News
To understand the workings of an enormously complex brain, it’s sometimes best to look at a simpler one. Rudy Behnia, whose research centers on vision, studies fruit flies for just that reason.
Columbia University chemist Xiaoyang Zhu has been named a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).
Dear Campus Historian,
As the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the Lenfest Center for the Arts open on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, it is definitely worth glancing back to the beginnings of the Morningside Heights campus, which was dedicated almost 121 years ago.
When faced with planning the next phase of construction on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, Marcelo Velez sometimes flips open his laptop and “walks” through a computer-generated 3-D model of the 17-acre building site. The technology is just one of many tools that helps Velez, vice president of Columbia’s Manhattanville Development Group, manage every aspect of construction of the University’s newest campus.
When Deborah Cullen joined Columbia in 2012, she was given an enviable task. As the new director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, she would oversee its move from a set of rooms hidden away in Schermerhorn Hall for the past 30 years to an expansive, light-filled space in the new Lenfest Center for the Arts on the University’s Manhattanville campus.
This year’s MFA thesis exhibition, an annual showcase for the work of students graduating from the Visual Arts program at the School of the Arts, returns to campus for the first time in more than a decade. The show, which opens April 22, will inaugurate the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery’s new home in the Lenfest Center for the Arts on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus.
Since it was founded in 1965, Columbia University School of the Arts has produced a stream of award-winning writers, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, directors and visual artists. While the school has never lacked for talent, it has long suffered from a paucity of square footage.
An innovative digital art installation on the ground floor of the new Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus invites visitors to peer inside the brain and meet the neuroscientists who are working upstairs to unravel its complexities. The multiscreen floor-to-ceiling work, Brain Index, loops through large-scale models of the brain while telling the stories of individual researchers and their quests to push the boundaries of neuroscience.
At his 2002 inauguration, Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger spoke about a great research university’s responsibility to address the challenges that face society. Yet without the space for students and faculty to pursue knowledge, he said, Columbia could not fulfill that essential civic mission. He committed the University to a long-term vision for a new and different kind of urban campus that would address expanding academic needs and enhance the urban fabric of the city and West Harlem.
Columbia University announced today that three acclaimed works will be awarded the 2017 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy:
Mike Pride, former editor of the Concord Monitor who helped guide the Pulitzer Prizes through their centennial year, will retire as administrator this summer.
The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
An international team of astronomers has observed evidence of a star that whips around a black hole at a rate of nearly twice an hour. If confirmed, the finding could demonstrate the tightest orbital dance between a black hole and a companion star ever seen.