Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee

Sen. Steven Chaikelson is Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre Arts in the School of the Arts, where he runs the MFA Theatre Management and Producing Program, and serves as Co-Director of the T Fellowship for Creative Producers. He also teaches in Columbia Law School and Barnard College.

Through his company, Snug Harbor Productions, Steven general manages and/or produces on and off Broadway, around the United States, and internationally. His most recent producing credits include the Broadway and touring productions of The Band’s Visit, winner of 10 Tony Awards including Best Musical, the Off-Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, and Death of a Salesman in London. Steven has consulted for numerous not-for-profit arts institutions, including the Apollo Theatre, Cambodian Living Arts, and Peter Brook’s CICT.

Steven is a member of the New York State Bar, the Broadway League and Treasurer of the Off-Broadway League. He is a co-author of Theatre Law: Cases and Materials, the first law school textbook specifically devoted to theatre law, and has contributed to the theatre volumes of Entertainment Industry Contracts, published by LexisNexis. On the University Senate, he serves on the Campus Planning & Physical Development Committee.

Sen. Shamika Dhar is a first-year MFA film student, concentrating in creative producing, from Bangalore, India. As an undergraduate at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Shamika served on the Student Senate. She is a former D1 tennis athlete who majored in theatre arts and technology with a double minor in communications and journalism.

Scott Wright is Vice President for Campus Services, which includes many of the areas students experience outside of the classroom during their time at Columbia: Dining, Undergraduate Housing, Event Management, Lerner Hall, Transportation, Mail, Print and Environmental Stewardship. On the University Senate, Scott serves on the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee.

A strong advocate for student interests, he enjoys the challenges of serving Columbia's diverse student community in the unique setting of New York City. Scott has been at Columbia since 1999. Prior to working at Columbia, Scott spent 15 years with ARAMARK, supervising food service and facility management for university clients in the western 11 states, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Scott is a native of Canada and grew up in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Hobart College.

Sen. Sarah Hansen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. Since joining Columbia in 2004 she has served on numerous A&S committees including multiple years as the chair of the Lecturer Advisory Committee. Dr. Hansen's research focuses on reflection, visual problem-solving, and laboratory learning. 

Sen. Richard Davis joined Columbia in 2007 as the Howard Levene Professor of Statistics. His research expertise includes time series, applied probability, spatial temporal modeling, heavy-tailed modeling, and extreme value theory.

Professor Davis was director of graduate studies in the Department of Statistics from 2008 to 2013, after which time he became Chair of the Department, serving from 2013 to 2019. He served as the Natural Sciences Chair representative to the Arts and Sciences Policy Planning Committee (PPC) from 2018 to 2019, and served on several PPC subcommittees. From 2021 to 2023, he served on the Arts and Sciences Promotion and Tenure Committee and on the University Senate. Professor Davis was a member of the Data Science Institute’s executive committee from 2014 to 2019. He has served as chair of the Statistics Department’s DEI committee, and has engaged with the group of DEI chairs from the Natural Sciences. In 2016, he served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the largest professional society for statisticians and probabilists.

Peter Michaelides is the Vice President of Finance and Administration at Columbia University Facilities and Operations. He is responsible for the planning and administration of an annual operating budget of $450 million and a five-year capital budget of over $2 billion in approximately 300 buildings. In addition to serving as Facilities and Operations Chief Financial Officer, Peter is responsible for the administrative support to Facilities and Operations, including capital project administration, procurement, human resources, labor relations, management information systems, accounts payable, business process analysis, data analytics, reporting, internal controls and parking administration.

An employee of the University for over thirty years, his tenure began in the Office of Institutional Real Estate, where he held several positions of progressive responsibilities including as the Assistant Vice President of Planning and Project Administration. He served an integral role on the transition team responsible for leading the effort in the assessment, planning, and the consolidation of the University’s Institutional Real Estate and Facilities Management departments. Within Facilities and Operations, Peter’s portfolio as the Associate Vice President for Financial Services included the leadership in planning and administration of a multi-funded facilities operating budget for the Morningside and Manhattanville campuses, the off-campus residential portfolio, and external leases totaling over $450 million annually in approximately 300 buildings. In that position, he also led the Facilities and Operations data analytics and reporting team.

