Active learning strategies transformed what could have been a class of slides and lectures this past semester into one in which students debated, created and thought critically about what statues mean, from antiquity to today.
Writer Toni Morrison, M.A. ’55, has been chosen to receive the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ highest honor for excellence in the arts. Three Cornell architecture alumni have also been named to receive 2019 Architecture Awards.
Morrison earned the Gold Medal for Fiction. Two Gold Medals, in rotating categories in the arts, are awarded each year to those who have achieved eminence in an entire body of work.
Cornell student and faculty researchers and their community partners will use this year’s Engaged Cornell research grants to study Cornell’s socio-economic impact on Tompkins County, whether mobile research labs effectively engage underrepresented populations, and whether farmer-led research in Malawi influenced student learning and development.
This year’s grants, 15 in all, were announced earlier this month by the Office of Engagement Initiatives.
Fresh off winning a Guggenheim fellowship, democracy scholar Suzanne Mettler, Ph.D. ’94, has just received another honor: a Radcliffe Institute fellowship.
Mary McDonald ’78 discovered her voice at Cornell.
Originally a French horn player, McDonald joined the Cornell University Chorus, the women’s vocal ensemble, during her sophomore year and won an audition for free voice lessons.
“I had never had formal voice lessons,” she says. “One day, I asked, ‘What about these notes up here?’”
Cornell astronomer Jonathan Lunine suggested to Congress reasonable, practical steps – including baby steps back to the moon – to help Americans one day put boots on the oxidized dust of Mars.
Yunqui (Kelly) Luo has long been intrigued by the laws of nature.
“As a kid, I loved to play with tools and understand the ways in which the physical world works around us,” she said. The physics labs at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology cemented her passion for research.
It’s a simple task for humans: Sort plants by the colors of their pots. For robots, though, it’s a much more arduous undertaking.
In a project blending technical savvy with lofty ambitions, a multidisciplinary team of Cornell undergraduates designed and built an autonomous robot capable of recognizing and handling potted plants.
Each new observable provides different ways of confirming the theory of general relativity and offers insight into the intrinsic properties of gravitational waves.
Fake news is a threat to American democratic institutions, whether through online election interference or, in extreme cases, inciting violence. New research offers a roadmap for dealing with false information.
With more than 5,000 international students, Cornell is a vibrant global community. The Office of Global Learning honored international students’ achievements May 2, sending the Class of 2019 off in style.
Wendy Wolford, center, vice provost for international affairs, congratulates international graduates.
Before Clinton Ikioda ’19 came to Cornell, students and staff at his high school said he’d been admitted only to fill a diversity quota. Once he arrived, he felt constant pressure to prove he belonged – as well as a persistent worry that he didn’t.
Maria Harrison, the William H. Crocker Professor at Boyce Thompson Institute and adjunct professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science, and Mariana Wolfner, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences, are among 100 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced April 30.
The Provost’s Seminar on Teaching and Learning brought nearly 75 faculty and instructors together to share and celebrate innovations in teaching at Cornell.
Hailed as “transformative” and “a historic achievement” by faculty members, a strategic investment of close to $2 million directed by Provost Michael Kotlikoff has improved Cornell’s capabilities in flow cytometry, which is pivotal in cell research.
Classics scholar David Mankin, beloved by Cornell students for his inspiring and idiosyncratic teaching style, compassionate mentorship and the signature black sunglasses he wore to class, died April 24 after a brief illness. He was 61.
Winnie Ho ’19 has received the 2019 Campus-Community Leadership Award. The annual honor, given by the Division of University Relations, is presented to a graduating senior who has shown exceptional town-gown leadership and innovation.
Fresh air, nature and playing outdoors is the perfect prescription for sedentary and sluggish children, Briana Lui ’19 advises. Lui and more than three dozen Cornell seniors presented their undergraduate research at the 17th annual Hunter R. Rawlings III Research Scholars Senior Expo on April 17 in the Physical Sciences Building and the Clark Atrium.
Suzanne Mettler, Ph.D. ’94, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Department of Government, has been awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
A Cornell professor collaborated with researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London, where experiments were conducted using special confinement chambers constructed at Cornell.
