Our defining moment.

Mathios, Alan D.

As we approach the university's sesquicentennial, I welcome you to the new Human Ecology magazine, which highlights groundbreaking ideas and endeavors by our students, faculty, staff, and alumni. For readers of LINK magazine, which ceased printing this year, you will discover the same wide-ranging alumni coverage, plus in-depth updates on the college's teaching, research, and outreach. I am excited to share the college's story in one publication designed for our entire community.

Our mission remains the same: to improve people's lives by exploring and shaping human connections to natural, social, and built environments. To support that goal, we bring together outstanding students, top faculty and staff, and innovative facilities, delivering world-class education and research to address societal needs.

In recent years, we've positioned ourselves to lead in many ways. The college has dramatically expanded its student and faculty exchange programs, building institutional relationships in Australia, France, India, Japan, Korea, Panama, Tanzania, and elsewhere. We oversee a New York City Urban Semester Program to provide more opportunities for hands-on education, and in establishing the Global and Public Health Sciences major this year, we've increased the international focus of our curriculum.

Through our departments, centers, and institutes, we're pursuing groundbreaking research across eight multidisciplinary themes: community and family policy; economics and federal policy; fashion and technology; health and design; lifespan development; neuroscience; public health and nutrition; and sustainability. A growing number of outreach projects, anchored in the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, extend our research to communities around the state. In New York City, we guide an extension office that leads nutrition education and family and youth programs in all five boroughs.

This unprecedented growth is possible thanks to support by alumni and friends. In recent years, annual giving has leapt from $400,000 to more than $1 million, and our endowment has climbed sharply. We have invested millions of dollars in faculty renewal, student financial aid, seed grants for research, graduate fellowship support, sesquicentennial fellows, and endowed professorships. Now, with the college's largest single gift in our history, a $10 million commitment from Joan Klein Jacobs '54 and Irwin Mark Jacobs '54, we can continue to recruit and retain top scholars (read more on page 44).

This is our defining moment. As the university commemorates its founding, we take an opportunity to reflect on our past, celebrate our present, and inspire our future. The stories in these pages--about cutting-edge advances in design, health, human development, nutrition, and public policy--capture the college at this moment of transformation, representing some of the most vital, dynamic work being done anywhere in the world.

We believe in the power of education, and in the power of research to provide solutions to even the most intractable problems. We believe in the power of community to create meaningful change, and that our work here in the college is only as significant as its impact in the real world. In this new magazine, at this new anniversary, we invite you to join us in planning our next 150 years at Cornell.

Alan D. Mathios

Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean

College of Human Ecology