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Philanthropist T. Denny Sanford Donates $100 Million to Anti-Bullying Program in Partnership with LIU

T. Denny Sanford looks on appreciatively as teacher Meryl Cooper leads her students at Long Island's William S. Covert Elementary School in an exercise from the Sanford Harmony program. (Photo courtesy: LIU)

Sanford Harmony, an ambitious and innovative national program to reduce bullying and promote greater tolerance, received a transformative gift when billionaire philanthropist T. Denny Sanford came to New York and announced that he was donating $100 million to further its goals.

Created in 2014 by the Sanford Education Center at National University, the program is a research-based social and emotional learning project designed to promote positive peer interactions and relationships among all students through lessons and group activities that encourage communication, collaboration and mutual respect.

Currently Sanford Harmony is impacting more than 200,000 students in the New York area through its regional partnership with Long Island University. All told, more than 1 million students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade are involved.

The South Dakota native was welcomed at the William S. Covert Elementary School in Rockville Centre, one of the first schools to implement the program, by Dr. Kimberly R. Cline, President of Long Island University, the Northeast regional partner for Sanford Harmony.

“As we see more and more corrosive effects of bullying and school violence on our children in our society, the need for Sanford Harmony is greater than ever,” said Dr. Cline in a story reported by Newsday. She was joined by local educators as well as officials including Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and representatives for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Nassau County Executive Laura Curran.

“It really creates harmony among the kids,” Sanford told the Associated Press in a related story. “But as I said, the long-term goal is harmony among adults. Preventative medicine is the purpose of the whole program.”

Sanford was the guest speaker at LIU Post’s commencement ceremony in 2017.

The donation to the National University System, a network of nonprofit educational institutions, is the largest in its history and comes a year after Sanford gave the group $28 million.

According to Newsday, Dr. Michael Cunningham, Chancellor of the National University System, said that the additional money will be distributed on a per-capita basis across the country. So far 31 school districts in New York City and 22 on Long Island are participating. The goal is to reach 20 million students nationwide by 2023.

LIU Post Graduate Audrey Ney Gets Her First Role Off Broadway

Audrey Ney lights up the room in the Off-Broadway production of "Lewis & Tolkien: Of Wardrobes and Rings." (Photo courtesy Rising Images)

Taking the long view, Audrey Ney no doubt saw it coming. In many ways, the recent musical theater graduate (LIU Post ’17, BFA) has been preparing for her breakthrough role in “Lewis & Tolkien: Of Wardrobes and Rings”—now running Off Broadway at The Black Box Theater through June 14—since she was a little girl growing up in Nashville, Tenn. That’s when she surprised her mother by memorizing C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” and performing the classic children’s fantasy tale to her heart’s content—and her mother’s consternation.

“My mother finally said, ‘Oh, my gosh, you better start performing this for other people!’ ” recalled Audrey with a laugh.

Another moment in this narrative arc came in her fifth grade talent show when Audrey enacted the key moment in the book when Lucy—the youngest of the four intrepid Pevensie children—goes through the magical wardrobe and meets Tumnus, a mischievous faun, in the wintry woods of Narnia who, after some persuasion, decides not to take her to the wicked queen but instead to make her a cup of tea at his cozy home. Showing her theatrical versatility even then, Audrey played Lucy, Tumnus and the Narrator.

And so here she is on stage in the Rising Image production written by David Payne and directed by Marc Whitmore at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture on 18 Bleecker Street. Playing an American barmaid named Hattie, Audrey says she’s “a bright light” in the Rabbit Room at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England, where C.S. Lewis (David Payne) and J.R.R. Tolkien (Gordon Tett) had once been just two members of the Inklings writers’ club. Now, many years later, they return as two towering figures of 20th century English literature who’d had a serious falling out after Narnia rubbed up against Middle Earth.

“They disagreed on a lot of things but they still had a very deep friendship,” Audrey explains. “I think it’s a really important play today because so many friendships are breaking up because people aren’t really listening to each other.”

Audrey credits her LIU theater professors, Maria Porter, David Hugo and John Frazier, to name a few mentors, for helping her grow as an artist.

