University Senate Directory

Will Vanti is the Science and Engineering Librarian of Columbia University Libraries.  He is responsible for library collections in the areas of engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and statistics, and provides academic support to students, faculty, and staff researching these subjects as well as more general science support to Columbia's undergraduate and graduate students.  Will joined Columbia in January 2005 as a research assistant in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, and transitioned to the Libraries in December 2014.  On the University Senate, Will is a member of the External Relations and Research Policy committee.

Dr. William Hunnicutt is the Associate Director of the Carleton Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. He completed a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Will oversees research and teaching operations within the Carleton Lab, and conducts research in the area of cementitious materials, with a specific interest in construction materials used in nuclear power plants and their degradation due to radiation, as well as experimental measurement of nano- to millimeter scale mechanical properties.

Weiping Wu is Vice Provost for Academic Programs, and Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. She served as Interim Dean of the School during spring and summer 2022. Professor Wu is also on the faculty of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia Population Research Center. Before joining Columbia in 2016, she was Professor and Chair in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Trained in architecture and urban planning, Professor Wu has focused her research and teaching on understanding urban dynamics in developing countries in general and China in particular. She is an internationally acclaimed urban and planning scholar working on global urbanization with a specific expertise in issues of migration, housing, and infrastructure of Chinese cities. Her publications include nine books, as well as many articles in top international journals. Her published work has gained an increasing public presence, particularly her book The Chinese City (now in second edition). It offers a critical understanding of China’s urbanization, exploring how the complexity of Chinese cities both conforms to and defies conventional urban theories and experience of cities elsewhere around the world. Her most recent book is China Urbanizing: Impacts and Transitions, gathering an interdisciplinary group of scholars to capture the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It also provides new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change.

Professor Wu has had a number of academic leadership roles beyond the university setting. Currently, she is on the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), which accredits university programs in North America leading to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in urban and regional planning. She was the President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) in 2017-2019, a consortium of university-based programs offering credentials in urban and regional planning, with more than 100 full-member schools in North America. Between 2008 and 2012, she was an editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, ACSP’s flagship journal. She has been a member of the International Advisory Board for the Urban China Research Network and a member of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s Humanities and Social Sciences panel, as well as serving on the editorial board of four journals. She is an editor of the SAGE Handbooks of Modern China series. In addition, she has provided consultation to the Ford Foundation, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and World Bank.

Sen. Varna Vasudevan is an MBA student at Columbia Business School, where she focuses on social enterprise, innovation, and early-stage venture capital. Originally from Northern California, she studied Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, where countless hours spent prototyping in the campus makerspace sparked a career at the intersection of design, technology, and business. Sen. Vasudevan began her career in product strategy and user experience design at Ford, Lyft, and creative agency Instrument - helping imagine autonomous vehicle concepts, launch CitiBike and multimodal transit products, and lead design for the reimagined Oura App and Fortnite’s first loyalty program. At Columbia, she serves as a VP of Education for the Venture Capital Club, VP of Admissions for Columbia Women in Business, a Nonprofit Board Leadership Fellow, and an Orientation Leader for the Class of '27. She’s currently an MBA Associate at Female Founders Fund, supporting early-stage VC investments across healthcare, deep tech, and consumer sectors. Varna hopes to bring a creative, cross-disciplinary perspective to the University Senate - drawing on the open-minded, collaborative spirit of her alma mater and previous organizations to strengthen connection across Columbia’s diverse schools. In her free time, she loves exploring new matcha cafes, hip-hop dancing, traveling (country #37 this year!), and tinkering in the campus woodshop!

Sen. Ulrich Hengst, PhD, is Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology (in the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain) and Associate Vice Chair for Research and Training in his department. His research focuses on the cell biology of neurodegeneration and neuronal resilience. He is co-director of a training grant for advanced neuroscience graduate students and of a post-baccalaureate program for students from institutions that do not provide significant research experiences. Dr. Hengst holds a PhD from the University of Basel (Switzerland) and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Bochum (Germany).

Sen. Tiffany Bryant has held a number of roles in government, including working for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the State of New York.  She currently works as a political consultant. She is the Chair of Columbia College Women and on the board of the Columbia Alumni Association. Previously Sen. Bryant served as the Vice President of Columbia's Black Alumni Council. She received her Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Columbia College in 2008.

Susan Witte is a social worker and Professor at the School of Social Work, where she teaches courses in the clinical and advanced generalist methods of the master’s program, as well as in the doctoral program. In 2019, Dr. Witte was selected as a member of the inaugural cohort of the Provost’s Senior Faculty Teaching Scholars in recognition of her outstanding achievements in both teaching and research. Dr. Witte’s research and teaching involve prevention and treating HIV/AIDS, other STIs, intimate and gender-based violence, alcohol and drug use, and related social determinants of health and mental health.

A much-lauded translator of modernist and contemporary German-language literature, Sen. Susan Bernofsky holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her many translations include three novels and four collections of short prose by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is a Berlin Prize, Cullman Center, and Guggenheim fellow. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award, and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel The End of Days (2014) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada's novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her most recent published translation is Tawada's novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (2024). She has recently completed a new translation of Thomas Mann's monumental novel The Magic Mountain, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in early 2027.

Sen. Stuart Firestein is Professor of Neuroscience at in the Department of Biological Sciences.  His research focuses on the vertebrate olfactory system, perhaps the best chemical detector on the planet.  He completed his Ph.D. in neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and was a post doctoral fellow at Yale University Medical School. In 1991 he joined the faculty at Columbia, becoming a  full professor in 1998.  His laboratory has received continuous funding from NIH and private foundations for the past 25 years.

Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the A. P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science. In 2011, he received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. He is a AAAS Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.  He recently joined the Santa Fe Institute as a member of the (visiting) Fractal Faculty.  At Columbia he is on the advisory boards of the Center for Science and Society (CSS) and the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience – both centers for interdisciplinary work between the sciences and the humanities – and the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Paris Global Center. His book on the workings of science for a general audience called Ignorance, How it Drives Science was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. His second book, Failure: Why Science is So Successful, appeared in October 2015. They have been translated into 12 languages and remain in print.

He has lectured extensively in university and public venues, nationally and internationally including a TED talk in 2013 that has accumulated over 3 million views. He speaks regularly for primary school educators and students on the place of science in modern culture and the often forgotten values of ignorance, failure and uncertainty. 



 

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. 

Sen. Soulaymane Kachani serves as the Senior Vice Provost of the University and a professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He oversees the development of Columbia’s teaching, learning, and innovation strategies. He led the establishment of the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grants program, the Science of Learning Research (SOLER) Initiative, and Columbia+, Columbia University’s online platform to engage alumni and learners from around the world through non-degree non-credit courses, events (live-streamed and recorded), and podcasts.

Professor Kachani focuses on propelling Columbia’s excellence as a global university, working to enhance existing international academic partnerships and develop new ones, and to make its campuses ever more welcoming to students and scholars from around the world. He also works on many aspects of academic management.

Professor Kachani conducts research in the fields of dynamic pricing, revenue management, machine learning, logistics, supply chain management, algorithmic trading, statistical arbitrage, traffic flow modeling, and transportation analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a Master of Science in Operations Research from MIT and a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in Applied Mathematics from École Centrale Paris. His book (with Bill Eimicke and Adam Stepan) Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Diverse University, published in October 2023, is an exploration of the digital higher education landscape in the post-pandemic era.

Sen. Simon Ogundare is an MD-PhD student at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a graduate of Columbia College (’24), where he studied neuroscience while participating in the John Jay and Laidlaw Scholars’ Programs. Born in New York and raised between Nigeria and the United Kingdom, he brings a transnational perspective to questions of health, identity, and structural inequality. 

Simon's research background explores the neuroscience of comorbidity, examining how chronic pain and depression co-occur, and how their neural representations become entangled in the brain. Elected to the University Senate in 2025, Simon is committed to transparency, structural accountability, and expanding student participation in university governance. His platform emphasizes cross-campus coalition-building and ensuring that the University Senate reflects the needs of students across CUIMC, especially during a time of active review of the University Senate’s structure and scope. 

Simon’s approach to advocacy is shaped by his international background, his work as a science communicator, and his commitment to building a community that welcomes and celebrates – rather than dilutes – diverse voices. He believes healing, education, and institutional change are fundamentally communal processes: each requiring trust, shared power, and sustained dialogue. On the University Senate, Simon aims to strengthen avenues of communication through existing and novel channels, strengthen the links between Morningside and CUIMC, and push Columbia toward a more inclusive, responsive, and transparent future. He sees the University Senate not just as a governance body, but as a platform for collective action: a space to organize across schools, challenge institutional inertia, and push for a Columbia that truly reflects the values, needs, and voices of its community.

Sen. Serena Ng joined Columbia in 2007 and is the Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics. Dr. Ng's research focuses on empirical methods for economic data and she is managing editor of the Journal of Econometrics. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the International Association of Applied Econometrics. Dr. Ng has served on the Promotions and Tenure Committee (PTC), the Tenure and Review Advisory Committee (TRAC), the Advisory Committee on Conflict of Interest, the PPC subcommittee on recruitment, and various search committees. She is an affiliated member of the  Department of Statistics.

Sen. Sarah Hansen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. Since joining Columbia in 2004 she has taught introductory chemistry lecture/laboratory courses and supports pedagogical development through graduate seminars and workshops. Her aim is to foster a collaborative approach to learning, shifting the teacher into the role of facilitating meaningful engagement between students while decreasing the distance between chemistry in and out of the classroom. Dr Hansen was the 2024 recipient of the Division of Natural Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence.

Her research focuses on reflection, visual engagement, and laboratory learning. She co-edited Eye-tracking for the Chemistry Education Researcher (2019) and serves on the advisory committee for Columbia’s Science of Learning Research Initiative.

From 2020-2023 she served on the Lecturer Advisory Council from 2020-2023, chairing for two years. Through advocacy and committee work she actively seeks opportunities to ensure the unique and vital perspectives of untenured faculty at the University are included in Governance and Policy decisions.

Sara Coffield (GS’25) is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of General Studies, where she studied Art History and Sociology. Her senior thesis on the graphic works of the Bibiena family began with research in the Avery Classics Collection, where she later served on a Collections Acquisition Advisory Cohort. At Columbia, Sara also participated in the Justice-in-Education Initiative’s Rikers Education Program, facilitating a book club for incarcerated people.

Sara has experience in art book publishing, worked at the Metropolitan Museum’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America. Most recently, Sara completed a curatorial internship at the Morgan Library & Museum in the Printed Books & Bindings department, where she was tasked with responsibilities relating to collection management, acquisitions, exhibitions, and teaching.

Prior to academia, Sara danced professionally for a decade, performing internationally with Ballet Dortmund, Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier, and the Royal Swedish Ballet.

Sen. Rohan Munoth is a computational biologist working at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC). He develops and optimizes data pipelines to analyze large biological datasets like whole-genome and single-cell sequencing. Much of his work involves using cloud computing and high-performance computing (HPC) to process data efficiently and at the scale researchers require.
He earned his Master’s in Quantitative Biology and Bioinformatics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on creating scalable workflows and studying molecular processes such as ribosome pausing during protein synthesis. Combining biology and programming, Rohan enjoys solving research problems by writing clean, reproducible code and improving data analysis workflows.
He’s passionate about making complex biological data easier to work with and believes that good computational solutions can help speed up scientific discovery. Whether it’s setting up cloud infrastructure or optimizing pipelines, Rohan focuses on practical approaches that help researchers get meaningful results faster.

Sen. Robert Mulvey is thrilled to begin his work as a University Senator representing the School of General Studies. Prior to Columbia, Robert performed with numerous professional ballet companies around the United States. Robert fought for dancers’ labor rights as a union organizer and directed outreach initiatives. His career was dedicated to protecting dancers and expanding arts access to underserved communities.

Robert is pursuing a B.A. in Philosophy with a concentration in Dance, with plans to pursue research in performance and media studies. His academic interests center on aesthetics, critical theory, and performance studies, with a focus on the relationship between movement, embodiment, and knowledge production. His research is driven by the rich insights scholarship can achieve at the intersection of dance and philosophy.
At Columbia, Robert has been actively involved in student leadership and advocacy, serving as a Senior Resident Advisor, GS Social Media Ambassador, and participant on University committees. His Senate priorities include expanding financial aid access, supporting FGLI and nontraditional students, improving arts and performance space availability, and fostering cross-school collaboration and integration.

Robert is committed to amplifying the voices of GS students and advancing policies that promote equity, academic flexibility, and interschool engagement across the University.

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.

Sen. Rebecca Schnall is a highly regarded scholar, interdisciplinary team scientist and a demonstrated mentor. She is a nurse scientist and behavioral interventionist who has committed to mentoring the next generation of nurse scientists and clinician scholars. As a member of the CUIMC community for over 20 years, she brings a unique and broad perspective shaped by her experience as an alumnus, former research coordinator, Associate research scientist and as a tenured faculty member since 2016. She serves as an educator mentor and researcher with continuous federal support totaling over 40 million dollars. Nationally, she serves on pivotal scientific leadership roles at NIH, CDC and AHRQ. At Columbia, she has served on multiple key committees including the CUIMC faculty affairs and the Institutional Review Board. Across all these roles, she has remained grounded in Columbia's mission: to generate and disseminate knowledge, and to foster an inclusive and dynamic learning environment.

Sen. Raimondo Betti is Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. On the University Senate, Professor Betti serves on the Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee.

Professor Betti's research focuses on the area of structural health monitoring, a crucial area for the safety, maintenance, and rehabilitation of our nation’s infrastructure system. His main interests range from the development of numerical algorithms for the identification of high-fidelity models of buildings and bridges to the development of methodologies for the assessment of the internal conditions of main cables of suspension bridges and for the estimation of their remaining strength. 

Professor Betti received a Laurea (Magna cum laude) in civil engineering from the Universita’ degli Studi di Roma, “La Sapienza” (Italy) and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Southern California. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and serves on the Board of Governors of the International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring. He also serves as Expert Advisor for Bridge Monitoring and Cable Corrosion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

Sen. Peter T Coleman is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University and a renowned expert on constructive conflict resolution, intractable conflict and sustaining peace. Dr. Coleman directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) at Teachers College, is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice (IPSP), and is founding co-executive director of Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4), currently at the Columbia Climate School. Dr. Coleman has authored or edited a dozen books, well over 100 scientific articles and chapters, is the recipient of various awards, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Haaretz, Nature, Scientific American, PBS Newshour, and Harvard Business Review. His most recent book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (2021) was released by Columbia University Press. 

Paola Valenti is an economist with expertise in development economics, applied econometrics, applied microeconomics, and economics of antitrust and intellectual property. Dr. Valenti's has expertise in industries such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, industrial chemicals, consumer products, food, and computer hardware and software.

Dr. Valenti previously served as a consultant at NERA Economic Consulting, developing economic research and quantitative analysis. She has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank's Human Development Network and Social Protection Group, conducting research on poverty among the elderly in Bulgaria, Mauritius, Nepal, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Tajikistan.

Dr. Valenti holds laurea and Dottorato di Ricerca degrees in economics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, an M.Sc. degree from CORIPE Piemonte, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Sen. Ovita Williams is Executive Director of the Action Lab for Social Justice and Lecturer in Discipline at Columbia School of Social Work. Dr. Williams worked with survivors of intimate partner violence in the forensic social work arena with ten years of experience in the Counseling Services Unit at the Kings County District Attorney’s Office. Prior to this position, Dr. Williams was a child and family therapist at the Children’s Aid Society. She is currently involved in racial equity facilitation and committed to social justice and ending gender-based violence. Dr. Williams has developed and facilitated interactive workshops for social workers, managers, and practitioners on facilitating courageous dialogues around our intersecting identities. At Columbia, Dr. Williams collaborates with students, alumni, faculty and administrators on the development of the course Decolonizing Social Work through a power, race, oppression, privilege (PROP) framework. The course centers undoing anti-Black racism and dismantling white supremacy culture.

Sen. Oren Pizmony-Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds a BA in political science and MA in sociology of education from Tel Aviv University, and a PhD in sociology and comparative and international education from Indiana University-Bloomington. Pizmony-Levy is the Founding Director of the Center for Sustainable Futures and is an affiliated faculty at the Columbia Climate School. His research and teaching focus on the intersection between education and social movements, including test-based accountability and international large-scale assessments (e.g., TIMSS and PISA), LGBTQ+ education, and environmental sustainability education. His current projects revolve around exploring how educators engage with climate change education and examining the international landscape of organizations that are actively involved in climate education and communication.

For more information on this seat and election, please contact [email protected]

This Administration seat is open. The seat is filled by appointment by the Office of the President. For more information, please contact us at [email protected]

Sen. Nicole B. Wallack, PhD, is the Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program (UWP) and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, which she joined in 2003. She co-chaired the Lecturers Study Committee, which created the report on the status of lecturers for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 2018. She was the inaugural chair of the Lecturers Advisory Committee in 2020. Until summer 2025, she served as the first lecturer elected to the PPC. In each of her roles, she has advocated for non-tenure eligible faculty has encouraged their full participation in faculty governance in their home departments and across schools and campuses at Columbia. She has served previously on the Committee on the Status of Women and the Faculty Affairs Committee of the Senate as a non-tenure-eligible representative for the Humanities. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of essay studies, writing studies, composition and rhetoric, the impact of AI on writing programs, American literature, and teacher education. In fall, 2025, she was elected to Co-chair the NTTOT caucus and served on the Executive Committee of the Senate.

Sen. Niall Bolger is a Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences. He served as Department Chair from 2010 to 2013. He has broad academic interests, ranging from couples' stress physiology to statistical theory to the history of science. He teaches a two-course statistics sequence to psychology graduate students. He has co-taught with Geraldine Downey a Data Science Institute-sponsored undergraduate course called Laboratory in Justice Data Science.

Sen. Naveen Anupoju is a master’s student in the Mathematics of Finance Program at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and worked as a quant at an international bank, focusing on developing and refining risk models. Outside his academic and professional interests, Naveen enjoys practicing yoga, exploring music, cooking simple comfort meals, and finding new relaxing spots around New York City. He is excited to contribute to the Columbia community through his role in the University Senate.

Sen. Nasser Odetallah is an MFA student in Film at the Columbia School of the Arts. Originally from Oklahoma, he holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia School of General Studies (’25), studying English, film & media studies, and Mediterranean studies, and a bachelor’s degree from Yale University (’20), studying chemistry and molecular biophysics & biochemistry. 

While at Yale and General Studies, Nasser served in many leadership roles, supporting students and representing student interests to staff, administration, and faculty, most notably serving as Columbia General Studies Student Body President during the 2023-2024 academic year. Nasser is primarily interested in strengthening the voice of and engagement with students on central university issues including freedom of speech and academic freedom; financial support for students; campus access and space; expansion of key student services such as dining, health services, housing, and study spaces; and accountability from faculty and administrators in repairing institutional trust and integrity. Coming from Palestinian-American, Puerto Rican, LGBTQ+, and first-generation, low-income (FGLI) backgrounds, Nasser has experience working across student populations and interests to effect positive and long-lasting change at the university-level. Nasser looks forward to working with the other students on the University Senate to create positive change and continue to add the student voice on critical university-wide issues.

Naomi Schrag is the Vice President for Research Compliance, Training, and Policy in the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, and the University's Research Integrity Officer (RIO). She oversees work on issues such as research misconduct, conflict-of-interest and international research compliance, and collaborates closely with other offices across the University to develop integrated approaches to compliance and training.

Before joining Columbia in January 2006, Ms. Schrag practiced law for nine years, focusing on regulatory compliance and litigation involving biomedical research, with clients including pharmaceutical companies and not-for-profit organizations. Ms. Schrag also clerked in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Ms. Schrag graduated from New York University School of Law in 1995. Before entering law school, she worked on an oral history of the Holocaust for the Museum of Jewish Heritage. 

Nancy LoIacono is a Research Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. She is an environmental scientist and epidemiologist and has dedicated her career to understanding the effects of exposure to metals (in particular lead and arsenic) on children’s neurocognitive development and the development of adverse health outcomes (cardiovascular and lung disease and diabetes) in adults. She has worked on studies at both the molecular and population levels. She has been involved in several long-term prospective studies that have focused on identifying the adverse effects of exposure to metals, evaluating the effectiveness and safety of various interventions, and formulating strategies to reduce or eliminate these exposures and/or to mitigate their effects.

Sen. Nachum Sicherman is the Carson Family Professor of Business and the Chair of the Economics Division at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. He is an expert in the fields of labor economics, applied microeconomics, cost-benefit-analysis of medical procedures, and behavioral economics. His work has been published widely in top economic journals. Prior to Columbia, Prof. Sicherman taught at Rutgers University and the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD in economics at Columbia University.

Monica Goldklang, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Medicine (in Anesthesiology) in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Goldklang’s main area of research interest is in translational studies investigating the pathogenesis of smoking related lung disease. Her work involves understanding the mechanisms of protease upregulation in lung injury. She is currently working on a project investigating factors that alter MMP-13 expression and activity in lung disease. Moving forward, Dr. Goldklang has received NIH K08 funding to investigate the role of ion channels in smoking related lung disease. 

Sen. Michael Thaddeus was brought up in Morningside Heights.  He spent his student years at Harvard College and the University of Oxford and was then a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.  He has been a faculty member at Columbia since 1997, first as Associate Professor, then as Professor of Mathematics.  He has served on the Executive Committee of GSAS and the Committee on Science Instruction.  In the Department of Mathematics, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in 2009–12 and as Department Chair in 2017–20.

He has long advocated for transparency in University affairs, especially regarding enrollments, staffing, and finances, and for a powerful faculty role in decision-making.  A motion that he presented to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2021 has led to the annual release of Arts and Sciences operating budgets to the Faculty.  Likewise, his 2022 investigation of Columbia's U.S. News ranking has led to the annual release of Common Data Sets by our undergraduate schools, making public a wealth of numerical information.

In 2023, he was elected to a two-year term as vice-president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.  In that role, and as a University Senator, he continues to advocate for transparency, shared governance, academic freedom, and the rule of law.

Sen. Michael Mitsanas is a Master of Science candidate at Columbia Journalism School, a Toni Stabile Fellow in Investigative Journalism, an Officer of the Graduate Student Government, a University Senator, and a freelance investigative reporter. His coverage has appeared in TIME Magazine, CNN International, NBC News, and other outlets, often revealing how decisions made in the halls of power shape the lives of real people. Michael has interviewed small business owners in Busan, a seaside port city in South Korea, to understand how U.S. trade policy affects their revenue streams; documented the Myanmar junta’s use of hunger as a “weapon of war” in Rakhine State; chronicled South Korean activists’ decades-long push for anti-discrimination legislation; and co-authored a TIME investigation exposing how central government data restrictions hamper local suicide prevention policy programs in South Korea. As a breaking news reporter, Michael covered stories at the nexus of law, politics, and global affairs. His reporting spanned the special counsel’s indictments of President Donald J. Trump, the 2024 GOP primary, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden, Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade of military promotions, the Sudanese Civil War, state-level election law battles, the 2023 NATO summit, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s diplomatic visit to China, the indictment of former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Michael holds a B.A. in International Studies from the American University School of International Service, and he is a member of the Overseas Press Club (OPC), Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), and the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA). He speaks intermediate Korean and basic Greek.

Sen. Michael B. Gerrard is Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on environmental and energy law.  He founded and directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which now has 16 lawyers and is the leading academic center on climate change law in the world.   He is a former Chair of the Faculty of Columbia’s Earth Institute and now holds a joint appointment to the faculty of its successor, the Columbia Climate School. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2009, he was partner in charge of the New York office of the Arnold & Porter law firm.  He practiced environmental law in New York City full time from 1979 through 2008. He was the 2004-2005 chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy and Resources.  He has also chaired the Executive Committee of the New York City Bar Association, and the Environmental Law Section of the New York State Bar Association.  

Since 1986, Gerrard has written an environmental law column for the New York Law Journal.  He is author or editor of fourteen books, two of which were named Best Law Book of the Year by the Association of American Publishers: Environmental Law Practice Guide (twelve volumes, 1992) and Brownfields Law and Practice (four volumes, 1998). Among his other books are Global Climate Change and U.S. Law (with Jody Freeman and Michael Burger) (3d ed. 2023); Threatened Island Nations: Legal Implications of Rising Seas and a Changing Climate (with Gregory Wannier, 2013); and Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (with John Dernbach 2019).
 

Sen. Melissa Stockwell, MD MPH is the Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Health and the Felice K. Shea Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Professor of Population and Family Health in the Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. She is also the founding director of the Department of Pediatrics’ Center for Children’s Digital Health Research. Additionally, she is a practicing pediatrician.

Sen. Melinda Aquino (she/hers) is the Associate Dean of Multicultural Affairs in Undergraduate Student Life, Columbia College and Columbia Engineering. Working at Columbia University since 2005, she brings a long history of advocacy and community building; deep understanding of campus culture and dynamics; collaborative relationships across the University; and dedication to equity, access, and inclusion. Her 25+ year career in higher education has centered educational access and equity, intergroup dialogue and facilitation training, climate assessment and advocacy, conflict resolution, and restorative justice. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Florida, M.A. in English Literature from the University of Miami (Florida), M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University, and a M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University. She is the proud mother of four young children, who are often seen attending student cultural events around campus with her.

Sen. Matthew Beck is a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science SEAS studying 2-D materials. Matthew is from Monmouth County, New Jersey, and earned a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rowan University. At Rowan University, Matthew served in several university leadership roles, including Student Government Association (SGA) President and Assistant Vice President of Academic Affairs. Matthew also has several years of industry experience working at Lockheed Martin in advanced electronic packaging. While at Columbia, Matthew has served as a department representative for the Engineering Graduate Student Council and as Ph.D. Career Chair for the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association. On the University Senate, Matthew co-chairs the Student Affairs Committee and serves on the Alumni Relations and Executive committees. 

Maria Luisa Gozzi is a senior lecturer and has taught at Columbia University since 1993. She has twice served in the University Senate and on the Lecturer Advisory Committee.

Dr. Gozzi has taught Italian language courses at all levels, and thematic courses on Italian cinema, opera, linguistic and cultural diversity, literature and war, Dante, stylistics, and the senses. She has published articles on Italian cinema, Italian literature and language pedagogy, and has created several websites for Italian language and culture acquisition. Dr. Gozzi came to the United States after graduating from the University of Florence, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University. 

Sen. Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Adjunct Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute and is Affiliated professor at Sant’Anna School of Economics in Pisa, Italy. Dr. Tedesco has been the Resident Scientist at the Columbia Business School, since 2021. On the University Senate, He is a fellow of the Explorers Club and a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, Equity Working Group. Dr. Tedesco serves on the Research Officers Committee and on the External Relations and Research Policy Committee. 

Dr. Tedesco received his Laurea degree and Ph.D. from the University of Naples and the Italian National Research Council. He then spent five years as a postdoctoral and research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He moved to CCNY in 2008 as an Assistant Professor, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. During his time at CCNY, he founded and directed the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory and was a rotating program manager at the National Science Foundation from 2013 to 2015. In 2016, he joined Columbia University. 

Dr. Tedesco’s research focuses on the dynamics of seasonal snowpack, ice sheet surface properties, high latitude fieldwork, dendrochronology, global climate change, its implications on the economy and real estate and climate justice. Dr. Tedesco led more than ten expeditions to Greenland and to Antarctica, beside fieldwork in  many other places, including Iceland, the United States, Canada, the Italian Alps. He is the editor of “Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere,” published by Wiley in 2015, and “The Hidden Lid of Ice.,” First published in 2018, it has been translated into seven languages and was selected by The Washington Post and by National Geographic Traveler as one of the best 10 books of the year. 

Sen. Marc Younker is a 3L representing Columbia Law School. Marc currently Marc co-chairs the University Senate Rules Committee and serves on the Student Affairs Committee. He is from West Orange, New Jersey, and earned his B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University, graduating magna cum laude. Outside of Columbia, Marc serves on the board of Garden State Equality, New Jersey's largest LBGTQ+ advocacy organization.

Maneesha Aggarwal has worked at CUIT since 2001 and was appointed to AVP of Academic and Research Solutions in June 2016. She added Emerging Technologies to her portfolio in 2018.

Maneesha oversees teaching and learning and research services for the University. She has successfully led large projects in partnership with schools/departments across the University, including upgrading CourseWorks (twice, to Sakai in 2011 and Canvas in 2016), managing the Sundial replacement project, and launching the University-wide online evaluation system. Maneesha has also spearheaded the launch of new services including Electronic Notebooks, Confluence, Zoom, Panopto, JuypterHub and more. Additionally, Maneesha provides strategic leadership in the areas of research computing including High Performance Computing, RASCAL and InfoEd teams.

Maneesha provides direction for CUIT's Emerging Technology Consortium (ETC), which she kicked-off in the fall of 2017. This group positions CUIT as an exchange place for cutting-edge work and knowledge sharing among researchers, faculty, students and industry partners. ETC is focused on fostering and developing applications of new technologies, such as voice-aided technologies, augmented reality, virtual reality, and 3D scanners and printers. 

Executive Assistant: Anna Braude ([email protected])

Sen. Mahmood Mamdani was appointed Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University in 1999.

Professor Mamdani received honorary doctorates from University of Johannesburg and Addis Ababa University, both in 2010. He received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2011and was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. Professpr Mamdani was listed as one of the “Top 20 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy (U.S.) and Prospect (U.K.) magazine in 2008, and among ‘the world’s top 50 thinkers, 2021’ by Prospect Magazine (UK). Professor Mamdani has written extensively on political identity and political violence. His latest work, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Harvard, 2022, was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, 2021, and as World History Finalist by Association of American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards), 2021.

Sen. Mahlon Mathieson, MS ’25, is a Doctor of Nursing Practice student in the Midwifery Program at Columbia University School of Nursing and serves as the School’s representative to the Columbia University Senate. Entering her second term, she remains committed to shared governance, student advocacy, and ensuring that diverse perspectives are represented in university decision making.

Beyond her role in the Senate, Mahlon serves on the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Graduate Nursing Student Academy Leadership Council, where she contributes to initiatives that support graduate nursing students across the country. She is also a teaching assistant and SAFE nurse, combining her passion for education, mentorship, and patient advocacy to support both students and survivors.

Mahlon's academic and research interests focus on maternal health equity, reproductive health, and trauma informed care. Her scholarship explores barriers to support and access for childbearing families, with particular interests in interpersonal violence screening, lactation support, and public health initiatives that improve maternal outcomes. Through her research and clinical work, she seeks to advance evidence based, person centered care that promotes safety, dignity, and health equity.

As a student leader, Mahlon is dedicated to fostering collaboration across schools and disciplines while advocating for policies and initiatives that strengthen the student experience. She approaches leadership with empathy, integrity, and a commitment to service, striving to create an environment where all members of the Columbia community feel heard, valued, and empowered to contribute.
 

Sen. Maeghan Sill (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student in the Education Leadership program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Driven by a deep commitment to educational equity, her passion for using data to drive meaningful change was forged by a teaching career spanning more than a decade in diverse school settings in the U.S. and overseas. While completing her M.S. in Learning Analytics, also from Teachers College, she served their Student Senate as a departmental senator and an active student advocate. She co-authored a bill that led to the rollout of free menstrual products in campus bathrooms and served on the Campus Safety Advisory Committee. She also represented student interests at the Student Library Advisory Council and worked to initiate a smaller meal plan option. Her research now lies at the intersection of education leadership and data science, where she explores how factors like school climate impact teacher retention and workforce diversity. As a University Senator, she is committed to serving as a bridge between students and university leadership, fostering greater equity, transparency, and community.

Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy.

Her university awards include: Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2009/2010); The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA) (2007/8), and Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching (2005).

She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. In 2024 and 2025, she was a Visiting Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Empirical Aesthetics) in Frankfurt and taught at the Courtauld Institute, London. in 2020, she was a Mellon fellow at the Tate Museum in London and, in 2019, a Visiting Professor at the University of Torino. In 2008, she was Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: "The Language of Emotions") and, in 2009, for the FU-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University.  In 2002-3, she was the Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and 2000-2001, Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner's Die Meistersinger.

Lydia Goehr is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992/2007 with a new essay); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (2008, essays on Adorno and Danto); Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread. A Philosophical Detective Story (2021); David Lean (Filmmaker and Philosopher) (2025). Her current projects include Furniture-Art: Essays on Objects and Objections; and Violin Lessons: Notes toward a Philosophy of Practice.  She is co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006), and co-editor with Jonathan Gilmore of Blackwell's A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (2022). With Gregg Horowitz, she is series editor of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia University Press. 

Sen. Lori Qingyuan Yue is a tenured associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. An expert on the interplay of business, society, and government, she has published research on how firms respond to contentious social environments and regulatory uncertainty. Prior to Columbia, she was on the faculty at the University of Southern California, where she served on the Marshall School of Business faculty council for three years.

Sen. Lisa Rosen-Metsch '90GS is the 9th Dean of the Columbia School of General Studies and the first alumna to serve as Dean. Previously, she was the Chair and Stephen Smith Professor, Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. Dean Rosen-Metsch is a medical sociologist and an internationally recognized scholar whose work has focused on the social determinants of health with special focus on access to care for persons living with HIV and substance use disorders. For the past two decades, her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has resulted in over 250 publications in high impact journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Addiction, and the American Journal of Public Health.

Mentoring and teaching has always been a high priority for Dean Rosen-Metsch and she has won numerous teaching awards and co-directs a NIH-funded training program with the Columbia School of Social Work. This spring, she taught a new seminar course in the Department of Sociology for undergraduates entitled “AIDS and U.S. Society” that explored how the HIV/AIDS epidemic transformed American society. In her time as Dean, Columbia GS has significantly increased fundraising for student financial aid scholarships, created and launched new international dual-degree programs, and created new initiatives focused on social justice and women student veterans.

Sen. Liane Bdair is a student at Columbia College, studying economics and political science on a pre-law track. She serves on the executive board of Turath, the Arab Students Association, where she helps foster community and cultural pride among Arab-identifying students. Additionally, Liane’s Palestinian- American Background makes her deeply committed to equity, inclusion, and student advocacy. As a University Senator, Liane is focused on promoting shared governance, increasing transparency from the administration, and ensuring that student perspectives are meaningfully included in decision-making processes. With a new perspective and a dedication to building bridges between administration and student groups, she is passionate about amplifying voices that are often overlooked in university policy and governance conversations.

Sen. Letty Moss-Salentijn is Edward V. Zegarelli Professor of Dentistry (in Anatomy and Cell Biology). On the University Senate, Dr. Moss-Salentijn serves on the Education and Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure committees. Dr. Moss-Salentijn’s research has focused primarily on aspects of growth and development of skeletal and dental tissues. Much of her work was done in collaboration with her late husband Professor Melvin L. Moss and colleagues in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. More recently, especially during the pandemic, she has worked with members of CTL, CUIT, and the Computer Science Department to assist her faculty colleagues in the use of new media applications to enrich online teaching. 

Loftin Flowers is the vice president for government relations and leads the University’s engagement and advocacy efforts with federal, state, and city government. Loftin holds a BA in History from Haverford College and an MPA from Columbia University. Prior to his role at Columbia, Loftin worked in Washington, DC at the national offices of the Children's Defense Fund, the Democratic National Committee, and John Kerry’s 2004 campaign for president.

Sen. Kwamina Vandyke is an MBA candidate at Columbia Business School and former Creative Marketing Manager at Amazon. He spent six years in consulting with Deloitte and Accenture, during which he founded The Mayhem Collection, a luxury fashion brand based out of Ghana. He also founded New Home Football Academy in Ghana, helping to introduce and develop American football in the region. Vandyke holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Virginia Tech and a master’s in Sports Management from Hampton University.

