What is your current role?
Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center and Research Scientist at The New York State Psychiatric Institute/Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, Inc.

What are you working on now?
My laboratory is broadly interested in identifying the neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory in disease states. To do so, we created an activity-dependent tagging system in mice that allows us to visualize an individual memory across the whole brain in mice with single-cell resolution. We can then quantify and manipulate the neural ensembles underlying memory loss following natural aging or Alzheimer’s disease results, or the neural ensembles underlying aversive memories following depression or PTSD.

What drew you to your field?
The brain has always fascinated me. When I was in college, I joined a neuroscience laboratory for financial reasons—I was the first person in my family to go to college, and needed extra money to support myself. I immediately loved the work (e.g., being able to ask and answer questions that interested me), and have never since left a laboratory setting. My mentor at the time suggested that I continue in research, which I ultimately did. Then and now, I am driven to find novel treatments or preventions for psychiatric and cognitive disorders.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
The greatest lesson I learned during graduate school was to think outside the box. My graduate program taught me to think creatively, to question the status quo, and to come up with innovative experiments to answer my questions. Moreover, I have learned not to be afraid to take advantage of novel tools to answer my questions.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
During graduate school, my mentor René Hen taught me how to present my work clearly. I learned the importance of conveying my science not only to people in my direct field, but also to other scientists and the public. I have learned so much from René—especially how to give a great talk.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
Meeting all of the people in René Hen’s laboratory and in the Biological Sciences program. Most important, I met my best friend, Justine (Barry) Kupferman, in graduate school, and to this day we are still very close. I have been so blessed by her friendship.

What are your passions outside of your work?
Raising our two girls and cooking.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
Take advantage of all of the great people at Columbia. Their wisdom and guidance has been instrumental in my career.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
Staying at Columbia for a long time, I hope!

Career Support

These services offered by the Center for Career Education (CCE) help PhD students to explore professional paths and achieve their career goals.

• One-on-one career counseling
• Career assessments
• LionSHARE: job board available only to Columbia students and alumni
• “Quick Questions” drop-in hours
• Practice interviews
• “Insider Info” about hundreds of employers
• Clothing Closet: borrow interview attire at no cost
• Services for international students
• Services for students with disabilities
• Services for veteran students

Professional Development Programs

These GSAS and Columbia programs below allow advanced doctoral students to gain valuable professional experience and leverage campus resources.

• GSAS Fellowships in Academic Administration Program
• GSAS Teaching Scholars Program
• Columbia Entrepreneurship

Funding to Attend Conferences

The GSAS Conference Matching Travel Fund provides support for graduate students in the Arts and Sciences to present at conferences.

Developing Job Search Documents and a Portfolio

The following CCE resources can assist students in developing their online presence and job application materials.

• Design Your Next Steps: sample resumes, CVs, and cover letters
• Converting Your CV to a Résumé
• How and Why to Write a Great Cover Letter
• Transferable Skills for PhDs in the Humanities

Visit LionSHARE to find upcoming skill-building workshops offered by CCE.

Mapping Your Career Journey

Below are self-assessment tools to identify skills, interests, and values, and resources for learning about employers.

Self-Paced Career Exploration

• PhD Career Development Timeline
• ImaginePhD: career exploration and planning tool for students in the humanities and social sciences
• myIDP: career exploration and planning tool for students in the natural sciences
• Columbia Individual Development Plan (IDP) Program
• CCE Industry Guides
• Non-Academic Career Options for PhDs in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• Career Exploration for STEM PhDs

Subscription & Digital Resources

• Versatile PhD: non-academic and non-faculty career resources for PhDs
• GoinGlobal: Country Career Guides and USA City Career Guides
• Wetfeet: in-depth company research
• Vault: company-specific information and interview strategies
• UniWorld: employment at multinational companies
• Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning Courses
• Graduate Student Consulting Club: case interviews

Networking

There are several ways for PhD students to make valuable professional connections with employers, Columbia alumni, and peers:

• CCE Industry Showcases
• CCE PhD Pathways: Career Conversations
• Columbia Career Connections LinkedIn group
• Columbia Alumni LinkedIn exploration tool
• Informational interviewing
• Versatile PhD Meet-Ups (fourth Sunday of each month)
• Professional associations

Career Support

These services offered by the Center for Career Education (CCE) help MA students to explore professional paths and achieve their career goals.

• One-on-one career counseling
• LionSHARE: job board available only to Columbia students and alumni
• “Quick Questions” drop-in hours
• Practice interviews
• “Insider Info” about hundreds of employers
• Clothing Closet: borrow interview attire at no cost
• Services for international students
• Services for students with disabilities
• Services for veteran students

Funding to Attend Conferences

The GSAS Conference Matching Travel Fund provides support for graduate students in the Arts and Sciences to present at conferences.

Developing Job Search Documents and a Portfolio

The following CCE resources can assist students in developing their online presence and job application materials.

• Design Your Next Steps: sample resumes and cover letters
• Your Résumé: What to Put In, What to Leave Out
• How and Why to Write a Great Cover Letter

Visit LionSHARE to view upcoming skill-building workshops offered by CCE.

Mapping Your Career Journey

Below are self-assessment tools to identify skills, interests, and values, and resources for learning about employers.

Self-Paced Career Exploration

• Master’s Career Development Timeline
• CCE Industry Guides

Subscription & Digital Resources

• GoinGlobal: Country Career Guides and USA City Career Guides
• Vault: company-specific information and interview strategies
• UniWorld: employment at multinational companies
• Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning Courses
• Graduate Student Consulting Club: case interviews

Networking

There are several ways for MA students to make valuable professional connections with employers, Columbia alumni, and peers:

• CCE Industry Showcases
• Columbia Career Connections LinkedIn group
• Columbia Alumni LinkedIn exploration tool
• Informational interviewing
• Professional associations

For full-time doctoral students on twelve-month research and teaching appointments in the sciences and related fields, the period between the fall and spring semesters, as well as the summer months, are considered to be active time of research, research training, and teaching preparation rather than holidays.

However, in any given year, such students are entitled to two weeks (ten weekdays) beyond the eleven (Morningside Campus) or twelve (CUMC Campus) designated University/Federal holidays listed immediately below:

Time off during the designated University/Federal holidays listed above is non-negotiable. Students should plan to take the remaining time-off days to which they are entitled after coordinating with a) their advisor or PI when holding a research appointment; and/or b) the faculty instructor or lead course coordinator when holding a teaching appointment. This will ensure that the requested time off does not conflict with the responsibilities attendant to the research enterprise or the course.

For full-time doctoral students on twelve-month research and teaching appointments in the sciences and related fields, the period between the fall and spring semesters, as well as the summer months, are considered to be active time of research, research training, and teaching preparation rather than holidays.

However, in any given year, such students are entitled to two weeks (ten weekdays) beyond the eleven (Morningside Campus) or twelve (CUMC Campus) designated University/Federal holidays listed immediately below:

Time off during the designated University/Federal holidays listed above is non-negotiable. Students should plan to take the remaining time-off days to which they are entitled after coordinating with a) their advisor or PI when holding a research appointment; and/or b) the faculty instructor or lead course coordinator when holding a teaching appointment. This will ensure that the requested time off does not conflict with the responsibilities attendant to the research enterprise or the course.

What is your current role?
Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

What are you working on now?
In a joint project with Lauren Gaydosh (a former student and now professor), I am studying how colleges and college students respond to everyday economic inequality on their campuses. Focusing on Princeton undergraduates, we are investigating interactions among students of different social class backgrounds in order to observe how students negotiate various monetary and gift transactions.

What drew you to your field?
General curiosity about social practices, which soon became a more specific attempt to understand how people manage to combine moral concerns with economic activity.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
I learned the potential wonders of an academic community that shares intellectual concerns, but also an impetus to help improve the social world.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
Empathy and list-making. The first has made relations to colleagues, students, and staff more meaningful, and the second has kept me organized.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
Friendships with fellow students and the start of what became life-long bonds with some of my teachers. When I returned to Barnard and Columbia in 1978 as a faculty member, some of those teachers became valued colleagues!

What are your passions outside of your work?
My family.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
In a tight labor market, students worry about choosing a thesis topic that will get them an academic job: understandable. But do not be deterred from your passions in choosing your research focus. You can always find ways to combine passion with practicality.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
I have been teaching since 1976, and am not yet ready to retire! I love teaching undergraduates and mentoring graduate students. The same is true for my research: I continue being fascinated with the complexities of our social ties.

GSAS doctoral candidates Sebastian Heilpern (Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology) and Yen Joe Tan (Earth and Environmental Sciences) were named the 2018 recipients of the Edward Prince Goldman Scholarship in Science from The New York Community Trust. The award is given annually to Natural Sciences graduate students selected by faculty, and includes a prize of $5,000 funded by the Sidney Prince Trust.