Thanks to Post Theater Company, she’s performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in 2014 and at The World Congress hosted by the International University Theater Association in Manizales, Columbia, in 2016. Now with Rising Image as both the Tour Manager and “Hattie,” she’s helped bring this two-act play across the country and to the UK. When this show’s run is over, Audrey plans to head to Chicago, which has a very lively theater scene.

“LIU was amazing for me,” Audrey said. “Post Theater Company literally took me around the world and taught me that I can be a theatre artist (actor, writer, director, designer, etc.) and I do not have to box myself in or be defined as only one thing in order to be a part of creating something spectacular.”

For tickets to “Lewis & Tolkien: Of Wardrobes and Rings,” contact The Sheen Center at www.SheenCenter.org or by phone at 212-925-2812.

Conference on Black Holes, Supernovas and Neutron Stars at LIU Brooklyn Is an Astronomical Success

On May 24th and 25th, LIU Brooklyn hosted the 21st Eastern Gravity Meeting featuring presentations on black holes, neutron stars and related topics in astrophysics.

Leading researchers in the field discussed their latest studies, including LIU Brooklyn’s Michael Ramsey, a recent Brooklyn Honors College graduate with a triple-major in physics, biology and psychology. Speakers also included Ph.D. students as well as tenured professors and veteran scientists, some from as far away as Mexico and South Korea.

Ramsey presented his award-winning talk on “Energy Extraction From Black Holes by Cosmic Strings.” He considered his presentation, and the event as a whole, a success.

“This is a very prestigious event,” Ramsey said. “The fact that we were selected to host it shows we are making enormous strides to be in the spotlight with prestigious institutions.” The Physics department was just reintroduced in the fall semester, after a decades-long absence.

Ramsey won the Jim Kirby Prize in Physics, Geology and Astronomy at the national honor society Alpha Chi’s 2018 convention held April 5-7 in Portland, Oregon. He said the freedom to use scientific jargon, given the audience of experts, made the speech come easier the second time around.

“It’s almost overwhelming at first, but at the same time, it’s comforting,” Ramsey said. “You almost feel in your own element.”

Dr. Zachariah Etienne, whose talk on colliding neutron stars headlined the meeting, also believes the conference boosts LIU’s reputation. “I think it improves the visibility a great deal,” he said. “You get people coming in from all over the region, sometimes around world.”

Etienne’s speech captivated the diverse crowd of visitors, drawing questions throughout and a huddle of undergrads around him upon conclusion. The discourse resembled a small TED talk, or perhaps what one might expect on a Special Features DVD for Interstellar.

In addition to his role as a professor at West Virginia University, Etienne serves as a scientist for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. In 2015, LIGO first detected gravitational waves. Then, on August 17, 2017, the team recorded a collision of neutron stars for the first time in human history. Etienne’s enthusiasm when describing the breakthrough was palpable and contagious.

“It’s absolutely beyond all belief,” he said. “A sugar cube of neutron star is as massive as Mount Everest, and we’re taking two of these guys more massive than the sun and just annihilating each other at almost the speed of light. It’s insane.”

Scientists now believe these collisions created most of the gold in our universe, according to Etienne. Hence the title of his speech: “When Neutron Stars Collide! Gravitational Waves, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and the Ring on Your Finger.”

Etienne recalled how a decade ago he would give a similar presentation on gravitational waves, only with a caveat. “We’re going to have to build instruments more sensitive than we’ve ever built in the history of humanity,” he would say. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do it.”

That was before LIGO. Now, with a mix of scientific amazement and boyish pride, he says, “We did it. We did it.”

Etienne is good friends with LIU Physics professor Steve Liebling, who served as the event’s emcee. The two met long before the discovery of gravitational waves. Liebling was happy that LIU got to host the Gravity Meeting because it drew undergraduates to the program.

“I think it’s good for our students,” Liebling said. “Our students get to see: physics is not some boring book they have to read. It’s cool stuff.”

While Etienne pointed out the benefit for students to get used to defending their work in public, he also thinks it’s good for scientists themselves.

“I always come back from conferences pretty motivated because there are people who really care about what I’m doing,” Etienne said. “Being able to give talks to experts in the field, getting feedback and building connections: it’s part and parcel to being a scientist.”