Sen. Kristina Douglass is an archaeologist who investigates how people, land- and seascapes co-evolve. She is Associate Professor of Climate at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, she was the Joyce and Doug Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Penn State University. Douglass is also a Smithsonian Institution Research Associate. Her work is grounded in collaborations with local, Indigenous, and descendant (LID) communities as equal partners in the co-production of science, and the recording, preservation and dissemination of LID knowledge. Douglass and her collaborators aim to contribute long-term perspectives on human-environment interactions to public debates, planning and policymaking on the issues of climate change, conservation, and sustainability. Since 2011 Douglass has directed the Morombe Archaeological Project (MAP), based in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area. This territory is home to diverse LID communities, including Vezo fishers, Mikea foragers and Masikoro herders. The MAP team is made up of Velondriake LID community members, and an international group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. The MAP is anchored to the Olo Be Taloha Lab (@OBTLab and https://obtlab.la.psu.edu ) at Columbia, which Douglass also directs. Douglass is a mother, singer, dancer, Capoeirista, SCUBA diver and avid gardener, all of which intersect in essential ways with her work as an archaeologist.

Sen. Ko-Chia Tsai is a master’s student in the Applied Analytics program at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Information Systems from Oregon State University and brings over five years of professional experience in the technology sector, working in roles such as IT Test Analyst and Application Developer. Her academic focus includes data-driven decision-making, organizational analytics, and the intersection of technology and community impact. Alongside her studies and professional background, Ko-Chia has been actively involved in student initiatives and service-oriented programs supporting youth and community development, consistently demonstrating a commitment to collaborative leadership and inclusive engagement. In her role as a University Senator, Ko-Chia works to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue, improve communication between students and university leadership, and ensure that student perspectives are represented in institutional discussions. She is committed to promoting transparency, equitable access to resources, and connections across Columbia’s campuses, with a focus on fostering a more engaged and inclusive student experience.

Sen. Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History.

Sen. Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country, as well as a book of essays, Raising Raffi.

Most of Gessen's journalistic work has focused on the effects of the collapse of communism on the countries of what used to be the Soviet Union. His New Yorker article on the insoluble problem of Moscow traffic -- a legacy of militant Soviet urban design combined with the anti-planning ethos of hypercapitalism — was included in Best American Travel Essays in 2011. His New Yorker story on the opening to shipping of the Northern Sea Route above the Russian Arctic as a result of global warming was included in Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2013. He has written about the wars and revolutions in Ukraine, as well about the experts in the U.S. government who work on the region.

Gessen began his career as a book reviewer for the early online magazine FEED, and subsequently contributed review-essays to Dissent, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. He started n+1 with Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, and Marco Roth in 2004.

Gessen was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in History and Literature in 1998, and subsequently received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Syracuse University. In 2014-2015 he was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

Kate Immergluck is a second-year medical student at VP&S. Before medical school, she completed a degree in Public Policy Analysis and Biology at Pomona College and worked at an education and sports-based youth development program. She is currently working on developing a Trauma Informed Care curriculum for the medical school and is invested in cultivating a trauma informed learning environment for students across Columbia’s schools and campuses.

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 co-chairs the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee and 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.

Sen. Kara Lamb is an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, a senior researcher in the Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP) Center, and an Affiliate of the Data Science Institute. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Climate School and collaborates with researchers at NASA GISS on the NASA Digital Twins for Climate Science project. She serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on AI Applications to Environmental Science and is a member of the U.S. CLIVAR Process Study and Model Improvement Panel. 

Dr. Lamb received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Columbia, she spent four years as a research scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, where she contributed to several major international airborne field campaigns, including the NASA KORUS-AQ and AToM missions and the NOAA FIREX FireLab study. Dr. Lamb’s research lies at the intersection of atmospheric observations, high-resolution modeling, and scientific machine learning. Her work focuses on improving understanding of aerosol and cloud processes, and developing interpretable, physics-informed machine learning approaches to advance next-generation Earth System Models.

Sen. Julie Crawford, Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, has been teaching at Columbia for almost 25 years. She earned her BA from McGill University and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the literature and culture of early modern England, with additional expertise in the history of reading, the history of sexuality, and feminist political thought. She has served as the Chair of Literature Humanities and the Committee on the Core (2014-2018), as well as on the COI, the EPPC (where she chaired a Subcommittee on Adjunct Labor in 2018-2020), as a DUS in both IWGS (now ISSG) and English, and as a director of the MA program in English and Comparative Literature. A strong advocate for faculty governance and due process, she would welcome the opportunity to serve in the principal representative university body dedicated to those aims.

Sen. Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (department chair from 2012-2018).  She previously worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs on text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and then created their first HCI Research Department.   She has served on the ACL executive board, the ISCA board (2005-7 as president), the CRA-WP board, the NAACL executive board, the CRA Executive Board, the AAAI Council, and the IEEE SLTC as well as numerous awards committees.  She was editor of Computational Linguistics and Speech Communication and is a fellow of AAAI, ISCA, ACL, ACM, and IEEE, and a member of the NAE, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence.  She received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, the ISCA Special Service Medal and the ACL Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Medal. She studies speech and NLP:  TTS; false information on social media and its intent, multimodal humor; radicalization in online videos and social media; charismatic speech; entrainment, emotion and empathy production and recognition in conversation; deceptive, trusted and mistrusted speech; and code-switching in text and speech.

Sen. Joseph Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He’s especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.

His essays and articles include : “World Literature as Property” in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; “However Incompletely, Human” in The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law; “‘It’s good to be primitive’: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticity” in Modernism and Copyright; “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” in Critical Quarterly; “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There” in The Journal of Human Rights; “‘A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story’: Silence, Violence, and Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apart” in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya” in Research in African Literatures; “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” co-authored with Sophia A. McClennen, in Comparative Literature Studies; “A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” in Human Rights Quarterly; “Humanitarian Reading” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.

He is co-editing a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region. He is currently working on two monographs, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and "New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature," which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.

Joseph C. Ulichny earned his B.S. in Chemistry with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Scranton, graduating from their Honors Program magna cum laude. While at the University of Scranton, he was dually advised by Professor Josephine M. Dunn and Professor Trudy A. Dickneider, working on an interdisciplinary thesis project in art history and chemistry. He then earned his M.A in Chemistry from Columbia University, working under the direction of Professor Gerard Parkin. In 2008, he became an Associate in Chemistry at Columbia University under the mentorship of Professor James J. Valentini, former Dean of Columbia College. He was given the Excellence in Chemistry Award from the University of Scranton, as well as the Jack Miller Teaching Award from Columbia University. While in graduate school, he worked on synthetic and structural inorganic projects in the Parkin Lab. Joseph became the General Chemistry Course Coordinator during the Spring 2010 semester. In addition to chemistry, his interests are art history, art restoration and conservation, as well as the theatre.

Sen. Josef Sorett is Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education, Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Director of the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, Dr. Sorett employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in black communities and cultures in the United States. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016) illumines how religion has figured in debates about black art and culture across the 20th century. A second book, The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an American Secular, is forthcoming with Oxford UP. Additionally, Josef is editing an anthology, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, which will be published by Columbia University Press.

Dr. Sorett's scholarly work has been supported with grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leone B. Carpenter Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and Yale University’s Institute for Sacred Music. His research has been published in academic journals and anthologies; and his writing and commentary have also appeared in a range of popular media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as on the BBC and NPR.

Jonathan Susman, M.D., is Clinical Director of Vascular and Interventional Radiology and Program Director of the IR Residencies at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Susman grew up in St. Louis and earned his A.B. at Columbia College. After his training and a brief stint on staff at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he returned to Columbia where he has been for the past two decades. Dr. Susman has a keen interest in interventional oncology and interventions in the post liver transplant patient. He has presented internationally on complex portal and biliary interventions, as well as on oncologic embolization and ablation. 

Sen. Jonathan Glover is the James L. Dohr Professor of Accounting and Chair of the Accounting Division at Columbia Business School. His research interests include financial and managerial accounting, public policy, accounting history, information economics, mechanism design, incentive theory, and relational contracts. The topics he has worked on include earnings management, accounting conservatism, financial accounting standard setting and regulation, corporate governance, information system design, performance measurement, and managerial compensation. He has published more than 50 research papers in leading journals in accounting, economics, and related fields.

Before joining Columbia, Jonathan was on the faculty of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University from 1992-2015, where he taught a variety of MBA courses on financial and managerial accounting and a PhD course on accounting and information economics. He served as Head of the Ph.D. Program at Tepper from 2008-2011. He also held visiting positions at U.C. Berkeley in the spring of 2000 and at Columbia during 2014-2015. Professor Glover was an academic fellow in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2004-2005.

Professor Glover is the incoming managing editor of Foundations and Trends in Accounting, an outgoing editor of The Accounting Review, has been an associate editor of Management Science, and serves or has served on the editorial boards of the The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, and the Review of Accounting Studies. 

Jonathan graduated from the Accounting Honors Program at The Ohio State University in 1988 and from Ohio State’s PhD Program in Accounting in 1992. Ohio State’s Omicron Chapter of Beta Alpha Psi awarded him their Alumnus of the Year Award in 2016.

Sen. John Santelli, MD, MPH is a Professor of Population and Family Health and Pediatrics at Columbia. He joined Columbia University in 2004 after 18 years in public health research in Baltimore and at the U.S. CDC. Santelli trained in Adolescent Medicine and Public Health in Baltimore. He has conducted policy-related research on adolescent health including HIV/STD risk behaviors, teen fertility, socioeconomic determinants, prevention programs, and research ethics. He has been a national leader in ensuring that adolescents have access to medically accurate, comprehensive sexuality education, and are appropriately and ethically included in health research. Since 2009, Santelli has been the principal investigator on five NIH-funded projects at the Rakai Health Sciences Program on HIV risk among youth including empirical research bioethics and social determinants of health. He is a past President of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and was a member of the planning committee for the 2016 Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing.

Jenny Mak is the Senior Associate Dean of Engineering Student Affairs and an Adjunct Professor of Professional Development and Leadership at Columbia Engineering. Dr. Mak provides leadership to the Engineering Student Affairs team, supporting Columbia Engineers and the school’s K-12 outreach efforts. She established Columbia Engineering's Graduate Career Placement (GCP) and Professional Development and Leadership (PDL) units.

Dr. Mak joined Columbia Engineering in 2003. Prior to joining the Dean's Office, she was the Executive Director of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia Engineering. Previously she was a Senior Consultant for Deloitte Consulting and a Technology Consultant for D. E. Shaw & Co.

Dr. Mak is a proud four-time graduate of Columbia University: Doctor of Education, Master of Arts, Master of International Affairs, and Bachelor of Science. She earned her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Columbia Engineering. Her research interests include the intellectual and ethical development of college students, adult learning, and leadership.

Sen. Jeffrey Wayno is a historian of the European Middle Ages who works as a subject librarian and rare book curator in the Columbia University Libraries. As the Collection Services Librarian at The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, he is responsible for both Burke's general and rare collections, as well as the ancient, medieval, and religious studies collections at Butler Library. An alumnus of Columbia's doctoral program in medieval history, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the University Libraries before taking up his current position in 2018. He also regularly teaches Literature Humanities in Columbia College's Core Curriculum.
Jeffrey serves as co-chair of the University Senate's Libraries and Digital Resources Committee and as a member of the Education Committee.

Sen. Jeanine D’Armiento, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine in Anesthesiology, Director of the Center for Molecular Pulmonary Disease in Anesthesiology and Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, and Director of the Center for Lymphangiomyomatosis (LAM) and Rare Lung Disease. On the University Senate, Dr. D’Armiento chairs the Executive Committee and serves on a number of other committees. In 2008, Dr. D’Armiento completed a two-year appointment as Associate Dean for Gender Equity and Faculty Development, where she concentrated on professional development programs for women faculty. Dr. D’Armiento served as Executive Director of the Summer Program for Under-Represented Students at CUIMC for close to two decades. She serves on the Executive Board of the Alpha-1 Foundation, which she has chaired. Dr. D’Armiento also serves as a consultant to the Director of the Office of Rare Disease at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. 

