Health

Some of the same key survival traits that have kept us alive for thousands of generations are killing us today.

Wendy Chung realized in medical school that someone would need to know what to do with all that information gleaned from sequencing the human genome—so she focused on acquiring the skills to find genes and treat genetic diseases.

A 20-month-old girl suffering from a rare neurodegenerative disease was diagnosed and successfully treated in a case that exemplifies the potential of precision medicine.

In his senior year of medical school, Benjamin Schwartz enrolled in a month-long elective in narrative medicines that he credits with changing his life.

Research shows that black-legged ticks are rapidly growing in number, expanding geographically and carrying pathogens that can lead to ailments like Lyme disease and babesiosis into places where they were relatively unknown.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, Ken Burns and Barak Goodman were at Columbia on March 24 when the University hosted a media briefing on the future of cancer research. Speakers and panelists included Katie Couric, a co-founder of Stand Up to Cancer, and Columbia researchers Kenneth Forde, Stephen Emerson and Thomas Maniatis.

Gillian Metzger (LAW’96), the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law and faculty director of the Law School’s Center for Constitutional Governance, is an expert in administrative and constitutional law, with a specialization in federalism.

Scott Small, director of Columbia’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center,  the Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology, discusses what is known and what’s yet to be discovered, about the disease.

After serving as chief executive officer of Aetna Inc., Jack Rowe became a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health. Trained as a gerontologist, Rowe sees longer life spans as posing a challenge to society on such issues as retirement, infrastructure, urban planning and medicine.