Join the Society of Columbia Graduates and the deans of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering to recognize this year’s recipients of the Great Teacher Awards. Don't forget your beverage of choice to toast our Great Teachers!

2023 Great Teacher Award Recipients:

Marc W. Spiegleman

Great Teacher Award - Engineering

James J. Valentini

Great Teacher Award - Columbia College

You may register for the event here for Columbia College, and here for Columbia Engineering.

Join the Society of Columbia Graduates and the deans of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering to recognize this year’s recipients of the Great Teacher Awards. Don't forget your beverage of choice to toast our Great Teachers!

2022 Great Teacher Award Recipients:

Steven L. Goldstein

Higgins Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Associate Director, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Columbia College

Clifford S. Stein

Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and Professor of Computer Science

Interim Director, Data Science Institute

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

You may register for the event here.

The Society of Columbia Graduates cordially invites you to attend its 72nd ANNUAL GREAT TEACHER AWARDS PRESENTATION and 111th ANNUAL MEETING.

GREAT TEACHER AWARD HONOREES

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah J. Griffin is the Chair, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies; the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies; and Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. She is also Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Jazz Studies.

Rocco A. Servedio

Rocco A. Servedio is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering.

The Society of Columbia Graduates cordially invites you to attend its 71st ANNUAL GREAT TEACHER AWARDS PRESENTATION and 110th ANNUAL MEETING

Please register through the following Reunion Weekend web links:

For College Alumni: https://www.college.columbia.edu/alumni/reunion/2019

For Engineering Alumni: https://engineering.columbia.edu/reunion

GREAT TEACHER AWARD HONOREES

GIUSEPPE GERBINO

Professor of Music, Historical Musicology, and Vice Chair of the Department of Music, Giuseppe Gerbino has a passion for introducing music into the lives of undergraduate students. His research and publications have focused on early opera, the relationship between music and language in the early modern period, the Italian Madrigal, and Renaissance theories of cognition and sense perception. Professor Gerbino joined the faculty in 2001 and quickly became a valued member of the Columbia community, contributing his expertise in many distinguished roles. He served as Chair of the Department of Music from 2011 to 2014 and is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies for Music Majors in the School of General Studies. Professor Gerbino’s commitment to the University is broader than just his involvement with the Music Department. He was also a member of the Governing Board and Selection Committee of the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, from 2009 to 2012, and has served as a member of the Interdepartmental Committee on Medieval and Renaissance Studies since 2001.

Having served in regular intervals as Chair of Music Humanities, Professor Gerbino has been instrumental in shaping the Music Humanities curriculum. He considers Music Humanities an integral part of the Core Curriculum, describing the four Core classes as “inextricably intertwined points of entry into the intellectual life of the West through four fundamental manifestations of human behavior: the linguistic, the abstract thinking, the visual, and the auditory.” Professor Gerbino teaches a section of Music Humanities, along with his other undergraduate and graduate classes, and also serves as a mentor to the graduate students who teach the class. One of his Music Humanities students described the experience as “an extraordinary class taught by an extraordinary man.” In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, given to a professor who demonstrates unusual merit in scholarship, university citizenship, and professional involvement. After graduating from the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1993, summa cum laude, Professor Gerbino earned an M.A. in Musicology from Duke University in 1997 and his Ph.D. in

Musicology four years later, in 2001. He was awarded a three- year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Marenzio Online Digital Edition which was developed to put a complete critical edition of the secular music of Luca Marenzio online. He served as co-editor of that online digital edition. He has been widely published in numerous international journals and is the author of two books, Canoni ed enigmi: Pier Francesco Valentini e l’artificio canonico nella prima metà del Seicento, published by Torre d’Orfeo in 1995, and Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. In 2010 he was the winner of the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society.

BARCLAY MORRISON

Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Barclay Morrison is widely recognized for his important contributions and research involving traumatic brain injury. His research explores the cellular, molecular, and metabolic effects of injury to brain cells in response to precisely controlled biomechanical stimuli. He explores novel treatment options through an understanding of post-traumatic pathobiology in greater detail and looks to design and implement new research tools in his quest to better understand the mechanisms and cellular response of the brain to traumatic injury.

Professor Morrison and his research group are the recipients of numerous awards. In 2006, he was honored with the Kim Award for Student-Faculty Involvement from the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. The Kim Award, established in 2000 by Edward and Carole Kim, was created to honor a faculty member who is not only an outstanding teacher, but who also shows a special, personal commitment to students. In 2009, he was Keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury. In 2015 he was elected Vice President of the International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury and three years later, he was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Since joining the faculty in 2003, Professor Morrison has been actively involved at Columbia with an impressive commitment to the University at every level of service. He sits on numerous University Committees, School of Engineering Committees, and Biomedical Engineering Committees. He has participated in organizing over one hundred outreach events that have supported faculty, students, scholarship winners, as well as prospective high school students and their families who had been invited to campus events as an introduction to Columbia. Professor Morrison’s teaching record has been outstanding. He has had an important role in the design of the Biomedical Engineering curriculum and teaches core curriculum courses in that department. He has implemented an entire course in PowerPoint, Quantitative Physiology II, Organ Systems, in response to its complicated multidimensional inquiry and because there is no quantitative physiology text yet published to address this highly technical material.

