DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Blickstein, Tamar. The native stranger. Advisor: Nadia Abu El-Haj.

Nsabimana, Natacha. The day after tomorrow: Waiting for the future in contemporary Rwanda. Advisor: Mahmood Mamdani.

Yerby, Erin. Spectral bodies of evidence. Advisor: Michael Taussig.

APAM: Applied Physics
Li, Haixing. Electronic properties of molecular silicon. Advisor: Latha Venkataraman.

Rhodes, Dov. Shaping effects on resistive instabilities in a Tokamak plasma surrounded by a resistive wall. Advisor: Andrew J. Cole.

Art History and Archaeology
Polonyi, Eszter. Ghost writer: Bela Balazs' Hauntology of Film. Advisor: Noam M. Elcott.

Silveri, Rachel. The art of living in the historical avant-garde. Advisor: Branden W. Joseph.

Biomedical Engineering
Liu, Zen. The effect of matrix stiffness, composition and three-dimensionality on p53 expression in engineered human bone tumors. Advisor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

Business
Rouen, Ethan. Rethinking measurement of pay disparity and its relation to firm performance. Advisors: Fabrizio Ferri and Trevor S. Harris.

Slutzky, Pablo. Essays in empirical corporate finance. Advisor: Daniel Wolfenzon.

Chemical Engineering
Mathew, Shyno. Molecular dynamics simulations of microtubule-associated protein 1A/1B-light chain 3(LC3-I) and its membrane. Advisor: Sanat K. Kumar.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Brugger, Adrian. On the boundary conditions and internal mechanics of parallel wire strands. Advisor: Raimondo Betti.

Computer Science
Jermyn, Jill. Discovering network control vulnerabilities and policies in evolving networks. Advisor: Salvatore J. Stolfo.

Sukan, Mengu. Augmented reality interfaces for enabling fast and accurate task. Advisor: Steven K. Feiner.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Guindre-Parker, Sarah. The costs of reproduction and the evolution of cooperative breeding in African starlings. Advisor: Dustin R. Rubenstein.

Schwartz, Naomi. Landscape consequences of disturbance in tropical second-growth forest. Advisors: Ruth DeFries and Maria Uriarte.

Economics
Brown, Zachary. Essays on price transparency and health care. Advisor: Katherine Ho.

Desai, Kunjal Kamal. Essays on development economics. Advisor: Suresh Naidu.

Dupraz, Stéphane. Three essays on economic fluctuations. Advisor: Michael Woodford.

Hansman, Christopher. Essays in public and urban economics. Advisors: Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié.

Sun, Meiping. Three essays on urban policies. Advisor: Brendan O’Flaherty.

Electrical Engineering
Prasitmeeboon, Pitcha. Robustification and optimization in repetitive control for minimum phase and non-minimum phase systems. Advisor: Richard W. Longman.

English and Comparative Literature
N'Diaye, Ngara. Marking blackness: Embodied techniques of racialization in seventeeth century European theatre. Advisors: Kim Hall and Jean E. Howard.

History
Juravich, Nicholas. A classroom revolution: Community educators and the transformation of school and work in American cities, 1953-1981. Advisor: Mae Ngai.

Keilson, Ana. Making dance modern: Knowledge, politics and German modern dance, 1890-1927. Advisor: Samuel Moyn.

Italian
Vanhove, Pieter. Faces of the Earth: Translating European Humanism in representations of modern and contemporary China. Advisors: Elizabeth Leake and Lydia Liu.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Méndez-Oliver, Ana. Frontier identities and migrating souls: Re-conceptualizing new religious and cultural imaginaries in the Iberian worlds. Advisor: Patricia E. Grieve.

Mathematics
Choi, Kyeongsu. The Gauss curvature flow: Regularity and asymtotic. Advisor: Panagiota Daskalopoulos.

Deopurkar, Ashwin. Tropical geometry of curves with large theta characteristics. Advisor: Aise Johan de Jong.

Keller, Jordan. Linear stability of Schwarzschild spacetime. Advisor: Mu-Tao Wang.

Lewis, Paul. A large sieve zero density estimate for maass cusp forms. Advisor: Dorian Goldfeld.

Petkov, Vladislav. Distinguished representations of the metaplectic cover of GL (n). Advisor: Dorian Goldfeld.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Kremnitzer, Yuval. How to believe in nothing: Moses Mendelsohn's subjectivity and the empty core of tradition. Advisor: Dan Miron.

Torshizi, Foad. "The clarity of meaning": Contemporary Iranian art and the cosmopolitan ethics of reading in art history. Advisor: Hamid Dabashi.

Physics
Vlasov, Andrey. Outflows from compact objects in supernovae and novae. Advisor: Brian Metzger.

Sustainable Development
D'Agostino, Anthony. Essays in climate and development economics. Advisors: Supreet Kaur Anand and Wolfram Schlenker.

Merte, Steffen. Essays on the economics of climate. Advisors: Scott Barrett and Douglas G. Martinson.

TC / Applied Behavioral Analysis
Frias, Frank. How stimulus relations accrue for the names of things in preschoolers. Advisor: R. Douglas Greer.

TC / Behavioral Nutrition
Lee, Jong Min. East Asian students' perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in relation to U.S. food and the food environment. Advisor: Isobel R. Contento.

TC / Cognitive Studies in Education
Fang, Fu-Fen. Teachers' beliefs about the nature and malleability of intelligence. Advisor: James E. Corter.

Marks, Jenna. The impact of a brief design thinking intervention on students' design knowledge, iterative dispositions, and reactions to failure. Advisor: Catherine Chase.

TC / Comparative and International Education
Llanque Zonta, Victor. Does mass transit counter school segregation in Bolivia? Advisor: Regina Cortina.

TC / Economics and Education
Kopko, Elizabeth. Essays on the economics of education: Community college pathways and student success. Advisor: Thomas R. Bailey.

Liu, Yuen Ting. Three essays on the economics of higher education: The academic and labor market returns to four to two-year transfer, summer enrollment, and the year-round Pell grant. Advisor: Thomas R. Bailey.

Wang, Anyi. Technical and vocational education in China: The characteristics of participants and their labor market returns. Advisor: Mun C. Tsang.

TC / English Education
Van Orman, Karin. (Re)contextualizing street fiction. Advisor: Ernest Morrell.

TC / Mathematics Education
Golnabi, Laura. Mathematics self-efficacy and flow in developmental mathematics students. Advisor: Erica N. Walker.

Tam, Kai. Testing the ability to apply mathematical knowledge. Advisor: Alexander P. Karp.

