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.
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.
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.
While most Cornell students headed home for the summer – off to internships, work or play – a group of entrepreneurial undergrads and graduate students are staying in Ithaca for intensive business development as part of the new Life Changing Labs (LCL) summer incubator.
Among them was Naomi Gendler, a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In a few minutes, Gendler summarized her project, “Analysis of Methods to Excite Head-Tail Motion of Bunches within the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.” Her research could help improve the stability of electron beams in particle accelerators.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
The Brock Turner rape case at Stanford triggered a firestorm of criticism; an op-ed by assistant professor of philosophy Kate Manne in the Huffington Post helps to explain why.The case, she wrote, “vividly illustrates…all of the ways we collectively ignore, deny, minimize, forgive, and forget the wrongdoing of men who conform to the norms of toxic masculinity, and behave in domineering ways towards their historical subordinates: women.”
These 16 new A&S faculty members will contribute to the nexus of big ideas, foundational methods, and colliding and intertwining disciplines found at the center of Cornell.
Simultaneously critical and creative, timeless and timely, global and individual, the humanities embrace the complexity of a rapidly changing world and inspire us to seek to understand it.
For many teenagers, math is just a necessary component of earning a high school diploma. For others, though, math is a passion, a destination in itself.
Lori Khatchadourian teaches the Exploring Archaeology mini-course at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca.The week of June 15-19, professors Adam T. Smith, anthropology, and Lori Khatchadourian, Near Eastern studies, led a mini-course on archaeology at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca. Nine children ages 5-8 spent five mornings exploring aspects of archaeological research.
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.
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.
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 European languages.
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 five years.
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.
The hand game “rock-paper-scissors” is a classic way to settle playground disputes, with rock smashing scissors, scissors cutting paper, and paper covering rock. But it turns out that nature plays its own versions of the game, and mathematicians and biologists have used it to study everything from human societies to bacteria in a petri dish.
Chinelo Onyilofor ’15 has found that her studies in chemistry and art history have taught her the art of looking for small details, whether she’s finding the hidden meaning in a painting or an answer to solve a chemical synthesis.After she graduates this weekend, Onyilofor, a double major in the College of Arts and Sciences from Annapolis, Maryland, plans to travel for a year before going to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in organic chemistry.
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES TEACHING AND ADVISING AWARDSThe Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants went to graduate students Sarah Maxey, government, Allison Tracy, ecology and evolutionary biology, Danielle Morgan, English, and Laura Manella, neurobiology and behavior.
When Irene Li ’15 isn’t hunkered down surveying the latest research on the local food movement and social change, she’s in a Boston kitchen, meeting growers or dreaming up new items for her food truck and restaurant.Li, one of three sibling owners of Mei Mei Kitchen in Boston, is a College Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences, who will return to her family business after graduating.This year’s class of College Scholars presented their final projects April 17.
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 to learn if we are not alone.
The course of Carol Rattray's '78 career has veered from finance to philanthropy to entrepreneurship, so she's a popular person when she volunteers her time for the Arts and Sciences Career Services office.
Jandy Nelson '87 decided at a very young age that she wanted to be a poet. "I was probably about 13," she says. "I don't know where it came from -- I still don't. My parents always thought I would grow out of it, and I didn't."
“We’re down one Democrat. It’s going to be a slaughter,” someone called out.The students in Suzanne Mettler’s Introduction to American Government and Politics class huddled in small groups in eight different classrooms, bargaining, brokering deals and negotiating, trying to overcome gridlock and partisan loyalties to pass a budget.
If you hear Tim Novikoff, Ph.D. '13, speak and you're of a certain age, you might recognize him as the voice of Jeffy from MTV's "Daria" animated series from the mid-1990s.But if you look at his LinkedIn profile, you'll see that his career has followed a path that marries his love of the technical world with the joy he finds in being creative.
Hundreds of students have just completed new courses in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Active Learning Initiative (ALI), part of a strategic effort by the college to embrace engaged learning models and emerging technologies. The ALI five-year pilot project is funded by Alex and Laura Hanson, both Class of 1987.
For the 15 students in a new interdisciplinary class this semester, the murals common throughout East Harlem have deeper meanings than passersby might realize.
Among the billions and billions of stars in the sky, where should astronomers look for infant Earths where life might develop? New research from Cornell University’s Institute for Pale Blue Dots shows where – and when – infant Earths are most likely to be found. The paper by Blue Dots research associate Ramses M. Ramirez and director Lisa Kaltenegger, “The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main Sequence Stars,” is forthcoming in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Math, to a mathematician, is an aesthetic, creative endeavor. But for too many high school students, math has become a reviled, boring subject.It doesn’t have to be that way, as Steven Strogatz aims to show the students in his new College of Arts and Sciences course, Mathematical Explorations. The course fulfills the math distribution requirement and has attracted seniors who put off taking a math class as long as they could, as well as freshmen intrigued by the course’s title.
