Skadden Fellows, Holberg Prize, and More Honors

Columbia News produces a monthly newsletter (subscribe here!) and article series featuring a roundup of awards and milestones that Columbia faculty, staff, and students have received in recent days. In this edition, you’ll find awards and milestones from February 20 to March 20, 2025.

If you have an accomplishment you'd like to be considered for inclusion, please email [email protected] with your name, title, school, department, and a link to the relevant award or milestone.

You can take a look at past accomplishments on our Awards & Milestones page.

INSTITUTIONAL

Columbia was named a Top Producing Institution of Fulbright U.S. Students in 2024–2025, with 25 Columbians as awardees. Acknowledging this achievement, Ariella Lang, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, notes that “this designation confirms what we know, namely that our students and alumni are dedicated to productive and generous international exchange, pushing the boundaries of research and actively engaging in host communities around the world.”

FACULTY

ARTS & HUMANITIES

Aleksandar Boskovic, Senior Lecturer, Department of Slavic Languages, was awarded the North American Society for Serbian Studies Book Prize, for Zenithism (1921-1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology, with his co-editor.

Elisheva Carlebach, Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, has received the Association for Jewish Studies Gender Justice Award for Mentorship.

Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian and Chair of the Italian Department, was awarded the 2024 Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize for literatures written in languages other than English for The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America.

Andrés Jaque, Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and Mark Wigley, Dean Emeritus of GSAPP, have both received a 2025 Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mary Mendenhall, Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, was awarded the Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award, along with co-authors Gauthier Marchais, Yusuf Sayed, and Neil Boothby, for their book, Education and Resilience in Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and Dorothy Borg Associate Professor of the History of American-East Asian Relations, Department of History, has received the Best Book in World History and Best Multi Volume Reference Work by the Association of American Publishers, for The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, for which she served as general editor.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, was named the 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate. The Holberg is one of the largest international research prizes (about $540,000) awarded annually for outstanding research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology.

Sarah Sze, Visual Arts Professor at School of the Arts, is the inaugural recipient of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Meraki Artist Award, which celebrates the artistic achievements of women artists and their impact on the field of contemporary visual art.

MEDICINE & SCIENCE

David D. Ho, Clyde '56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Columbia University Asian Faculty Association.

Ian Kronish, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Nathalie Moise, Associate Professor of Medicine, received $5,491,662 over five years from the National Institute on Aging for their project, “The Columbia Roybal Center for Fearless Behavior Change - renewal.”

Gary Miller, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, was awarded $7,722,583 over five years from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for “NEXUS: Network for Exposomics in the U.S.”

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Daniel Abebe, Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, was named to City & State New York’s 2025 Law Power 100 list.

Richard Betts, Leo A. Shifrin Professor Emeritus of War and Peace Studies, Department of Political Science, was honored with the 2025 Notre Dame International Security Center Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of “outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of international security affairs.”

Richard Briffault, Jamal Greene, Lina Khan, Dorothy Lund, David Pozen, and Tim Wu, faculty at Columbia Law School, are among the scholars in the Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2024 ranking compiled by researchers at George Mason University.

Qin Gao, Professor of Social Work and Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia School of Social Work, has been awarded a grant by the Henry Luce Foundation to study the social, economic, and health impacts of COVID-19 in China.

Gita Johar, Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business, was awarded the Fellow Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology. The award recognizes seasoned scholars who have made outstanding and unusual contributions to consumer psychology, through both research and service.

POSTDOCS & STUDENTS

Sarine Mardirosian (CC'26) has been named a Brooke Owens Fellow. Jonathan Pierre (SEAS'27), Isabella Singleton (SEAS'27), and Claudio Solano (SEAS'25) have been named Patti Grace Smith Fellows. Both fellowships honor exceptional students in aerospace.

Brigid McCabe (CC'25), majoring in American Studies, was named one of three 2025–2026 O'Hare Fellows to spend a postgraduate year working as a journalist at America Media.

Nicole Morote (LAW’25) won first place in the National Native American Law Students Association Writing Competition. Her winning piece, “The Tribal Rules of Evidence,” will be published in the American Indian Law Journal.

Francesca Bruna Pipino (BUS’25) and Tadesh Inagaki (BUS’25), co-presidents of the Social Enterprise Club at Columbia Business School, are 2024 Net Impact Chapter of the Year Winners. Each year, Net Impact recognizes outstanding chapters that exhibit its mission to inspire and equip emerging leaders to build a more just and sustainable world.

Nathan Porceng (LAW’25) and Malik Sammons (LAW’25) were named recipients of the prestigious Skadden Fellowship. They will begin two-year fellowships to pursue public interest law full time this fall.