TC / Politics and Education
Al-Thani, Hessa. Modernity aspirations: The struggle of Qatari male students to be. Advisor: Jeffrey Henig.

TC / School Psychology
Bancroft, Alexis. Basic relational concept and verbal behavior development in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Advisor: Marla R. Brassard.

TC / Science Education
Bernardo, Cyntra. Integration of culturally relevant pedagogy into science learning. Advisor: Christopher Emdin.

Boda, Phillip. Disability studies, multiculturalism and urban science education: A mixed-methods phenomenography of graduate student learning. Advisor: O. Roger Anderson.

Wu, Jason. English language learners' native language use in secondary science. Advisor: O. Roger Anderson.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Kodaira, Yoko. An investigation of cognitive processes associated with notetaking and notes-review. Advisor: Stephen T. Peverly.

Stutzman, Naomi. Examining the relationship between personality and performance: Does personality predict performance for female leaders? Advisor: Debra A. Noumair.

TC / Speech and Language Pathology
Garcia, Felicidad. Brain responses to contrastive and noncontrastive morphosyntactic structures in African American English and mainstream American English: ERP evidence for the neural indices of dialect. Advisor: Karen Froud.

Hsu, Sih-Chiao. Effects of an intensive voice treatment on speech production of Mandarin speakers with Parkinson's disease: Acoustic and perceptual findings. Advisor: Erika S. Levy.

Obermeyer, Jessica. Efficacy of attentive reading with constrained summarization-written in people with mild aphasia. Advisor: Lisa Edmonds.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

APAM: Applied Mathematics
Li, Jiao. Embedding seawall model in coastal flooding simulations.

APAM: Applied Physics
Fung, E-Dean. Photoinduced transport in single-molecule junctions.

Mandal, Jyotimrmoy. Surfaces and devices with tailored optical properties for radiative thermal management.

Architecture
Godel, Addison. Architecture as infrastructure interface in urban America, 1954-1996.

Biomedical Engineering
Karamolegkos, Nikolaos. Modeling and estimation of cardiorespiratory function, with application to ventilation therapy.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Fafalis, Dimitrios. Computational continua modeling of heterogeneous solid materials.

Computer Science
Riederer, Christopher. Big location data: Balancing profits, promise, and perils.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Leland, Caroline. Evaluating climatic and ecological signals in tree-ring data from Central Mongolia: A multiparameter approach.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Quebbeman, Andrew. Linking biogeochemistry to topography and spatial distributions of tree species and soil microbial communities.

History
McFarlane, Wallace. Thinking like a river rat: Trinity River history.

Mulder, Nicholas. The rise of the economic weapon: Sanctions in Britain, France, and Germany, 1914-1939.

Woker, Madeline. Paying for subjection: A history of fiscal power in the French colonial empire, 1870-1939.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Acosta, Santiago. The condition of oil: An ecology of the Venezuelan culture boom (1973-1983).

Mechanical Engineering
Bian, Dikai. Interlaminar toughening of glass fiber reinforced polymers.

Kang, Jiyeon. Robotic functional gait rehabilitation with tethered pelvic assist device (TPAD).

Music
Jiang, Qingfan. Toward a global enlightenment: Missionaries, musical knowledge, and the making of encyclopedias in eighteenth-century China and France.

Philosophy
Brown, Simon. Animal minds and evolutionary dependence.

Where did you grow up? 
Austin, TX.

What drew you to your field? 
The chance to spend my workdays thinking and talking about words and music.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I look at the ways in which ideas change as they are translated across time, culture, language, and medium. Right now I am researching the composer and theorist Richard Wagner's influence on the twentieth-century European novel. How do theories about musical performance affect the telling of stories on a page?

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
Teaching Literature Humanities has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was a Columbia College undergrad many years ago, and having the chance to revisit these texts again from the other side of the table has been an absolute delight. My eighteen-year-old self would be disgusted with me, but I've developed a particular fondness for St. Augustine.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
I am a latecomer to archival research, but the Rare Book & Manuscript Library absolutely takes my breath away—the treasures there are endless. Participating in the libraries' Pine Tree Scholars program, which focuses on bookmaking practices, has also completely transformed the way I think about my research. More generally, the chance to spend years collaborating with brilliant professors and students is hard to beat.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
Opera is exciting!

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I still can't quite believe I get paid to read books, go to the opera, and think.

Who are your favorite writers?
Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Proust.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Eugene Onegin.

Who are your heroes in real life?
John Crosby, who founded the Santa Fe Opera, had a wild idea about starting an opera company in the middle of the desert, and just went and built it from the ground up. I think of that any time things seem challenging.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A sea otter.

What music have you been listening to lately?
A lot of Wagner. I've also been trying to get my three-year-old son into Cats so we can go see it for my birthday. It's my eighties kitsch dream come true.

Where is your favorite place to eat on or around campus?
There is no better comfort food than the special shiro at Massawa. It is perfect.

Grassroots feminism in China. Nineteenth-century royal portraiture. The direction of time in electromagnetic radiation. MA students presented on these varied subjects—and many others—at the second annual GSAS Master’s Synthesis Competition, held on May 4, 2017, in the Satow Room of Lerner Hall. At the event, fifteen master’s candidates met the challenge of sharing their thesis research in no more than five minutes and four slides, without the use of notes, in front of an audience of students, alumni, and faculty.

“This is a celebration of our master’s candidates and their outstanding culminating work, as well as an invaluable opportunity for these students to develop stronger presentation and persuasion skills, which will serve them well in any career,” said Carlos J. Alonso, dean of GSAS.

The top prize went to Stephanie Sardelis, from the Conservation Biology program, for her presentation Quantifying the Influence of Daylight on Marine Mammal Vocalizations in the North Bering Sea. Brandi Cannon, another Conservation Biology student, earned second place for Conservation of Endangered American Chaffseed, and Ishita Pektar, a recent graduate of the Human Rights Studies program, came in third for Conceptualizing Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Interpreting Interpretations of FPIC.

“The event was a great segue from academic life into the job market, because it taught us how to condense the main points of our theses down to an elevator pitch that was accessible and interesting,” said Sardelis. “Amid the stress of finishing my thesis and final exams, the competition allowed me to ‘zoom out’ on my project, and reminded me why our work is important.”

A judging panel composed of interdisciplinary faculty evaluated the presentations for both content and style. The judges were Frédérique Baumgartner, lecturer and director of the MA program in Art History; Mary Marshall Clark, codirector and cofounder of the MA program in Oral History; Josh Drew, lecturer in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology and advisor for the MA program in Conservation Biology; and Line Lillevik, director of the MA/MSc program in International and World History.

