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Cornell debuts biotech, pharma management program

Networking at Cornell Tech

As biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals continue efforts to make advances in medicinal drug formulation, safety and efficacy, experts in the field are implementing innovations to address regulatory hurdles, research costs and global health challenges.

The new Biotech and Pharmaceutical Management Program offered through the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy is designed to give leaders the opportunity to explore industry trends and cutting edge research with a cohort of peers, executives and renowned faculty from the university.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle.

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Pre-college big data certificate offered free to Cornell community

Close-up of hands typing on a laptop

A new pre-college certificate program designed to help high school students develop data analysis skills complementary to a wide range of academic and professional fields will be offered at no cost to the children of Cornell faculty and staff and underserved students nominated by local high schools and other partners.

“Big Data for Big Policy Problems,” offered by eCornell in collaboration with Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the School of Continuing Education, is a rigorous, non-credit version of the course offered to Cornell students.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle.

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New Cornell certificate emphasizes dialogue in DEI

Photo of group dialogue with one young woman facing camera.

In 2020, hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion roles surged. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, three years later – amid recession fears – companies are cutting DEI leadership positions at a rapid and disproportionate rate, leaving practitioners to seek new ways of continuing efforts to create welcoming work environments.

Dialogue for Change, a new online certificate program from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) delivered through eCornell, provides a fresh approach to DEI for team managers and supervisors, executives and all employees interested in building equitable cultures.

“The certificate focuses on four key development areas: human connection, social identity, intergroup communication and strategic change,” said Adi Grabiner-Keinan, executive director for academic DEI education and director of the IDP. “Our goals are to develop participants’ awareness around the four development areas and to strengthen their capacity to make meaningful change at personal, interpersonal and institutional levels.”

Together with Lisa Nishii, vice provost for undergraduate education and professor in the Cornell ILR School, Grabiner-Keinan is co-author of the Dialogue for Change certificate. The duo intends for the program to help professionals promote sustainable institutional change no matter their position on the organizational chart.

In three courses – Counteracting Unconscious Bias, Dialogue Across Difference and Strategic Influence – participants learn and practice skills for intentional connection and communication, and examine ways to impact change in different spheres of influence, including within their teams and organizations. These skills, according to Grabiner-Keinan, are crucial well beyond the field of DEI.

“Skills such as active and generative listening, strategic questioning, purposeful sharing, perspective-taking, withholding judgment and questioning assumptions allow us to lead, communicate and collaborate effectively,” Grabiner-Keinan said. “They enable us to broaden our perspective, learn from a variety of people and situations, bring people together, think creatively and create meaning and vision. Unfortunately, such skills are seldom taught in schools or colleges.”

Dialogue for Change engages students in weekly live sessions. Trained IDP facilitators guide participants through practice conversations within small groups of experts and peers. Each dialogue builds on earlier coursework, enabling the cohort to use new knowledge in real time. Students who complete the program earn professional development credit hours toward human resources and project management certifications.

Each student who earns the Dialogue for Change certificate, Grabiner-Keinan says, will recognize their power to foster inclusion, connection and equity in any role. “An integral part of this program is to identify the agency and responsibility that each of us has. It’s true that leaders and supervisors have more power in institutions, but this program helps people understand that they all have power to make change interpersonally and institutionally within their workplaces.”

The Dialogue for Change certificate program is now enrolling students. Visit the program website to learn more.

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eCornell, non-profit partners tackle economic mobility

Inside the bustling Bethel Gospel Assembly and Beth-Hark Christian Counseling Center in Harlem, Minister Lyneese Straws responds to a daily rush of requests from congregants, volunteers and community members. Each person gets her full attention.

She understands that even brief interactions can change lives.

More than a decade ago, Straws transitioned from receiving services from New York-based not-for-profit Dress for Success to volunteering for the organization — just in time for its collaboration with QVC for the first National Makeover Day. As cosmetics entrepreneur Bobbi Brown applied her makeup, Straws shared that she possessed a cosmetology license and education in business: the right foundation for a beauty marketing career.

“It was unbelievable when Bobbi asked, ‘Are you working now?’ I said no,” Straws recalled. “She said, ‘Good. Now you work for me.’”

An interview in the same week secured Straws’ nine years of employment with Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. When the role ended — on the verge of the COVID-19 pandemic — she relied on severance, investments and unemployment payments, and struggled to maintain housing for her family. She returned to volunteering, this time through Bethel Gospel Assembly’s food pantry and soup kitchen at Beth-Hark.

