CornellCast: Recent Items: Recent Episodes
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Recent video and audio recordings of compelling lectures, discussions, and performances featuring members of the Cornell community and distinguished guests. View more at www.cornell.edu/video, along with details and links to related videos and web sites.
This special event featured music and art that evokes American historical and cultural themes. Patricia Garcia Gil, postdoctoral associate and artist in residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, discussed and performed music by lesser-known American women composers on the Center’s Hazleton Brothers square piano, made in New York circa 1850. These compositions commemorate events including the War of 1812, the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the United States in 1824, the 1853 New York World’s Exhibition, and the American Civil War, as well as sentimental subjects and the American landscape. Andrew C. Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Museum, offered context for the musical selections with popular American prints by Winslow Homer and other artists. Cosponsored by the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards.
At this symposium, presented in conjunction with the Johnson Museum of Art exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history offer new methodologies seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. The symposium was made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.The second session, “Abundance and Acculturation: The Visual Languages of Luxury and Liberation,” was moderated by Leonardo Santamaría-Montero, PhD candidate at Cornell University.Presentations at the second session were “Splendor and Iridescence: Pearls in the Art of the Spanish Americas,” Mónica Dominguez Torres (University of Delaware); “‘Your Plenteous Grandeur Resides in You’: Asian Luxury in Spanish American Domestic Interiors,” Juliana Fagua Arias (Cornell University); and “Supplicant Africans: From Baptizands to Emblems of Abolition,” Elena FitzPatrick Sifford (Muhlenberg College).
At this symposium, presented in conjunction with the Johnson Museum of Art exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history offer new methodologies seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. The symposium was made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.The third and final session, “Temporal Interventions: The Spanish Colonial World through Musical Heritage and Asynchronous Juxtapositions” was moderated by Andrew C. Weislogel, Johnson Museum.Presentations at the second session were “Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America” with fortepiano performance by Patricia García Gil (Cornell University); and “Time-Warping the Museum: Temporal Juxtapositions in Displays of Spanish Colonial Art,” Lucía Abramovich Sánchez (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
At this symposium, presented in conjunction with the Johnson Museum of Art exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history offer new methodologies seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. The symposium was made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.The first session, “Framing the Divine: Visualizing Devotion in the Spanish Americas,” was moderated by Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University).Presentations at the first session were: “Trent as Compass: Directions, Circuits, and Crossings of the Visual and Canonical in Spanish America,” Cristina Cruz González (Oklahoma State University); “Invisible Soldiers and Constant Servants: The Pre-Hispanic Roots of the Andean Cult of Angels,” Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (University of Florida); and “Framing Miracles for a New World: The Oval,” Jennifer Baez (University of Washington).
In this conversation, Nigerian American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon discusses their work, on view in the Johnson Museum exhibition “Precious Okoyomon: The Sky Measures Little,” with Stacey A. Langwick (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology) and Antonio DiTommaso (Professor, School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop Sciences Section and Associate Director, Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station). The exhibition was inspired in part by Okoyomon’s extended research and teaching engagements with Cornell students, faculty, and staff as the Johnson Museum’s first Migrations Visiting Artist in 2022. This program and the exhibition were developed in conjunction with the Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.
Master calligrapher and contemporary artist Hakim Karimzada discussed his work in conversation with Dr. Seema Golestaneh, associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Born in Afghanistan in 1972, Karimzada is known for bold and daring pieces that express his own experience of migration. For him, calligraphy celebrates his beloved hometown of Herat and through it he introduces the ancient culture and civilization of its people. The exhibition “Hakim Karimzada: Herat and Me” was on view at the Johnson Museum of Art June 6–September 15, 2024. Dr. Golestaneh’s research is situated at the nexus of anthropology and religious studies. Her current project investigates the dreams and aspirations of Afghan intellectuals in the late 1980s and ’90s for forms of government and collectivity that did not come to pass. Support for this program was provided by the Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund.
This special event was held in celebration of “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish America” (July 20–December 15, 2024), the first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell. The works of art and student research from the Spring 2024 course that developed the exhibition recognize the creative agency and resilience of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race artists during a tumultuous historical period bookended by conquest and revolution, and consider the profound impact of colonization, evangelization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the visual culture of the Spanish empire. Andrew Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson Museum, and Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student in the History of Art, provide a brief overview of the exhibition’s conception, development, and resulting research.
The Smith Family Business Initiative celebrates a decade of service in September, 2024. This video provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the people behind the SFBI and the generations who continue to learn and build on their families' work.
Andrew Karolyi, Charles Field Knight Dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, delivered this keynote address to the 2024 Eighth Annual Shanghai Green Finance Conference. In this talk, Andrew Karolyi discusses global biodiversity loss risk. Providing data on species decline and sources measuring the dependency of GDP on nature and its services, Karolyi provides figures on the funding needed to prevent biodiversity loss, as well on the funding currently being employed. There’s a significant gap between the two. Karolyi points to specific targets and commitments that have been set mobilizing public and private capital. In 2024, Karolyi and colleague John Tobin-de la Puente published the paper A Call for Biodiversity Finance, showing the accelerating loss of biodiversity on earth and the growing need for financial flows to be directed toward arresting these losses. They document the financing gap and then provide a framework and open research questions for financial economists to pursue in supporting sustainable biodiversity management.Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
Andrew Karolyi, Charles Field Knight Dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, delivered this special address to the 2024 Eighth Annual Shanghai Green Finance Conference. Concerns about ESG investing reveal that ESG is subjective, and ESG performance is difficult to substantiate through measurement and comparison. In this talk, Andrew Karolyi discusses accelerating growth in assets related to sustainability, and shares the results of a survey on the impact of sustainable investing. Overall, he and his colleagues find wide variation and confusion about best practices in the integration of ESG into valuation. New regulations are on the horizon, however, and Karolyi et al. stress the need for a “better valuation framework to integrate ESG that emphasizes modeling and forecasting cash flows over discount rates.” Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
Suzanne Shu, Professor and Dean of Faculty and Research at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, introduces the latest group of faculty research videos. Shu says these videos “represent the curiosity and discovery that our faculty are out in the world doing, and that our research crosses boundaries way beyond what a typical business school includes.”Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
“Banks are exposed to financial and reputation risks when lending to polluting borrowers,” says Emma Wang, introducing her recent paper Public environmental enforcement and private lender monitoring: Evidence from environmental covenants. Joint efforts between public and private sectors to reduce corporate pollution are active, but results remain unclear. The authors study the importance of sustainable finance in achieving green environment goals, and whether and how public environmental enforcement affects private lenders’ monitoring efforts and their effectiveness.Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
“Strategy can serve as a foundation to rigorously answer important questions in a changing business landscape,” says Sarah Wolfolds, but strategic management scholars have been limited in the data available to them. In this video, Wolfolds discusses research done with Daniela Scur on the use of the World Management Survey, an abundant source of robust, verified data. The WMS is free and accessible, and offers data of “incredible breadth and scale,” allowing for replication exercises, which are key to refining and reinforcing the theories that are most supported in practice. Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
The Farm-to-School (FTS) movement in the United States began in the 1990s, in response to student health concerns and growing interest in local food policies. FTS projects have been widely supported by policy makers at state and federal levels, yet many of the outcomes of this inflow of policy and funding remain unclear, often due to insufficient data. With detailed food purchasing numbers from Buffalo City Schools (the second largest district in the state and the largest to qualify for enhanced reimbursement), Schmit et al estimate the gross and net economic impacts of the policy through a customized input–output model, and they observe clear shifts in food spending categories that suggest changes in what and where foods were purchased. Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
“How do we put ethics into economics? You might think that it’s already there, but it isn’t. Ethics is conspicuously absent in economic models, and this is not an oversight. It draws on a tradition in economics that markets work best when rational agents all act in their own self-interest.” Noting that ethics can be seen as a last resort, O’Hara and her co-author David Easley explore this issue in their 2023 paper “Financial Market Ethics,” which is featured in the latest edition of Research with Impact. Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
Suzanne Shu’s research often focuses on decumulation, and the work discussed here is specifically interested in the strategies and thinking behind the spending of retirement resources. For example, the age at which a person begins claiming Social Security benefits can have a profound effect on their lifetime income (the younger you are when you claim, the less you receive). In this video, Shu discusses her paper, “What Motivates Social Security Claiming Age Intentions?” which is featured in the latest edition of Research with Impact. “How do we get people to think about this decision and choose what’s best for them in their retirement? We found that the interventions that had the greatest impact on intended claiming age…were those that suggested that delaying claiming might be a good choice in terms of a norm that other people would recommend.” Read more about SC Johnson College of Business faculty and research here.