See a full list of student participants below. Check back soon for videos of the winning presentations.

Dr. Sheldon Buckler (center) with his wife, Dorothea, and Prof. Colin Nuckolls. Photo by Michael DiVito.

November 4 was an especially memorable homecoming for Dr. Sheldon Buckler (’54GSAS, Chemistry). Buckler returned to Columbia with his wife, Dorothea, for a lunch celebrating their $3 million gift to establish and endow the Sheldon and Dorothea Buckler Professorship in Material Science in the Department of Chemistry, with Prof. Colin Nuckolls as the inaugural holder of the chair.

“It was a very emotional moment for me. Columbia contributed a lot to the success I had,” said Buckler, who lives in Massachusetts and retired two years ago after an accomplished career in basic chemical research, technology-based innovation, and business development.

At the lunch, held in the library of the Italian Academy, Buckler shared colorful stories about his unlikely path to Columbia. The child of Polish immigrants, he grew up in a large, mostly Yiddish-speaking family that was “not education oriented.” (Only two of twenty-four cousins attended college.) He argued his way past the examination requirements for admission to New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School, and it was there that he developed an interest in chemistry, which he went on to study as an undergraduate at NYU.

His doctoral studies at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he said, were enriched beyond measure by the people he encountered there, in particular Prof. Gilbert Stork and Prof. Ronald Breslow, who remain on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry. Buckler reconnected with Breslow at the lunch.

“The people I met in the Chemistry Department raised my sense of what was possible in the world,” said Buckler. “This was a thank you, a gift from my heart, that expresses how much I appreciate what Columbia did for me.”

Read personal financial management expert Shahar Ziv’s top pieces of financial planning advice specifically for graduate students.

1. Plan. Budgeting equals awareness. Create a financial plan to help you cultivate awareness of how you spend and save, and to ensure that your spending aligns with your goals and values.

2. Find your system. Pencil and paper, Microsoft Excel, Mint, YNAB, MVelopes: there are many tools that can help you manage your finances. Use the one that best helps you live below your means and understand how you are spending your money.

3. Harness the time value of money: Your most valuable financial asset is time. Start saving early to take advantage of the power of compound interest and allow your money to grow exponentially. If saved today, $1,000 could be worth more than $10,000 in thirty-five years, but only about $5,000 if you waited ten years to start saving (assuming 7 percent annual return and yearly compounding).

4. Learn the money value of time. As life gets busier, try to keep your finances simple. Automate as many routine financial tasks as possible: schedule direct deposits to automate savings, and set up auto-pay on important bills to prevent late payments that could damage your credit. Check your account statements regularly to avoid letting debt creep up or unknown transactions sneak past you.

5. Protect yourself. Most graduate students forget to obtain renter’s insurance. It is inexpensive (usually less than $200 a year), can be shared with a roommate, and covers items both inside and outside of your apartment. Get “replacement cost coverage,” and visually catalog your items with a phone or video camera to have documentation in case of a claim.

6. Remember that stuff happens. Create a three-to-six-month emergency fund to cover the unexpected. Whether facing a large medical bill, an accident, or something else, having a buffer will help keep you afloat without resorting to more expensive options, such as paying with your credit card.

7. Maintain your financial reputation. Good credit can lead to thousands in savings. Conversely, bad credit can cost you thousands. Ensure that you maintain a solid credit rating. On a thirty-year mortgage for $500,000 in New York, dropping from a credit score of 760 to 650 could mean paying more than $110,000 in extra interest and fees.

8. Stagger your credit reports. You are entitled to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). Spread these out: pull a report every four months so you have more frequent checks on your credit and avoid identity theft. To check your report, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. (Avoid FreeCreditReport.com, as it enrolls you in other services that most people do not need.) Want to check your credit score? Many credit cards and banks offer this service for free. Otherwise, websites such as Credit Karma can give you a good approximation of your credit score—with no strings attached.

9. Take the time to research your options for paying off student loans. Find out whether you qualify for federal income-driven repayment programs, and whether they make sense for you. Here is a good place to start.

10. Recognize that money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Do not forget about the journey, and buy experiences that make you happy!

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Art History and Archaeology
Helprin, Alexandra. The Sheremeteus and the Argunous: Art, serfdom, and enlightenment in eighteenth-century Russia. Advisor: Anne Higonnet.

Biomedical Engineering
Bunting, Ethan. Performance analysis and optimization of 2D cardiac strain imaging for clinical applications. Advisor: Elisa E. Konofagou.

Business
Semenov, Aleksey. Higher volatility with lower credit spreads: The puzzle and its solution. Advisor: M. Suresh Sundaresan.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Abrams, Jeffrey. Nav1.5: Effect of auxiliary proteins on function and role in atrial fibrillation. Advisor: Steven O. Marx.

Bohnen, Michael. Potassium channelopathies in pulmonary arterial hypertension. Advisor: Robert S. Kass.

Peng, Gary. Gating mechanisms underlying deactivation slowing by atrial fibrillation mutations and small-molecule activators of KCNQ1. Advisor: Robert S. Kass.

Chemical Engineering
Garcia, Kristen. Artifical metabolons: Design of self-assembled bio-complexes. Advisor: Scott A. Banta.

Stonor, Maxim. Conversion of biomass to hydrogen via the catalytically enhanced alkaline thermal treatment reaction. Advisor: Jingguang Chen and Ah-Hyung Alissa Park.

Vi, Thu. Factors that affect polymer brush formation. Advisor: Jeffrey T. Koberstein.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Londono Lozano, Juan. A coupled viscoelastic and damage mechanics approach for solids with applications to ice and asphalt. Advisor: Haim Waisman.

Wang, Yongxiang. Developments in the extended finite element method and cohesive zone models for failure analysis of quasi-brittle materials. Advisor: Haim Waisman.

Computer Science
Berg, Thomas. High-level, part-based features for fine-grained visual categorization. Advisor: Peter N. Belhumeur.

Dall, Christoffer. The design, implementation, and evaluation of software and architectural support for ARM virtualization. Advisor: Jason Nieh.

Liu, Jiongxin. Object part localization using exemplar-based models. Advisor: Peter N. Belhumeur.

Yoon, Young Jin. Design and optimization of networks-on-chip for heterogeneous systems-on-chip. Advisor: Luca Carloni.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Wang, Zi. Dilemmas of empire: Movement, communication, and information management in Ming China, 1368-1644. Advisor: Robert Paul Hymes.

Electrical Engineering
Zhu, Jianxun. Architectures and circuit techniques for high-performance field-programmable CMOS software defined radios. Advisor: Peter Kinget.

