News

University President Lee C. Bollinger has appointed Professor David Madigan as Executive Vice President and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

Statistician. Technologist. Artistic collaborator. And now, journalism professor.

Having spent virtually all his career working with numbers, Mark Hansen finds himself joining forces with the wordsmiths at Columbia Journalism School. “I feel like a spy in the house of Pulitzer,” he jokes.

When the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation was established at Columbia and Stanford in 2012, part of its $30 million endowment was earmarked for what founder Helen Gurley Brown called “Magic Grants.”

In the decision by the federal judge who found New York City’s stop-and-frisk policies unconstitutional, one name appears more than any other: that of Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School and the Mailman School of Public Health.

Charles Zuker has devoted his career to unraveling the neurobiology of the senses—especially taste, but he is quick to tell you that it’s not because of some inherent fascination with bitter, sweet, and salty truths. “The fact is that we don’t study the senses simply to understand the senses,” says Zuker, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of neuroscience. “We study the senses as an entry point—a tractable problem—in dissecting the mysteries of the brain.” And taste, he notes, is a particularly elegant system for plumbing those mysteries. The senses are…
Brad Lubman, of Ensemble Signal, speaks about the composer and conductor Oliver Knussen and gives a preview of repertoire programmed for the upcoming Miller Theatre Composer Portrait on April 18, 2013.

El Diario La Prensa, the nation’s oldest continuously publishing Spanish-language newspaper, has given the University some 5,000 photographs documenting the lives of New York’s Latinos, their struggles and their contributions to the city and its culture.

Study points to possible treatments and confirms distinction between memory loss due to aging and that of Alzheimer's.

Columbia history professor William R. Leach’s interests cross over many fields—and meadows too. As a lifelong butterfly collector, Leach has traversed open fields, streambeds and orchards in pursuit of the flying insects whose metamorphosis from fuzzy caterpillar to beautiful winged creature has inspired generations of artists and poets. Now he has parlayed his experience into a book showing how butterfly collecting was at the heart of America’s enthusiasm for the natural world in the decades after the Civil War.

Large earthquakes from distant parts of the globe are setting off tremors around waste-fluid injection wells in the central United States, says a new study. Furthermore, such triggering of minor quakes by distant events could be precursors to larger events at sites where pressure from waste injection has pushed faults close to failure, say researchers.

Psychologists and criminal defense attorneys have long argued that the adolescent brain is different from the brain of a child or an adult. The only problem? They couldn’t prove it. Now, with the help of advances in technology, a team of experts—including Columbia Law School Professor Elizabeth S. Scott—has set out to answer questions about how adolescent brain functioning differs from that of adults and how such differences may affect behavior and decision making. What they learn may have huge implications for the way the legal system determines adolescent culpability and punishment. Scott,…

Professor Adam Galinsky is power hungry. For more than a decade, he has studied the role of power as a psychological force, both its behavioral effects and the practical implications of having power and feeling powerful.