James Wells Gair, Ph.D. '63, a professor of linguistics emeritus who did pioneering work on South Asian languages and their relation to other languages, died Dec. 10 in Ithaca at age 88.
Walter Isard, professor emeritus of city and regional planning and economics, has died at age 91. Isard was an influential scholar who founded the fields of regional science and peace science. (Nov. 11, 2010)
Dean Ritter led 15 veterans and reservists participating in the 2017 Cornell Warrior-Scholar Project through a discussion of the Declaration of Independence.
A study of Internet chain letters shows that such messages do not fan out widely, reaching many people in a short time, but instead travel in long straight lines, with the last recipient several hundred steps away from the originator.
A survey of women who recently gave birth found that many women change their behavior and consume less fish during pregnancy, in spite of receiving recommendations for eating fish during pregnancy.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has awarded Kelly Patterson and Sarah Thebaud, Cornell doctoral students who are studying entrepreneurship, 2008 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowships of $20,000 each. (Jan. 4, 2008)
Kirby Edmonds, a Dorothy Cotton Institute senior fellow, will present the keynote address at a luncheon, Jan. 20, at Beverly J. Martin Elementary School. Librada Paz, council member of the western New York for the Rural and Migrant Ministry, will give an afternoon keynote at Ithaca College.
Jonathan Jansen, vice chancellor and rector of the University of the Free State in South Africa, will give three talks on higher education and South Africa while on campus Oct. 21-23.
Social scientists are turning to their own methods in order to study themselves. The Ford Foundation has awarded $197,000 to Cornell University's Institute of European Studies for a project to enhance academic policy research and scholarship about the social sciences, a diverse area of study struggling in an increasingly competitive academic environment. The project is called "The Social Sciences at Risk: The Differential Impact of Changing University Environments on the Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities." The Ford Foundation grant will fund a workshop and a symposium through 2003, under the direction of Davydd Greenwood, Goldwin Smith Professor of anthropology at Cornell. The workshop will be used to develop, and partly execute, a long-term research agenda and to organize a symposium composed of senior scholars, university administrators and foundation officers, and policymakers. (April 8, 2002)
Based on the success of a $1.4 million program launched in 2001, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Cornell University an additional $1,785,000 over five years to continue postdoctoral fellowships and seminars in the humanities and social sciences.