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