What happens when campus food scraps + cow manure meet cutting-edge sustainability research? ♻️🐮
Cornell’s newest Living Lab project will turn organic waste into renewable energy through a small-scale biodigester. Using microbes in sealed tanks housed at the Cornell Teaching Dairy, the system will create biogas that can help power dairy operations while supporting research on carbon capture, biofuels and sustainable waste solutions.
The project is bringing together students, researchers and staff from across @cornelluniversity — including @cornelluniversitycals , @cornellvet , @cornelleng , the Cornell @atkinsoncenter for Sustainability, and @sustainablecornell — to test real-world climate solutions right here on campus.
Stay tuned to learn how the biodigester will serve as a hands-on learning and research platform with potential benefits for farms across New York state.
From adolescent health and child development to aging, mental health and the impacts of social media, students across Cornell are advancing research designed to improve lives and strengthen communities.
At the 2026 Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR) Poster Symposium on April 28, nearly 40 undergraduate and graduate students gathered at the Physical Sciences Building to share interdisciplinary projects connecting research with real-world impact.
“This event showcases the remarkable translational research work students are involved in across the campus,” said Kristen Elmore, BCTR associate director. “They’re excited to share the findings they’ve discovered while working on this research with communities, which is a hallmark of Cornell’s land-grant mission.”
Students from Cornell Human Ecology, the College of Arts and Sciences and Cornell Duffield Engineering presented research spanning adolescent health, early childhood education, caregiver wellbeing, neurological conditions, healthy aging and the lived experiences of youth.
For students like Hyun Hwang ’26, the symposium was also an opportunity to grow as communicators and collaborators. “Presenting at the symposium gives me the opportunity to grow as an academic communicator, pushing me to translate complex ideas into clear, concise and accessible language for all audiences,” Hwang said.
Three awards recognized outstanding student work:
🏆 Best Presentation: Brooke Kivel ’26, whose research explored how the gap between wanting control and feeling in control relates to OCD symptoms over time.
🏆 Best Poster: Lorie Li ’28 and Madeline Lee ’28, who presented summer internship research as BCTR Scholars with The Village at Ithaca.
🏆 High Impact Project: Francoise Cattaneo, Ph.D. candidate, whose research identified distinct eating patterns among teenagers in rural Bangladesh.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photo Credit: Devin Flores/Kristen Elmore
The future is at your fingertips. 👋🤏⌚️
Swipe your hand or tap your fingers together to control your device – no keyboard, no mouse, no extra gear.
Introducing WatchHand, a groundbreaking AI-powered system that transforms your smartwatch into a high-tech hand-tracking device. Developed by Cornell Bowers and KAIST researchers, this tech uses micro-sonar to read your hand’s every move in real time.
From skipping songs with a pinch to mastering AR/VR controls, WatchHand opens up endless possibilities. It could revolutionize assistive technology for users with limited mobility or speech and unlock seamless control in augmented and virtual reality environments. Plus, all data and processing occurs locally on your device – so personal data wouldn’t be shared.
>>> Learn more at bowers.cornell.edu
Cornell students are helping tackle one of the more complex challenges in climate science: understanding methane emissions from waterbodies and mangrove ecosystems 💦
Through a collaboration brought together by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, students worked with @cornelluniversity researchers to design a low-cost, portable device to measure methane emissions.
Then, the device was deployed in mangrove ecosystems in Colombia with partners at @environmental_defense_fund . Working alongside local community partners, this effort is expanding access to critical data needed to better understand these ecosystems and support long-term restoration and climate resilience.
This is what it looks like to connect student innovation with real-world impact—where hands-on learning, cross-sector partnerships, and community collaboration come together to advance solutions.
📌 Read more about the research: link in bio
A big thank you to our collaborators: students and researchers in @cornelleng and @cornelluniversitycals , @defreeslab@cornellbirds and @coastalsolutionsfellows , and the community of Punta Soldado, Colombia 🇨🇴🤝
Engineering education research is a rapidly growing field focused on designing effective education systems and learning experiences within engineering. Scholars study how engineers learn, the impacts of educational practices, and how to expand participation in engineering, among other topics. With $25 million from a recent record-setting naming gift from David A. Duffield ’62, MBA ’64, we will establish the Cornell David A. Duffield Engineering Education Research Institute, positioning the college as a leader in the field.
“The last three years have been an exciting time for engineering education research at Cornell. The collaborations within Duffield Engineering and Cornell more broadly have shown how discipline-based education research can create transformative learning experiences for students. We see this new institute as a home for these and new collaborations, a place for scholars, change leaders and educators to come together and work at the forefront of engineering education.”
-- Alexandra Coso Strong, associate professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Systems Engineering
The institute will be founded by four Cornell University faculty who work in schools across the college. Alexandra Coso Strong will lead the institute as its inaugural director. Allison Godwin, the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin ’67, ’68 Professor in Engineering Education Research in the R.F. Smith School, will serve as the first associate director.
Students are turning their passion for sustainability into action at @cornelluniversity ! 🌳
Earth Day offers a moment to reflect, but for many students, this work is part of their everyday lives. Through their classes, campus involvement, and the paths they’re preparing to pursue, they’re thinking deeply about how to create a more sustainable future.
