STUDENT AWARD WINNERS

Zvi Galil Award for Improvement in Engineering Student Life
Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE)

Bernard Jaffe Prize 
Yunus Kovankaya 

School of Engineering and Applied Science Scholar Athlete Award
Elisa Luo

Campbell Award
Alexander Moreno

School of Engineering and Applied Science Student Activities Award
Katherine O'Reilly

Thomas "Pop" Harrington Medal
Athena Pagon 

George Vincent Wendell Memorial Award
Elias Tzoc-Pacheco

Robert D. Lilley Award for Socially Responsible Engineering
Engineers Without Borders: Yuba County

Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for Excellence
Yash Vijay Amonkar, PhD

Graduate Student Life Leadership Awards
Mark Barbet, PhD
Albert Fernandez Veiga, MS

Graduate Speaker
Camille-Louise Kouba Mbayo, MS

Valedictorian and Illig Medal Winner
Ethan Wu

Salutatorian 
Julia Zhao

FACULTY AWARD WINNERS

CEAA Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award
Lydia Chilton, Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Xunyu Zhou, Liu Family Professor of Financial Engineering 

Edward and Carole Kim Award for Faculty Involvement
Hardeep Johar, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research 

Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award 
Brian Smith, Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Presidential Teaching Award Winner
Yi Zhang, Associate in the Discipline of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

ALUMNI AWARD WINNER

Columbia Alumni Medalist
Alexander A. Ned BS’87, MS’90 

ABOUT THE STUDY

JOURNAL: PNAS

TITLE: "The Montreal Protocol is delaying the occurrence of the first ice-free Arctic summer"

AUTHORS: Mark R. England (1) and Lorenzo M. Polvani (2)

1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, UC Santa Cruz; now at the University of Exeter
2. Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

FUNDING: This research was funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation to Columbia University. The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

ABOUT THE STUDY

JOURNAL: PNAS

TITLE: "Implicit learning of convective organization explains precipitation stochasticity"

AUTHORS: Sara Shamekh, Kara Lamb, Yu Huang, Pierre Gentine

Department of Earth of Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

FUNDING: The study was supported by: SS and PG acknowledge funding from European Research Council grant USMILE, from Schmidt Future project M2LiNES and from the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center (STC) Learning the Earth with Artificial intelligence and Physics (LEAP), Award 2019625 - STC. KDL acknowledges support from LEAP and DOE Grant DE-SC0022323 ``Discovering Physically Meaningful Structures from Climate Extreme Data."

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Allie Obermeyer, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is among this year’s Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2023. The award is given by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation for faculty within five years of their academic careers who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education. 

Obermeyer, who joined Columbia Engineering in 2017, focuses on developing novel protein-based materials to address problems in biomedicine, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. In recent years, Obermeyer has teamed with Helen Lu, Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering, on the development of bioengineering sustainable textiles. The Columbia Engineering professors partnered with Theanne Schiros, a Columbia research scientist and an associate professor at FIT, on the startup Werewool, which uses protein structures in place of plastics to make fibers that can biodegrade and return nutrients to the soil, making the clothing supply chain more sustainable. Werewool recently won the ELLE & Polestar Design Towards Zero Award for innovators who use new and circular materials within the fashion industry, and has also raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors. 

Prior to Columbia, Obermeyer was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, and obtained her PhD in chemistry and chemical biology from the University of California, Berkeley and her BS in chemistry from Rice University. She has won an NSF CAREER Award, the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from the Columbia Engineering Alumni Association, and the Andrew D. Morsey Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence from the Chemistry Department at the University of California, Berkeley. 

As a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar, she and the 18 award winners will receive an unrestricted research grant of $100,000. Established in 1946 by chemist, inventor, and businessman Camille Dreyfus, the foundation’s stated mission is to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances throughout the world.