Artist Claudia Joskowicz is joined by Saul Ostrow (independent curator/critic, Art Editor at Large for Bomb Magazine), Gabriela Rangel (independent curator/editor/writer), Hanna Tulis (Architecture), and Cecelia Lawless (Romance Studies) to discuss topics related to her video works of the past fifteen years. This symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibition of “Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte—After Ruscha” at the Johnson Museum of Art (January 27–June 9, 2024) and with the publication of the 2024 monograph “Claudia Joskowicz: Quietud en movimiento/Stillness in Motion” (Editorial Turner). Claudia Joskowicz’s visit was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Tayari Jones, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, presents the public keynote talk, “What We Answer To: A Southern Daughter’s REFLECTION,” on Thursday, March 21, at 5pm, at the Multipurpose Room, Africana Studies and Research Center. This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of Literatures in English and Africana Studies and Research Center. Jones is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. She is the best-selling author of An American Marriage, which won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and was named a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection. Jones' other novels include Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow. Named one of TIME's "10 Best Fiction Books of 2018," An American Marriage "illuminates the waves of injustice and heartbreak that unravel families entangled in a flawed judicial system." The New York Times describes An American Marriage as "beautifully written" and "wise and compassionate." Jones was elected in 2019 to the A.D. White Professor-at-Large program, which was established in 1965 to bring the world’s greatest scientists, artists and scholars to Cornell to advance the intellectual and creative life of the campus and community.
Celia Vasquez Yui: The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals was on view August 26–December 17, 2023, at the Johnson Museum of Art, where it was initiated and organized by Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Shipibo Conibo Center, New York, and its executive director, Matteo Norzi. In October 2023, Peruvian ceramic artists Celia Vasquez Yui and her daughter Diana Ruiz Vasquez visited Ithaca for a series of programs in conjunction with the exhibition, including a public hands-on workshop at the Museum and this interview by Ananda Cohen-Aponte, associate professor of art history, and Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student in art history. Their conversation explored the interconnected nature of art making, environmental activism, and struggle toward Indigenous sovereignty by the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Peruvian Amazon. Celia Vasquez Yui: The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals was supported by the Russell ’77 and Diana Hawkins Exhibition Fund, the Hartell-Cattarulla Endowment for Exhibitions, and generous gifts from Ira Drukier ’66 and Gale Drukier and from Richard F. Tucker ’50 and Genevieve M. Tucker. Installation photographs by David O. Brown; video and images of the artists’ public workshop at the Johnson Museum on October 15, 2023, by Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano and Wendy Kenigsberg.
Wu Hung is a leading art historian and contemporary art critic and curator. At this symposium keynote lecture, he explores the developmental logic of “new photography” in China after the Cultural Revolution in a twofold sense: while the shifting focuses, styles and technology characterize a series of interconnected movements or stages, they also indicate the country’s deepening globalization and commercialization. This lecture was presented as the annual Stoikov Lecture on Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, funded by a generous gift from Judith Stoikov, Class of 1963, and held as part of a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China,” curated by Nancy P. Lin, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and Ellen Avril, chief curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University (August 26–December 17, 2023). An elected member of the American Academy of Art and Science and the American Philosophic Society, Wu Hung is the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He has received the Distinguished Teaching Award (2008) and Distinguished Scholar Award (2018) from the College of Art Association (CAA), an Honorary Degree in Arts from Harvard University (2019), and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from CAA (2022).
On Nov. 14, NPR’s David Folkenflik ’91, Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in the College of Arts and Sciences, moderated a panel discussing “Free Press in a Free Society: U.S. Newsrooms on the Front Lines.” The panelists were Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune and Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Department of Government (A&S).“Free Press in a Free Society” is part of the Distinguished Visiting Journalist program in the College of Arts and Sciences and of Cornell’s Freedom of Expression theme year.Folkenflik serves as NPR’s media correspondent. His stories and analyses are broadcast on multiple NPR programs, including All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Here & Now; he previously served as host of On Point. He was named one of the 50 most influential people in American media by Business Insider.Chan worked at the New York Times in multiple roles and at the Washington Post before joining the Los Angeles Times as deputy managing editor and then editorial page editor. At the LA Times he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2021. He joined the Texas Tribune as editor-in-chief in 2021.Mettler's research and teaching focus on American political development, public policy and political behavior. She is particularly interested in issues pertaining to democracy (both democratization and backsliding), inequality and citizenship. Her most recent book is “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.”
Celebrate the achievements of our Brooks School graduates, alongside Deans and faculty members, with the reading of our graduates' names.
Atlanta-based artist Nydia Blas was born and raised in Ithaca, part of a local community studded with names beloved locally and known nationwide, from her aunt Beverly J. Martin to Dorothy Cotton, Alex Haley, Cecil A. Malone, and Ruth Carol Taylor. Her exhibition at the Johnson Museum, “Love, You Came from Greatness” (August 19, 2023–January 7, 2024) is a new body of work portraying Black families in Ithaca and created in response to a collection of Black family albums held by Cornell University Library. This talk was supported by gifts made in memory of Richard Sukenik ’59.
