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Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today announced the appointment of Carlos J. Alonso as dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Rafael Yuste likens scientific research to mountain climbing. Assemble a skilled team, get the best equipment, map the route and proceed with slow, deliberate steps. “By walking up very securely, step by step, and not losing track of the summit, you can get there,” says the professor of biological sciences and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.

Yuste knows what he’s talking about. An avid mountain climber, last summer he scaled Monte Perdido, an 11,000-foot peak in the Spanish Pyrenees whose final icy incline has claimed dozens of lives.

From the much lower elevation of his office in the Northwest Corner Building, Yuste is tackling another tall challenge: trying to untangle the cerebral cortex. It’s the largest part of a mammal’s brain and is responsible for fundamental functions like perception, memory, imagination and thinking, yet it continues to perplex scientists. “People have been studying the brain seriously for the past hundred years, but now neuroscience is in an exciting time because of the applications of all kinds of new techniques,” says Yuste, who is working toward a unified theory of the cerebral cortex—a computational formula for how the brain functions.

Yuste’s approach is to reverse-engineer the brain, much like engineers who take apart circuit boards to figure out if they are part of a toaster or a TV. “The main hypothesis of how the cortex works is that it’s a circuit built out of modules, like little bricks that repeat throughout the brain,” says Yuste. He takes slices of mice brains, a third of a millimeter thick and consisting of about 20 layers of neurons—also known as nerve cells, they are the central components of the nervous system—then studies them with techniques drawn from physics, chemistry, engineering and computer science.

In his role as co-director of the Kavli Institute (his co-director is Thomas Jessell), one of Yuste’s jobs is to promote interactions between the basic science groups at Morningside and the neuroscientists who are currently housed at the medical center. The institute, headed by Nobel laureate and University Professor Eric Kandel, is also part of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative.

His team, for example, developed an optical mapping method that involves bathing these brain slices with a chemical that deactivates neurons, and then uses lasers to stimulate them and visualize connections with light. “This way, not only can we see the circuit in action, we can manipulate it with light and be able to get the circuit to become activated and inactivated in an arbitrary fashion,” says Yuste.

Neurons either fire or they don’t; excitatory neurons activate other neurons while inhibitory neurons prevent them from firing. One conundrum neuroscientists face is the relationship between the two kinds of neurons. Yuste recently published research in the journal Neuron demonstrating the multiple connections between inhibitory and excitatory neurons using his optical mapping method. The study supported a long-standing hypothesis that the brain is active in the absence of input, or to put it more technically, the circuits in the brain can generate “intrinsic activity.” It’s one piece of the puzzle Yuste hopes will contribute to the unified theory of the cortex.

Yuste’s training started when he was a high school student, analyzing blood samples in a laboratory run by his mother, a pharmacist in Madrid. His father was a lawyer who was a member of Spain’s State Council and ran a cultural foundation. Attracted to the idea of both doing research and treating patients, Yuste went to medical school in Spain but began considering basic neuroscience research when he did a rotation in the psychiatry ward.

“I realized we were treating schizophrenics without any deep understanding of what goes wrong,” he recalls. “The same argument can be made for many types of epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and bipolar disorders. It’s very difficult to come up with therapies when we don’t understand how the circuit works.” After a six-month research stint in Cambridge, England, Yuste decided to drop medicine and move to the United States to get his Ph.D. at The Rockefeller University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs before joining Columbia in 1996.

Like a mountaineer who can visualize the summit, Yuste is optimistic. “The rest of the body is pretty well understood, but once you go higher than the nose, we’re in uncharted territory,” he says. The unified theory he envisions would be as simple and elegant as the DNA double helix, and could likewise have a galvanizing effect on the field. “Many of us have a feeling that a big breakthrough is about to occur that would illuminate everything.”

—by Beth Kwon

After two years at Columbia as University provost, Claude Steele is returning to Stanford University, where he will become dean of its School of Education. A noted social psychologist, Steele came to Morningside Heights in May 2009 from Stanford, where he served as a professor of psychology from 1991 to 2009 and led the psychology department as chair from 1997 to 2000.

Steele has conducted a wide range of research, examining such issues as self-identity, group stereotypes and addictive behaviors. He described the decision to leave Columbia as perhaps the most difficult of his career.

In an email to the University community, Steele said he loved his job here. “It is a fascinating, challenging and constantly stimulating experience to be the provost of a great research university, especially one that is thriving on so many important fronts.” However, he added, “life doesn’t always go as planned. The decision to accept the Stanford offer came down to a difficult-to-pass-up opportunity to play a role in the field of education.”