French and Romance Philology
King, Diana. Translating revolution in twentieth-century China and France: Theories, practices, texts. Advisor: Souleymane Bachir Diagne.

Genetics and Development
Yarychkivska, Olga. Molecular mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance: Novel regulation of DNMT1. Advisor: Timothy H. Bestor.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Stein, Rachel. Re-composing the global Iberian monarchy through the Lisbon press of Pedro Craesbeeck (1597-1632). Advisors: Alessandra Russo and Jesús R. Velasco.

Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection
Chen, Yen-Hua. Asymmetric metabolism by sibling lymphocytes coupling differentiation and self-renewal. Advisor: Steve Reiner.

Nursing
Boyd, Donald. Investigating and measuring certified registered nurse anesthetist organizational climate. Advisor: Lusine Poghosyan.

Physics
Smith, Russell. A search for squarks and gluinos with recursive jigsaw reconstruction. Advisor: Emlyn Hughes.

Political Science
Gomes, Bjorn. The drive and struggle for recognition. Advisors: David Chambliss Johnston and Melissa Schwartzberg.

TC / Applied Anthropology
Le Fevre, Lisa. Strategies and ties of resilience: Bulgarian elderly in an aging and depopulation landscape. Advisor: Charles C. Harrington.

TC / Economics and Education
Hanisch Cerda, Barbara. Does school accountability pressure improve school quality? Advisor: Henry M. Levin.

TC / Science Education
Zubiaurre, Laureen. The development of reflective thinking and its influence on patient care skills in third year dental students. Advisor: O. Roger Anderson.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Ferraris, Dyan. Does gender matter in the evaluation of successful physicians? Examining how evaluators use stereotype-based attributions in determining outcomes at work. Advisor: Caryn J. Block.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Art History and Archaeology
Johal, Rattanamol. Dissolving margins: Indian art in the globalized nineties.

Morgan, Nicholas. Displaying queerness: Art and identity in the 1990s.

Woldman, Joseph. Look at me: The disembodied gaze in sixth-fifth century Etruria.

Biomedical Engineering
Spasic, Milos. Targeting primary cilia-mediated mechanotransduction to enhance whole bone formation.

Business
Choi, Yoonjin. Cultural brokerage – A new perspective on organizational culture and individual performance.

Kiguel, Andrea. Essays in emerging markets finance and integration.

Meng, Ruoqu. Motivating choices, effort, and performance: Beyond monetary incentives.

Piazza, Alessandro. From founders to funders: Generalized exchange, social capital, and homophily in ahgel investing.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Coffel, Ethan. Extreme heat under climate change: Projections and impacts.

Gao, Yuchao. The impact of organic aerosol volatility on aerosol microphysics for global climate modeling applications.

Li, Xiaoqiong. Asian summer monsoon changes in response to greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols.

Oliver, Ruth. Spatiotemporal dynamics of songbird breeding in arctic-boreal North America.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Bernard, Allison. The literary politics of meaning-making: Writing and identity in seventeenth-century Chinese drama.

English and Comparative Literature
Cox, Therese. Subtopia: Architecture, literature, and the poetics of place in postwar British writing.

French and Romance Philology
Abele, Celia. Fictions of knowledge collection: From Diderot to Sebald.

History
Ng Tam, Yung Hua. The Chinese restaurant diaspora: Chinese restaurant networks and their role in supporting migration throughout the Western hemisphere.

Nofil, Brianna. Gender, community policing and crime control in the late twentieth ceuntury U.S.

Italian
Fleck, Samuel. The double in late 19th century Italian literature: Readings in Fogazzaro and his contemporaries.

Mechanical Engineering
Zhu, Yibo. Graphene based nanosensors for detection of low-molecular-weight biomarkers.

Music
Glasenapp, Brian. The Beaupré Antiphoner: Liturgy, community, and continuity (1290-1796).

Psychology
Kallman, Seth. Don’t save the worst for last: Experienced and predicted affective impacts of task ordering.

Majd, Christine. Tools to assist restrained eaters: A query theory and regulatory focus approach.

Martin, Rebecca. Influencing emotions: How brain development and social forces shape we think and feel.

Theatre
Sirmons, Julia. Intermediality in the wings: Theatricality in European art cinema.

Urban Planning
Stiglich, Matteo. The techno-political economy of privately-financed highways in Lima, Peru.

Where did you grow up?
Pelham Manor, NY.

What drew you to your field?
The opportunity to intern with Dr. Emery Brown, a leading researcher at the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital, during the summer of my junior year of college. I primarily investigated the effect of anesthetic drugs on consciousness, opening my eyes to a new area of study involving neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and human behavior.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I study the effects of drugs on the brain and behavior.

What do you enjoy most about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The many opportunities to collaborate and conduct interdisciplinary research.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct? 
The prevailing theory within the field of neuroscience is that dopamine is the “pleasure” neurotransmitter in the brain. Although dopamine is involved in producing euphoric feelings, it also leads to stress-inducing emotions. Also, several other neurotransmitters contribute to production of “pleasurable” feelings, not solely dopamine.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Designing, executing, and completing my first experimental research study.

Who are your favorite writers?
James Baldwin, Albert Camus, and Stieg Larsson.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Lisbeth Salander from the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. She is the epitome of female strength and vulnerability.

Who is your hero in real life?
My brother. I’ve always admired his hard work, his analytical skills, and his ability to use his knowledge of historical events to break down current events. I also really respect his courage to move to another country, learn a new language, and raise a family.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Michelle Obama. For almost a decade, she was able to balance personal, societal, and national roles in a way that sets her apart from other First Ladies. She not only raised two intelligent and well-respected daughters, but also led community-changing initiatives during her time as First Lady.

What music have you been listening to lately?
I start every morning listening to Brazilian jazz, and Lianne La Havas. On rainy days, I usually listen to Sade or Anita Baker. I am also a huge ’90s hip-hop fan: Nas’s Illmatic, Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s Black Star, and Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night are on my most-played list.

What is your favorite blog or website?
The New York Times Travel section. I love to travel!

Dear Provost Coatsworth, Executive Vice President Madigan, Dean Alonso, faculty, and administrative staff; dear families and friends, but most important, dear PhD Class of 2017:

I feel extremely honored to deliver the student speech today, and would like to start by thanking my two advisors in the Political Science Department, David Johnston and Jack Snyder, as well as Lasana Harris from [University College London], and my other committee members, Robert Jervis and Helen Verdeli from TC; as well as my parents, husband, son, and friends who are sitting in the audience today.

