A memorial celebration Sept. 12 in Statler Auditorium brought together much of what M.H. “Mike” Abrams cherished – poetry, Elizabethan music, family, friends and colleagues.Abrams, who died in April at 102, was “one of the greatest professors in Cornell’s history and certainly one of its most beloved,” said Jonathan Culler, Abrams’ successor as the Class of 1916 Professor of English.“Mike spent…
The United States is not entering a new Cold War with Russia, but rather a Cold Peace, according to Peter Katzenstein, Cornell’s Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.Today’s U.S. Cold War rhetoric comes from both sides of the political spectrum, with the right calling for a militarized foreign policy approach, including direct military…
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research – the world’s largest public opinion archive – will move from the University of Connecticut to Ithaca, where it will be known as the Roper Center at Cornell University, and casually as Roper@Cornell, on Nov. 7.Founded in 1947, the Roper Center is a leading archive of social science data from public opinion surveys. The center collects, preserves and…
Growing inequality and its effect on democracy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world today. A faculty discussion, part of the inauguration celebration for President Elizabeth Garrett, will bring new perspectives to the challenge of inequality for democratic governance. The “Democracy & Inequality” panel will be held Friday, Sept. 18, at 3 p.m. in Bailey Hall. The event is free…
A first-generation science and engineering student while at Cornell, the late Stanford H. Taylor ’50, Chem.Eng. ’51, considered the humanities essential to a well-rounded education.Taylor, who died in 2010, and his wife, Jo Ann, supported humanities initiatives at Cornell including endowing the department chair of the Sage School of Philosophy in 2007. The Taylor family is continuing their legacy…
William Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell, died Sept. 1 due to complications from a brain tumor at his home in Horseheads, New York. He was 73.Provine, a professor of the history of biology in the departments of History and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was born Feb. 19, 1942, in Nashville, Tennessee.He joined Cornell as an…
Engaged Cornell has awarded its inaugural Engaged Curriculum Grants to 18 projects initiated by faculty across the university. The grants, totaling $930,299, support work that places community-engaged learning at the heart of the Cornell student experience.One such project is a cross-disciplinary minor in crime, prisons and justice. Students will take five courses in the new minor and will serve…
As a leader in research at the intersection of computer/information science and the social sciences, Cornell has helped to define and create the field of computational social science.On Sept. 11-12, Cornell will host a conference showcasing cutting-edge research in the field and featuring alumni and other noted scholars in the discipline.“This conference comes at an important time, just as we’re…
The three co-founders of Novomer, a startup company based on Cornell research, have received the 2016 Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success from the American Chemical Society (ACS), the society has announced.Company Vice President Scott Allen, Ph.D. ’04; founding CEO and board Chairman Anthony Eisenhut ’88; and Geoffrey Coates, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, received the…
Aby Warburg – whose early 20th-century emphasis on the power of recurrent images was eerily prescient of contemporary thought – died before he could finish his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” consisting of large panels of collages tracing the history of art.Now, nearly 90 years after Warburg’s death, Cornell University Library, in partnership with Cornell University Press and the Warburg Institute of the…
First-year students arriving on campus this week are members of Cornell’s most racially diverse incoming freshman class since the university began keeping records on race in the early 1980s.Of the 3,219 students in the Class of 2019 enrolling this fall, a record number are students of color – 1,488, or 46.2 percent; and a record number of freshmen self-identify as underrepresented minority…
The Cornell University Department of English will hold a memorial celebration for M.H. Abrams, the Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus, in Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12. The celebration is free and open to the public.Abrams, a towering figure in literary and cultural studies, died at the age of 102 on April 21, 2015.Cornell President Elizabeth Garrett will…
The art of kirigami involves cutting paper into intricate designs, like snowflakes. Cornell physicists are kirigami artists, too, but their paper is only an atom thick, and could become some of the smallest machines the world has ever known.A research collaboration led by Paul McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale…
For C. Riley Snorton, assistant professor of Africana studies and of feminist, gender and sexuality studies in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, winning a coveted National Endowment for the Humanities-Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence fellowship is the chance of a lifetime. He will examine a topic that has intrigued him since college, when he first self-identified as a transgender…
Graduate student Tonia Ko’s career as a young composer and artist has hit a new level, with several recent international honors, concert commissions and performance premieres, including a piece performed on bubble wrap.Ko, 26, was one of nine recipients of the 63rd annual BMI Student Composer Awards, held May 18 in New York City. The winners ranged in age from 14 to 26.“It’s something I applied…
