Cornell University Alumni

"I wanted to be an entomologist since I was about 8 years old “I saw all the trees getting ruined by these caterpillars. My father used a chemical to kill them on a prized dogwood outside the kitchen window [but] it killed all the good bugs – lady beetles, lacewings, honeybees and so forth."

"When most people think of a professor they think "teacher," and that is true. However, my work entails the two other "pillars of professorship"--research and service. On any given day, my research involves everything from grant writing, to presenting experimental results at conferences, to guiding students through their own masters and PhD programs."

"It's estimated that 30 percent of type II diabetes patients have NASH [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a severe form of fatty liver disease]."

"I went into chemistry instead of engineering because I thought engineers drove trains."

"Young s are unable to fly when they leave the nest; they fall and flutter to the water below and swim immediately ..."

"Once my mom told a shop owner I was going to college next year. He laughed and asked if I wanted an "Mrs. degree". Even as a teenager, I was ticked off! There are people who can't fathom women in STEM—especially women of color. Oftentimes as the only African-American and/or female in situations, I STILL run into those subtle doubts or even insults at times. However, I've found that a tough skin, a determined mind, and a prayerful heart can take you through any challenge and to any goal."

"A maximum of 140 species of birds can be seen more-or-less regularly each year in interior Alaska. Of these species, however, only 28 can be considered regular winter residents, including two hawks, six s, five owls, four s, and eleven s ..."

"I tell my students to hone their communication skills, both oral and written. It's no secret that we engineers and scientists are often guilty of being poor communicators, but being able to communicate, especially to the general public, is essential. I love that show "Big Bang Theory," but we're not all that bad! The other thing needed is imagination. You must be willing to step into the unknown because in STEM you won't be hired to solve problems for which the answers are already known."

"I think it's important to get started as soon as you can. In one sense, I decided I wanted to get a doctorate when I was 5 years old, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a professor until many years later."

"Most s leave the during September and October (Hunt et al. 1981b), but stragglers have been recorded as far north as as late as any water exists, even to mid-November ( and 1959)."

"The author takes a ian approach to identifying the major environmental factors that help define the species-specific niches of birds in Alaska. In her study, she censused breeding birds on twelve 10- plots selected to represent fairly homogeneous tracts of each of the major s described for Alaska's taiga."

"My husband and I were on this protracted and tragic adoption journey. It was really hard and there were a lot of things that went wrong, so I decided while this is happening I'd write a book about it to make it more interesting as opposed to just tragic. It's definitely based on our experience, but not exactly our experience. You know, I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers [laughs]. I think I learned some things about it, how to be patient, a little bit, and I'm so hard on that narrator, that I got to see the worst of how I felt. My husband said this to me actually—he said I was taking this horrible thing that we were going through and turning it into something positive. I felt productive in that way."

"It's actually quite frightening to be an author and know the business side of publishing. I imagine it's easier to be in Iowa and not know what's going on with your book. If the industry had stayed the same, I might still feel in control of the publishing process, but sales reps' jobs have changed, marketing jobs have changed, publicity jobs have changed."

"... when I just started this book I thought: Roth’s pretty much has it down on what the worse thing a Jewish boy can do but what is the worst thing a Jewish girl can do? Well: it is most likely throwing up her mother’s cooking. Food is identity, it’s love, it’s politics, it’s family. To reject that, and in such a self-destructive manner, is something I wanted to investigate. It also implicitly brings up the notion of privilege, which is also a stereotype many young Jewish women are saddled with."

"Raspberry Horntail, Hartigia cressoni (). One of the , a western species, injuring young shoots of , , , and . Bright yellow-and-black females appear in April and May to insert eggs with a curved point under epidermis of tender tips of host plants."

"Dogs sometimes disturb roses by burying their bones too near the roots, but in general rose thorns provide adequate self-protection."

"In 1933, Dr. Westcott bought a garden in , as a laboratory. She described it as "equipped with all the common plant diseases." Home studies and experiments with plant problems led to a career as a plant doctor, and for many years, she tended gardens in the New York area. The first of her seven books,The Plant Doctor, published in 1937, was based on her experiences. She wrote on rose growing, plant diseases and pests. The Gardener's Bug Book appeared in 1946 and is undergoing its fifth revision. Dr. Westcott was a contributor to many publications. During World War II, she lectured on pest control for s. Dr. Westcott was known for her annual Rose Day Open Houses for hundreds of visitors at her gardens in Glen Ridge and, later, at her retirement home in Springvale in ."

"Our new headquarters were at the laboratory at , outside of , right next to 's . He was always going out alone on horseback by our building and I always just missed seeing him."

"are tiny insects with rasping-sucking mouthparts, gradual metamorphosis. They feed by macerating surface layers of plant cells and sucking up the juices. They belong to the order Thysanoptera ..."

"Hand pick the s where you can and use bait. A barrier of lime on the soil around trees will keep snails away. s are named for their sooty black spore mass. They are important on grains and grasses, not too common on . Corn and onion smuts appear in backyard gardens."

"Barry Strauss’ excellent The Trojan War using conventional chronology, warns the reader that ‘most dating is relative and approximate rather than absolute.’"

"It may be that science has rather gone to our heads. Science is all right in its place, but that is no reason for our treating life like something in a test tube. Social studies such as education, sociology and similar things, which surely more than anything but fiction must deal with human beings and all their complicated relationships, are haunted by the scientific method, reduced largely to graphs, statistics and a hodge-podge of pseudo-scientific terms, the human element neglected or lost. In a similar manner, equally affected perhaps, romance has to be reduced to the scientific or physiological level. The love songs we hear on the radio and see on television are accompanied by physical gymnastics."

"Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete. ... It isn’t organized waste. It’s a sound contribution to the American economy."