I am here today to talk about what Columbia means to me as a place—as an enigmatic place of arrival and possibility, as a place that marks my intellectual biography, as a tangible place in which a multitude of my identities found a space to speak to each other.

On one of my first lush summer evenings on campus seven years ago, when I was sitting with a newly made friend on the steps of Low Library, we were watching how the lights of Butler Library opposite of us were beginning to pierce brightly into the soft, darkening sky, one small window after the other. My friend and I talked about how for our hypermobile generation, places and locations are often piled onto each other without clear order, whereas recounting specific years provides more structure and clarity. For this generation, the memories of places that we travel to and from, and that we leave behind and immerse ourselves in anew, can quickly become a jumbled and bewildering collection of facts. Instead, specific years begin to structure us—almost as if they light up in front of our eyes, like the row of bright windows of Butler Library, into the darkness of the sky.

Yet today I want to make the case that our memory of Columbia is especially precious for a hypermobile generation like ours, because it is deeply etched into us as a memory and experience of place, above all.

I came to Columbia from having studied political philosophy in the UK, I grew up in Germany, was born in China, and thus arrived at Columbia with many question marks about my cultural and intellectual belonging.

I wrote an interdisciplinary dissertation that employs the social neuroscience on prejudice, stereotyping and dehumanization of others, to build a neuropolitical theory of how we can live together cooperatively in hyperdiverse and divided societies. Columbia’s campus, its winded corridors in the prewar buildings, the seminar rooms, the libraries, and above all, its people became a physically tangible and contained place where I could draw connections between my conflicting identities.

Academically, it became a place where in my quest to create a new neuropolitical language and interdisciplinary theory for today’s identity politics, I could literally cross disciplinary boundaries by walking over to the offices and seminar rooms of different departments and library rooms on the Morningside campus, within a matter of hours, within a whole long day. As I was contemplating during my graduate years what impact the brain has on politics, and how politics reflects in the brain, I crisscrossed campus and connected the disparate intellectual fields in my mind—neuroscience and political philosophy—by walking across the campus space.

But just like any physical place that is able to grip our imagination, Columbia is a place that at once attracts our most daring visions and yet most vulnerable longings. If, like me, you have ever wondered and despaired about who you are, how you are supposed to think, and how you are supposed to talk about yourself in light of the often conflicting cultural, racial, linguistic and gender identities that you carry within you, then you will know that words such as belonging, home and liberation are not just abstract concepts but powerful and enticing sounds that compel you to explore them with an almost irrational yearning and resolution.

When I arrived at Columbia, I wanted to understand the force of social identities such as race, culture, and class, in determining political outcomes in our post-Cold War world order. I was motivated by my upbringing by Chinese parents in post-War, unified Germany: I was puzzled how identity politics could lead to such disastrous outcomes such as the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, but at the same time, how it could also lead to empowering triumphs such as the Civil Rights Movements and desegregation in the US, as well as the Feminist Movement and postcolonial liberation. Why did identity politics in the twentieth century lead to such disastrous and yet triumphant outcomes? And how are we to learn from this for the identity politics of the twenty-first century, in our increasingly hyperdiverse and divided societies?

But of course, as is so often the case, the deepest and most hidden, but also most desperate and powerful, drive behind these questions came from my own Self. They came from my own experience as an intercultural minority woman who did not know whether she belonged to the West or the East. From my experience of being rejected as too Western by fellow Chinese and as too foreign by fellow Western colleagues, professors, and friends. From my experience of not knowing which history was truly writing me, and which history I should help writing. From yearning for a place that I could call my intellectual home, where I belonged without being put into set identity categories, where I could ask questions and try to answer them in a crispness and unfussiness that allowed me to focus completely on the question itself.

A place where the beginning of each day was not marked by that stinging sense of shame that still too many of us who move from identity margins into the center allow to wash over ourselves. I was looking for a place where it did not matter so much who you once were but where what you said, thought, and responded to in this very moment in a seminar room, a research lab and a lecture hall, took on importance and reality. Columbia as a campus and New York as a city became that place where the words belonging, home, and liberation could be uttered completely anew.

However, I am not trying to idolize Columbia: My memory of Columbia is also marked by contestation of its place, and by who is represented and allowed entry here. I am thinking back of my time as student senator, when I engaged in heated debates about Columbia’s global identity in light of ROTC’s return to campus, about Columbia’s responsibility to invest ethically, low-income students who confessed about their struggles with food stamps and finances, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, as well as the historic erection of a plaque that honors the Lenape people in 2016.

Therefore, when I think back, my time here at Columbia is marked both by the liberation that the space offers to intercultural people like me, but also by the constant awareness that this space needs to be continuously contested, reclaimed, and transformed by a diverse assembly of voices.

The meaning of a place also comes from seeing it through someone else’s eyes. I would not be the person I am today without the undergraduate students that I have taught—to consider the identity challenges of our time through the perspective of this youngest generation on campus has been deeply humbling for me, giving me true joy and purpose. Likewise, our parents and family who are sharing this special moment with us today carry within them the knowledge of other continents, histories and political eras—which is why seeing us on stage today, in this place, in this city, at this moment, is deeply touching and meaningful to us, but perhaps even more so to them.

Dear Class of 2017, I leave you with this image of Butler Library’s lights lighting up like the years that are to unfold before us after our graduation, but also, with a visceral sense of place connected to Columbia—of that period in your life where the fractured identity parts within you found enlightenment and meaning, and a true sense of belonging in a single haven of time and place.

Thank you, Dean Alonso, Provost Coatsworth, Executive Vice President Madigan, members of the faculty, administration, and staff, family, friends, and my fellow graduates, for coming to celebrate the master’s graduating Class of 2017.

In a tumultuous world, we should cherish moments like these that serve as harbingers for the realization of the varied aspirations cloaked under this sea of blue. As I look around this amalgamation of stone and ambition, a curious feeling of bittersweet contention fills my eyes with pride and disillusionment, my lungs with the disconcerting scent of a relinquished friendship. My stint at Columbia has reached its final moments.

My time here has been a transformative experience, to say the least. I learned a lot about myself and the world. Amidst the precarious uncertainty of the social, political, and economic moment we call the present, this campus and the friends I have made here have remained a beacon of hope and a bastion of creativity. While I did not spend my free time in clubs on campus, the American Studies program became my home. Dr. Sandler, the director of my program, was my professor, advisor, and confidant. While my frequent visits were not always announced beforehand, Dr. Sandler listened to my rants and provided me with a much-needed outside perspective on the trials and tribulations of graduate studies. The Music Department was also receptive to my intrusions as a foreigner to their discipline. I took an ethnographic methods class my first semester with Dr. Fox, who would subsequently become my thesis advisor. I went on to take more music courses and found myself in Dodge Hall often.