This public lecture was held on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall by Prof. John Foster, University of Michigan.High power electric propulsion and nuclear propulsion systems offer the promise of liberating humans from low Earth orbit and enabling quick trip times throughout the solar system. But how do we practically test these engines on the ground? The energetic plumes these rockets produce interact with the walls of vacuum chambers which are supposed to simulate space-like conditions, leading to high backsputter rates and elevated chamber pressure. If these problems are unavoidable, how do we account for these processes when interpreting the test data and then extrapolating to space operation? In this talk, we survey the challenge to testing high power electric propulsion on the ground using the gridded ion thruster as an example, unpacking the myriad of physical processes that can impact interpretation of on-orbit performance. We also survey past ground test methods of characterizing nuclear thermal rockets—which are prohibited today—and current approaches being posed to test, understand, and characterize performance of these engines on the ground.
Sunday 12/17/23., Barton Hall, 10 am-noonCongratulations to our December graduates and proud Cornell families! A university ceremony to recognize all December graduates will take place in Barton Hall on Sunday, December 17.
Cornell Crypto Policy and AI Lab Meet To Discuss How The IRS' Proposed Regulations on Digital Assets Could Be Catastrophic For The USThis panel of experts will discuss potential impacts on the United States economy of the IRS’s proposed regulation.Featured: Sarah Kreps, Government Professor and head of Tech Policy Institute at Cornell, Susan Joseph, Attorney/Consultant and Executive Director of FinTech at Cornell, John Wu, ’92, President of Ava Labs Jason Schwartz, Tax Partner and co-head of Digital Assets, Fried Frank
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority children have been seized by the Chinese government, detained, and beaten if they speak their native language, according to numerous human rights groups. These reported violations of children’s rights were explored in a symposium entitled “Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide” on Fri., Oct. 27, from 1-5 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall, room 76. The symposium explored: what is happening to children victimized by family separation, who are forcibly cut off from family, siblings, language, and culture why is the Chinese government doing this what is the nature of the deep traumas the children endure how can these wounds be remedied, if the genocide is halted tomorrow Experts, activists, and witnesses, including Uyghurs, gave presentations on these issues, including the experiences of “Indian schools” in the US and Canada. The panelists include: Rukiye Turdush, independent scholar from East Turkistan Zumret Dawut, camp survivor from East Turkistan, with her family Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation Magnus Fiskesjö, associate professor of anthropology (A&S) Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa), associate professor of performing and media arts (A&S) Amy Bombay (Anishinaabe from Rainy River First Nations), Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Canada
Cuban American artist and writer Coco Fusco discusses the research that went into the creation of her 2021 video work “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word,” on view at the Johnson Museum of Art (September 16, 2023–January 7, 2024). Fusco is a professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Fusco shot footage of the waters around Hart Island, which is home to the largest mass grave in the United States and where New York’s unclaimed victims of Covid-19 have been buried. The film evolved from research that Fusco conducted about the history of artistic representation of plagues and other epidemics of infectious diseases. This talk is the first major program cosponsored by the Johnson Museum and the Public History Initiative (PHI), based in the Department of History in the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University, highlighting how artists explore themes of history, memory, and the archive through their work. Gemma Rodrigues, Ames Director of Education and Curator of the Global Arts of Africa at the Johnson Museum, and Stephen Vider, associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and founding director of PHI, introduce the artist. The Findlay Family Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Findlay Family Foundation. Fusco’s visit was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, with additional support from the Cornell University Department of Art.
Teaching & Learning Science in the 21st Century" - Carl Wieman (ADW Professor-at-Large)Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science and engineering have advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Education in these subjects, however, guided primarily by tradition and dogma, has remained largely medieval. Recent research on how people learn, combined with careful experiments in university classrooms, is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than is currently used in most classes. I will discuss these results, what they tell us about principles of learning, and their effective implementation in science courses. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. It also shows better ways to evaluate teaching quality, and it reveals that traditional attitudes about learning and the introductory science curriculum can be inadvertently sustaining systemic discrimination.
Artistic freedom is a fundamental democratic right. Creative expression, from poetry to street art, theater, and literature, is often at the vanguard of political resistance and change, and so artists are some of the first to be silenced. In this panel, speakers discuss their own experiences as artists in authoritarian contexts where their ability to produce art was violently suppressed.These artists have all found haven at Cornell. Their art speaks to the trauma of authoritarianism and the hope for change.Sharifa “Elja” Sharifi is an Afghan visiting scholar and a 2022–23 Institute of International Education Artist Protection Fund Fellow at the Johnson Museum.Pedro X. Molina is a Nicaraguan political cartoonist and visiting critic with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.Khadija Monis ’24 is an Afghan student, poet, and artist.Moderator Rachel Beatty Riedl is the director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and a John S. Knight Professor of International Studies.The event was sponsored by the Johnson Museum and Global Cornell as part of the university’s theme this year, “The Indispensable Condition: Freedom of Expression at Cornell.”
The Joint Annual Meeting featuring Kraig Kayser, MBA '84, Chair of the Cornell University Board of Trustees, and Arturo Carrillo '96, MEng '97, Chair of the Cornell University Council. President Martha E. Pollack's State of the University Address will follow, leading to an inspiring Keynote Program after a short break.Keynote Program: Artificial Intelligence and Free ExpressionArtificial Intelligence is here and changing our everyday lives faster than we can keep up with. At the same time, free expression is being challenged from all angles. And with the explosion of natural language processing and public access to generative AI tools like ChatGPT, technology is rapidly shaping how human beings express themselves, get work done, understand their societies, and interact with others.Kavita Bala, dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and steering committee member of the “The Indispensable Condition: Freedom of Expression at Cornell” initiative, will lead a panel discussion on the profound impact of AI on speech and free expression.Faculty from across colleges and campuses will explore the challenges new technologies bring: ethical content moderation, personal and social expression, global perspectives on AI, its impact on democracies and policy, the First Amendment, harnessing technology for the public good, and more.Learn how Cornell is leading the way and why we’re uniquely positioned to shape AI’s and our own future.
The Becoming Big Red: Cornell First-Year Families Conversation Series is hosted by the Cornell University Office of Parent & Family Programs. Our topic is Living and Dining at Cornell. Joined by Kristen Loparco, Director of Housing, Abby Preihs, the Director of Residential Life, and Karen Brown, Senior Director of Campus Life Marketing and Communications, we discussed living on campus, the benefits, housing options, dining options and student requirements.
