CALS research leads list of 2019’s most read stories

Beyond the numbers, Chronicle stories in 2019 focused on how the university accomplishes its mission and priorities, as exemplified in President Martha E. Pollack’s State of the University address.

As New York’s land-grant university, Cornell takes seriously its mission to positively impact its home state and does so in many ways. In January, a Cornell Engineering team led by Dean Lance Collins proposed a plan to help New York City avoid “L-pocalypse” – a dreaded shutdown of a key stretch of the subway system. Gov. Andrew Cuomo praised the plan’s Cornell ingenuity at a Jan. 3 press conference: “This is really a unique design, a unique system. … It’s faster, it’s cheaper, it’s better than the way we’ve been doing it now.”

The work of Cornell Cooperative Extension impacts every county in the state. One such effort: a project to help restore Long Island’s shellfish populations to keep a major downstate industry afloat. Extension-Suffolk County used its extensive aquaculture expertise to rejuvenate waters there by spawning millions of oysters and hard clams and planting them in five coastal sanctuaries in Nassau and Suffolk counties. The effort was a key part of New York state’s $10.4 million Long Island Shellfish Restoration Project.

Cornell’s Local Roads Program partners with New York state communities to improve the quality and safety of New York’s roads by offering free and low-cost services to the 1,500 village, town and county officials who maintain them.

Among programs connecting Cornell and communities across the state, the university’s farmworker initiatives were recognized with a national award from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and ILR’s Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative hosted a prison job fair to connect employers with potential hires.

Other highlights from the past 12 months:

• A study from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology led to a startling revelation: If you were alive in 1970, more than 1 in 4 birds in the United States and Canada – a total of nearly 3 billion – have disappeared within your lifetime. “We were astounded by this result … the loss of billions of birds,” said Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Lab and the study’s lead author. The report appeared Sept. 19 in the journal Science, and included analysis of 529 bird species.
• The Mars rover Opportunity finally called it a day – many days beyond its original 90-day expected lifetime. On Feb. 13, NASA officially ended the 15-year mission to detect evidence of water on the red planet. Steve Squyres, professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy, in A&S, led the scientific mission, assisted by numerous Cornell students over the years, including two who have since become faculty members: Alex Hayes ’03, M.Eng. ’03, associate professor of astronomy; and Dmitry Savransky ’04, M.Eng. ’05, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
• Closer to home, but still out of this world: Doctoral student Hunter Adams deployed thumbnail-size satellites to monitor environmental conditions in vineyards. Not only was Adams testing the satellites for future space flight, he was able to harvest data that will help farmers make better decisions about growing crops and caring for animals. Dubbed Monarchs, the satellites are a customized version of the ChipSat technology developed in the lab of Mason Peck, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

This article also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.