News Archive

Great teachers are passionate about the classroom, as evidenced by the 10 faculty members honored this year with Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Awards.

After a distinguished career that has spawned numerous books and television series on everything from the French Revolution to the slave trade, Columbia Professor of Art History and History Simon Schama is now unveiling his most personal project yet: "The Story of the Jews," a multimedia account of 3,000 years of Jewish history.

Leon coordinates the use of space on the CUMC campus for community projects and special events, everything from small meetings to big galas, health fairs and the annual HBO Latino Film Festival, which for several years attracted hundreds of people each summer for the premiere of a Latino film that later was shown on HBO. 

School students arrived at the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Kolb Annex on the Columbia University Medical Center campus March 12 to participate in the annual Community Brain Expo, cosponsored by the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University.

For nearly half a century, Gary Johnson, an instrument maker at Columbia University Medical Center, has been taking scientists’ ideas for research equipment and turning them into reality. “People come to me and tell me what they need,” said Johnson, who is the director of the Design and Instrument shops for the Center for Radiological Research and the core facilities at the Medical Center. “When I get a request, I sit down with the researcher and we kick the ideas around and draw some sketches.” In January, Johnson, who has worked with nearly every department and center at the Medical…

Michael Sovern (CC’53, LAW’55) has had a six-decade love affair with Columbia, from the moment he walked through its gates in 1949 through to the present as University president emeritus and Chancellor Kent Professor of Law.

The Columbia Water Center, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, announced today the release of a new white paper, “Assessment of Groundwater Level Trends across the United States,” that analyzes long-term groundwater trends across the United States. 

Samuel Roth has faded from history, but the books he published are hard to forget. This literary renegade, who studied at Columbia nearly 100 years ago, printed prurient novels, political exposés and foreign authors—often without their consent—and later in his life was known as the “smut king.”

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has named a veteran legal counsel, Joan C. Waters, as University Ombuds Officer.

A California judge has called David Rosner “the people’s historian.” Although the judge was speaking of Rosner’s role in a case that lists the People of the State of California as plaintiff, it is an apt description of someone who has spent decades studying environmental hazards, especially the toxic effects of lead paint on children. “Lead poisoning is the oldest and most persistent childhood epidemic in American history,” said Rosner, the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and a professor of history in the Graduate…

Columbia University announced today that two acclaimed works will be awarded the 2014 Bancroft Prize:

for Astrobiology Magazine Wind and dust conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa can help predict a meningitis epidemic. Determining the role of climate in the spread of certain diseases can assist health officials in “forecasting” epidemics.

Ask Thomas Jessell why he has dedicated his career to understanding the neurobiology of movement, and he puts it in simple terms: “Movement is the overt expression of all behaviors—without movement, intent and desire can be planned and felt but never realized.” 

Eight hundred years ago, relatively small armies of mounted warriors suddenly exploded outward from the cold, arid high-elevation grasslands of Mongolia, and conquered the largest contiguous empire in history. Led by Genghis Khan and his sons and grandsons, the Mongols briefly ruled most of modern-day Russia, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, Persia, India, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They reshaped world geography, culture and history in ways that still resound today. How did they do it? Among the forces at work: the Mongols’ fast horses and brilliant cavalry tactics; their openness to new…

In something as tiny as a speck of dust lies the potential to change earth’s climate. When winds blow iron-rich dust off the continents, they give the plant-like algae floating on the surface of the oceans added nutrients to grow faster.