News & Events

CALS highlights some of the strategies the college and its community members are adopting to improve diversity in faculty, staff and student recruitment and retention.

Thomas Wyatt Turner, Ph.D. 1921, was the first Black person at Cornell to earn a doctorate and the first Black person in the nation to earn a doctorate in botany. He was also a pioneer in the civil rights movement.

According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education in 2019, nearly 75 percent of all animal science graduates from U.S. colleges and universities were white. Cornell’s Minority Animal Science Students (MASS) club aims to address this disparity by encouraging the success of underrepresented minority students inside and outside the classroom. Started in 2016, MASS is led by student president Brandon Garcia ’23 and faculty adviser Kristan Foster Reed, assistant professor in Cornell CALS Department of Animal Science. We connected with Garcia, Reed and former board member Amanda Cheung ’21 to learn more about the club and its significance to the department.

The Tompkins County Historical Commission will release a short book written by Cornell Professor Kurt Jordan with the help of Gayogo̱hó:nǫʔ community members, titled “The Gayogo̱hó:nǫʔ People in the Cayuga Lake Region: A Brief History.”