The Becoming Big Red: Cornell First-Year Families Conversation Series is hosted by the Cornell University Office of Parent & Family Programs. Our topic is Health and Wellbeing at Cornell. Joined by Julie Edwards, Director of the Skorton Center for Health Initiatives, Beth Parrott, Interim Director of Student Disability Services and Disability Access Consultant and David Reetz, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services, and Lyn Abbass, Senior Program and Member Specialist in the Office of Student Health Benefits we discussed the services available to students from Cornell Health, the Student Health Plan and the requirements for students and how families can support their student with their physical and mental health.
Ori Heffetz has been working with computer scientists to apply traditional economic tools to the management of data, asking economic questions about the optimal level of data “noise” to use in private and public settings. Evaluating the tradeoffs in each setting, Heffetz and his co-authors study the reactions in individuals to increases and decreases in the level of data privacy offered to them and evaluate the costs and benefits in terms of social impact. These findings help the authors to advise government and industry on how to better manage the sensitive data they collect.
Wesley Sine provides a direct link between equality and the cost of doing business. It’s common for an economy to be organized to deliver the most resources to the most skilled, and this practice brings about varying levels of inequality. Social inequality drives social mistrust, and this affects business practices, where entrepreneurs resort to excessive contractual and regulatory practices that increase the cost of doing business. “The cost of doing business goes down significantly,” however, “in areas characterized by high levels of trust, driven by high levels of equality.” Sine observes that when governments support organizations that work across social boundaries, like churches or social clubs, they can build social trust, thereby promoting entrepreneurship and innovation.
Omid Rafieian studies digital marketplaces and personalization, with a particular focus on understanding the determinants of consumer behavior. Consumers rely more on their smartphones and are exposed to increased numbers of ads and other notifications. In studying user responses to mobile aps, where ads are shown in a sequence, Rafieian and his co-authors measure the causal impact of the increase in variety of ads on users’ responses to the next ad. Consistent with psychological data, they find that if variety is increased, user attention is stimulated and engagement with the subsequent ad is increased.
In emerging markets, traditional mom and pop shops co-exist alongside modern retailers who sell similar products,” Shreya Kankanhalli explains, noting that the traditional shops don’t utilize modern marketing techniques like branding and signage. She conducted a two-year field experiment in Mexico City, pairing undergraduate marketing students with traditional mom and pop retailers to measure the effects of modern marketing techniques on sales. In this video, she summarizes the effects, which are significant and persistent.
Online retailers frequently implement aggressive price promotion wars, but increased demand puts a strain on the fulfillment process. “You don’t want to spend all your promotion budget getting customers in the door but fail to serve them well and end up with a lot of unhappy customers, which defeats the purpose of the promotion,” says Li Chen. In his research, he builds a theoretical model showing the importance of integrated planning between marketing and operations, to drive the strategy that preserves service capacity.
Overconfidence is a significant bias evaluated in many lab settings, but researchers have struggled to examine it in real-world settings, where individuals respond to positive and negative feedback. Studying managers in a competitive setting, Raymond and his co-authors observed psychological functions allowing managers to maintain overconfidence despite poor past performance. This “rosy recall” is also linked to overconfident predictions of future pay and performance. Overconfident managers are likely to save company money by hiring fewer support personnel, but to sacrifice a level of customer satisfaction in doing so.
Lawrence Jin focuses on understanding asset prices, investor behavior, and firm behavior as observed from financial markets. “Human behavior is a big open question, and then on top of that, financial markets have just lots of frictions and lots of institutional details. So given the complexity of human behavior and the complexity of the markets, it is just very difficult to clearly pin down the main drivers.” Jin’s research in the field of behavioral finance works to make sense of important financial phenomena using models that features market participants who are “less than fully rational.”
Ryan Guggenmos works to expand our understanding of how individuals make financial decisions. In this paper, co-authored with Kristina Rennekamp, Guggenmos examines the near-ubiquitous use of the non-GAAP metrics, and how the increased regulatory scrutiny of these measures seems to affect the aggressiveness of GAAP use. “If cracking down on these non-GAAP measures leads more aggressive GAAP reporting, these trade-offs should be considered when deciding how much scrutiny to apply.”
Innovation is crucial to firms’ economic growth and competitive advantage,” Yifei Mao notes. However, she and her co-authors note, when departing employees are forbidden to work for competitors, labor mobility is reduced. This can be directly linked to a reduction in innovation, which particularly affects startups. Mao and her collaborators examine the extent to which employers lose value when their employees leave.
When NASCAR switched from leaded to unleaded fuel in 2007, the areas surrounding racetracks suddenly stopped absorbing historic and large doses of airborne lead. Since that time, Ivan Rudik and his collaborators have been able to measure changes in test scores for students in those elementary schools near the NASCAR races; the affected schools show significant improvement in student performance, akin to the effects of an increase in school child spending or reduction in class size, while similar schools in unaffected areas showed little change. This research will help inform the EPA in its upcoming review of lead exposure regulation.
Mani Sethuraman focuses on corporate disclosures and their effects on capital markets. In this study,Sethuraman and his co-authors Kristina Rennekamp and Blake Steenhoven use the conversation as aunit of analysis. Specifically, they examine the level of engagement between analysts and managersduring public earnings calls and use psychology and social linguistics to observe investor reaction tovarying levels of engagement. “We use a combination of experiments and archival data analysis in acomplementary fashion to validate our conclusions. Fundamentally, achieving a better understanding ofthe forces shaping corporate communications and its usefulness to investors will help all stakeholdersperform their roles more effectively, leading to more efficient functioning of capital markets.”Read more here.
Dragana Cvijanovic’s recent interdisciplinary research has explored public health and climate finance implications on the real estate market investments. In this video, Cvijanovic describes a recent paper in which she and her co-authors, studying CEO compensation in real estate, use variation in real estate prices to study CEO pay for luck. The authors empirically disentangle pay for luck from pay for action, and show that CEOs are rewarded for taking value enhancing actions in response to luck.
Franchising important to the economy, especially in the hospitality sector, where businesses can use franchisees to expand more quickly than they could through company ownership alone. Tashlin Lakhani recently published two papers on human resource in franchise businesses, finding that, on average, franchisees under-invest in high performance HR practices which have proven to be linked to improved organizational performance, unless they have received clear guidance from the company on sound HR practices and their implementation.
Any contextual ambiguity makes more apparent our own bias regarding potential machine errors,” says Marie Ozanne, and her research on consumer trust in technology helps illuminate this. Ozanne and her collaborators created a custom social media site ostensibly focused on food, and enlisted human beta testers who interacted with bots as fellow testers, generating interactive likes and comments. When vague and direct harassing comments were introduced, along with identified human and AI moderation in response, the authors found that users were more likely to question AI moderators, specifically when they moderated ambiguously negative comments. In the interest of transparency, Ozanne contends that this bias can be mediated “by making AI and humans work as moderating teammates.”
