News & Events

Brew, Re-Energize, Recycle

Americans consume nearly 400 million cups of coffee a day, and the used coffee grounds that remain — like the leftovers of your Grande Skinny Caramel Macchiato — most often end up in the trash.>>

KCC’s Urban Farm Keeps Growing

The locavore movement is enjoying ever more popularity in New York City, with urban farms, chicken coops and beehives cropping up around Brooklyn. And, at Kingsborough Community College, April is the first anniversary of its Urban Farm program — a commitment to sustainable food practices that has already altered the way students relate to their food.>>

Signposts That Digitally Aid the Deaf

Matt Huenerfauth’s Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory at Queens College is outfitted with spandex bodysuits with Wii-like sensors, spandex gloves that have little thin strips signaling precise joint movement and helmets containing eye trackers — motion-capture equipment that you’d find in a Hollywood animation studio.>>

‘Damnable Scribbler’

Mac Wellman may be the American theater’s most perseverant renegade playwright. A cockeyed iconoclast, Wellman has never had much use for conventional notions of plot, character or even language. This could explain why he might be the most prolific playwright mainstream theatergoers have never heard of — as well as why he’s been a fascination to critics, arts foundations and his students at Brooklyn College, where he’s the Donald I. Fine Professor of Play Writing.>>

Top-Notch Quality — From Cutting - Edge Labs to the Rooftop “Jay Walk.”

John Jay College of Criminal Justice has a brand new campus. Opened last fall, the 625,000-square-foot vertical building cost $600 million and boasts innovative spaces and technologically advanced forensic facilities.>>

Streamlined PATHWAYS

It was fall 2011, and Greg Bradford was looking forward to graduating from Brooklyn College at the end of the semester. Over a nine-year period, he had studied at York College, then Borough of Manhattan Community College and then Brooklyn, where he believed he finally had the academic credits he needed for his baccalaureate degree in psychology.>>

Aspiring Doctor Is Well on Her Way

As a fifth grader growing up on Long Island, Melissa LoPresti was riveted by the stories her parents told about helping to save lives. Her father is an oncology pharmacist and her mother, a nurse. “I would listen to my parents speak in a medical jargon, wishing that I could understand them,” and help save “someone’s life one day,” says LoPresti, a senior at the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at City College.>>

Farsighted Dynamo

As a scientist, Lisa S. Coico is president of City College of New York at a crucial, exciting time. A unique, CUNY and City College research campus is rising on CCNY’s south campus, adding to the New York State Structural Biology Center already there to bring a world-class “research triangle” to Harlem.>>

Baruch ‘Quants’ Ace International Contest

Students in Baruch College’s Masters in Financial Engineering program are ready to trade on Wall Street. Two teams from the program won first and fourth places in the prestigious 2012 Rotman International Trading Competition, at the University of Toronto in February, vying with 48 other teams from 44 academic institutions. Last year Baruch placed third.>>

Dream Weavers

Elizabeth Cusick analyzed stunted brain growth among HIV-infected South African children. Mubashir Billah learned Arabic and dug beneath stereotypes of Arab radicalism in Jordan. And Thomas Lombardo staged his favorite play in the East Village.>>

It’s all About Connecting

Like most CUNY students, Jasmine Osorio had to work full time in the summer to make some extra money. She had a $10-an-hour job lined up at a Harlem clothing boutique not far from her home in the Bronx.>>

Commuting To Class — With the Kids

Early on the first morning of the new semester, Ebonie Council leaves her apartment in Flushing and navigates her three children under age 5 — to Long Island City, an eight-mile trip that takes an hour and a half by subway and bus. They walk the last three blocks to LaGuardia Community College, where Council delivers her brood to the college’s Early Childhood Learning Center before finally getting to her first class of the day.>>

The Defense Rests

Alan Dershowitz, the famed, chutzpah-driven attorney, donated his historic papers to Brooklyn College, and after they were sorted into 1,841 archival boxes, a ceremony was held on campus one day last fall. Dershowitz, known for his candor, held “court” before the ceremony on the edge of a fabled Brooklyn College quadrangle. He spoke about his marginal career as a high school student, the way Brooklyn College turned him around — and how he almost went to a different CUNY school: City College.>>

New Ideas Highlight An Inspired Setting

There’s the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Football Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But the original Hall of Fame — located at Bronx Community College — might be among the best-kept secrets in America.>>

Exploring a Portal to the Past

A Queens College archaeologist’s team is probing origins of an ancient Greek settlement in Turkey. With its rich soil and abundant natural resources the Sinop region in Turkey was the earliest Greek colony on the Black Sea coast, dating back to the seventh century B.C. The Black Sea region played a key role as the breadbasket of the Greek and then the Roman Empire.>>

Why NYC’s Recession Was Shorter Than USA’s

While the United States lost 8.4 million jobs — about 6 percent — during the 27-month Great Recession that started in December 2007, employment in New York City declined by 3.5 percent, and the downturn lasted only 17 months here. Why did New York outperform the rest of the nation? The obvious answer, says Greg David, director of the Business and Economics reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, is the Wall Street bailout. But, says David, there were other, less apparent reasons too.>>

Noted and Quoted: Record 16 CUNY Students Win NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

A record 16 CUNY students — 15 of whom earned undergraduate degrees at the University — have won coveted National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships for work toward their master’s or doctoral degrees. Other CUNY students have also won prestigious awards including a Clarendon Fund Scholarship of the University of Oxford, a Goldwater Scholarship and a New York City Urban Fellowship.>>

GRANTS and HONORS: Recognizing Faculty Achievement

The University’s renowned faculty members continually win professional-achievement awards from prestigious organizations as well as research grants from government agencies, farsighted foundations and leading corporations. Pictured are just a few of the recent honorees. Brief summaries of many ongoing research projects are listed here.>>

Count on Us!

University Student Senate Chairperson Kafui Kouakou intends to do something novel in November: cast his first vote as a newly minted American citizen. Coming from Togo — a country that has seen coups, political murders and arrests, political parties banned and the constitution suspended during its tumultuous 50-plus years of independence — he knows how valuable the right to vote is. “Where I come from, we had a president who took the power, and even if he got the vote in a so-called fair election [in 2010], people got into fights and got killed. Here you actually put the people in power. That’s a big difference compared to a place where you can vote, but the outcome of the election is preset.”>>

‘Glorious Panoramas’ of an Unsung Borough

For more than a quarter of a century award-winning landscape painter Daniel Hauben has set up his easel under elevated subway trains, at street corners and on overpasses, capturing the life of the Bronx on canvas and paper. In the last two years, however, Hauben, 55, has stayed inside, working in his Riverdale studio to create monumental art pieces for the new, $102-million, three-story North Hall and Library complex at Bronx Community College.>>