Cornell University Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner, among the world's best-known psychologists, has been publishing articles and books for 60 years on what really matters in the development of human beings. Now he has pulled his ideas together and published a new book that traces the historical development of his groundbreaking bioecological model of human development and detailing how it can be applied via programs and policies. Making Human Beings Human: Bioecological Perspectives on Human Development (Sage Publications, 2004) is Bronfenbrenner's culminating work and statement that he hopes will shape the future of his field. Bronfenbrenner, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Human Development and of Psychology at Cornell, is a co-founder of the federal Head Start program and is widely regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in developmental psychology, child-rearing and human ecology -- the interdisciplinary domain he created. (September 24, 2004)
The libraries at Cornell and Columbia are expanding an existing partnership to include Southeast Asian studies; personnel and resources will be shared. (June 8, 2011)
Among 473 of the alien plant species that have invaded from Europe and become naturalized in the United States as noxious weeds, the "most successful" traveled light.
Avshalom Caspi, Ph.D. '86 and his wife have won a $1 million prize from the Jacobs Foundation for their work on the interplay between genes and environment in determining proclivity toward violence. (Oct. 21, 2010)
A major gift from a Cornell University Law School alumnus and his wife has endowed a center for international and comparative law studies that now has its first director. Approved by Cornell's Board of Trustees last October, the Clarke Center for International and Comparative Legal Studies was created through an endowment gift from Jack Clarke, L.L.B. '52, and his wife, Dorothea, that supports a directorship, several professorships and a range of international and comparative law initiatives at the Law School. (March 1, 2002)
New York, NY (May 17, 2004) -- Imagine a puzzle made up of one hundred billion pieces, each reacting to the other, and you have a glimpse of the enormity of the challenge facing researchers bent on understanding how brain cells work together to create human perception, thought, and action. Every day, over 50,000 neuroscientists around the globe collect data on just these types of neural interactions, publishing their collected facts and figures in over 300 journals and scientific assemblies worldwide. But the sheer quantity and scope of neuroscientific data means that individual researchers cannot hope to utilize but a small fraction of what is available.--Many experts -- including Dr. Daniel Gardner, a Weill Cornell Medical College Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, and Director of the College's Laboratory of Neuroinformatics -- now believe the time has come to give this community of scientists a better means of accessing -- and re-analyzing -- this vital data.
Jack Szostak, Ph.D. '77, has received the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for research that has implications for cancer and the biology of aging. (Oct. 5, 2009)
Chilly workers not only make more errors but cooler temperatures could increase a worker's hourly labor cost by 10 percent, estimates Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell's Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory.