News

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. NYSERDA will invest $5 million in seed money at each center over a five-year period, with cost-sharing from each institution required. The centers are expected to operate on their own after NYSERDA funding ends. The new entities—“idea incubators”…

The Humble and Much-Maligned Body Mass Index Takes the Cake

By analyzing tissues harvested from organ donors, Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have created the first ever “atlas” of immune cells in the human body. 

Fourteen winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards were announced today by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

This semester Charles Fried is back in Morningside Heights as the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Visiting Professor of Law, teaching contract law to 36 first-year students.

Graduates of Columbia’s acting program can claim something besides their diplomas at Commencement: membership in Actors Equity. Under an unprecedented agreement between the Theatre Program at the School of the Arts and the off-Broadway Classic Stage Company, all third-year M.F.A. students in Acting will be eligible to join Actors Equity Association. In addition, two M.F.A. students in Stage Management each year will be eligible to join. This agreement marks the first time that a graduate theater program in New York has offered this invaluable bridge to the field. Equity pay scales are significantly…

In a paper in the Sept. 13 issue of "Physical Review Letters," Zelevinsky and her team reported the creation of a new type of ultracold strontium molecule, made of pairs of these glowing atoms.

Soon after winning the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said she would donate the $630,000 cash award that comes with the prize to the foundation she established to support primary education in her native India. “What I do there is what I do here,” Spivak said. “I give my time and skill to train teachers and students together.” An internationally renowned scholar of postcolonial theory whose work focuses on the importance of the humanities in the redress of the economically dispossessed and marginalized, Spivak was honored…

Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor of the Humanities, Pamuk took the podium and captivated the audience with a lively discussion of the novel and its real-life counterpart, which opened this year in his native Istanbul.

In his research, Axel explains that the sense of smell is possible because neurons directly connect the brain to the outside world. Receptors on the neurons of the nose pick up odors from the environment and send that information directly to the olfactory bulb, the first relay station in the brain.

Columbia University Libraries, on behalf of the board of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, has announced the five finalist plays for works produced for the first time in 2012. 

Once again, Columbia filmmakers dominate the Sundance lineup. This year's festival, which will take place January 17 - 27, 2013 in Park City, Utah, features work by an astounding number of School of the Arts students, alumni and faculty.

A new exhibition entitled "The People in the Books: Judaica Manuscripts at Columbia University Libraries" opened in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on September 12. Co-sponsored by the Norman E. Alexander Library, the exhibition of Hebrew and Judaica manuscripts will run through January 25.

A large, multi-center clinical trial led by researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) shows that a new genetic test resulted in significantly more clinically relevant information than the current standard method of prenatal testing.