Peter holds a bachelor’s degree from Stony Brook University in Mechanical Engineering, and a Master of Business Administration in accounting from Baruch College. He is also an alumnus with a Master of Science in Sustainability Management from Columbia University.

Laurie Magid is a 1985 graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and served as a Notes and Comments Editor for the Columbia Law Review. After graduating, she served as a law clerk on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit before entering public service as an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia. For the last two decades she has been a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. During her time as a federal prosecutor she was detailed to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Office for the last year of the Obama Administration to work on the Clemency Initiative. During the Covid pandemic, she worked almost entirely on compassionate release motions by people who are incarcerated and at risk from Covid. On the Univiersity Senate, Laurie has co-chaired the Alumni Relations Committee and served on the Campus Planning and Physical  Development and External Relations and Research Policy committees.

Laurie has taught criminal procedure and legal writing - as an Associate Professor at Widener Law School, as a Legal Writing professor at Villanova Law School, and as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School and Temple Law School. Laurie was a member of the Columbia Law School Association from 2010 to 2018, where she served as President for the last four years and brought a focus on mentoring women and first-year professional students. She has served on the Columbia Alumni Association since 2017, and on the Alumnae Leadership Group since 2015, where she helped organize the first “She Opened the Door” conference. She was the Chair of Leaders Weekend in 2019.

Laurie lives in Philadelphia with her husband, who owns a catering company, and has three grown children. She also serves on the Board of her synagogue, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s LGBT synagogue, where she has helped lead their efforts on social justice issues with projects such as setting up a mentoring program for formerly incarcerated students at CUNY Law School.

Sen. Katherine Brooks is a Collection Analysis Librarian in the Columbia University Libraries. In this position, she analyzes electronic resource usage data to support strategic collection development and management in the Libraries while also serving as a science librarian. On the University Senate, Katherine serves on the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee and on the Libraries and Digital Resources Committee. Before joining the Libraries, Katherine was a Frontiers of Science postdoctoral fellow in the Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Science Department and instructor in the College.

Karla Camacho is from Orange County, California. She is on the Columbia College Student Council where she serves as Vice President. She is a first-generation Latina, double-majoring in Ethnicity and Race Studies and Political Science. Other than CCSC, she is involved with Columbia's FLI Network and political volunteering off-campus.

Julian Infante Laborde is a junior at Columbia College, majoring in biology with a concentration in public health on the pre-med track. He is deeply passionate about student life programming and serves as President of the Activities Board at Columbia (ABC), the main governing body on campus that helps student groups navigate funding and other processes. Julian's goal is to strengthen ABC's advisory role to student groups and enhance engagement with group leaders to better understand their financial needs. Beyond his work with ABC, Julian has been active in other student organizations such as Sabor and CU Boricuas, further integrating himself into campus life. He also works as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for Columbia University Emergency Medical Services (CUEMS), a role he has held since his sophomore year. In this position, Julian is dedicated to promoting the wellbeing and safety of the Columbia community and its surrounding neighborhoods.

John Donaldson is the Mario J. Gabelli Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School, where he teaches courses in basic finance and options. Dr. Donaldson focuses on business cycles and asset pricing, with a particular emphasis on the real side of the economy’s impact on equilibrium pricing of financial assets. Dr. Donaldson received his M.S in economics and M.S. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. in economics also from Carnegie Mellon University. On the University Senate, he co-chairs the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee.

