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.

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.