On July 4, the veil over Jupiter’s mysteries will be ripped away with the arrival of NASA’s Juno mission, and Jonathan Lunine will be there to watch it happen.Like cosmic archaeologists, astronomers will use Juno’s instruments to understand what went into the icy planetesimals that Jupiter swept up after it formed.
Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy and director of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute, has been name the inaugural recipient of the Barrie Jones Award by The Open University (OU), United Kingdom, and the Astrobiology Society of Britain (ASB). The award will be presented in a ceremony on July 7 at the OU campus.
The enzyme sirtuin 6, or SIRT6, serves many key biological functions in regulating genome stability, DNA repair, metabolism and longevity, but how its multiple enzyme activities relate to its various functions is poorly understood.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Forty-one years after graduating, on May 22 Charles ("Chip") Aquadro was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from St. Lawrence University, his alma mater, in recognition of his achievements in science.
Although Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” has been translated into 22 languages including Tamil and Macedonian, a French version had never been available.
America has been talking about racial segregation and its effects for decades. Now another kind of separation is grinding away at America’s neighborhoods: income segregation, where people are separated by their wealth, or lack of it.
Professor Emerita of English Carol V. Kaske, who taught at Cornell for 40 years, died June 15 at Cayuga Medical Center. She was 83.A respected and influential scholar, she specialized in English literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She first taught at Cornell in 1963, was named a full professor in 1992 and retired in 2003.
For students who have many interests across diverse disciplines, the College Scholar Program in the College of Arts & Sciencs may fit their needs. This year’s graduating class of College Scholars recently presented their final research projects, focused on topics such the anthropology of food and China’s naval development.
If you’re expecting to hear from aliens from across the universe, it could be a while.Deconstructing the Fermi paradox and pairing it with the mediocrity principle into a fresh equation, Cornell astronomers say extraterrestrials likely won’t phone home – or Earth – for 1,500 years.
Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future(ACSF) has given $1.5 million from its Academic Venture Fund to a record 14 new university projects. This marks the third consecutive year ACSF has granted more than $1 million.
By tweaking just one or two genes, Cornell researchers have altered the patterns on a butterfly’s wings. It’s not just a new art form, but a major clue to understanding how the butterflies have evolved, and perhaps to how color patterns – and other patterns and shapes – have evolved in other species.The genes in question are especially interesting because they have been “co-opted” – they previously did some other job at a different place in the development process.
Stephanie Czech Rader '37, a chemistry graduate who became a U.S. spy in Europe at the end of World War II and died Jan. 21, was posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit before her burial June 1 at Arlington National Cemetery.
"This is an exciting moment for Jewish studies,” said Gretchen Ritter, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, in her introduction to a Reunion Weekend panel on “Jewish Studies at Cornell, Today and Tomorrow,” held June 10 in the Physical Sciences Building.The panel included Jonathan Boyarin, Jewish Studies Program director, and Kim Haines-Eitzen, incoming director of the Religious Studies Program.
Isaac Kramnick, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government Emeritus and Jason Frank, professor of government, write in their recent New York Times opinion piece that the popular musical “avoids an equally pronounced feature of Hamilton’s beliefs: his deeply ingrained elitism, his disdain for the lower classes and his fear of democratic politics.”
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Researchers from varied disciplines are tackling the topic of inequality — asking questions about its sources and its impacts, as well as the policies and movements under way to reduce it.
The Atlantic Philanthropies, created by Charles F. Feeney ’56, made its very first grant in 1982 to Cornell University. By the end of this year, the foundation will conclude its grant-making, realizing the full impact of the foundation’s largesse within its founder’s lifetime and fulfilling Feeney’s commitment to “Giving While Living.”
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Math matters in important ways, and each year Cornell’s Department of Mathematics sponsors a public lecture to illustrate just how much. This lecture takes place during the national Mathematics Awareness Month, with the goal of increasing public understanding of and appreciation for mathematics. This year’s lecture, held April 29 in Malott Hall, featured assistant math professor Lionel Levine on “The Future of Prediction.”
We are constantly bombarded with linguistic input, but our brains are unable to remember long strings of linguistic information. How does the brain make sense of this ongoing deluge of sound?
"Barbarians Rising,” a new History Channel series, dramatizes the stories of nine of history’s greatest warriors as they fight for freedom – and to ensure accuracy the filmmakers turned to Barry Strauss, Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
On May 22, Ithaca High School (IHS) seniors presented the mathematics research projects they did as part of the Senior Seminar, a course for Ithaca High School (IHS) students who have completed most or all of the IHS math classes. The seminar meets at the high school and is taught by three graduate mathematics or applied mathematics students each year, to introduce high-school students to three mathematics topics they normally would not see until college.
From left, government faculty members Gustavo Flores-Macias and Sarah Kreps with graduate students Colin Chia, Minqi Chai & Caitlin Mastroe.Six doctoral students from the Department of Government presented papers and met fellow PhD students and faculty interested in issues of global security during a workshop May 23-25 in Sweden.