My cohort is scattered among the many buildings on campus, so finding another departmental home was essential for us, due to our interdisciplinary program. However, the freedom of this program is what drew me to Columbia. I truly enjoyed every class that I took because it was crafted by my eclectic theoretical foundations, culminating in my interdisciplinary research on the hip-hop cypher.

This mixture of disciplines provides us with a more comprehensive analysis of the world around us. Our political battles are based on sociological, economic, and psychological perspectives, so academics should strive to reciprocate in turn. Everyone is an ethnographer of his or her own experience. Reflexivity should be a focal point in every student’s education because it helps one grow as a researcher and as a human being.

I expected a dearth of humanity on this campus. Inside the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, I imagined a realm of legacies: elitist snobs who knew nothing about the plight of those not born into wealth. I was certainly privileged, but still felt distant from this insulated prestige. I graduated from SUNY College at Old Westbury in 2015 with the first graduating class of over 1,000 students. I went to school with working parents, kids who worked full time to afford an education, and students struggling with student loans. I myself worked four jobs during my undergraduate years to keep up with the financial demands. Through it all, I saw the beautiful, painful struggle of human existence. I thought that Columbia would never reveal that side of the human condition. To this day, the students and faculty are a testament to the true diversity of experience that I hoped to encounter.

Moreover, moving to Manhattan catalyzed a profound metamorphosis of my worldview. The most significant of these changes was my immersion in hip-hop culture. Navigating the New York underground fulfilled my research goals and allowed me to hone my craft as an MC. While I am still learning, I would not have fully realized this transformation in my native Long Island. A large part of my research is the impact that hip-hop has had on my life over the last two years. It provided a creative outlet, a chance to meet people outside of school, and most importantly, a humanistic philosophy that is unique to hip-hop culture. The community that my rap group creates and maintains is an intimate collective that sincerely speaks to the potential of human nature. I have brought this humanism into my research, my music, my relationships, and my life. I hope that all of you who are graduating today have had similar experiences during your time here.

It is with this belief in humanity and the hope I have for this country that I wish the graduating class all the best in their future endeavors. We do not need luck with hard work, persistence, and an open mind. These are the cornerstones of Columbia’s spirit and pedagogy. I know that you all have great aspirations for the future, and I have no doubt in my mind that you will all become great leaders and role models in whatever field you choose to inhabit. As for me, I hope to inspire change. Although the path will be filled with success and failures, I am determined to become president someday.

I believe that life experience is much more than the notes you take. I believe that the “real world” outside of college is not as daunting as people make it out to be. I believe in me, and I believe in you. I believe that anything is possible with the right tools and the knowledge of our ignorance. Be humble in the face of success, proud in the face of adversity, and steadfast to your convictions. Most importantly, be you.

Thank you and congratulations, Class of 2017!

During your stay in this institution, we have endeavored to train you how to think, write, and speak like a member of an academic field, as a participant in an intellectual community defined by the mores and conventions of your discipline, leaving in the process little time, or room, for much else. Indeed, looking back at the foundational myth of the modern university, one can detect readily a desire to place the institution in a location of exception with respect to the social, as an enterprise that derives its force and reason for being from its insularity, from its distance from societal concerns. This is part and parcel of the apprenticeship model of graduate education, and explains to a large degree the sense of loneliness that we have all felt at one time or another while in graduate school, as if we all had to re-create for ourselves, and within ourselves, the principal tenets of our chosen discipline, and thus engage in a project of intellectual self-fashioning that necessarily had to keep the world at bay. Given the effort that you have expended in achieving this goal, you would be justified in thinking that the triumph that you celebrate today surely should be enough.

And yet: The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in the early twentieth century an aphorism that comes to mind to describe what I am hoping to convey to you as you leave this institution: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella, no me salvo yo,” which can be loosely translated as “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not redeem it, I cannot redeem myself.” Since November of last year, most academic institutions in the nation have been buffeted by the unexpected outcome of a general election whose principal ideological contours appear to issue from a version of this country that is felt by some of us to be unsettling and unfamiliar. I do not want to challenge or bemoan the results of that election here, but to invoke it as an object lesson for all of us. Using the very analytical tools that you have learned at Columbia and which we live by, we should endeavor to understand the phenomenon down to its root causes. But perhaps more important is for us to be chastened by the very surprise with which we received this event.

For in hindsight now, all of the pieces were readily available that would have allowed us almost to predict, as opposed to being surprised by, the results of the last election: the indifference at the radical concentration of wealth and resulting income inequalities; the disregard for a lowered standard of living for many of our middle-class citizens; the shrugging of shoulders at the seemingly wanton police killings of black citizens; the lack of concern with the pollution of the public sphere with misinformation; the conundrum that, on the one hand, our current economic system has ushered in the wondrous, wondrous world in which we live, but that it also has a continual propensity to naturalize inequalities, and to produce narratives of success about individual effort that justify those inequalities. All of these circumstances point to the loss of our sense of the commons, of the belief that we have some responsibility to our brethren, and that our fundamental assumption should be that what is best is what is good for the largest number of people. Had we allowed ourselves to see these phenomena, we would not have been staggered by the events of November.

The university may have been created to keep the world at bay outside its walls, but we should not allow that mythological foundation to determine our relationship with our surroundings. The very distilled concentration, the monomaniacal attention to your intellectual projects that has allowed you to be where you are today is a decided strength, but it can also lead imperceptibly to a withdrawal from the world that is not that different in its effects from outright neglect. Struggling against the insular experience in which you had to immerse yourself to be successful in graduate school will perhaps be the most taxing, the most demanding task you will undertake in the next chapter of your life.

Everything that you have learned at Columbia will only acquire its full significance when you are able to articulate its meaning for the commons. Hence, in spite of the requisite headlong plunge into our disciplinary milieu, we must never lose sight of the larger social context that will endow our work with its ultimate significance. We are, as a society, at peril of losing that sense of responsibility toward the common good without which our work will be diminished, but more important, without which no understanding or application of justice may sustain itself. Your studies have endowed you with powerful analytical tools and equally effective powers of persuasion, and you should use them to protect the health of the social compact; to strengthen the resilience of our common bonds. Strive to be happy as an individual, but always keep in mind Ortega’s admonition that if you do not also endeavor to redeem your circumstance, your own fulfillment will be in jeopardy. Never lose sight of the fact that many persons—even absolute strangers—have contributed to this personal success of yours that we celebrate today, and that the best way to acknowledge that debt is through your renewed commitment to the essential business of being human among, and alongside, other human beings.