“I’d been volunteering for six months. Beth-Hark’s former operations manager, Kendall Glaspie, under the guidance of Executive Director Michelle P. Robinson, saw leadership skills in me and asked if I wanted to participate in a pilot program with eCornell,” Straws said. “Earlier in the year, I saw an ad for eCornell and I looked at courses, but I didn’t have the funding. When opportunities like that fall in your lap, you know it’s purpose. It’s by design.”

United Way of New York City, a Beth-Hark partner, is one of several organizations participating in eCornell Transform. The new program gives working adults from underserved communities no-cost access to online courses and certificates from Cornell University, powered by eCornell, with the core goal of supporting economic mobility for all.

“The eCornell Transform program is unique because it taps into existing relationships, through our nonprofit partners, to determine a community’s workforce needs and identify adults who could meet those needs with additional training and support,” said Joanne Troutman, director of social impact programs for eCornell. “By extending educational opportunities from Cornell to those who otherwise would not have access, we aim to help individuals upskill and forge career paths that earn a living wage.”

eCornell recently completed its pilot of the Transform program, which ran in partnership with a handful of nonprofit organizations across the country, with a particular focus in New York state. With successful results across the board, eCornell now plans to secure additional partner funding and expand the program to participants in more locations.

Through the Transform program, Straws completed the Cornell project leadership certificate. The program’s six courses and live study group prepare students to influence teams, leverage emotional intelligence, drive project outcomes and foster healthy conflict. Straws’ favorite course, “Leading Project Teams,” offered her a forum of peers to discuss her work experience and ways to apply her new skills.

After completing the project leadership program last fall, she was promoted from volunteer to pantry and soup kitchen manager. In addition to ensuring smooth day-to-day operations for consumers, Straws performs administrative duties related to the center’s grants and food deliveries.

“I learned so much from the leadership certificate with Cornell. It taught me about myself and how to deal with others in team settings,” she said. “I’ve been able to use what I learned in running the pantry, and I manage over 15 volunteers in a week. It’s about getting to know the volunteers and the consumers, calling them by their names, knowing their faces, developing relationships and serving everyone in excellence.”

Earning the project leadership certificate has been vital in helping Straws serve her larger community as well. She employs skills from the program at Bethel Gospel Assembly where she co-directs ministries for adults and teens, during team ministry engagements at Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx and in her own marketing consulting business, Just Jump Brandstorming.

Her next step is to complete studies for a real estate license as she develops plans to create a one-stop-shop transitional housing complex that will also offer makeovers, counseling, pantry services and more.

She also hopes to complete additional certificates through eCornell.

“These are all pieces of a puzzle to make the vision come to fruition. Being a part of the Transform program opened doors for me,” Straws said. “It was invaluable because I was able to apply it to so many areas of my life — in ministry, in helping the community, within myself. In every moment, God allows me to be a part of the bigger picture, which is to help rebuild someone’s life.”

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Crypto Regulation: Can Securities Laws Keep Pace with Innovation?

Nearly everyone agrees that the crypto asset market needs more robust regulation, but there is much disagreement about what the laws should look like as well as who should be legislating and enforcing them.

One key concern is whether crypto assets are commodities or securities, which raises crucial issues about which governing organization should be responsible for oversight and enforcement. Additionally, laws are struggling to keep pace with technological innovation, thereby increasing the potential for scams, fraud and poor practice.

Charles Whitehead, Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law at Cornell Law School and author of Cornell’s Securities Law certificate, discussed the shifting regulatory environment around crypto and what’s next for the revolutionary technology in a recent webcast, “Crypto Regulation: Can Securities Laws Keep Pace with Innovation?”

In the U.S., there are several regulatory bodies overseeing crypto assets. Does this make sense, and if not, why?

It’s referred to as the regulatory alphabet here in the United States: SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). It’s a reflection of the way in which we think historically about how to regulate the industry. The problem is that over time the historical distinctions have fallen away. What may or may not be a banking practice can now pop up in the securities industry. The way we think about regulation and the industry has changed over time, largely reflecting the innovation in the industry itself. Crypto is highlighting a fundamental flaw with the U.S approach to financial regulation, which is that we don’t have a central regulator.

There needs to be a focus on anti-fraud. There needs to be a focus on protecting consumers. The real debate is who is going to do this. I would suggest it’s the SEC.

Why is the SEC uniquely positioned to oversee this?

The SEC is a consumer financial regulator. Their fundamental goal is to protect consumers. They were set up with a view toward protecting retail investors. The regulations that the SEC has for broker dealers, exchanges and people that take custody of these assets were intended to protect investors against the things that you see with FTX: people losing money and the scams that are out there right now. The SEC already has a toolkit, and it makes sense for the SEC to pick this up.

