The Low Down

The Columbia Alumni Association of Boston is masterful at “dedicated leadership” and is committed to "bringing University initiatives and opportunities to the local community,” according to the Columbia Alumni Association (CAA), which honored the club with its Regional Club Award of Excellence last year.

What do the City of Brotherly Love and the Pearl of the Orient have in common?  They are the winners of the 2015 Columbia Alumni Association (CAA) Regional Club Award of Excellence!

Created in 2012, the CAA Regional Club Award of Excellence recognizes the leadership and dedication of Columbia's alumni leaders worldwide in fostering vibrant Columbia communities across the globe through programs, events, conferences, and opportunities in their local communities.  With over 320,000+ alumni (and counting!), the CAA's 100+ clubs and alumni leadership in cities across the globe play critical roles in building upon our shared Columbia connections, long after we leave campus. 

This year, the international award goes to the Columbia University Alumni Association of Hong Kong (CUAAHK) and the domestic (U.S.) award goes to the Columbia University Club of Philadelphia.  

We know that Columbia alumni are smart, opinionated, and care about their Alma Mater.  In August 2015 we asked alumni to be all of those these as a volunteer for the CAA, and take a survey once a month.  With 3,000 members, the Alumni Voices survey panel was launched.

From TED:

What do rap shows, barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common? Associate professor at Columbia's Teacher's College Christopher Emdin says, they all hold the secret magic to enthrall and teach at the same time — and it’s a skill we often don't teach to educators. A longtime teacher himself, now a science advocate and cofounder of Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. with the GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Emdin offers a vision to make the classroom come alive. 

by Tim Page '79CC
Published in the Fall 2014 Columbia Magazine 

Chou Wen-chung vividly recalls the first time he felt the transformative power of music. It was the 1920s. He was a boy in Qingdao, which was not yet the gigantic metropolitan area of 8.5 million people that it is today, though it was already one of China’s busiest cities.

“I must have been about four years old,” says Chou ’54GSAS, who turned ninety-one this past June. “I had just begun to be aware of things, walking around freely, on my own, in our big garden. I heard sounds coming from the small house where the servants were — they’d left the door open and I was awfully little and they didn’t seem to mind that I came in. There they were, a handful of people, male and female, laughing and drinking a very cheap form of alcohol called kaoliang. They were playing instruments and singing, and I saw that they were happy and relaxed. I understood right away that these sounds were something through which you could express your happiness.”

Courtney Gaughan Bowman, a student in the writing program at Columbia's School of the Arts, pens the Shouts & Murmurs satire spot of the November 10, 2014 New Yorker magazine. "To the Cockroach in My Apartment" is wonderfully absurd, but rings true for anyone who's ever had a roommate, or a cockroach, in her own life.

Andrew Dolkart '77GSAPP and director of Columbia University’s Historic Preservation program, is profiled in The New York Times in advance of receiving the Historic Districts Council’s Landmarks Lion award on Nov. 19.

Published in Columbia News, October 29, 2014

Since the first case of Ebola was diagnosed in New York City on Oct. 23, there has been a daily barrage of news reports about the deadly disease. Public officials including Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, as well as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, have weighed in on a range of issues, from mandatory quarantines to how the disease is transmitted.

At Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, researchers have developed a computer model that tracks and forecasts the growth of Ebola cases in West Africa, the epicenter of the disease. For Jeffrey Shaman, an associate professor of environmental health sciences who led the development of the model, that means that much of his day is devoted to sometimes arcane epidemiological measures such as the “basic reproduction number,” or R0, the projected number of cases generated by a single infected person in a fully susceptible population. If R0 is less than 1, the disease will extinguish itself. If it is greater than 1, it will spread—and the larger the number, the harder it will be to control. Right now the R0 in the U.S. is close to zero.

by Cynthia Indriso '86PH
www.cynthiaindriso.com

Common to every autobiography published of the Nobel laureates across all six prize categories is their acknowledgement of the key role that great mentors have played in helping them on their journey to excellence.

In the business world, the key role played by mentors has traditionally been less venerated, though this has changed in recent years.

by Amol Sarva '98CC
originally published Dec. 18, 2013 in Wired magazine

The idea of stimulating brain performance seemed very plausible when I first heard about it, taking my PhD in cognitive science at Stanford. Your brain operates with electricity; why couldn't electric current or waves boost it a bit? Gentlemen physicists such as Volta and Galvani were fiddling with frogs' legs and cadavers back around the late 18th century. Another Italian wrote about curing melancholia with electricity in 1804. And today, everyone knows about the power of shock therapy. 

But what appeared on my radar in 2003 was different: a headset that sent weak electromagnetic waves into your head. Lawrence Osborne, in The New York Times Magazine, reported that after his brain was electrically stimulated, he suddenly produced some incredible cat drawings. Admittedly, this was no peer-reviewed journal: in fact, no lab had been able to reproduce the findings of the man behind this and similar experiments, a University of Sydney physicist named Allan Snyder.