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The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/2004/03/01/squash-finishes-eighth-at-tourney/)

March 1, 2004

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Squash Finishes Eighth at Tourney

By wpengine | March 1, 2004

After going 8-4 in the regular season, the men’s squash team finished eighth at the annual national championships in New Haven, Conn. this past weekend. The No. 6 Red opened the tourney with a 9-0 loss to No. 3 Yale. The squashers then suffered a close 6-3 defeat to No. 7 Western Ontario in the consolation bracket. Yesterday, the squashers lost a hard-fought 5-4 match against No. 8 Penn.

Trinity College won the overall title, defeating Harvard 5-4. The Bantams will once again bring home the Potter Cup, the top prize in men’s squash. Trinity has not lost a match since 1998.

All three tournament games were rematches for the Red.

Back in January, Cornell lost to Yale, 9-0, in New Haven. This time around, the Elis once again utilized home-court advantage, as well as its deep lineup. Yale has three of the nation’s top 20 players.

In November, the squashers played head coach Scott Stoneburgh’s alma mater, Western Ontario, defeating the Mustangs, 6-3. That month the Red also defeated Penn, 6-3.

Before the tournament, Stoneburgh noted Western Ontario had not brought its best game in the fall, and that his old team would play much better this time around.

His prediction was right.

The Mustangs won all of their matches in the bottom half of the lineup, in addition to wins at the one and three spots. Cornell junior Mike Delany, along with sophomores Will Cheng and Matt Greenberg, captured the Red’s three wins.

Cornell gave its best performance of the tournament against Penn. Several of the nine matches went to the maximum five games. Sophomore Matt Serediak, freshman Rohit Gupta, Delany, and Greenberg were all victorious, but Penn managed to win the lower ladder spots and take the match.

Despite its disappointing tournament play, the Red still enjoyed an impressive year. With regular-season wins against Ivy rivals Penn and Brown, Cornell cemented its place as a solid team in squash’s toughest conference. Cornell also defeated Amherst College and Williams College this year, both by a score of 9-0.

Several members of the squash team will compete in the individual nationals in Canton, N.Y., starting Friday.

Archived article by Ted Nyman

Related

Jazz Musician Gets Ithaca Swingin'

By wpengine March 2, 2004

Cornell and the surrounding Ithaca community is filled with a wide range of musical talent, ranging from newly-established student-based bands to old-time favorites who have been performing on campus for countless years. The East Hill Classic Jazz Group led by Johnny Russo has been performing for students in Collegetown as well as on campus for well over two decades. Russo was drawn to the musical scene at an early age. When he was eight years old he decided that he wanted to be a trumpet player for his elementary school band in Geneva, N.Y. His conductor agreed to let him join but insisted that he start off on the trombone, as there was a lack of trombonists at that particular time. He continued to stay with the music department throughout high school and decided that he would take his love of music and pursue a career in the field. He was granted a scholarship and was accepted into the Eastman School of Music, a division of the University of Rochester, where he graduated in 1966 with a B.A. in music. Russo went on to spend a short time with the military, followed by period of exploration in New York City. “My time spent in [the city] helped me to find myself and realize what I really wanted,” Russo said. “New York City was not for me. I traveled all over the United States and half of the world and I decided that the Ithaca area was where I was meant to be.” Russo came back from his travels and settled down in Ithaca in 1977. From that time on, Russo started to gain recognition and popularity among Cornell students. “My big break came in 1984 when the owner of Ruloff’s offered me a job playing the piano for diners. This opened up all of the doors for me and my fellow band members.” Russo said. It was in this strategically-located spot that numerous fraternity brothers heard Russo’s music and became interested in hiring him for various fraternity events. “We have played at almost all of the frats on the Cornell campus for events such as the Alpha Delta Phi Victory Club, Psi Upsilon, and Alpha Sigma Phi’s Great Gatsby Party,” Russo said. Russo and his band members have played for the Cornell Alumni Reunion for many years and were “hired by the class of ’44, ’46, ’54, ’59, ’64 and the Johnson School of Business for their reunions.” Russo’s sextet includes Doug Robinson on guitar, Drew Frech on banjos, Brian Earle on clarinet, Bernie Upson on bass and Steve Brown on percussion. Russo plays the horns. The sextet traveled to New York City in April to perform at Carnegie Hall and is planning on returning there in 2005. Russo said, “There is nothing that I don’t enjoy about music, but this is the highest form of it: when you can sit back and let the musicians go at it, totally natural and not enhanced. We go in and give it our all.” On Thursday night, Russo’s sextet will be performing a concert sponsored by the Tompkins County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at the Ithaca Unitarian Church at 8 p.m. Archived article by Shannon Delaney
Prof. Snags $400K

By wpengine March 2, 2004

The National Science Foundation awarded Prof. Farhan Rana, electrical and computer engineering, a $400,000 grant for his teaching and research work at Cornell. The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program supports young professors who successfully integrate education and research. Rana won the five-year award for his work with devices that emit very short pulses of laser light, which have important applications in medical imaging, communications and studying molecular interactions. Currently, such pulses are produced by bulky machines that cover a large table and require elaborate cooling systems. Rana aims to improve semiconductor lasers, which fit onto a microchip and harness quantum mechanics to produce similar pulses. Existing semiconductor lasers have been unable to match the speed or energy output of the larger table-top versions, but Rana’s work aims to close the gap. “Our goal is to make a semiconductor laser on a chip — which would be maybe less than one millimeter square — that would deliver the same type of pulses that this big thing can do,” Rana said. “We just started the research in this direction.” He said he will spend the grant on lab facilities, graduate student funding and equipment for his courses. The award is intended for untenured professors early in their careers, such as Rana. He came to Cornell last year, immediately following his doctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I finished my Ph.D. thesis and I took a plane and landed at Ithaca airport,” he said. According to Prof. Lester Eastman, electrical and computer engineering, Rana was up against difficult competition for the NSF grant. “These awards are made for young people who show a lot of progress to support them for a couple years and get them rolling,” he said. But during his year at Cornell, Rana satisfied both the research and education criteria of the grant. He developed two successful new courses that introduce advanced electrical engineering students to his research area. ECE 531, which debuted last semester, won the highest student ratings in its department according to Rana. After taking the course, Jahan Dawlaty grad became interested enough to embark on a research project with Rana. “He is a very good lecturer, very well-organized and clear,” he said. “It was probably the largest amount of material that I gathered from any course in one semester.” Rana’s current course offering, ECE 532, is garnering similar student reactions. “It’s one of the most challenging classes I’ve taken but it’s taught very well,” said Martin Schubert ’04, an ECE student. “The professor definitely knows his material.” The semiconductor laser research, although still in the experimental stages, has also quickly produced results. Rana said his design might create pulses of light as brief as 50 femtoseconds, about 100 times shorter than current semiconductor lasers. A femtosecond is 10 to the negative 15 seconds — in comparison, the fastest computer processors today take several hundred thousand femtoseconds to execute the simplest instructions. “It shouldn’t cost more than $1,000 [to mass-produce],” Rana said of the design. “There are all these universities that are dying to get big lasers” but are unable to afford the six-figure price of the table-top devices, he said. The semiconductor lasers are built upon a phenomenon known as quantum dots, which Rana describes as small clusters of material “which tend to perform like single atoms.” Tiny structures with the right shape can elicit specific behavior from electrons and photons in the semiconductor. “You tailor the electrons and you tailor the photons to get the interaction that you want,” Rana said. “It’s the ability to sculpt it at that scale that gives the advantage.” “It requires techniques which have been developed over the last 10 to 15 years across several different disciplines,” he said. “You have to combine results