Is crypto more like a currency than a security? It seems like that is how it’s being used or advertised. Why not categorize it that way?

If I were taking crypto and buying a sandwich with it, that would look much more like a currency. That is something that really doesn’t need the protections of the securities laws. To the extent that it’s being used as a way to promote investment, it begins to look a lot more like a security.

Crypto assets are used primarily as speculative investments, which is not in line with the stated vision of most projects out there. How should regulators navigate this?

The whole rationale behind crypto assets was decentralization — a way to create a non-centralized, non-government-controlled medium of exchange across multiple parties. The vision was that it would provide banking attributes without necessarily having a bank, that you’d be able to use crypto assets as a means to support parts of the community that otherwise were not being properly supported by the financial industry. That’s largely not been the case. You can argue that in some cases people pursuing crypto deals are taking advantage of the folks that crypto initially was intended to support.

There will come a time when crypto will begin to look more like a commodity or more like a currency. In that case, the need for regulation drops away. We’re just not there yet. There should be a regulator focused on consumer protection precisely because of the scams.

One of the throughlines here is technological innovation. Law is unable to keep pace, and that creates an environment with increasing potential for fraud like what we saw with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

FTX is a huge blow to the integrity of the industry just because FTX was viewed as the safe place in which you could do trading activity. The other part is it was done offshore in the Bahamas, so it was being done away from the direct regulatory oversight that you might otherwise see. A large part of what was happening there would have been either prohibited or regulated were we to treat these underlying instruments as securities.

You can’t trust the markets to police themselves. This is a common view that the market will police itself, and that if there had been a problem with FTX, it would have been uncovered much earlier because the market or participants in the market would have seen this. In an enthusiastic market like crypto, you don’t see that type of oversight.

As of August 2022, whitehouse.gov. tells us that the estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto assets are between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt hours per year. Is there any push to regulate this side of things?

There already are rules in place and government groups like the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency that have the ability to step in, look at the issues and potentially regulate the usage of electricity, consistent with their mandate for environmental protection and energy conservation.

I would ask not whether we should look at this but whether we’re being broad enough. If electricity is an issue and energy is an issue for crypto, let’s look at the New York Stock Exchange and stocks and bonds that are trading. I believe there are huge amounts of energy being expended there as well.

Want more? Explore Charles Whitehead’s Securities Law certificate program delivered by eCornell.

This post has been edited for length and clarity.

Hear more from Whitehead in the webcast “Crypto Regulation: Can Securities Laws Keep Pace with Innovation?”

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Entrepreneurship program emboldens spice startup founder

For Abena Foli, the farm-to-table lifestyle is a birthright. Each day she uses the knowledge she gained from growing up on her father’s farm in Ghana to enrich her career as a food scientist and regulatory affairs leader.

“Working in the food industry, I get to sit in marketing ideation sessions, and research and development meetings. Whenever we talk about innovation in ingredients or products, West Africa is never mentioned,” said Foli, who now lives in Texas. “There was a lack of West African-originated products on shelves. I wanted to leverage my food science background as well as my West African heritage to solve that problem.”

She decided to start small for maximum impact: “When people are new to cuisines,” she said, “they tend to try seasonings first.”

Foli founded POKS Spices in 2016 to bring flavors from West Africa into American home kitchens. In 2021, she became one of the 60,000 women to participate in the certificate program offered by the Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship at Cornell, which is managed by the Cornell Law School and powered by eCornell.

Funding from Bank of America makes it possible for the students to gain the skills and resources to build a successful venture – and earn a business certificate from the university – at no cost.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle Website.

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New Sustainable Tourism program charts course for travel’s future

At the intersection of travel and sustainability is sustainable tourism, a response to the growing need for the travel industry to ensure host communities receive socioeconomic benefits and are protected from adverse environmental effects. As business rebounds in the pandemic’s fourth year, tourism professionals are strategizing to reduce the “invisible burden” of tourism and address unprecedented challenges.

The Sustainable Tourism Asset Management Program (STAMP) – part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business – recently launched Sustainable Tourism Destination Management, a self-paced online course designed to train hospitality and tourism leaders in managing destination assets.

Delivered by eCornell, the course equips professionals working in a wide array of destinations with data-driven methods for measuring the impacts of tourism, managing natural resources, creating climate action plans and tracking economic development goals.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle Website.