Sen. Heidi L. Allen, MSW, PhD is an Associate Professor at Columbia School of Social Work. She studies the impact of social policies, like Medicaid –America’s health insurance for the poor –on access to health care, health and mental health outcomes, and financial well-being. The primary aim of her research is to eliminate disparities by rigorously informing and evaluating social policies that sit at the intersection of health and poverty. Over the past decade, her scholarship has been published in the leading medical and health policy journals and featured prominently in the media and during Medicaid policy proceedings. 

Sen. Camille McGriff was re-elected to the University Senate in Spring 2024. She is a dual degree student in the Master of Architecture (M.Arch) and Master of Critical, Conceptual, and Curatorial Practices (CCCP) programs at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She received her undergraduate degree in Architectural Studies and Writing & Rhetoric from Hobart and William Smith Colleges (2022). As a member of the University Senate, she focuses on the campus experience, including spatial planning and development, and Senate structure and operations. She is passionate about the spatial politics of architecture and their resulting rhetorical practices. Her personal interests include fiction writing, running, and sailing.

Sen. Benjamin Orlove, an anthropologist, has conducted fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes since the 1970s and also carried out research in East Africa, the Italian Alps, and Aboriginal Australia. His early work focused on agriculture, fisheries, and rangelands. More recently he has studied climate change and glacier retreat, with an emphasis on water, natural hazards, and the loss of iconic landscapes. In addition to his numerous academic articles and books, his publications include a memoir and a book of travel writing. On the University Senate, Dr. Orlove is the incoming co-chair of the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee.

Orlove taught for many years at the University of California, Davis. At Columbia University, he also teaches in the Master’s Program in Climate and Society, for which he serves as Associate Director. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and is one of the four co-directors of the Center for Research in Environmental Decisions.

Sen. Andrew J. Einstein is a cardiologist, cardiac imager, and researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He serves as Director of Nuclear Cardiology, Cardiac CT, and Cardiac MRI, Director of the Advanced Cardiac Imaging Fellowship, and a tenured Professor of Medicine, with primary appointment in the Department of Medicine and secondary appointment in the Department of Radiology. Born and raised in New Jersey, Dr. Einstein received an A.B. from Princeton University and attended Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he received an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in the Department of Biomathematical Sciences. His graduate research focused on developing image analysis methodology in microscopy. He also received an M.S. in patient-oriented research/biostatistics from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. After internship and residency in internal medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, he completed fellowship training at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Einstein’s clinical activities are centered on cardiovascular PET, SPECT, CT, and MRI, and he serves on the attending physician staff in the Heart Institute. His research, which uses each of these modalities, focuses on improving the use of imaging in cardiovascular medicine, with particular interests and current funded projects in quality of healthcare, radiation safety, global health, amyloidosis, artificial intelligence, and device development. It is funded by multiple NIH grants, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and industry.

Dr. Einstein is the author or coauthor of over 300 papers and abstracts, in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Circulation, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This work has been influential in affecting clinical practice, and has been widely reported in the popular media and cited over 16,000 times in the scientific literature. For it, Dr. Einstein has received the American College of Cardiology's Douglas P. Zipes Distinguished Young Scientist Award, the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging’s Hermann Blumgart Award, the American Federation for Medical Research's Junior Physician Investigator Award, and the Lewis Katz Cardiovascular Research Prize for a Young Investigator.

He is a member of the editorial boards of JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging and the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology, and served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. He is frequently invited to lecture on subjects related to cardiovascular imaging, and has addressed organizations such as the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, European Society of Cardiology, International Atomic Energy Agency, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Senate in an AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy briefing. He has served as a member of study sections of the Center for Scientific Review, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and National Cancer Institute. He is Chair of the Academic Cardiology Section of the American College of Cardiology, and a member of the boards of directors of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and the Cardiovascular Council of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. He serves as a member of the Congressionally-chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes, and previously served as a voting member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Medical Imaging Drugs Advisory Committee. Dr. Einstein has served as a mentor to over fifty trainees at various stages ranging from high school to junior faculty.