Pioneering Cornellians often make change—but for the first time, you’ll find a Cornellian on your change! Vera Cooper Rubin, MS ’51, a groundbreaking astronomer whose life’s work included procuring the scientific evidence to prove the existence of dark matter, is being featured in the 2025 cohort of the American Women Quarters Program.
According to Big Red history expert Corey Ryan Earle ’07, it’s believed to be the first time a Cornellian has ever been depicted on a circulating U.S. coin.
The program, which the U.S. Mint launched in 2022 in partnership with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, has honored five women annually with individual designs on the reverse side of the quarter.
Rubin’s fellow honorees for 2025—the program’s final year—are athlete Althea Gibson, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, disabilities activist Stacey Park Milbern, and journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells.
The five designs will be circulated throughout the country over the next several months.
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
