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Professor Steven Tuber Shows Psychotherapists How Patient Responses Relate to Personality Traits “If I hold up a coffee mug and ask you to tell me what it is, it is easy for you to give me the correct answer, but you haven’t revealed anything about yourself,” says City College of New York Professor of Psychology Steven Tuber. “But if I ask you to describe something that is ambiguous I am giving you a problem, and how you make sense of it tells me something about yourself.” Projective tests, such as the Rorschach test, can help make sense of how a patient deals with ambiguity when clinicians

A new measure of obesity developed by a City College of New York researcher and a physician predicts early death better than BMI. BMI, or Body Mass Index, has long been the most common and convenient way to estimate a person’s percentage of body fat. Obesity is a leading cause of death worldwide. However, BMI is a poor predictor of when someone has entered the danger zone and is at risk of dying early. “One criticism leveled at BMI is that it doesn’t distinguish muscle and fat mass, so that it doesn’t tell you if you have too much fat,” said Dr. Nir Krakauer, assistant professor of civil

Floriana Garo, Class of 2011, is Miss World Contestant There is Colin Powell, statesman and author. There is also Jonas Salk, creator of the polio vaccine, and Andrew Grove whose Intel chip revolutionized computers. The list of notable City College of New York alumni is lengthy. Now add Floriana “Lola” Garo to the roll. A year after graduating from CCNY with a BS degree in International/Global Studies, the 5-foot-11 beauty queen who began her modeling career at City was chosen Miss Albania 2012. She will compete August 18 in the Miss World beauty pageant in China. But that’s not all. Segueing

Spitzer School Professor Lance Jay Brown Stewards Juried Competition That Leads to Development of Innovative Via Verde Project in South Bronx Via Verde, a new, 222-unit housing project in the South Bronx, is being hailed as a triumph of sustainability, affordability and beauty. “I don’t think there will be any housing studio (class) where students will not be looking at Via Verde as a case study,” says Lance Jay Brown, ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture in City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture. “For the next five years it will be the go-to project for how to integrate

Tradition, a Tribute to Townsend Harris, Dates to 1986 Continuing a tradition began more than a quarter of a century ago, Takayuki Ohguro, chair of the Shimoda City Assembly, will lead a 10-member delegation on a pilgrimage to The City College of New York July 18 to honor its founder Townsend Harris. This will be the 26th delegation from Shimoda, a city 60 miles southwest of Tokyo, to visit CCNY to pay homage to Mr. Harris, who founded what was then known as The Free Academy in 1847. He later opened the first U.S. consulate in Japan, where he is a revered figure. Mr. Ohguro’s party will

WHCR GM Angela Harden Receives Harlem Hospital Community Health Award, Congressional Recognition for Health Mission In a neighborhood where health issues are prevalent, Angela Harden, general manager of The City College of New York’s community radio station, WHCR 90.3 FM, has made spreading awareness and prevention to Harlem listeners one of her missions. Since 2006, the station has carried a weekly talk show, “Health in Harlem,” that offers practical information about medical problems that are prevalent in the community. In honor of her work, the Harlem Hospital Center’s (HHC) Community

Laser Technique Developed by CCNY and Berkeley Researchers Brings Ultrafast Computing Closer to Reality The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. Researchers from The City College of New York (CCNY) and the University of California Berkeley (UCB) used light to control the spin of an atom’s nucleus in order to encode information. The technique could pave the way for quantum computing, a long-sought leap forward toward computers with processing speeds many times faster than today’s

Kayhan Irani, a 2008 City College of New York graduate, Humaira Hansrod, a 2012 graduate from the Macaulay Honors College at City College and PhD candidate Susan M. Tsang have been awarded 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholarships for study and research abroad. Ms. Irani, a New York Emmy Award-winning screenwriter with a BA in Theatre and Social Change from the CUNY Baccalaureate program, will travel to India this fall. She will spend seven months in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and New Delhi researching early Parsi communities and embroidery for a play titled “Paisley” that she is writing. “For the entire

Study Finds Similar Patterns in Epidemic’s Movement Across United States and Marketing and Distribution of Food Products An international team of researchers’ study of the spatial patterns of the spread of obesity suggests America’s bulging waistlines may have more to do with collective behavior than genetics or individual choices. The team, led by City College of New York physicist Hernán Makse, found correlations between the epidemic’s geography and food marketing and distribution patterns. “We found there is a relationship between the prevalence of obesity and the growth of the supermarket

Gene Involved in Dementia Affects the Insulin Pathway, Reports Biology Professor Chris Li and Colleagues In recent years it became clear that people with diabetes face an ominous prospect – a far greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Now researchers at The City College of New York (CCNY) have shed light on one reason why. Biology Professor Chris Li and her colleagues have discovered that a single gene forms a common link between the two diseases. They found that the gene, known to be present in many Alzheimer’s disease cases, affects the insulin pathway. Disruption of this pathway is