In new research, Steven Alvarado reports that having college-bound friends increases the likelihood that a student will enroll in college. However, the effect of having college-bound friends is diminished for Black and Latino students compared with white and Asian students, especially for males and especially for selective and highly selective colleges, due to structural and cultural processes.
Charles Petersen, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in history, studies 20th-century American history to better understand the rise of social and economic inequality in recent decades.
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.
Proposals are due April 15 for a new cycle of grants from the Migrations initiative, seeking to support work in migrations-related research, pedagogy and engagement with a specific focus on racism and dispossession.
Cornell will celebrate its seventh Giving Day March 11, in a 24-hour campaign bringing together Cornellians around the world to show their support for the university and compete in friendly challenges, a trivia night and more.
The university has launched a search for the founding dean of the School of Public Policy, building excitement about the fledgling school that could formally start operations as soon as this fall.
Richard Newell Boyd, the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus, died in his sleep in Cleveland, Ohio on Feb. 20. He was 78.
Indian Member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi will join economics professor Kaushik Basu on March 2 for a conversation about democracy, development and life in politics in India and the world.
The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has been named as a 2020 climate policy "breakthrough" for government initiatives in Vietnam to increase agricultural production there while reducing methane emissions from rice paddies. According to Norman Uphoff, professor emeritus of government, "SRI is one of many forms of agroecological practice."
John Munson/Cornell University
A photo of Hall of Fame musician Lou Reed and artist Andy Warhol, in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
In viral social media videos, two doctoral students in the field of biomedical and biological sciences explain how messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines work, also creating Spanish versions.
Individuals in a higher income bracket have made the most health-related changes to stay safe during COVID-19, according to a new study co-authored by Cornell economist Michèle Belot. The researchers examine the role of socioeconomic differences in explaining self-protective behavior.
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."
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Provided
Illustration of the spacecraft containing NASA’s Perseverance rover
The incoming cohort of fellows will explore subjects ranging from the evolution of primate lifespans to urban public art in China to the effects of uncertainty and debt on financial decision-making.
A podcast launched this semester by the Society for the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, provides a space for humanities scholars to share ideas virtually, keeping cross-disciplinary dialogue going even during pandemic conditions and extending the reach of these conversations beyond Cornell.
Cornell faculty and students are teaming up with community partners in Tompkins County to address opioid use, increase food security, build a greener construction industry and share stories of Ithaca’s Black history pioneers. The four teams received Engaged Research Grants, totaling more than $192,000, from the Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI).
Ed Baptist, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $750,000 digital infrastructure grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of the Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database. Launched in 2014, the database collects and compiles fugitive slave advertisements from 18th- and 19th-century U.S. newspapers.
Political polarization, environmental justice and inclusion in higher education are a few of big issues faculty members—including several from the College of Arts and Sciences—will tackle in the next academic year as fellows at the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS).
“Women who enter into occupations that are traditionally masculine spaces such as in the security sector or politics face many barriers that prevent them from succeeding in the profession."
Cornell University Library’s Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences is seeking applications to create online collections that will support teaching and scholarship at Cornell and beyond.
New research by Harry Greene, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, suggests that for some cobras, the venom evolved additional complexity to deter potential enemies– possibly including bipedal, larger-brained hominins like Homo erectus, our extinct close relative.
Little is known about how higher cortical areas in the brain develop after the primary areas are in place. A new study by Cornell and Yale researchers, including professor emerita of psychology Barbara Finlay, uses computer modeling to show that the development and evolution of secondary visual cortical areas can be explained by the same process.
Alexis Soloski’s articles about theater during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic “transcended the limits of traditional reviews," the award committee said.
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.
National Park Service
Russian Commander Iurii Lisianskii’s 1804 outline drawing of the Tlingit fort used to defend against Russia’s colonization forces. Cornell and U.S. National Park Service researchers have pinpointed the fort’s exact location in Sitka, Alaska.
Cornell and National Park Service researchers found the fort using geophysical imaging techniques and ground-penetrating radar.
Robert Barker/Cornell University file photo
Hector D. Abruna, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CHEM), in the lab with post-doctoral students.
Cornell astronomers have estimated that Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane on Saturn's largest moon, is at least 1,000 feet deep near its center.
John Munson/Cornell University
Julia Gardner, head of research services for the library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, uses an overhead document camera to show a 15th-century book of sermons, originally attached to a lectern by a chain.
Through two semesters of remote learning, Cornell's archivists, curators and librarians are finding virtual ways to help instructors teach research, using gems from Cornell University Library’s rare and distinctive (RAD) collections.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft – currently orbiting Jupiter, flying close approaches to the planet and then out into the realm of the Jovian moons – and the InSight lander, now perched in Mars’ equatorial region, have both received mission extensions, the space agency announced Jan. 8. Cornell astronomers serve key roles on both projects.
Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, has won a three-year, $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative that will bring together scholars across the university and beyond to study the links between racism, dispossession and migration.
Ding Xiang Warner, professor of Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, has won a yearlong 2021 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to study etched shell casings and other “trench art” made by some of the Chinese laborers who supported the allied armies during World War I.
During his 16 years representing a Long Island district in Congress, Steve Israel said he saw divisiveness and partisanship grow exponentially. By the time he retired from the House of Representatives in 2017, compromise and respect for democratic norms seemed almost irrelevant, he said, and his biggest fear was not of foreign conflict but internal division.
Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, technologists and health officials have looked to technologies – including smartphone contact tracing applications – to stem the spread of the virus. But contact tracing apps, which require a critical mass of adopters to be effective, face serious obstacles in the U.S., Cornell researchers have found.
An international team of astronomers – including 17 Cornellians – report they have found the first faint, low-frequency whispers that may be gravitational waves from gigantic, colliding black holes in distant galaxies. The findings were obtained from more than 12.5 years of data collected from the national radio telescopes at Green Bank, West Virginia, and the recently collapsed dish at the Arecibo Observatory, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Entrepreneurship at Cornell has named Jessica Rolph ’97, MBA ’04, co-founder and CEO of early childhood development startup Lovevery, its 2021 Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year. Rolph will be honored at the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Eclectic Convergence conference, Nov. 12 in New York City.
A comparative analysis of COVID-19 policies across 18 countries, led by researchers from Cornell and Harvard University, reveals that different countries reacted to the pandemic with a variety of policies – resulting in widely varied public health and economic outcomes linked to underlying characteristics of each society.
While some consider public opinion polls critical to democratic accountability, others question the ability of today’s pollsters to accurately reflect the public’s preferences on issues and candidates.
How do perceptions of luck shape views about inequality and redistribution? Could interventions nudge hiring managers to evaluate job candidates blindly, and thus more objectively? Has remote instruction during the pandemic improved student interactions and equity in science labs?
The first mention of the word “coronavirus” in a Cornell Chronicle story in 2020 came on Jan. 29, when the university designated mainland China as an elevated-risk destination, and imposed travel restrictions on students, faculty and staff.
