The Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) is an interdisciplinary STEM center for research and education. It covers five related fields: nanoscience, photonics, structural biology, neuroscience, and environmental science. The CUNY ASRC is located in a 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) building on the southern edge of City College's campus in Upper Manhattan. The CUNY ASRC, which opened in September 2014, is an outgrowth of CUNY's "Decade of Science" initiative, a multibillion-dollar project to elevating science research and education.
The CUNY ASRC formally joined the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2017. Today, the CUNY ASRC is one of the major pieces of CUNY's citywide research network. Five years after the center opened, over 200 graduate, undergraduate, and high school students had been mentored by CUNY ASRC scientists. In that time, the center also hosted over 400 conferences, seminars, and workshops and awarded over $600,000 in seed grants to CUNY faculty.
The CUNY ASRC was founded on the principle that researchers across different disciplines would collaborate to make scientific advancements. Thus, it consists of five related fields:
Nanoscience: Exploring on the tiniest scale, using the living world for inspiration to create new materials and devices that advance fields ranging from biomedicine to energy production
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Photonics: Discovering new ways to control light, heat, radio waves, and sound for future optical computers, ultrasensitive cameras, and cell phone technology
Structural biology: Combining physics and chemistry to explore biology at the molecular and cellular levels, with the intention of identifying new ways to treat diseases
Neuroscience: Investigating how the brain senses and responds to environmental and social experiences, with a focus on neural networks, metabolic changes, and molecular signals occurring in brain cells, with the goal of developing biosensors and innovative solutions to promote mental health
Environmental sciences: Developing high-tech, interdisciplinary solutions to urgent environmental challenges, including air and water issues, climate change, and disease transmission
Each research initiative occupies one floor of the CUNY ASRC building that hosts four faculty laboratories and between two and four core facilities.
Core facilities
The CUNY ASRC has 15 core facilities with a variety of equipment. These facilities are open to researchers from CUNY, other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit companies from around the world.
The facilities include:
Advanced Laboratory for Chemical and Isotopic Signatures (ALCIS) Facility
Biomolecular Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility
Comparative Medicine Unit (CMU)
Epigenetics Facilities
Imaging Facility
Live Imaging & Bioenergetics Facility
MALDI Imaging Joint Facility
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Facility
Macromolecular Crystallization Facility
Mass Spectrometry Core Facility
Nanofabrication Facility
Next Generation Environmental Sensor (NGENS) Lab
Photonics Core Facility
Radio Frequency and mm-Wave Facility
Surface Science Facility
Education and outreach
The CUNY ASRC has various scientific education programs. Students from CUNY's community and senior colleges participate in research during the academic year and over the summer through programs such as the CUNY Summer Undergraduate Research Program. Graduate students from master's and doctoral programs at the Graduate Center and from the Grove School of Engineering are members of CUNY ASRC research teams.
IlluminationSpace
The CUNY ASRC's IlluminationSpace is an interactive education center, which accommodates high school field trips and provides free community hours. It has numerous virtual programs and resources.
The CUNY ASRC received a Public Interest Technology University Network 2021 Challenge Grant to establish the IlluminationSpace, STEM pathways, and science communications and outreach at CUNY. The funding is being used to increase participation of underrepresented demographic groups in STEM fields.
Community Sensor Lab
The CUNY ASRC Community Sensor Lab teaches high school students and community members how to build inexpensive, homemade sensors that can monitor aspects of the environment from the level of carbon dioxide and pollutants in the air to acidity in the soil and water.
Faculty opportunities
The CUNY ASRC offers a seed grant program to fund collaborative research that supports tenured and tenure-track faculty at CUNY colleges. The program started in 2015 and currently awards six one-year, $20,000 grants annually.
In addition, the center's National Science Foundation CAREER Bootcamp Program, which guides tenure-track faculty through the proposal writing process, have helped CUNY researchers secure substantial NSF CAREER grants.
Grants and research
Between 2014 and 2019, CUNY ASRC researchers secured 126 grants totaling $61 million. Several recent grants have set records for CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. Faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students at the CUNY ASRC also hold several patents. Professor Kevin Gardner, director of the CUNY ASRC Structural Biology Initiative, was instrumental in the identification of hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha (HIF-2α) as a druggable target and the drug development efforts that led to the FDA-approved first-in-kind kidney cancer drug from Merck, belzutifan.
