Faculty for the Future
Avery August Featured in Portraits of Extraordinary Individuals
Conducting research on diseases common in humans and animals alike allows Cornell immunologist Avery August to make discoveries otherwise impossible. Mice, for example, no longer develop asthma when a particular enzyme is targeted. This novel research begs the question: can scientists create new medicines that are similarly effective in humans?
August, Ph.D. '94, is professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Veterinary Medicine. His work is featured on the Portraits website.
previous entriesMessage from the Provost
Cornell faces a remarkable opportunity to secure new faculty members. During the next ten years, more than half of our distinguished faculty members will reach emeritus status. Cornell will need to hire 800 professors, a hiring rate that will not occur again in our lifetimes.
Our Vision
Because of the critical need to renew faculty ranks, faculty excellence is the top priority of Cornell’s Strategic Plan. Fully engaged in the process of discovery, Cornell’s faculty does pioneering research that influences numerous areas of knowledge. In an unusually collaborative culture, faculty members often work in multidisciplinary teams across departments, colleges, and schools. Accessible and dedicated teachers, they provide insight and inspiration that change students’ lives.
Our Plan
Our Plan for Faculty Renewal
The university has established a $100 million Cornell Faculty Renewal Fund to hire as many as 100 new faculty members per year for the next five years—a rate unprecedented at Cornell. New faculty will be hired in areas that are determined to be important academic disciplines now and in the years to come.
Our Plan for Faculty Diversity
Faculty turnover represents a historic opportunity to accelerate hiring that broadens diversity. With small-to-modest improvements in the gender diversity of faculty ranks during the past decade—roughly 27 percent of the faculty is female— we seek continued progress. We also seek greater progress in strengthening racial and ethnic diversity.
Our Priorities
We seek to raise $50 million in support of faculty renewal and $20 million in support of faculty diversity across our colleges and professional schools.
Faculty Renewal: To honor Cornell’s 150th anniversary in 2015 the university has announced a $50 million Faculty Renewal Sesquicentennial Challenge. The challenge will match multi-year gift commitments of $500,000 on a $1 for $1 basis. A gift of $500,000 ($100,000 per year for five years), for example, will leverage an additional $500,000 in faculty renewal matching funds, and the donor will receive gift credit of $1 million dollars.
Faculty Diversity: Current-use funds will assist with spouse support or other ways that can help the university to improve the gender and racial/ethnic composition of Cornell’s faculty as a new generation of teachers, researchers, and academic innovators is recruited.
This is being seen for the first time. Nobody else has seen this in the world.
The creative energy in the room was almost palpable. I think this is what happens when we hear surprising and mind-opening perspectives from those in very different disciplines.
The only way people learn is when their minds are occupied with a problem -- not listening to the problem but engaged in it.
The [Mellon] seminar allows me to be part of a sustained and vibrant intellectual community, thereby alleviating the sense of isolation that comes with relocation.
"Our university is on the cusp of unprecedented change. In the next decade more than half of our most distinguished teachers and scholars will be moving to emeritus status. That means that Cornell will need to hire 800 new faculty members. That's a hiring rate that will never occur again in our lifetimes."
Aging in the age of climate change
