On Thursday, the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) officially launched the Byllye Avery Professorship in Sexual & Reproductive Justice, the nation’s first of its kind. The announcement was marked with a celebration that brought together reproductive justice leaders and philanthropists, including Avery, Loretta Ross, Dr. Natalia Kanem, and Abigail Disney.

The urgency of biodiversity crisis increasingly calls for creative solutions, innovations, public engagement, and novel perspectives beyond conservation science. Interdisciplinary collaborations between biodiversity conservation and the arts could play a key role in this transition to generate powerful synergies.

Rural and primarily agricultural economies are the most susceptible to climate change and armed conflict. Climate-driven weather events add pressure to an already fragile system, affecting the socioeconomic conditions on which health depends, especially in ethnically divided or areas with scarce resources.

Nowadays, compute-intensive programs, like those for training artificial intelligence and machine learning models, are used extensively. Modern compilers use vectorization techniques to exploit parallel processing capabilities to improve the performance of such programs. A group of scientists from the University of Southern California, Cisco AI Research, and Intel Labs designed a data-driven, graph-based learning framework for automatic vectorization called autograph, which utilizes deep reinforcement learning to have an intelligent agent learn an optimal policy. Autograph greatly outperformed other approaches across different datasets. The work was published on June 2, 2025, in an article titled “A Graph-Based Learning Framework for Compiler Loop Auto-Vectorization” in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal.

Land use is at the heart of the many emergencies facing our world today: climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice and food insecurity. These – exacerbated by unsustainable practices such as industrial agriculture – combine to create simultaneous and interconnected crises. To overcome these challenges, large parts of the Earth's surface must meet several demands at the same time – from species conservation and food production to human well-being. This is where multifunctional landscapes come in, because they can meet many ecological, social and economic goals at once. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel have evaluated how using land in such ways can support nature conservation and ecosystem restoration. Their review article shows ways to redesign land use and nature conservation using integrated approaches. This was published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity.