Thirteen faculty members from across Cornell are being honored by the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement with this year’s Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Awards. With one recipient in each college, the awards recognize faculty who have developed community-engaged learning, leadership or research activities that create curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students.

“We are proud to highlight the great variety of innovative and impactful high-quality community-engaged learning work being done at Cornell,” said Basil Safi, executive director of the Einhorn Center. “Faculty are collaborating with community partners locally and around the world to create positive change and offer students unique opportunities to deepen and apply their learning in and with communities. The impact of this year’s Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Award recipients ranges from an Ithaca middle school to healthcare workers in India and many places in between.”

Recipients of the 2025 Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Awards are:

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: Michael Charles, assistant professor, biological and environmental engineering, is a Diné (Navajo) scholar who collaborates extensively with Indigenous communities. He uses computational modeling to develop datasets and design frameworks that empower decision-making at community scales and highlight risks to vulnerable communities in the face of climate change and rapid technology transitions. His work addresses areas such as energy and food systems management, public health and ecosystem services, climate risks and vulnerability, and data sovereignty and research governance.

College of Architecture, Art and Planning: Pamela Karimi, associate professor, architecture,  has been deeply engaged in community-focused initiatives and town-gown collaborations for over a decade and fosters critical discussions on the role of nonprofit organizations, grassroots initiatives, art, architecture and adaptive reuse in the transformation of these urban landscapes. This semester, she is using funding from an Engagement Impact Grant to organize a lecture series on the multifaceted challenges and opportunities of community-engaged design in post-industrial cities and economically declining regions.

College of Arts and Sciences: Amiel Bize, assistant professor, anthropology, taught SHUM 4682 Disturbing Settlement, a two-course sequence, at the Society for the Humanities, inviting students to critically analyze land relations, colonialism and social justice in Central New York. A speculative design studio with community partners Khuba International, the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ Learning Project and design educator Rosa Weinberg reimagined what Cornell’s landholdings might look like if they were dedicated to a more ecologically, socially and economically just future.

Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy: Laurie Miller, senior lecturer and associate director for public engagement, is an integral part of public engagement work unfolding at the Brooks School, annually supervising 40–60 capstone projects with community partners all over the world. Partners in 2024–25 include Ithaca Fire Department, Mental Health Association in New York State (MHANYS), U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Fitch Ratings, U.S. Department of State, CARE, International WELL Building Institute, Global Livingston Institute and KIA Europe. Her ongoing research project with Enfield Food Distribution brings Cornell faculty and undergraduate and graduate students together to help the food pantry manage growing demand.

Cornell Engineering: David Goldberg, associate professor, operations research and information engineering (ORIE), transformed ORIE’s undergraduate research program to meet strong student interest in addressing critical societal issues through operations research and data science. He plans to work with the ORIE faculty and students, community partners and the entire Cornell community to continue growing and enhancing these initiatives.

College of Human Ecology: Misha Inniss-Thompson, assistant professor, psychology, collaborates with community organizations to address the well-being of Black girls while creating transformative learning opportunities for Cornell students. Her community-engaged work has focused on developing partnerships with three non-profit organizations in New York State: Sankofa Reproductive Health & Healing Center (Syracuse), Black Girls Smile (NYC) and Future Wellness Foundation (NYC). In addition, she teaches Black Girlhood Studies: Rememory, Representation, and Reimagination (HD 4560), a seminar in which she works alongside English Language Arts teachers and students at DeWitt Middle School in Ithaca to develop culturally and historically relevant curriculum using middle grade and young adult literature. 

School of Industrial and Labor Relations: Kricky Ksiazek, Civic Researcher and High Road Fellowship Coordinator, Buffalo Co-Lab, is the leader and heart of the High Road, an 8-week immersive, engaged summer experience for undergraduate students with community partners affiliated with Buffalo’s Partnership for the Public Good. She teaches Community Controlled Economic Development (ILRGL 3052) each spring and thanks to her outreach, educational and organizational work, interest in the program from students and community organizations far exceeds its current capacity.

Cornell Law School: Angela Cornell, clinical professor of law, is the founding director of the Labor Law Clinic (LAW 7871), and in that capacity she collaborates with workers’ centers, nonprofits and unions to advance the interests of workers both domestically and internationally.  Students in her clinic assist and represent low wage workers with discrimination and retaliation claims at the administrative level and support their effort to improve their work environment and find legal redress. At the international level, students have most frequently been involved in the UN supervisory treaty process with reports on freedom of association and assembly, child and migrant labor.  

Cornell SC Johnson College of Business: Trent Preszler, professor of practice in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, has created several innovative community-engaged learning projects in the Dyson School. He taught a course in which students built a wood canoe while learning about the intersection of markets, water and indigenous culture, and he launched the Thoreau Planetary Solutions Initiative to support students interested in careers in the sustainable business sector.

College of Veterinary Medicine: Paul Maza, associate professor of practice, biomedical sciences, founded Feral, Abandoned, Rescued animals Veterinarians (FARVets). Since 2010, the initiative has been addressing dog and cat overpopulation and welfare through spay-neuter-vaccination clinics, working with partners across the state, country and world. It offers veterinary students hands-on experiences helping animal welfare groups in a variety of settings.

Cornell Tech: Angelique Taylor, assistant professor, information science, employs community-driven collaborative design processes to design, build and test robots, artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality head-mounted displays, with a particular focus on healthcare stakeholders. She has collaborated on robot designs with healthcare workers from emergency medicine, internal medicine, sleep clinics and long-term care facilities. In her INFO 5356-030: Introduction to Human-Robot Interaction course, she trains students with skills to design interactive social robots that engage K-12 students from underrepresented groups in robotics and AI.

Cornell Bowers Computing and Information Science: Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor, information science, employs community-engaged approaches to design technologies that improve socioeconomic outcomes for underserved populations, for example helping to improve rural healthcare and education in India. He also serves as faculty director of the Hack4Impact club and created INFO 4505: Computing and Global Development, working with students to design inclusive technologies with a positive social impact.

Weill Cornell Medicine: Anyanate Gwendolyne Jack, assistant professor of clinical medicine, Department of Medicine, division of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism. She collaborates with an interdisciplinary team, community partners and learners through various health equity and community-engagement initiatives with the New York Presbyterian Division of Community and Population Health, Weill Cornell Medical School, EndoMet Racial Justice Team. She is director of the Cornell Center for Equity’s Faculty Scholars in Health Equity, through which she developed the Institute for Health and Advocacy Leaders (I-HEAL). As a United Hospital Fund Health Equity Fellow, she is partnering with Word of Life Inc community-based organization to develop a health and nutrition curriculum for students involved in a school-based community garden.