News Briefs

Dr. Katrina Armstrong Named Interim University President

Dr. Katrina Armstrong became interim University president on Aug. 14, succeeding President Minouche Shafik, who announced her resignation that same day. Armstrong is also CEO of Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, which includes the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of Nursing, the College of Dental Medicine and the Mailman School of Public Health. She has held that post since 2022.

In addition, Armstrong is executive VP for health and biomedical sciences for the University and the Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor of the University. She is an internationally recognized investigator in medical decision making, quality of care, and cancer prevention and outcomes, as well as an award-winning teacher and a practicing primary care physician.

In a letter to the community, Board of Trustees co-chairs David Greenwald LAW’83 and Claire Shipman ’86, SIPA’94 called Armstrong “the right leader for this moment,” and said that she “brings a truly exceptional skillset to our University and our current challenges. She is a medical leader who cares deeply about community and society — a scientist and a humanist.”

Previously, Armstrong was chair of the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and physician-in-chief at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. She began her academic career at Penn, where across 17 years she held a series of leadership roles, including as director of research at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, chief of general internal medicine and associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center. She earned a B.A. in architecture from Yale, then spent a year at the National Institutes of Health before beginning medical school at Johns Hopkins.

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Bollinger To Be 2024 Hamilton Medal Honoree

The 2024 Alexander Hamilton Medal will go to President Emeritus Lee C. Bollinger, who led Columbia from 2002 to 2023, the longest tenure of an Ivy League president in the modern era.

The Hamilton Medal, the highest honor awarded to a member of the Columbia College community, recognizes distinguished service to the College and accomplishment in any field of endeavor. The 76th annual Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner will take place on Thursday, Nov. 21, in Low Rotunda.

During his two decades of leadership, Bollinger enacted a wide array of transformational academic initiatives to assure the University’s future among the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. Among these was creating Columbia’s first new campus in nearly a century, in Manhattanville — a pioneering model designed for artistic creativity and local community engagement.

He also established the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, the world’s foremost neuroscience research center, and created the Columbia Climate School, the first of its kind in the nation. To leverage scholarly knowledge for solutions to global problems — what he described as the University’s Fourth Purpose — Bollinger established Columbia World Projects and built a network of 11 Columbia Global Centers across four continents.

He led two of the most successful capital campaigns in the history of higher education and, throughout his presidency, continued to teach a popular undergraduate course on the First Amendment.

A prominent advocate for diversity in higher education, Bollinger led the seminal Supreme Court cases at the University of Michigan that first upheld the constitutional right of colleges and universities to consider race in admissions to build a more diverse student body.

During his tenure, Columbia substantially expanded financial aid for the College and Columbia Engineering, and achieved record levels of undergraduate applications, selectivity and diversity. Bollinger is the first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty and one of the nation’s foremost First Amendment scholars, widely published on the centrality of free speech and press to a democratic society.

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New Deans for Three Schools

Three Columbia schools are welcoming new leadership during the 2024–25 academic year.

Daniel Adebe has been appointed dean of the Law School and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law. Prior to joining Columbia, Adebe spent six years as the vice provost for academic affairs and governance at Chicago; he was also deputy dean of its law school from 2016 to 2018. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between the constitutional law of U.S. foreign affairs and public international law.

Sarah Cole has been named dean of the School of the Arts, a role she had held in an interim capacity since last fall. Prior to that, since 2018, she had been dean of humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; she also was previously chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Cole is an expert in literary modernism and teaches an array of topics in 19th- and 20th-century literature.

Alexis Abramson, an expert in sustainable energy technology and advanced energy research with extensive experience in academic administration, has been appointed dean of the Columbia Climate School. She is currently dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth and will begin at Columbia on Jan. 1.

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Good as Gold!