A company can present their earnings in a lot of different ways,” says Guest. “For example, in the US there’s a standard way to calculate earnings, called GAAP (or generally-accepted accounting principles), but these days most companies also report earnings numbers using a variety of adjusted definitions such as by excluding restructuring costs, to give one commonly used adjustment method.” Guest and his colleagues study these no-GAAP practices as they relate to CEO pay and discover that around 10% of firms seem to be overpaying. They also recommend means by which to expand understanding of this trend. Read more here.
People evolved to exaggerate potential threats in their environment; overcaution could assure safety in the wild. Biased exaggerations in everyday social spaces, however, are inaccurate and damaging. People who feel threatened by “groups whose beliefs and worldviews seem different from the mainstream” perceive these groups as growing in size. These inaccuracies are socially and culturally damaging, and are not distinct to any one identity or political group. “We can all fall into this trap,” Rifkin says. “It’s critical to slow down and check our snap judgments whenever we’re sizing up new environments and the people within them.”
We know that conflict of interest often arises between heads of firms and department managers, when they have different goals,” says Yi Chen. He and his co-authors pose the research question: how should headquarters might balance against potential misinformation from management? Their findings suggest that when firm leaders provide managers with a committed pool of resources for a designated period of time, managers are less likely to exaggerate need and resources can be better preserved for the future.
Online labor platforms have established unique dynamics between employers and workers. No matter the product or service, online workers are hired and compensated on a per-task basis, and they work remotely with limited supervision. To accommodate the lack of oversight, employers often offer performance-based financial incentives. Kaynar and her collaborators have established a data-driven framework for learning about effectiveness of these incentives, including worker effort and commitment as a factor. This framework can gather data on workers’ responses to different financial incentives and provide a building block for investigating and prioritizing worker welfare, an issue of increasing prominence in online platforms.
Aaron Adalja and Jura Liaukonyte examine the impact of mandatory GMO labeling on consumer preferences in areas where voluntary non-GMO labeling is customary and popular with consumers. A controversy between scientific consensus about GMO safety and consumer awareness of the science has led industry groups to argue that the need for GMO labeling is moot; still several states saw mandatory-GMO-labeling initiatives. Of these, only Vermont passed a mandatory food labeling law. Here, Adalja discusses the effect of mandatory GMO labeling in a market which was already receptive to voluntary non-GMO labeling.
Today’s large e-commerce platforms face new challenges in inventory management, selling hundreds of millions of products simultaneously, with various demand patterns that require different replenishment strategies, meeting increasingly diverse customers, varied products, and more intense service demands. In this research, Meng Qi and colleagues develop new frameworks for inventory management by investigating a data-driven multiperiod inventory replenishment problem with uncertain demand and vendor lead time (VLT). They also conduct a field experiment that their new algorithm reduces holding cost, stockout cost, total inventory cost, and turnover rate substantially compared with the firm’s current practice
History can help make us aware of patterns in our thinking about the world, of prejudices and habits of thought. In a lecture on April 20, 2023, sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, David Nirenberg, the director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, drew upon the long history of anti-semitism in order to ask how that history can help us understand debates about anti-semitism today.
The Cornell Family Conversation Series is hosted by the Cornell University Office of Parent & Family Programs. Our topic is Education Abroad. Joined by Emily Doughtry from our Education Abroad and the Office of Global Learning we discussed education abroad, the available resources, how it can impact a student’s future, and how parents and families can support their student’s experience abroad. Education AbroadPrepare/Get StartedPaying for Study AbroadAll ProgramsApplicationFAQ
Artists Marie Watt and Hayden Haynes explore the relationship between their respective practices and the artistic and cultural traditions of the Seneca Nation, including the importance of everyday objects, storytelling, and the power of collaborative artwork and teaching. This event was held in conjunction with the exhibition Storywork: Prints by Marie Watt from the Collections of Jordan Schnitzer and His Family Foundation at the Johnson Museum (February11 July 30, 2023). Marie Watt (Seneca, Turtle Clan) is a multimedia artist and a member of the Seneca Nation (one of six that comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) with German-Scots ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work, drawing from history, biography, Iroquois oral narratives, and Indigenous teachings, explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe. Hayden Haynes (Seneca, Deer Clan) is an antler carver, mixed media artist, and photographer, and a member of the Seneca Nation. His artwork is a blend of past and present Seneca-Haudenosaunee culture and pays homage to the ancestors that inspire him, highlighting contemporary issues that contemporary Indigenous peoples face while celebrating their strengths. He pushes the boundaries of what is considered Native American art and focuses on amplifying women’s voices, honoring their role in Seneca (or Onöndowa’ga:’) communities. His Message from our Ancestors (2021) was acquired for the permanent collection of the Johnson Museum. Moderator ;Dr. Jolene K. Rickard (Ska:rù:re’/Tuscarora, Turtle Clan) is an artist and associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies and the American Studies Program at Cornell University.
Comics journalism and non-fiction comics, which employ visual storytelling to cover news or nonfiction events, have become more popular over the last three decades. In a lecture on Tues., March 28, Andy Warner ’06, an author of nonfiction comics, explored the power of graphic media to tell true stories. This lecture was sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Summary: AEM 4940 The Business of Sustainability with Boats Professor: Trent PreszlerPart of the Grand Challenges curriculum. Winner of the Dyson Better Business Week Pitch Competition!Students in this course are building a 16-foot wooden canoe to be donated to the HaudenosauneeCanoe Journey, a program that guides young people from the Onondaga Nation on a 13-day paddlingexpedition across the ancestral waterways of the Haudenosaunee people. Boatbuilding techniques areintroduced during class alongside a historical survey of the Indigenous cultural heritage of Upstate NewYork. Students participate in every aspect of our canoe construction while also completing an individualproject in critical self-reflection, to help connect hands-on work with research. Working in this team-based learning context, students will also be responsible for the business plan and execution necessaryto launch their canoe at a community-wide Ithaca Canoe Fest held in Cass Park on May 7, 2023.Students created this video as their successful submission to the Dyson Better Business Week PitchCompetition. All winnings are applied to project expenses. Community-engaged learning at its best!
Join the Johnson Museum of Art and Dr. Verity J. Platt, Professor of Classics and the History of Art at Cornell, for a talk on Pliny the Elder, the Roman author, natural philosopher, and statesman at the center of the Johnson’s exhibition “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder,” curated by Dr. Platt and Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson Museum.Pliny’s multivolume “Natural History” has been profoundly influential on Western ideas about humanity’s relationship to the natural world, from geography, zoology, and botany to the history of art. But how are we to read it today, two thousand years after his birth in 23/24 CE and at a time when we are radically rethinking our own relationship to nature and to the legacies of the Roman Empire?This talk explores how the “Wonder and Wakefulness” exhibition addresses Pliny’s many different concepts of nature, including how his role as a member of the Roman elite and an imperial administrator existed in tension with his ethical approach to materials and the environment, as well as its implications for his understanding of art—both the ingenious “discoveries” of artists and the creative power of Nature herself.
