AppDev Aids Students With App Designs Project team designs apps popular across Cornell's campus

By CAMDEN WEHRLE Sun Staff Writer

In 2014, Cornell AppDev began as one of the College of Engineering’s newest project teams. Since then, the team has developed numerous apps devoted to aiding Cornell students and community members, ranging from providing dining hall information to TCAT tracking. The team, advised by Prof. Walker White, computer science, currently has six apps published — with more on the way this semester.

Product lead Archit Mehta ’25 estimates that around 12,000 undergraduates — about 80 percent of the total Cornell undergraduate population — use at least one of the team’s apps in a given semester. Before joining the team, he too was one of those users, making use of the CourseGrab app to enroll into high-demand classes during the Add/ Drop period.

When researching project teams, Mehta was drawn to AppDev and was accepted to the team during his second semester at Cornell.

“AppDev was the [project team] that really stood out to me just because I really agreed with the mission statement of making an impact in the Cornell community, giving back to students and solving their headaches,” Mehta said.

Mehta previously worked on updating the Eatery app to a new version titled Eatery Blue which would contain more information, such as incorporating Collegetown restaurant menus into the app.

The updated app is intended to be released soon. Currently, Mehta’s work entails overseeing all of the apps in development and including more input from the Cornell community in choosing which apps to build.

According to Noah Solomon ’24, the vice team lead, identifying problems students face and creating solutions are the first steps in the multi-semester long process of developing a new app.

Every semester, the team holds an “app jam” process, where team members pitch new apps, the best of which are developed into full apps.

“We have to first of all make sure the problem we’re solving is a real problem. That involves student interviews, actually talking to students,” Solomon said. “That’s when we start saying, ‘how can we solve this problem from a technical standpoint as well as a product perspective?’”

By AIMÉE EICHER Sun Assistant News Editor

Through her research and community work, Prof. Laura Bellows, division of nutritional sciences, is helping children and families develop healthier eating and physical activity patterns.

Bellows’s research focuses on the development of eating behaviors and physical activity patterns in early childhood. Her academic training lies in exercise science, nutrition and public health. Bellows earned a B.S. in Exercise Science and Health Promotion from Miami University before going on to earn an M.P.H in Human Nutrition from the University of Michigan. While studying public health through her master’s program, Bellows recognized her own privilege regarding food access, which inspired her to focus her work on lower-income communities.

“I had an experience in my master's degree in which I was observing someone working with lower-income families, and it really resonated of how fortunate my upbringing was, and how challenging it is for some people — and the challenges were due to barriers, both systematic and educational, in some cases, or income-oriented,” Bellows said.

After completing her M.P.H., Bellows began working directly with communities, aiming to combine her backgrounds in nutrition and physical activity. Through this work, she helped design programs to improve fami- lies’ access to healthy foods while also respecting varying cultural backgrounds.

“[I] was not really focused on research per se, but really just working with people, communities and those that were lower-income,” Bellows said. “It ended up being in rural communities as well as Latino populations, from a health equity perspective.”

Bellows worked at Colorado State University for 21 years, starting in a local county through the university’s cooperative extension program. She then moved her projects to campus, funded through SNAPEd, a nutrition education program for people within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. During this time, Bellows also earned a Ph.D. in Community Nutrition from Colorado State University.

“I worked on a program with lower-income preschool centers and healthy eating, and I came on to expand that program and continue to work with these lower-income communities and centers,” Bellows said. “That's when we started adding research components to try to understand how well the program worked, and who it was reaching and what they were doing with the information.”

To continue reading this story, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Emily Davis, Ph.D.

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