News

Columbia University announced today that Dean Nicholas Lemann will step down at the end of June, 2013, at the conclusion of the school’s centennial year, after a 10-year term.

Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D, Ph.D., an alumnus of Columbia College and Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 

Visitors to Morningside Park on the evening of September 29 were treated to a luminous sight. A parade of over 500 people holding 110 handmade lanterns and glowing sculptures lit up the park’s winding paths and Columbia’s Morningside campus. 

Principal Jeanene Worrell-Breeden welcomed an audience of more than 300 parents, teachers, neighborhood residents and university community members—along with local and state dignitaries—to celebrate Teachers College Community School’s move into its permanent new home. 

Ten years after the end of a brutal civil war a more hopeful nation has emerged from the ashes, Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told a packed crowd of Columbia University faculty, administrators and students at a World Leaders Forum on Sept. 27.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has announced that Vishakha Desai, former president and chief executive of the New York-based Asia Society, will join the University as his special advisor for global affairs while also serving as a professor of practice at the School of International and Public Affairs, effective January 1.

Research on volcanic eruptions and on the structure of abstract graphs have resulted in two Columbia professors being named MacArthur Fellows, the “genius” awards given to individuals who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.” 

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery opens its new exhibition season with \"Robert S. Duncanson: An Antebellum African American Artist,\" a survey of rarely seen works by the 19th-century landscape painter. Curated by renowned Duncanson scholar Joseph D. Ketner II, the exhibit gathers more than 20 paintings as well as drawings and contextual materials from the 1840s to the 1870s. Duncanson, who was based in Cincinnati, Ohio—then the largest and most prosperous city in the western United States—was the principal artist among a vibrant group of mid-century Ohio River Valley landscape…

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger issued the following statement today celebrating the life of Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger.

Child development specialist Cassie Landers, EdD, MPH, helped promote the idea of portable playgrounds to UNICEF two years ago when she saw its potential for children growing up in crisis and post-conflict areas and in places where opportunities for education and play are limited.

Columbia University Libraries and Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith are pleased to announce the establishment of a significant theater award, The Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, abbreviated as the EMK Prize.

Sometime in the next year and a half, a glowing interstellar blob—possibly a star or a young solar system—will pass perilously close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. If it is sucked in, scientists will witness for the first time a significant “feeding event,” which will result in a massive release of energy that helps galaxies and stars evolve.

Researchers in the Taub Institute at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have identified a mechanism that appears to underlie the common sporadic (non-familial) form of Parkinson’s disease, the progressive movement disorder. 

Columbia to Award the 2012 Horwitz Prize to Richard Losick, Joe Lutkenhaus, and Lucy Shapiro for Discovering the Intracellular Structure of Bacterial Cells

Long before she was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and spent 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest as a political prisoner in Burma, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said she learned how to survive her pressure cooker-like imprisonment from an actual pressure cooker.