News, Continued

Gerstner Philanthropies is excited to announce that the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core, part of the American Museum of Natural History’s new addition, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, will open to the public on May 4, 2023. This addition will create more than 30 connections among 10 of the Museum’s buildings to improve visitor circulation on campus, and will feature all new exhibition galleries, learning labs and collections facilities. The Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core will display over 3,000 objects from the Museum’s research collections and will span across three levels. The Collections Core is designed to showcase the importance of scientific collections as the bedrock on which scientific discoveries stand. The glass panels of the Collections Core will give visitors the opportunity to view scientists in-action working with the specimens on display. Along with the Collections Core, the Gilder Center will also include an all-new insectarium, with the world’s largest live leafcutter ant display, as well as a live butterfly vivarium. “The Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation is a glorious new facility that fulfills a critical need at a critical time: to help visitors to understand the natural world more deeply, to appreciate that all life is interdependent, to trust science, and to be inspired to protect our precious planet and its myriad life forms,” said Ellen Futter, President Emerita of the American Museum of Natural History.

Gerstner Philanthropies has made a gift of $166,667 to support the Helping Hands Student Emergency Fund at The City College of New York. Helping Hands provides one-time assistance to students facing one-time emergencies with the goal to help college students continue through to graduation. The grant will assist students for the remainder of 2023. “We are grateful to be able to partner with the Gerstner Philanthropies team, which allows us to expand on the important work of providing emergency support to our students to maintain momentum in their college career. Student retention is a key goal of City College,” said Dee Dee Mozeleski, senior advisor to the president, and vice president and executive director of The Foundation for City College.

As of March 1, 2023, Gerstner Philanthropies has awarded $7.9 million in Helping Hands funds to 24 social service organizations and colleges, a 47% increase from last year’s grantmaking. $7.3 million will expand support to existing emergency grant programs at 19 grantees across the country, with an additional $0.6 million supporting new partnerships with public colleges within the New York City area. Over $0.7 million of the awarded funds will support a new program capacity-building initiative at seven organizations with the goal of improving Helping Hands program efficiency and expanding its reach to serve more people in need.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) have invented a new RNA sequencing method that achieves high-quality results from small volumes of frozen tumor specimens. They demonstrated the success of their technique in two clinical studies that profiled dozens of tumor samples, both those archived and those freshly collected, to understand how they respond to anti-tumor therapy.

A new study from Gerstner Scholar Jesse Delia and researchers at the AMNH identified the mechanism that allows Glass frogs to maintain their unique transparency. Researchers had previously observed Glass frogs shifting into a transparent state during rest periods as a means to camouflage themselves. By using soundwaves to identify where the Glass frogs were storing their red blood cells, Delia and his colleagues observed the Glass frogs storing up to 89% of their red blood cells within the liver. This ability, and the fact that the Glass frogs did not develop any bloods clots could have potentially large benefits for blood-clotting treatment in humans.