For Reunion 2018, Cornell alumni came back to campus in various ways. Some arrived by bus from New York City, and some came by plane from overseas. Some caught shared rides from other states, and some attended virtually, thanks to live stream.
One young alumnus came back by bicycle – and he came a very long way.
Reunion drew more than 7,500 alumni, family members and friends back to the Ithaca campus June 7-10. And with more than 5,400 alumni in attendance, 2018 was the most highly attended Reunion in Cornell’s history.
“Cornellians are coming home in record-breaking numbers,” Paul Cashman ’73, president of the Cornell Association of Class Officers, said at Cornelliana Night, the raucous, song-filled culmination of the weekend.
In an era that swirls with government distrust, national political cynicism and questions of character among authorities, public service can rescue us, said New York State Supreme Court Justice Debra James ’75, J.D. ’78, at the June 8 Olin Lecture in Bailey Hall during Reunion Weekend.
Four Cornell faculty members have received Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Awards, which recognize sustained and distinguished contributions of professorial faculty and senior lecturers to undergraduate advising. The awards were established by Stephen Ashley ’62, MBA ’64, in honor of his adviser, Kendall S. Carpenter, a professor of business management at Cornell from 1954 until his death at the age of 50 in 1967.
At its May 26 meeting, the Cornell Board of Trustees elected three new trustees to four-year terms: Ooi Lee (William) Lim ’80, MAR ’82; Aryan Shayegani ’88, M.D. ’92; and Bradley H. Stone ’77.
The first graduating class of Five Points Correctional Facility inmates in the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) received their degrees to congratulations and cheers at a recent ceremony.
The campus community has expressed strong interest in and engagement with a report from a faculty committee tasked with identifying organizational structures that might position Cornell’s social sciences for excellence in the next 10 to 15 years, say key administrators after holding 23 listening sessions with stakeholders.
The 2008 financial crisis was a watershed moment for the world’s central banks and their central bankers. Long seen as old boys’ clubs of bland technocrats, they suddenly found themselves in newspaper headlines and the speeches of populist politicians. The debates were not about standard central banking fare – tweaking interest rates to manage inflation – but equality, fairness and democracy.
As a Fulbright scholar at Cornell this year, Rebecca Macklin deepened her research through engagement with Native American communities, including joining Cornell students in educational outreach to indigenous high school students.
When Carisa (Triola) Steinberg ’97 was growing up, no one in her family had attended college. They didn’t expect her to, either. Her grandfather had college funds only for the boys in the family.
She applied to Cornell anyway and was accepted – with full funding.
Cornell faculty members and academic staff participating in the Knowledge Matters Fellowship presented their projects, including comics, videos and websites, at a showcase wrapping up the yearlong transmedia training program May 10 at A.D. White House.
A newly arrived collection of Jewish books containing fables, with around 400 volumes spanning six centuries, will enrich Jewish studies at Cornell and cast light on the depth and breadth of Jewish civilization.
The collection, which includes a 15th-century Torah scroll and six volumes from the first complete printing of the Babylonian Talmud, was delivered to the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) earlier this month by Jon Lindseth ’56.
Internationally known artists Carrie Mae Weems and Xu Bing will join participants from across the university this fall in the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) 2018 Biennial.
A hike in a spectacular Utah canyon got Shimon Edelman thinking: Humans crave novelty; boredom creates unhappiness. But if happiness is only possible through the pursuit of new experiences, what role does memory have?
For Gabriela Matos-Ortiz, scientific knowledge leapt from the pages of biology textbooks into reality.
Matos-Ortiz arrived from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico to a snow-covered Ithaca in January, but soon warmed to the idea of shadowing other students in the laboratory – thanks to an opportunity from the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board’s (CURB) mentorship program.
Recently awarded Engaged Graduate Student Grants will support 21 Cornell doctoral students and their community partners researching a range of topics, including arts and agriculture, education and the environment, health and history.
Grant recipients come from both the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses and represent 15 fields of study – the most since the program launched in 2016, with a particular increase in projects from the social sciences.
The lecture hall boasted hundreds of seats, a room so large the professor had to wear a microphone to be heard. The class is the first of five large introductory lecture courses in the Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences, that will be transformed with grant funding from the Active Learning Initiative (ALI) to include a larger share of activities that require student participation and engage students to learn by doing rather than passive listening.
Faculty, staff and graduate students will gather for the fifth Empowering Women in Science and Engineering (EWISE) symposium on Wednesday, May 23, in Stocking Hall. The all-day symposium is open to graduate students, postdoctoral associates, researchers and faculty members.
Thirty-four four-person teams from 18 schools in upstate New York competed April 29 in Girls’ Adventures in Math (GAIM), a team-based math competition for girls in grades three through eight held at Cornell University and 10 other locations nationwide. The national results have just been announced, and Ithaca’s Cayuga Heights Elementary School finished first in the Cornell competition Elementary Division – and was one of the top five upper elementary teams nationally.
Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in the College of Engineering, and Kin Fai Mak, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, are experts on atomically thin materials, particularly their optical and electronic properties.
Cheers of encouragement, heartfelt love and exuberance punctuated each award presented at the annual Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives’ (OADI) Honors ceremony May 4, at the Statler Hotel ballroom.
Martha Haynes, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, led an audience of students and faculty on a “journey across space and time” April 25 in Philip Lewis Hall.
A new student-organized exhibition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art surveys American artists’ use of landscape as the country expanded between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In 1893 in Franklin Hall (now Olive Tjaden Hall), the Physical Review debuted as the inaugural publication of the American Physical Society (APS).
The APS is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Physical Review and has selected 50 “milestone” research papers spanning a wide range of important results. Fittingly, a few of those papers feature Cornell researchers.
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.
For most of human history, nearly everyone lived in precarious conditions – their lives, in the words of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Yessica Martinez has received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a graduate school program for immigrants and children of immigrants, that will fund her pursuit of a Cornell MFA in creative writing.
The 2018 Community Engagement Showcase, April 16 in Klarman Hall, celebrated undergraduate and graduate students who collaborated with local and international communities.
Professor of cell biology Anthony P. Bretscher has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with Catherine Lord, professor of psychology in pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
Renowned poet and legendary Cornell faculty member A.R. Ammons – “Archie” to all who knew him – was remembered by colleagues and friends at an informal reception April 9 in Klarman Hall.
Why is expertise that used to be authoritative now sometimes dismissed as “fake news”? Is it possible to save an endangered language by bringing a native speaker to Cornell to document it? And what does it mean to work in a Bosnian weapons factory when the source of one’s livelihood is lethal to others and the environment?
In what seems to be a new age of populism, what does history tell us about elites and the will of the masses?
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson will address these issues in his talk, “Populist Revolt: Everything Old is New Again,” April 23 at 5:15 p.m. in G10 Biotechnology Building. The lecture is sponsored by the Freedom and Free Societies program at Cornell and is free and open to the public.
The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) is offering funding for the Cornell teaching community to implement new projects that will facilitate challenging, vibrant and reflective learning experiences for undergraduates.
All faculty and full-time instructors engaged in teaching at Cornell are invited to submit proposals exploring new and emerging tools and technologies, approaches and teaching strategies.
