Gratitude to the Cornell University faculty.

Thank you for stewarding Cornell as its president and, as a scientist-leader, for keeping the university grounded in honest inquiry and open teaching.

Thank you for leading Cornell's academic mission as provost while remaining a working computer scientist whose work on rendering and recognition shaped the field.

Thank you for a lifetime modeling black holes and gravitational waves, and for the Numerical Recipes that taught generations of scientists to compute honestly.

Thank you for pioneering catalysts that turn waste and carbon dioxide into useful polymers, and for teaching chemistry that takes the planet seriously.

Thank you for revolutionizing how we see electrochemical interfaces and for advancing the batteries and fuel cells a cleaner world depends on.

Thank you for bringing rigor and conscience to development economics, from Cornell classrooms to your service as Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Thank you for decades of careful theory on how economies and networks learn and adapt, and for mentoring students across economics and beyond.

Thank you for revealing the mathematics of synchrony and networks, and for sharing the joy of math with the wider world so generously and so clearly.

Thank you for telling the hard truth about slavery and American capitalism, and for the Freedom on the Move project that returns names and voices to the enslaved.

Thank you for poetry of oceanic memory and music, from Port Antonio to Ithaca, and for teaching students that language can hold a whole world.

Thank you for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3, honored with the 1996 Nobel Prize, and for decades of patient low-temperature craft at Cornell.

Thank you for illuminating how molecules bond, honored with the 1981 Nobel Prize, and for a life that joins chemistry, poetry, and generous public teaching.

Thank you for Outer space and a lifetime shaping geometric group theory, honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Thank you for opening the history of American women and early America, and for a lifetime of scholarship crowned by leading the American Historical Association.

Thank you for poems of fierce intelligence and tenderness, and for a MacArthur-honored life teaching young writers to find their own true voice.

Thank you for teaching the world to see the hidden structure of networks, and for the algorithmic wisdom you bring to the ethics of the systems we build.

Thank you for a career designing beautiful algorithms and for the textbook that taught a generation how to think clearly about hard problems.

Thank you for building the world's highest-resolution electron microscope, recognized by the National Academy of Engineering in 2026, and for letting us finally see matter atom by atom.

Thank you for teaching constitutional law with clarity and candor, and for explaining hard questions of law to the public with patience and care.

Thank you for advancing women's rights and feminist legal thought, and for insisting that the law truly serve the people it governs.

Thank you for bringing rigorous evidence to the study of organizing, and for standing with front-line workers who show up for their communities.

Thank you for a career studying how work is organized and how workers are treated, especially in the essential service jobs so many people depend on.

Thank you for uncovering how plants recognize their own pollen, work honored by the National Academy of Sciences, and for carrying forward McClintock's Cornell legacy.

Thank you for founding the study of market microstructure and for a career, including leading the American Finance Association, spent making markets fairer and better understood.