Professor, Department of Education, Barnard College

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor in Education, is an anthropologist of education. Prior to joining Barnard College, she was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She currently serves as the President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict.

Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies.

Professor, Department of Astronomy, Columbia University

Marcel Agüeros is an associate professor of astronomy at Columbia University. A native New Yorker and a Columbia College alumnus, Marcel received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006, returned to
Columbia as a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Post-doctoral Fellow that year, and joined the faculty in 2010. Marcel is an observational astrophysicist who uses new approaches to address classic questions in stellar evolution.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the eighteenth century. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.

Doctoral Student, Human Rights, Columbia University

Sydney Amoakoh is a Human Rights Studies MA candidate at Columbia University whose research takes a look at the considerations and constraints behind the drafting of human rights into humanitarian guidelines, with specific focus on the recent inclusion of a section on menstrual health management (MHM) in the 2018 edition of the Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response.

Professor, Department of Psychology, Columbia University

Dima Amso is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She has a BS in psychology from Tufts University, was trained at Cornell University and received a PhD in psychology from New York University in 2005. She served on the faculty at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University before joining the faculty at Brown University in 2010 and Columbia University in 2020. Her research examines the development of attention, executive functions, and memory, with an emphasis on how environmental variables shape these trajectories.

PhD Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Patrick Anson is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature. He is writing a part-ethnographic, part-literary-critical dissertation about programs that propose reading groups focused on 20th and 21st century narrative literature as a means to address a range of social problems, from mass incarceration, where a reading group functions as an alternative sentence for people convicted of an offense, to military trauma, where a reading group helps to establish social connections among veterans.

Doctoral Student, International Affairs and Journalism, Columbia University

Teresa holds a BA in International Relations from Brown University and is currently pursuing a Master of International Affairs and an MS in Journalism at Columbia University. She previously worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (Rome), where she was responsible for the coordination and editing of high-profile publications. Among others, she edited the joint FAO-EL PAÍS publications series “The State of our Planet”. She is interested in how documentary video, photography and journalism at large can drive social action and improve public policy across geographical boundaries.

Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Dr. Askanase completed her fellowship in Rheumatology at New York University School of Medicine/NYU Hospital for Joint Disease and continued there as an investigator where she participated in multiple NIH and industry sponsored clinical trials, and gained extensive experience with SLE patients. She is currently the Director of the Lupus Center and Director of Rheumatology Clinical Trials at Columbia University Medical Center.

A. George Bajalia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. His work is concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region.

PhD Student, Sustainability Management, Columbia University

Naomi Batzer graduated from Barnard College with a degree in economics in 2017. She is particularly interested in the roles of health and gender in development economics and wrote her final paper on the effect of Ebola on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. She is in her first semester of the Sustainability Management program at Columbia University.

Doctoral Student, History, Columbia University

Iuri Bauler Pereira holds a B.A. in History from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His research focus on the transnational connections and geopolitical imagination of Latin American Countercultures (underground press, literature and film), Brazilian Critical Geography, and the Intellectual History of the Americas.

Naor Ben-Yehoyada's work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean.

Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center

Natalie Bello is a clinician scientist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center where she practices cardiology with a specialty in multimodality imaging. She received her BS from Cornell University, her MD from University of Rochester, and a MPH degree from Harvard University. Dr. Bello is the director of research for the Columbia Women’s Heart Center and her broad scholarly interest is elucidating gender differences in cardiovascular health and disease.

Katherine Bergevin is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature, specializing in anglophone literatures of the Atlantic world. She holds a graduate certificate in feminist scholarship from Columbia's Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston

Chris Bobel is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches courses on Gender & the Body, Feminist Theory, Feminist Research Methods, Women in US Social Movements and Feminist Activism.

Mellon Public Humanities Fellow, Sarah Lawrence College

Emily Bloom is a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association.

Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Columbia University

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities.

Sohini Chattopadhyay is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the science of managing mass death in colonial cities, with a particular interest in Bombay and Calcutta among other cities in the early twentieth century.

Professor, Department of History, Columbia University

Amy Chazkel, Bernard Hirschhorn Associate Professor of Urban Studies, is a historian of Brazil with broad interests in the urban humanities, law and society, crime and justice, policing, slavery, abolition, and post-abolition societies in the Atlantic world. In her own research and writing, she has principally explored the urban and legal history of post-colonial Brazil.