We arrive, then, at the end of this magnificent ceremony. Go forth to be our representatives and emissaries to the world, and all of us at Columbia will rejoice in your inevitable achievements. Make us, and your relatives and friends, prouder still about you than we are today.

Thousands of family members, friends, faculty, and staff gathered to celebrate the achievements of about 570 graduating MA candidates and about 340 graduating PhD candidates on Sunday, May 14, 2017.

Find below fourteen photos that illustrate the excitement and pride felt by those in attendance. See many more photos on the GSAS Facebook page.

Related Links:

• MA Candidate’s Remarks by Ediz Ozelkan
• PhD Candidate’s Remarks by Liya Yu
• Closing Remarks by Dean Carlos J. Alonso

Master’s graduates take their seats.

MA student speaker Ediz Ozelkan shares what he has learned from Columbia and New York.

Sunil Gulati, senior lecturer in the Department of Economics and president of the US Soccer Federation, delivers the keynote address for MA graduates.

Economics students pose for photos after the ceremony.

Beaming MA candidates make their way past applauding faculty following the ceremony.

MA graduates celebrate on the steps of Low Library.

Andrea Solomon, vice dean of GSAS, leads the faculty procession at the start of the doctoral ceremony.

Angelica Patterson, PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences, spots one of her fans in the crowd.

Friends and family look on with excitement as graduates take their seats.

Two doctoral candidates share a fist-bump.

Dean Carlos J. Alonso greets Jennifer Rhodes, PhD candidate in Italian, and her son.

Stephanie Shiau, PhD candidate in Epidemiology, prepares to ascend the stage.

Alondra Nelson—professor of sociology, dean of social science, and keynote speaker for the PhD ceremony—applauds graduates.

Doctoral graduates are congratulated by faculty as they exit.

Please see below for degree applications and other forms intended to be completed by faculty members.

Note: Forms for students may be found here.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Biomedical Informatics
Boland, Mary. A systems-level approach to understand the seasonal factors of early development with clinical and pharmacological applications. Advisor: Nicholas Tatonetti.

Biostatistics
Huang, Tzu Jung. Marginal screening on survival data. Advisor: Ian W. McKeague.

Business
Li, Xinlei. Relationship lending in syndicated loans: A participant's perspective. Advisor: Fabrizio Ferri.

Classical Studies
Allen, Molly. Portraits of grief: Death, mourning, and the expression of sorrow of white-ground Lekythoi. Advisor: Ioannis Mylonopoulos.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Goldsmith, Yonaton. Trans-Asian glacial-interglacial paleohydroclimate reconstructed using lake geomorphology and organic and inorganic stable isotopes. Advisor: Wallace S. Broecker.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Guindre-Parker, Sarah. The costs of reproduction and the evolution of cooperative breeding in African starlings. Advisor: Dustin R. Rubenstein.

Prager, Case. Impacts of arctic warming on plact traits, multiple dimensions of biodiversity, and ecosystem function. Advisors: Kevin L. Griffin and Shahid Naeem.

Schwartz, Naomi. Landscape consequences of disturbance in tropical second-growth forest. Advisors: Ruth DeFries and Maria Uriarte.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Weeks, Brian. Reconstructing community assembly: The impacts of alternate histories. Advisors: Joel L. Cracraft and Shahid Naeem.

Economics
Dupraz, Stéphane. Three essays on economic fluctuations. Advisor: Michael Woodford.

Tuzcuoglu, Kerem. Three essays in economics. Advisor: Serena Ng.

Germanic Languages
Bajohr, Hannes. History and metaphor: Hans Blumenberg's theory of language. Advisors: Harro Müller and Andreas Huyssen.

Germanic Languages
Walsh, Patrick. The figure of the prophet in German literature around 1800. Advisor: Dorothea von Mücke.

History
Dunitz, Sarah. Educational empires: The USA, Great Britain, and British Africa, circa 1902-1944. Advisor: Alice Kessler-Harris.

Italian
Fraga, Mariana. Reading Clarice Lispector in contemporary Italian feminist philosophy. Advisor: Elizabeth Leake.

Mathematics
Petkov, Vladislav. Distinguished representations of the metaplectic cover of GL (n). Advisor: Dorian Goldfeld.

Music
Hansberry, Benjamin. Phenomenon and abstraction: Coordinating concepts in music theory and analysis. Advisor: Joseph Dubiel.

Hilewicz, Orit. Listening to ekphrostic musical compositions. Advisor: Joseph Dubiel.

Political Science
Daniel, Anthony. From Wagner to Taft-Hartley, revisited. Advisor: Robert Y. Shapiro.

Sustainable Development
Oremus, Kimberly. Here's the catch: Fisheries and fishery management under climate variability. Advisors: Mark A. Cane and Wolfram Schlenker.

TC / Anthropology and Education
Christian, Elaine. Shepherds, servants, and strangers: Popular Christianity, theology, and. Advisor: Hervé H. Varenne.

TC / Applied Behavioral Analysis
Farrell, Cesira. An investigation into the speaker-as-own-listener repertoire and reverse intraverbal responding. Advisor: Jessica Dudek.

Mackey, Michelle. The effects of a reader immersion: Procedure on the technical reading comprehension responses of kindergarten and first grade students. Advisor: R. Douglas Greer.

Mercorella, Kelly. The effects of producing and sequencing narrative components of a story on reading comprehension. Advisor: R. Douglas Greer.

Moore, Colleen. The effects of the establishment of conditioned reinforment for reading on the acquisition of reading. Advisor: R. Douglas Greer.

TC / Cognitive Studies in Education
Awotwi, Ama. Computer-based number categorization as an intervention for computer-based number line estimation. Advisor: Herbert P. Ginsburg.

Fang, Fu-Fen. Teachers' beliefs about the nature and malleability of intelligence. Advisor: James E. Corter.

TC / English Education
Callahan, Nicole. Radical writing: Apprentices essaying ways into philosophical thinking: A multiple case study. Advisor: Sheridan Blau.

TC / Mathematics Education
Tam, Kai. Testing the ability to apply mathematical knowledge. Advisor: Alexander P. Karp.

TC / Politics and Education
Al-Thani, Hessa. Modernity aspirations: The struggle of Qatari male students to be. Advisor: Jeffrey Henig.

Pheatt, Lara. The pursuit of profit or prestige: What the diffusion of MOOCs can tell us about disruptive innovation in US higher education. Advisor: Jeffrey Henig.

TC / School Psychology
Bancroft, Alexis. Basic relational concept and verbal behavior development in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Advisor: Marla R. Brassard.