Here’s how they describe what Earth Day means to them 💚
Major new telescope on Chilean summit opens window on universe 🔭 🌌
Thirty-four years after Cornell scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama.
FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve, and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.
FYST is a project of the Cornell University-led CCAT Observatory, Inc., a collaboration that includes Germany’s University of Cologne, University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and a Canadian consortium of universities led by the University of Waterloo, in conjunction with Chilean astronomers through the University of Chile.
And at a height of 18,400 feet above sea level – higher than the Mount Everest base camp at 17,598 feet – FYST lies above most of the atmospheric layers that block submillimeter waves from reaching the ground. The Atacama Desert’s extremely dry air will provide exceptional views, without water vapor to obscure the signal.
The telescope features an innovative optical design that allows astronomers to observe over a wide field-of-view in each exposure, enabling them to rapidly and efficiently map wide areas of the sky. Operating in the submillimeter wavelength range of light, FYST will create movies of the sky – “celestial cinematography” – in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum where this has never before been done.
A celebration of the telescope took place April 9 on Cerro Chajnantor, beginning at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope facility, with more than 100 attendees. They included international dignitaries, project supporters and scientists from the U.S., Germany, Canada and Chile, underscoring the global effort behind this milestone achievement.
We’re proud to announce this year’s student awardees at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability! ⭐️
Forty undergraduate and graduate students have been selected to advance sustainability solutions through their research—from developing sustainable strategies for coffee and strawberry production, to applying cutting-edge technology to protect pet food systems and pollinators, to designing new approaches for conserving energy and ecosystems.
Together, these projects represent more than promising ideas. They are investments in the people who will lead the future of sustainability.
This year, Cornell Atkinson is providing over $325,000 in funding to support student-led research, reinforcing our commitment to training the next generation of sustainability leaders. By supporting students early in their academic and professional journeys, we are helping to build the knowledge, skills, and networks needed to drive impact across industry, government, academia, and the non-profit sector.
The awards announced today span three key programs:
🔬 15 Graduate Research Grants 🦋 17 Sustainable Biodiversity Fund grants ☀️ 4 Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research Grants
Congratulations to this remarkable cohort, and stay tuned to learn more about their impact!
📌 Link in bio to explore all 2026 awardees and abstracts across the 3 programs!
Inside the humming, meticulously controlled environment of Cornell’s NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, Nandan Reddy Muthangi knows that even the slightest miscalculation can undo hours of work. An M.Eng. student in Cornell’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, he is developing new methods for building test chips for systems that ensure reliability in semiconductor manufacturing.
“If you look around, almost everything relies on a chip – electronics, medical devices, transportation. As these devices continue to shrink, it’s important we continue to improve how we test and manufacture them. I want to be part of that.”
-- Nandan Reddy Muthangi
A fascination with fish gills has led researchers at Cornell to develop a bio-inspired approach to mixing heat and molecules in fluids – findings that could inform future biomedical devices, heat exchangers and soft robotics.
Moving heat and mass efficiently through flowing liquids is central to technologies ranging from dialysis machines to industrial cooling systems, yet many of those technologies rely on rigid components to get the job done.
“For a long time, human-made devices in this realm have relied almost entirely on total surface area to improve efficiency, whereas fish have soft, moving materials with a lot of porosity. I wanted to learn from these animals to improve the efficiency of engineered devices.”
— Yicong Fu, mechanical engineering doctoral student
We are thrilled to announce Emily Bernhardt, Ph.D. ‘01 as the next Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, effective September 1!
Emily is a freshwater ecologist and biogeochemist – a scientist who studies how chemical elements and energy cycle through ecosystems. Her research aims to document the extent to which the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems is being altered by land use change, global change and chemical pollution, and examines the efficacy of efforts to protect and restore streams and wetlands.
Emily joins us from Duke University, where she is James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry. She has chaired the Department of Biology for six years, and has been a key contributor to Duke’s Climate Commitment.
She received her Ph.D. from @cornelluniversity in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Emily is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (@thenasciences ) and a fellow of the Ecological Society of America (@ecologicalsociety ), the Society for Freshwater Science and the American Geophysical Union (@americangeophysicalunion ). She will hold a joint academic appointment in the new Ashley School of @cornellglobaldevelopment and the Environment in @cornelluniversitycals .
Welcome back to Cornell, Emily! 🎉
📌 Read more: Link in bio
Last Friday brought everything full circle for our Welding students ⚙️
What started as a two week Ultra High Purity welding unit on our @tstboces campus ended inside the cleanroom at @cornellcnf . Students not only saw the many career opportunities that await them after graduation, but also put their own work to the test.
Using the same type of leak testing process used in cleanrooms, students checked their orbital welds to see if their pipes would hold under pressure with gas flowing through them. We’re happy to report not a single leak was detected!
Part of the work of CTE is preparing students for their futures. With @microntech coming to our region, we’re proud to partner with @cornelluniversity and @swagelok to give our students opportunities to hone their craft and gain the skills needed for what’s next!
📸 Michael Cahill, Digital Media student and TST PR Intern, @newfieldcsd Senior
#Welding #STEMiconductorEducation #CareerAndTech #ConnectingMindsInspiringGrowth #BOCESProud