The Cornell Family Conversation Series is hosted by the Cornell University Office of Parent & Family Programs. Our topic is Supporting your First-Generation Student. Dannemart Pierre, Peggy J. Koenig '78 Associate Dean of Students for Student Empowerment, Director of First-Generation & Low-Income Student Support, joined us to discuss the resources available for first-generation students and how families can support their student while at Cornell. First Generation & Low Income Support siteAccess FundSwipe Out Hunger
The Cornell Family Conversation Series hosted by the Cornell University Office of Parent & Family Programs. Our topic is Career Exploration and Preparation. Joined by Dr. Erica Kryst, the Executive Director of Cornell Career Services, we discussed the programs and services offered by the Cornell Career Services office that can assist family members in supporting their student in their exploration of possible careers, preparation for their future career and how they can help them in their journey.Career ServicesCareer Development ToolkitCareer Outcomes DashboardHandshakeCUeLinksResumes and Interview Prep
At the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, all Dyson undergrads are required to complete a community-engaged learning project with a professional or community partner as part of the GrandChallenges curriculum.In Fall of 2022, AEM 4000 student project collaborated with community partners who were in AEM 4000 presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners.In this video, Cristian Carranza, Dyson ‘22, describes his team’s work with CleanWatts, the Portugese cleantech company expanding its operation to the United States via Soft Landing New York, a partnership between the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Binghamton University, the Center for International Business Advancement, the US Economic Development Administration, and the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator. Project title: Building member knowledge of cooperative equityCommunity Partner: CleanWatts
The Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology Program is a year-long, field-based research and training program in ornithology based during the summer months at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the scenic White Mountains of New Hampshire.The Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest has served as training grounds for learning and practicing a variety of field techniques used to study birds (500+ participants). The Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology Program provides Cornell undergraduates meaningful, field-based research experiences and the opportunity to develop original research leading to peer-reviewed publications to support their development as scholars.For more information visit: birds.cornell.edu/hubbardbrook/
In this video recorded in November 2022, Cornell Hanga Ahazaza director Kim Szpiro andRwandan partners describe the benefits of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business’sengagement in Rwanda with MasterCard Foundation.
Brooks Executive Programs Graduation 2022: Executive Master of Health Administration and Executive Master of Public AdministrationSaturday, December 17, 2022 Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room
Brinda SomayaAn A.D. White Professors-at-Large public lecture Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 5:15pm Milstein Auditorium, Milstein Hall
Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Raffles Professor of Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore, delivered the 12th Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture entitled “Transnational Families and the Temporary Migration Regime in Southeast Asia,” on November 15, 2022.
In this video recorded in October 2022, SMART executive director Fridah Mubichi-Kut explains the SMART program’s history and focus, and students and faculty members describe their experiences.
This lecture is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is co-sponsored by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the Cornell Council for the Arts.Xu Bing is an internationally acclaimed Chinese artist whose creative and cultural interventions touch on the fields of public and ecological art, printmaking, new media installations, drawing, and sculpture. His biography charts the path of the international influence of Chinese contemporary art and its complex place in Chinese culture over the last forty years.For the 2022 Cornell Biennial, the Johnson Museum commissioned his newest “Background Story,” a lyrical light box in dialogue with an historical Chinese ink painting in the Museum’s collection. Through the manipulation of recycled plastic and miscellaneous trash from daily life, the artist dilutes or intensifies light to “draw” an ink-like image on glass that conveys traditional Chinese reverence for nature while serving as a warning about humans’ ongoing mistreatment of the environment.
In this video recorded November 10, 2022, Fintech at Cornell executive director Susan Joseph speaks with Cornell policy and law professor Sarah Kreps about the specifics of the collapse of FTX, its promised but rescinded buyout by Binance, and the situation’s implications for the developing cryptocurrency industry.
The university recently completed the Cornell University Borehole Observatory (CUBO), a nearly two-mile deep exploratory borehole. Data gathered through CUBO, such as subsurface rock conditions and heat output, will allow the university to determine if it can move forward with Earth Source Heat (ESH), our version of a deep geothermal system that researchers believe has the potential to sustainably heat Cornell’s Ithaca campus without the use of fossil fuels.
This is an essay about liking trees. It argues that liking (as distinct from love) is a feeling capable of motivating collective opposition to the ongoing, catastrophic destruction of forests around the world. It makes that case through an examination of two distinct projects: Powers’s novel 'The Overstory' and Leonard’s photographs of trees that have grown into, around, or through fences.
The Fermi sea in a metal is a topological object characterized by an integer topological invariant called the Euler characteristic, ¿F. In this talk we will argue that for a 2D Fermi gas ¿F is reflected in a quantized frequency dependent non-linear 3 terminal conductance that generalizes the Landauer conductance in D=1. We will critically address the roles of electrical contacts and Fermi liquid interactions, and we will propose experiments on 2D Dirac materials, such as graphene, using a triple point contact geometry. We will go on to show that for a D dimensional Fermi gas, ¿F is also reflected in the multipartite entanglement characterizing D+1 regions that meet at a point. This generalizes a well-known result that relates the bipartite entanglement entropy of a 1+1D conformal field theory to its central charge c. We will argue that for an interacting 3D Fermi liquid, ¿F distinguishes distinct topological Fermi liquid phases.
Bethe Cornell Community Lecture by Charles KaneChristopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of PhysicsUniversity of PennsylvaniaHost: Chao-Ming JianAbstract: Matter can arrange itself in the most ingenious ways. In addition to the solid, liquid and gas phases that are familiar in classical physics, electronic phases of matter with both useful and exotic properties are made possible by quantum mechanics. In the last century, the thorough understanding of the simplest quantum electronic phase - the electrical insulator - enabled the development of the semiconductor technology that is ubiquitous in today's information age. In the present century, new "topological" electronic phases are being discovered that allow the seemingly impossible to occur: indivisible objects, like an electron or a quantum bit of information, can be split into two, allowing mysterious features of quantum mechanics to be harnessed for future technologies. Our understanding of topological phases builds on deep ideas in mathematics. We will try to convey that they are as beautiful as they are fundamental.
