The 1994 Rwandan Genocide, which claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Hutus and Tutsis, forced Georges Ndabashimiye’s family to seek refuge in the Congo where militant rebels violently seized their camp and killed Ndabashimiye’s father and sister. The national and personal disaster plunged Ndabashimiye to the brink of despair. “To be able to lead a decent life,” he said, “you have to make sense of the world again.” He found a refuge, education, and within a few years he slowly reassembled the pieces of his shattered life. In 2004, he earned a William Jefferson Clinton scholarship to City College and four years later, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics and was accepted into Stanford University’s doctoral program in applied physics.
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Joyce Moy has spent years assisting Asian immigrants adjust to life in New York City and as the newly appointed director of the Asian American/Asian Research Institute of the City University of New York, she hopes to help even more. An attorney, Moy has served as executive director of business and community development at LaGuardia Community College, where she launched the Small Business Development Center. “The immigrant community is a substantial economic engine for New York City,” says Ms. Moy. “It’s important for us in this global economy to understand how Asians in America can play a substantial role in connecting the United States to Asian cultures and Asian countries.”
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Like former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Kojo Wallace attended the elite Mfantsipim Methodist boarding school in Ghana’s Cape Coast and studied hard to succeed. His efforts — then and since his emigration in 2006 to join his New York City cabbie father — are paying off. In June, Wallace graduated at the top of his class at Bronx Community College and was named valedictorian. He was also awarded a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship worth up to $60,000 toward his undergraduate degree at Cornell University. Wallace plans to study biochemistry in hopes of becoming a neurosurgeon and, ultimately, to work with Doctors Without Borders, the international medical humanitarian organization. “The brain intrigues me because of the way it works; how something that’s almost jelly-like is able to do all the stuff that it does,” says Wallace.
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Executive Committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Monday, July 21, 2008.
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When the second deadliest cyclone on record hit the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar in May, it left 134,000 people dead or missing and some 2.4 million stranded without adequate food, shelter or supplies. Using typical Geographic Information Systems, Yuri Gorokhovich, associate professor in the Department of Environmental, Geographic and Geological Sciences at Lehman College, created computer models of the geographic distribution of people affected by Cyclone Nargis, the name given the disaster that struck the Southeast Asian country of 48 million. “It’s amazing how much global data we have,” said Prof. Gorokhovich, whose maps and other research were used by the United Nations to estimate the damage. “What we produced totally coincided with what the U.N. employees reported from the ground.
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The top-earning 1% of Americans account for one-quarter of the country’s health expenditures, a disparity showing how skewed today’s health-care system is towards the wealthy, says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “Even if you have millions of dollars, you can easily find yourself [unable] to pay for medical care, out of pocket.” Krugman and Elisabeth Ryden Benjamin, director of New York Healthcare Restructuring Initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York, discuss the health care crisis and the presidential candidates’ proposals at a forum at Hunter College, “Changing Health Care 2008: Information Leading to Action.”
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Public schools are pushing too much cutting-edge technology instead of focusing in the core mission of education, according to Internet guru Omar Wasow. Mr. Wasow, a former board president of the Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant and co-founder of the social networking website, BlackPlanet.com, keynoted the New York City College of Technology’s “Race and New Media” conference.
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Jazz icon Louis Armstrong was wealthy enough to live anywhere, yet the renowned trumpeter, who grew up in numbing poverty in New Orleans, chose modest Corona, Queens, to live in with his wife Lucille starting in 1943. For decades “Sachmo,” as he was known, recorded his everyday conversations in the home, while meticulously organizing his journals, letters, musical commentary and other materials until his death in 1971 at 71. Today, the two-story brick house-turned-museum is administered by Queens College and looks much as it did when Lucille died in 1983. Deslyn Dyer, assistant director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum discusses its treasure trove of memorabilia, as well as the Louis Armstrong Archives housed at Queens College.
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Life is about choices. “Behavioral economics” analyzes the underpinnings of choice using psychology and economic theory, says Richard H.Thaler, professor of behavioral economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. By improving “choice architecture” – the context in which people make decisions – you increase the chance of making good choices in everyday decisions such as credit cards, mortgage rates and prescription drug plans. As part of the Provost’s Distinguished Lecturers Series at the Graduate Center, Professor Thaler discusses choice architecture and libertarian paternalism, the central doctrine of his new book “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness,” co-authored by Cass R. Sunstein.
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Charles Darwin changed the way people thought about evolution with his 1859 seminal work “On the Origin of Species,” featuring the theory of natural selection. His own financial practices helped shape his groundbreaking ideas. “(Darwin’s) way of dealing with money… (played) a leading part in his natural selection theory (and) provided structure for his thinking of animal and plant evolution,” says Janet Browne, author of the two-part biography “Charles Darwin.” The Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Professor Browne leads a discussion entitled “‘The Advantage of a Private Income: Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Theory, and the Natural Economy of Households,” at the Graduate Center.
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