Newly Discovered Dinosaur-Era Creatures Offer Insight Into Evolution Fossils of Fossiomanus (left) and Jueconodon
By Lida Tunesi
Graduate Center Professor
Jin Meng (Earth and Environmental Sciences) was part of a team that recently discovered two new species of small, mammal-like creatures from 120 million years ago. The fossils came from northeastern China.
The new animals are the first so-called “scratch-diggers” found in this area, and share similar digging-oriented traits even though they are not closely related.
“We depend on fossils to understand the early evolution of mammals and other organisms,” Meng said, “so that we can understand what has happened in Earth’s history and why there is such diverse life.”
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Established in 1961, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) is devoted primarily to doctoral studies and awards most of CUNY s doctoral degrees. An internationally recognized center for advanced studies and a national model for public doctoral education, the Graduate Center offers more than thirty doctoral programs in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences, as well as a number of master s programs. Many of its faculty members are among the world s leading scholars in their respective fields. The school currently enrolls over 4700 students from throughout the United States, as well as from about eighty foreign countries, and its alumni hold major positions in industry and government, as well as in academia. The Graduate Center is also home to more than thirty interdisciplinary research centers and institutes focused on areas of compelling social, civic, cultural, and scientific concerns
Getting Her Ideas Out of the Lab: Roxana Piotrowska, Class of 2021, on Her New Role at Estée Lauder and What Led to It
Roxana Piotrowska (Photo courtesy of Piotrowska)
By Lida Tunesi
As
Roxana Piotrowska (Ph.D. ’21, Chemistry) can tell you, water-responsive nanomaterials and the cosmetics industry might have more in common than you would think. Having completed her dissertation research with Professors
(GC/City College; Chemistry/Chemical Engineering) at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC), Piotrowska recently began a new job with makeup, skin care, and fragrance company Estée Lauder.
“During my Ph.D. I worked with peptides, which are short chains of amino acids and building blocks of proteins,” Piotrowska said. “I used peptides to develop and study water-responsive materials that can one day hopefully help harness yet untapped evaporation energy.” In her new position, she has also been working with peptides, but to creat
Two Graduate Center Anthropology Students Win Fulbrights
Evan Mann and Carly Batist
Two Graduate Center students in the Anthropology program won 2021–2022 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants.
Ph.D. candidate
Ph.D. student
Student Spotlight: Javier Otero Peña Wants to ‘Make Cities More Just and Livable’
Javier Otero Peña (Photo courtesy of Peña)
In his first published paper, Ph.D. student
Javier Otero Peña (Psychology)
takes a step toward his goal of understanding why people do or do not use public spaces, and what those spaces mean to them.
“What drove me to this field, and to a Ph.D. in environmental psychology, is a desire to make cities more just and livable,” Peña said.
Peña was first author on the new paper, which examines park use in low-income neighborhoods around New York City. The study appears in