About the Awardees

• Sebastian Heilpern (Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology) is a rising fourth-year student working under the supervision of Dr. Shahid Naeem. Mr. Heilpern’s scientific research is focused on the complex relationship between the multiple dimensions of biological diversity (e.g., taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity) and the magnitude and stability of multiple functions in ecological systems. The empirical system used to test the theory he has developed, and recently published, is the highly diverse Amazonian freshwater fish that are critical nutritional resources for communities found throughout the tributaries of the Amazon Basin. Unlike many students who tackle single scientific issues, Mr. Heilpern’s work synthesizes health, nutrition, and human wellbeing with the natural sciences of tropical biology, biodiversity, climate change, ichthyology, ecology, hydrology, and evolutionary biology.
• Yen Joe Tan (Earth and Environmental Sciences) is a rising fifth-year student working under the supervision of Dr. Maya Tolstoy and Dr. Felix Waldhauser. His research spans several earth science subdisciplines, and addresses important questions in seismology, volcanology, and geodynamics. His specific focus is on improving our understanding of processes associated with the creation of new tectonics plates at mid-ocean ridges. In his most significant published contribution so far (Tan et al., Nature, 2016), Mr. Tan investigated the evolution of a suboceanic volcanic eruption using data recorded by seismometers deployed on the seafloor. The detailed observations derived in this study put important new constraints on the forces active at the boundary where plates are created and drift apart.

Where did you grow up? 
Norfolk, NE.

What drew you to your field? 
Religion has always interested me. It tends to pervade culture and politics in unexpected and often shocking ways. Growing up Roman Catholic in rural Nebraska, I was quite familiar with institutional religion and doctrine. As a scholar and teacher today, however, I am far more intrigued by how different cultures intellectually and emotionally negotiate the vagaries of human life. The field of religious studies, in particular, raises compelling questions about religious traditions and practices from a host of interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., historical, sociological, and cultural).

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I study the history of “haunted houses” (in Latin: loca infesta) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German-speaking lands. The nature and power of spiritual creatures inhabiting the cosmos became a site of intense theological debate in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Many theologians and preachers wrote copiously about how demons caused marvelous occurrences (how things disappeared, the emergence of sudden illness, why suffering persisted in human life). My dissertation examines the particular problem of how immaterial spirits were said to violently invade material locations. To this end, I trace the cultural effect that spiritual haunting had on different religious communities before and after the Protestant Reformation.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The access to everything New York has to offer: museums, cultural history, scenery. At most other universities throughout the country, students would have relatively limited access to such exciting places and events.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
The library services, by far. My work in late medieval and early modern history requires examination of treatises that can be found only here. At Columbia and Union Theological Seminary, we have a robust collection of archival documents suited to the study of premodern primary sources.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
I always emphasize to my students that the so-called “Dark Ages” never existed. The moniker was applied retroactively to the medieval period by later authors as a pejorative term. Studying the history of premodern magic, witchcraft, and demonology seems always to invite that designation for the Latin Middle Ages. I frequently point out that it was only in the early modern period that the systematic persecution of witchcraft and sorcery, as such, took place.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Being a father. I have a one-year-old daughter named Willa, and she constantly reminds me that life is filled with wonder

Who are your favorite writers?
I am an avid fan of comic books and graphic novels. I read just about everything by Alan Moore, Mark Millar, and Neil Gaiman (including his other works, too!). For the uninitiated, I would recommend Moore’s Promethea series first—it is simply brilliant.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My mother has been a major source of support and inspiration in my life. She has accomplished and overcome so much, and it would not be an exaggeration to call her my hero.

Where did you grow up? 
Outside Cleveland, OH.

What drew you to your field? 
An early exposure to fine art and parents who encouraged me to follow my heart when it came time for post-secondary education. I continue to be enthralled by art that speaks as much of the human condition as it does of everyday realities.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I am a social art historian who focuses on how political, social, and cultural factors affected the work of American artists in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, I study artists who worked in Southern California, because their work has largely been marginalized as “provincial” in relation to the work of New York artists. In them, I see echoes of the student protest movement, various civil rights struggles, popular culture, and the Cold War economy, among other things.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The vast resources available through Columbia’s libraries and library consortia.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
Teaching in the Core Curriculum for four years has given me the opportunity to learn and grow as an educator, which is invaluable experience for someone who is looking forward to a career in academia.