Sibling suns – made famous in the “Star Wars” scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset – and the planets around them may be more common than we’ve thought, and Cornell astronomers are presenting new ideas on how to find them.NASA AmesNASA video describes the Kepler satellite's first discovery of a planet orbiting sibling suns in 2011. With the publication of this Cornell research,…
Growing up in Ethiopia in the early 1980s and coming to the United States as a young teenager in 1989, Dagmawi Woubshet witnessed unprecedented expressions of mourning and loss in both countries in response to the AIDS crisis.Woubshet, associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, analyzes these cultures of mourning in “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in…
Cornell researchers have used cutting-edge X-ray technology to noninvasively image fruit flies during and after mating. The study, published online ahead of print June 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how researchers used the Cornell Biotechnology Resource Center’s high resolution micro-CT (computed tomography) scanner to acquire detailed 3-D datasets of…
To sort out the biological intricacies of Earth-like planets, astronomers have developed computer models that examine how ultraviolet radiation from other planets’ nearby suns may affect those worlds, according to new research published June 10 in Astrophysical Journal.“Depending on the intensity, ultraviolet radiation can be both useful and harmful to the origin of life,” says Lisa Kaltenegger,…
What does it take to reverse a first impression? Cornell researchers were especially interested in implicit impressions – rapidly and uncontrollably activated positive and negative evaluations of others. Implicit impressions are assumed to be very difficult to revise.The answer, according to researchers Melissa Ferguson and Jeremy Cone: Simple countervailing information isn’t always enough. But …
Editors and other language mavens have long recognized that sentences containing subject relative clauses – as in, “The man who called the woman is friendly” – are easier to understand than those containing object relative clauses, such as, “The man who the woman called is friendly.” And indeed, this observation is borne out in laboratory experiments with French, English, German and many other…
Cornell chemists William Dichtel and Jiwoong Park have received Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards. The highly competitive program supports research teams working in more than one traditional science or engineering discipline to accelerate breakthroughs in basic research.This year, the DOD awarded 22 MURI grants totaling $149 million over the next…
Next time you’re in a cocktail party discussion about science fiction, you’ll have a lot to brag about. The university has produced more than its share of notables in the field, including several mainstream names.If you want more details, of course, ask a librarian. Fred Muratori, reference and instruction services librarian, reviewed Cornell faculty and student contributions to the field in a…
When it’s time for a meal of katydids, bats use their ears. When hunting and eating male katydids, different bat species locate their prey by listening for specific signals in male katydids’ mating calls, according to a recent Cornell, Dartmouth, McMaster University in Canada and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study. Furthermore, the researchers found that each bat species differed in…
While looking for life on planets beyond our own solar system, a group of international scientists has created a colorful catalog containing reflection signatures of Earth life forms that might be found on planet surfaces throughout the cosmic hinterlands. The new database and research, published in the March 16 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), gives humans a better chance…
During an inspiring, humorous and highly candid talk to more than 420 people Sept. 18, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared how Cornell shaped her journey to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cornellians who survived demanding professors and unforgiving winters while developing a strong work ethic could relate. Ginsburg ’54 said that whenever she drafts High Court opinions, “changing the way…
As Bob Dylan reminded us, the times they are a-changing. According to a Cornell University poll, young adults are much more likely to report that they will be politically active over the next few years, compared with everyone over 25. As a result, the pollsters said, “The U.S. will have a significantly different political climate in the future.”This and related polls show that younger citizens…
Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University
2021-22 Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award winner Zachary Grobe
The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI), along with a committee made up of faculty and students, has selected doctoral students Janani Hariharan and Zachary Grobe as recipients of the 2021-22 Cornelia Ye outstanding teaching assistant award.
“Their commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and engaging all students in a welcoming environment made our two winners rise to the top of a…
Even the most extreme objects in the universe – including black holes – must obey certain rules.
A central law for black holes predicts that the total area of their event horizons – the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape – should never shrink. This law is Hawking’s area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971.
Fifty years later, physicists…
