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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Cornell researchers have become the first to control atomically thin magnets with an electric field, a breakthrough that provides a blueprint for producing exceptionally powerful and efficient data storage in computer chips, among other applications.
In a Medieval Studies Brown Bag Lunch, Eric Rebillard discussed his recent book, “Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs,” a collection of texts that describe the martyrdom of Christians executed before A.D. 260.
John Hsu, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, died March 24 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was 86.Hsu joined the Department of Music in 1955 and was a member of the Cornell faculty for 50 years, retiring in 2005. He served as department chair from 1966 to 1971 and was named the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in 1976.
Teams of scientists, including researchers from the Cornell physics and astronomy departments, are collaborating on two of the largest telescopes ever built to take readings on the universe’s oldest light measurable, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB.These telescopes will be placed in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile and will give scientists new tools to record the earliest signals from the universe.
Zhiyu Gong (linguistics) will travel to China to record some of the last remaining speakers of the critically endangered Daur language. Kara Fikrig (entomology) will go to Colombia to study the feeding habits of mosquitoes that carry dengue fever and other diseases. Ali Abbas (applied economics and management) will spend time in Pakistan exploring collusion between citizens and the state in the property tax market.
Enzymes are nature’s best nanoscale catalysts, and often show what’s known as catalytic allostery – that is, reactions at one site affecting reactions at another site, typically a few nanometers away, without direct interaction between the reactants.
The initiative connects economists, legal experts and other scholars with leading thinkers in government, international development, civil society and the private sector.
The report identified ways to better connect faculty, provide faculty with support and improve Cornell's external visibility and recruiting power in the social sciences.
For José Armando Fernandez Guerrero ’18, two strong women – his grandmother, Apolonia, and his mother, Josefina – believed that his education would open opportunities. A third – a high school French teacher – showed him how to use his education, and the passion for languages and linguistics it inspired, to help him embrace and move beyond his past.
More than 200 awardees, nominees, nominators and senior staff members gathered at the Statler Ballroom for the fifth annual Employee Excellence Awards celebration March 13.“You are held in the highest regard by the student-athletes,” Vice President Ryan Lombardi told the audience, “for your willingness to listen when they are struggling with school work, family issues and missing home.”
Imogene “Gene” Powers Johnson ’52, a devoted alumna, benefactor and matriarch of a multigenerational philanthropic Cornellian family, died March 3 in Racine, Wisconsin. She was 87.
The #MeToo movement seems to have sparked a sea change in how we think of sexual harassment. But in this Academic Minute, Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy, discusses why our attitudes are still not where they need to be. She is the author of the recently published “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.”
