Columbia faculty, students, and staff are on the cutting edge of advancements in all fields and their work is fittingly awarded and recognized. Below, find the most recent accomplishments and milestones as well as monthly lists of recent awards.
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Recent Awards & Milestones
Years before Alex Halliday joined Columbia’s Earth Institute as its director, he was changing the field of geochemistry. During the early 1990s, he saw the potential of a new kind of mass spectrometer for studying small isotopic variations in elements that were difficult to ionize and measure.
Brian Metzger, an associate professor of astrophysics, has won a 2019 Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize for pioneering predictions of the electromagnetic signal from a neutron star merger, and for leadership in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy.
Rafael Yuste, a professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, has been awarded the Eliasson Global Leadership Prize by the Tällberg Foundation for his seminal contributions in inspiring the US and International BRAIN initiatives and for his efforts toward building ethical guidelines for neurotechnology and artificial intelligence.
Raju Tomer has won a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, for his pioneering work in developing new technologies for high-resolution mapping of brain structure and function.
Columbia alumnus Arthur Ashkin (CC 1947) has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking research in laser physics.
Elena Aprile, a physics professor at Columbia who is leading the world’s most sensitive search yet for dark matter, will receive the American Astronomical Society’s 2019 Berkeley Prize.
Two Columbia professors — a neuroscientist whose work on the visual system could lead to a cure for blindness and a theoretical computer scientist who has helped define the limits of computation — are among the 84 new members elected this week to the National Academy of Sciences.
Columbia University has received nearly three million dollars in grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through its program in Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities.
The Kennedy prize is given annually to a new play or musical that explores U.S. history and meaningfully participates in the great issues of our day.
The Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Branka Arsić was awarded MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for her book 'Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau.'