SUNY Geneseo students raised $150,197 in this year’s Relay For Life, an annual fundraiser that supports the American Cancer Society. The student-run 12-hour event in the Ira S. Wilson Ice Arena was packed with performances, activities, and speakers to help to raise money for cancer research and services for cancer patients.

“This year’s Relay For Life was a huge success,” said Katherine Bensburg '19, a childhood/special education major from Mahopac, NY, and president of Geneseo’s Colleges Against Cancer (CAC) organization. 

History majors Isabel Owen ’19, from Great Neck, NY, and Catherine Shields ’19, from Hilton, NY, have won 2019–20 U.S. Student Fulbright awards for Brazil and Turkey, respectively. They will serve as English Teaching Assistants in a university or post-secondary institution for a year, expanding their abilities with the Portuguese and Turkish languages and serving as cultural ambassadors in a local community.

Sociology major Karla Lora ’20, from Bronx, NY, has been named a finalist with the highly competitive Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) Congressional Internship Program. She is one of 24 undergraduate students selected to spend 12 weeks in Washington, DC, next fall interning in a congressional office and receiving leadership training from CHCI.

Two student teams from SUNY Geneseo’s VentureWorks entrepreneurship program secured three awards in the finals of the tenth annual New York State Business Plan Competition (NYBPC) April 29 at The Armory at Sage in Albany. 

SUNY Geneseo’s Together Program has straightforward aspirations: to build a cross-cultural bridge between Geneseo undergraduate students and the region’s Spanish-speaking community. In practice, the program does much more.

Annie Renaud ’19, from Glastonbury, CT, has won a 2019–20 U.S Student Fulbright award for Russia. The communication major, who has minors in both Central and Eastern European studies and the college honors program, will work as an English Teaching Assistant at a Russian university or post-secondary institution.

The award is the culmination of Renaud’s five-year journey with associate professor of German Cynthia Klima, a mentor for Renaud and countless Geneseo students interested in what Klima refers to as “less commonly taught languages.”

Three Geneseo students have received 2019 Chancellor’s Awards for Student Excellence. SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson presented the awards to the following Geneseo students, all seniors:

   Patrick Buckley from Elmira, NY
   Emily Janiszewski from Hamburg, NY
   Elena Kleinhenz from Delmar, NY

Luke Bamburoski ’19, a Brockport, NY, native, was one of the first applicants to Geneseo’s interdisciplinary neuroscience major. Strategic as an incoming student, he selected psychology as his major (he’s also an Edgar Fellow) giving him a running start for neuroscience that started accepting majors at the end of his first year.

Lorenzo Rodriguez ’19, from Jamestown, NY, has won a U.S. Student Fulbright Research Grant for Bulgaria for 2019–20. An anthropology major with a minor in sociomedical science, he will research the ways in which funding and staffing challenges within health care facilities impact local communities in the capital Sofia and neighboring cities.

Paleontologist Matthew Lamanna, Ph.D., the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, will deliver the sixteenth annual American Rock Salt Lecture in Geology on Thursday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Newton Hall Room 202, on the SUNY Geneseo Campus. Lamanna’s talk, “The Origin of Modern Birds: New Cretaceous Fossil Discoveries from China and Antarctica,” is free and open to the public.