Linelle is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Chemical Engineering department. She is currently working with Dr. Larry Walker in the Biofuels Research Lab with a focus on the solid state fermentation of switchgrass.

Linelle hails from the lovely island of St. Lucia and came to the USA in 2000 to pursue her undergraduate studies. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at the City College of New York where she was very active on campus. It was there that she fell in love with New York City.

Linelle loves the beach and loves to snorkel, kayak, or just lie in the sand with soca or reggae music in the background. She also loves to cook, dance and sing, even though she would definitely starve as a singer. In addition, she loves to travel and tries to visit a new country each year.

Mario is a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Economics and Management, where his work focuses on international trade and agriculture. He was born in Brazil and has lived extensively in the United States. Mario was a high school exchange student in Oklahoma and later returned to the United States to pursue his under graduate graduate studies at Claremont McKenna, Stanford and Georgetown.

Prior to coming to Cornell, Mario worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and the Brazilian Institute for International Trade Negotiations. His career in international trade took him to more than twenty countries around the world. In between meetings, he rode elephants in Thailand, explored the lost city of Machu Picchu and wandered through the streets of Rome on a motor scooter.

Mario enjoys everything that is international. He speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish, French and Italian, and wants to learn Chinese. As he grew up on a tropical beach, Ithaca's winter was quite an experience for him. In his spare time, Mario enjoys playing volleyball, dancing, cooking and meeting new people.

Daphna grew up in Sunnyvale CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Ironically, she knows very little about semiconductors and has never understood why people have given up on using typewriters. However, she loves California very much and stayed there to do her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. There she majored in psychology and discovered her interest in studying adult attachment in romantic relationships.

In her year off between undergraduate school and graduate school, Daphna worked as a project coordinator at Veterans Affairs in Menlo Park, CA. Currently, she is a fourth-year graduate student in Human Development.

In her spare time, she enjoys bowling and silly puns. She also loves Cadbury mini-eggs, romantic comedies, and the TV show SCRUBS.

David is a fourth year PhD student in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. He works with Dr. Lance Collins who is a fluid dynamicist specializing in applying numerical methods to investigate various interesting scientific questions. They are currently working to understand some of the mechanisms responsible for ripple and dune formation and the release of dust into the atmosphere on Mars. David came to the US in 2002 for college at the University of Vermont in Burlington VT.

 He grew up in Southeastern Ghana where he fell utterly and irreparably in love with soccer. He thoroughly enjoys the sport which he has both played for fun and followed as a passionate fan. His affections lie with his national team the Blackstars, and with Hearts of Oak and Arsenal on the club level. He likes to cook and watch movies. He loves music and likes to sing, although those who have heard him sing may describe the experience as painful.

He is fascinated with fast powerful cars with superb handling. They truly represent the limits of auto-engineering although this leaves him at odds with a desire to own an ultra fuel efficient car. Perhaps technologies currently under development will allow both to co-exist in the same car someday.

Jonathan is a third-year Ph.D. student in the English Department where he studies American literature and culture of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries with an emphasis on print culture and publicity. Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, he earned his B.A. from SUNY Geneseo and his M.A. from Syracuse University before arriving at Cornell in 2006.

 A lifelong Upstater, Jon is happy to suggest a myriad of activities and destinations within less than a day’s drive of Ithaca. When not researching or teaching, Jon enjoys traveling in the U.S. and abroad, playing tennis, cooking, watching both popular and obscure sports alike, tasting new beers, reading newspapers, playing on his bar trivia team, and exploring museums.

Jon’s favorite cuisine is a three-way toss-up between Vietnamese, Thai, and Brazilian.He speaks Portuguese, and his favorite movie is Office Space.

Ruth is a second-year graduate student in City and Regional Planning. Her research interests include sustainable land use planning and managing transitions to sustainable cities and regions. She just spent the summer interning with the US EPA in Washington, DC, learning about environmental program evaluation and discovering the joys of logic modeling.

Ruth grew up in Malaysia and Singapore and went to high school in northern Australia with box jellyfish and crocodiles. She has a BA in sociology and French with a concentration in linguistics from Houghton College.

Before coming to Cornell, Ruth spent four years living in Normandy, France where she taught English at a university, worked at a cooking school, earned a second undergraduate degree in sociology from the Université de Rouen, and started playing the cello.