March 2, 2021
The Office of Academic Integration (OVPAI) has awarded $750,000 in seed grants to 10 studies ranging from refugee health and legal rights, to a vaccine treating fentanyl addiction and overdose, to pancreatic cancer and antibiotic tolerance.
This year’s awardees represent faculty collaborations across five colleges and schools, and 18 departments and divisions across the Cornell Ithaca campus and Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City.
Designed to catalyze collaborative research interactions among Cornell faculty based in Ithaca and New York City, OVPAI provides funding opportunities that foster transdisciplinary, multi-investigator programs that aim to be competitive for support from federal funders and major foundations.
Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon s last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a judicious selection from the magnificent six-volume Complete Letters of 2009. Had he not been a painter, Van Gogh could have made his name as a writer, as his correspondence shows. Impassioned, often heartbreaking, furious, funny and tender, these letters form a unique testament from a pivotal figure in 19th-century art. For my third choice, I am going to flout the rules by picking a book to be published in January 2021: Billy O Callaghan s Life Sentences (Cape) is a superb and moving novel of