 

 

 

 

On June 1st LIU Brooklyn Makes First NCAA Baseball Tournament Appearance Since 1972

The Blackbirds celebrate their NEC championship win at Dodd Stadium in Norwich, Conn., after beating Wagner College 8-5 on May 26. [Photo courtesy LIU Brooklyn]

On Friday evening, June 1, in South Carolina, the Northeast Conference championship-winning LIU Brooklyn baseball team is playing in the NCAA tournament for the second time in its history. Their last appearance was in 1972, when the Blackbirds went 1-2 in the District 2 regional game then held at Princeton, N.J.

The Blackbirds (31-24, 16-12 NEC) are the No. 4 seed at the 2018 regional championship. Starting at 6 p.m., they’ll take on the top seed—and hometown host—the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers (42-17, 23-7 Sun Belt) at Spring Brooks Stadium in Conway, South Carolina. The Chanticleers, ranked No. 20 in the nation in NCAA’s latest Division 1 poll, won the College World Series in 2016. The double-elimination format means that LIU Brooklyn will take on either the winner or the loser of the UConn/Washington game taking place at noon on June 1.

The games will air on ESPN3, with Richard Cross on the play by play and Jay Powell providing the color commentary. It’s also streaming on the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds’ website.

With their NEC Championship win last week, the Blackbirds set several new marks for LIU’s baseball program. They won their 31st game—a record for Brooklyn—and took their first-ever NEC Tournament title.

Reaching this round is a major achievement for the Blackbirds baseball coach Dan Pirillo (LIU ’08), now in his second year at the team’s helm.

Nor has this accomplishment escaped notice in the sports world. The Washington Post ran an Associated Press story about the team, referring to a sign hanging in the Blackbirds’ dugout all season. It showed a Northeast Conference preseason baseball coaches’ poll predicting that Brooklyn would finish fifth out of seven teams in the NEC.

“No one really believed in us,” senior outfielder Dom Paiotti told the reporter, “except for us.”

Forbes Ranks LIU Top “Hot College in the Making”

LIU has experienced unprecedented growth and has made significant strides toward becoming a nationally recognized research and teaching institution.

Forbes rated Long Island University one of the top “hot colleges in the making” under innovative management. Citing its focus on experiential learning, Forbes noted that University President Dr. Kimberly Cline is “one to watch.” With a campus in “hipster-haven” Brooklyn, Forbes recommended LIU as a strong “momentum investment.”

LIU has also seen a second consecutive double-digit rise in our U.S. News and World Report rankings to number 102 in the North and has received other prestigious accolades including: Master’s Programs Guide’s recent rating of The Palmer School of Library and Information Science as No. 17 on its list of the nation’s 50 best programs, and LIU Post’s designation as one of The Princeton Review’s Green Colleges.

 

 

LIU plans NY Metropolitan Area’s First Veterinary College with Governor Cuomo’s Announcement of $12M in State Transformative Funds

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that LIU would receive $12 million in state funding to help open the region's only veterinary medicine college. [Photo courtesy Suffolk County Democratic Committee)

New York State is investing $12 million to help build the College of Veterinary Medicine at LIU Post as part of the state’s $72 million investment to support three transformative local health care initiatives, it was announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on May 18.

The University is creating the new College to help fill a void in the industry. Currently, there are only 30 schools of veterinary medicine in the United States and just three are in the Northeast. None of these is located in the New York metropolitan area.

In a story reported by Newsday,  Cuomo said that the new LIU veterinary school in Brookville, in conjunction with projects proposed for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Northwell Health in Manhasset, would give a big boost to the region’s push to develop biotechnology—and further the creation of a “research corridor” on Long Island.

“We have to invest in the future economy,” Cuomo reportedly told the Long Island Association, a non-profit business advocacy group, at its annual dinner held in Woodbury last Friday night. “The future economy, I believe, and more importantly you believe, is going to be in the life sciences cluster.”

Pending approval, LIU’s College of Veterinary Medicine hopes to enroll 100 students each year in a four-year doctoral program.

As quoted in Newsday, LIA President Kevin Law said that these three projects that the governor wants to fund “are going to significantly strengthen the research corridor that we have been trying to establish on Long Island, from Brookhaven National Laboratory to the Genome Center in Manhattan.”

