Research & Discovery

This page highlights the astonishing amount of scientific discovery happening at Columbia, one of the world’s leading research universities. 

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Clockwise from top left: An iceberg stranded on a submerged rock in northwest Greenland (Karl Zinglersen); homo erectus crania from the Turkana Rift (John Rowan); a mosquito feeding (Alex Wild); a shell of thick gas and dust (red) expelled from the outer layers of a star as its core collapses into a black hole. The inner regions show a heated ball of gas (white) continuing to fall into the central black hole. (Keith Miller, Caltech/IPAC - SELab)
Columbia University Discoveries in 2025-26 to Know About

Here are some of the top scientific research findings of the past academic year.


 

RECENT STORIES

A new implant is orders of magnitude faster and smaller than today’s state-of-the-art brain-computer interfaces.

Ryan Leone hopes to use his medical degree, which he’ll earn next spring, to treat both service members and veterans.

Columbia physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi discovered nuclear magnetic resonance in the 1930s. Today, it lets doctors look inside patients.

Sebastian Mizera just joined the physics department as an assistant professor, researching quantum field theory.

Columbia professors contributed to new research that seeks to understand an anomaly that has puzzled particle physics for decades.

In 1951, Columbia’s Charles Townes came up with the idea for the device that led to the laser. It earned him a Nobel Prize.

The Mauve satellite will study flares from stars and their impact on the habitability of nearby planets.

Current climate models overstate the rate of nitrogen fixation, a natural process that helps remove atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Psychology Professor Chujun Lin is using machine learning to identify how people judge each other, and the consequences that has.

Professor Louis Brus won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on quantum dots. Turn on your TV, and you might see some.

The technique successfully opened the blood-brain barrier, which usually hinders chemotherapies.

Columbia Public Health and Climate School researchers led a new study into the ongoing global health threat from arsenic.