Cate Thompson, Fellow

Cate started her Cornell life as a Prefreshman and went on to earn her BS Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell. Currently she serves as the Director for the Pre-Collegiate Summer Scholars Program (PSSP), a summer bridge program for accepted students. In her long history with the university, Cate has served in admissions, academic advising, as a college diversity officer and a premed/vet advisor. Since 2012 she has expanded her role with the addition of co-teaching three courses that serve students throughout the university.

Ben Ortiz, Fellow

Ben Ortiz is the Assistant Curator of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, which is part of Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections division. The CHHC is the world's most extensive research archive on Hip Hop music and culture (a very broad subject through which a wide diversity of topics can be explored). The CHHC is nearly a decade old and continues to grow each year. It contains an estimated quarter-million artifacts!

Ben served as an inaugural member of the CHHC's advisory board upon its creation in 2007, and took on his current role in 2011. Prior to that, he worked at Cornell in other capacities including coordinator of K-12 Outreach in the Cornell Public Service Center, New York State Higher/Educational Opportunity Program Counselor in the Office of Minority Educational Affairs (today called OADI- Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives), and residence hall director for the Risley Residential College for the Creative and Performing Arts, as well as Clara Dickson Hall, and the Multicultural Living-Leaning Unit (McLLU).

In addition to his position with Cornell Hip Hop Collection, Ben is also active in the local music scene, and can be found rocking dance floors as his alter ego, DJ ha-MEEN. Other pursuits of Ben's include painting, mountain biking, and playing Afro-Cuban and other forms of percussion.

Sarah Hormozi, Fellow

Sarah Hormozi received her M.Sc. in Mathematics and her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2011. She then completed the most prestigious Canadian postdoctoral fellowship award, sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and subsequently joined Ohio University in 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. She moved to the department of Chemical Engineering at Cornell University in 2020. She also serves on the advisory boards of Journals of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, The American Institute of Chemical Engineers and Physics of Fluids.

She has a broad research interest in fluid mechanics, rheology, and microstructure of complex slurries; i.e., suspensions of non-Brownian particles in complex fluids. The flows of complex slurries are ubiquitous in many natural phenomena (e.g., landslides, mudslides, and submarine avalanches) and industrial processes (e.g., converting biomass into fuel, chemical mechanical polishing in semiconductors, body armor fabrics, concrete industries, additive manufacturing, flow batteries, drug delivery, blood cells segregations, and biolocomotions). For these applications, even small increases in efficiency when processing complex slurries could make significant positive economic and environmental impacts.