Thanks to all who visited this month’s Open House with Marketing and Communications and Columbia Magazine. See photos here.

With inquiries:
Ra Hearne: [email protected]
Marketing and Communications

Julia Joy: [email protected]
Columbia Magazine

Dedicated on October 24, the Manhattanville campus is the most transformative site development since the University’s move to Morningside Heights in 1897. Watch the video and browse the Manhattanville website to learn more.

At the Manhattanville dedication ceremony, distinguished faculty, University deans, and students joined Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger in welcoming civic and community leaders as well as renowned architect Renzo Piano of Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which designed the campus master plan with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. To read President Bollinger’s remarks, click here.

Manhattanville move-in will begin with full building operation and opening ceremonies in Spring 2017.

On our new campus, neurologist Olajide Williams, MD, and psychiatrist Sidney Hankerson, MD, will lead the expanded stroke awareness and community mental health programs in the Wellness Center scheduled to open in 2017. Read more and attend Dr. Williams’s November 10 Hip Hip Stroke lecture.

The Atlantic Philanthropies and Columbia announced the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, a 10-year, $60 million program dedicated to dismantling anti-black racism in the US and South Africa. Alondra Nelson, Dean of Social Science, will serve as faculty lead and worked closely with Shalini Mimani, principal gift officer, and others to secure funding. More

For the fifth annual Columbia Giving Day, donors stepped up in memorable numbers to “change lives that change the world.” With 14,269 gifts raising $14,560,943, this year’s total surpassed last year’s of almost $12.8 million, marking a 14% increase in dollars raised and 9% increase in gifts received.

#ColumbiaGivingDay drove social media engagement and donations internationally on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. This year also featured new opportunities for cause-based giving through crowdfunding.

“We cannot possibly name all of the partnerships that were critical in the success of this Giving Day and offer our gratitude to you all,” said Christina Sebastian, Director for Annual Fund Programs.

Learn more about Giving Day results.

More than 500 alumni leaders returned to campus for the annual Columbia Alumni Leaders Weekend (CALW). Including staff and students, over 700 attended—a 13% increase from last year. CALW Steering Committee Chair Emily Ball Jabbour ’06SW reflects on the weekend’s success.

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.

Recognize This Mustachioed Columbian?

Do you know this Columbia notable? Send his name, why he is well-known, and where his bust is located on the Morningside Heights campus to [email protected] by Monday, November 14. Winners will be contacted via e-mail.

September Countdown Contest Winners

Jessica Sain-Baird (program coordinator of annual fund programs) shares her VIP visit to NASA and Linda Ury Greenberg (director of marketing research) recommends summer reading: Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan.

Linda Ury Greenberg, Director of Marketing Research, Marketing and Communications:

My summer reading, Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, is a fascinating personal account of the author’s bout with an autoimmune disease—anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis—that attacked her brain in so many crazy and scary ways. It’s the story of her crisis and the smart doctor who identified what was going on and helped her.

Susannah is a New York Post reporter, so the writing is really direct and easy. While it is not the usual summer subject matter, it was definitely a compelling read!

Jessica Sain-Baird, Program Coordinator of Annual Fund Programs:

In early September, I was among 100 people invited to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a two-day event called NASA Social. More than 7,000 of NASA’s social media followers have been invited to more than 120 of these events since 2008.

Participants gain VIP access to NASA’s facilities, meet and hear from scientists, and, at this particular event, visit the OSIRIS-REx rocket up close and watch it launch into space. OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. mission to carry samples from an asteroid back to Earth.

One of the events we attended relates to the “Big Idea” of Climate Response. Scientists discussed the Journey to Mars mission, which includes plans to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, and how they are preparing for life on Mars.

Gioia Massa, the Science Team Leader for the veggie system at NASA, shared some vegetables with us that she had grown in an environment similar to the International Space Station. Scientists shared sustainability practices that would make life on Mars easier—e.g. 10 pounds of space trash can be used to create seven pounds of rocket fuel. NASA even had to “reinvent digging” to conceptualize digging in an extremely low gravity environment such as Mars.

It was fascinating to hear directly from NASA’s scientists how carefully they are planning a trip to Mars and make the experience as sustainable as possible. NASA’s considerations of the climate on Mars translate to the climate issues and sustainability challenges we’re facing on Earth.  

See photos I took at NASA here. 

“The object of my invention is to generally facilitate the compilation and increase the scope of… statistics.”

Columbia’s leadership in Data and Society is longstanding. Herman Hollerith 1879 School of Mines, 1890 PhD is one of the first recognized statistical engineers and founders of modern information processing. He invented punch cards for recording data as well as a tabulating machine and sorter to electronically process the results. Learn more.

The Alumni Center’s seventh-floor conference room is named after Hollerith.