News

President Barack Obama’s new national defense strategy represents “a move in the right direction and a chance to do more of what we should have done after the Cold War and before the second war against Iraq,” according to Richard Betts, the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies. 

Columbia University School of the Arts is pleased to announce that Timothy Donnelly, associate professor of writing, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book The Cloud Corporation (Wave, Picador). 

Teachers who succeed in raising standardized test scores have a lasting influence on their students’ lives, helping them avoid teenage pregnancy, go to college and earn more money as adults.

Filling seats is always a concern at concert venues. Now, in a twist, Miller Theatre wants to fill the stage with listeners.

When Carlos Alonso was a student at Escuela Secundaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, the island’s elite public high school, all his teachers were Ph.D.s, professors on loan from the University of Puerto Rico. Yet it was years before he had an inkling that he might want to be an academic himself. Indeed, his first two years at Cornell were spent in the engineering division, after which “I switched to literature, convinced that I would be a scholar and teacher for the rest of my life,” he said.

Fourteen years ago, North Korea’s calendar was changed so that time officially began in 1912—the birth year of Kim Il Sung, who ruled the communist nation from its founding in 1948.

Without real estate, there could be no architecture, no planning, no preservation. Now the graduate school devoted to all those things has launched the University’s first Center for Urban Real Estate, a research group whose mission is to identify solutions for a rapidly urbanizing world.

Ruben Gonzalez views ribosomes—the minute particles in cells that make proteins—as the “machines” of life. Naturally, the associate professor of chemistry is interested in watching these little protein-producing factories in real time, especially when they malfunction and cause disease.

Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Last fall, a private bus company operating under a city contract permitted its passengers, primarily Orthodox Jews, to enforce a religious tradition—in order to prevent physical contact between the sexes, women were required to sit in the back of the bus. The New York Times, New York Post and CBS 2 ran the story, which was later picked up by the BBC and Belgian and Israeli news outlets. But it was an enterprising reporter from The New York World—a new Graduate School of Journalism endeavor—who first broke this story of segregation.

Sasha Chavkin (JRN’10),…

A Volcanic Explosion Crater May Have Future Potential

In California’s Death Valley, death is looking just a bit closer. Geologists have determined that the half-mile-wide Ubehebe Crater, formed by a prehistoric volcanic explosion, was created far more recently than previously thought—and that conditions for a sequel may exist today.

Poet, painter and photographer Liu Xia has been a noteworthy figure on the contemporary Chinese art scene for more than three decades.

If Barry Kane does his job right, you may never know he exists. As associate vice president and University Registrar for all 17 of Columbia’s divisions, he oversees the invisible but vital tasks of academic life: class registration and course enrollment, classroom assignments, final exam schedules, transcripts for tens of thousands of students, and mandatory reports to the federal government and NCAA. And, of course, the 10,000-plus diplomas conferred each year.

Worldwide pandemics of influenza caused widespread death and illness in 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. A new study examining weather patterns around the time of these pandemics finds that each of them was preceded by La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific.

Study Reveals Origins of Esophageal Cancer |  New Understanding of Fastest-Rising Solid Tumor in U.S.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have identified the critical early cellular and molecular events that give rise to a type of esophageal cancer called esophageal adenocarcinoma, the fastest-rising solid tumor in the United States. The findings, published online today inCancer Cell (21(1) 36–51 (2012), challenge conventional wisdom regarding the origin and development of this deadly cancer and its precursor lesion, Barrett’s esophagus, and…