May/June 2008
Around the Quads
In Lumine Tuo
MAZUR: Marc Mazur ’81 was honored by Columbia’s Community Impact on April 3 with its sixth annual Making a Difference Service Award, presented “to a prominent person who has consistently given back to the community.” A former member of the Alumni Association Board of Directors, Mazur is an ardent supporter of Columbia athletics and has mentored many Columbia student-athletes and young alumni.
Mazur is a senior adviser at Brevan Howard US Assets Management, previously worked for 12 years at Goldman Sachs and was senior adviser to a number of domestic and international corporations with an emphasis on the healthcare and finance fields. He is active on a number of nonprofit boards targeting public health issues including suicide prevention among college students, drug abuse and inner city education.
Community Impact is a nonprofit organization that consists of more than 950 Columbia student volunteers participating in 25 community service programs. It provides food, clothing, shelter, education, job training and companionship for more than 8,000 residents in the surrounding communities each year.
Guggenheims: Six Columbia professors have won Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, granted in recognition of “stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.” Margo Jefferson ’71J, Sam Lipsyte, Samuel Moyn, Peter Ozsváth, Alexander Stille ’83J and Jonathan Weiner are among 190 artists, scientists and scholars who were selected from more than 2,600 applicants.
Jefferson, a creative writing professor, is a cultural critic for The New York Times. She has been a daily book reviewer, the Sunday theater critic and a Sunday Book Review columnist. In 1995, she received a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published in 2006. She is currently studying racial composition and improvisation.
Lipsyte is the associate director of undergraduate creative writing and author of the novel Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book for 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. He also is the author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive, named one of the 25 Best Books of 2000 by the Village Voice Literary Supplement.
History professor Moyn won the 2007 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Prize of the German Studies Association for his book A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. The prize is awarded every second year for the best book dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context.
Math professor Ozsváth previously won the American Mathematical Society 2007 Oswald Veblen Prize. Granted every three years, the prize is one of the field’s highest honors for work in geometry or topology.
Stille, the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism, is the author of The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, and several other books.
Journalism professor Weiner is the author of several books, including The Beak of the Finch, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science. He has written for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the New Republic and many other newspapers and magazines.