Sen. Janie Weiss is IT Manager of the Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, a role she has held for over 30 years. She assists faculty, staff, and students with their IT needs, helping to advance the research enterprise. On the University Senate, Janie serves on the Rules Committee, Structure and Operations Committee, Commission on the Status of Women, and Commission on Benefits.

James H. Applegate is Professor of Astronomy. Dr. Applegate received his B.S. in astrophysics from Michigan State University and his Ph.D. in physics from SUNY at Stony Brook. He was a Bantrell Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, and a previous chair of the Astronomy Department at Columbia.

Sen. Jacob Benoist is a graduate student at the Columbia Climate School, where he studies the interrelationships between climate change and society. As the University Senator representing one of Columbia’s newest schools, he is dedicated to strengthening connections across the university and ensuring that climate has a meaningful place in campus-wide dialogue and decision-making. Jacob earned his B.A. in Individualized Studies from New York University in 2024, where he explored how environmental studies can be leveraged for effective and inclusive sustainability within business and governance. His professional and research experiences span education, policy, and finance, informing his current academic focus on climate communication – aligning corporate sustainability incentives with community-driven action.

Sen. Jackie Dugard (BA, MPhil, PhD, LLB, LLM) is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR), where she is the outgoing Director of Graduate Studies for the Human Rights Studies MA (HRSMA) program. Prior to joining Columbia in July 2022, she was an Associate Professor of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa (2014-2022), where she is now a Visiting Professor of Law. With a background in law and social sciences, Jackie has published widely on social- and climate-justice. She is a Global Fellow at the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (University of Bergen, Norway), and an editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights.
Jackie has significant leadership experience - she was a co-founder and the first Executive Director of the non-governmental organization, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and the founding first Director of the Gender Equity Office (GEO) at Wits. As a human rights academic and practitioner, she is committed to governance accountability and improving the working conditions of non-tenure track faculty, as evident in her involvement in the organizing committee for the Contingent Faculty of Columbia University (CFCU-UAW)  unionization process currently underway for non-tenure track colleagues. 

Sen. Huda Paracha (BC ‘26) is a rising senior at Barnard College, majoring in religion, with a focus on Islam, and on the pre-medical track. As a first-generation, low-income student from Queens, New York, Huda empathizes and stands with her peers as the student body fights to make their voices heard. She is proud to serve on the University Senate and advocate on behalf of Barnard’s diverse student population, and the wider Columbia University and Harlem community. In addition to serving as University Senator for Barnard College, Huda works to give back to her community, spending her time volunteering at Mount Sinai’s Oncology Center for the American Cancer Society. On the University Senate, Huda co-chairs the Student Affairs Committee, and serves on the Executive and Education committees. 

Sen. Howard J. Worman, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Cell Biology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, has been at Columbia since 1994, researching cell biology and liver diseases, teaching medical and graduate students, and caring for patients at the medical center. On the University Senate, Dr. Worman co-chairs the Committee on External Relations and Research Policy and serves on the Budget Committee and the Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee.

Honey Sue Fishman provides vision, organization, and leadership to the operation of Columbia’s undergraduate residence halls and Alfred Lerner Hall, the student center. 

This broad scope of work encompasses short- and long-term capital planning of the physical assets, custodial and maintenance, and guest services for student residents, visitors, and administrators. With her team, Honey Sue aims to provide a consistent, easy to navigate, and rewarding campus experience. 

In addition to these responsibilities, Honey Sue manages Columbia’s Trademark and Licensing program and several on-site services provided by contracted vendors. Honey Sue has served in various leadership roles during her tenure at Columbia. Most recently, she served as executive director of Business Services. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis. 

Sen. Holger A. Klein is the Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History and Archaeology. He was educated in Art History, Early Christian Archaeology, and German Literature at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, London, and Bonn. His research focuses on the history and historiography of Late Antique, Early Medieval, and Byzantine art and architecture, especially the cult of relics and issues of cultural and artistic exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean. Professor Klein joined Columbia in 2000 and served the university in various academic leadership positions, namely as Chairman of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Art Humanities, Director of the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, and Faculty Director of Casa Muraro. He is the recipient of the 50th annual Mark Van Doren Award, the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, and the Wm. Theodore de Bary Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum.

On the University Senate, Sen. Klein is Vice Chair of the Executive Committee. He co-chairs the Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and serves on the Budget Committee. 

Sen. Henry Ginsberg is the Irving Professor of Medicine at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he has conducted basic and translational research on lipid metabolism and cardiovascular disease for 37 years. Dr. Ginsberg was Director of the Irving Center for Clinical Research from 1994 to 2006 and the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research from 2006 to 2017. From 1992 to 2008 and from 2014 until the present, he has been PI on an NHLBI T32 postdoctoral training program in Arteriosclerosis Research. Dr. Ginsberg has published over 400 peer-reviewed and invited papers in journals, and has received funding from the NIH for more than 40 years. He also sees patients with severe lipid disorders and teach. On the University Senate, he serves on the Commission on the Status of Women and on the Structure and Operations Committee, and hopes that his many years on the faculty allow him to offer insights and perspectives relevant to the issues facing the University.

Sen. Henning Schulzrinne is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Mathematical Methods and Computer Science and Professor of Electrical Engineering. On the University Senate, he serves on the Executive Committee and on the External Relations and Research Policy and Structure and Operations committees.

Professor Schulzrinne received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2004 to 2009 and as Engineering Fellow, Technical Advisor, and Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2010 until 2017.

Professor Schulzrinne has co-developed a number of protocol standards that are now used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications, including RTP, RTSP and SIP. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Sen. Helen Han Wei Luo is a Philosophy PhD student whose dissertation centers the relationship between ethics and etiquette, following the Confucian tradition. Her research is partly supported by the SSHRC doctoral fellowship. Raised in Vancouver, she holds a B.A. in French and Political Science from Simon Fraser University and a M.A. in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia. A creative writer in her spare time, some of her representative work is featured at the CBC Literary Prizes, in The Plentitudes Journal, and in the Best of Canadian Poetry 2023 anthology. On the University Senate, Helen is Vice Chair of the Student Affairs Committee, co-chairs the Commission on Diversity, and serves on the Executive 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. Gregory Mann, Professor of History, is an historian of West and francophone Africa. His work has focused largely on Mali and the Sahel in the twentieth century, including both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Mann has written two books: From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality (2015) and Native Sons: West African Veterans and France (2006). Each analyzes an aspect of governmentality, or the forms of governmental logic that animate life and struggle in the seam between state and society. Mann has also published a score of peer-reviewed articles—notably in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Journal of African History—on themes ranging from pilgrimage to migration, human rights, the history of the social sciences, and the historiography of Africa. He is currently writing a synthetic book-length essay on the historical relationship between Africa and France, from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Mann is a former editor of the Journal of African History, and a member of the editorial boards of that journal and of Humanity. He is a member—along with Dr. Devon Golaszewski, Madina Thiam and Oumou Sidibe—of the Projet Archives des Femmes du Mali, a project funded by the Modern Endangered Archives Program at UCLA. He is former director of Columbia’s M.A. program in History and Literature (Paris).

Mann has been a visiting professor at Paris-VIII (St. Denis), Sciences Po (Paris), and Paris-I Sorbonne-Panthéon. He has also co-organized a number of workshops and programs with colleagues at the University of Bamako. He has been a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center and has won numerous other fellowships and awards.

Mann has worked with a number of doctoral students on dissertations in history, anthropology and political science, as well as with Master’s students in the Columbia-LSE Dual Degree Program in International and World History. Queries from prospective students are welcome.

Sen. Greg Freyer is Professor and Faculty Director of Graduate Education in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health.  He directs the DrPH and MS Toxicology programs and the Certificate in Toxicology. Dr. Freyer has been a member of the University Senate since 2011. He co-chairs the Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and serves on the Budget Committee, Structure and Operations Committee, the Commission on Benefits and the Commission on the Status of Health Sciences.

Dr. Freyer is deeply engaged in developing educational programs, teaches multiple courses and was recipient of both the Mailman School of Public Health Excellence in Teaching Award and the Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award in 2014. Dr. Freyer’s research has focused on cellular responses to environmental insults, particularly related to DNA damage. 

Sen. Giovanni O. Oliveros as a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology for the past two years, I have worked tirelessly to advance not only my research career but also my lab’s scientific objectives. My experience, coupled with prior teaching and mentoring experience outside Columbia, has prepared me to represent postdoctoral researchers at a time when research needs are at an all-time high and funding is in limbo.

Through both my laboratory and mentoring / teaching experience, I have seen how funding shifts can impact the research and mentoring experience - even a small cut has drastic impacts on a trainee’s stability, growth, and future success. With drastic funding cuts and the future of postdocs uncertain, it is imperative that our voices are heard, particularly on issues such as job security, professional development, and salary equity, for all the hard work we contribute to the Columbia community.

My passion for building a more responsible, transparent, supportive research environment is what drives me to serve. As the postdoctoral senate representative, I will work to make sure the postdoc community at Columbia is well represented and our needs are met. I am ready to represent the postdoctoral community.

Sen. Gerard A. Ateshian is a SEAS senator representing tenured faculty. He was an undergraduate student at Columbia (SEAS), from 1984 to 1986, and a graduate student until 1991, after which he assumed a faculty position in Mechanical Engineering. He served on the Senate as a non-tenured representative of SEAS faculty in the late 1990s. He is a faculty member in mechanical engineering and in biomedical engineering, and his research focuses on understanding mechanical factors in osteoarthritis, and assisting with the development of treatment methods for this degenerative joint disease.

Sen. Emanuel Clemente (he/him/his) is a Master of Public Health student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, concentrating in sociomedical sciences. A graduate of the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Political Science, Emanuel’s work and academic interests lie at the intersections of medicine, law, and community health. Originally from South Florida and from a Puerto Rican family, Emanuel’s perspective is shaped by his experiences navigating social and structural inequities in health and education. He values organization, transparency, and collaboration as essential tools for effective advocacy and student representation. His background in community outreach, health education, and civic mobilization reflects his commitment to transforming the structures that influence population health outcomes through any role he assumes. 

Joining the University Senate during a pivotal moment in the University’s history, Emanuel is dedicated to representing student voices with transparency, empathy, and integrity. He aims to strengthen the relationship between Columbia’s Morningside and CUIMC campuses, deepen the University’s engagement with the surrounding New York City community, and foster an inclusive academic environment that promotes student wellness, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public service. Emanuel believes in building a public health community that not only studies inequity but actively works to dismantle it.

Sen. Elizabeth Adeoye (she/her) is a Columbia College student majoring in political science, with a minor in sociology and a special concentration in business management. She previously served on the Columbia College Student Council as Pre-professional Representative and currently sits on the boards of several cultural and pre-professional organizations, including the African Students Association. She is also a Resident Adviser, supporting undergraduate students throughout their time in University housing. Coming from a Nigerian-American background, Elizabeth advocates for increased support and resources for FLI students, international students, and students of color. She also dances on two teams, Raw Elementz and the Columbia University Dance Team, remaining active in Columbia’s cultural life.
 

As a University Senator, Elizabeth plans to push for clearer communication between students and administration, more equitable resource distribution, and stronger representation for underrepresented communities in university policy. She brings to the role a strong track record of leadership, cross-campus collaboration, and a deep investment in equity and inclusion at Columbia.

Elisha Dura (she/her) is a senior in Columbia College majoring in English and pursuing a minor in Education Studies. Her research and academic interests include writing center studies, first-year writing instruction, and rural education. Elisha currently works as the Columbia Libraries Peer Fellow at the Writing Center and as a freelance book editor. Previously, she has interned at an NYC charter school and a student leadership nonprofit organization in her home state. On campus, Elisha serves as a senior staff writer at Bwog Columbia Student News and dances with Orchesis, the largest dance organization at Columbia.