He is recognized by his undergraduate students as a wonderful role model and mentor. “Best instructor I’ve had to date”, “I love this class”, “Great ability to communicate ideas, concepts and equations and translate them to application” are among the legion of comments from undergraduate students attending his classes.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, Professor Morrison received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 1992, an M.S.E. in Bioengineering in 1994 and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 1999. At Johns Hopkins, he was awarded the prestigious Ashton Fellowship and the S.R. Pollack Award for Excellence in Graduate Bioengineering Research.

We’re hosting University Professor Ruth DeFries of the department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology (E3B) and Chair of Faculty at the Earth Institute, who has graciously agreed to speak to the Society on the topic: “Steps Towards Sustainable Development: Education, Research, and Impact”.

Dr. DeFries’ research and over 100 scientific publications examine human transformation of the landscape and its consequences for climate, biogeochemical cycling, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services that make our planet habitable. She is also actively focused on linking scientific information into policy decisions, and on seeing that new generations of scientists are educated to continue the necessary development of sustainable practices far into the future. Her institutional leadership has led to the creation of innovative Earth Institute programs, and her public advocacy is responsible for advances around the world concerning climate change, food and water insecurity, and nature conservation.

She came to Columbia in 2008 as the Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development, was then chair of the department of E3B, and co-chair of the undergraduate program in sustainable development. Currently Dr. DeFries is Director of Columbia’s “DeFries’ Lab”, a growing multidisciplinary group that focuses on research that informs policies and decisions towards sustainable resource use, and is also Chair of Faculty at the Earth Institute.

$25 for admission; reception to follow - Registration Required

 Artificial Intelligence technology has been making grand strides over the past few years, outperforming humans in tasks once thought to be impossible. Machines can now recognize images, interpret audio and understand language with unprecedented reliability. But where will this technology go next, and how far can it reach?

This talk outlines a brief history of AI, and its embodied cousin, Robotics. We will follow the field from its inception nearly a century ago, into its accelerating ascent in recent years, and look into the future. 

AI is a beneficiary of several compounding exponential technologies. But unlike smooth progress observed in many other areas, AI progresses in distinct waves. Each wave leaps forward as a new fundamental capability is mastered, then lulls us into complacency until a wave washes over.

BRIEF BIO: Hod Lipson is a professor of Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University in New York, and a co-author of the award winning book “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing”,  and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”. His work on self-aware and self-replicating robots   challenges conventional views of robotics. Lipson directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative. For more information visit http://hodlipson.com

Dr. McKeown is the Director of The Data Sciences Institute at Columbia.

A leading scholar and researcher in the field of natural language processing, Professor McKeown focuses her research on big data; her interests include text summarization, question answering, natural language generation, multimedia explanation, digital libraries, and multilingual applications. Her research group's Columbia Newsblaster, which has been live since 2001, is an online system that automatically tracks the day's news, and demonstrates the group's new technologies for multi-document summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. Currently, she leads a large research project involving prediction of technology emergence from a large collection of journal articles.  

McKeown joined Columbia in 1982, immediately after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1989, she became the first woman professor in the school to receive tenure, and later the first woman to serve as a department chair (1998-2003). McKeown has received numerous honors and awards for her research and teaching. She received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, and also is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, was selected as an AAAI Fellow, a Founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and an ACM Fellow. In 2010, she was awarded the Society of Columbia Graduates’ Great Teacher Award, and the Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award for Innovation. McKeown served as a board member of the Computing Research Association and as secretary of the board. She was president of the Association of Computational Linguistics in 1992, vice president in 1991, and secretary treasurer for 1995-1997. She was also a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Artificial Intelligence and the co-program chair of their annual conference in 1991.

Douglas Chalmers is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia University.  He has taught at Columbia since 1966, including the Contemporary Civilization course in the Core Curriculum since 1984.  He has also taught at Swarthmore and Rutgers, as well as holding visiting professor appointments at several universities in Latin America and Europe.  He has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Professor Chalmers had been Chair of the Department of Political Science, Acting Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, and Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies before retiring in 2005.  

He is currently Executive Director of the Society of Senior Scholars, President of EPIC (Emeritus Professors in Columbia), and Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Retirement. 

