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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jane Wang, professor of physics, has been awarded a fellowship from the Simons Foundation for 2020.
The fellowships are given to outstanding mathematicians and theoretical physicists to extend academic leaves from one term to a full year, enabling recipients to focus solely on research for the long periods often necessary for significant advances.
When Michael Fontaine began translating the Latin poem “How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing” by Vincent Obsopoeus, he could not have known it would be published in the middle of a pandemic. Ironically, much of the advice offered in this 500 year-old text seems eerily appropriate to this time of social distancing -- Obsopoeus tells readers that the best way to drink is at home.
Nozomi Ando, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has received the 2020 Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award from the American Crystallographic Association. The purpose of this award is “to recognize outstanding achievement and exceptional potential in crystallographic research demonstrated by a scientist at an early stage of their independent career.”
In Monday’s coronavirus press briefing, President Trump said that he has “total authority” to reopen the economy, in contrast to plans being made by governors and local officials across the country to lift restrictions.
With the coronavirus pandemic challenging the wellbeing of people and countries around the world, global financial institutions face the tremendous task of coordinating economic policies and offering relief for the most vulnerable countries. Such effort will be on display this week, as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual spring meetings.
On Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved into an intensive care unit after his coronavirus symptoms worsened. Johnson, who secured his premiership last December with a landslide victory for the Conservative Party, ran on a populist and pro-Brexit platform. As coronavirus started to spread in the country, Johnson initially opposed lockdown-type measures suggesting that a speedy spread of the virus would create “herd immunity.”
Earlier this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency in major cities across the country in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19. Abe asked people to refrain from going outside in Tokyo and six other prefectures worst hit by coronavirus.
On April 8, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced that he is ending his presidential campaign, all but ensuring that former Vice President Joe Biden will face President Donald Trump in November.
As part of the nation’s record $2 trillion relief bill, Congress has set aside $500 million for the CDC to develop a “public health surveillance and data collection system” meant to track the spread of coronavirus. While it’s not clear what this system will look like or how it will function, it puts Americans on a historic path towards giving up certain privacies for the benefit of public health.
The matching tool site encourages diversity, so people can connect with others from a different part of the world, different culture or with new interests and insights.
Last month, as Cornell faculty learned they needed to move quickly to remote instruction, Sara Warner, director of LGBT Studies and associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, realized she had more technical skills than some of her peers.
“In our department, it’s hard to translate what we do to online teaching, especially the live, embodied participant experience,” she said. “I could see the look of concern on some of our faculty members’ faces.”
When Ray Thompson ’21 was a freshman coming to Cornell from Alabama, he couldn’t wait to be in a quad with a bunch of roommates — he and his siblings all had their own rooms at home. But, Thompson ended up in a single room in Clara Dickson Hall and worried a bit about making friends.
When you arrive on campus as a new Arts & Sciences student, you learn that you are one of the 15,043 undergrads here, that there are 1,684 faculty ready to lead your classes and that you can choose from 40 majors, 59 minors and almost 4,000 classes. But what you have to discover over time, for yourself, are all of the places on campus where you can do this work — places to eat, study, relax, meet with your friends or study partners or places to just enjoy the beauty of Ithaca.
Ph.D. student Ellen Abrams was awarded the 2018-19 Taylor and Francis Early Career Prize from the British Society for the History of Mathematics for her essay “‘An Inalienable Prerogative of a Liberated Spirit’: Postulating American Mathematics.”
Shoot a rifle, and the recoil might knock you backward. Merge two black holes in a binary system, and the loss of momentum gives a similar recoil -- a “kick” -- to the merged black hole.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the first NYC public school closures on March 12, adding to the many K-12 schools across the country that are closing or moving to online education to help control the spread of the coronavirus. Equity is a large concern in school closures for those students who depend on subsidized breakfasts and lunches and also may not have a supportive environment outside of school.
Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor in the astronomy department and director of the Carl Sagan Institute, will give the Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting June 1.
Cornell students who carefully followed President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment can now take a course on the subject matter starting in the fall. The course, taught by Joseph Margulies, a professor of government and law, and Edward Baptist, professor of history, will look at the politics and history of impeachment in the United States.
A Media Studies Conference, “Media Objects,” will take place at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art next fall, postponed from this spring. With a focus on the distinctive approaches to the study of media, the conference will host speakers from a wide variety of disciplines.
Yunyun Wang ’20, a double major in information science, systems and technology (ISST) and government, has been named a Newman Civic Fellow, an honor given by Campus Compact that “recognizes and supports community-committed students who are changemakers and public problem-solvers” according to information on its website.
Nelson Hairston, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Environmental Science emeritus, has been awarded the Naumann-Thienemann Medal by the Societas Internationalis Limnologiae (SIL), the highest honor that can be bestowed internationally for outstanding scientific contributions to limnology.
Hairston will receive this honor at the next SIL congress in Gwangju, South Korea.
Joshua Johnson’s ’21 senior research project won’t be just on paper – he envisions kids walking through his senior project: a museum that helps them think more broadly about the term “classical civilizations.”
Cells depend on signaling to regulate most life processes, including cell growth and differentiation, immune response and reactions to various stresses.
Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English, was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize for his book “The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States."
Doctoral student Carol-Rose Little and collaborator Morelia Vázquez Martínez (Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Macuspana) received a special distinction award in the best student presentation category from the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas during the society's winter meeting in January in New Orleans, La.
When Mary Fessenden, Cornell Cinema director, sits down to think about what films to show each semester, she has lots of movies in mind, but she also works closely with professors to find ties to the classes they’re offering.
