Cornell Engineering

We are pleased to announce the recipients of our 2026 Academic Venture Fund!

📌 Read about the awardees: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/06/cornell-atkinson-awards-drive-progress-tech-ag-sustainability

The Academic Venture Fund supports bold, interdisciplinary research that is often too novel, early-stage, or high-risk for traditional funding sources. This year's six funded projects will explore emerging sustainability challenges, from safeguarding coral reef ecosystems and strengthening food system resilience to investigating environmental drivers of wildlife disease.

By supporting new ideas and new collaborations, the fund helps researchers generate the knowledge needed to advance the next generation of sustainability solutions.

→ Awardees represent campus partners: Cornell Engineering College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine Cornell Research & Innovation

Once a Cornellian, always a Cornellian 🐻❤️

As an undergraduate researcher, Edward Lee ’26 is already changing the game in quantum computing.

“One of the current limitations to quantum information processing is that qubit control is difficult to scale,” he says. “State-of-the-art implementations take up a lot of space with signal generating equipment for just a couple dozen qubits, and more than a million are required for useful, error-free computation!”

To tackle this challenge, Edward took the lead on developing QuASI, an open-source software library that acts as a “digital twin” for qubits, simulating quantum system dynamics to help speed up the process of designing and scaling qubit control schemes.

According to his advisor Mohamed Ibrahim, Edward is “remarkably dedicated, hardworking, and self-motivated. During his training in my lab, he enriched his expertise in multiple areas, including analog circuit design, signal processing, and quantum computing.” Edward gained valuable experience in the lab through hands-on research, collaborative team meetings, and an opportunity to present his work at the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit.

“Research offers a unique opportunity to explore the edge of your field with quite a lot of flexibility, particularly at a university like Cornell,” Edward says. “For students starting undergraduate research, embracing the uncertainty of research and understanding that any progress, no matter how small it feels, could be adding a new layer to the field’s collective knowledge has kept me motivated."

Congratulations to our newest Cornell University Alumni! We are so proud of you and can’t wait to see what comes next! 🎓❤️✨

Today's the big day: The day we formally celebrate !

Join us for two ceremonies today: the first at 10 a.m. and the second at 2:30 p.m.

Can't attend in person? Watch our livestreams, starting one hour before each ceremony:

First ceremony: https://commencement.cornell.edu/may/events/comm/livestream-ceremony-one/

Second ceremony: https://commencement.cornell.edu/may/events/comm/livestream-ceremony-two/

The massive steel tubes at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Kennedy Space Center towered into the sky, but 7-year-old Priya Abiram had no idea what they were.

“They’re rockets,” she remembered her dad telling her. “They’re the hardest things that humans have ever built, and it is even harder to fly them.”

Fifteen years after that vacation in Florida where she started dreaming of space, Abiram ’25 is graduating with her M.Eng in aerospace engineering and heading for a career in the space industry, advancing the understanding of how human bodies work in space and how to build systems to keep them alive.

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/05/grad-hopes-advance-womens-health-space.