The Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Program promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell. Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year Laidlaw program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities. We’ll also share tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact laidlaw.scholars@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Niwaeli Kimambo will share her ongoing work in Eastern Africa that links rural land use change to domestic urban actors. The work uses remote sensing analysis to track the emergence of tree crops (e.g., pine, eucalyptus, and avocado). Remote sensing analysis is paired with spatially explicit fieldwork from Uganda and Tanzania to argue that the rural tree crop boom is linked to new, urban-based land users. Direct involvement of urban-based citizens in rural land use signals a profound regional shift in rural land ownership and land markets. Dr. Kimambo will discuss the implications of this shift for environmental policy like tree-based landscape restoration, local ‘land grabs’, as well as geographic study of cross-scale phenomena.

Basic research, and applying what we learn directly to enhance conservation efforts, is a primary focus of the Elephant Listening Project. About equal effort is targeted at gathering new data from the forests of Central Africa, pushing the boundaries of how we can use acoustic monitoring to achieve conservation goals, and building capacity in Central Africa to ensure sustainable conservation into the future.

While the use of innovative technology is a key part of what we do, good old basic observational studies also play a key role. Linking specific calls to interactions requires careful (and long) observation. At the same time, we strive to teach local assistants and researchers how to use the technology, building capacity in the next generation of conservationists.

The East Asia Program (EAP) offers several categories of fellowships and grants to support student and faculty research and study related to East Asia:

EAP Graduate Area Studies Fellowships East Asian Language Study Grants EAP Research Travel GrantsCan’t attend? Contact eap@cornell.edu.

The speaker, Jordan Blekking (Postdctoral Associate, Department of Global Development, Cornell) is investigating how smallholder farmers’ perceptions of environmental conditions vary across locations and how these perceptions inform their cropping decisions in areas experiencing high rainfall variability. Second, he uses publicly available, high resolution (<250m) remotely sensed products to investigate how urban food retail environments change as African urban areas grow. He has conducted research in Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa.

Declining soil health is a major challenge for smallholder farmers in Africa. Smallholders often struggle to align their intentions to improve soil health with on-farm behaviors. Using a longitudinal dataset collected by an NGO from 170 smallholders in Western Kenya, we examine the extent to which short message service (SMS) messages that are targeted toward specific behaviors can enhance the adoption of sustainable gardening practices following a six-month farmer field school training. We find that, on average, farmers that received timely SMS messages targeted to specific practices adopted 0.44 more practices during a one-year period (p <0.05), even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. We also tested whether framing related to community social norms were effective, but we did not find evidence that social norm framing improved adoption rates. These findings suggest that behaviorally targeted and temporally relevant SMS messaging can significantly increase the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. In-person messaging remains the most important avenue for information dissemination, but our findings illustrate how NGOs and other agricultural extension service providers can use SMS messages to maintain farmer engagement and adoption of sustainable practices following a training period.

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"Seeds of Survival is an exhibition at Cornell Botanical Gardens that honors the Black experience in the Americas dating back to the transatlantic slave trade1. The exhibition includes an outdoor plant display, audio tour and an indoor exhibit1. It focuses on food plants native to West Africa, such as black-eyed peas, okra and millet, that were used as provisions on the slave ships and became embedded in American cuisine21. The exhibition also highlights the cash crops, like sugarcane, cotton and tobacco, that fueled the transatlantic slave trade2."- Cornell Botanic Gardens

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