Why should resources – financial or intellectual – be dedicated to the pursuit of theoretical knowledge when the world has so many pressing problems? On April 24 particle physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed will examine the significance of performing basic research in his latest public talk as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large. The talk will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Rockefeller Hall’s Schwartz Auditorium and is free and open to the public. A reception will follow at 9 p.m. at the West Pavilion of Clark Hall.
Two Cornell faculty members with expertise in psychology and evolutionary biology have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 17.
For four decades, environmental photographer James Balog has traveled the world capturing the connections between humans and nature in vivid detail.
The Cornell community will have the opportunity to explore these connections, too, when Cornell Cinema hosts a free screening of “The Human Element” on Earth Day, April 22, at 7 p.m.
The Milstein program "prepares students to understand both the technical and the human aspects of new technologies," said Cornell President Martha Pollack.
By examining data from the Cassini spacecraft’s last close encounter with Saturn’s moon Titan, scientists have found that its methane-filled lakes are up to 300 feet deep, much deeper than previously thought.
The symposium – focusing on Turner’s activism and impact in shaping the black student movement – will be held from April 12-13 at the Africana Center, 310 Triphammer Road. The keynote address, scheduled for 11 a.m. April 13, will be given by John Bracey, professor in the W.E.B. du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The closest earth-like exoplanets are bombarded by high levels of radiation, but Cornell astronomers say life has already survived fierce radiation, and they have proof: you.
Harry Kesten, Ph.D. ’58, the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, whose insights advanced the modern understanding of probability theory and its applications, died March 29 in Ithaca. He was 87.
On April 19, 1969, dozens of members of Cornell’s Afro-American Society and several Latino students occupied Willard Straight Hall for 36 hours to call attention to what they perceived as the university’s hostility toward students of color, its student judicial system and its slow progress in establishing an Africana studies program.
Over the course of two decades, Riché Richardson, associate professor of African-American literature in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center, received her doctorate and two fellowships, taught at two universities, published numerous essays and a book – and survived three major surgeries.
There’s a good chance someone somewhere on March 21 wished you a happy first day of spring. For mathematician Steven Strogatz, the day possessed an added significance worth celebrating.
“Happy max derivative day, everybody!” he wrote that evening to his more than 53,000 followers on Twitter.
A team of astronomers has created a catalog with the 1,822 stars that can be observed by NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), most likely to host Earth-like planets.
Samuel Barnett ’19 has been named one of 11 junior fellows by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Barnett, a College Scholar whose studies focus on national security and geopolitics, will spend his fellowship year working with Carnegie’s executive office on issues of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.
Chinese Communist Party officials often invoke the outrage of the Chinese people when disputing a foreign government’s actions or demands. International observers are often skeptical of these claims about the overarching feelings of 1.3 billion people.
But not much is known about what citizens of the People’s Republic of China actually think about their country’s foreign policy. A Cornell scholar of Chinese politics and foreign relations is among the first to ask that question.
Assistant professors Jeremy Baskin, Song Lin and Brad Ramshaw have been named recipients of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowships, which support early-career faculty members’ original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance.
The history of feminist performance is one of radical storytelling, of showing how the personal is political, and of carving out spaces in which women can feel, in the words of performance artist Holly Hughes, “at last, fully human.”
An interdisciplinary symposium at Cornell March 15-16 will explore what this history can teach us about the future of feminism, and how we can use performance to reflect the changes we want to see.
Bollywood director Nandita Das brings her breakout 2018 film “Manto,” the story of maverick writer Saadat Hasan Manto during the Partition of India, to Cornell on Thursday, March 14.
Two operations research and information engineers, two electrical engineers and two mathematicians from Cornell have received National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program awards.
Over the next five years, each researcher will receive up to $500,000 “to build a firm scientific footing for solving challenges and scaling new heights for the nation, as well as serve as academic role models in research and education,” according to the NSF website.
Stepping into the shoes of a god isn’t easy, as historian Barry Strauss makes clear in a new book that traces the biographies of 10 of the men who succeeded Julius Caesar.
A groundbreaking Cornell-led study shows that nearly 1 in 2 Americans have had a brother or sister, parent, spouse or child spend time in jail or prison.
Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 education at Cornell Tech, led the workshop for students in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity and community members.
E.D. (Ed) Intemann, M.F.A. ’84, a senior lecturer in the Department of Performing and Media Arts and resident lighting designer at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts for more than two decades, died Feb. 21 at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. He was 60.
