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For years, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have worked to bring the latest medical advances and treatment to their neighbors in Upper Manhattan.

The newly reinstated Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) will be open to Columbia undergraduates as early as the start of the spring 2012 semester, and the program will be fully implemented by next fall.

Stuart Firestein, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, and William Zajc, chair of the Department of Physics, have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a prestigious scientific society established in 1848.

The first years of Matthew La Croix’s life were consumed with hospital visits. By the time Matthew was 3 in 2010, he needed a bone marrow transplant to survive.

When he was 10 years old, Julio Fernandez took a correspondence course in electronics and earned a certificate for putting together a doorbell. Today, the Columbia professor of biological sciences builds and takes apart proteins, the building blocks of the body which, when they bond improperly, may cause disease.

Traditionally, scientists study proteins in a test tube, a method that Fernandez believes does not offer an accurate enough picture of complex body biochemistry. “In a test tube how would you know what’s happening to something that requires mechanical force to extend and relax?” he says, referring to the stretching and contracting that happens to proteins when they bond with one another in the body. “You have to study proteins and biological molecules in an environment as close to their native condition as possible.”

To that end, Fernandez has spent his career developing a new field—mechanical biology—to understand organic substances with tools from physics, engineering and computer science. His team in the Northwest Corner building builds its own equipment, engineers its own proteins and writes its own computer programs to analyze the data. Though the students each have academic specialties, many have picked up expertise on the job in other disciplines.

In a paper published in the October edition of Nature Chemistry, Fernandez’s team made the first direct observation of how disulfide bonds reshuffle within a protein. Disulfide bonds play a central role in controlling the elasticity of tissues. They used an atomic force microscope, a device developed by physicists in the 1980s to study items such as computer chips at the nanoscale, but adapted by his team to examine biological substances.

“Think of a protein as a rope tied up in a knot that is held together by a disulfide bond,” explains Pallav Kosuri, a Ph.D. student on Fernandez’s team. “Someone breaks the disulfide bond and the knot can now unfurl. We’re watching knots unfurl in a single protein molecule.” The team placed proteins on the examining surface of the atomic force microscope, which is fitted with a sensitive tip that is more than a thousand times sharper than the thickness of a human hair. The tip is attached to the protein, and a laser is used to record the exact position of the tip as the knot unfurls—or when the protein bonds reshuffle.

Disulfide bonds occur in nearly 30 percent of proteins; because they’re so prevalent, scientists believe their interactions may be clues to unraveling a broad range of illnesses, from infectious disease to cancer. Viruses, for example, interact with human cells through proteins that contain disulfide bonds. Marfan Syndrome is a disorder in which fibrillin, a disulfide-bonded protein in connective tissue, malfunctions. Symptoms may include extraordinarily stretchy skin, and in heart tissue, a faulty elasticity that can affect healthy blood flow.

As a physics student at the University of Chile, Fernandez met a group of neuroscientists from Los Angeles studying a squid native to the shores of that South American country. They lured Fernandez to the UCLA School of Medicine, where he received his Ph.D. in physiology and was a post-doctoral research fellow. Following appointments at the Max Planck Institute, the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine and the Mayo Foundation, Fernandez came to Columbia in 2002.

His lab is currently at work studying how muscle elasticity works. They’re also trying to understand the elasticity of the main receptor implicated in HIV infection—another protein with disulfide bonds. “We’re trying to revolutionize protein biochemistry from the point of view of mechanical forces,” he says.

by Beth Kwon

Sixty years ago, music professor Vladimir Ussachevsky received a large package at his office with revolutionary new technology: a reel-to-reel Ampex tape recorder. At the time, most people were using such a device to record and edit sound. Ussachevsky had another idea. He wanted to use it to create original music.

His subsequent experiments led to the founding of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the oldest center for electronic music in the United States. Launched in 1958 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the center sought to encourage the brand-new art of electronic music composition. It installed a custom-built, RCA Mark II Synthesizer, the first programmable synthesizer ever made, a multi-paneled behemoth that today occupies an entire room at Prentis Hall.

Since the 1980s, of course, computers have become ever smaller and more ubiquitous, raising the question of what happens to a much-vaunted computer music center, one that nurtured the likes ofSwitched-On Bach composer Wendy Carlos, Edgard Varese and Charles Wuorinen, when people can create computer music in their own home using programs like Garage Band?

The answer has been for the center to evolve into a sort of music and technology salon, welcoming students, faculty and staff across many disciplines to collaborate on the most experimental projects imaginable. “We offer the chance to expand what you do,” says Brad Garton, the center’s current director. “If you come here as a composition student or a music theorist, you can suddenly become immersed in an environment with visual artists, filmmakers and engineers.”

