Emmys, Blavatnik Awards, Millennium Fellows, and More Accolades for Columbians

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 Aug. 21 to Sept. 17, 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. And you can subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox. 

FACULTY

ARTS & HUMANITIES

Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, and Alma Steingart, Assistant Professor of History, have been selected as members of the Institute for Advanced Study for the 2025-26 academic year. The prestigious fellowship recognizes the significance of these scholars' work, and provides an opportunity to advance their research and exchange ideas with scholars from around the world.

Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, is the 27th recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize. Established in 1999, the award recognizes excellence in scholarship, criticism, or practice in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design.

Jeremy Dauber, Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, the oldest organization of Judaic scholars in North America. Fellows are nominated and elected by their peers, and thus constitute the most distinguished and most senior scholars teaching Judaic studies at American universities.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has been named University Professor, the highest academic honor that Columbia awards to faculty. Provost Angela Olinto said that Griffin "is a visionary and pioneering scholar and an outstanding member of our Columbia community. Her work has impacted multiple fields and areas of focus and exemplifies the sort of pathbreaking, interdisciplinary scholarship that we seek to honor in our University Professors."

Rosalind Krauss, University Professor, Art History and Archaeology, is a recipient of the 2025 Balzan Prize “for her outstanding scholarly achievements and her foundational role in the establishment of contemporary art as a field of research.”

Duy Linh Tu (JRN’99), Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia Journalism School; Sebastian Tuinder (JRN'21), Adjunct Assistant Professor of Journalism; Anup Kaphle (JRN’08); and Jacob Templin (JRN’09) won a 2025 Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video for South Africa’s migrant delivery workers find safety in numbers, produced for Rest of World’s Gig Workers Rising series.

Amelyn Ng, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, is among the recipients of the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize at Exhibit Columbus for PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS, a collaboration with César Lopez, Jess Myers, and Germán Pallares-Avitia. Inspired by Columbus public school roofscapes, the project transforms the classroom into a layered, multi-sensory landscape.

Ying Qian, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, is the winner of the 50th Annual Lionel Trilling Book Award for her book Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. The award is given by the Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council, which called her book "an exemplar against which all other books we read had to measure up."

MEDICINE & SCIENCE

John Beard, Irene Diamond Professor of Productive Aging (in Health Policy Management, Epidemiology, and in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center) and Director of the International Longevity Center USA at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Celebrating Excellence in Intrinsic Capacity from JFA/ICFSR Intrinsic Capacity, Frailty and Sarcopenia Research. Beard is being honored for his pivotal contributions to our understanding of intrinsic capacity and for developing the Integrated Care for Older People program.

Suzana J. Camargo, Professor of Climate, Columbia Climate School, and Ocean and Climate Physics at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Guohua Li, Mieczyslaw Finster Professor of Anesthesiology, has published a collection of poems entitled Gorman Ponds: A Haiku Journal. The paperback in the Haiku format is a debut perspective on what it means to be human, building upon each poem to create a narrative of truths embodied by nature.

Daniel C. Javitt, Professor of Psychiatry, was awarded the 2025 Lieber Award for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (formerly NARSAD). Antigona Martinez, Adjunct Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry, was awarded the organization's Maltz Prize for Innovative & Promising Schizophrenia Research.

Jason Liebowitz, Assistant Professor of Medicine, has been appointed to the Rheumatology Board for a three-year term by the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Neel Shah, Associate Professor of Chemistry, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for research into protein tyrosine kinases—enzymes that control how cells grow, divide, and respond to their environment, and that, when dysregulated, are a major driver of cancer. 

John Rowe, Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging, was recognized by the Gerontological Society of America with the Maxwell A. Pollack Award for Productive Aging. Rowe was cited for his research that directly improved policy or practice, and bridges the worlds of research and practice. This award is funded by the New York Community Trust through a generous gift from the Maxwell A. Pollack Fund. The award presentation will take place at GSA’s 2025 Annual Scientific Meeting, Nov. 12-15 in Boston.

Adam Sobel, Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and of Earth and Environmental Sciences, received the Joanne Simpson Tropical Meteorology Research Award for advancing understanding of tropical meteorology through transformative approaches, including the weak temperature gradient approximation and moisture-mode theory, from the American Meteorological Society.

Samuel H. Sternberg, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, was named a finalist for the 2025 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Postdoctoral Researchers Yunjia Lai and Viraj Pandya were named finalists for the 2025 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists, which honors outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Yushu Xia, Lamont Assistant Research Professor, received an Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award (The New Innovator Award) from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, recognizing promising research that is opening new avenues of knowledge to deliver groundbreaking solutions to difficult challenges.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Seyla Benhabib, Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Law, will receive the 2025 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in December. The award recognizes her as an outstanding political and philosophical intellectual for her influential work on migration, feminism, political belonging, and international conflicts.

Lina Khan, Associate Professor of Law, was named Person of the Year by the United Food and Commercial Workers Western States Council.

POSTDOCS & STUDENTS

A cohort of 25 Millennium Fellows has been selected at Columbia University this year. Presented by the United Nations Academic Impact and MCN, the Millennium Fellowship is a semester-long leadership development program to support student leadership for UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Eddy Albarran, Postdoctoral Researcher working with Rui Costa, Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology, was honored with the Henry Grass Rising Star in Neuroscience Award.

Mauricio Rada, Samantha Saona, and Daniela Ugas, PhD candidates at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), secured the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award, with support from GSAPP faculty Hugo Sarmiento, Tom Slater, and Anthony Vanky.  

Maya Venkatraman (SEAS’21) was named a 2025 recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (CSGrad4US). Currently, Maya works in the AlQuraishi Lab at Columbia University, where she helps develop genome-scale language models for prokaryotic DNA, and is pursuing a part-time Master’s in Statistics at Columbia.

ALUMNI

Several Columbians won 2025 Emmy Awards in television: Tim Carvell (CC’95) and Joanna Rothkopf (JRN'14) for “Last Week Tonight,” and Ramin Hedayati (CC'02) for “The Daily Show.” Check out all the Columbians whose projects were nominated.