The Report ^{(FY 2009)}

Faculty Research & Honors

More Notables

• Cornell’s Applied and Engineering Physics Program was ranked number one among its peers for the fourth consecutive year, according to U.S. News and World Report’s 2009 college rankings.
• The arXiv (pronounced “archive”)—an online repository for electronic preprints of scientific papers in physics and related fields, hosted by Cornell University Library—achieved a new milestone with half a million e-print postings in 2008, reinforcing its place in the scientific community as a primary daily source of information. The project received an $883,000 ARRA grant at the end of 2009 to transform the database into a place where users and resources can “talk to each other.”
• Cornell’s new Social Science Gateway to TeraGrid, NSF’s national supercomputing infrastructure, delivers access to vast social sciences data on people, jobs, and firms—right to Cornell researchers’ workstations. This research tool was created at Cornell and funded by a 2009 NSF grant. John M. Abowd, Industrial and Labor Relations, is principal investigator.
• Arecibo Radio Telescope identified a massive, fast-spinning binary pulsar with a mysterious elongated orbit, which has challenged accepted views of binary pulsar formation and provided new opportunities for scientists to study the fundamental properties of highly dense matter.
• Cornell’s NanoScale Science and Technology Facility opened a satellite office housed at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, providing a closer link to nanotechnology capabilities for medical researchers.
• At Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, scientists uncovered a lost artwork using a confocal x-ray fluorescence technique developed at the center. American artist N. C. Wyeth recycled an earlier canvas by painting “Family Portrait” (1924) over his 1919 magazine illustration of two men in a brawl.
• The Institute for Computational Sustainability was launched in 2008 with an NSF award of $10 million. Bringing together computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists, and environmental scientists from Cornell and five other academic institutions and organizations, the institute applies computer science to problems in managing and allocating natural resources. Carla P. Gomes, Computing and Information Science, is principal investigator.
• The Cornell Population Center received a $1.15 million grant from NIH to expand its capacity to conduct national and international demographic research focusing on families and children, health behaviors and disparities, and poverty and inequality.
• Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci, Human Development, received $1.4 million over four years to establish the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, aimed at assessing and reducing gender bias in recruitment, mentorship, and evaluation in science, technology, engineering, and math fields.
• Making Electoral Democracy Work, an international collaborative research project, funded with $2.5 million (Canadian) by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is studying how electoral rules influence the strategies of political parties and the choices voters make by examining 27 past elections in Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. The project is co-led by Cornell’s Christopher J. Anderson, Government.
• For food safety research, the USDA awarded $1.67 million to Randy W. Worobo, Food Science and Technology, Geneva, and Martin Weidmann, Food Science. The researchers are studying preventive methods of keeping food-borne pathogens from contaminating fruits and vegetables during all phases of production—growing, processing, transport, and preparation.
• The first large-scale study on nursing home violence, led by Mark S. Lachs, Medicine, WCMC, and Karl A. Pillemer, Human Development, received a four-year, $2.5 million NIH grant to focus on prevalence, risk factors, and physical and psychological consequences of verbal and physical aggression among nursing home residents.
• To explore why we sleep, Joseph R. Fetcho, Neurobiology and Behavior, received a $2.5 million award from NIH.
• Alexander J. Travis, Baker Institute for Animal Health, received an NIH award of $2.5 million to develop tiny biomachines for drug delivery that use the strategy of a sperm’s tail to drive the locomotion.
• To model the internet in a new way, three Cornell researchers—Eric J. Friedman, Operations Research and Information Engineering, Steven H. Strogatz, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Ao Tang, Electrical and Computer Engineering—received a $1.5 million NSF grant. Their team is creating computer models of large networks that recognize small details, using test cases in controlling Internet congestion and creating incentives for fair distribution of resources in peer-to-peer networks.
• The Tisch University Professorships were established with a gift of $35 million from Andrew and Ann Tisch, allowing Cornell to honor and retain current faculty members and recruit the most talented young scholars and researchers from around the world.
• Cornell received a five- year, $3.2 million grant from the NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program to establish the Graduate Traineeship in Materials for a Sustainable Future, which allows 30 graduate students to work in the Cornell Center for Materials Research on developing materials to advance sustainable living. Paul Chirik, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is principal investigator.
• To train graduate students in food systems and poverty, Cornell received a five-year, $3.2 million IGERT grant from the NSF to support 25 PhD students for two years each. The students are exposed to different disciplinary approaches to crucial problems, such as water shortages, climate change and vulnerability to food systems, soil degradation, pests and diseases, and food supply chains. Christopher Barrett, Applied Economics and Management, is principal investigator.
• William M. Trochim, Policy Analysis and Management, received an NSF grant for $2.3 million to develop a web-based system that will help evaluate science-based education programs.
• Cornell was awarded $26.8 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to launch a broad-based global partnership to fight wheat rust, a deadly disease that threatens global food security. Ronnie Coffman, Plant Breeding and Genetics, is project director.
• The Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis was established with a NCI grant over five $13 million years. This collaboration of the Ithaca campus of Cornell, Weill Cornell Medical College, and the State University of New York at Buffalo will focus on using nanotechnology to advance cancer research. Michael L. Shuler is the center’s director.