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The Perfect Match: Pairing Beer with Food

Open a restaurant menu and you will often find a specific wine suggested to pair with a particular dish. But what if you prefer a crisp lager over a fruity Riesling? Certain beers pair just as well with food as wine does: Hefeweizen goes nicely with haddock, for instance, while IPAs are a fine complement to spicy food.

Restaurants all over the country are incorporating beer into their menus, and those who enjoy entertaining at home are considering their own menus. Is it OK to braise a turkey in pilsner? Which dark ale should you add to a beef carbonnade? Understanding the different flavors and complexities of beer can help turn any meal into an unforgettable experience.

In our recent keynote, “The Perfect Match: Pairing Beer with Food,” we explore beer styles and dish combinations with our expert panel: Doug Miller, lecturer in the Cornell University Nolan School of Hotel Administration and author of the Beer Essentials certificate program; Ari Sanders, director of tavern operations at Fullsteam Brewery; and Michael Wille, associate professor of culinary arts at the Culinary Institute of America.

What are some basic rules about pairing food with beer?

Wille: “When I’m trying to pair food and beer, I usually look for things like the flavor impact of the beer; that can range anywhere from delicate to intense. I’m looking at the body of the beer and the type of food I’m pairing it with. Some beers can be light and citrusy and fizzy. Others can kind of have malt characteristics and be dark and caramelly.

I’m usually trying to find harmonies within the flavors. You also might want to look for contrasts. If you have something in your food that might be fatty, you might want to cut that with something acidic, light, or fizzy in the beer. Harmonies and contrast, I think, are two of the most important things to take into consideration.”

Miller: “Look for how the food’s being prepared. Is it fried, so potentially more fat content? Is it grilled, so does it have a smoky element to it, in the case of a steak? Build mostly off the protein. The sauce can come into play, if there is a sauce, but I would key your pairing off how it’s being prepared and the protein or the main component of that dish.”

Is there a hard and fast rule when it comes to pairing beer with food like with wine? For example, most of us think about pairing a white wine with chicken. Does that relate to beer as well?

Wille: “When you have high alcohol, that’s going to usually intensify the heat in a dish. But when you begin to understand some of the flavors and tastes of different styles of beers and you understand complementing and contrasting, the rules are there to be broken.”

Sanders: “I’ve always thought about it as, ‘What does meat eat?’ Meat eats grain. What’s beer made of? Grain. I think beer is always a very natural complement to food. I do think it’s very important to have some intentionality when you decide to set a pairing up. What are you trying to show off? Do you want to break the palate up to reset for the next dish? Are you trying to show off the light buttery complexity of a sauce? Are you trying to show off the richness of a red meat? What you are trying to accentuate when you make your pairing is really important. Intentionality is important, but play. I won’t say rules are meant to be broken; rules help us along the way to learning.”

With beer now becoming more prominent, have you seen a change in your students’ taste buds whereas before the major focus was on wine pairings?

Miller: “I started teaching a beer course 14 years ago at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, and I would have the students try a sour beer. They were ready to throw it back at me. They just thought there was something wrong with me. And I’m talking about world-class sours like Cantillon and 3 Fonteinen. Now my students love it. One of the reasons this might be the case is we’re looking at the generation that grew up eating Sour Patch candy and sour items, so they were more accustomed to having sourness in their diet.

Also, now they’re shifting away from IPAs. When I taught the class last spring, they were indifferent about IPAs. When it came to lager or pilsner-style beers, they were all in. I’m curious to see when I teach it this spring if this indifference on IPA continues and we have another transitional shift of what’s popular amongst students.”

IPAs can be bitter. Are there some foods to pair with it to make it more palatable?

Sanders: “IPA is probably the broadest category of beer available in America right now. You’ll see an IPA that’s sitting at 135 IBUs, which is how we measure bitterness, and you’ll see one that reads sweet and juicy – almost like lemonade. What I would encourage is to think about what type of flavors you enjoy. Think about what a fruity, juicy, hazy IPA can go well with. I pair those about the way I would pair white wine, with fish or things with light buttery sauces. But every IPA is going to go great with a nice piece of fried chicken.”

Wille: “As chefs we say, ‘Fat is flavor.’ Any item that’s going to have that fat in there is going to be something that’s going to be strong enough to stand up to those IPAs and the bold flavors.”

Miller: “Also, make sure that your IPAs are fresh because IPAs do change. Those lovely, juicy, citrusy notes after about 60 days start changing to be more bitter. It’s not that they spoil or go bad, but the flavor profile changes.”

What are some things people should look for when trying to pick out a beer that they might like?

