GUEST EDITORIAL
CCNY’s Role in STEM Education
By President Lisa Coico, City College of NY
Throughout its long history, The City College of New York has been a pillar for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. It is home to ten Nobel Laureates, the latest awarded to alumnus John O’Keefe in 2014, and now the new CUNY School of Medicine on the CCNY campus, an expansion of our established Sophie Davis School for Biomedical Education. A few of the many ways we have been actionable in our STEM efforts is through student education and success, faculty research and innovation, and community partnerships.
CCNY students are recipients of Goldwater, Gilman, and Hollings scholarships as well as National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships and U.S. Geological Survey internships. They are conducting research in areas ranging from working on mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope and testing water quality and availability in a rural Haitian-Dominican community to studying at the top research institutions around the world.
The STEM education they receive pays off in many ways, including “Grover,” a car designed by chemical engineering students that placed 11th in the 2014 AIChE Chem-e-Car finals at Georgia Tech and winning thousands of dollars in prize money for startups ranging from a chip that can determine drug treatment options for cancer patients to reusable bamboo cloth baby diapers in CCNY’s Zahn Innovation Center Entrepreneurship Final Pitch.
I am very proud of the work of our students and that they work alongside some of the best faculty in the country. The Grove School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering is recipient of the 2015 Biomedical Engineering Society Diversity Award for its exceptional impact on diversity among faculty and students and ongoing commitment to diversity through the NIH Minority Scholars program.
The new Barabino Laboratory, named for the Grove School’s dean Gilda Barabino, officially opened in July, allowing the dean and a seven-member team to conduct work on vascular and orthopedic tissue engineering research and apply these principles to solving problems in medicine.
A study by CCNY physicists suggests that “smaller is smarter” when it comes to influential super spreaders of information in social networks, presenting a major shift from the widely held view that “bigger is better,” and highlighting consequences for a broad range of social, natural and living networked systems.
CCNY researchers have developed an eco-friendly biodegradable green “herding” agent that can be used to clean up light crude oil spills on water.
As the world’s growing demand for digital data slows the Internet and cell phone communication, CCNY researchers may have determined a new way to increase its speed by proposing a scalable algorithm, called Collective Influence.
With the recent opening of the City College Center for Discovery and Innovation, our faculty and students have a state of the art facility in which to build and expand upon our STEM advancements as well as attract top scientists worldwide.
We strongly encourage using education, research, and experience to build better communities. Recently, our Engineers Without Borders-USA student chapter used their summers and winter break working on water distribution and sanitation projects in rural Honduras, and they extended goodwill closer to home by helping to build a green and sustainable community center on a reservation.
In partnering with our local communities, CCNY hosts hundreds of high school students from across the five boroughs in a number of STEM summer programs on our campus in Harlem.
Through the New York STEM Institute, students, particularly women and underrepresented minorities, participate in a free, intensive six-week program focusing on math (advanced algebra to calculus), science (chemistry and physics), and critical writing and reading in preparation for successfully pursuing college majors in these areas.
The annual Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers Photonics training summer program offers high school students an opportunity for applied research in photonic science and technology.
And, the annual HIRES (High School Initiative in Remote Sensing of the Earth Systems Science and Engineering) summer internship program lets students work closely with scientists in the field and in labs, collecting and analyzing data, and making presentations at the CUNY Summer STEM Symposium.
For 168 years, City College has opened doors to opportunities where faculty research illuminates our understanding of the world and offers solutions to some of today’s most challenging problems. Above all, City College is a change agent in the exchange and implementation of ideas that empower and transform. #
