In This Issue:

Three Chairs for Columbia Engineering

Joining the field of named professorships at the Engineering School are three newly established chairs—the Lawrence Gussman Professorship; the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professorship and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professorship. “We are deeply grateful to each of these donors for choosing to insure the excellence of our faculty by endowing these professorships,” said Dean Zvi Galil. “I am happy to announce that Alfred V. Aho, professor of computer science, has been named the first Lawrence Gussman Professor; Kathleen McKeown, professor of computer science, is the first Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor; and Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering and of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, is the first holder of the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professorship.”

Alan Silberstein '69, left, Carol Silberstein B'69, and Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering and of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, and the first Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor.

Alan and Carol Silberstein Chair

The Alan and Carol Silberstein Chair, established late last Spring, was inaugurated with a mini-symposium, Engineering for a Better World. Alan Silberstein ’69, a management expert in financial services, and his wife, Carol Krongold Silberstein B’69, an attorney, spoke about their reasons for establishing the chair.

Noting that it was Earth Day, Mr. Silberstein said their decision to fund a professorship “reflects our belief in the transforming power of engineering to the world at large.” Mrs. Silberstein noted that “this Chair has immense, life-changing possibilities for Asia, Africa and other poor areas of the world.”

The couple said they wanted the gift to be a mark of the leadership of Dean Zvi Galil. “His legacy may be the creation of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering,” Mr. Silberstein said, “and we are particularly proud that Professor Lall is one of the world’s leading experts in water resources.”

Upmanu Lall is chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate Prediction. His research interests include hydroclimatology, nonlinear dynamics, stochastic hydrology, and integrated management of water, energy and environmental systems.

“Water is our most valuable resource,” he said. “The sustainable development and use of water and the environment are key to reducing poverty and societal vulnerability to the vagaries of nature.” In his closing remarks, Dean Galil said: “This symposium has given us a glimpse into how science, engineering and the applied sciences can teach our next generation. This department might turn out to be the most exciting and revolutionary department in our School. It has the knowledge, the spirit and the heart.”

Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Chair

Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, left, speaks to Kathleen McKeown, the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor.

The first Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor is Kathleen McKeown, former chair of the Computer Science Department. She adds this “first” to many others, including the first woman to receive tenure at the Engineering School and the first woman department chair. The Rothschild Professorship was endowed by Henry Rothschild and Dr. Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, Howe Professor Emerita of Materials Science, to be awarded to a tenured woman faculty member of Engineering or the hard sciences.

In establishing the professorship, Dr. Neumark said, “My husband and I felt that it was appropriate to encourage the academic careers of other women at Columbia.” Dr. Neumark is one of the world’s foremost experts on doping wide-bandgap semiconductors. “ Columbia enabled me to do independent research that led to significant progress in my field,” she said. She has done groundbreaking research in this area that also led to several significant patents. As a result of this work, she was named Howe Professor.

She graduated summa cum laude in 1948 from Barnard, received an M.A. in chemistry from Radcliffe as a Dana Fellow, and Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia in 1951. She began her career as a research physicist at Sylvania Research Laboratories, moving to Philips Laboratories as a senior member of their research staff. In 1985, she left Philips to become a professor of materials science at Columbia.

Prof. Kathleen McKeown’s research interests are many and cross-disciplinary, including text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, digital libraries, concept to speech generation and natural language interfaces. She received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and joined the Columbia faculty. She has received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, and was selected as an AAAI Fellow.

Lawrence Gussman Professorship

The Lawrence Gussman Professorship was established through a bequest of the late Mr. Gussman ’38, ’39 Ch.E. (CC’37), who joined Stein, Hall & Co., Inc. in 1940 and rose to become its president, director and CEO. Under his leadership, the company broadened its activities to become a leading manufacturer of chemical specialties, merging with Cel-anese Corp. in 1971. An active member of the Engineering Council, a Board member of Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association for many years and, in 1970, recipient of the Egleston Medal, the Alumni Association’s highest award for distinguished engineering achievement, he also held the University’s Alumni Medal for service to the Engineering School. In 1993, Mr. Gussman made a gift to the Gouverneur Morris Pooled Income Fund and, upon his death, the principal created the Lawrence Gussman Professorship in Engineering.

Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor
Kathleen McKeown, T. C. Chang Professor Shree Nayar, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson
Professor Mihalis Yanakakis and Lawrence Gussman Professor Alfred V. Aho

The Computer Science Department gave each of its recent four chaired professors a Columbia chair. Shown above seated in their respective new chairs are, from left, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor Kathleen McKeown, T. C. Chang Professor Shree Nayar, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor Mihalis Yanakakis and Lawrence Gussman Professor Alfred V. Aho.

Professor Alfred V. Aho, the first Lawrence Gussman Professor, is a former chair of the Computer Science Department and currently Vice-Chair for Undergraduate Education. He is the author of 10 textbooks in several fields of computer science that have been translated into many languages for use by students around the world.

He received the Society of Columbia Graduates Great Teacher Award and the 2003 John von Neumann Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Waterloo. Prior to coming to Columbia in 1995, he was Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that invented UNIX, C and C++.

Last month, the Computer Science Department hosted a reception celebrating the Rothschild and Gussman chairs, honoring the donors and the incumbents. At the same time, the Department recognized the appointment last year of Mihalis Yanakakis as the Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor in computer science. The Computer Science Department now has six named professorships, including the T.C. Chang Professorship held by Shree Nayar.