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Applying analyses designed by City College of New York biologist Mike Hickerson , a team of international researchers is challenging a commonly held view that explains how so many species of birds ended up in the Neotropics, an area rich in rain forest extending from Mexico to the southernmost tip of South America. It is home to the most bird species on Earth. "The unanswered question has been—how did this extraordinary bird diversity originate?" said Dr. Brian Smith , lead author of a paper on the subject published in the journal "Nature" this week and an assistant curator at the American

Alma mater to honor polio vaccine pioneer’s 100th birthday with symposium on disease he helped defeat The City College of New York will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Jonas Salk, one of its most distinguished alumni, with a symposium 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Thursday, October 23, in the Great Hall of Shepard Hall, on the CCNY campus. The "Jonas Salk Centenary Symposium: Polio, Vaccines & Infectious Disease – Science, History & Social Significance," will bring to City College several renowned medical experts. They will honor Dr. Salk who graduated from CCNY in 1934 and

Biologists claim that humans can perceive and distinguish a trillion different odors, but little is known about the underlying chemical processes involved. Biochemists at The City College of New York have found an unexpected chemical strategy employed by the mammalian nose to detect chemicals known as aldehydes. According to a team led by CCNY Associate Professor of Chemistry Kevin Ryan and Columbia biologist Stuart Firestein , some of the nose's many aldehyde receptors don't detect the aldehyde by its structure and shape directly. Rather, the aldehyde is recognized by its ability to undergo a

City College of New York administrator Doris Cintrón and Juan Carlos Mercado, a dean and author, will receive Simon Bolivar Career Achievement awards Thursday, October 2, from CCNY's Latino Alumni group. They will be honored at the group's seventh annual awards dinner for their services to the Latino-American community and the City of New York. The event starts at 6 p.m. in the faculty dining room, third floor, North Academic Center, on the City College campus. The Latino Alumni group is an affiliate of the Alumni Association of The City College of New York. It hailed Dr. Cintrón, the senior

" Searching for Zion " (Grove Press, 2014), the critically acclaimed work by City College of New York Associate Professor of English Emily Raboteau , has won the 2014 American Book Award . Professor Raboteau will receive the award October 26 at the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco, Calif. In their 35th year, the awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. They were established by The Before Columbus Foundation which will honor 15 other winners. This is the latest accolade for "Zion," a work of

To understand how the repeated climatic shifts over the last 120,000 years may have influenced today's patterns of genetic diversity, a team of researchers led by City College of New York biologist Dr. Ana Carnaval developed a new biodiversity metric called "phylogeographic endemism." It quantifies the degree to which the genetic variation within species is restricted in geographical space. Dr. Carnaval, an assistant professor of biology, and 14 other researchers from institutions in Brazil, Australia and the United States, analyzed the effects of current and past climatic variation on the

More than $5 million in federal research grants has been awarded to four City College of New York researchers in the interdisciplinary CUNY Institute for Macromolecular Assemblies . The funding is from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Defense (DoD). The recipients, all principal investigators for their respective projects, are: Professor Ranajeet Ghose , chemistry; $1,024,780 from the NSF for his five-year project, "Conformational Dynamics and Regulatory Interactions in a Bacteriophage RNA Polymerase Complex." Assistant Professor

Competition among species can cause geographical isolation In a study that could alter traditional notions in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, three City College of New York researchers present results indicating that competition between two species can lead to the geographic isolation of one of them. The finding by biologists Eliecer E. Gutiérrez , Robert A. Boria and Robert P. Anderson is the cover story in the August issue of the Swedish-published journal "Ecography" under the title, " Can biotic interactions cause allopatry? Niche models, competition, and distributions of

State officials have approved The City College of New York's plan for implementing Governor Andrew Cuomo's Start-Up New York initiative at CCNY. "We're now bona fide participants of Start-Up and several dozen companies have expressed interest in participating in our plan program," announced Dr. Ashiwel Undieh, CCNY's associate provost for research who is leading the College's Start-Up program. "The next step is to engage wider faculty participation and identify space on or off campus to house the program." Start-Up New York is Governor Cuomo's plan to transform university campuses, including

" Zone Morality ," philosophy Professor David Weissman 's seventh book since 2000, is one of several titles by City College of New York faculty this summer and fall. The 128 page hardcover published by Walter De Gruyter, Inc. describes systems - families and businesses - and moral codes created by the causal reciprocities of their members. Other faculty publications include: " Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life" (Oxford University Press) by Jeffrey M. Blustein, Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy; " Inequality in the