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In
This Issue:
Bill Gates Speaks to SEAS Students
SEAS Sees Operas and Concerts
Entrepreneurialism, with a Scottish EDGE
Three Chairs for Columbia Engineering
SEAS Leads Technology & Society Studies at Columbia
Inspiring Children and Youth to Become Engineers
SEAS Incubates New Generation of Engineered Tissue
The Power of Data Mining and Machine Learning
Chemical Engineering
Celebrates 100 Years
Engineering Start-Ups + Venture Capitalists = Success
SEAS Teachers Honored by SOCG and Engineering Alumni
Reunion: Maintaining the Columbia Connection
Our Newest Alumni (Class of 2005) Celebrate
Homecoming 2005

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