Who are your favorite writers?
Thomas Pynchon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Steve Martin.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Philip Marlowe.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Chris Burden, Frank Zappa, Mike Kelley, and John Zorn: artists who pushed the limits of their form and redefined genres.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Anna Chave, for her social readings of otherwise formalist works of art, which expose the hypocrisy and narrowmindedness of accepted interpretations.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A less intelligent form of life.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Minimalism and improv.

What is your favorite blog or website?
Honestly, the Columbia University Libraries homepage. I’m a nerd—what can I say?

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Sweetgreen.

Through the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, GSAS doctoral students who teach independently in Columbia’s language departments during their first five years will receive an additional $2,000 in summer funding each year in which they do independent language teaching—typically sometime in years two through four—for a maximum of three summers during their first five years in the program.

Students who engage in independent language teaching will receive the $2,000 research supplement in the summer immediately following each year of independent teaching. If a student teaches only one semester independently in a given year, the summer award for that year will be $1,000.

Please note that to receive the Mellon supplementary stipend, a student must be the instructor of record for the course, and appear as such in the Directory of Classes.

This award is given in recognition that such students regularly spend more time in classroom instruction and assessment of student learning than regular teaching assistants. It acknowledges this extra instructional time during the academic year, and is meant to allow students to make progress toward the degree during the summer, a period in which they have no teaching responsibilities.

What is your current role/job title?
Senior Managing Director and Head of Strategy, Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC.

What drew you to your field?
Investing has a lot in common with good research in psychology, or good research in any discipline, for that matter. You have to develop a strong theory of why a market is showing certain behavior. You have to test that theory with data. And then you have to clearly communicate results. One of the best things about investing is that if the data support the theory, you can act on them immediately.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
Besides the technical skills, Columbia taught me that a final, definitive answer to any really interesting question is hard to find. The questions in business change constantly, so Columbia taught me to bring a healthy amount of thought and flexibility to answering them.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
Writing clearly. No good idea gets very far unless you can explain it to someone else.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
Talking shop at the West End with fellow grad students.

What are your passions outside of your work?
Family, jazz, and essays by Joan Didion or any other good writer.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
The skills and knowledge you pick up at Columbia have power and application across more areas than you might suspect. Think broadly about where you can use them to improve the world.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
I'm thinking less about the next thing and more about doing the current thing well. The next thing always takes care of itself.

Where did you grow up? 
Morton, PA.

What drew you to your field? 
The opportunity to study issues related to racial and educational inequality, and the prospect of conducting rigorous research that could point to concrete strategies for reducing inequality in these domains.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
My current research examines Black young people’s relationships with authority figures in the education and justice systems, with the aim of understanding how these relationships can shape their life chances for better or worse.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
For four summers, I have had the honor of serving as a graduate student mentor to talented groups of underrepresented undergraduate students through the GSAS-Leadership Alliance Summer Research Program.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
There are many, but I’ll name a few:

• The opportunity to teach my own summer course, and the resources at the Center for Teaching and Learning that helped me design the course
• A small research grant from the Sociology Department that enabled me complete my MPhil research and turn it into a publishable paper
• The programming and support offered by the GSAS Office of Academic Diversity

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
People outside the academy sometimes confuse sociology with clinical psychology. On a few occasions when I’ve mentioned that I am a sociologist, people have asked if I could counsel them. I’m a good listener, but would not be of much help in that department. Sorry, folks!

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
There are two. The first is bringing my curious, bright, and loving fourteen-month-old daughter into the world. The second is pursuing a PhD. I’m the first in my extended family to do so, so it’s a community achievement.

Who are your favorite writers?
Maya Angelou, Howard S. Becker, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Shuri from Black Panther (played by Letitia Wright). She’s witty, innovative, and brilliant.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My mother and maternal grandmother—talk about phenomenal women! Their hard work, sacrifices, and encouragement have made it possible for me be here today.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Drs. Alondra Nelson and Prudence Carter. They are extraordinary scholars with inspiring academic careers.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Beyoncé, of course!

What music have you been listening to lately?
Bob Marley has been on heavy rotation lately. I’ve also been listening to some Bossa Nova and Afro-Cuban Jazz.

What is your favorite blog or website?
The Professor Is In: an incredible resource for graduate students.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Max Caffé.