The CUNY ASRC is home to one of 15 Centers for Advanced Technology (CATs) designated by Empire State Development NYSTAR. Funded by a nearly $8.8 million grant, the CUNY ASRC Sensor CAT spurs academic-industry partnerships to develop sensor-based technology. Developing biomedical and environmental sensors is a particular focus, as is finding new approaches to sensing through photonics, materials, and nanoscience research.
Supported by a 2020 grant of up to $16 million from the Simons Foundation, a team of scientists led by Professor Andrea Alù, director of the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative, is studying wave transport in metamaterials. The team's work could lead to greater sensing capabilities for the Internet of Things, improvements in biomedical applications, and extreme control of sound waves for medical imaging and wireless technology.
Professors Rein Ulijn and Andrea Al], the directors of the CUNY ASRC Nanoscience Initiative and the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative, each won a prestigious Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense, the agency's highest-ranking single-investigator award. Alù's $3 million fellowship, awarded in 2019, allowed him to develop new materials that enable extreme wave manipulation in the context of thermal radiation and heat management. Alù was also named the 2021 Blavatnik National Awards Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering. Ulijn's $3 million fellowship, awarded in 2021, allowed him to research how complex mixtures of molecules acquire functionality and to repurpose this understanding to create new nanotechnology that is inspired by living systems.
Research
CUNY Graduate Center describes itself as "research-intensive" and is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to be an R1 or have "highest research activity". The CUNY Graduate Center's primary library, named after Mina Rees, is located on campus; however, its students also have borrowing privileges at the remaining 31 City University of New York libraries, which collectively house 6.2 million printed works and over 300,000 e-books. Beginning in 1968, the CUNY Graduate Center maintains a formal collaboration with the New York Public Library that allows faculty and students access to NYPL's extensive research collections, regular library resources, as well as three research study rooms located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Further, as of 2011, students have access to the libraries of Columbia University and New York University through the NYPL's Manhattan Research Library Initiative. The CUNY Graduate Center library also maintains an online repository called CUNY Academic Works, which hosts open-access faculty and student research.
Initiatives and committees
The CUNY Graduate Center does additional work through its initiatives and committees:
Futures Initiative
Graduate Center Digital Initiatives
Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS)
Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative
The Committee for the Study of Religion
The Committee on Globalization and Social Change
The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies
Endangered Language Initiative
Intellectual Publics
Centers and institutes
With over 30 research institutes and centers the CUNY Graduate Center produces work on a range of social, cultural, scientific and civic issues.
American Social History Project
The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML) was established in 1981 to create and disseminate materials that help with understanding the diverse cultural and social history of the United States. Founded by Stephen Brier and Herbert Gutman, who sought to teach the history of everyday Americans, early projects included the film 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation, about the 1877 railway strike.
ASHP has created curriculum grounded in the work of Howard Zinn, Herbert Gutman, and Stephen Brier which aims to teach social studies at the high school level with the inclusion of diverse viewpoints, including indigenous groups, enslaved Americans, immigrants, and the working class. Notable curricula and teaching tools have included Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Who Built America? Other curriculum, such as Golden Lands, Working Hands, has focused on labor history; these types of ASHP materials emphasize collaborative teaching and learning strategies and have been popular in teaching districts that prioritize union labor.
Digital teaching resources created by ASHP have included the History Matters website and the online resource Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: Exploring the French Revolution. As teaching tools, these websites place an emphasis on inclusion of primary source material for use in the classroom, alongside teaching strategies for seamless use of these documents in classroom curriculum. The online resource September 11 Digital Archive has received acclaim for its comprehensive representation of historic perspectives. ASHP is also a partner of the Mission US project and co-produced Mission US: Cheyenne Odyssey, an award-winning video game about a Cheyenne tribesman whose way of life is challenged by western expansion.
ASHP was established out of the success of a series of National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars; seminar topics have included Learning to Look: Teaching Humanitites with Visual Images and New Media, Visual Culture of the American Civil War and its Aftermath, and LGBTQ+ Histories of the United States. This focus on professional development opportunities for educators has included other workshops such as the Bridging Historias: Latino/a History and Culture in the Community College Classroom program.
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality was launched on September 1, 2016. The Stone Center expanded and replaced the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Center, which opened its doors at the Graduate Center in 2009. It began a post-doctoral program in 2019.
The Stone Center has hosted several scholarly convenings. One year after its launch, it hosted the 2017 Meeting Of The Society For The Study Of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). In 2021, it convened wealth inequality scholars for the two-day conference, From Understanding Inequality to Reducing Inequality.
