Five of the 40 Nobel laureates who have Cornell affiliations: [left to right] Douglas D. Osheroff (1996 co-winner), Hans Bethe (1967 winner), David M. Lee (1996 co-winner), Roald Hoffmann (1981 winner), Robert C. Richardson (1996 co-winner)
Marks of Distinction
- Forty Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell as faculty members or students. The 2006–07 Cornell faculty included 3 Nobel laureates, a Crafoord Prize winner, 2 Turing Award winners, a Fields Medal winner, 2 Legion of Honor recipients, a World Food Prize winner, an Andrei Sakharov Prize winner, 3 National Medal of Science winners, 2 Wolf Prize winners, 5 MacArthur award winners, 4 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Eminent Ecologist Award recipients, a Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion recipient, a Presidential Early Career Award winner, 26 National Science Foundation CAREER grant holders, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research, a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award in Literature, a recipient of the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a recipient of the Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science, 2 Packard Foundation grant holders, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator grant holder, and a NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research) early career award winner.
- Cornell awarded the nation's first university degree in veterinary medicine and first doctorates in electrical engineering and industrial engineering. It awarded the world's first degree in journalism (and taught the first university course in that subject), and established the first four-year schools of hotel administration and industrial and labor relations.
College of Veterinary Medicine
- Cornell endowed the nation's first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. It was the first U.S. university to offer a major in American studies.
- Cornell is the only Ivy League/Ancient Eight university that also is its state's federal land-grant institution; whose official motto is in English ("I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study"—Ezra Cornell); and whose board of trustees includes student, faculty, and staff voting members. It was the first among all U.S. colleges and universities to allow undergraduates to borrow books from its libraries.
- Cornell was the first university to teach modern Far Eastern languages. Cornell's Full-Year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) program provides unusually comprehensive and intensive one-year study of Chinese or Japanese.
- Cornell University Press was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States and is one of the country's largest university presses.
- The New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center is a pioneer in biomedical technology. Its alliance with Columbia University's medical center and Houston's Methodist Hospital is one of the most extensive and effective health-care-provider networks in the nation, whose facilities include the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, AIDS Care Program, Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, Greenberg Division of Cardiology, Institute of Genetic Medicine, Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health, Pain Management Center, and Center for Vascular Biology.
The Cornell Theory Center's virtual reality environment allows researchers to visualize data in three dimensions.
- Cornell's 2005–06 research expenditures totaled $605.3 million ($419.1 million of this funding was from federal sources; $186.2 million was nonfederal).
- Cornell ranked first in National Science Foundation funding for programs in academic science and engineering in 2003–04 (the most recent data available).
- The Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise, and Commercialization (CCTEC) facilitates the commercial development and use of technological innovations created by Cornell researchers, and encourages related entrepreneurship and economic development, by securing intellectual property rights protection and by marketing and licensing the technologies to businesses. In 2005–06, CCTEC received 237 invention disclosures, helped file 228 U.S. patent applications, distributed $3.7 million in royalties, licensed 47 inventions to industry, and helped form five start-up companies that are based on Cornell technologies.