Abstract: Symmetry and topology are two of the conceptual pillars that underlie our understanding of matter. While both ideas are old, over the past several years a new appreciation of their interplay has led to dramatic progress in our understanding of topological electronic phases. A paradigm that has emerged is that insulating electronic states with an energy gap fall into distinct topological classes. Interfaces between different topological phases exhibit gapless conducting states that are protected and are impossible to get rid of. In this talk we will discuss the application of this idea to the quantum Hall effect, topological insulators, topological semimetals and topological superconductors. The latter case has led to the quest for observing Majorana fermions in condensed matter, which opens the door to proposals for topological quantum computation. We will close by surveying the frontier of topological phases in the presence of strong interactions.
This visiting artist talk at the Johnson Museum of Art is the third in an ongoing series with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. The Migrations initiative studies global migration of all living things through an interdisciplinary, multispecies lens, with a special focus on themes of racism, dispossession, and migration A conceptual photographer, performance artist, and writer, deSouza was born to South Asian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in England before settling in the United States. They are a professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, and hold an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Bath Academy of Art, England. DeSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi. DeSouza’s talk, “The Culture of Location,” frames the genre of landscape in relation to migration, settlement, and climate change. The title is a play on “The Location of Culture” by Homi Bhabha, now a classic of postcolonial theory. DeSouza’s transmedia practice explores the legacies of colonialism through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. Their solo exhibition “Al-An deSouza: Elegies of Futures Past” was presented at the Johnson Museum of Art (September 10–December 4, 2022).
Navina Najat Haidar is the Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is currently marking ten years of its permanent galleries. This talk presents a visual introduction to the spaces, objects, and ideas that constitute the galleries, as well as new directions ahead. Haidar organized the exhibitions “Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi” (2016); “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy” (2015); and “Treasures from India: Gems and Jewels in the Al-Thani Collection” (2014) at the Met. She was involved in the planning of their permanent galleries for Islamic art, which opened in 2011, and is currently working on a series of new installations to mark their anniversary. Her future projects include an exhibition on the age of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, and a forthcoming book on the pierced window screen (‘jali’) in Islamic architecture. The annual Stoikov Lecture on Asian Art at the Johnson Museum is funded by a generous gift from Judith Stoikov, Class of 1963, and is cosponsored this year by the Department of the History of Art and the Cornell South Asia Program.
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Solar sheep cooperative development Community Partner: Teddy Abera, Michelle Corio, Sumire Doit, Jyothis Joy Mazhuvanchery Student Team: Jessica Felde, Bin Huang, Summer Li
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Hudson Valley Farm Cooperative DPO and Worker Equity Community Partner: Park Slope Food Co-op Student Team: Nikhil Iyer, Frederic Minzberg, Thomas Mocorrea
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Collaborative onion marketing opportunities Community Partner: CCE Orange County, NYS onion farmers Student Team: Sheryl Kiernan, Srinidhi Rajesh, Arin Sheehan
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Governance Processes for Worker Cooperatives Community Partner: CoLab Cooperative Student Team: Oliver Fisher, Jack Knibb, Jordan Miller
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Member engagement and cooperative options Community Partner: Long Island Oyster Growers Association Student Team: Andrew Darby, Avery Primas, Darius Tam, Michael Wassmuth
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Governance systems andmember heterogeneity Community Partner: Eden Valley Growers Student Team: Joey Kummer, Juul Loonen, John Rogers
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management(AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients.In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates.Project title: Building member knowledge of cooperative equityCommunity Partner: National Grape/Welch’sStudent Team: Faiz Adem, Seth Bollinger, Maxine Mangubat, Danielle Sitzer
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates.Project title: Worker Co-op Business TransitionCommunity Partner: Brookton’s MarketStudent Team: Grace Harrigan, Cheong Chun (Keith) Li
This visiting artist talk at the Johnson Museum of Art is the second in an ongoing series with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. The Migrations initiative studies global migration of all living things through an interdisciplinary, multispecies lens, with a special focus on themes of racism, dispossession, and migration.Nigerian American poet, sculptor, and avant-garde chef Precious Okoyomon discussed themes of migration, dispossession, and redress. Their large-scale, immersive artworks are especially concerned with the entangled fate of humans, plants, and animal species as they move from place to place across the planet. Approaching artmaking like a poet, Okoyomon mines the metaphorical associations of all manner of found objects and raw materials—from kudzu vine to lambswool—to elicit new reflections upon our complex, interconnected histories. Okoyomon was born in England in 1993, raised in Nigeria and the United States, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
SC Johnson College dean Andrew Karolyi talks with Professors Glen Dowell and Mark Milstein about COP 26 and the imperative of sustainable business education. From Business at a New Threshold: Harnessing Finance and Data for Sustainable Prosperity. November 11, 2021.
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates. Project title: Macadamia nut production cooperative Community Partner: Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards Student Team: Alice Karetsky, Nicole Pelletier, Connor Ranck, Jose Valencia
Ryan Lombardi, Vice President for Student & Campus Life, and other Cornell leadership lead an informational forum to help students and families plan for the fall semester on campus.
In this brief clip from the 2022 Cornell Business Forum, SC Johnson College dean Andrew Karolyi describes the value system that drives business leaders as a force for good. Summarizing Cornell’s approach to business education, he states: “Our goal is to develop people-centered leaders who think responsibly and are empowered to create sustainable, shared prosperity.”
Karl Lam, Nolan ‘24, is an Einhorn Center Engaged College Ambassador. He also participated this year in the VACEP Pathfinders project, in which Cornell and VinUniversity students collaborated with a Vietnamese NGO on collecting and distilling research examining adverse childhood experiences. In this short video, Lam describes critical reflection and the effects these engaged experiences have had on his world perspective and his approach to learning. “Critical reflection is asking you to see yourself in a larger ecosystem...It was important for us to know that we were there to learn and understand as much as we were there to help, for our Vietnamese counterparts to educate us and tell us what was happening.”
Anabel’s Grocery is a social entrepreneurship practicum in the management and operation of a campus-based, student led nonprofit enterprise addressing food insecurity. "I’ve learned so much about food justice and leadership; plus, it’s a great learning space for students to explore themes and (work on) committees in a learning and study space with great products from New York farms.”
Jonathan Le transferred to Nolan during the pandemic, but connected with his Cornell community by joining the Engaged College Ambassadors team. Through this work and his service internships, he has realized that “you really want to surround yourself with people who care about the well-being of their community, through engaging in ESG fundamentals or simply offering to be a mentor to young professional.”
Alethia’s main interest is in the role that business and policy can play in promoting economic and social empowerment and sustainability. In addition to serving as an Engaged Student Ambassador, she’s participated in many community-engaged learning opportunities at Cornell, including the SMART program (twice) in China and Rwanda, and the South Africa Impact Learning trip. She has also conducted research with the center for Sustainable Global Enterprise.