Sen. Elisa E. Konofagou designs and develops ultrasound-based technologies for automated estimation of tissue mechanics as well as drug delivery and therapeutics. Her group has worked on the design of algorithms that can estimate minute deformation as a result of physiological function, such as in the heart and vessels, and displacements induced by the ultrasound wave itself, such as in tumors and nerves, while she maintains several collaborations with physicians in order to translate these technologies to the clinical setting. She has also developed novel techniques in order to facilitate noninvasive brain drug delivery as well as modulation of both the central and peripheral nervous systems. 

Dr. Konofagou received a B.S. in chemical physics from Université de Paris 6 in 1992, an M.S. in biomedical engineering from Imperial College (London, U.K.) in 1993 and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Houston in 1999. She is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and in 2007 she received the NSF CAREER Award. In 2021, Dr. Konofagou was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. On the University Senate, Dr. Konofagou serves on the Budget Committee.

Sen. Eli Baum is a senior from Brooklyn, NY. He studies math and English at Columbia College. Currently, he is an editor at The Blue and White Magazine, where he has written and edited articles about campus and local politics. In his free time he likes to play board games and read.

Sen. Ebonnie Goodfield ('24GS, '26SW) is a Navy Veteran, Columbia Center for Veteran Transition & Integration staff, Columbia Alumni Association Board member, Founder and President of Women Veterans of Columbia University and Campbell Award Recipient for GS 2024 graduating class. During her undergraduate she updated the university's antibullying policies, co-created intercollegiate fellowship programs for women students and served as Vice President for Columbia Milvets, assisting in coordinating the Dean's Women Roundtable series, sitting on Columbia University Military Ball committee, and introducing the university's first Women President at her inaugural event. She is now pursuing her Master's in Social Work with a policy focus aimed at informing and tailoring the transition of women veterans. Ebonnie has been the recipient of the American Red Cross Service to the Armed Forces Hero award (2018), the GS Service and Change Agent awards (2021-2023), the Columbia Alumni Association Campbell, Restorer of Broken Walls DV Ministry Purple Shoe and National Alliance on Mental Illness Max Gabriel Awards (2024) and most recently accepted the William Pearson Tolley Champion for Veterans in Higher Education Award with her colleagues at CVTI for visionary leadership, advocacy and transforming the landscape of higher education for veterans.

Diego Rivera serves as deputy vice president to Columbia Residential and oversees all operational aspects of the Columbia University residential portfolio which includes 150 buildings (6.7 million GSF) and over 5,800 residential apartments. 

As the Deputy Vice President of Columbia Residential, Diego is responsible for the financial performance of the portfolio, property maintenance, the entire leasing process and residents’ satisfaction. He determines and ensures that annual budgets for the portfolio are met, that operating plans are effectively and efficiently monitored and that capital improvement projects are accomplished.   

Diego's extensive knowledge and experience comes from holding executive positions on some of the largest Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) in the country, such as AvalonBay Communities, Equity Residential, Archstone-Smith and LCOR. With over 20 years of experience in Multifamily Real Estate, Diego has developed significant strengths in leadership and team building, marketing and promotions, as well as in customer relationship management, new business development, operations and profit and loss management. Diego holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the Universidad Mayor de San Simon, Bolivia.

David Pozen teaches and writes about constitutional law, information law, and nonprofit law, among other topics. 

In 2019, the American Law Institute named Pozen the recipient of its Early Career Scholars Medal, which is awarded every other year to “one or two outstanding early-career law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law.” Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar of the California Supreme Court, the selection committee chair, described Pozen’s writings on government secrecy and constitutional theory as “remarkable” and “widely influential,” “as timely as they are learned and as creative and thought-provoking as they are nuanced and precise.”

Pozen’s body of work includes dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters. He has also edited two volumes for Columbia University Press, on transparency (2018) and free speech (2020), and been a semi-regular contributor to the Balkinization and Lawfare blogs. He has been the keynote speaker at numerous academic conferences, in the United States and abroad, and his scholarship has been discussed in outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Politico, American Scholar, and NPR.

In 2017, Pozen became the inaugural visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In 2013, the student-run Columbia Society of International Law recognized Pozen with its Faculty Honors Award.

From 2010 to 2012, Pozen served as special adviser to Harold Hongju Koh, legal adviser at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, Pozen was a law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Merrick B. Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and was a special assistant to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. David Kessler is a Professor of Pediatrics and Vice Chair of Innovation & Strategic Initiatives in Columbia’s Department of Emergency Medicine. In this role, he works across teams to develop novel programs and lead strategic initiatives to solve complex healthcare challenges. After graduating from Princeton University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s global health track in Pediatrics, he completed Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship, and Emergency Ultrasound training at Bellevue Hospital, along with a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation from NYU. Dr. Kessler is co-founder of INSPIRE (International Network for Simulation-based Pediatric Innovation, Research, and Education), fostering a global community of investigators dedicated to collaboration, mentorship, and advancing simulation scholarship. His career focuses on improving patient outcomes through innovative technology, with extensive experience in clinical research, grant-funded projects, and international leadership in Simulation and Emergency Ultrasound. He has a long track record of collaboration across the Columbia School of Engineering and Data Science Institute with current research exploring artificial intelligence for automated ultrasound interpretation, virtual and augmented reality for clinical skills training, and simulation-based professionalism education using natural language processing for performance assessment.

Sen. David Lurie is Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and also teaches in History and in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Sen. Lurie's first book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, won the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012, and he received the Marc Van Doren Teaching Award in 2022. He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, as director of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and of the University Committee on Asia and the Middle East, and has been on many departmental and Arts and Sciences committees, including ARC (Academic Review Committee) and PPC (Policy and Planning Committee). Sen. Lurie was the founding president of the Columbia chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors—please join!!), serving until summer 2024.

Sen. David Hajdu is one of the most respected arts critics in America. Currently the staff music critic for The Nation, he served as music critic for The New Republic for 12 years. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and other publications.

Hajdu is the author of seven books of cultural history, criticism, and fiction: "Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn," "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña," "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America," "Heroes and Villains: Essays on Movies, Music, Comics and Culture," "Love for Sale: Pop Music in America," "Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction," and "A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge," a work of graphic nonfiction with art by John Carey. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and three-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His book "Lush Life" was named one of "Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time" by The New York Times.

In addition to writing about music, Hajdu is a successful songwriter and librettist for concert music. His most recent project is the song cycle "The Parsonage," a work of historical nonfiction in musical form, created in collaboration with the composers Regina Carter, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and others.

Hajdu's book in progress is a history of machine-made art, AI, and computational creativity, to be published by W.W. Norton.

In 2022, Hajdu was appointed by President Biden to the National Council on the Humanities.

Sen. Daniel Wolf Savin is Senior Research Scientist in the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory. Dr. Savin's work addresses cutting-edge questions in astrophysics, planetary science, and solar physics through observations coupled with laboratory astrophysics studies in atomic, molecular, condensed matter, and plasma physics. On the University Senate, he represents Professional Research Officers and chairs the Research Officers Committee. He serves on the Executive Committee, co-chairs the Structure and Operations Committee, and serves on the Budget Committee. Dr. Savin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society. In 2026 Dr. Savin was awarded the Laboratory Astrophysics Prize of the Laboratory Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Sen. Daniel Peishan Li is a graduate student in Columbia University’s Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Program, where his work centers on applied data science, statistics, and interdisciplinary social research. He previously earned his B.S. at Emory University, majoring in quantitative science and economics. His interests span machine learning, political behavior, and empirical finance, with experience across investment banking, asset management, and AI adoption. At Emory University, Daniel served as President of Eta Omega Chi, a professional business fraternity aimed at strengthening career development and community-building across campus. As the University Senator representing GSAS/Social Sciences, he is committed to building equal practical support for cross-disciplinary channels, expanding actionable access to academic and career support services, and connecting social science students with the institutional and professional resources they need to thrive.

Sen. Dafne Sarfati is a senior at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, studying industrial engineering with minors in computer science and entrepreneurship and innovation. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she is passionate about utilizing technology, data analytics, and entrepreneurship to drive social innovation, sustainability, and educational equity. 

Dafne has served on the Engineering Student Council for two years as the International Student Representative, where she advocated for policies and initiatives that support the academic, career, and campus life of international students. She is currently the Co-President of the Columbia Turkish Students Association and the Treasurer for the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE), where she manages club finances and leads weekly workshops on entrepreneurship and product management. She is also involved with Columbia Undergraduate Admissions, serving on the Engineering and Global Recruitment Committees. 

Dafne has worked on projects such as developing a community-led well-being index in New York City, and creating a digital course advising system for Columbia’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. Through the University Senate, Dafne hopes to advocate for international students, promote transparency, and strengthen communication between SEAS undergraduates, the University Senate, and the wider Columbia community.

Sen. Clarisa Long’s current research focuses on the intersection of intellectual property law and competition policy. She serves on the committee of The Center for Cybersecurity at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute and is a former faculty director of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology. She is a registered patent prosecutor with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Prior to joining the Columbia Law faculty in 2005, Professor Long was the Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. She has been a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a fellow at Harvard Law School, and an associate at Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C.

Before becoming an academic, Long was a molecular biologist who conducted research in New Zealand and the United States, including at the National Institutes of Health. Her books include Genetic Testing and the Use of Information (AEI Press, 1999) and Intellectual Property Rights in Emerging Markets (AEI Press, 2000).

Sen. Chunhua Weng is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Before arriving at Columbia, she completed a Ph.D. in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the University of Washington at Seattle.

The Weng Lab is focused on clinical research informatics. Her lab develops novel methods to improve the efficiency and generalizability of clinical trials research, to facilitate human phenotyping using electronic health records data, and to automate clinical evidence computing. They invent data-driven methods to optimize the inclusiveness and safety of clinical trial eligibility criteria for COVID-19 clinical trials. They discover knowledge of common clinical trial eligibility criteria from all the studies in ClinicalTrials.gov. They discover clinical trial recruitment success factors. They develop user-friendly software tools to help clinical trialists identify eligible study cohorts in the EHR data and help patients search for clinical trial studies with minimized information overload. They advance human phenotyping using clinical text combined with the Human Phenotype Ontology. They develop neuro-symbolic methods to automate medical evidence comprehension (making PubMed computable). They collaborate closely with clinical investigators, biostatisticians, rare disease experts, and translational researchers at CUIMC and beyond.

The National Library of Medicine, the Human Genome Research Institute, FDA, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute have supported Dr. Weng’s research. Also, Dr. Weng has received several signature awards from Columbia University, including an Irving Fellowship (2007–2010), a two-phase Collaborative and Multidisciplinary Pilot Research Award (CaMPR) (2008–2010), a Columbia University Diversity Research Fellowship (2009), a Florence Irving Professorship (2010–2013), and a multidisciplinary collaborative award (2021-2022). Dr. Weng was a finalist in the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award. Dr. Weng is currently an Associate Editor for Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Sen. Christopher Munsell is the Glascock Associate Professor of Professional Practice of Real Estate Development Finance at Columbia GSAPP. Chris has been featured for his innovations in the hybrid learning environment and for his research on artificial intelligence. He is a regular speaker on capital markets, climate finance, structured finance, and real estate pedagogy with organizations that include PropTech Norway, the Asian Real Estate Association of America, Boston University, the American Real Estate Society, Women in Real Estate Development (WiRED), the Penn Club of New York, Opal Group, MSRED Alumni Inc. and the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University.

Chris has over fifteen years of real estate finance experience working for large institutions and middle-market investors. He has structured and managed more than $3 billion in real estate across all asset types and in more than 20 states. Chris is an Executive Board Member of the Real Estate Network of the Columbia Alumni Association, as well as a member of the Urban Land Institute, the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council, the International Council of Shopping Centers, and the Columbia Alumni Global Sustainability Network. Chris holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Boston University.

Dr. Christine O’Hea is an assistant professor in the Department of Orthodontics at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine. She has been with the College of Dental medicine for 5 years. She earned her DMD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and her certificate in Orthodontics/Masters in Dental Science from the University of Connecticut in 1999. Dr. O'Hea is a Diplomate of the American Board of Orthodontics and has served on the Admissions Committee, Committee on Instruction and Progress Review Committees during her time at CDM.

