News

Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel and Small Business Services Commissioner Robert Walsh presented La-Verna Fountain, Columbia’s vice president for Construction Business Services and Communications, with the Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise Advocate of the Year Award for Upper Manhattan.

When word came that Katharina Pistor, Columbia Law School’s Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, had been chosen to receive the Max Planck Research Award for 2012, the comparative law expert was in a hotel room in Florence, Italy, preparing for a student’s dissertation defense. Pistor, to be sure, was not expecting the news she received when the Max Planck Society’s president, Peter Gruss, interrupted her background reading with a call. “I picked up the phone, and he said: ‘I have good news. You were just awarded the Max Planck Research Prize and 750,000 euros,’” Pistor says, recalling…

Some 75 Columbia faculty members, post-docs, students and friends gathered in Low Library at 3 a.m. Wednesday to experience one of the biggest developments in particle physics, watching a live feed from Geneva where news was announced of the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle—quite possibly the long-elusive Higgs boson. 

Columbia mourns the passing of three members of its community who made significant contributions to the University. 

Robert Shapiro is a professor of political science, who specializes in American politics, especially public opinion and political behavior, political psychology and political leadership.

Here’s his view on the issues raised in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 opinion on the Affordable Care Act.

The Inamori Foundation announced that Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been selected to receive the 28th annual Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in the field of thought and ethics. An Indian intellectual, activist and University Professor, Spivak is also a founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Known as the “Nobel of the arts,” the Kyoto Prize is an international award presented annually to individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind in categories of advanced technology, basic sciences and…

As the eyes of the world focused on Egypt’s transition to democracy, Columbia University political science faculty members conducted a quantitative research workshop for aspiring social scientists at The American University in Cairo just weeks before Egypt’s historic presidential elections.

One in eight people who suffer a heart attack or other acute coronary event experience clinically significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a meta-analysis of 24 studies led by Columbia University Medical Center researchers. 

On June 8, a Head Start ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrated the opening of a brand-new space for the program. 

Modern science is immensely complex, but Professor Virginia Cornish had a simple idea for solving a big problem. The problem was cholera, which infects about four million people annually and kills at least 100,000, most of them children under age 5.

The Bridge to the Ph.D. Program in the Natural Sciences strongly encourages applicants from historically underrepresented groups including but not limited to black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander undergraduates. The two-year program is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Provost’s Office.

Scientists have long studied populations that have endured trauma as diverse as the Holocaust, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan in order to understand how humans cope with devastating loss. What they’ve found is that despite the horrific nature of such events, most survivors demonstrate the ability to bounce back. Dr. Sandro Galea, who has studied the mental health consequences of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and Hurricane Katrina, says humans are naturally resistant to the effects of trauma. Galea,…

“Inequality undermines the strength of our economy and contributes to economic instability,” says Stiglitz. America’s growth was strongest in periods where inequality was far lower, he points out, particularly in the decades after World War II when wages for middle class and blue collar workers steadily increased. 

Don’t be fooled by the name. Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has thousands of objects in its collection that are neither books nor manuscripts.

It’s an unlikely place to build a NASA telescope: a leafy estate in Irvington, N.Y., that once belonged to the son of Alexander Hamilton. Inside a hangar-like building on the site, which is home to Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories for experimental physics, Charles Hailey assembled mirrors for NuSTAR, the most sensitive X-ray telescope ever constructed. Its mission: to conduct a census of black holes, map exploding stars known as supernovae and observe other dynamic events in space.