Miller: “I think the key thing is going to a place where you have a knowledgeable staff, go to your bottle shop or, depending on what state you’re in, a beer store, grocery store, whatever it may be; and talk to that knowledgeable person behind the counter. They could give you a lot of great insight about what just came in. They could make some suggestions on potential pairings. If you can get it from your local tap room or brewery, have a conversation with the people behind the counter. They’re a wealth of information and can help guide you through your beer journey.”

Sanders: “You know what you don’t like, and if you don’t like the food, you’re not going to like the pairing. If you know you don’t like bitter, it’s going to be hard to sell you on a super bitter IPA regardless. Be open to isolating what you don’t like and be open to saying, ‘I really like this thing. Help me find it.’ Again, knowledgeable staff is always key in that choice.”

Have you ever cooked with beer and what have you made?

Miller: “Yes, I’ve cooked with beer. If you look at countries like Belgium, they cook with beer on a regular basis. You go to a restaurant, and the chef is adding beer to the sauce, they’re braising with the beer. I think it also could be utilized if you have a little bit of barbecue sauce in a bottle – add a little beer in there just to shake it up and get the last little bit out. Then pour it into the pot. I use that sometimes.”

Sanders: “I always put beer in my pot roast. I generally use a dark beer. Any local stout I can find, I love in some pot roast. A good coffee porter is a great way to start braising off a pork loin. Sit it overnight in that coffee porter and then do a coffee rub. It’s one of my favorite things to do.”

Wille: “I agree with Ari on the stewing and braising. Those are fantastic culinary techniques where you do a combination of dry and moist cooking.

Ari and I were talking about battering and frying items. Beer is a really important component when you’re making a batter. When you dredge something like fish in flour and then you put it in a wet batter, that beer helps to aerate that batter and give it the light crispiness.”

What are your thoughts on a perfect beer to pair with heavy comfort food?

Wille: “I’m thinking about the malt flavor that’s going to be in those beers or maltiness, having that kind of sweetness that goes with heavy comfort food, so English-style brown ales or something along those lines.”

Miller: “I think it also depends on the weather, too. Being in Upstate New York in the winter, I’m thinking of something a little bit more robust, maybe a little bit higher alcohol, versus if you’re in Arizona where it’s still hot or Texas, maybe you are looking for something lighter like a pilsner or lager.”

What about food preparation? How might that impact pairing?

Wille: “I personally think it’s easier to craft the food to the beer. The beer has already been made, and it’s been put in the keg or the can or the bottle. When you have a taste of that beer, then you could start thinking about the notes that are in there or the alcohol content. Then you craft your food.”

What are the weirdest beers you’ve tried and were you pleasantly surprised?

Sanders: “It was a peated malt sour, and I was very surprised. It never occurred to me that the smokiness of scotch would even be nice soured.”

Wille: “The dill pickle sour, which I thought was a pretty cool, pretty weird beer. Professor Miller and I were talking about the possibilities with that, pairing it with a Reuben or a corned beef sandwich.”

Miller: “When I judged the New York State Brewers competition three years ago, the winner brewed a beer utilizing maple water. Not maple sap, but the maple water from the tree. It was absolutely delightful because it had a slight acidic note to it, almost like a sassafras note to it.”

What are your thoughts about new beer innovations?

Miller: “Beer is always reinventing. You’re now starting to look at new yeast drinks. There are students at Cornell that extracted yeast from an ancient Egyptian vessel and then brewed a beer with it just to see what would turn out. You’re starting to see innovation on lager styles. With the Craft Brewers Association, there are over 120 different beer styles recognized. Don’t get too deep in the weeds on the different variations of these beer styles. But that’s where the beer world is going. Beer is art right now.”

Final thoughts?

Wille: “When you’re pairing your food and your beer, taste both the food and the beer intermittently. Typically, you’ll have one of three outcomes: the food overpowers the beer, the beer overpowers the food, or the two products go so well together that they create more than the sum of their parts.”

Sanders: “The whole point of beer is community coming together, opening a glass, cheers-ing to friends and loved ones. If you like it, don’t be ashamed. Go out there, fly your flag about it. Enjoy the beer you enjoy.”

Miller: “Don’t get caught up in trying to make the perfect pairing. Just enjoy the company you’re with, enjoy the food, and enjoy the beer. Are there opportunities to get geeky on it? Absolutely. But don’t overthink it.”

Want more? Explore Doug Miller’s Beer Essentials certificate program delivered by eCornell.
This post has been edited for length and clarity. Experience the full keynote for “The Perfect Match: Pairing Beer with Food” on the eCornell website.