News

In his new book, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama, Professor Stephen Sestanovich’s argues that since World War II, policy makers have repeatedly miscalculated, quarreled with allies and underestimated their foes. Presidents worried that too much or too little has been done to shape events, and then set out to rectify their predecessors’ mistakes.

Ozgur Sahin, associate professor of biological sciences and physics, has developed a new machine using Legos – a prototype generator that can harness the energy of evaporation.

In spring 2010, the research icebreaker Polarstern returned from the South Pacific with a scientific treasure—ocean sediments from a largely unexplored part of the vast, remote ocean that surrounds Antarctica—the Southern Ocean.

Russia experts at Columbia’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies have sponsored three panel discussions related to the Sochi Olympics, one on Russian politics and two concerning the anti-gay policies of the Putin administration. A fourth, on cybersecurity and the Olympics, is scheduled for Feb. 10.

The Vilcek Foundation named Thomas M. Jessell as the winner of the 2014 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science. 

In a study published today in the online edition of "Nature," researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) found that a mutation in the bone cells called osteoblasts, which build new bone, causes AML in mice. 

Columbia College announced today the appointment of Joseph Ayala as the new Executive Director of its Double Discovery Center, a Columbia College program that works to enhance higher education opportunities for local low-income and first-generation youth and adults between the ages of 12 and 27.

The course aims to spread to an international audience a broader understanding of the need for economic development that is socially inclusive and also protects the environment.

Sig Gissler, who helped move the Pulitzer Prizes more deeply into the digital age, will retire as administrator this summer, Columbia University announced today.

With a mission to explore and better understand the aging process and its societal implications, Columbia University has established a university-wide, interdisciplinary aging center.

In recent years, human interactions with intelligent machines and software have become increasingly commonplace. This can be attributed to developments in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence involving the integration of systems that can learn from data.

When Gary Shteyngart became a professor of writing at Columbia in 2007, he finally fulfilled his immigrant parents’ Ivy League dreams. As he recounts in his new memoir, Little Failure, Shteyngart’s high school grades weren’t stellar enough to gain him admission to a top college, which meant he had failed himself, his parents and his future: “We may as well not have come here,” he writes in the book. Now, after publishing three award-winning, critically acclaimed works of fiction, Shteyngart has turned his acerbic lens on himself to tell the tale of his family’s journey from Russia…

Giving young children the influenza and pneumococcal vaccines together appears to increase their risk of fever, according to a study led by researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, the fever was brief, and medical care was sought for few children, supporting the routine immunization schedule for these vaccines, including the recommendation to administer them simultaneously. The study, which looked at children 6–23 months old, was published online on Jan. 6, 2014, in "JAMA Pediatrics."

I have made my opposition to academic boycotts of Israel emphatically clear over the years, most prominently in my 2007 letter that was signed by some 400 of my fellow college and university presidents speaking out against the British University and College Union's boycott of Israeli scholars and universities.

Using high-resolution functional MRI (fMRI) imaging in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and in mouse models of the disease, Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have clarified three fundamental issues about Alzheimer’s: where it starts, why it starts there, and how it spreads.