"In spite of the obstacles a few female artists persisted and gave us some wonderful scenes depicting beauty, , and primitive western life. Among these we might mention (1880's), (1800's), Mary Elizabeth Achey (1860–1885), and (1885–?)."

"As I became more tuned into trees, I began to admire the enormous near the path to the . I even oriented the entrance of the outhouse so that I could gaze at this tall, furrowed tree while sitting there. It was much better than reading ."

"Dr was, in her words, a part-time . She died 1 July 2011, and her last name calls to , a celebration of independence. A wildlife ecologist, writer and photographer, she built her own 12x12 cabin on after her divorce in 1964. She chronicled her life and research in more than a dozen books, including the Woodswoman series. ... Her work remains relatively unknown in the male-dominated landscape, but I believe a copy of Woodswoman belongs next to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in a library. If you’re looking for a real declaration of independence, and a deeper social experiment, try a woman living alone in the for decades."

"I developed from being a lister of birds and es to an investigator of ecosystems, and as a natural outgrowth, becoming a and protector of wildlife and ."

"Her reach as an environmentalist extended to Guatemala, where she had discovered the flightless bird known as the at while leading nature tours in 1960. When LaBastille returned five years later to study the rare bird, its population had declined by 50%. She wrote her doctoral dissertation for Cornell on the plight of the grebe, or “poc” as the bird was known locally, and spent 24 years campaigning to save it. She persuaded the Guatemalan government to make the grebe’s habitat a wildlife refuge, launched educational programs and wrote about the doomed bird in her 1990 book “Mama Poc,” the nickname local residents gave her."

"… a beside the sparkling Rio Bajo Chiquero? Not everyone agrees that a ’s chief function is to conserve , species, ecosystems, and natural beauty, The possibilities made me cringe."

"During my morning trek, two of the striking differences between and s became evident. Any 5 s around my cabin in the , or in New England woods, may have 10 to 12 kinds of trees growing; yet, here in the same-sized area, an average of 200 species can be found!"

"At least 46 people held at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba detention camp joined a disputed number of fellow detainees already refusing food in protest of their indefinite detention last week, the Department of Defense said in a statement yesterday. [...] Thirty-two hunger strikers have been hospitalized and force-fed through nasal tubes, a prison camp spokesperson told the Boston Globe. In late October, US District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the Defense Department to notify the lawyers of prisoners it intends to force-feed before doing so."

"[...] over the course of more than 50 years, Defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as “replacement smokers,” about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, they suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, they distorted the truth about low tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting, and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal – to make money with little, if any, regard for individual illness and suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system."

"It is about an industry, and in particular these Defendants, that survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the Government, and to the public health community. Moreover, in order to sustain the economic viability of their companies, Defendants have denied that they marketed and advertised their products to children under the age of eighteen and to young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in order to ensure an adequate supply of “replacement smokers,” as older ones fall by the wayside through death, illness, or cessation of smoking. In short, Defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted."

"Gimbutas, following most recent Russian work, has departed from Childe, to the extent of deriving the Kurgan cultures from the steppes on the Lower Volga and farther east (…) While linguistic opinion has been moving in the direction of putting the Indo-European homeland in the region of the Vistula, Oder or Elbe, archaeological opinion is now putting it in the Lower Volga steppe and regions east of the Caspian Sea."

"Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."

"Islam has struck deeper roots on the coast, and has tended to be at its most self- conscious among trading communities. There has often been tension, and sometimes devastating warfare, between the coast and the interior. Although it is attractive to think of Islam as a causative factor in this conflict, it would probably be more correct to think of it as deriving from primary economic and political differences, with a rather more self- conscious Islam providing from time to time a convenient rallying banner for the coastal states."

"It has sometimes been assumed, with extraordinary unconcern for the historical evidence, that the more self-conscious Muslims of the coast were the greatest enemies of the Dutch Protestants, while the less firm Muslims ruling the interior kingdom of Mataram more readily became the tools of the Europeans. But this is simply not so."

"In the course of the centuries, Islam spread throughout the Javanese population, until its adoption by the last large district, the “east hook,” was accomplished in the late eighteenth century. This process seems on the whole to have been peaceful, or as peaceful as it could have been in a period of Javanese history characterized by almost incessant warfare. Conversion by arms may have occurred when a Muslim dignitary defeated a non­ Muslim, whereupon the vanquished and his people would presumably have embraced Islam."

"Yet, despite all her success, Ruthann wasn't completely satisfied. She had what she believed to be much more important work to do and, like always, she went after it with great gusto."

"The reality was that she had a personal score to settle and was willing to stop at nothing to see it through. However, her plans wouldn't turn out quite the way she hoped."

"She often portrayed herself as a victim … and attempted to use past history and mental illness as excuses for her criminal behaviour."

"Everyone else’s lives have moved on."

"You ever look through a kaleidoscope? That was my mind. My mind looked exactly like a kaleidoscope."

"I always tried to live my life being very good to the people around me, and when I needed that very same quality it was nowhere in sight."

"This kitchen is a testament to my resiliency"

"The opinions of best researchers in the matter of the age of the Ṛgveda differed not by a few centuries but by a few thousands of years."

"Now it is clear that the presumption of 200 years for each of the literary epochs in the birth of the Veda is purely arbitrary... it was strangely forgotten on how weak a footing the prevailing view actually stood...” (Ketkar 1987:272)"

"Doris Margaret Anderson’s expertise in celiac disease and her dedication to education have had a lasting impact on the Island community and beyond, leading to her appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1982."

"Dr. Anderson was a founding member of the PEI chapter of the Canadian Federation of University Women, and her work on celiac disease has been recognized as a significant contribution to both the scientific and educational communities.""

"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."