CUNY Graduate Center: Science and the Arts: LIMULUS POLYPHEMUS & ACSS

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Horseshoe Crab

ACSS

IACERE

Resiliency

The Graduate Center
New Media Lab
365 Fifth Avenue

Americas Center on Science and Society
(ACSS)

A 21st Century Global Ecosystem Observatory
CUNY Graduate Center

Director: Professor Ronald G. Hellman
Room 7-205; Telephone: 817-1800; Fax: 817-1560
ACSS@gc.cuny.edu

The Americas Center on Science and Society (ACSS) conducts multidisciplinary research to advance the integration of the natural and social sciences and public policymaking. The Center promotes collaboration among the faculties of CUNY's Graduate Center and serves as a link between CUNY's intellectual community and other experts and decision-makers working on key contemporary areas impacted by globalization and science. ACSS' research focuses on (1) the relationship between economy, science, government, and ecosystems; and (2) the increasing demand for sound science to provide solutions to a widening range of complex issues, especially those arising from application of breakthrough discoveries in the natural sciences such as genetics (agriculture and transgenic foods), biotechnology (health and pharmaceuticals) and the related life and physical sciences that impact on a broadening range of human activity. The Americas Center addresses a number of critical gaps in these areas and provides a framework of comparative analysis to help close numerous divides that can only be overcome through the integration of knowledge and policy.

The Americas Center's goals are:

To conduct research and encourage an integrated study of science and society especially through multidisciplinary team work.
To encourage greater interchange among CUNY scholars, share ideas and findings vital to research and to create a forum for the dissemination of their research.
To bring together scholars and practitioners through programs and activities to inform public policy debate as the requisite basis for rational decision making.

Research Priorities

The Graduate Center's President Frances Degen Horowitz observed in her report "Toward 2001" (September 1993) the need for "the general enhancement of science and technological studies throughout CUNY." The Americas Center began working in this direction of ground-breaking policy research early in 1995. As its initial field of research the Center has developed the Inter-American Program on Comparative Ecosystems and Regional Economies (IACERE) a comparative study of estuaries in the Americas. Critical habitats, estuaries are ideal environments joining science, economics, and the political process (with increasing international importance), and therefore provide a fertile source of policy and scholarly interaction. They represent complex ecosystems that bring together clearly ecological and human policy dimensions.

The IACERE Multi-disciplinary Research and Training Agenda 2000 is committed to creating an effective set of tools to understand and manage estuaries that benefit both the ecosystem and the economic modernization process. Utilizing comparative estuary characterization studies now in progress the ACSS plans to build over the next several years a quantitative model (the Biocomplexity Resilience Threshold Model [BRTM]) to understand the significance of the symbiotic ecological phenomena as it relates to ecosystem resilience. This research explores the extent to which human-induced interruptions of the complex web of symbiotic interactions produce bioindicators which can predict threshold states of system disequilibrium.