Frontiers of Science

Matt Collinge graduated from Penn State University, where he studied Astronomy and Physics. He did his doctoral work in Astrophysics at Princeton University. His research interests include extreme active galactic nuclei, variable stars, and the central structure of the Milky Way. Matt is currently a Columbia Science Fellow in the Department of Astronomy.

Peter deMenocal received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Columbia University in 1991. He is an Associatge Professor within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and conducts his research at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He uses geochemical analyses of deep-sea sediments to reconstruct past changes in climate and ocean circulation. Current research includes studying the role of African climate change in shaping the course of human evolution, and understanding the patterns and causes of climate change over the past millennia of the current warm period (the Holocene).
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Peter Eisenberger received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in Applied Physics. His physics research at Bell Laboratories, Exxon Research and Engineering and Princeton University was in using x-rays to probe the properties of materials, including biological and self assembled thin films. He joined Columbia in 1996 as the Founding Director of the Earth Institue and Director of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. He is currently a Professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences where he is doing research on a knowledge based approach to human co-evolution with the planet. He is also involved in developing a new science center that will utilize new approaches to learning.

Angela Gee graduated with a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology and Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.   She received her PhD. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia University. Her research investigates the neural mechanisms that underlie how we allocate attention and perceive the visual world.   Angela is currently a Columbia Science Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior

Stuart Gill graduated from Melbourne University in 1999 and received his doctorate from Swinburne University in 2005. He is a Columbia Science Fellow in the Department of Astronomy. Stuart's research focuses on the first billion years of the Universe's evolution, specifically following the metal enrichment during this period by the 'first objects'. His interests also include the study of galaxies that inhabit the largest objects in the Universe - galaxy clusters.

David Helfand graduated from Amherst College and received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 1978 and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Astronomy. He was a recipient of the Columbia Great Teacher award in 2002. His research interests include large-scale structure as derived from radio surveys, the origin and evolution of neutron stars and supernova remnants, and active galactic nuclei and the cosmic X-ray background.
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Sidney Hemming received her BS in Geology at Midwestern State University (Wichita Falls, TX), MS in Geology at Tulane University, and a Ph.D. in Geology at SUNY Stony Brook. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and has been on the faculty of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences since 1996. Her current research focuses on the application of isotope geochemistry of sedimentary archives to understand Earth’s history. A particular research interest is the study of past variations in Earth’s climate.

Joy Hirsch has recently been recruited to Columbia University Medical Center as Director of the Functional MRI Research Center. The new Center is focused on the investigation of systems within the brain that govern cognition, perception, and disease-based applications for neuroimaging. Medical and graduate-level educations as well as multi-investigator collaborations are a high priority. Prior to her recruitment to Columbia she founded the fMRI laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and pioneered the introduction of brain mapping procedures for clinical applications as well as neuroimaging investigations of bilingualism. Her current research interests are focused on understanding the neurocircuitry that governs early and late visual processes, second-language acquisition, and cognitive control such as conflict and error monitoring. She was previously a Professor at Yale University in the Neuroscience Program and the Department of Ophthalmology after receiving her Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Kathryn Johnston is an Astrophysicist, interested in understanding how our own Galaxy formed.  She pursues this goal using a combination of close collaborations with observational colleagues and computer simulations of galactic collisions.  She arrived in this field following an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cambridge University,  a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz and a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.   She joined the Columbia Astronomy Faculty in Fall 2006, after spending 7 years as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University

David Kagan received his BA in mathematics and physics from Columbia University in 2002 and his PhD in Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University in 2007. His main interests are in quantum field theory and string theory and he is currently a Columbia Science Fellow at the Physics department's Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics (ISCAP).

Alison Keimowitz graduated from Wesleyan University and received a master's degree in Physical Chemistry from Yale University. She then came to Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences where she completed a doctorate examining geochemical controls on arsenic in groundwater. Alison spent the past academic year in Israel on a Fulbright fellowship studying pollution-degrading bacteria and regional water issues.

