CUNY Newswire

City College turns to one of its own to present the Ninth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism: Distinguished Professor of Political Science Marshall Berman, who will speak 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2, in The Great Hall, Shepard Hall. His topic will be “Emerging From the Ruins.” The talk is free and open to the public.

The 13th Annual CUNY Jazz Festival, a gathering of bands and ensembles from across the CUNY system, takes place May 2-3 in Aaron Davis Hall, Theatre B, at The City College of New York, 135th Street and Convent Avenue, Manhattan. Trumpet player Tim Hagans, hailed by “The New York Times” as “a firecracker of a trumpeter,” will be the festival’s guest artist.

Preeminent public intellectual Walter Russell Mead will deliver the inaugural Anne and Bernard Spitzer Lecture at The City College of New York 4:30 p.m. Monday, April 15. Mr. Mead, who is author of the blog Via Meadia on The American Interest website, will address the state of America’s relationship with Asia, given recent growing turmoil in the region.

Alla Zamarayeva, a junior chemical engineering major in the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York, has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for 2013 from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The Goldwater Scholarship, which is federally funded, is America’s premiere award for undergraduates majoring in math, science and engineering.

Former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, who served as a special enjoy for Middle East peace in the Obama administration and held several other high-profile positions in business and public service after he retired from the Senate, will deliver the 2013 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture 5:30 p.m. Monday, April 22, at The City College of New York. The event, to be held in the Great Hall, Shepard Hall, on the CCNY campus at 160 Convent Ave., New York, is free and open to the public.

More than 80 scientists, climatologists and weather experts from across the globe will descend on The City College of New York this month to take part in a conference celebrating the collection of three decades-worth of worldwide satellite observations of the properties, behavior and effects of clouds.

The City College of New York has entered into a three-year agreement with the government of Mexico that will enable the College to host Cátedra Cultura de México, a series of Mexican culture lectures, on its campus and at offsite locations in New York City. The first event in the series is a three-day conference, April 23-25, at CCNY’s main campus in Harlem, the CCNY Center for Worker Education in Lower Manhattan and Instituto Cervantes New York in Midtown Manhattan.

The City College of New York’s new website has won the Silver Award for Website Design in the 28th Annual Educational Advertising Awards. The category was for institutions with 10,000 – 19,999 students. The overall competition, sponsored by Higher Education Marketing Report, drew close to 3,000 entries from across the United States and several foreign countries.

City College of New York historian Dr. Judith Stein is doubly distinguished. Professor Stein, who earlier this year became a CUNY Distinguished Professor, has been awarded a CUNY Distinguished Fellowship for the spring 2014 semester from the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) of the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York. She one of 15 “exceptional national and international scholars” selected for the inaugural cohort of this GC initiative.

Levine-de Beer Genetics Lecture to explore idea of DNA as ultimate forensic record of three billion years of evolution

Four City College of New York undergraduates were winners in two recent CUNY-wide student competitions. Christopher Nickerson, a sophomore in the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, won first prize in the 2013 Student Speech Competition, and studio art majors Elizabeth Arias, Bao Lin Zhang and Steven Chalmers took second prize, third prize and honorable mention, respectively, in the visual arts category in the 2013 CUNY / LaborArts contest.

For the first time ever, graduating seniors in The City College of New York’s Department of Theatre and Speech will present a showcase evening of scenes, songs and monologues to the New York entertainment industry. The City College Showcase will be presented 7 p.m. Monday, May 6, at the Producers’ Club, 358 W. 44th Street, in the Crown Theater.

Military Times, a publisher of newsweeklies and a website for armed services personnel and their families, ranked The City College of New York 33rd best four-year college in the United States for veterans. CCNY was the highest-rated New York State public college in the annual survey.

Spring break in the Caribbean conjures up images of days on the beach and nights in the clubs. But for five City College of New York undergraduate environmental engineering majors, two professors, a graduate student and a post-doc, it means something very different: trying to understand a climate-related phenomenon that is imperiling two lakes on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Student teams from more than 20 schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey will delay spring break to converge at The City College of New York Saturday, March 23, for an underwater robotics competition – the first ever of its kind in the Northeast.

Two scientists from The City College of New York have won National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards to support their research, teaching and outreach over the next five years.

Pulitzer Prize winner to do book reading and signing March 18; Cuban blogger to participate in a dialogue March 21

The City College of New York hosts two prominent figures from the world of Hispanic arts and letters the week of March 18.

The City College of New York Department of Media and Communication Arts will welcome its first group of students into its new master’s degree program in Branding + Integrated Communications – “BIC” in September 2013.

BIC is a 36-credit, portfolio-driven master’s degree program created with the guidance, insight, and support from significant players in New York City’s advertising and public relations community.

Tom Sleigh, senior poet and director of Hunter College’s creative writing MFA program, will be the featured guest poet for the 41st annual The City College Poetry Festival. The all-day, all-verse event runs 9:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, May 10, in Theater B of Aaron Davis Hall, 135th Street and Convent Avenue on the CCNY campus. Dubbed “the Woodstock of the Spoken Word,” the festival has become New York’s longest-running poetry celebration.

Dr. Arthur Szlam, assistant professor of mathematics at The City College of New York, has been awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship for 2013. Professor Szlam develops mathematics for cutting-edge applications in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence research focused on improving the abilities of computers to learn in a more human way.