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IN LUMINE TUO
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HONORED:
In March, the National Science Foundation named Duncan J.
Watts, assistant professor of sociology, as a Faculty Early
Career Development Award recipient. The $370,000 award, which will
support Watts's research on the theory and applications of complex
social networks, is the NSF's most prestigious award for junior
faculty members. Watts's research - which draws upon techniques
used in physics, applied mathematics and computer science - seeks
to map the ways large-scale human networks, such as a
multi-national corporation, function in the new economy. Watts, who
attended the University of New South Wales in Australia before
earning his Ph.D. from Cornell, is currently at Columbia as part of
an initiative funded by the University's Office of Strategic
Initiatives (OSI), a branch of the Office of the Executive Vice
Provost.
MAYORAL:
Dominick Purpura '49 and two Columbia physicists, Horst
Stormer and Janet Conrad, were among eight New Yorkers
who received the 2001 Mayor's Award for Science and Technology,
awarded for breakthrough research or achievements for the
betterment of science.
Purpura, who has been dean of the Albert Einstein School of
Medicine since 1984, is widely recognized for his work on the
origin of brain waves, developmental neurobiology, and the
mechanism of epilepsy. His groundbreaking work on mental
retardation identified the primary involvement of certain
structural abnormalities in nerve cells in the brain.
Stormer became Columbia's 59th Nobel laureate in 1998, when he
shared the physics prize for discovering the fractional quantum
hall effect, which may have applications in the development of
enhanced microchips. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1997.
Conrad, an associate professor of physics, will receive a Young
Investigator Award, given to researchers younger than 40. She is
currently pursuing high-energy research at the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, where she is investigating the unproven
theory that neutrinos have mass.
Two
other Columbians also received Mayor's Awards this year: Angelo
Christian, associate professor at P&S, and New York
Times science correspondent John Noble Wilford '62J.
POLITICAL:
Professor of Political Science Robert Shapiro has been
awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize with his coauthor, Lawrence Jacobs
'90 GSAS, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, for
their book, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and
the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (2000). In the book,
Shapiro and Jacobs argue that when not facing election, politicians
routinely disregard public opinion and support policies favored by
ideology, party activists, political contributors and
interest-group allies.
The
$5,000 award, given annually since 1992 by the Joan Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John
F. Kennedy School of Government, honors books dedicated to
improving government or politics through an examination of the
press and government or the intersection of press and politics in
creating public policy.
Shapiro, who is chairman of the political science department
and has a joint appointment with the School of International and
Public Affairs, is associate director of Columbia's Institute for
Social and Economic Research and Policy. He is co-author of The
Rational Public (1992) and co-editor of Presidential
Power (2000).
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