When Gro Harlem Brundtland talks about sustainability, people listen. As head of the World Commission on Environment and Development, she helped coin the term "sustainable development" in the organization's landmark 1987 report, "Our Common Future." She spoke April 28 at Cornell on "The Global Significance of Sustainable Development," presenting the 2005 Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lectureship.
"We have a moment. A moment to transform the situation. It is not a moment, by the way, to make peace. It is a moment to end the war," said former U.S. Ambassador Dennis B. Ross, speaking April 27 in the Statler Auditorium at Cornell as this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellow. Ross was referring to the decades-old war between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"The whole issue of sustainability is a difficult one, because it's sustainability for how many and at what standard of living? This we should never forget," said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, speaking April 29 as part of the closing centennial observance of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Cornell.
When Yolanda King, the eldest child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, visited the Cornell campus last February and performed "Open My Eyes, Open My Soul: Discovering the Power of Diversity" in Sage Chapel, she received a standing ovation from the audience. That visit has now garnered the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony for the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Committee, which organized the event. The prize was awarded in a special ceremony April 29 in the Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room.
A team of three MBA students from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management earned $3,000 and the informal title "Wizards of Wall Street" by making stock recommendations that impressed the financial professionals who served as judges. The Cornell students defeated nine other university teams at the third annual MBA Stock Pitch Challenge April 22 at the Johnson School in Sage Hall on Cornell's campus.
About 170 women small-business owners, including those who are members of minority groups, got help April 21 at a special Cornell-sponsored workshop, "Rebuilding New York City: What Every Minority/Woman-Owned Business Should Know." The event took place at the Cornell Conference Center in Manhattan and received excellent reviews from the participants, reported IWW Director Francine Moccio.
Although the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's search for the ivory-billed woodpecker began in February 2004, an announcement wasn't planned until May 18, 2005. The long lead time was crucial to permit the lab's partner, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), time to protect the Arkansas discovery area through land acquisitions and to allow the search team to gather convincing evidence of the bird's existence. But on April 26 the news began leaking on the Internet.
Michael D. Johnson has been named dean of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, President Jeffrey S. Lehman and Provost Biddy Martin announced May 3.
Students opposed to Cornell's plans to build a parking lot for the West Campus house system on a parcel of land owned by the university for more than half a century took their protest into Day Hall on April 28. They sat in President Jeffrey Lehman's office for five hours before being removed by Cornell Police.
A Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) researcher at Cornell has received a grant to help assemble a unique database of DNA mutations in maize (corn). The project not only will allow researchers to study the effects of knocking out the function of single genes, one at a time, but also will create seeds for each mutation, or disrupted gene. The seeds will be made widely available to researchers.
Cornell's DSpace, an online digital archive administered by Cornell University Library to make university scholarship freely available, is offering new options for the university's scientists and scholars with the creation of "communities" for every department on campus. Faculty are invited to a half-day workshop to learn how the DSpace repositories will work and to discuss possible uses, May 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Philip Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
Cornell University doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology Karen Deen Laughlin will travel to Capitol Hill May 10 and 11 to speak to members of Congress about science policy. She will do so as a 2005 Emerging Public Policy Leader, an award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), a Washington-based nonprofit scientific association.
