News Archive

Last month, in the farm belt of Des Moines, Iowa, the 82-year-old Hillel received the annually awarded $250,000 World Food Prize for his life’s work. 

More than 90 percent of U.S. foreign language students, from K-12 through university, study one of the Big Four—French, German, Italian and Spanish. That means minuscule numbers are taking all the other languages spoken in the world, according to the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. 

Ovarian Cancer Patients Have Lower Mortality Rates at High-Volume Hospitals Women who have surgery for ovarian cancer have better outcomes if they are treated at high-volume hospitals, according to researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. The improved survival rate is not dependent on a lower rate of complications following surgery, but on the treatment of complications. Patients with a complication after surgery at a low-volume hospital are nearly 50 percent more likely to die as a result of the complication…

For two days in October, more than 20 executives of nonprofit groups in Harlem came together at Columbia Business School for a leadership training program. To Professor Ray Horton, who joined the faculty in 1970, the new Strengthening West Harlem Nonprofits program represents the ideal alignment of University expertise and his own longstanding commitment to serving the local community. For the past three years, he has been in charge of social enterprise programs in the business school’s executive education division, which he sees as an important platform for enhancing the leadership skills of…

About 10 percent of kids born with kidney defects have large alterations in their genomes known to be linked with neurodevelopmental delay and mental illness, a new study by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers has shown.

Columbia faculty members weigh in on Election 2012

A study by researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, recently e-published ahead of print by the "Journal of Clinical Oncology," suggests that women who have surgery for ovarian cancer at high-volume hospitals have superior outcomes than similar patients at low-volume hospitals.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today issued the following statement to the University community: \"Today, after serving for more than eight years as Columbia’s Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas B. Dirks is announcing that he is stepping down to prepare to become the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. This, of course, is a major role in American higher education, especially at this moment, and while we will miss Nick deeply and are extremely grateful for all he has done for Columbia,…

November 10, 2012 marks the first day of Avery Hall’s second century. 

Researchers at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been explaining to the media and public how weather systems converged to make Sandy so powerful, and how the rising sea levels caused by climate change have sharply increased the destructive potential from such storms on the New York region. At the Mailman School of Public Health, faculty members with expertise in disaster response and in post-traumatic stress disorder provided context and commentary to the news media, and discussed the environmental risks and ethical issues that cropped up in the storm's aftermath. In the aftermath…

This article originally appeared in our October 2010 issue and has been revised and updated for the 2012 presidential election. As Mitt Romney and President Obama crisscross the nation this campaign season, some voters are receiving VIP treatment. The country’s electoral college system almost guarantees that voters in swing states, like Ohio and Florida, get more candidate attention, both on campaign stops and on the airwaves, than in states that lean decidedly Democratic or Republican. In fact, according to Professor Brett Gordon, just one third of the US population was exposed to more than…

As a matter of longstanding University policy, Columbia University is closed for Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 6. There are no classes Nov. 5 or Nov. 6. All administrative offices are closed on Nov. 6. The University will reopen and all classes will resume on Wednesday, Nov. 7. Prospective voters who visit Who’s on the Ballot (whosontheballot.org) and submit their address will be provided with their polling place, who is running for office at every level of government and links to candidates’ campaign websites and social media pages. Make your voice heard. Vote.

Researchers in the group of Centennial Professor of Chemistry, Samuel Danishefsky, have synthesized what is arguably the largest and most complex biological molecule ever assembled by the methods of organic chemistry.