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Columbia faculty members weigh in on Election 2012

A study by researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, recently e-published ahead of print by the "Journal of Clinical Oncology," suggests that women who have surgery for ovarian cancer at high-volume hospitals have superior outcomes than similar patients at low-volume hospitals.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today issued the following statement to the University community: \"Today, after serving for more than eight years as Columbia’s Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas B. Dirks is announcing that he is stepping down to prepare to become the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. This, of course, is a major role in American higher education, especially at this moment, and while we will miss Nick deeply and are extremely grateful for all he has done for Columbia,…

November 10, 2012 marks the first day of Avery Hall’s second century. 

Researchers at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been explaining to the media and public how weather systems converged to make Sandy so powerful, and how the rising sea levels caused by climate change have sharply increased the destructive potential from such storms on the New York region. At the Mailman School of Public Health, faculty members with expertise in disaster response and in post-traumatic stress disorder provided context and commentary to the news media, and discussed the environmental risks and ethical issues that cropped up in the storm's aftermath. In the aftermath…

This article originally appeared in our October 2010 issue and has been revised and updated for the 2012 presidential election. As Mitt Romney and President Obama crisscross the nation this campaign season, some voters are receiving VIP treatment. The country’s electoral college system almost guarantees that voters in swing states, like Ohio and Florida, get more candidate attention, both on campaign stops and on the airwaves, than in states that lean decidedly Democratic or Republican. In fact, according to Professor Brett Gordon, just one third of the US population was exposed to more than…

As a matter of longstanding University policy, Columbia University is closed for Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 6. There are no classes Nov. 5 or Nov. 6. All administrative offices are closed on Nov. 6. The University will reopen and all classes will resume on Wednesday, Nov. 7. Prospective voters who visit Who’s on the Ballot (whosontheballot.org) and submit their address will be provided with their polling place, who is running for office at every level of government and links to candidates’ campaign websites and social media pages. Make your voice heard. Vote.

Researchers in the group of Centennial Professor of Chemistry, Samuel Danishefsky, have synthesized what is arguably the largest and most complex biological molecule ever assembled by the methods of organic chemistry. 

The Columbia University community mourns the loss of Jacques Barzun, who died yesterday in San Antonio, Texas, at the age of 104.

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have created the first true mouse model of typhoid infection.

The World Health Organization (WHO) inaugurated the Mailman School’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health as a WHO Collaborating Center for Bioethics, the only such center that explicitly focuses on the ethics of public health.

As an intern in Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML), Jean-Christophe Cloutier was used to the silence. But he could barely contain himself the day he stumbled on what appeared to be a previously unknown manuscript by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay in the archives of another writer. 

The Record talked to faculty across the University to gauge the broader trends of the 2012 election cycle and to look beyond the issues to the actual mechanics of voting and campaign craft.

Thomas M. Jessell, co-director of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, believes the program offers the prospect of changing the way that many aspects of academics will be pursued at Columbia in the decades to come.