Alheli D. Alvarado-Diaz
Lecturer in History, Department of History
Alhelí de María Alvarado-Díaz is a historian. She is the creator of Shooting the Core: Reinterpreting Political Theory through Film, Documentary and Reportage, the founder of Theory and Practice, a working collective of postdoctoral fellows and senior scholars on political philosophy and history. She teaches political theory and cultural history at Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, NYU and Pratt Institute and is currently working on a manuscript Agent Provocateur: A Cultural History of Rebels and Provocation since the French Revolution.
Donna Bilak
Lecturer in the Discipline of History, Department of History
Donna Bilak is currently the History of Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow for The Making and Knowing Project directed by Pamela H. Smith at Columbia University. Dr. Bilak’s research interests encompass early modern European history of science, alchemy, and emblem culture, as well as 19th-century jewelery history and technology.
Susan Boynton
Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music
Susan Boynton is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music. As a medieval musicologist she specializes in the study of liturgical manuscripts, monastic liturgy, music drama, vernacular song, and relationships between sound and image. Her first Hybrid Learning grant focused on introducing graduate students to digital humanities techniques for the study and presentation of medieval liturgical manuscripts, especially those in the collection of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Adam Cannon
Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science
Adam Cannon is the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. Dr. Cannon joined Columbia in 2000. From 2000-2005 he also worked as a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Dr. Cannon’s current research interests are in computer science education, machine learning and statistical pattern recognition. In his role as Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education he has introduced several new degree programs and is responsible for the undergraduate curriculum in computer science. He has won numerous teaching awards during his career and remains committed to promoting the highest possible quality in undergraduate education.
Nyssa Chow
Nyssa Chow is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, and a recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, the Women in Film and Television Fellowship, the Toms Fellowship, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation Award. She has worked as a photojournalist and in broadcast journalism. Nyssa has served as the Chief Editor of Generation Lion Magazine with circulation throughout the Caribbean, New York, and Miami. She is the 2012 recipient of the prestigious Sloan Foundation Grant, and in fulfillment of the grant, produced a feature length web-series. In 2014, she won the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Most recently, Nyssa has been one of five writers nominated for the Blue List, and invited to appear in the Hollywood Black List database. Born in Trinidad, she has a particular interest in social justice, trust, and political participation.
Matthew Connelly
Professor of History, Department of History
Matthew Connelly, professor of history, specializes in 20th century world politics, with publications on the history of transnational insurgencies, global social movements, and intelligence estimates and war planning. Like many historians of U.S. foreign relations, he has spent years working in declassified documents and interviewing former government officials. Unlike most historians, he also works with data scientists to amass virtual archives and explore them through natural language processing and machine learning. He is the principal investigator of the Declassification Engine project, which aims to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy and provide government officials with tools to automate and accelerate the declassification process. He received his B.A. from Columbia (’90) and his Ph.D. from Yale (’98).
Angelina Craig-Flórez
Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Angelina Craig-Flórez, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer and co-Director of the Spanish Language Program in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where she teaches all levels of the Spanish Language Program.
Dr. Craig-Flórez received her BA in English and Comparative Literature from Fordham University and her Ph.D. in Spanish Medieval Literature and Cultural Studies from Columbia University. During her more than 20 years as a teacher of Spanish as a Foreign Language, Dr. Craig-Flórez has always aimed to merge her interests in literary and cultural studies with the newest approaches in second language teaching and acquisition.
She was awarded the RFP in 2014-2015 for her Project: “Student generated iBooks as final projects and the incorporation of mobile technologies in the face-to-face classroom” which has been successfully applied in her Advanced Language in Content Course: Spain in its Art.
Rachel Gordon
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, College of Physicians and Surgeons
Dr. Rachel J. Gordon has a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, and in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Gordon is an accomplished clinician-educator. Most recently, she has developed and implemented the highly acclaimed new Ready 4 Residency course, which has a flipped, blended-learning format. This required course for fourth year medical students has replaced “Back to the Classroom.” Dr. Gordon also directs the Microbiology/Infectious Diseases section in “The Body…in Health and in Disease.” She teaches “Biology & Pathophysiology for Epidemiologists,” a core course in the epidemiology doctoral program. Further, as a member of the Apgar Academy for Medical Educators, she is a funded ADEPT leader engaged in peer-teaching.
Dr. Gordon is interested in the effective use of technology and innovation in medical education. She has also played an integral role in introducing Team-based Learning and Just-in-Time Teaching as learning tools at CUMC. Her teaching abilities have been recognized with several teaching awards including the Distinguished Teacher of the Year, the Charles W. Bohmfalk Award for teaching in the preclinical years and the Ewig Award for clinical teaching.
Sarah J.R. Hansen
Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry
Sarah Hansen, Ph.D., joined the Chemistry department in 2004 and has been teaching college chemistry courses for the past 14 years. Her research includes curriculum design and assessment as well as visual problem solving strategies.
She teaches a general chemistry laboratory course which she recently successfully shifted to a hybrid format. Dr. Hansen has managed several funded projects with an educational focus including her current NSF-funded work using eye tracking to develop metavisualization skills.
Thai Jones
Lehman Curator for American History and Lecturer in the Department of History
Thai Jones is the Herbert H. Lehman Curator for American History at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He teaches archival-based courses in the history departments at Columbia and Barnard College. Formerly, Jones was assistant professor of U.S. History at the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He is the author of two books: More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2012), and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004). His current project, Boomtown: Capital and Labor in America’s Last Gold Rush will be published by Harvard University Press in 2017.