He is the author of The Social Democratic Party of Germany (1964), co-editor of The Right and Democracy in Latin America (1992), author and co-editor of The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (1997), as well as articles, papers and presentations on political and civil society structures. He co-edited Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies: Essays in Honor of Alfred Stepan (2012, Notre Dame University Press) and is the author of Reforming Democracies: Six Facts About Politics That Demand a New Agenda (2012, Columbia University Press), based on his 2007 Schopf Lectures at Columbia.

He and his wife reside in an apartment in Morningside Heights and weekend in Columbia County, NY.

Peter Pilling was introduced as Columbia’s Director of  Intercollegiate Athletics and Physical Education in February 2015 after serving as vice president at IMG College for nine years. Director Pilling brings a broad sports management background to Morningside Heights, as he has previously worked as a senior associate athletics director at Brigham Young University and an associate athletics director at Villanova.

As Vice President at IMG College, the nation’s largest collegiate sports marketing company, from 2006-2015, Pilling gained extensive experience working with athletics departments of top NCAA Division I schools including Brigham Young, TCU, Baylor University, Gonzaga and the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Prior to IMG College, he worked at BYU where he was the Senior Associate Athletics Director overseeing athletic operations including finance, development, media relations, corporate sponsorships, marketing and promotions.  He also had sports administration responsibilities over men’s and women’s basketball, tennis, track and field, and swimming. 

While at Villanova, Pilling managed the operations of marketing, promotions, licensing, media relations, ticket operations and the Wildcat radio and television networks. In addition, he was responsible for football and men's basketball scheduling and was active on the conference level serving on the BIG EAST Public Relations/Marketing and Tennis Championship committees.

Pilling previously held the title of associate athletics director at both St. Bonaventure University and the University of Wyoming. Additionally, he has worked at both Morehead State and the University of Kentucky.

A former board member and past president of NACMA (National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators), Pilling has also served on the Board of Directors for NCLA (National Collegiate Licensing Association). In June 2001, he received the 2001 NACMA National Outstanding Individual Achievement Award.

A graduate of Brigham Young University with a bachelor's degree in accounting, Pilling continued his education at Ohio University, where he earned a Master's degree in Sports Administration. At both BYU and Villanova, Pilling was an adjunct professor in the business department, where he taught a sports marketing course.

Eric R. Kandel, M.D., is University Professor at Columbia; Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Science; Co-Director, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute; and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A graduate of Harvard College and N.Y.U. School of Medicine,  Dr. Kandel trained in Neurobiology at the NIH and in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.  He joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1974 as the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.  At Columbia Kandel organized the neuroscience curriculum.  He is an editor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field now in its 5th edition.  In 2006, Kandel wrote a book on the brain for the general public entitled In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which won both the L.A. Times and U.S. National Academy of Science Awards for best book in Science and Technology in 2008.  A documentary film based on that book is also entitled In Search of Memory.  In 2012 Kandel wrote The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Bruno-Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria's highest literary award.

Eric Kandel’s research has been concerned with the molecular mechanisms of memory storage in Aplysia and mice.  More recently, he has studied animal models in mice of memory disorders, mental illness and nicotine addiction.  Kandel has received twenty-two honorary degrees, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as well as being a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and a member of the National Science Academies of Austria, France, Germany and Greece.  He has been recognized with the Albert Lasker Award, the Heineken Award of the Netherlands, the Gairdner Award of Canada, the Harvey Prize and the Wolf Prize of Israel, the National Medal of Science USA and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000.

Now in her eleventh year as Columbia’s Director of Intercollegiate Athletics and Physical education, the indefatigable Dr. Murphy has guided Columbia Athletics through arguably the most transformative and successful period in its history. 

During her first 10-years, the Lions captured 26 Ivy League titles in 11 different sports, the most of any decade in Columbia Athletics history.  Several Columbia teams won their first-ever Ivy League titles, and some earned first-time NCAA at large bids and/or won their first-ever events at the NCAA Championships.  Columbians also won 128 Ivy League Individual Event Championships, the most of any comparable span in school history.

Dr. Murphy established a strategic focus on excellence in athletics, and a host of new programs and   initiatives aimed at transforming the experience of Columbia’s more than 800 student-athletes.  She spearheaded the  successfully completed $100 Million Columbia Campaign for Athletics: Achieving Excellence. Through the Campaign, Columbia truly revitalized its athletics program – with the construction of the Campbell Sports Center, and the infusion of capital throughout all programs and initiatives.  Facility transformations also included the building of of new field hockey and baseball venues, the revitalization of Christie Field House, and the resurfacing of every outdoor practice and competition venue.  Dianne established: varsity squash teams for men and women, the Leaders for Life program, providing leadership training to student-athlete representatives from all 31 varsity sports; the Athletics Hall of Fame; the Championship Performance Program; helped initiate the new Sports Management Masters Degree Program; and the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium 25th Anniversary Celebration.