We celebrated our graduates’ senior design projects. We partnered with the dental school to launch a new program in dental engineering. Along with our colleagues at Columbia Business School, we graduated the first cohort of MBAxMS students. The Columbia University Formula Racing team made an impressive showing at the national competition, and the Columbia Space Institute’s rocketry team brought home a gold (and set its own records) at the inaugural FAR-OUT competition in the Mojave Desert. Our faculty partnered with collaborators across disciplines to teach courses on the social implications of AI and the political impact of algorithms and machine learning. Researchers in the storied Carleton Laboratory worked with the city to restore the pumps in the Morningside Park pond. 

Driving the Dialogue

Image

We launched The Lever, a limited-series newsletter featuring faculty perspectives on global challenges. The first series explored solutions for storing renewable energy. We also kicked off the Lecture Series in AI. In one of the first talks, the legendary deep-learning researcher Yann LeCun, who is Meta’s chief AI scientist, delivered a talk to more than 1,000 attendees. Media outlets across the world tapped our researchers’ expertise in articles and video on topics from digital twins in biomedical research to desalination technology and intelligent robots— and every aspect of AI. Kristen Myers and Christine Hendon challenged us to imagine how engineers can improve women’s health, and Pierre Gentine asked if AI could save the environment. Tal Danino dazzled readers with an art book featuring research inspired images from his lab.

Celebrating Faculty Excellence

Image

Columbia Engineering celebrated the election of faculty members Jingguang Chen and Jeannette Wing to the National Academy of Engineering and congratulated Marco Giometto, Alex Urban, and Brian Smith on their NSF CAREER awards. We commended Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic on winning a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York Investigator Award. We were pleased to share that Oleg Gang was named a 2024 Vannevar Bush Fellow, that Ke Cheng received the Coulter Award, that Christos Papadimitriou and Michael Weinstein were named Simons Society Senior Fellows. We congratulated Vishal Misra on his appointment to vice dean of computing and artificial intelligence and John Kymissis on being named vice dean of infrastructure and innovation, and Kymissis' election to the National Academy of Inventors.