Learn more about the Big Ideas—from Climate Response to Precision Medicine—behind the people and places on Campaign Countdown’s Alumni Center PC screensavers.
Climate Response
Natalie Boelman, Associate Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, researches how vegetation and climate change impact animals in the Arctic.
Data and Society
A satellite orbits the earth. The image, from the International Space station, shows the Atlantic coast of the United States. Long Island and the New York City area are visible in the lower right. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are near the center.
Global Solutions
Undergraduates participate in a semester-long immersion program in tropical biology and sustainability at Columbia’s Global Center in Nairobi, Kenya. Students research how humans and wildlife interact with each other and their environments across East Africa, developing their global environmental leadership and research skills.
Just Societies
A protest banner on Butler Library’s facade challenges a male literary canon to honor such female authors as Charlotte Brontë. General Studies student Laura Hotchkiss Brown first attempted displaying the banner during the May 1989 Commencement, but University security officials stopped her. The banner was displayed successfully the following Fall with University permission.
The Future of Neuroscience
An image from the Zuckerman Institute shows depleted brain cells in a mouse’s CA2 region which may contribute to social memory deficits—the inability to recognize familiar faces, a feature of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. The CA2 region resides in the brain’s hippocampus, an area primarily responsible for memory and spatial navigation.
Precision Medicine
Itsik Pe’er, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science, develops and applies novel computational methods to study DNA sequencing to understand human diseases.
