Cornell University, located in Ithaca, N.Y., is the largest and most comprehensive school in the Ivy League and is the land-grant university of New York state. It comprises nine privately endowed and four state-assisted colleges, including seven undergraduate colleges. Undergraduate enrollment is approximately 13,000, with students from every state and nearly 100 countries studying under an internationally renowned faculty. The university's 745-acre campus, considered by many one of the loveliest in the country, is situated on a hilltop at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes of central New York state.
Cornell is among the top 10 research universities in the United States, based on research dollars. It is home to national research centers in the areas of supercomputing, high-energy physics, astronomy, mathematical science, nanofabrication and computer graphics. In addition, it has many interdisciplinary research centers, covering advanced materials, manufacturing, agriculture, astronomy and atmospheric science, biotechnology, electronics, environment, computing and mathematics. Four Nobel laureates are on the faculty, in chemistry and physics.
In addition to the upstate Cornell campus, the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, (founded April 14, 1898), which is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, is in Manhattan and is considered to be one of the top-ranked clinical and medical research centers in the country. Weill Cornell has about 1,540 faculty and 650 students.
In 2002 the Weill Medical College Weill opened the Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) in collaboration with the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. WCMC-Q offers a complete medical education, leading to a Cornell doctor of medicine (M.D.) degree, with teaching by Cornell faculty. The establishment of WCMC-Q breaks new ground as it is the first American university to offer its M.D. degree overseas and the first higher education institution in Qatar to be coeducational. Its six-year program is divided into a two-year, non-degree Pre-medical Program, which was launched in September 2002, and a four-year Medical Program, leading to the M.D. degree, starting in September 2004.
Among many of Cornell's science programs is the New Life Sciences Initiative (NLSI), of which the centerpiece is the Life Science Technology Building, to be completed by mid-2007 with a budget of $140 million. The NLSI is a universitywide collaboration and a multiyear, $600 million campaign to enhance and support life sciences research and education. The 250,000-square-foot building will house Cornell's bold attempts to erase interdisciplinary boundaries and explore the biology of all living things. Teams of scientists -- including biologists, physical scientists, engineers
and computational scientists -- are joining forces to examine life and life processes using new technologies that process huge amounts of data very quickly and in much greater depth than ever before.
Cornell also has wide-ranging experience in international education and research, and a century of global leadership in international agriculture development and related institution strengthening. This springs from the university's pioneer work in agricultural development in what is now Nanjing University, China, in the early 20th century. In the Philippines, Cornell helped form the University of the Philippines Los Baños and assisted in the rebuilding of the country's agricultural system after World War II. In Uganda in the 1990s, Cornell, with World Bank support, coordinated and administered the external degree component of a program to enhance the human resource development of Uganda's universities. Cornell has U.S. Department of Agriculture grants in Armenia, Honduras, Thailand and South Africa, as well as Ford, Rockefeller and Hilton foundation-funded initiatives in Africa and Asia, and some 25 international collaborative projects in Madagascar and Ethiopia.