Darcy Kelley graduated from Barnard College and received her Ph.D. from the Rockefeller University. She has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 1981 and is currently Professor of Biological Sciences. In 2002 she was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. Darcy Kelley's research uses the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis , to study the neurobiology of social communication, with the goal of determining how one brain communicates with another and to study sexual differentiation, the hormone-directed developmental program that leads to male and female phenotypes.
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William H. Menke graduated from MIT and received his doctorate from Columbia University. He is currently is a Professor and Chair of the departmant of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Deputy Director of Education of LDEO. William Menke's research uses seismic tomography methods to form images of the earth's deep interior. He has applied these methods to ridge axes and volcanoes in Iceland, fault systems in California, and mountains in the Himalayas.
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Eleni Nikitopoulos received a BA in Psychology at Tufts University and a DVM from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. In 2003 she received a PhD in Behavioral Biology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her dissertation work concerned female sexual strategies in long-tailed macaques. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the E3B department, studying cooperation and kinship in female blue monkeys.

Ben R. Oppenheimer Associate Curator and Associate Professor Physical Sciences, Astrophysics Education Ph.D. in Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, 1999 B.A. in Physics, Columbia College, Columbia University, 1994.
Dr. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist: he studies planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. This nascent field is so young that much of the work involves developing the techniques needed to see these planets, so that their light can be dissected and analyzed. His optics laboratory in the Rose Center is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle this problem. In March 2004, Dr. Oppenheimer deployed the world's most sensitive coronagraph at the AEOS Telescope in Maui. He designed and built this coronagraph in his AMNH lab. See lyot.org for more information. Dr. Oppenheimer also works on faint white dwarfs, the remnants of normal stars, and brown dwarfs, star-like objects that are too small to be stars but too large to be called planets. He is the co- discoverer of the first brown dwarf, called Gliese 229B, and was the first scientist to study the atmospheric composition, chemistry and physics of a sub-stellar object outside our solar system.

Beth O'Shea graduated from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, with a Bachelor’s degree in Earth and Environmental Science (Honors) and a Ph.D in Geochemistry. Her research investigates the occurrence and distribution of arsenic in groundwater of Australia and the United States. In 2005 she joined the Dickinson College Geology Department, where she spent 2 years as Visiting Assistant Professor of Geochemistry. Beth also spent 4 years as a hydrogeologist assessing and remediating contaminated land with an environmental consulting company in Sydney. She is currently a Frontiers of Science Fellow at Columbia University, where she actively continues her arsenic geochemical research while pursuing her commitment to undergraduate teaching.

Ana Petrovic received a B.A. in Chemistry from Whitman College in 2003 and received the Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in summer 2007. Her research has involved structural investigations of chiral organic, inorganic and biomolecules via tandem implementation of three chiroptical spectroscopic methods (Vibrational Circular Dichroism, Electronic Circular Dichroism and Optical Rotatory Dispersion). Ana is a Columbia Science Fellow in the Department of Chemistry.

Robert Pollack is Professor of Biological Sciences, and Director of the Earth Institute’s Center for the Study of Science and Religion, at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. He is the author of more than a hundred research papers on the oncogenic phenotype of mammalian cells in culture, and has edited many books and reviews on aspects of molecular biology. His 1994 book, "Signs of Life: the Language and Meanings of DNA," received the Lionel Trilling Award, and has been translated into six languages. His latest work, "The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: order, meaning and free will in modern science," was published in 2000. He is currently writing a Sloan Foundation-supported book on the moral, ethical and religious implications of the agendas of modern medical science.Dr. Pollack graduated from Columbia College with a major in physics in 1961. He holds a Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis University. He has been a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia since 1978, and was Dean of Columbia College from 1982 to 1989.

Eliza Woo graduated with a B.A. in Integrative Biology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 and received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Stony Brook University in 2008. Her research uses biological invasions to answer fundamental questions in community ecology while informing practical conservation applications. Eliza is currently a Columbia Science Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences.