News
A challenge brought by Grants Pass, a small rural city in southern Oregon, is the most significant case in decades before the U.S. Supreme Court about homelessness. The case could upend how cities interact with people living in the streets. (AP Video by Claire Rush, Manuel Valdes)
Recent global events have underscored a pressing truth: our ever-expanding interactions with the natural world can lead to unforeseen health challenges. At the juncture of urban development, climate change and health concerns, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic raised the necessity to strengthen our public health infrastructure. Through its new Public Health Essentials online certificate program, Cornell seeks to help leaders proactively address today’s global health challenges. “COVID-19 came and showed us that our public health workforce was underprepared and that our public health systems were not equipped to detect and respond to an emerging pandemic,” said Gen Meredith, associate professor of…
A simple but powerful intervention asks students to color-code their written text to indicate how claims are supported with evidence. Each claim is assigned a color and students use the same color to mark the corresponding evidence; for example, a student could highlight a claim about increasing mosquito populations in a blue color, and then also mark the supporting evidence about mosquitos in blue. This strategy limits the potential use of generative AI in student writing while reinforcing learning objectives. It also provides a new way for students to visualize and map out the argumentation and organization of a piece of academic writing. Surprisingly, it led to a range of unanticipated benefits for students and faculty alike, such as…
In 2023, the Federation of American Scientists engaged 85+ experts in conversations around federal policies needed to address extreme heat, yielding over 100 recommendations to address extreme heat’s impacts and build community resilience. These recommendations represent the building blocks of a whole-of-government strategy on extreme heat, spanning six distinct topic areas: infrastructure and the built environment, workforce safety and development, public health, medical preparedness, and health security, food security and multi-hazard resilience, planning and response, and data and indices. Cornell Public Health’s Alistair Hayden and Amie Patchen helped author three policy memos…
Five faculty members have been honored with the 2024 Teaching Innovation Award, sponsored by the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and the Center for Teaching Innovation. This year’s theme, “Creative Responses to Generative Artificial Intelligence,” recognizes creative approaches from the last year developed in response to generative AI. Award winners will present their experiences at the Provost’s Teaching Innovation Showcase: Creative Responses to Generative AI, on April 11. The winners will collaborate with CTI to share their experiences with colleagues. “The award winners, and other applicants as well, represent a wide and impressive range of responses to the new challenges and opportunities associated with…
Shot@Life is a grassroots advocacy campaign under the United Nations Foundation that champions, supports, and invests in global childhood immunization programs like UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance In 2023, Shot@Life secured...
Discover the crucial balance between caring for our feline companions and protecting our shared future on this enlightening episode with Casey Cazer and Amelia Safi to unpack the findings of their latest JAVMA articles Prepare to be informed about the responsible use...
A Cornell-led team has received a 3.2-million-dollar grant to study the effects of climate change on child malnutrition in Zimbabwe. Laura Smith ’07, Ph.D. ’16, assistant professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, is project lead on the Wellcome Trust grant, and will examine climate change data from the past 10 years for associations with nutritional outcomes including food security, dietary diversity and child malnutrition. “It’s quite a task because the data was not ever collected for doing longitudinal work,” said Smith. “But it’s a real treasure of data.” With nearly a quarter of children in Africa under the age of five considered nutrient-starved, and the continent’s increase in severe weather, biodiversity loss and…
While world public health agencies are focused on how to react to the next pandemic once it has started, a new plan proposes using ecological perspectives to prevent disease outbreaks before they happen, according to a paper published March 26 in Nature...
Recent advances in technology have allowed scientists to gather larger quantities of acoustic data from locations more remote than ever before As a result, the study of animal sounds can be used to inform species or habitat conservation and natural resource management...
Although we often think of museums as hosting classes in art history or archaeology, the Johnson Museum education specialists work with classes from many different fields including STEM and social sciences Close observation, consideration of perspectives and cultural...
Wildfires have increased dramatically in recent years, in part due to climate change. While more than 90% of wildfire-attributable deaths are due to smoke, less than 1% of wildfire funding goes to mitigating smoke hazards, with most government funding spent on preventing and extinguishing flames. Policymakers are remaking wildfire policy right now, and Dr. Hayden’s team, including Dr. Corinna Noel and two MPH students, Farida Yusuf and Hannah Morris, are conducting research funded by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability to get government stakeholders the information needed to act. The U.S. and Canada have seen unprecedented numbers and sizes of wildfires along with unforeseen reductions…