciplinary scholar Noliwe Rooks discusses how people curate their home spaces, now that much of work and school is conducted from home via video conferencing. The pandemic has also underlined our need for human contact, she says. Rooks is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The more than 200 members of Cornell’s choral groups may not be able to sing together each week, but they are still spending time listening and sharing their love of music virtually, with a host of guest visitors this semester.
by :
Bryan Hagelin
,
Department of Performing & Media Arts
As Cornell University shifts to remote instruction due to COVID-19, this year's Centrally Isolated Film Festival (CIFF), Cornell’s annual student-run film competition celebrating student filmmakers, will also move online.
On Monday, President Trump said in a tweet that he would sign an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to the United States in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. The executive order is anticipated to include halting new green cards and work visas.
European Union leaders are meeting on Thursday to discuss how to power the bloc’s economic recovery and help its hardest-hit members weather the current crisis. On the agenda are various proposals to raise a recovery fund, including the option of joint ‘coronabonds’ as well as a stimulus package to address the economic damage caused by the pandemic.
An Ithaca theatre company is creating a live-streamed performance of a new work from six international playwrights, including a Cornell professor. The piece will premiere May 1.
Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a doctoral student in government with a focus on international relations from Goa, India. After earning her bachelor’s degree at Edinburgh University and master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she chose to attend Cornell due to the ability to work with faculty across fields, friendliness of those in the field of government, and available resources.