Panelists discuss the university’s COVID-19 guidance for the start of the fall semester and answer questions. Panelists Mike Kotlikoff, Provost Gary Koretzky, Vice Provost for Academic Integration Lisa Nishii, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Mary Opperman, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Moderator Joel Malina, Vice President for University Relations
Srinidhi Ranganathan values her time serving the Engaged College Initiative, where she worked with student clubs on a pilot program to bring community engagement into co-curricular activities. “This experience has helped me gain perspectives that probably my colleagues in investment banking do not have. I think beyond immediate outcomes now, and I have a greater sensitivity to stakeholders beyond shareholders.”
Todd Schmit describes the coursework in his class Cooperative Business Management, focusing on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients. “No other business school in the country teaches a course on cooperative businesses: how they’re structured, financed, and governed. Students work with their clients through a full semester to come up with deliverables that are valuable to the organization.”
Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration Graduate Recognition Ceremony 2022 recognizing B.S, MMH, and Baker Program in Real Estate degree candidates. Saturday, May 28, 2022 in Barton Hall.
Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management Graduate Recognition Ceremony 2022
Cornell’s commencement weekend was May 27-29, 2022 and was held in-person. Statistics and Data Science was pleased to invite our degree candidates and their families to the hybrid graduation ceremony that took place from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, May 27, 2022, in Barton Hall.
On Saturday May 28, 2022, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University recognized and celebrated the degree candidates for PhD, Master of Engineering and Bachelors of Science degrees.
Livestream recording of the 2022 ILR Commencement Recognition Ceremony for graduate and undergraduate ILR students.
Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management Graduate Recognition Ceremony 2022: PhD, Ithaca MBA, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA, MPS in Management | Saturday, May 28, 2022 | Newman Arena, Bartels Hall
The Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy honored 224 graduates at its first recognition ceremony, held May 28, 2022 in Bailey Hall. Dean Colleen L. Barry delivered the commencement address, Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Maria Fitzpatrick congratulated the graduates, and four students were named as recipients of the John Siliciano Award, the school’s endowed academic and leadership achievement award, named for Cornell Deputy Provost John Siliciano.
It’s assumed that an increase in the number of jobs is a positive thing. Chau and her collaborators examine a growing phenomenon in labor markets: contract employment, which includes temporary jobs, fixed-term work, gig economy, and the subcontracting of work. As production is divided into tasks and the tasks are then subcontracted to workers, these “alternative” arrangements are becoming more a part of the mainstream, with varyingcontract terms. In some countries, over 50% of the workforce is involved insome form of fixed-term labor, which generally offers unstable terms and lower pay.
In the first global estimates of share of global food expenditures that goes back to farmers, Barrett and his collaborators find that, on average, 27% of consumer food expenditures goes back to farmers. The rest goes to costs related to convenience, packaging, and quality --all added after the commodity has left the farm. “The biggest impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the global food system are going to be felt not because of the loss of Ukranian or Russian wheat and maize and fertilizer fromthe market --those things are important and they’re getting a lot of attention, but they ultimately account for a very small share of the consumer price of these products. The real price impact is going to come from the increased cost of manufacturing, transporting, refrigeration caused by rise in energy prices.”
Alex Susskind’s recent work provided consumers with calorie information to see how it impacted their behavior in the dining experience. They find that customers do use that information in making their choices, frequently choosing lower-calorie options, and that they appreciated it. As this information has become more widely required, the research confirms its usefulness.
2022 Commencement for the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, College of Human Ecology, Cornell Graduate School, Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell Tech, Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and School of Industrial and Labor Relations
2022 Commencement for the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell Graduate School (Review list of Fields to attend), Cornell Law School.
The Senior Convocation Ceremony is a Cornell tradition that takes place during the Senior Days leading up to Commencement Weekend. Convocation is a student-led event that celebrates the accomplishments of the undergraduate graduating class. Highlights of the event include a student speaker, a student poet, student organization performances, University leadership, and an invited guest speaker. Welcome address: Dean Marla Love Performance: African Dance Repertoire Address: President Martha Pollack Student Poet: Nasra Ismail Convocation Chair Address: Lotoya Francis Guest Speaker Address: Constance Wu Closing remarks: Vice President Ryan Lombardi Performance + Alma Mater: Class Notes
To better understand why some scientific discoveries are more commercially successful than others, Marx observed scientists from different institutions who arrived at the same idea, and found that the determining factor was not the status of the institution but a team’s prior entrepreneurship experience and the level of interdisciplinary research in their work. He also discusses potential policy lever project on the gender gap in entrepreneurship and the results of enforcement of non-compete clauses on women vs. men.
People enjoy binging entertainment content like television shows, but don’t remember the content details as well when they view this way. Do students binge their online learning? LaTour finds that some do, but that when they binge their learning matters: those who binge ahead of the class can do well, but those who procrastinate their online learning until the last weeks of the class do worse, and dislike their experience.
While firms pay closer attention to data when they are affected by regulation or when their competitive peers experience data breaches, this increased attention to data doesn’t help them in terms of market valuation. Regulatory compliance iscostly, and that cost exceeds market benefits. The dominant platforms, however, are able to withstand this expense, therebyskewing the competitive arena in their favor bydiscouraging smaller startups. Leiponen suggests that regulation should attempt to balance the scales.
How to design orgs to drive employee behavior and customer engagementAsis Martinez-Jerez studies organizational design to drive employee behavior and customer engagement. His study of servant leadership has looked at varying employee responses to different incentives. When a manager is a servant leader, teams respond to incentives that reward team members, but if the rewards go to managers, team members are less likely to be inspired. Managers can inspire a team to be more productive when the firm offers a non-monetary team reward (like a shared night out) than when a monetary reward is offered.
In the past decade, many large retail chains have gone out of business. This is commonly attributed to the advent of e-commerce, says Nathan Yang, yet that is not the only cause of mass retail closures.Blending economic theory, game theory, and data analytics, Yang and his collaborators posit that in some cases, firms’ aggressive expansion and deterrence measures are also a likely contributor. When retail chains oversaturate a market in the interest of driving competitors away, they make take on debt that’s unsustainable.
Yuan Shi studies new products and novel technologies in a wide range of sectors, including entertainment, tech, and venture capital. Examining potential pressures causing rising short-term-ism in investor firm valuations and in markets, he and his collaborators look at strategic implications for firms. Another paper empirically establishes a relationship between short-term-ism and the quality of firms’ increasing R&D spending, which does not seem to be improving in quality. Some industries, including those in the hospitality sector, are more long-term-driven and patient, meriting study. Shi and his collaborators also examine the shifting of power from traditional gatekeepers to general consumers.
Professor Forman tries to understand conditions in which IT investments are most valuable.Firms increasingly participate in digital multisided platforms, but may need to make organizational changes in order to make the most of platform engagement. When the knowledge is challenging, platforms can increase new user engagement by introducing new channels of knowledge exchange, including chat rooms.