How we're changing things.
We break through disciplinary walls—combining unparalleled teaching and research with a hands-on culture—to bring new thinking and new solutions to some of today’s biggest challenges.
Food
Eastern Broccoli Project on track to meet $100M goal
“I think we’re going to hit it,” said Thomas Björkman, Cornell professor of horticulture and the project’s principal investigator.
Between 2012 and 2017, the number of New York state broccoli farms increased from 290 to 535, and the number of Eastern Seaboard broccoli farms doubled. Yet about 85% of the broccoli consumed annually on the East Coast is shipped from California and Mexico, even with widespread enthusiasm for locally grown foods.
One challenge of growing broccoli in the East is that the plant was originally cultivated as a winter vegetable in Mediterranean climates, so trying
How is Cornell helping New York state's craft beverage industry?
On tap are an array of beers crafted with New York state ingredients: Seeds of Love and Outrage, Backroad Odysseys, and Lazy Lollygagger, an ale that spotlights the flavor of cherries and lemon-thyme.
Owner Jason Sahler knows his way around a brewery – tending to the beer in his tanks, consulting with his tap room manager and analyzing sales numbers.
But when he has a technical question – say, about the oil composition of a particular variety of hops – he turns to a guiding scientific hand 275 miles away at the Cornell Craft Beverage Institute at Cornell AgriTech in Geneva, New York.
Field Note
Undergrads launch chickpea snack companyMajor & Minor
Viticulture & Enology
Agriculture
Can rice be grown in New York's climate?
“I said, ‘That’s the one I’m looking for, the wetland is good for the rice,’” Badjie said, flashing an easy smile. “Dawn said, ‘No, you can’t grow rice here. Are you crazy?’”
Few farmers attempt to grow a warmth-loving crop like rice in the Northeast’s short growing season, but Badjie and Hoyte are experimenting with rice-growing methods to suit New York’s climate on their Ever-Growing Family Farm. It’s the only commercial rice farm in New York state, and one of a handful of small rice farms in the entire Northeast.
Badjie is guided by generations of farming experience. Before moving to
The great disruption: What happens when Earth's population hits 10 billion?
Rapid and radical changes are happening across agriculture as digital technology expands a farmer’s capacity to produce high-quality, nutritious food.
Major
Agricultural Sciences
Plants
How can we protect New York state’s berry industry?
Cornell University’s berry team provides expertise in horticulture, entomology, plant pathology, agricultural economics, plant breeding and management practices for New York state’s $20 million berry industry.
Spotlight
New roots are foundation for big changes
Plants use a common ‘language’ for emergency alerts
But what if plants themselves could “talk” to each other?
That’s a question that André Kessler, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and his research team addressed over a 12-year study that examined plant-to-plant communication in goldenrod.
According to their research, published Sept. 23 in Current Biology, plants actually do have a way of talking to each other. Their messages come embedded in the form of airborne chemicals known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which transfer information among plants.
The project looked at Solidago altissima, a species of goldenrod
Major & Minor
Plant Sciences
Global Development
Project partners researchers, librarians & AI to fight hunger
But research sometimes points in different directions. So it can be hard for policymakers to decide where to dedicate limited funds, and how best to help farmers adopt the right crops.
Ceres2030, a global effort led by International Programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (IP-CALS), the International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Institute of Sustainable Development, is employing machine learning, librarian expertise and cutting-edge research analysis to use existing knowledge to help solve these and other challenges – all aimed at eliminating hunger
AI helps shrink Amazon dams’ greenhouse gas emissions
With hundreds of hydropower dams currently proposed for the Amazon basin – an ecologically sensitive area covering more than a third of South America – predicting their greenhouse emissions in advance could be critical for the region, and the planet.
A Cornell-led team including ecologists, computer scientists and researchers from South American organizations has developed a computational model that uses artificial intelligence to find the most promising configurations of dam sites amid a staggering number of possible combinations.
The researchers found that achieving low-carbon
Major & Minor
Development Sociology
Applied Economics
Restoring Long Island's shellfish population
“Clamming and fishing, they’re in your blood,” says Warner, as Hampton Bays, a coastal village in Southampton, New York, fades into the distance. “It’s a lifestyle, not a job.”
That lifestyle – and Long Island’s coastal ecosystem, economy and culture – have been threatened since the 1970s by increasing degradation in the quality of Long Island’s water. Cornell Cooperative Extension aims to change that, by leading the largest effort ever to restore Long Island's shellfish populations.
Out on the bay, Warner cuts the motor. He slides his mud rake into the water, extending the telescoping
Former head of Nintendo is Dyson Leader in Residence
Fils-Aimé, who graduated with a degree in applied economics, will participate in a number of events and share leadership lessons and principles he has developed over his career. In his role this academic year, he will visit campus once per semester; his first visit will be Oct. 21, when he will give a public lecture at 7 p.m. in Call Auditorium, Kennedy Hall.
Leaders in Residence is a component of the Dyson Leadership Program, which is designed to provide undergraduate business students co-curricular opportunities and meaningful touchpoints to strengthen their leadership abilities. Each
Field Note
Studying agribusiness in SpainMajor
Economics & Management
Environment
Street smarts: Cornell paves the way for safer roads in NYS
A half-mile snippet of Albro Road, a sleepy byway in Sherburne, New York, 36 miles south of Utica, had severe cracks in its pavement. They made for a teeth-chattering ride.
