Episode Details

On this episode of CUNY Laureates, we profile another three Guggenheim Fellows who graduated from the City University of New York.

Leonard Herzenberg was an immunologist and geneticist at Stanford University who helped revolutionize the field of medicine with the invention of the fluorescence activated cell sorter. Working off an earlier cell sorter created at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Leonard and his team of Stanford engineers adapted the machine to separate cells by fluorescent tags. He later improved the machine by incorporating monoclonal antibodies, which could tag cells more accurately. Leonard spent his entire career working alongside his wife and fellow scientist Leonore Herzenberg, who was instrumental in much of his work, including the development of the cell sorter. Fluorescence activated cell sorters have been instrumental in the study of autoimmune diseases, cancers, and stem cell research, and are present in nearly every major medical laboratory today. Leonard was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in both 1976 and 1986.

Maggie Nelson’s genre-bending books were shaped by her early years in New York City and at the Graduate Center. When she first arrived in the city, she was influenced by the “New York School” of artists and took the movement in a new direction with her writings and her studies. Now a professor at the University of Southern California, she continues to publish new and challenging life writing, including her latest from 2025, “Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth”. Nelson won a Guggenheim fellowship in 2010.

Jeff Talman has been creating art installations based on found sound for over 25 years. But what brought him to this unique field? In his early years, Talman explored the cathedrals of Europe and captured the sound inside these large spaces, and what he heard turned into his lifelong project. In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to continue his work and later, he expanded out of cathedrals to explore the sound of the outside world, including that of the cosmic background radiation, which some have called the sound of creation.

00:00 – Intro
00:43 – Leonard Herzenberg
09:21 – Maggie Nelson
17:59 – Jeff Talman

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