Every Thursday night in Collegetown’s eHub location,there’s business building going on.Fueled by Chipotle,startup ideas and knowledge from various disciplines,30-50 students gather every week for Startup Hours,a meetup begun last year by Sean Cai’25,an applied economics and management major in Dyson.“Startup Hours was our take on creating acasual recurring event where CS majors,business majors and creators of all disciplines could meet and build,”Cai said.The informal meetings allow students to work on projects,meet with venture capitalists and mentors,find out about startup resources and catch up with other builders and early-stage investors.Once amonth,organizers invite aguest speaker.During an October meeting,participants heard from investor George Mathew‘95,managing director at Insight Partners,who shared the story of his career and offered advice to students about building acompany.“When you start these journeys,you have to move the best ideas forward and be able to differentiate your ideas from others,”he said.“You have to go from being the idea leader to being the engine builder.”As aneurobiology and behavior major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,Mathew said his Cornell education helped him to be alifelong learner.“I try to optimize for learning and being curious—all the things that Cornell teaches us very well,”he said.Emma Warden’25,an information sciences major(A&S),came to listen to Mathew because she has interests in technology and healthcare and working at astartup.“I love hearing how really successful people think and how they have used their resources,”she said.Peter Lu’25,an industrial and labor relations major,said he comes to Startup Hours to meet other like-minded students share ideas,and find friends to help him build his company.Lu also hosts the Passion Play Profit podcast,and he recorded Mathew’s talk as apodcast episode.“It’s aplace where everyone is willing to help,”he said about Startup Hours.Caroline Zhu’26,an applied economics and management major(Dyson),said some students who come to Startup Hours are venture capital fellows looking for companies for potential investment,others are company founders seeking co-founders and still others just want to learn more about entrepreneurship.“Our primary goal when we started was to bring out those secret entrepreneurs working in their dorm rooms and connect them to all of Cornell’s resources,”she said.“There are alot of nitty gritty details about entrepreneurship that really come out when you get entrepreneurs talking to each other.”Startup Hours are financially sponsored by Entrepreneurship at Cornell and take place every Thursday from 7:30-9 p.m.at eHub Collegetown,409 College Ave. 查看详细>>

After its inaugural cycle in 2022-23,Cornell University’s Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellowship,formerly known as the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative,enters its second year with anew cohort of 15 business students and 12 researchers who are eager to embark on their journeys to becoming C-suite startup leaders.The Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellowship started as an effort to bridge the gap between Ph.D.and MBA students at Cornell,with an interest in getting life science innovations into the hands of customers.The program provides students with the entrepreneurial mindset,training,and judgement to aid them in developing ventures in the life sciences.The fellowship’s unique structure pairs doctoral researchers across Cornell’s campuses with graduate business students to collaborate on real-world startup design and testing.“Even after just one year of programming,the Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellowship is well on its way to creating apipeline of leaders that will advance the life sciences industry in New York state and globally,”said program director Gregory Ray,Ph.D.‘14.“We’re excited to continue building on last year’s success and providing acollaborative space where participants can think beyond the bounds of their respective programs.”When it was established as the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative in its first year,the program immediately gained traction.Over aseries of six monthly,in-person workshops that alternated location between Ithaca and New York City,participants interacted with more than 50 investors,founders,and industry leaders,gaining perspective to apply to their entrepreneurial endeavors.The success of the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative identified aframework that could easily be applied to other industries,inspiring the creation of the Green Technology Innovation Fellowship and prompting the name change to the Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellowship.Throughout the course of the year,business and research participants will be matched with one another to form teams and take part in workshops that will cover various topics to lay afoundation for startup creation.“I aspire to gain hands-on experience with strategy,implementation,and VC interaction regarding astartup,”said Eman Said,MBA‘24,a member of this year’s cohort.“I hope to hone my skills as an MBA in the life sciences and healthcare while expanding my network throughout the next year.” 查看详细>>

Students can now choose anew minor in digital agriculture,a multidisciplinary field focused on food and agriculture production systems,but with an increasingly broader span of applications and interests.Development of the new minor was fueled by the founders and faculty of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture(CIDA),an interdisciplinary community of leaders across Cornell in areas of expertise ranging from the life sciences to social sciences,engineering and computing science. 查看详细>>

Humans make lots of irrational decisions in predictable ways,but what if we’re all just doing our best within the limits of our abilities?Researchers were able to simulate human behaviors using aprobabilistic finite automaton,a well-known model of limited computational power.They programmed the automatons to compete against each other in awildlife poaching game,as either arhino poacher or aranger trying to stop the poaching.When the automatons could remember everything,they settled into an optimal game strategy.But when researchers limited their memories,they took some decision-making shortcuts–the same kinds as actual humans playing the game.This new work supports the idea of bounded rationality,that“sometimes we do silly things or make systemic mistakes,not because we’re irrational but because we have limited resources,”said first author Xinming Liu’20.“Oftentimes,we cannot remember everything that happened in the past or we don’t have enough time to make afully rational decision.”Liu presented the work,“Strategic Play By Resource-Bounded Agents in Security Games,”in May at the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.The senior author is Joseph Halpern,professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S.Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.In the poaching game,there are ahandful of sites,each with adifferent probability of containing arhino.In each round,the poacher and ranger choose asite to visit,making their decisions based on data from previous rounds.The poacher gains points by catching arhino;the ranger gains points by catching the poacher.If the poacher and ranger can recall every move in the game,they soon settle into Nash equilibrium–a rational,unchanging pair of strategies.But if the automatons have more limited memory–so they can’t remember where they saw that rhino 10,100 or 1,000 rounds back–they make seemingly irrational human-like decisions.One human behavior the automatons emulated was probability matching.This occurs when aperson is guessing the results of acoin toss when the coin is weighted to be heads three out of four times.Instead of always guessing heads,which would give a75%success rate,many people would guess heads three-quarters of the time,which would lower their success rate to about 63%.In the game,this means the poacher made more visits to sites where they most often encountered rhinos in the past,and fewer visits to sites that rarely had arhino.For the automatons,this strategy wasn’t ideal,but still yielded decent results.Another irrational human behavior that led to good game performance was overweighting significant results–a phenomenon in which important or traumatic incidents loom especially large in the memory.For example,a person might drive slowly down astretch of road where they received aspeeding ticket many years ago.When the researchers programmed the poachers to overweight previous encounters with the ranger,it paid off in the game.They ended up avoiding sites where the rangers were most likely to be.To see how these results match up to actual humans,Liu recruited approximately 100 people to play as the poacher on an online platform.While some humans chose the same site every time or picked randomly just to finish the game and receive payment,others chose sites purely based on probability matching.A third group assumed the ranger was probability matching,and visited sites accordingly to avoid the ranger.The similarities in gameplay between the humans and automatons show that the model can re-create at least two human behaviors,which,instead of being irrational,actually improved their performance.“Another way to interpret it is to say that you’re doing the best you can given your computational limitations,”Halpern said.“And that strikes me as pretty rational.” 查看详细>>