TC / Science Education
Bernardo, Cyntra. Integration of culturally relevant pedagogy into the science learning. Advisor: Christopher Emdin.

Boda, Phillip. Disability studies, multiculturalism and urban science education: A mixed-methods phenomenography of graduate student learning. Advisor: O. Roger Anderson.

TC / Science Education
Fleshman, Robin. Not driven by high-stakes tests: Exploring science assessment and college readiness of students from an urban portfolio community high school. Advisor: Felicia Moore Mensah.

Hoard, Althea. A black feminist book club as a multicultural professional development model for inservice science teachers. Advisor: Felicia Moore Mensah.

TC / Science Education
Wu, Jason. English language learners' native language use in secondary science. Advisor: O. Roger Anderson.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Kodaira, Yoko. An investigation of cognitive processes associated with notetaking and notes-review. Advisor: Stephen T. Peverly.

Stutzman, Naomi. Examining the relationship between personality and performance: Does personality predict performance for female leaders. Advisor: Debra A. Noumair.

TC / Speech and Language Pathology
Garcia, Felicidad. Brain responses to contrastive and noncontrastive morphosyntactic structures in African American English and mainstream American English: ERP evidence for the neural indices of dialect. Advisor: Karen Froud.

Hsu, Sih-Chiao. Effects of an intensive voice treatment on speech production of mandarin speakers with Parkinson's disease: Acoustic and perceptual findings. Advisor: Erika S. Levy.

Obermeyer, Jessica. Efficacy of attentive reading with constrained summarization-written in people with mild aphasia. Advisor: Lisa Edmonds.
 

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Biomedical Engineering
Fong, Christopher. Development of portable diffuse optical spectroscopic systems for treatment monitoring.

Business
Johannesson, Erik. Ex-insider trading - former insiders and formerly inside stock.

Chemical Engineering
Pandey, Shashank. Bioinspired collective synchronization within the arrays of electrostatic.

Song, Ruobing. Spot-beam crystallization of silicon films.

Winter, Lea. Comparison of plasm- with thermal-catalysis for exploration of unique chemistries and activation of stable molecules.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Cunnigham, Maxwell. Evidence of the glacial buzzsaw at low-latitudes: How glacial erosion limits tropical mountain height.

Pascolini-Campbell, Madeleine. Variability of hydroclimate in the North American Southwest: Implications for streamflow, the spring dry season and ecosystems.

Shoenfelt, Elizabeth. Reconstructing bioavailable fe fluxes to the Southern Ocean with particulate fe mineralogy and direct measurements of bioavailability.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Healy, Gavin. Tourism to the People's Republic of China (1949-1985): Business, politics, and culture.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Bytnerowicz, Thomas. Exploring mechanisms by which temperature may control the success of symiotic nitrogen fixers across latitude and elevation: Time-lags and notrigen fixation rates.

History
Azarbadegan, Zainab. Bloodless battles: Sovereignty and citizenship in nineteenth=century Ottoman Iraq.

Lawson, Owain. Power failures: Engineers and the Litani River, 1931-1965.

Italian
Arrigoni, Carlo. 'Il Meccanismo delle Passioni': Fantasy and ideology in the works of Giovanni Versa.

Visco, Julianna. Dante and Boccaccio: A poetics of textiles.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Quintero, Alejandro. Red ink: Blood and nation-building in mid-nineteenth century Spanish America, 1840-1870.

Nutritional and Metabolic Biology
Skowronski, Alicja. The role of leptin in body weight regulation.

Philosophy
Heeney, Matthew. Mental agency and responsibility for mind.

Political Science
Milonopoulos, Theodoros. In the shadows of victory and defeat: Battlefield assessment, mid-war decision-making, and the expansion and termination of armed conflict.

Mueser, Benjamin. The concept of a territorial right.

Syunyaev, Goergiy. Strategic distribution of responsibilities in decentralized autocracies.

Thorley, Dane. Courts, experiments, and randomization: A three-paper diseertation proposal.

Wilke, Anna. Public goods provision in developing countries.

Zubia, Aaron. The neo-Epicurean legacy in early liberalism.

Forty alumni, students, and faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences gathered in the library of Columbia University’s Italian Academy on June 1, 2017, to celebrate outstanding achievement at the Alumni Awards Dinner, where the GSAS Alumni Association presented both the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement for alumni who have made significant contributions to their fields and to society.

“This is the culminating event for the Graduate School every year, and is also my favorite event,” Dean Carlos J. Alonso told attendees. “It is the moment in which everything comes together for us, because everything we do during the year happens so that we may produce students such as the ones we honor here tonight. This is why we do what we do.”

The Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement was bestowed upon doctoral alumnus Professor Francisco Ayala (’64GSAS, Biological Sciences) and master’s alumna Ursula K. Le Guin (’52GSAS, French and Romance Philology). Professor Ayala, a National Medal of Science and Templeton Prize recipient who holds multiple appointments at the University of California, Irvine, has conducted groundbreaking research on population and evolutionary genetics, and his discoveries have led to new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

“I am an American because of Columbia University, and I have accomplished whatever I have accomplished because of Columbia University,” said Professor Ayala, who recounted leaving Franco-era Spain to pursue his graduate studies at Columbia.

Le Guin, described by The New York Times as “America’s greatest living science fiction writer,” was unable to attend the event, but wrote a letter expressing her gratitude.

“What I learned [at Columbia] of course served me all my life, though not directly as a scholar or teacher,” she wrote in the letter, which was read aloud at the dinner. “An education of that quality and caliber enlarges, enhances, and supports a mind in innumerable ways, many of them quite unpredictable.”

Andrea Batista Schlesinger (’13GSAS, International and World History), deputy director of US programs at the Open Society Foundations, was the master’s recipient of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. Before her graduate studies, Batista Schlesinger had advised New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, led the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, and authored the acclaimed book The Death of Why: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy.

“There are people who deliver education, and then there are masters of their fields, which is the experience I had here,” she said.

The doctoral recipient of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award was Dr. Warren Bass (’02GSAS, History), a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal. After leaving Columbia, Dr. Bass served as part of the 9/11 Commission and helped to write and edit its landmark final report. He also served as an editor of the Washington Post, and as director of speechwriting and Middle East policy adviser to Ambassador Susan Rice.

“I’m not quite sure whether Columbia realized how far outside the academy I would stray, but I have always carried what I learned here with me,” he said in his acceptance remarks. “I have always found my degree to be unbelievably useful.”

Professor Francisco Ayala

Awards Committee chair Dr. Harriet Zuckerman (’65GSAS, Sociology) and Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Dr. Warren Bass