When she was growing up in Harlem, Ginger So ’79 walked 10 blocks each way once a week to borrow books from the public library.In those books, she saw photographs of an America she did not know – an America of houses with white picket fences – and images of other countries. Her reading made her want to travel, so she followed the advice of her mother and studied hard, gained entrance to a good high school and later was admitted to Cornell.
At a May 2 reception and award presentation, the first cohort of Ewing Family Service Award recipients presented updates on their projects to 40 students, faculty, staff and members of the Ewing Family.Established in fall 2015 to support Cornell’s commitment to innovation in community engagement, the Ewing Family Service Award provides up to $2,000 per project to foster student, faculty or staff leadership and social responsibility in the Cornell campus community.
Professor of performing and media arts Bruce Levitt is the inaugural recipient of Cornell’s Engaged Scholar Prize, Vice Provost Judith Appleton announced May 11.
The Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) has announced 10 faculty-in-residence fellows in the social sciences, humanities and arts for 2016-17.
Cornell astrophysicists Saul Teukolsky and Lawrence Kidder have earned a share in the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics – a $3 million award – that recognizes those who helped create the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its ability to find gravitational waves. The discovery announced in February provided strong confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Katja C. Nowack, assistant professor of physics in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) to receive $750,000 for research over five years as part of DOE’s Early Career Research Program for her research project, “Magnetic Imaging of Topological Phases of Matter.”
Once a popular pastime, bee hunting involves capturing and feeding wild bees, then releasing and following them back to their hive.The practice is little-known today, but bee expert Thomas D. Seeley – the Horace White Professor in Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and author of several books on honeybees – has just published a book that offers insights into the history and science of bee hunting.
A conspicuous miniature wagon is parked in Willard Straight Hall’s browsing library. In the vintage Straight interior surrounded by sculptures, paintings and scale-model ships, the antique-looking wooden wagon might seem like a part of an exposition on rural life in 18th-century Britain. But the wagon is no exhibition piece; it’s the home of a student-founded, self-funded independent community book exchange.
Following the April 2015 Nepal earthquake that killed more than 8,000 people, Maya Devi Neupane, president of the United Women’s Savings and Credit Cooperative, said her Kaule community on the Phyukhri Ridge “felt orphaned, abandoned.”She continued, “The earthquake destroyed our homes and our [Women’s Cooperative] building. We had to take shelter in the plastic greenhouse ‘tunnels’ where we had begun a tomato-growing project.”
Noliwe Rooks, associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender and sexuality studies, and director of graduate studies at theAfricana Studies and Research Center, and Bryan Duff, senior lecturer in education, received the
Jim can feel the eyes of his classmates. He stays up nights reading his law books. He knows the information. None of that matters now. What matters is he’s the only black man in a classroom of white eyes and it consumes him. He feels branded.He starts to talk. His voice trembles. He stutters. His mind goes blank. He fails, again. He can’t exactly explain why.
At the Central New York THAT (The Humanities and Technology) Camp held in Olin Library, there were no official presenters, while participants voted on workshop topics and met in collaborative sessions.The informal structure suited the subject matter, since digital humanities is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field.
Four Cornell faculty members. including two from the College of Arts & Sciences, are among 213 national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders elected new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
María Cristina García, the Howard A. Newman Professor in American Studies at Cornell, is the recipient of a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Carnegie Corporation of New York has announced.
Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA or ObamaCare) became law in 2010, Americans have remained deeply divided in their overall assessments of the law and whether it should continue.
The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies has announced two new international faculty fellows for 2016-19:Rachel Bezner Kerr, associate professor of development sociology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Thomas Pepinsky, associate professor of government in the College of Arts and Sc
It takes more than just hard work to turn an idea for advancing social justice into a successful reality. It also takes inspiration, a strong network and a lot of support, encouragement and advice.
So long, good Samaritans.In the first study of its kind, Cornell sociologists have found that people who have a medical emergency in a public place can’t necessarily rely on the kindness of strangers. Only 2.5 percent of people, or 1 in 39, got help from strangers before emergency medical personnel arrived, in research published April 14 in the American Journal of Public Health.
The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, designed to increase the completion of doctorates among first generation, low-income and underrepresented students – ultimately diversifying the professoriate – inducted 16 undergraduates April 9.
A state of electronic matter first predicted by theorists in 1964 has finally been discovered by Cornell physicists and may provide key insights into the workings of high-temperature superconductors.
The voices shaping the important conversations of our age, from racial unrest to income inequality and the war on cancer, are now a little more diverse, thanks to a group of Cornell faculty members.
Some populations of frogs are rapidly adapting to a fungal pathogen calledBatrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd) that has decimated many populations for close to half a century and causes the disease chytridiomycosis, according to a new study.
The Institute for the Social Sciences’ Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) theme project tackled the challenges inherent in interdisciplinary research collaborations, particularly the issue of how sociologists, psychologists, economists, lawyers, musicians and entrepreneurs sometimes struggle to understand one another.
Twelve faculty-led projects, including six in Arts & Sciences, have been awarded approximately $213,000 under the Internationalizing the Cornell Curriculum (ICC) grant program.
Cornell researchers, working in collaboration with scientists in Switzerland, have identified a strong connection between a protein, SIRT5, and healthy heart function.
Ten Cornell doctoral students will work with community partners in New York state and around the world on individual research projects supported by Engaged Cornell. The first Engaged Graduate Student Grants were announced by Vice Provost Judith Appleton.
Over the past decades, millions of managed colonies of honeybees have died from varroa mites that transmit deadly viruses, yet wild colonies survive.Cornell researchers describe – in the March 11 issue of the journal PLoS One –experiments that help reveal how wild colonies endure mites and pathogens.
The legendary Cornell Professor Milton Konvitz, Ph.D. ’33, encouraged students to explore the origins of ideals embedded in the U.S. Constitution to understand civil rights and civil liberties.He referenced principles of intellectual history in such lectures as “The Hebrew Bible,” “Antigone” and “Revolution” in his “American Ideals” course, first offered in 1947.
We are living in a prison industrial complex, according to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York.Gilmore gave the American Studies Program’s annual Krieger Lecture in American Political Culture March 3 on “Organized Abandonment and Organized Violence: Devolution and the Police.”
Technology has changed all aspects of our lives, even ancient fields of study in the humanities. The College of Arts and Sciences’ fourth Big Ideas Panel, part of its New Century for the Humanities celebration, explored technology in the humanities March 15 in Klarman Hall’s Groos Family Atrium.
The U.S. incarcerates a greater proportion of its population than any other country in the world, with dire social and economic consequences for the incarcerated, their children and those who work in the criminal justice system. In his new book, “Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World” (Cambridge University Press), Peter Enns sheds new light on why.
Students and faculty in the Cornell in Turin program were recognized recently for their work in Turin’s San Salvario neighborhood as part of their research studies of migration and services for immigrants in Italy.