As Senior Associate Provost for Administration and Planning, Carrie Marlin’s portfolio includes key areas of academic management—faculty housing, K–12 schooling priorities, domestic and international emergency response, space planning, and policy development. She oversees Tompkins Hall Nursery and Childcare Center, guides The School at Columbia University, and directs initiatives for Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering. In partnership with the Office of International Risk Management, she develops and manages international travel policies and protocols. Carrie is also the primary liaison to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to these responsibilities, at the Provost’s request, Carrie has served in interim roles as Executive Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action and Director of the Office of Work/Life.

Prior to joining the Office of the Provost in 2015, she worked in education and public service in New York City and Washington, D.C., as Senior Director of Strategy and Policy at the New York City Department of Education, Chief of Staff in the New York State Assembly, an English and Journalism teacher in District of Columbia Public Schools, and as a senior advisor on local and national political campaigns. 

Carrie received her BA in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her MA in Education from Trinity Washington University, and her MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Sen. Carlos V. Cruz ’88CC was raised in the Marcy Avenue projects in Brooklyn and in South Texas by immigrants from Panama and Mexico and learned the beauty of bringing diverse people together and the power of community, an outlook that he put into practice in his vast extracurricular involvement at Columbia.  As multi-year President of Columbia Pride, and Vice President, Development, and Communications Chairs of the Latino Alumni Association, sometimes simultaneously, he takes great pride in helping amplify and support everyone in the Columbia community.  In his many interactions with Columbians, he is always inspired by our ideas, accomplishments, and character.  After a few great years working with the wonderful team at Columbia Undergraduate Admissions right after graduation with a concentration in Economics, Carlos embarked on a career in supply chain, product development, sourcing, and merchandising where he has risen to positions of leadership at Gap, Inc. and Target, helped structure startups, and consulted. Carlos currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Columbia College Alumni Association and the 1754 Society and the Columbia Alumni Association Board.

Sen. Carlos Alonso is Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Prior to serving as dean, he was Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. On the University Senate, Dean Alonso serves on the Committee on the Rules of University Conduct, and has served on the Commission on Diversity and the Honors and Prizes Committee. 

Dean Alonso received his B.A. from Cornell in Spanish and Latin American Literature and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Yale. He is the author of Modernity and Autochthony: The Spanish American Regional Novel, and The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America, and editor of Julio Cortázar: New Readings. He was the editor of PMLA and edited the Hispanic Review. While at Penn, Dean Alonso received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the university's highest award for pedagogical excellence.

Dean Alonso specializes in 19th and 20th-century Latin American intellectual history and cultural production and in contemporary literary and cultural theory. He has taught the graduate seminar on Literary and Cultural Theory and the course Theories of Culture in Latin America. Under his editorship, the department's Revista Hispánica Moderna received the 2009 Council of Editors of Learned Journals Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.

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. She is passionate about the spatial politics of architecture and their resulting rhetorical practices. Her personal interests include fiction writing, running, and sailing.

Sen. Bruce Fan is the University Senator representing the School of International and Public Affairs. Bruce is currently a first-year Master of International Affairs student at SIPA, concentrating in data science for policy. His academic and professional interests sit at the intersection of public policy, technology, and governance, with particular focus on AI governance, digital assets, and evidence-based policymaking. Prior to SIPA, he studied political science and has worked across government, policy research, and technology-oriented organizations. 

As University Senator, Bruce is focused on strengthening communication between SIPA students and the broader Columbia community, advocating for transparency in university governance, and advancing policies that support student well-being, academic flexibility, and cross-school collaboration. He is especially interested in ensuring that graduate student perspectives are meaningfully represented in institutional discussions that shape Columbia’s future. Bruce views student governance as both a responsibility and an opportunity to listen carefully, act thoughtfully, and serve with integrity on behalf of the SIPA community.

Sen. Brent Stockwell is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, Professor of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences, and Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology. He is a current Senator representing tenured natural sciences faculty in A&S, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Senate. He served on the Alumni Relations and Campus Planning and Physical Development Committees in the Senate. He has been on the Columbia faculty for 22 years, where he has consistently advocated for improved resources for science. In a series of papers from 2003 to 2012, Professor Stockwell discovered a previously unrecognized form of cell death that he termed ferroptosis. Professor Stockwell has received numerous awards, including being elected to the US National Academy of Medicine, the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, the Great Teacher of Columbia College Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, and the Dean Peter Awn Commitment to the LGBTQ community Faculty Award. He has been in the top 1 percent of highly cited researchers the last six years and was ranked among the top 50 scientists in the world by citations in 2025. He has published >200 scientific articles and received >50 research grants for >$40 million. He has served as Chair of the Educational Policy and Planning Committee in A&S, on the Columbia College and College of General Studies Joint Committee on Instruction, as Chair of the Provost's Advisory Committee on the Libraries Research Subcommittee, and as Chair of the Provost Faculty Advisory Committee. He has a BA in Chemistry and Economics from Cornell and a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard.

Brendan O’Flaherty is Professor of Economics. On the University Senate, he serves as parliamentarian, co-chairs the Senate Structure and Operations Committee and is a member of the Elections Commission.

Professor O'Flaherty's research focuses on homelessness, race, and the economics of cities. Before coming to Columbia in 1987, he spent two years as an aide to Kenneth Gibson, the first black mayor of Newark, N.J. He previously served as acting director of finance for the City of Newark and chaired the Program and Planning Committee of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard. 

Sen. Benjamin Bostick is a professor of geochemistry at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and has been a dedicated member of the Columbia University faculty for over 15 years. His research focuses on environmental systems, and he has collaborated extensively with colleagues across Columbia’s campuses. Sen. Bostick recognizes the vital role that research officers play in advancing the University’s mission. As a University Senator, he is committed to implementing changes that bridge the divide between instructional and research faculty. He advocates for stronger connections across academic units and ranks to foster a more integrated and supportive Columbia community. He places a high value on enhancing engagement between research faculty and students and is deeply committed to supporting the research staff who are critical to the University’s scholarly success. Additionally, Sen. Bostick is passionate about expanding the University’s connection with the broader New York City community through research and academic life.

Sen. Ben Orlove, an anthropologist, has conducted fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes since the 1970s and also carried out research in Africa, the Italian Alps, and the Pacific Northwest in the US. 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. He has served as a Lead Author on two reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is active in climate policy work.

Orlove taught for many years at the University of California, Davis. At Columbia University, he is a professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, and also teaches in the Climate School. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and has served as one of the four co-directors of the Center for Research in Environmental Decisions.

Sen. Babi Kruchin has been teaching at the American Language Program (ALP) since 1999. Kruchin teaches academic courses from beginners to advanced and specializes in teaching academic writing for international students and academic skills for graduate students. She has trained ESL teachers on both campus and online courses in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has presented in various TESOL conferences and organizes teacher development events for NYS TESOL. Among other publications, she has contributed to Teacher Development Interactive, Pearson. Her interests lie in teacher education, teaching academic writing, and the effective use of technology in the classroom.

Athena Tsu is a second-year medical student at VP&S. Before medical school, she studied Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where she also served as Gender and Sexuality Representative on Engineering Student Council and worked at an education nonprofit. She currently mentors and teaches students at VP&S and across CUMC through Columbia’s Interprofessional Education curriculum, Student Success Network, and House Mentorship Program; she is committed to building welcoming, inclusive communities and supporting students across Columbia’s schools.

Armando Javier Gimenez (CC’26) serves as ABC’s current President and Interim-Indigenous Representative. Armando is dedicated to advocating for underrepresented groups on campus in his work on ABC and Columbia Black Pre-Law Society. Armando is dedicated to his positions and responsibilities within the Columbia community and strives to assist and serve its students. 

Sen. Ann Thornton is Vice Provost and University Librarian for Columbia University in the City of New York, where she is responsible for one of the top five academic research library systems in North America with world-class physical and digital collections and expert staff in support of research, teaching, and learning. On the University Senate, Vice Provost Thornton serves on the Libraries and Digital Resources Committee, and the Elections Commission.

She came to Columbia in June 2015 after serving for nearly two decades at the New York Public Library, where she was most recently the Andrew W. Mellon Director, a position she held since 2012, with responsibility for research and reference services, collection development, preservation, fellowships, and exhibitions. Vice Provost Thornton’s previous roles at the New York Public Library included Director of Reference and Research Services, Associate Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and Assistant Director of Electronic Resources for the Science, Industry and Business Library.

Early in her career, Vice Provost Thornton served as a systems librarian at the University of Houston Libraries. She was a Leadership Fellow in a program sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and subsequently served on the board of that organization. Additionally, Vice Provost Thornton has chaired the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and has served on the New York State Education Department’s Board of Regents Advisory Council on Libraries and on the Council of Experts for the National Academic Library and Information Systems Foundation of Bulgaria. She currently serves as chair of the board of governors for the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium.

Sen. Anil K. Lalwani joined the faculty of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2012. On the University Senate, Lalwani serves on the Honors and Prizes Committee, and served previously on the External Relations and Research Policy Committee. 

Dr. Lalwani is considered one of the leading ear surgeons for children and adults in the country. His clinical specialties include cochlear implantation, middle ear implants, chronic ear disease, cholesteatoma, facial nerve disorders, otosclerosis, superior semicircular canal dehiscence, glomus tumors, cerebellopontine angle tumors (e.g. acoustic neuromas), and skull base surgery, and gamma knife therapy. 

Dr. Lalwani earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1985 and subsequently completed is internship in General and Thoracic Surgery at Duke University Medical Center and his residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UCSF. Following subspecialty training in Neurotology and Skull base surgery, he served as Senior Staff Fellow at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institute of Health.

Angela V. Olinto is Professor of Astronomy and of Physics and Provost of the University. On the University Senate, Provost Olinto serves on the Executive Committee.

As Provost, Olinto is Columbia’s chief academic officer, and works to advance the academic distinction, intellectual richness, creativity, and integrity of the many facets of Columbia University. She supports the president in the development and implementation of the University’s strategic academic priorities, and leads the deans and faculty in their pursuit of research and teaching excellence.

Olinto directs the development and implementation of Columbia's academic plans and policies, and supervises the work of its schools, departments, institutes, and research centers, with the support of a dedicated team of Vice Provosts and staff of the Office of the Provost. She manages faculty appointments and the tenure review process, supports faculty recruitment and retention as the University collectively aspires to diversify talent and expand excellence, seeds new education initiatives, and heads efforts to lower barriers to cross-disciplinary initiatives that expand the individual and collective impact of our faculty and students. In addition to the Office of the Provost, she oversees a number of centers and institutes, offices, and other academic resources, including the Data Science Institute, University Libraries, the Italian Academy, and the Columbia University Press.

Prior to joining Columbia in March 2024, Olinto was Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. She previously served as Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics there from 2003 to 2006 and again from 2012 to 2017.

As a scholar, Olinto is best known for her contributions to the study of the structure of neutron stars, primordial inflationary theory, cosmic magnetic fields, the nature of the dark matter, and the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma-rays, and neutrinos. She is the Principal Investigator of the POEMMA (Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) space mission and the EUSO (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) on a super pressure balloon (SPB) missions, and was a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, all designed to discover the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles, their sources, and their interactions.

Olinto is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Brazilian Order of Rio Branco medal at the rank of Commander in 2023, a Chaire d’Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de Recherche in 2006, the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2015 at the University of Chicago. She received a BS in Physics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1981, and PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

Sen. Andrew R. Marks, MD. is Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and Clyde '56 and Helen Wu Professor of Molecular Cardiology (in Medicine) at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he is Chair of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics. Dr. Marks holds a B.D. from Amherst College and an MD from Harvard. On the University Senate, Dr. Marks has served on the Executive Committee, Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee, and Commission on the Status of Women.

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.

The Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. She has served as Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and chair of the Black Theology Unit for the American Academy of Religion. Her research specializes in womanist theology and critical theory, philosophy of religion and phenomenology.

Her forthcoming volume is The Scandal of Flesh: Black Women’s Bodies, God, and Politics. She is also the author of The Back of God: A Theology of Otherness in Karl Barth and Paul Ricoeur, and editor of several future volumes including, Political Theology on Edge with Catherine Keller and Clayton Crocket, and The State of Black Theology.

She serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, the Black Theology Papers Project, and she is editor of the web forum Love, Struggle Resist, a critical, social and political forum for the progressive multireligious community.

Dr. White is a recipient of both the Lilly Theological Research Faculty Fellowship from The Association of Theological Schools and The Louisville Institute Book Grant for Minority Scholars.

She has delivered lectures in Brazil, Denmark, India, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and across the United States. She sits on the advisory boards for the Karl Barth Society of North America and Logia at the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She has served as a member of the Committee on the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession and with the Theology and Religious Reflection steering committee for the American Academy of Religion. She also serves on the Committee on Teaching about the United Nations and is a founding member of The Carter Center’s Scholars in Action created to address gender violence against women and girls.

Dr. White is a recipient of Emory University’s 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award.

Prior to her appointment at Union, she served on the faculty at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in theology from The University of Chicago Divinity School, a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School with a concentration in philosophy of religion, and a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College with honors in philosophy. She is also an ordained American Baptist minister and served as a church pastor, hospice chaplain, and chaplain for children and adults with developmental disabilities.

Sen. Amy Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College. Professor Zhou received her BA and PhD in Sociology from UCLA as well as postdoctoral training at the UCSD Institute for Practical Ethics. Her research and teaching interests include healthcare, inequality, race/ethnicity, development, and science and technology studies. Professor Zhou's research has examined health inequalities in both the US and global setting. One line of research explores the impact of global health policies. Her current book project examines how global health efforts to address the HIV epidemic reconfigures local healthcare institutions and has unintended consequences for policymaking, healthcare practices, and the lives of providers and patients in Malawi. Another line of research looks at racial health inequalities in the US, focusing on the meaning of race in delivering racially targeted health services. Recently, she has started a new project that examines the social and ethical implications of gene drive technologies.

Sen. Amy Hungerford is the Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is also the Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of American literature, her first two monographs explore literary engagements with genocide and with religion in the 20th century. Her most recent book, Making Literature Now, examines how social networks—both virtual and traditional—shape contemporary writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading. Her current research and writing is about the sociable qualities of solitude. Ongoing work as co-editor of the post-1945 volume of the Norton Anthology of American Literature serves students around the country for whom it is a central course text; her popular, and free, online course, “The American Novel Since 1945,” is enjoyed worldwide.

Sen. Amir Ziv is James L. Dohr Professor of Professional Practice of Accounting in the Accounting Division of Columbia Business School. Amir Ziv first joined Columbia Business School in 1994. In 2006 he became Vice Dean of the Business School, where, among other responsibilities, he oversaw the MBA and Executive MBA programs (Admission, Students Affairs, Career Management and the Samberg Institute for Teaching Excellence). In 2013 he was appointed Professor of Professional Practice. His current responsibilities include serving as faculty director of the Mendelson Center for Undergraduate Business and of the Master of Science in Accounting and Fundamental Analysis (MSAFA) Program. 

Over the years, Amir has taught in degree and executive education programs and is a recipient of multiple (19 in total) teaching awards, including the Columbia Business School’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also developed and participated in management training and executive development programs at major corporations. Over his career he also served on the faculties of Yale School of Management, and Reichman University, where he founded and headed the executive education division.

Professor Ziv served for over 10 years on the editorial board of the Review of Accounting Studies. His research deals with the effects of accounting regimes and alternatives on economic environments. Specifically, he has studied the role of accounting information in organizational design, financial disclosure, performance evaluation, auditing, and information transmission among strategic players. Dr. Ziv received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, 1990; his M.Sc. from the University of Haifa and Technion, 1986; and his B.A. from the University of Haifa, 1984. He also passed the CPA Examinations, 1985.

Biography:

Professor Aliou Cissé Niang earned his B.A. in Religious Studies with a minor in history (Cum Laude) at Williams Baptist College in 1994 in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.  He received a M.A. Th.  (Graduate Dean’s Award of Excellency) at Logsdon School of Theology (HSU) in 1997 in Abilene, TX, and  a Ph.D.  in Biblical Interpretation–New Testament (with Distinction) at Brite Divinity School (TCU) in Fort Worth, TX in  2007.  While at Brite Divinity School, he served as Graduate Assistant and Lecturer in New Testament Survey classes  and co-taught a course on Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation with Dr. Leo G. Perdue.  He was also instructor at the Department of Religion at TCU where he taught Understanding Religion: The Bible from 2002-2003 and was a guest lecturer on the “African and the African Diaspora: History, Religion, and Culture” (RELI – 20503) (Honors).  He was engaged in inter-religious dialogue on “Christian Perspectives on the Jesus of the Gospels” with Dr. Yushau Sodiq (Professor at the Department of Religion–TCU) at the Moslem academy in  Arlington, TX. Before joining Union in August 2011, he served as assistant and associate professor of New Testament at Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, TN, where he was named The Rev. Dr. James L. Netters Associate Professor of New Testament (2008) and received The Paul R. Brown Distinguished Teaching Award in 2010.  While in Memphis, he served as Biblical Theologian in Residence at the First Baptist Church of Memphis, TN, and spoke at many churches and the Church Health Center providing workshops on Understanding the Bible and seminars on various biblical topics.  He continues to speak in local churches and lectures in both academic and ecumenical settings.

He is a member of the Commission on Baptist-Muslim Relations of the Baptist World Alliance and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Voices in Biblical Studies (IVBS)–Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Peer-reviewed series.

Professor Niang’s first book (Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal: The Apostle Paul, Colonists and Sending Gods, Brill, 2009) compares the colonial objectification of his people by French colonists to the Graeco-Roman Colonial objectifications of the ancient Celts/Gauls/Galatians, and explores Paul’s role  in bringing about a different portrayal.  He is working on his third book on Illness and Health.  His teaching and research explore themes and issues in Biblical and Postcolonial Theologies.  Niang believes it takes a village to create a leader and turns his classroom into a micro-village–a learning community where brothers, sisters, and non-binary friends learn to appreciate their diverse and yet unified experiences of God.  His teaching pedagogy reflects his exercise of the wisdom of his West African Diola elders as he seeks to create and foster a learning environment where students would freely yet responsibly engage in the ongoing critical quest for healthy ways to shape the social and spiritual dimensions of their journeys of faith.  He is passionate about translating academic work to the Church.

Education

BA., Williams Baptist College, 1995
M.A., Hardin-Simmons University, 1997
Ph.D. Texas Christian University, 2003

Sen. Alan Yang is a Senior Lecturer in Discipline at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). He teaches the core Quantitative Analysis I & II sequence (introductory statistics and econometrics) and Quantitative Methods in Program Evaluation (applied econometric methods for causal inference) at SIPA.

His research interests include public opinion and political behavior, research methods and statistics, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality studies. His research has appeared in edited volumes and journals such as Political Science Quarterly, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. His book, Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics (with Rodolfo de la Garza), was published in 2020 (New York and London: Routledge). He has done statistical consulting work for non-profit, NGO, and academic organizations. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at Columbia University.

Sen. Adena Bargad, PhD, CNM is Associate Professor of Nursing at Columbia University School of Nursing. She is a Certified Nurse Midwife with more than two decades of clinical and teaching experience. She has served as Program Coordinator for the Women’s Health Subspecialty in the School of Nursing for over a decade and specializes in women’s sexual and reproductive health care across the life cycle. She maintains an active clinical practice with Planned Parenthood affiliates across New York. Dr. Bargad has designed and led graduate-level nursing curricula that integrate simulation-based education and distributed learning technologies. She is dedicated to preparing the next generation of nurse practitioners and midwives to advance health equity in their practice. Dr. Bargad has been nationally recognized as a PATH Framework trainer for Title X and Essential Access Health which promotes reproductive autonomy and values-centered counseling strategies. She was honored to receive the School of Nursing Teacher of the Year Award in 2023.

A Lecturer at Columbia, Sen. Adela J. Gondek first taught American political theory and the Core Curriculum in the Department of Political Science, and then began teaching ethics at SIPA, SPS, and E3B. She acquired her PhD in the Department of Government at Harvard, with cross-disciplinary study in the law and divinity schools and the Kennedy School of Government.  She has also served as a legislative analyst in the Massachusetts State Senate, with investigative specialization in consumer product safety, prison reform and model judicial practice.  Dr. Gondek currently focuses on environmental, sustainability, and public ethics in the Sustainable Development Program of the Arts and Sciences, and the Master of Arts in Climate and Society Program at the Climate School.  Most recently, she has written a chapter titled, The City Meets Practical Ethics, published in a book titled, Urban Sustainable Development (2024).  She has been made a member of the Women’s International Forum (WIF), which works in partnership with the United Nations.  Under this aegis, she has presented a talk titled, A New Ethics, at the United Nations (November, 2025).  She has also presented a talk in the American Community School in Athens, Greece (April, 2026) on Education, Leadership and Ethics.

Sen. Adana A. M. Llanos, PhD, MPH, is a geneticist, cancer and molecular epidemiologist, and health equity scholar whose research bridges molecular biology and population health to illuminate the complex pathways linking social inequities and biological mechanisms of disease. She is a tenured Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and Co-Leader of the Cancer Population Science Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Llanos' pioneering studies have advanced understanding of the biological effects of adiposity-related hormones in breast cancer and have revealed how chronic stress, neighborhood deprivation, and racial segregation contribute to breast cancer inequities. Another exciting area of her research program focuses on investigating the health implications of long-term exposure to environmental toxicants, especially endocrine-disrupting chemicals and carcinogens found in personal care products, including hair products.

Beyond her scientific contributions, Dr. Llanos is a dedicated mentor, educator, and community partner. She works closely with non-profit organizations to promote health advocacy, education, and survivorship, particularly among historically marginalized populations. Through her research, leadership, and service, Dr. Llanos is committed to advancing a more equitable future in which all people have the opportunity to thrive.

Sen. Adam Cannon is Teaching Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Cannon joined Columbia in July, 2000. From 2000 to 2005 he was also a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Cannon came to Columbia after earning a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Cannon’s current research interests are in computer science education, machine learning, and statistical pattern recognition. He is a winner of the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, The Society of Columbia Graduates Great Teacher Award, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science Alumni Association’s Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.

Sen. Claire Shipman, CC ‘86, SIPA ‘94, was appointed Acting President of Columbia University in March 2025. A longtime leader within the Columbia community, Shipman has served on Columbia’s Board of Trustees since 2013 and was elected Co-Chair in 2023. She is an award-winning journalist and an author and leading voice for the advancement of women’s leadership.

Shipman built an award-winning journalism career with CNN, NBC, and ABC, where she covered major global events, including the collapse of the Soviet Union. She received a DuPont and an Emmy Award for her coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student uprising, a second DuPont Award for reporting on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and a Peabody Award as part of CNN’s team covering the failed 1993 Soviet coup.

Shipman holds two Columbia degrees: a Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies. Learn more about Acting President Claire Shipman.

Sen. Abosede George is the Tow Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She teaches courses on African migrations, urban history, childhood and youth, and women, gender, and sexuality in African History. A native of Lagos, Nigeria, and a self-identified life-long migrant, she has lived in Zaire, Mali, the United States, and The Netherlands, and she has traveled as an African woman through five of the seven continents. Her articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, Meridians, and The Washington Post among other publications. Her prize-winning book, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development, was published in 2014 by Ohio University Press. She is currently working on a history of free Black migration from various parts of the African diaspora to Lagos, West Africa across the nineteenth century. Follow The Ekopolitan Project on FB, IG, or Twitter to learn more.

Sen. Aarsh Ray was born and raised in Katy, Texas, a suburb west of Houston. He attended Texas Tech University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in Microbiology. Currently, he is a member of the class of 2027 in the College of Dental Medicine. He is passionate about learning about the issues and challenges facing the oral health care system and how to approach them. In his free time, he enjoys watching and playing basketball and football. Within the University Senate, his main passions lie in ensuring that Columbia University is an encouraging and safe place for all students to excel in their collegiate endeavors. He is thrilled to serve his institution, Columbia University, which has been a pillar of educational excellence for centuries.