Cornell scientists have revealed anew phase of matter in candidate topological superconductors that could have significant consequences for condensed matter physics and for the field of quantum computing and spintronics.Researchers at the Macroscopic Quantum Matter Group at Cornell have discovered and visualized acrystalline yet superconducting state in anew and unusual superconductor,Uranium Ditelluride(UTe2),using one of the world’s most powerful millikelvin Scanned Josephson Tunnelling Microscopes(SJTM).This“spin-triplet electron-pair crystal”is apreviously unknown state of topological quantum matter.The findings,“Detection of aPair Density Wave State in UTe2,”were published June 28 in Nature.Qiangqiang Gu,a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of physicist J.C.Séamus Davis,the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences,co-led the research with Joe Carroll of University College Cork and Shuqiu Wang of Oxford University.Superconductors are topological when the pairing potential exhibits odd parity,leading to each electron pair adopting aspin-triplet state,with both electron spins oriented in the same direction.Topological superconductors are the target of intense research by physicists because they can,in theory,form the materials platform for ultra-stable quantum computers,said Gu.However,even after adecade of intense investigation into topological superconductivity,no bulk materials have been definitively recognized as spin-triplet,odd-parity superconductors,with the exception of superfluid 3He,which was also discovered at Cornell.Recently,the exotic new material Uranium Ditelluride(UTe2)has emerged as ahighly promising candidate for this classification.However,its superconductive order parameter remains elusive,said Gu.In 2021,theoretical physicists began to propose that UTe2 is actually in atopological pair-density-wave(PDW)state.No such form of quantum matter had ever been detected.In simple terms,a PDW is like astationary dance of the paired electrons found in asuperconductor,but the pairs form periodic crystalline patterns in space.“Our team at Cornell discovered the first PDW ever observed in 2016 using the superconductive-tip Scanned Josephson Tunnelling Microscope that we invented for that purpose,”said Gu.“Since then,we have pioneered SJTM studies at millikelvin temperatures and with microvolt energy resolution.For the UTe2 project,we have directly visualized the spatial modulations of the superconducting pairing potential at atomic scale and found them to modulate exactly as predicted in aPDW state as the density of electron pairs modulates periodically in space.What we detected is anew quantum matter state–a topological pair density wave composed of spin-triplet Cooper pairs.”Cooper-pair density waves are aform of electronic quantum matter in which pairs of electrons freeze into asuperconductive PDW state,instead of forming aconventional“superconductive”fluid where all are in the same freely moving state.“The discovery of the first PDW in spin-triplet superconductors is exciting,”said Gu.“Uranium-based heavy fermion superconducting compounds are anew and exotic class of materials that provide apromising platform for realisation of topological superconductivity.…Our scientific discovery also points out the ubiquitous nature of this intriguing quantum state in s-wave,d-wave and p-wave superconductors,and it sheds light on new avenues for identifying such states in abroad spectrum of materials.” 查看详细>>

Zoonotic spillover—when diseases pass between animals and humans—is amajor cause of disease and the primary cause of recent pandemics,including COVID-19.Scientists and practitioners from four continents will gather for awebinar that explores how strategic protection and restoration of natural habitats could disrupt pathways to zoonotic spillover,while also addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.The webinar,“How to Prevent the Next Pandemic:Nature-Based Solutions and Policy Opportunities,”will be Monday,June 26 at 11 a.m.,and hosted by Raina Plowright,a Cornell Atkinson Scholar and the Rudolf J.and Katharine L.Steffen Professor of Veterinary Medicine in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health.It will be moderated by award-winning science writer David Quammen,with an opening statement by Maria Van Kerkhove’99,head of the Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit for the World Health Organization(WHO)and technical lead for WHO’s COVID-19 response.“Almost every scenario of zoonotic spillover involves some kind of land-use change,but if you look at the pandemic treaties being negotiated right now,they do not include preventative solutions,”Plowright said.“Current pandemic treaties are focused on what happens once we have apathogen running rampant within the human population,but there’s little investment in that upstream process:identifying critical pinch points in nature and how to intervene so we can prevent spillover from happening in the first place.”Plowright advocates for carefully constructed ecological countermeasures:actions that protect and restore wildlife habitat or mitigate wildlife-human interactions.Such countermeasures act as a“critical first line of defense”against pandemics,while providing many co-benefits,including reducing the impacts of climate change and enhancing biodiversity,she said.Panelists are 10 global and cross-disciplinary experts,who will examine the fundamental drivers of pandemics,the strategies we can take to prevent them,and the current policy opportunities for primary pandemic prevention. 查看详细>>

Cornell’s newest doctoral graduates have completed one significant milestone,but their journey as scholars is only beginning,President Martha E.Pollack said to nearly 350 candidates waiting to cross the stage and be recognized at the 2023 Ph.D.Recognition Ceremony on May 27 at Barton Hall.“This isn’t the first time you’ve stood in acap and gown,with an achievement behind you and new adventures ahead,”she said.“But today you receive the highest degree there is to earn in academia.Today you cross the line from students to scholars.”Kathryn J.Boor’80,dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education,handed each candidate acertificate as they walked across the stage,signifying the completion of this phase in their journeys.“Crossing that line doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to learn;rather,it means all of you have made your own contribution to what there is to learn,”Pollack said.Provost Michael I.Kotlikoff encouraged graduates to thank the families and friends who offered support throughout their programs,and many of the new Ph.D.s wrote messages during the reception to do just that.As part of its Gratitude Project,the Graduate School offers participants blank postcards and invites them to write anote to someone who helped them on their academic journey,which the Graduate School then mails.“It has been alifelong dream to obtain aPh.D.,”said Jennifer Houtz,Ph.D.’23,a graduate from the field of ecology and evolutionary biology.“It is such asurreal experience to hit this milestone,especially with my adviser,lab mates and family in the audience.I could not have picked amore supportive and inclusive place to pursue my Ph.D.”Houtz credits Cornell with helping her become the scientist and teacher she is today.Backed by the encouragement of her advisers and mentors to pursue her passions for outreach and teaching,she will soon be aprofessor at aprimarily undergraduate institution–her dream job.“I’m grateful for Cornell for providing such achallenging but rewarding experience,”she said. 查看详细>>

A new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators has found that the risk of long COVID and its symptoms present very differently across diverse populations and suggests that further investigation is needed to accurately define the disease and improve diagnosis and treatment.The study,published April 7in Nature Communications,analyzed electronic health records as part of the National Institutes of Health’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery(RECOVER)Initiative to better understand the persistence of symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection,also known as long COVID,among broad,diverse populations.Led by Dr.Rainu Kaushal,chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine and physician-in-chief of population health sciences at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center,the research provides an overview of potential symptoms after acute COVID-19 and how the risk of these conditions may vary among different populations in the United States.“Long COVID is anew disease that is very complicated and quite difficult to characterize,”said Chengxi Zang,an instructor in population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine and lead author on the paper.“It affects multiple organs and presents asevere burden to society,making it urgent that we define this disease and determine how well that definition applies among different populations.This paper provides the basis for furthering research on long COVID.”The team studied electronic health records from two clinical research networks that are part of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network(PCORnet).One dataset,from the INSIGHT Clinical Research Network–which Kaushal leads–included data from 11 million New York-based patients,while the other came from the OneFlorida+network,which included 16.8 million patients from Florida,Georgia and Alabama.The team identified abroad list of diagnoses that occurred more frequently in patients who had recently had COVID compared with non-infected individuals.The researchers also found more types of symptoms and higher risk of long COVID in New York City than Florida.Specific conditions found across the New York City and Florida populations included dementia,hair loss,sores in the stomach and small intestine,blood clots in the lung,chest pain,abnormal heartbeat and fatigue.“Our approach,which involves using machine learning with electronic health records,provides adata-driven way to define long COVID and determine how generalizable our definition of the disease is,”Zang said.Comparing records across diverse populations in regionsthat experienced the COVID-19 pandemic differently highlighted how variable long COVID is for patients and emphasized the need for further investigation to improve the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.Some of the differences between the results from the two populations might be explained by the fact that New York City had amore diverse patient population,endured one of the first waves of the pandemic and faced the lack of personal protective equipment such as masks,compared with Florida,Zang said.The new study is related to previous work by Kaushal,who is also senior associate dean for clinical research and the Nanette Laitman Distinguished Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine,and colleagues,that categorized different subtypes of long COVID.“In this new research,we examined abroad list of potential long COVID conditions one by one,”said Fei Wang,associate professor of population health sciences and co-senior author of the study.“These findings can help us better recognize the broad involvement of multiple organ systems in long COVID,and design appropriate plans for patient management and treatment development.”Many Weill Cornell Medicine physicians and scientists maintain relationships and collaborate with external organizations to foster scientific innovation and provide expert guidance.The institution makes these disclosures public to ensure transparency.For this information,see profiles for Dr.Fei Wang and Dr.Rainu Kaushal. 查看详细>>

