CUNY Graduate Center

New York’s Newtown Creek is notorious as one of the most polluted waterways in the U.S., the site of a massive oil spill and industrial pollution stretching back to the 19th century. Restoration is underway, though, and three CUNY faculty members, Peter Groffman, Monica Trujillo, and Erika Niwa, are collaborating to help. They have teamed up to rehabilitate the estuary’s ecology and improve the qu...

For over a year Dianne Greenfield, a professor at Queens College and the Environmental Science Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Maria Tzortziou a professor at City College and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at The Graduate Center, have been researching how the COVID-19 pandemic’s forced shutdown has affected water quality in the Lon...

New York City has a water runoff problem that’s leading to the contamination of its lakes, rivers, and marine waterways. The city’s paved streets lower the amount of rainwater that can be absorbed, which leads to greater runoff. That runoff in turn causes local floods and overwhelmed sewer systems that bring effluent into the city’s many waterways, such as the Hudson River. Scientists expect these...

Ash Marinaccio is a multidisciplinary and award-winning documentarian working in theater, film, and photography. She is dedicated to storytelling that highlights the socio-political issues defining our times and is particularly invested in telling queer and working-class stories. She is currently a Ph. D. candidate in the Theatre and Performance program at The Graduate Center, CUNY where she has t...

The Community Sensor Lab at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC) aims to give New Yorkers living in marginalized communities, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and to air, water, and soil pollution, the ability to monitor their environment and use the data that they collect to advocate for environmental justice. In this podcast, w...

From the transistors in the iPhone 12 to coronavirus vaccines, nanotechnology surrounds us. In this episode of The Thought Project podcast, Graduate Center Professor Rein Ulijn describes the current and potential impact of nanoscience, or the study of structures and materials at the nanometer scale (one millionth of a millimeter, the scale of atoms and molecules), on education and workforce develo...

Heath Brown is an associate professor of public policy and criminal justice at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He studies policy process, interest groups, presidential transitions, and education policy. He is the author of five books, including Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State, which was published by Columbia University Press in January...

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is a distinguished professor of economics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, a faculty member at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, and a New York Times columnist. He writes frequently about U.S. politics, economics, and economic and social policy. Lately, he has been sharing his opinions about Bidenomics(mostly good), the state of the Republican Party and democr...

Michael Javen Fortner is an assistant professor of political science at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, and he recently published a policy paper, “Reconstructing Justice: Race, Generational Divides, and the Fight Over ‘Defund the Police’.” In...

John Torpey is a presidential professor of sociology and history and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He hosts the International Horizons podcast. Professor Torpey is also a Forbes.com columnist, and in a recent Forbes column, he compared the current pandemic to the 1918 Spanish flu. He discusses that column and its takeaways in this ep...

The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol “represented the greatest crisis of our democracy” since South Carolina’s secession prior to the Civil War, says historian and author Gunja SenGupta in this wide-ranging discussion of the latest events in Washington, D.C., and their precedent in the 1860s. An expert on the Civil War and slavery, SenGupta is a history professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY...

New York City’s 55 transfer schools serve over 13,000 high school–aged students who have dropped out of or stopped attending their traditional high schools. Operating with constrained budgets and under the constant threat of closure, these schools, sometimes referred to as alternative high schools, nonetheless can transform the lives of the students they serve in large and small ways, according to...

Melissa Checker is the Hagedorn Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and associate professor of Anthropology and Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She joins The Thought Project to discuss her latest book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. The book unpacks the ways in which the so-called sustainable construction projects that accompany...

Martin D. Ruck, a professor of psychology and urban education and senior advisor to the president for diversity and inclusion at The Graduate Center, CUNY, is leading the GC’s drive to achieve diversity and anti-racism goals laid out last spring in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In this podcast, Ruck discusses the project and his vision for creating an inclusive enviro...

Tsedale Melaku, author of You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism and alumna of The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow, joins The Thought Project podcast to discuss race, gender, and racism within American institutions, including universities. Melaku seeks to bring the racial equity and social justice activism from the streets into or...

Americans are coping with unemployment, hunger, and housing insecurity at levels that rival the Great Depression, according to Mimi Abramovitz, the Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Work at Hunter College and a professor of social welfare at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A prolific writer and researcher, she is among the noted policy experts calling for social security for all as a bridge to...

How the Pandemic Is Affecting Labor: Luke Elliott-Negri on The Thought Project by CUNY Graduate Center

What Biden’s Presidency Will Mean for Education: David Bloomfield on The Thought Project by CUNY Graduate Center

Robin L. Garrell started her role as president of The Graduate Center, CUNY in early August – just about 100 days ago. An accomplished biomedical engineer, she was previously vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate division at UCLA. In this episode, she reflects on moving across the country to lead The Graduate Center during a pandemic and how she is approaching important issu...

As the votes in the U.S. presidential election are still being counted, Graduate Center, CUNY professors and political experts Heath Brown and Charles Tien join The Thought Project to discuss what’s ahead for our country. They assess the depth of the blue-red divide, the strength of voter turnout, and how the election could play out in the courts. They find reasons for optimism and pessimism about...

On the brink of the U.S. presidential election, Javier Padilla, a political science Ph. D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses how affective polarization is impacting our country. The term refers to the animosity between Democrats and Republicans that extends beyond politics. The COVID-19 pandemic, Padilla asserts, has intensified this polarization, and it’s coming to a head with the u...

Thomas Weiss on The Thought Project - Episode 93 by CUNY Graduate Center

Kevin Nadal is a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is one of the leading researchers on the effect of microaggressions, or subtle forms of discrimination, on the mental and physical health of people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people; and members of other marginalized groups. He joins the The Thoug...

Margaret M. Chin is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of two books, including the most recent, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don't Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder. In Stuck, she portrays how second-generation Asian Americans who graduated from college between 1980 and 2008 have fared in the corporate world. Based on extensive...

Stanley Renshon is a professor of political science at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a trained psychoanalyst who has used these skills in his examination of four U.S. presidents: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, whom Renshon examines in his latest book: The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency. In his first podcast, Renshon explained ho...