Gene Network Sciences (GNS), a fledgling cancer-research company started by Cornell University graduate students and financed by Cornell business students, has been awarded a $2 million federal Advanced Technology Program (ATP) grant. ATP is administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and makes annual grants that are matched by industry. GNS was founded two years ago, and just 10 months ago it received funding of $125,000 from the Cornell Big Red Venture Fund, a venture capital group operated by students of Cornell's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. The investment was the fund's first in biotechnology. (October 21, 2002)
Cornell University Police, with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cortland Police Department, the Tompkins County District Attorney's office and the New York State Police, have completed a five-month investigation into the possession of child pornography. Robert E. Mosher, 39, of 3 Garfield St., Cortland, was arrested Oct. 17 at the New York State Police barracks in Owego, N.Y., and charged with two counts of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child, an E felony. Mosher was issued an appearance ticket to return to Ithaca Town Court on Monday, Nov. 11, at 9 a.m. (October 18, 2002)
D. Tyler McQuade, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, has won a $200,000 early career award from the New York State OfÞce of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) for research that strives to create polymers that mimic biological materials. The award is one of 10, totaling $2 million, given by the research agency to scientists across the state who are performing their research in the life sciences, biomedical sciences or in other life science-enabling disciplines, such as materials science and chemistry. (October 18, 2002)
Rami, Luna, Raven and Magpie, four "ambassador" animals from the Colorado-based Mission: Wolf program, will visit the Cornell University campus Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. in Robert Purcell Union for an educational presentation sponsored by Ecology House. The program about the natural history and current status of wild wolves is open to the public, free of charge, and children are particularly welcome. In their 15th annual fall visit to the Ithaca area, Mission:Wolf wolves and educators also will visit Dryden High School Oct. 28 at 7 p.m., in a visit sponsored by Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County and the Dryden Youth Commission. (October 18, 2002)
Glenn Murcutt, an architect from Down Under who has a one-person practice, is billed as an "ecological functionalist" and doesn't use a computer, took the architectural community by surprise last spring when he was named the winner of the Pritzker Prize, a lifetime achievement award that is architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Now Murcutt has another surprise: The designer of houses on Australia's rugged promontories and bluffs, who runs his Sydney practice alone and works mainly on private commissions, is coming to Ithaca to deliver a public lecture at the State Theater Thursday, Oct. 24, at 6:30 p.m. The event, which is free and open to all, is part of the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture series sponsored by Cornell University's Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. (October 18, 2002)
A major symposium at Cornell University on democratic reform and poverty alleviation in Africa will take place Oct. 24-26. The event is sponsored by Cornell's Institute for African Development in collaboration with the university's Poverty, Inequality and Development Initiative and Binghamton University's Center on Democratic Performance. Justice Johann Kriegler of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, that country's highest court, is the keynote speaker. His talk, "Democratic Reform in Africa," will take place Thursday, Oct. 24, at 6 p.m. in the Biotechnology Building's first-floor conference hall on Cornell's campus. It is free and open to the public. (October 17, 2002)
Cornell University student Scott J. Paavola, 19, a sophomore in the College of Engineering and member of the men's swim team, died Oct. 15 of a medical condition, according to the Ithaca Police Department. Paavola died unexpectedly at 525 Stewart Ave., the house of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, where he was a member. Cornell Police and the Ithaca Police Department conducted a joint investigation. The Ithaca Police Department issued a news release Oct. 16 stating, "A forensic postmortem examination conducted at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton has found ... Scott Paavola's cause of death to be a medical condition associated with an enlarged heart." (October 16, 2002)
Cornell University's collection of 220 mechanical teaching models from the 19th century, the largest such collection in the world, soon will be available on the Internet to students and teachers. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Cornell University Library a $725,088 grant to create a digital collection of the historical machines for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). (October 16, 2002)
Counselors at Cornell University are offering special services to groups and individual students following the death of a sophomore student Tuesday, Oct. 15. Scott J. Paavola, 19, a student in the College of Engineering and a member of the men's swim team, died unexpectedly at 525 Stewart Ave., the house of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, where he was a member. Cornell Police and the Ithaca Police Department conducted a joint investigation. The Ithaca Police Department issued a news release Oct. 16 stating, "A forensic post mortem examination conducted at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton has found ... Scott Paavola's cause of death to be a medical condition associated with an enlarged heart." (October 16, 2002)