LIU Brooklyn Alumnus Josh LaMore Authors New Book About Utah’s Cedar Breaks National Monument

Josh LaMore stands on a promontory overlooking Cedar Breaks National Monument in southern Utah.

Josh LaMore, who graduated from LIU Brooklyn Honors College as the class valedictorian in May 2014, has turned his experience in Utah’s rocky wonderlands into a breathtaking new book called “Beauty Beyond Telling: The Story of Cedar Breaks National Monument.”

Established as a protected area by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Cedar Breaks resembles a giant coliseum stretching three miles across, full of colorful stone spires, arches and pinnacles, known as hoodoos. From an elevation of 10,000 feet, it drops 2,000 feet to the canyon floor. The first nation peoples of the area call it the “Circle of Painted Cliffs.”

Commissioned and published by the Zion National Park Forever Project, the book project is a result of LaMore’s work as the National Collegiate Honors Council’s first Partners in the Parks Fellow.

LaMore credits LIU Professor Joan Digby, director of the LIU Post Honors College, and Southern Utah University for instigating the Partners and coordinating his fellowship.

Born in Illinois, LaMore said he’d never spent any time in a national park until the summer of his junior year when he and another LIU classmate joined a group of students at Sequoia National Park. They hiked deep into the Sierra Mountains and spent a week in the remote wilderness working on a project for the Park Service to reintroduce native plant species to their former habitats.

That fall he returned to Brooklyn to begin his senior year but the seed had been planted in his mind that he must get back to nature.

“It was incredible,” LaMore said. “It was like I had found a large part of myself that I didn’t know!”

Once he learned that the National Collegiate Honors Council had come up with enough funding for a fellowship, he knew he had to apply. He got the position.

“So, right after I finished my valedictorian speech, the next day I’m on a plane to Utah and living 20 miles from town,” he recalled.

His role at Cedar Breaks was to be an interpretative Park Ranger intern for the summer of 2014, giving 15-20 minute talks to visitors on the unique history of Cedar Breaks—and how it came to be.

The challenge was explaining half a billion years’ worth of geological transformation without using the word “millions” since he encountered some listeners who apparently believed that “the Earth is only 5,000 or 7,000 years old,” LaMore exclaimed. Complicating that notion is that records of human habitation in the area date back 10,000 years at least. “I had to be very sensitive with what I said,” LaMore added.

During his fellowship, he saw the need for a new book about Cedar Breaks because the visitor center had a publication less than a dozen pages long which completely ignored the compelling cultural history of the area and cited incorrect and outdated geology.

“We’re at the edge of the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin region,” LaMore said. “When you stand at the edge overlooking the beautiful amphitheater and all the rock formations below, that’s actually the cut-off between them.”

With encouragement from the park superintendent and the chief of interpretation and education, LaMore came up with a book proposal. Once his project was approved, LaMore got to work. What surprised him was discovering the competing narratives recounting the centuries of human interaction with the region, from the Paiutes to the early Spanish explorers, the Mormon settlers and the federal government.

“I teetered back and forth with all the different perspectives,” LaMore said. He’s immensely pleased with the final result. “I’m very happy with it.”

Currently, LaMore is a graduate student at Pratt Institute working on his master’s in library information science, which he hopes to receive this December. He’s also been a Museum of Modern Art library fellow and a freelance book editor and researcher. LaMore received an Academy of American Poets Award and was recognized in Z Publishing’s “New York’s Best Emerging Poets.” This fall he hopes to release a fully illustrated book of lyrical prose he calls, “Breaklands,” which draws upon his Utah journals.

“I never expected to be involved in writing!” said LaMore, who had toured with an alt-rock-punk band he started when he was 16. “I had an English teacher laugh at me when I expressed how much I hated English in high school. She told me that I would end up studying English later in life!”

These days it’s safe to say that the prescience of all LaMore’s teachers—especially the faculty who inspired him at LIU—has been richly rewarded.

LIU Brooklyn to Host Conference on Cutting Edge Research in Astrophysics

Gravity will surely be making waves this week when LIU Brooklyn hosts the 21st Eastern Gravity Meeting on May 24 and May 25 featuring presentations on black holes, neutron stars and astrophysics.