Maggie Wong ‘16 signed up for Chinese classes when she came to Cornell so that she could more effectively communicate with her grandparents.Four years later, she’s using some of the classes she took in Asian studies and her language-learning abilities as she heads to a year-long internship with an international non-profit in Cambodia.
In recent years, Cornell has amassed an impressive stable of experts in an emerging field for modern times: The ecology and evolution of infectious disease.
College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Sarah Murray received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, and Linda Nicholson received the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Academic Advising Award in the College of Arts and Sciences at a May 28 trustee-faculty dinner which recognized universitywide teaching and advising and newly tenured faculty.
Two of the country’s foremost constitutional scholars – Michael Klarman and Michael Dorf – offered their thoughts on the history of the U.S. Constitution at a panel during the May 26 Klarman Hall dedication.Interim President Hunter Rawlings, Cornell president emeritus and professor emeritus of classics, opened the panel he moderated with reflections on James Madison, America’s “greatest scholar-president.”
Doctoral student Tonia Ko was one of nine classical composers to win a Student Composer Award May 16 from Broadcast Music, Inc. The awards are given to composers age 15-27 who are recognized for their superior musical compositional abilities. The students are awarded scholarship grants, which help them with their musical education.
Deputy Provost John Siliciano presented Cornell faculty members Sahara Byrne, (Kit-Yee) Daisy Fan, María Cristina García and James P. Lassoie with 2016 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Awards May 28 at a trustee-faculty dinner.
In the face of scientific dogma that faults the population decline of monarch butterflies on a lack of milkweed, herbicides and genetically modified crops, a new Cornell study casts wider blame: sparse autumnal nectar sources, weather and habitat fragmentation.
Richard W. "Dick" Pogue's '50 freshman class wasn't like most classes that enter Cornell together. In 1946, 75 percent of the first-year students were veterans returning from service in World War II. Another 10 percent were women, and the other 15 percent were "greenhorn high school boys" like Pogue.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
A conference on the writing of Bolivian author Edmundo Paz-Soldán, professor of Spanish literature in the Department of Romance Studies, was held at the University of Seville, Spain, on May 25. The conference explored Paz-Soldán’s “narrative path,” and featured speakers from Spain, France, Bolivia and Belgium.
“Me, my partner and [Flaubert’s] ‘Sentimental Education’ were on vacation in the south of France. And it wasn’t pretty,” said literary theorist Paul Fleming during the May 26 “Transformative Humanities: Faculty Reflections on Life-Changing Creative Works” panel celebrating the dedication of Klarman Hall.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Vikram Gadagkar MS ’10, PhD ‘13 was recently awarded a prestigious three-year, $234,150 Simons Foundation fellowship with the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB). SCGB seeks to expand understanding of the role of internal brain processes in the arc from sensation to action, thereby discovering the nature, role and mechanisms of the neural activity that produces cognition.
In the early 1970s, in the basement of Clark Hall, the Cornell team of professors David Lee and Robert Richardson, along with then-graduate student Douglas Osheroff, first observed superfluid helium-3. For that breakthrough, the catalyst for further research into low-temperature physics, the trio was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics.
A 10-day journey to cities in the Brazilian rainforest gave students a firsthand look at the complex conditions of urbanization in the Amazon. The field trip in March, part of the spring seminar Forest Cartographies, focused on issues of community, housing, resettlement, deforestation, political ecology, anthropology and archaeology.
Jason Lefkovitz invited his high school history teacher, David Miles, to join him at the 28th annual Merrill Presidential Scholars Convocation luncheon.He also invited Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, as each of the 33 Merrill scholars was asked to bring to the event two teachers who have made a great impact on their lives, academic and otherwise. Nine of the scholars are Arts & Sciences students.
Kendra Bischoff, assistant professor of sociology and the Richard and Jacqueline Emmet Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been chosen as a 2016 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education research, nationally and internationally, for those who have recently earned doctoral degrees.
As Asia continues to expand its influence in the world, Cornell’s Department of Asian Studies has grown to reflect the importance of the region globally and now offers more Asian languages for study than any other American university.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Cornell's Topology Festival may be the longest running annual conference on a specific topic in math in the United States. The 52nd Topology Festival was held May 13-15 in Mallott Hall, with speakers from Israel, Germany, Sweden, and across the United States addressing topics in topological combinatorics.
Senior Millie Kastenbaum, a government major in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been named the inaugural winner of the Cornell Division of University Relations’ Campus-Community Leadership Award. The award will be presented annually to a graduating senior who has shown exceptional town-gown leadership and innovation.
Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies in the Department of History, writes in this Wall St. Journal opinion piece that the protectionist and nativist viewpouints espoused by today's politicians are nothing new. "While nationalism will always be fodder for politicians, today’s leaders need to understand the consequences," Strauss writes.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
In government professor Jonathan Kirshner’s new novel Urban Flight, the Big Apple is in Big Trouble: New York City is on the edge of bankruptcy, crime is out of control, the streets are gridlocked, and the corruption is so thick protagonist Jason Sims, a traffic helicopter pilot, can see it from the sky.