“I don’t think you’d want to have an open coffee cup in your hand on that road,” said Winton, Sherburne’s highway superintendent.
It was his job to fix it.
Winton, a Sherburne native who went to school across the road from the town garage, drove his F350 pickup through the area’s rolling hills as he described Albro Road. Jutting up against the Chenango/Madison County line, it is home to a church and a handful of
A half-mile snippet of Albro Road, a sleepy byway in Sherburne, New York, 36 miles south of Utica, had severe cracks in its pavement. They made for a teeth-chattering ride.
Field Note
Questioning candidates on climate change
Why has North America lost 3 billion birds?
According to research published Sept. 19 by the journal Science, the total breeding bird population in the continental U.S. and Canada has dropped by 29 percent since that year.
“We were astounded by this result … the loss of billions of birds,” said the study’s lead author, Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a leader of research and planning on joint initiatives by the Lab and the American Bird Conservancy.
Rosenberg led a research team of scientists from seven institutions from the U.S. and Canada in the analysis of 529 bird species
Biology
Simoes-Costa wins $2.3M NIH New Innovator Award
With a grant of $2,355,000 over five years, Marcos Simoes-Costa, assistant professor of molecular biology and genetics, will investigate how the spatial complexity of an organism is generated in early development.
“For the human body to be formed properly, different cells have to be positioned at very precise locations,” a process that begins very early in development, Simoes-Costa said.
He and his colleagues will use chicken embryos to analyze how genomes are regulated in space and time to create three-dimensional arrangements of specialized cells.
The study methods will be twofold
Faculty
Xiangtao Xu: Ecological modelingField Note
Connor McGuigan '20: Cancer research
A sea of troubles: Marine ecosystems send an SOS
Marine ecologist Drew Harvell was a University of Washington doctoral student in zoology in 1982 when she went on a research trip off Panama’s western coast with one of the world’s foremost experts in the biology of coral reefs. Then twenty-six and a relatively inexperienced diver, Harvell was nervous about encountering aggressive bull sharks in the low-visibility waters. But when the group submerged, they were shocked to find that the normally colorful coral had turned ghostly white. Surfacing, Harvell and her fellow students asked their teacher what was going on. “He had no idea,” recalls
Major
Biological Engineering
Communication
Kids can test drive social media safely with new simulations
Educators across the country can now use Cornell-designed interactive tutorials to teach elementary and middle schoolers how to participate positively in social media – while simultaneously learning to navigate some of its potential perils.
The project’s goal is to prepare students to get the most out of social media in a controlled environment, before they inevitably end up there in real life.
Social Media TestDrive, a project run by Cornell’s Social Media Lab in collaboration with the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, has partnered with Common Sense Education, a
A new order: Controlling the boundaries of social media
Social boundaries are collapsing online, complicating how people engage with news, politics and each other.
Major & Minor
Communication
Health + Nutrition
Major
Nutritional Sciences
How can we deliver clean, safe water to NYC?
Millions of times each day, New Yorkers turn on the faucet, relying on water supplied from about 125 miles away in the Catskill Mountains. Cornell CALS expertise keeps the award-winning water pristine.
Cornell program celebrates 50 years of nutrition education
Nutrition educators from across New York state joined Cooperative Extension staff and university faculty June 17-18 for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program.
Animals
Sled dogs lead the way in quest to slow aging
By the end of her racing days, she had competed twice in sled dog racing’s equivalent to the Olympics – the International Federation of Sleddog Sports World Championships. And she ended her racing career with a bang, winning an extremely competitive six-dog class race at the 2004 Tok Race of Champions in Tok, Alaska.
Now an assistant professor of animal science, Huson is co-leader of a $4.2 million project studying close to 100 Alaskan sled dogs between the ages of 8 and 13, former athletes past their glory days. The study, which began in 2018, is a quest for one of the holy grails of
Faculty
Corrie Moreau: Insect evolution
Scientists retrace monarch’s toxin-immunity evolution
By editing these genes into laboratory fruit flies using CRISPR technology, scientists have reconstructed evolution and instantly conferred – in the flies – the same toxin resistance enjoyed by monarchs.
“We experimentally went back in evolutionary time to reconstruct an event that happened naturally several times, several million years ago,” said Anurag Agrawal, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and co-senior author on a new paper published with University of California, Berkeley, colleagues in Nature, Oct. 2.
“Monarch butterflies are a beloved insect,” Agrawal said. “They
Field Note
Josh Appel '22 finds invasive water fleaMajor & Minor
Animal ScienceLife-changing impact
We're proud to serve as New York's sharing our research and discoveries with people across our state and around the world. Explore some of our recent projects:
Seeds
Cassava
Hydropower
Potatoes
Hemp
Sea Life
Health & Nutrition
Life-changing impact
We're proud to serve as New York's sharing our research and discoveries with people across our state and around the world. Explore some of our recent projects:
Rice
Shellfish
Social
Fish
Berries
Cider
Grapes
Entrepreneurs
Pest Management
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