In the wake of the recent federal actions that have drastically cut research funding, many alumni have wondered: what can we do to help our alma mater?
Shortly before Reunion ’25, the University launched Cornell Matters, a way for alums to make their voices heard in support of the critical research—in fields from oncology to cybersecurity—being conducted on the Hill and beyond.
Chronicling Enslaved People Seeking Freedom
A project collecting records of freedom-seeking enslaved people in the pre-Civil War U.S. came to a halt when researchers received a stop-work order from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In many cases, they are the only written records of these individuals.
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves, in slaveholding states and northern states as well. The public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
The database has historical value on several levels, says history professor Ed Baptist, a principal investigator on the project.
“It puts a human face on history; it teaches us that ordinary people can resist profoundly evil systems,” he says. “It reminds us that enslaved people were not faceless robots. They had will and courage and the power to resist slavery, and they did so.”
Safeguarding National Defense from Cyberattacks
“Semiconductors are at the core of everything we do in the economy and for national security,” says Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the government department. “Because they are so important, that also makes them a vulnerability and a target.”
In late 2024, the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute (BTPI), of which Kreps is founding director, began a congressionally authorized assessment of risks in the semiconductor supply chain and how to mitigate them.
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