Garton, a professor in the music department and director of undergraduate studies for music, took a decidedly tech route into the arts. “I was a failed pharmacist,” he notes. He received his undergraduate degree in pharmacy at Purdue University, where he spent much of his time on music, producing sound effects and playing keyboards for a punk band called Dow Jones and the Industrials. He got involved in digital music just as the technology was burgeoning in the early 1980s and applied to graduate school at Princeton, where he worked in the Princeton half of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

But in 1984, the two universities went their separate ways. Princeton was going full tilt toward the digital world, while Columbia was sticking with tape. It wasn’t until Garton came to Columbia in 1987 that the music center here went digital. He helped install the first computer systems and in 1994 was named director. Two years later, the Electronic Music Center was renamed theComputer Music Center, and Garton began shaping its direction.

Assisting him are Terry Pender, the center’s associate director, and director of research Douglas Repetto. Between the three, they offer a dazzling variety of classes united by a cross-disciplinary approach.

Garton recently taught a class on creating music applications for the iPhone, while Repetto co-teaches a class with School of the Arts visual arts professor Jon Kessler on how to create multimedia installations. Soon, the center will offer an M.F.A. degree in sound arts.

Simon Herzog (CC’12) was drawn to the center because of his background as a disc jockey. Now the sociology major is developing mixer/controller hardware with Repetto’s help, which he hopes to manufacture and sell. “Everyone at the center has been fantastic and helpful mentors to me,” he said.

In other examples of the center’s boundary-blurring work, Teachers College graduate students use the center’s technology to bring digital dance and sound into children’s classrooms, and Barnard dance majors learn digital tracking and sonic mapping of motion.

Garton’s wide-ranging acoustic interests have led to a collaboration with Columbia Brain Wave Music Project, in which sensors are used to turn brain waves into music and paintings.

The focus on the latest technology isn’t such a stretch for the 54-year-old Garton, whose mother was a musical prodigy and whose grandfather played for 44 years with the St. Louis Symphony. As a boy, he got hooked on Switched-On Bach, the platinum-selling album that helped popularize synthesizers. As a teen, he listened to the progressive rock banks Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, then techno bands like Devo and Talking Heads.

“It was always music at the core, but music and technology were really mixed together for me,” he says. “I still play piano for fun at home, plus use it for recording. But I would say my primary 'instrument' these days is my laptop.” Then he added as an afterthought, “As part of a belated mid-life crisis, I did buy a cherry-red Epiphone Les Paul model guitar a few years ago.”

by Nick Obourn 

Many people visit India to see the Taj Mahal, the majestic mausoleum built by a 17th century emperor as a tribute to his wife. But last month, a group of Columbia and Barnard architecture students went to India with a lesser-known destination in mind—Chandigarh, a 20th century planned city designed by the famous architect Le Corbusier.

Columbia Engineering School Professor Henning Schulzrinne has been appointed as Chief Technology Officer by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Schulzrinne received his undergraduate degree in economics and electrical engineering from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany; his M.S.E.E. degree as a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio; and his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the computer science and electrical engineering departments in 1996 at The Fu Foundation School of Engineering at Columbia University, New York. 

Gay men lead healthier, less stress-filled lives when states offer legal protections to same-sex couples, according to a new study examining the effects of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Peter K. Mangurian (pronounced Man - GUHR - ee - an), veteran NFL coach and former Ivy League head football coach, has been named Columbia University's Patricia and Shepard Alexander Head Coach of Football, Dr. M. Dianne Murphy, Director, Intercollegiate Athletics and Physical Education at Columbia University announced Thursday.

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have found the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited without any DNA involvement. The findings suggest that Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was eclipsed by Darwin’s, may not have been entirely wrong. The study is slated to appear in the December 9 issue of Cell.

At the Republican presidential debates, the recent Occupy Wall Street protests and kitchen tables across the nation, Americans are debating the impact of government, taxes and programs on the rich and the poor. For two questions in particular—exactly who are the poor and how much does policy have an impact on them?—Jane Waldfogel made a career searching for answers.

Two fossil fuels powered the rise of the modern industrial state. But only one—the hard, chunky rock extracted from the ground by legions of coal workers—has been a force for the development of democracy.

It’s not every day that a professor buys a breathalyzer. But Barron H. Lerner, whose latest book is a cultural history of drunken driving, wanted to know what a .08 blood alcohol concentration—the nation’s legal limit for drivers—really means.

“When I went to see the Manhattanville construction site, what struck me was that it was very quiet, clean and calm,” said Isabelle Silverman, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. “Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion can serve as a clean construction model for other cities and universities.”