2026 Marshall Scholars, UAE Rhodes Scholar, National Academy of Inventors, and More Accolades

Columbia News produces a monthly newsletter (subscribe here!) and article series featuring a roundup of awards and milestones that Columbia faculty, staff, and students have received in recent days. In this edition, you’ll find awards and milestones from Nov. 20 to Dec. 17, 2025.

If you have an accomplishment you'd like to be considered for inclusion, please email [email protected] with your name, title, school, department, and a link to the relevant award or milestone. 

You can take a look at past accomplishments on our Awards & Milestones page. And you can subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox. 

FACULTY

ARTS & HUMANITIES

Joseph Albernaz, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book for his monograph, Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community.

The Natural Materials Lab, founded and directed by Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), received a Gold Award from FRAME Magazine for Earthen Rituals, exhibited at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, Adjunct Associate Professors at GSAPP, won Architects Newspaper’s 2025 Best of Design Award, Residential, Single Unit Category, with their CLT House.

Julia Doe, Associate Professor of Music, received the 2025 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for her essay, “Musical Sociability, Atlantic Slavery, and the Portraiture of Carmontelle,” published in the Journal of Musicology.

Dana Lok (SOA’15), Adjunct Assistant Professor, Visual Arts Program in the School of the Arts, received an inaugural Liu Shiming Distinguished Educator Award. The award was established by the Liu Shiming Art Foundation to celebrate the critical and often underappreciated role of adjunct faculty—artists who balance independent studio work with the responsibility of shaping the next generation of visual artists. 

Brinkley Messick, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, who died in August 2025, was posthumously awarded the 2025 Middle East Studies Association Mentoring Award for “his extraordinary contributions to the training and support of others in Middle East studies.”

Khatchig Mouradian, Lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, has been selected as a Schmidt Sciences 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute awardee. He will serve as a co-Principal Investigator in the project "Connectivity and Individuality in Textual Traditions: Reimagining Scalable and Evidence-Based Approaches for Inclusive and Transformative Humanities Computing," which brings together an international team of historians and AI experts.  

Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, was named an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the highest honor the society confers, which recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.

Eleonora Pistis, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, is the winner of the 2025 Berger Prize, the leading book prize in the field of British art history. Her book, Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford, has been defined by the chair of the judging panel as “a rare example of true interdisciplinarity,” one that “breaks new ground in the field of intellectual history as well as architectural history.”

Ying Qian, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, received a Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies honorable mention from the Modern Language Association of America for her book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work in East Asian or East Asian diaspora literary or linguistic studies.

MEDICINE & SCIENCE

Alexis Abramson, Dean of Columbia Climate School, and Steven Cohen, Senior Vice Dean of Columbia School of Professional Studies, were named as Crain's Notable Leaders in Sustainability 2025: Abramson for leading the first higher education institution solely dedicated to addressing the climate crisis through an interdisciplinary approach to research and education, with measurable impacts on climate, the Earth, and society; and Cohen for advancing sustainability at Columbia’s MPA in Environmental Science and Policy program and its Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management.

Beatrice Beebe, Clinical Professor of Psychology, received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the International Congress of Infant Studies. The award recognizes "luminaries in the field who made the science of infancy what it is today.”

Louis Brus, Samuel Latham Mitchell Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering, and Elisa Konofagou, Robert and Margaret Hariri Professor of Biomedical Engineering, were named Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors.

Billy Caceres, Assistant Professor of Nursing, and Corina Lelutiu-Weinberger, Associate Professor of Health Sciences Research, have received one of eight Hillman Emergent Innovation grants from The Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation to pilot test their project “Reducing Cardiovascular Disease Risk Among Sexual Minority Adults.”

Ivaylo I. Ivanov, Professor of Microbiology & Immunology, was selected to join Pew Charitable Trusts’ 2025 class of Innovation Fund investigators. With Andrew L. Goodman of Yale, Ivanov will test whether medical drugs and gut microbes can activate antimicrobial peptides in the mammalian gut to reshape the gut microbiome.

Sarah Rossetti, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Nursing, and Maxim Topaz, Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor of Nursing, have received new funding from the American Nurses Foundation’s Reimagining Nursing Initiative to scale their projects nationally. Rossetti's project, the CONCERN Early Warning System, uses AI to identify deterioration risk for hospitalized patients based on patterns of nursing surveillance that can be measured using electronic health record data. NurseAssist-AI, led by Topaz, is an AI system that aims to reduce the documentation burden for home health care nurses.

Anil K. Rustgi, Herbert and Florence Irving Director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, was awarded the Vay Liang & Frisca Go Award for Lifetime Achievement by the American Pancreatic Association for his profound impact on the field of pancreatology (pancreatic cancer research). Rustgi was also awarded the Luminary Award in GI Cancers by OncLive® and the Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers, for "individuals whose contributions to gastrointestinal cancer research and patient care have made a lasting impact in their field."

Daniel W. Savin, Senior Research Scientist in the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, was awarded the 2026 Laboratory Astrophysics Prize by the Laboratory Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. The award recognizes his contributions to studies in X-ray astrophysics and early universe star formation, and his extensive service to the laboratory astrophysics community.

POSTDOCS & STUDENTS

Fatima AlJarman AlNuaimi (CC’26) was selected as a 2026 United Arab Emirates Rhodes Scholar, which provides funding for postgraduate study at Oxford University to two UAE students each year. She plans to study world literature with an interest in experimental literature emerging from the UAE, and is committed to developing platforms and programs for dialogue, exchange, and collaboration.

Lama Barhoumi, Taylor Lowery, and David Ni, students in the Real Estate Development Program at GSAPP, won first place at the Colvin Case Study Challenge.

Riya Kalra, master's student in biostatistics, was named overall champion and champion in the computer vision track at the NVIDIA AI & Dell Technologies Hackathon. Sripad Karne, master's student in data science, won first place in the agentic AI track.

Joseph Karaganis (CC’26), Brianna Przywozny (SEAS’25), and Theo Taplitz (CC’25) have been named 2026 Marshall Scholars. It is the first time that three Columbians have been selected for this prestigious award in a single year.

Nandini Rawal, master’s student in the Religion Department, was awarded first prize in the Hindi Essay Writing Competition organized by the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations.

Carolyn Swope, PhD candidate in Urban Planning at GSAPP, was awarded the Founder’s Prize at the Social Science History Association annual conference for her article “The Spatial Configuration of Segregation, Elite Fears of Disease, and Housing Reform in Washington, D.C.’s Inhabited Alleys.”

STAFF & RECENT ALUMNI

Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa (CC'24) was named an Examination Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University. Wadhwa, currently a Rhodes scholar and MPhil candidate in intellectual history, will receive seven years of doctoral and postdoctoral funding for her research that examines how India came to be identified with mysticism and spirituality in the 18th–20th centuries.

Gillian Murphy (GS’25) was recently named a Princeton in Asia Fellow for 2025, with a placement at the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka.