Watch Our 2011 Parade of Students

Our 2011 Parade of Students consisted of 53 research projects in 53 minutes—a breakneck tour through student research here at the Cornell Lab. We do it every two years for the benefit of our Board of Directors, and this time we invite you to watch, too. Last Friday, as all 53 students assembled in an auditorium on campus, we broadcast the Parade live on Facebook, and then archived it so you can tune in whenever you want.

Our administrative board always looks forward to the Parade of Students, and now you can see why. Sitting in the audience and letting all those ideas, hopes, plans, questions, creatures, and landscapes wash over you is fascinating, even if you don’t catch all the details. It’s an instant antidote for anyone who thinks the major questions in biology have all been answered.

One young researcher after another, from undergraduates to post-doctoral fellows, takes the stage in front of a single Powerpoint slide. They have exactly one minute to describe what it is they spend their time on. On Friday, we heard about everything from flamingos to fairywrens, from swallows to pseudoscorpions, from singing sparrows to wandering woodpeckers, and from elephants to eBird.

And these 53 students represented only about one-third of all the student work going on at the Cornell Lab. (We didn’t think we could manage three straight hours of presentations, and squeezing each 1-minute talk down to 20 seconds wasn’t really an option either.)

The video of the Parade is broken into two parts—Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

We’ve also compiled an index (by last name) of where each student appears in the videos. So if you’re a friend, family member, or colleague looking for  a particular student, you can just click on the indicated link (Part 1 or Part 2), then scroll directly to the listed time point to find them. (Images at left are from the 2011 Parade of Students, courtesy Ann-Kathrin Wirth, Susan Cook-Patton, Amos Belmaker, Jake Blessing, Rachel Ruden, Dolly Crawford, Sophie Orzechowski.)