News

Seeking to bridge the transition from pediatric to adult care for people living with cerebral palsy, Debby and Peter A. Weinberg, with several of their family members and friends, have given more than $7 million to help establish the Weinberg Family Cerebral Palsy Center at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). 

Columbia and Columbians have long been working across many regions in Africa, from the Mailman School’s leadership of AIDS/HIV programs and the Earth Institute’s research on sustainable development to the many scholars of African history and politics, culture and society. But with the opening of the University’s Global Center in Nairobi, Kenya, faculty, students, alumni and friends will have a new home base for engaging with the people, ideas and complex issues that confront a continent undergoing profound change. The Jan. 14 dedication and discussion event was big news in Africa, attended…

Since the global financial meltdown of 2008, a great debate has ensued over how best to regulate Wall Street’s excesses. What better format, then, to address such a thorny topic than the role-playing Socratic dialogue pioneered by the late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News and a longtime professor and legend at Columbia Journalism School? Last fall a panel of high-powered finance experts—including bank executives, regulators, politicians, journalists and a Nobel laureate in economics—assembled at Columbia’s Miller Theatre to participate in a panel titled “Financial Innovation:…

Ken Shepard's research focuses on finding new applications for integrated circuits, or chips. Semiconductor research has, he says, “focused on using integrated circuits for building computers and communication devices like cell phones, but what we haven’t really explored is how we can use them for biotechnology.”

Jim Yardley has seen firsthand how the nanotechnology field has exploded over the past decade. “It’s extremely exciting,” says the managing director of Columbia’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. 

It’s relatively simple to build a device capable of detecting wireless signals if you don’t mind making one that consumes lots of power. It’s not so easy to design energy-efficient devices that function as well as the components they replace, or to do it at the nano scale. 

“The development of this new technology over the past decade has brought us to the edge of fantastic new discoveries,” said Michael Purdy, the University’s executive vice president of research. “This is revolutionary. That means that Columbia has to be at the lead, just as we have been in nuclear physics and as we are in climate change.” 

In graduate school Sahin created an atomic force microscope that could measure mechanical forces at the molecular level, winning the grand prize in the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s Collegiate Inventors Competition. Today a refined version of the microscope is Sahin’s primary research tool.

Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has taken his innovative lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records—10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device (pictured at right) was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. In the…

When historian Hilary Hallett was researching the cultural history of early Hollywood, she drew on her expertise in feminism and film production to find a defining event about the fledgling industry—the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, a lurid episode involving the death of a beautiful young woman that set off a tabloid frenzy comparable to that surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial. The 1921 incident centered on model and actress Virginia Rappe, who died under mysterious circumstances after attending a hotel room drinking party hosted by Arbuckle, the popular, portly silent film star. He was acquitted…

President Barack Obama (CC'83), the first Columbia graduate to be elected president of the United States, was sworn in for a second term.

In the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus—which uses pattern separation to form new memories—is one of two areas of the brain where neurogenesis takes place.

Robert J. Winchester, MD, an immunologist in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Rheumatology, was awarded the 2013 Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Columbia University will award George Manahan, Music Director of American Composers Orchestra, the 2012 Ditson Conductor’s Award for the advancement of American music.

Computer Science Assistant Professor Martha Kim has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to develop energy tracking and monitoring techniques to audit and control software energy consumption.