President Félix V. Matos Rodríguez announced that at Commencement on Friday, May 26, Congresswoman Grace Meng will be the featured speaker. She also will receive the college’s President’s Medal in recognition of her many years of service to the greater Queens community.

Currently serving her third term in the House of Representatives, representing the Sixth Congressional District of New York, Meng is the first Asian American member of Congress from New York State, and the only member of Congress of Asian descent in the entire northeast. She is a member of the Appropriations Committee that is responsible for funding every agency, program, and project within the federal government.

Meng has passed several pieces of legislation into law, including laws about religious freedom, making Queens historic sites part of the National Parks Service, protecting public housing residents from insufficient heat, and measures that assist veterans and strengthen anti-terror initiatives. She also worked to create New York City school holidays for Lunar New Year and Eid. 

This fall Douglas Rushkoff (Media Studies) will be launching a studio course, Tech Development Lab. With advice from industry experts, participants will refine their technology concepts into proposals and prototypes that can be pitched to investors. At the end of the course, three projects will be invited to take space in QC’s Tech Incubator.  

The Tech Development Lab is open to the entire college community--including undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty--on Wednesdays, 1:40 pm to 4:30 pm; class size is limited to 15. For more information, visit http://goo.gl/j5omcu or email Rushkoff at drushkoff@qc.cuny.edu.   

It’s not every college student who can claim to have received a high-level clearance from the U.S. government.
Naomi Ducat can.  

Ducat, who graduated in December, had the remarkable experience of closing out her final months as a Queens College undergraduate while serving as a White House intern for the Obama administration, working in Vice President Joseph Biden’s Office of Foreign Affairs. The caliber of her work was such that she was asked to extend her internship beyond the November election and into the final weeks of the administration. Click here for the full profile.

The QC Chapter of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society held its 31st Annual Research Day in the Science Building Atrium on April 5. This event, which is a forum for students to communicate the results of their research to the QC community, attracted over 50 student participants.

Following the poster session, Sigma Xi President John Dennehy (Biology; Director, Undergrad. Research), Martin Klotz (Dean, Div. of Math & Natural Sci.), and President Félix V. Matos Rodríguez welcomed students to the award ceremony. Best Poster Prize and $100 went to Nicole Ortiz (Psychology) for her “Evaluating the Role of Neurotransmission and Neurodevelopment in ADHD Symptomatology and Autonomic Nervous System Reactivity: A Look at Candidate Genes and EDA” (mentored by Yoko Nomura, Psychology).

First runner-up and a $50 prize was awarded to Deborah Pedoeem (Chem. & Biochem.) for “XRS2: Crosslink Repair by Homologous Recombination” (mentored by Wilma Saffran, Chem. & Biochem.). Honorable mention and a $25 prize went to both Samantha Tramontano (Earth & Environ. Sci.) for “The Timing and Longevity of a Mafic Magma Recharge Event Prior to the 2015-2016 Eruption at Momotombo Volcano, Nicaragua” (mentored by Marc-Antoine Longpré, Earth & Environ. Sci.) and to Kaungmyat (Zach) San (Biology) for “The Impact of Urbanization on Soil Microbiomes in Long Island, New York” (mentored by John Dennehy, Biology).

Thomas Frumkes, a longtime member of the Psychology Department, recently died. He began his time at Queens as a postdoctoral fellow under Harold Schuckman in the late 1960s. He was then invited to join the faculty, where he rapidly moved through the academic ranks to become a professor. Tom was a world-renowned expert in rod-cone interactions; his lab published masterful works in human visual psychophysics and amphibian visual neurophysiology. He published prolifically in major journals, and enjoyed external funding from the NIH and NSF. In addition to being a wonderful scientist, Tom could build harpsichords from scratch, and in his retirement performed in many classical musical groups in Arizona.  

Joanne Miller

Joanne Miller (Sociology) died peacefully in her sleep on March 9. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and before coming to QC in 1986, was the director of the National Science Foundation Sociology Program. She became a full professor in 1999, and served as director of the sociology MA program as well as acting dean of Graduate Studies and Research.  Joanne was best known for her work on assessment and quantitative reasoning, and served as the coordinator of the department’s quantitative reasoning initiative. Her scholarly work focused on jobs, authority structures in organizations, and the response of corporations to diversity.
 

Henry Weinberg

Henry Weinberg, a former faculty member of the Aaron Copland School of Music and a beloved mentor to a generation of music students, died on February 22 at the age of 85. A protégé of Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola, Henry was the recipient of many major awards, including the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Brandeis Prize, and Fromm Foundation commissions, among others. He was also a composer-in-residence at the Koussevitsky Foundation Studio in Tanglewood. Henry taught at QC and the CUNY Graduate Center in the 1970s and 1980s along with his colleagues George Perle and Hugo Weisgall, a formidable group of composers who brought considerable notice to Queens College. His music was widely performed by such groups as the Composers Quartet and the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago.