This month’s featured titles include the latest from A&S faculty Ishion Hutchinson and Charlie Green, plus A&A alumni Chris Pavone '89 and Sarah Spain '02.
From designing a reversible male contraceptive to detecting life on distant ocean worlds, the latest Cornell Engineering SPROUT Awards are cultivating breakthroughs across medicine, space exploration, robotics and environmental sensing.
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
When we focus on making our work marketable, it’s no longer the creative endeavor that our society so desperately needs, alumna Jesi Bender-Buell '07 writes in a Chime In column.
Study participants who watched scenes from popular movies showed emotion plays a larger role than previously understood in establishing event boundaries that help structure attention and memory.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
A research project collecting records of freedom-seeking enslaved people in the pre-Civil War U.S. came to a halt when researchers received a stop-work order from the National Endowment for the Humanities in early May.
Northrup Grumman
An illustration of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope
The "premier telescope in space right now" will start a fourth annual cycle of observations on July 1, and three early-career astronomy researchers in A&S are PI or co-PI on observation programs chosen from a very competitive field.
A Cornell research team has employed a variation of a theory first used to predict the collective actions of electrons in quantum mechanical systems to a much taller, human system – the National Basketball Association.
"As a clinical psychologist, I’ve learned that moments of anxiety can be golden opportunities to learn to tolerate distress," A&S psychology major Alissa Worly Jerud ’08 writes.
Credit: Sheryl Sinkow/Provided
Left to right: Charles Walcott PhD ’59; Holger Klinck, the John W. Fitzpatrick Director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics; and K. Lisa Yang ’74 at the center’s advisory council meeting, where Yang honored Walcott with the establishment of the Charles Walcott Graduate Research Fellowship in Conservation Bioacoustics. Photo by Sheryl Sinkow.
A new $1.5 million gift from philanthropist K. Lisa Yang ’74 has established the Charles Walcott Graduate Research Fellowship in Conservation Bioacoustics to fund graduate research at the Lab of Ornithology.
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Jamila Walida Simon, MA ’10, standing, just completed her doctorate in global development.
More than two dozen staff members who earned degrees at Cornell or other institutions this year while also working at the university were celebrated in a ceremony June 10.
In the 2025 Summer Events Series, A&S Dean Peter John Loewen will give a lecture on AI; and beloved alumna author Diane Ackerman, M.F.A. ’73, M.A. ’77, Ph.D. ’79, will talk about her research trips.
Takahiro Kyono/Creative Commons license 2.0
Brian Wilson in 2012 in The Beach Boys 50th Anniversary Reunion
The deaths of Brian Wilson, co-founder of The Beach Boys, and funk and soul pioneer Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone, mark the end of a pivotal era in music, says professor Judith Peraino.
Kathy Hovis
From left, faculty members Alexandra Kleeman, Philip Milner and Talbot Andrews presented their work at the June 6 panel.
The panel, during Reunion 2025, was called "Beyond the Apocalypse: New Narratives and Innovations for Climate Action."
Diogo Lopes de Oliveira/Provided
PCST Network President Sook-kyoung Cho presents Bruce Lewenstein with the 2025 Award for the Advancement of Science Communication as a Professional Field (PCST Award).
The inaugural Award for the Advancement of Science Communication as a Professional Field from the International Network on Public Communication of Science & Technology recognizes outstanding contributions to the development of science communication as a field.
The exhibit on Ithaca’s St. James A.M.E. Zion Church will open on Juneteenth with a community event scheduled for 4 p.m.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Steven Strogatz, the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Strogatz has been busy with outreach activities as the inaugural Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics.
A professor of religious studies at Brown, Lewis will also hold a faculty appointment as a professor of religious studies and German studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Provided
The muon g-2 ring sits in its detector hall amidst electronics racks, the muon beamline and other equipment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The international, interdisciplinary team measured the magnetic anomaly of the muon – a tiny, elusive particle that could have very big implications for understanding the subatomic world.
A mainstay of the Department of Russian Literature from 1977 until his retirement after the department closed in 2010, Senderovich oversaw the establishment of a comprehensive graduate program in Russian literature, expanding Cornell’s graduate offerings in the field.
A $2 million gift from the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts will rename the Cornell Concert Series and allow it to continue its efforts to bring world-class musicians to campus.
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings bring together Nobel Prize recipients and approx. 600 exceptional young scientists from around the world for a week of “interdisciplinary exchange” aimed at fostering scientific collaboration across generations and national boundaries.
The Centennial Medal recognizes alumni who have made fundamental and lasting contributions to knowledge, their disciplines, their colleagues and society
The showcase was the final exam for students in Cornell’s game design courses
Alexandra Bayer/Cornell University
President Michael I. Kotlikoff congratulates a doctoral candidate at the 2025 Ph.D. Recognition Ceremony on May 23 at Barton Hall.
Cornell’s newest Ph.D.s found success even through the unexpected events of the last few years, President Michael I. Kotlikoff reminded nearly 400 doctoral graduates at the 2025 Ph.D. Recognition Ceremony on May 23 at Barton Hall.
This month’s featured titles include essays on womanhood by A&S alumna Nicole Graev Lipson ’98.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Marine 2nd Lt. Connor Eaton is pinned at the Cornell University ROTC Tri-Service Commissioning Ceremony, held May 23 in Statler Auditorium.
During a May 23 ceremony in Statler Auditorium, more than 25 members of Cornell’s Reserve Officers' Training Corps Tri-Service Brigade were commissioned as second lieutenants or ensigns in the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Space Force.
Provided
The Cornell men’s lacrosse team celebrates after defeating Maryland in the NCAA Championship Game May 26 in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
The Big Red defeated Maryland 13-10 in the NCAA title game held at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Simon Wheeler
Associate Professor Roger Moseley, left, is taking over as the new director of the Milstein Program, a job that Associate Professor Austin Bunn, right, has held for the past three years.
“The dream is, if you can make a really rigid polymer that’s also really tough, then you can make packaging that uses less material, yet has the same sort of properties."
Yao Yang and Madeline Degroodt
Artist’s rendering of watching energy materials in action.
The technique enables them to watch chemistry in action and collect real-time movies showing what happens to energy materials during temperature changes.
With brain mechanisms as a guide, Cornell researchers are designing low-energy robotic systems inspired by biology and useful for a wide range of potential applications.
This year’s cohort includes the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow and three Kohut Fellows. These emerging scholars will advance data-driven research by contributing original scholarly work that uses Roper iPoll’s extensive survey archive.
“This grant will allow us to pursue some high-risk, novel ideas for how to measure material properties like elasticity and high-frequency conductivity that have previously been inaccessible in 2D materials.”
The Class of 2025 leaves campus at a time of global uncertainty, but they say they feel prepared for the challenges that will come their way. In this feature, we celebrate their Cornell journeys.