CUNY Newswire

Believe it or not, Jane Tainow Feder makes learning grammar fun for associate degree students . Professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, she’s been known to climb on the desk to demonstrate how prepositional phrases work, or break into rap lyrics to help students remember subject-verb agreement, correct usage of singular and plural, the possessive apostrophe and other grammar rules.

Here is a collection of new books written by CUNY authors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With a spectacular 70-acre campus in Manhattan Beach, on the southern tip of Brooklyn, Kingsborough Community College overlooks three bodies of water: Sheepshead Bay, Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the only college in New York City with its own beach.

Here is a collection of new books written by CUNY authors…

Nicole Cooley grew up in Jefferson Parish, New Orleans, two blocks from the Mississippi River. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, she watched the news in horror from her house in Glen Ridge, New Jersey…