The public-health infrastructure -- both in the United States and worldwide -- is ill-prepared to deal with emerging viruses and microbes, journalist Laurie Garrett will assert when she delivers the 2003 Iscol lecture Thursday, April 24, at 4:30 p.m. in Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, Cornell University. Free and open to the public, the lecture is titled "Coming Plagues: Signaling an Environment in Distress." Garrett, a 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner for her hands-on coverage of Zaire's Ebola epidemic, is a medical and science writer at Newsday. The author of two books about disease epidemics and the state of global health care, Garrett is expected to tell her audience that many scientists today know what policy-makers and governmental leaders fail to acknowledge: that emerging and re-emerging diseases -- far from being eradicated -- pose an unprecedented threat to human health. She contends that dramatic changes in attitudes, as well as resource allocation, will be needed to construct a public-health infrastructure capable of coping with the myriad challenges of globalization. (April 14, 2003)
A collection of glass lantern slides that provides a snapshot of the history of design through the 1950s and 1960s, from prefabricated housing to room interiors and furniture, has been donated to Cornell University's Rare and Manuscript Collections at Kroch Library. The slides document the work of Ruby Loper, New York state's first female extension architect. Many of the slides -- positive transparencies sandwiched between two 3 14-inch by 4-inch glass plates -- are thought to have been taken by Cornell photographer Jon Troy and used by Loper both for teaching and research. Loper worked at Cornell from 1946 to 1967 and died in 1990. (April 11, 2003)
A Cornell University housing and energy expert has been named to head a New York state consumer program to promote energy-saving incentives for homeowners, landlords and builders.
A visual art project that brought Jews and Muslims together on Cornell's campus is the winner of the 2003 James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony.
John Ashbery, considered one of America's greatest living poets, will give this year's Robert Chasen Poetry Reading on Thursday, April 10, at 4:30 p.m., in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell University. The reading, hosted by the Department of English at Cornell, is free and open to the public. Ashbery is the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and the author of twenty collections, including Girls on the Run (1999), Your Name Here (2000), and Chinese Whispers (2002). His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award, the first time a book of poetry was so universally acclaimed. (April 8, 2003)
A student team from New York University's Stern School of Business was the first-place winner April 4 in the first-ever MBA Stock Pitch Competition. Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, which hosted the competition, came in second. They competed for two days against teams from seven other top U.S. business schools and were judged by a blue-ribbon panel of Wall Street stock-analysis experts on the buy and sell sides. The NYU team won a cash prize of $3,000, and the Johnson School team won $1,500. The competition for future stock analysts was co-sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). (April 8, 2003)
The Executive Committee of the Cornell University Board of Trustees will hold a brief open session when it meets in Manhattan Thursday, April 10, at 2 p.m. at the Cornell Club of New York, 6 E. 44th St. The public session will include a report from President Hunter Rawlings and an update on the State University of New York (SUNY) budget. (April 04, 2003)
Recent life-sciences research by Cornell University scientists and their students in Ithaca, N.Y., will be showcased April 12 at the Library of Congress (Thomas Jefferson Building, 1st Street SE), Washington, D.C. The scientific forum is titled "The Power and Promise of Life Sciences." (April 8, 2003)
The Executive Committee of the Cornell University Board of Trustees will meet in Manhattan on Friday, April 11, instead of Thursday, April 10. The change was made so that university trustees and administrators can support the Cornell men's hockey team in the national semifinal Frozen Four game at noon Thursday in Buffalo, N.Y. The committee will hold a brief open session when it meets at 12:15 p.m., April 11, in the Fall Creek Room at the Cornell Club of New York, 6 E. 44th St. The public session will include a report from President Hunter Rawlings and an update on the New York state budget. (April 8, 2003)
David Lin, assistant professor of biomedical sciences in the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, has been awarded one of the 20 2003 Beckman Foundation Young Investigator grants awarded nationally. The grant to Lin, providing $240,000 over a three-year period, is to further his study of connectivity in the mouse olfactory system. Laboratory mice, including transgenic mice, are used by Lin as animal models to study axon guidance and target selection in the nervous system. His laboratory focuses on the olfactory system and how neurons in the nose are able to identify their appropriate targets in the brain. A better understanding of connectivity in one species' olfactory system might someday inform studies of development or regeneration of other critical systems. (April 8, 2003)
Cornell University will host a symposium, "Globalization, Agricultural Development and Rural Livelihoods," April 11-12, examining globalization of markets and the status of world food supplies and of nutrition. The symposium, in 401 Warren Hall, will feature a keynote address, "Globalization, Agriculture and Rural Poverty: Implications for Developing Countries," by Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Cornell's Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy. The talk will be given in the opening session at 8:30 a.m. on April 11 (April 04, 2003)
Hotel operators have often discounted their room rates during slow times, in the belief that lower rates will increase revenues. They won't, according to the preliminary findings of a study at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration.
