Winter 2012–13
Around the Quads
In Lumine Tuo
A LION IN THE WHITE HOUSE: CCT will continue to be delivered to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., at least for the next four years. President Barack Obama ’83 was reelected on November 6, beating Republican opponent Gov. Mitt Romney. Read what Columbia faculty members have to say on the election at news.columbia.edu/oncampus/2960.
“GENIUS” GRANT: Terry A. Plank ’93 GSAS, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as well as a professor of Frontiers of Science, was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for 2012 along with 22 others, including Maria Chudnovsky, an associate professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia Engineering. Each will receive $500,000 in a no-strings grant paid out over five years. The fellowship makes no requirement of the winners except the expectation that they will continue to create and explore their work.
Plank studies volcanoes, particularly in and around the Pacific Ocean. “I’m interested in how much gas they have in them before they erupt, how much water is dissolved in magma before it erupts,” she told CCT in 2011. “It’s like trying to find out how much CO2 is in seltzer before you take the cap off and it goes ‘psht,’ because once it goes ‘psht,’ the gas is all gone. How do you know how much used to be in there? That’s the challenge.”
GOLDEN GOOSE: Nobel laureate Martin Chalfie, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences, has won the first “Golden Goose” award, celebrating researchers whose seemingly obscure or unusual federally funded studies turned out to have a significant impact on society. The award was created by a coalition of science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was presented on September 13 on Capitol Hill. Chalfie received the award along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien, his partners in receiving the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on green fluorescent protein. According to the press release, the team’s “research, following Dr. Shimomura’s work on how certain jellyfish glow in the dark, led to numerous medical research advances and to methods used widely by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.”
Also being presented the Golden Goose award were Charles Townes, a Nobel laureate in physics, for inventing laser technology, which stemmed from research in molecular and atomic spectroscopy while at Columbia in the 1950s. The team of Jon Weber, Eugene White, Rodney White and Della Roy also won for research on coral that led to discoveries in bone graft technology.