As a scholar, Steele has sought to understand the processes that drive educational achievement. In his new role, he is looking forward to developing the implications of that work in the area of education policy and practice.

“It is an important time to be rejoining that vital mission,” he said. “Nothing less than this rare opportunity to do so at such a strong school of education could have lured me away from my current position at Columbia.”

University President Lee C. Bollinger wished Steele well. “Though personally saddened by Claude’s decision to return to Stanford, I completely understand this life choice,” he said in the same email announcing Steele’s departure. “Given Claude’s great talents and the importance of the issues he wants to explore and resolve, this is clearly a benefit to society, while it is equally a loss for us at Columbia.”

Steele is noted for developing the concept of “stereotype threat” which, he says, is “simply being in a situation where a negative stereotype about one of your identities could apply. Then you know you could be judged or treated in terms of that stereotype.”

His book on the subject, Whistling Vivaldi, and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, was published in 2010 and uses reallife examples and the results of many scientific experiments to illustrate this theory, making the crucial point that stereotype threat is not limited to race. It can be seen in situations involving gender, age and other examples of group identity. “All of my research, in some way or another, bears on the value of diversity in participation in American society,” Steele told The Record in October 2009.

“It’s an incredibly important life mission of mine and part of my character. I’m always wending my way toward a support for that, and for facilitating that in American society. Full participation—that’s what I think of when I think of the idea of diversity. And among the Ivies, Columbia, I am proud to say, has the most diverse student body of all of them.”

—by John Uhl

Columbia University trustee Gerry Lenfest has made a leadership gift of $250,000 to Columbia University Libraries as part of a matching challenge funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a senior conservator at the Libraries.

Special from The Record

Jae Woo Lee knows what it is like to feel confused in class. He spoke almost no English when he immigrated to Flushing, Queens from Korea at age 18. At Bayside High School, “I could see what was on the board in math and science classes,” recalls Lee, who is now working toward a Ph.D. in computer science at Columbia. “But for three months I couldn’t really understand what people were saying.”

Special from The Record

Over billions of years, Earth’s continents have split apart and rejoined, and ice sheets have disappeared. Although the natural world is full of drama, the problem for teachers is that it happens in geological time, not real time.

Enter Columbia graduate student Kat Allen, who has developed a repertoire of techniques for bringing the popular introductory geology course, “The Climate System,” to life.

“Physicists can drop objects and roll model cars down ramps to demonstrate universal forces,” she says. “But geologists can’t fit an entire river delta into a lecture hall. If you’re stuck in a classroom, you need to be creative.”

She tries to make concepts tangible for her students, comparing the size of an iceberg to Central Park or the depth of an ocean trench to Mount Everest.

At Commencement, Allen received Columbia’s top teaching honor, which comes with an $8,000 prize.

In her lab at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Allen studies ancient plankton shells to learn about past ocean acidification. Her research has involved scuba diving off Puerto Rico and California’s Catalina Island to collect living plankton that she brings back to the lab and grows in glass jars.

She spends weeks measuring how the water’s temperature, acidity and other measures influence the growth of the plankton’s shell, the better to understand the ocean’s past chemistry and estimate how much carbon dioxide was in the air. Despite exotic fieldwork locations, most of the work involves long days in a lab, but Allen goes about her work “humming and whistling, always in a good mood,” says her colleague and adviser, Bärbel Hönisch.

Growing up, Allen liked exploring the tide pools and crags near her hometown of Falmouth, Maine, and says it was probably this early exposure to the outdoors that led her to study geology at Case Western Reserve University. At the suggestion of her rowing coach, she applied for and won a Churchill Scholarship to Cambridge University.

She came to Columbia in 2007 for her Ph.D., and is known at Lamont for her “coffee poems,” which put the latest journal studies into verse. Every Friday she sends an email to her colleagues with her latest effort, closing with an invitation to “come on down for coffee and cookies.” A study from the journalScience suggesting that dinosaurs could see in the dark led to this set of rhymes: “Eye shape and size just might/Show dinos prowled at night!/With great big teeth/And claws beneath:/They’d give me quite a fright!”

“I like to think of coffee hour as a social catalyst,” she explains. “I have no idea if the silly poems motivate people to come, but they’ve sparked some fun conversations.”

When it comes to teaching, Allen is a firm believer in getting students outdoors to learn about earth’s processes. At Columbia, she has led her fellow grad students on field trips to Iceland and brought New York City high school students to Piermont Marsh on the Hudson River to do their own research.

Two of her students this year made it to the finals of the prestigious Intel International Science and Technology Fair for original research on a threatened bayou fish. In the classroom, she explains how data are collected using specialized instruments, from satellites to air balloons. “I think it’s important for students to get in the habit of asking questions like: How was that measured? What’s the uncertainty?” she says. “In a world flooded with information, I want students to make informed decisions, whether they end up in a science career or not.”

—by Kimberly Martineau

Each year, Columbia’s Presidential Teaching Awards spotlight the most dedicated and innovative instructors at the University. The awards are given at Commencement to both faculty members and graduate student instructors.

Soon after graduating from college, Tyler Bickford taught music for a year at a rural Vermont elementary school. Years later, the same school would serve as a rich laboratory for his Columbia dissertation about how kids consume digital media.

On the way to earning his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, Bickford returned to Vermont to take notes on how some 70 K-8 schoolchildren share earbud headphones and use MP3 players. Before long, he found himself recruited back into teaching music appreciation to the same group of youngsters.

“Running a second grade class, you learn that you have to have clear ground rules so that you can then back off a lot and be more exploratory,” says Bickford, whose dissertation was titled “Children’s Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren.”

When he returned to Columbia to finish his degree, he was given a different kind of challenge: teaching the Core Curriculum seminar “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West” to College sophomores. This year, his efforts were honored with the University’s highest teaching award.

The class navigated texts by the likes of Nietzsche, Aristotle and Kant, an unusual curriculum for someone who once lectured at Columbia on Bob Dylan. Bickford calls it the best job he’s ever had.

As he did in Vermont with his much younger students, Bickford aimed to foster open idea sharing by assigning ungraded, stream-of-consciousness journal entries in tandem with narrowly focused academic papers.

“Often students would write in their journals about connections they thought were too far out or would be inappropriate to write papers about—self-help books and Epictetus, the Harry Potter books and Hume, Hobbes and Judith Butler—but which were actually really smart,” Bickford recalls. “I'd try to show them how it could be a solid idea for a paper, and they'd run with it.”

Victoria Fox, a senior film studies major at the College, recalls being intimidated by philosophy in high school, but in Bickford’s seminar in 2009, she discovered how texts like Plato’s The Republic were relevant to her life. Now she’s working toward a philosophy concentration. “The free-form writing made me approach the papers a lot more creatively,” she says.

Raised in Puerto Rico by a pair of teachers, Bickford majored in music and modern studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, earning his B.A. in 2001. He now hopes to secure teaching work in a field related to his studies.

At the core of his research is a deep interest in the status of children in society. “There has been an explosion in the commercial power of kids buying media,” Bickford says. “That’s honest-to-goodness political power.”

Professor Aaron Fox, chair of the Music Department and no relation to Victoria, first met Bickford about seven years ago and supervised his dissertation. He says that Bickford’s dedication to the young subjects of his research mirrors the core values of Columbia’s ethnomusicology program.

“As confident as he is in his ability, his focus is always on the other person at the table,” Fox says.

Fox also notes that Bickford is a rare example of a Music graduate student teaching a seminar on contemporary civilization. But he adds: “I expect this will be a more and more common thing now, now that Tyler's example has demonstrated that students in Music can successfully contribute to Columbia's undergraduate Core Curriculum in ways that go beyond Music Humanities.\"

—by Elizabeth Thomas

Two Columbia News videos will air this month on NYC TV, the official television network of New York City.

Both videos highlight unique collaborations between the University and the local community, including Columbia Engineering’s Center for Technology, Innovation and Community Engagement and The Young Company, an effort spearheaded by the School of the Arts’ acting program to bring Shakespeare to middle and high school students.

Soon after Columbia Law School emptied out at the end of the spring semester, its Jerome L. Greene Hall filled up with representatives of some of the world’s most remote island nations. The topic of their three-day meeting was the danger posed by rising sea levels.

Richard Hamilton, Davies Professor of Mathematics, has won the 2011 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. The Shaw Prize is given annually in three areas: astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences. This is the eighth year of the Shaw Prize; awardees will be honored at a ceremony on Wednesday, Sept. 28.

The Shaw Prize is awarded to individuals who have made outstanding contributions and significant advances in their current field of study. The award is dedicated to \"furthering societal progress, enhancing quality of life, and enriching humanity's spiritual civilization,\" according to the Shaw Prize website. Professor Hamilton is receiving the award for his work with Ricci flow in Riemannian geometry. The $1 million award will be shared equally with fellow winner Demetrios Christodoulou, professor of mathematics and physics at the ETH, a science and technology university in Zurich, Switzerland.