This annual regional conference is held to encourage the interaction of researchers in the Northeast from undergraduate students to faculty interested in all areas of gravitational physics.

The big event will be a talk open to the public this Thursday at 6 p.m. by Dr. Zachariah Etienne, an assistant professor of mathematics at West Virginia University, whose theme is “When Neutron Stars Collide! Gravitational Waves, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and the Ring on Your Finger.”

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe, including colliding neutron stars and black holes. A neutron star, born from a supernova explosion, is so dense that one teaspoon of it would hold as much mass as Mount Everest.

Etienne is a member of an international team of 1,200 researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration, whose discoveries have made world-wide news.

In 2015, LIGO first detected gravitational waves. On Oct. 16, 2017, LIGO announced that its team had directly detected colliding neutron stars for the first time. Albert Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 when he released his general theory of relativity.

“Gravitational wave observatories are opening a new window on the universe,” Dr. Etienne told West Virginia University’s Neuron magazine. In high school he said he “would devour all of the popular science books at the library written by famous physicists like Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg. Learning about the weird implications of modern physics captivated my imagination.”

Thursday’s topics start with “Black Holes” at 9 a.m. after a brief welcome by Dr. Scott Krawczyk, Dean of the Conolly College of Liberal Arts, which is hosting the conference.

At 10:15 a.m., LIU Brooklyn’s Michael Ramsey, a Brooklyn Honors College senior triple-majoring in physics, biology and psychology, will be presenting his award-winning talk on “Energy Extraction From Black Holes by Cosmic Strings.”

All talks will be in room LLC 116. The entrance to LLC, building 7 on the LIU Brooklyn campus map, is on the right underneath building 12, which hangs over the large central walkway running through the campus north to south.

The complete schedule of talks can be found here. Seating is limited. Etienne’s public talk promises to be entertaining and accessible to all–even those without a physics major.

 

 

LIU Brooklyn Class of 2018 Graduates!

While it may have been rainy outside, the future looked bright inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where Long Island University President Dr. Kimberly Cline conferred more than 2,000 degrees to students graduating from LIU Brooklyn and LIU Hudson at the 60thannual commencement ceremony.

LIU Trustee Al Kahn conferred an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree to Michael Tadross, a notable Hollywood producer born in Brooklyn, N.Y. As part of Warner Brothers, he produced a roster of smash hit movies including “Sherlock Holmes,” “I Am Legend” and “Oceans Eight.” His other projects included “Hitch,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Die Hard with a Vengeance.”

“My great philosophers are all from Brooklyn,” Taros, shown here with President Cline, pronounced in his commencement speech. “Like actor Steve Buscemi, who looked at me and said, ‘There’s a certain type of character you meet if you grow up in Brooklyn or Long island. It’s a mixture of moxie, heart and a wise guy sense of humor.’”

His favorite quote, he told the packed audience of friends, families and graduates, came from his friend Larry King, who said, “A D student from Brooklyn can be the governor of Oregon.”

Tadross urged the graduates to reach for the stars and take nothing for granted.

Congratulations to the Class of 2018!

LIU Brooklyn Inducts 96 Students into National Society of Leadership and Success

LIU Brooklyn welcomes its new members of the National Society of Leadership and Success.

LIU Brooklyn held its first induction ceremony for 96 students who joined the National Society of Leadership and Success on May 7.

The National Society of Leadership and Success is the nation’s largest leadership honor society, where top students nominated by their colleges come together to achieve their goals. Candidacy is a nationally recognized achievement of honorable distinction.  With 598 chapters, the Society currently has 870,894 members nationwide.  In addition to honorable distinction, the Society provides a step-by-step program for members to build their leadership skills through participation at their campus. Membership is for life and provides access to benefits including scholarships and awards, exclusive on-campus events, employer recruitment through an online job bank, and discounts on computers, textbooks, grad school prep courses, insurance and much more.

LIU Brooklyn’s Promise Staff members Abigail Bryant started this chapter of the organization on campus and Mikaela Williams took over the efforts to make this accomplishment possible.

A total of 226 students began the process of joining the National Society of Leadership and Success at LIU Brooklyn. The remaining 130 candidates hope to complete it during the Fall 2018 semester.

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