In 2020,hiring for diversity,equity and inclusion roles surged.According to the Society for Human Resource Management,three years later–amid recession fears–companies are cutting DEI leadership positions at arapid and disproportionate rate,leaving practitioners to seek new ways of continuing efforts to create welcoming work environments.Dialogue for Change,a new online certificate program from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Intergroup Dialogue Project(IDP)delivered through eCornell,provides afresh approach to DEI for team managers and supervisors,executives and all employees interested in building equitable cultures.“The certificate focuses on four key development areas:human connection,social identity,intergroup communication and strategic change,”said Adi Grabiner-Keinan,executive director for academic DEI education and director of the IDP.“Our goals are to develop participants’awareness around the four development areas and to strengthen their capacity to make meaningful change at personal,interpersonal and institutional levels.” 查看详细>>

A Cornell multidisciplinary research center that studies chronic fatigue syndrome has received afive-year,$9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease–funding that will enable experts from disparate fields to work together on the mysterious and debilitating condition.The Cornell Center for Enervating Neuroimmune Disease,established in 2017,ultimately seeks to understand the biological basis and develop atreatment for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome(ME/CFS),a disabling disorder for which there are currently no effective therapies.ME/CFS affects an estimated 3million people in the United States and some 65 million worldwide,causing some to be ill for decades and unable to work.The disease leads to overwhelming fatigue that rest does not alleviate.Symptoms may include brain fog,body pains,headaches,difficulty sleeping and prolonged increases in symptoms after mild physical exertion or exercise.“What is desperately needed in ME/CFS are effective treatments that not only improve certain symptoms,but actually ameliorate the whole disease,so that people can get their lives back,”said Maureen Hanson,Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences(CALS),who is the center’s director and co-principal investigator of the grant,which starts on April 1.“When we started the Center in 2017,our goal was to take abroad interdisciplinary approach,with the hope that we would find specific molecular changes in ME/CFS;now that we have found these changes,we can target our research on these changes and understand their impact,ultimately moving towards acure,”said Andrew Grimson,associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences,the center’s associate director and co-principal investigator on the grant.The center includes researchers from Cornell’s Ithaca campus(with collaborators from four colleges involved in the current cycle of research projects),the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan,Florida Atlantic University,and Dr.Susan Levine,who will diagnose ME/CFS in patients from her private practice in Manhattan.“The center allows biomedical engineers,bio-informaticists,immunologists,cell biologists–all these people with different expertise to come together and work on asingle problem,”Hanson said.The current grant will focus on three main research projects.First,project lead Ben Cosgrove,working with Iwijn De Vlaminck,both associate professors in the Cornell Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering,will analyze gene expression in muscle biopsies,using anew spatial transcriptomics machine that measures RNA in cross sections of tissue samples to identify all the gene activity in the sample and map where the activity is occurring.Cosgrove and De Vlaminck will look for gene activity in muscle fibers,blood vessels and immune cells from the biopsies of ME/CFS patients and controls to see what differences are found in people with the syndrome.They will also be breaking down tissues from the biopsies into individual cells and looking at the RNA–and genes expressed–in individual cells.The second project,led by Hanson,in collaboration with De Vlaminck,will analyze RNA released into blood plasma when cells die,before and after exercise,as people with ME/CFS respond abnormally–and adversely–to exercise.The tests seek to identify whether RNA released into the plasma after exercise is different between patients and controls.Also,the researchers will examine the proteins in extracellular vesicles–which play key roles in the body’s cellular signaling–before and 24 hours after exercise,to see if proteins present in extracellular vesicles are different in people with ME/CFS versus controls.They will also isolate extracellular vesicles from platelets,neuronal cells and blood vessel cells to check for differences between healthy people and ME/CFS patients,though this detailed inquiry will not involve exercise.Third,Grimson,in collaboration with Dawei Li,a biomedical scientist at Florida Atlantic University,will lead ateam to isolate and characterize gene expression in monocytes(a type of immune cell)and platelets in people with the disease compared to controls.In previous work at the center,Grimson discovered patients had abnormalities in both of these cell types,and this work will seek further information on such differences in the immune and circulatory systems,as both seem to be affected by the disease. 查看详细>>