Although Katrine Bosley '90 doesn't get a lot of time to talk to patients as CEO of Editas Medicine, she relishes the opportunity."You only have to talk to one patient with one disease that you're working on to know why you go to work every day," says Bosley, whose company is working to translate genome editing technology into new drugs and treatments for poorly treated diseases and patients.
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.
Brian Lukoff '04 loves math.This is not true for many Americans (30 percent according to a recent survey), who say they're just "not good at math."Lukoff thinks there's a way to change that statistic, believing that part of the problem is the way students are learning in math and other disciplines as well. He has developed a tool that helps teachers and professors gauge what their students know and address gaps right away.
The fearless honey badger steals lions' prey and gobbles cobras for dinner. Tenacious and determined, it devours honeycombs despite countless bee stings. This is the totem animal of Sally Wen Mao, MFA '13, and an inspiration for her first book of poems, "Mad Honey Symposium," published in May by Alice James Books.
“Welcome to Cornell Ruins National Park,” Adam T. Smith tells his students. “We’re lucky today. We have a cache of objects to examine discovered in the ruins of McGraw Hall.”This “Rise and Fall of ‘Civilization’” class examines traditional archaeological topics, like kingship and the origins of cities, partly by looking at our current civilization through the lens of a single site – the Cornell campus as it would look 1,000 years from now.
The scene is straight out of a disaster movie: melting glaciers wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, and a tundra-like wasteland where once forest reigned. Thirteen thousand years ago or so the spruces, firs and birches of central New York state vanished; dendrochronology researcher Carol Griggs '77, Ph.D. '06, is using ancient wood to figure out what happened when they finally reappeared.
A poor childhood in Guyana spent watching his mother get pushed around gave Frank Douglas, Ph.D. '73, M.D. '77, an early awareness of injustice. At age 12 he was challenging his school principal on fairness, despite the risk to his academic future.
Dana Bottazzo '03 has done her share of traveling. Raised in London and Kuwait, she attended school in Ithaca, worked for a law firm in Paris and Milan, and then fell in love with South America.
As a recent college graduate, Marisa Boston, Ph.D. '12, was enjoying her new job teaching English to Mexican immigrants in 2001, but she really wanted to go deeper -- to know the science behind language.Why was it easier for some people to learn? What was going on in the brain when people were learning a new language? How could she make it easier for them?
*//*-->*/James R. Michaels '68, a member of Cornell's 100th graduating class, always knew he wanted to be a rabbi. He dutifully chose a philosophy major when he entered Cornell but found that the department's emphasis then on linguistic evaluation wasn't a good fit.
Captain Lauren Morgens '02 stands on the quarterdeck surveying her ship, red sash around her waist and a tall feather in her pirate hat. It is a cloudy August afternoon in Lewes, Del.; her crew has finished scrubbing the Kalmar Nyckel's deck, and the last sailor has come off the rigging. Once the tall ship clears the shallows, Morgens' command to "set the mizzen" rings across the ship in a sing-song cadence that seems as old as the sea itself.
David O. Brown '83 has filmed orca whales feeding on sharks and underwater lava flows. He traveled to Alaska just a few days after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez to document its impact on wildlife and worked for the Cousteau Society, visiting the most remote and animal-rich places on the planet.
Cathy Choi '93 entered Cornell with numbers on her mind. But an English class cross-listed with theater turned Choi away from her planned math major. "I had never read a play before in my life, but I got bitten by the bug and really fell in love," says Choi. "I ended up as a theater major."
Fourteen new faculty members join the College of Arts & Sciences this year, bringing a wide range of expertise across diverse disciplines to strengthen our research profile and continue our tradition of collaboration, innovation and discovery.
Nine-year-old Valencyah walks down the hallways of Hazlehurst Pre-K-8 School in Mississippi toting a Ziploc bag filled to the seam with six books. She has three more in her backpack, all checked out from her classroom library. Valencyah is a straight-A student of Kathryn Ling '11 and hopes one day to become a doctor.
*//*-->*/Had it not been for the beauty of Cornell and a memorable weekend back in 1980, this story about Kathy Savitt '85, chief marketing officer for Yahoo, might very well be appearing in a publication for Harvard alumni.
This week, sophomore Renée reflects on how being assigned to a single dorm room in freshman year – something she was worried about at first – motivated her to go beyond her comfort zone and shaped who she is today. By Renée Girard '20, Government major, Law & Society and Public Policy double minor