Hamilton's mathematical contributions are primarily in the field of differential geometry and more specifically geometric analysis. He is best known for having discovered the Ricci flow and suggesting the research program that ultimately led to the proof, by Grigori Perelman, of the Thurston geometrization conjecture and the solution of the Poincaré conjecture.

Hamilton was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1996 and the Clay Research Award in 2003. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He also received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research in 2009.

The Shaw Prize is an international award managed and administered by The Shaw Prize Foundation. Additional information can be found on the Shaw Prize website.

Not every child can dream up a smartphone application and see it come to life. But that’s what happened when 8-year-old William Belhumeur suggested his father make an app that identifies plants using visual recognition technology.

As a professor of computer science at the engineering school and director of Columbia’s Laboratory for the Study of Visual Appearance, Peter Belhumeur has worked on face recognition software since the mid-1990s. He quickly saw that the same algorithms that can process the curve of an eyebrow or the angle of a cheekbone could be applied to the shape of a leaf.

“The idea of building classifiers that say, ‘Is this person in the photo a man or a woman?’ or ‘Is that leaf a sugar maple or a silver maple?’ uses a lot of the same sort of math and technology,” says Belhumeur.

With the help of computer scientist David Jacobs at the University of Maryland and John Kress, research botanist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution, Belhumeur developed LeafSnap, an electronic field guide that is now available on the iPhone and iPad, and on Android phones later this year. It is easy enough for a child to use, but goes well beyond the basics for botanists.

The team started by photographing leaves from the Smithsonian’s vast library. But they soon realized a viable application would have to be able to recognize leaves in the wild, not just museum specimens. So Belhumeur’s student volunteers collected thousands of leaves from Central Park—up to 50 samples each from the park’s 145 species—and photographed them with their iPhones.

A leaf’s shape is its least variable feature and easiest to capture in a photo, so the team focused on characteristics like smooth versus jagged, many-lobed or single-lobed. They then programmed the computer to perform a sort of process of elimination. “The computer basically ranks images by most similar to least similar,” says Neeraj Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science who manages LeafSnap’s software coding and is in charge of the volunteer leaf identifying team.

Back in a Schapiro Hall lab, the team trained the computer to distinguish one species from another. “We pick one feature we extract from the leaf, and using that we can say, ‘This looks more like all of these maples I’ve seen and less like something else,’” says Kumar.

The app, which is free, allows a user to photograph a leaf, upload it and see a list of possible matches within seconds. There is also a complementary website (http://leafsnap.com) with profiles of each species. Initial interest is high; the app has been installed 150,000 times.

In addition to the Central Park trees, LeafSnap’s database covers the 160 species in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park; between the two parks, most native species in the northeast are represented. Belhumeur’s team hopes to eventually map species across the United States and use a crowd-sourcing element to let users add their own images to the database. “This is the sort of system we need because species are disappearing off the planet at an alarming rate, and the process of identification is very slow,” explains Belhumeur.

Belhumeur went to Brown as an undergraduate and received his Ph.D. in engineering sciences from Harvard. He came to Columbia in 2002 after eight years as an electrical engineering professor at Yale. For him, LeafSnap bridges his high-tech background and love of nature. As a child in Providence, R.I., he remembers looking up at trees with his parents and trying to identify leaves with a field guide. Now his family has a farm in Cornwall, Conn., where they raise cattle, sheep, pigs, geese and chicken. “It was fun to take that visual recognition technology and drop it into this domain, working with biologists and doing something I cared about as a kid,” he says.

His son is already thinking of new apps. “I think it is time for Fishsnap and Bugsnap,” says William, “so there is still a lot of work to do.”

—by Beth Kwon

Thursday, June 23, 2011

6:30 p.m.: AFRO-SAMBA
with Quenia Ribeiro

7:30 p.m.: BELLY DANCE
with Arianna Al Tiye

8:30 p.m.: DANCE PARTY
with DJ Stormin’ Norman

Thursday, July 21, 2011

6:30 p.m.: BOLLYWOOD
with Pooja Narang

7:30 p.m.: HIP HOP
with Tweety

8:30 p.m.: DANCE PARTY
with DJ Stormin’ Norman

This event is sponsored by Columbia University’s Office of Government and Community Affairs, School of Continuing Education-Summer High School Program, and the Arts Initiative at Columbia University.

Please e-mail questions to: [email protected] or visit the Office of Community Outreach website.

A team of researchers from Columbia Engineering, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and Rutgers University has now demonstrated that evaporation from the land surface is able to modify summertime rainfall east of the Mississippi and in the monsoonal region in the southern U.S. and Mexico.