Mary Marshall Clark
Senior Research Scientist, Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics
In addition to being the Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research located in INCITE, Mary Marshall Clark is co-founder and director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program, created in 2008-09. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002, and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association. Mary Marshall writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. Her current work focuses on the global impact of torture and detention policies at Guantánamo Bay.
Katherine E. Reuther
Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry
Katherine E. Reuther, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University and the Assistant Director of the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership. She is the academic advisor for all Master’s students and is working on developing new instructional tools and programs to enhance graduate education in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Specifically, she has spearheaded the development of a graduate-level Biomedical Design program that covers all aspects of the design process, including needs identification, concept generation, and commercialization. Dr. Reuther received her BS in Biomedical Engineering from The College of New Jersey and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Karl Sigman
Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Karl Sigman joined Columbia University’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department in 1987. Professor Sigman was the recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award both in 1998 and in 2002. He teaches courses and does research in stochastic models, simulation, financial engineering, and queueing theory, and has been involved in modeling USA Presidential elections by using Monte Carlo simulation. Before joining Columbia, Professor Sigman was a postdoctoral associate at the Mathematical Sciences Institute at Cornell University. As of July 2011, Professor Sigman is currently the Director of Undergraduate Programs.
Amy Werman
Lecturer in Social Work, School of Social Work
Dr. Amy Werman teaches Research Methodology, Program Evaluation, Clinical Case Evaluation, and Direct Practice courses at Columbia School of Social Work. She is passionate about teaching social work students, and believes that students learn best through application of concepts and in vivo experiences. Thus, she is continually investigating and testing out new technologies and pedagogical approaches including flipping her classrooms and teaching online.
Dr. Werman has had a private psychotherapy practice for eighteen years, applying her training as a family therapist to her clinical work with individuals, couples and families. Dr. Werman decided to devote part of her practice to the treatment of adolescents with bipolar disorder and their families after a fellowship at Hillside Hospital Department of Psychiatric Research during which she worked on an NIMH study of this population.
Dr. Werman is on the Board of several non-profit organizations where she offers her expertise in evaluating social service programs both in New York and in Israel. She is also a program advisor and researcher for Nirim in the Neighborhoods, a wilderness therapy program serving youth at extreme risk in Israel. She has participated in several of its survival missions.
Dr. Werman received her master’s from Columbia University School of Social Work in 1982, and her doctorate from Adelphi University School of Social Work in 2001.
GRADUATE STUDENT LIGHTNING TALKS
Molly Rosa Avila
Molly Rose Avila is a 4th year PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her work focuses on late 19th and early 20th century theater and acting technique, and this summer she looks forward to teaching her own course–”On Chekhov’s Stage: The Plays in Context”–as a GSAS Summer Teaching Scholar. For the past two years Molly Rose has taught First Year Russian, and as a Peer Teaching Fellow (2015-2016) she developed the innovative assignment “Masha’s Not Here,” which she will be presenting today.
Whitney Cowell
Whitney is a 4th year PhD Candidate in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. Whitney participated in the Innovative Teaching Summer Institute program during the summer of 2014 and was subsequently accepted into the Peer Teaching Consultant program for the 2015-2016 academic year. While serving as a teaching fellow, Whitney designed an interactive public health case study to foster critical thinking skills among the Master of Public Health students in her Molecular Epidemiology course. Whitney’s interest in this approach to student learning developed during the Summer Institute program after she attended a “SIMS” workshop on the Millennium Village Simulation used in Dr. Jeffrey Sachs’ sustainable development class.
Nicole Gervasio
Nicole Gervasio is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation explores absence as an aesthetic strategy for representing collective trauma and political violence in contemporary postcolonial literature. At Columbia, she has taught “University Writing: Readings in Human Rights” and “Literary Texts and Critical Methods.” This summer, she will be teaching a self-designed seminar titled “Violence and Human Rights in Postcolonial Fiction” as a GSAS Teaching Scholar. Currently, she is a teaching assistant for “Literature Humanities” at Taconic Correctional Facility through Columbia’s Justice-in-Education Initiative, which hosts college courses for incarcerated men and women. For this lightning round, she will be discussing a multidisciplinary exercise that she began developing as a participant in the 2015 Innovative Summer Teaching Institute and implemented as a Peer Teaching Consultant this fall for “Legacy of the Mediterranean,” a required course in First-Year English at Barnard.
Ryan Hagen
Ryan Hagen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology, specializing in organizations, technology, and the sociology of knowledge. His dissertation examines the development and practice of disaster risk management as a profession and area of expertise. He has also led an historical study of intervention in collective violence in the post-Reconstruction southern US. In the summer of 2015 he attended Columbia’s Innovative Summer Teaching Institute, where he developed an innovative teaching assignment that challenged students to see the role of technology in urban life from a uniquely sociological perspective.
Orit Hilewicz
Orit Hilewicz is a PhD candidate in Music Theory. Her interests include intertextual relations between music and other arts, twentieth-century music, and musical temporality. This year, she is a fellow in the Peer Teaching Consultants program at the Center for Teaching and Learning. Orit will present an assignment she developed in the 2015 Innovative Teaching Summer Institute and implemented last fall as a teaching assistant in a second-year undergraduate music theory course.
