2000s > Frontiers of Science
Science Publications
In 1995, the Office of the Provost launched 21st Century, signaling the University's renewed research ambitions. In his column, Provost Jonathan Cole discusses the post-Cold War funding dilemma and the absence of a peace-time national science strategy to guide individual scientists and institutions towards solutions to slowly mounting threats to global order — disease pandemics, environmental pollution, species degradation, uncontrolled population growth, ethnic strife and global warming.
Cover of Earth Matters newsletter, May 1997
Columbia's own Wallace Broecker, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute, was among the first researchers to link climate change to rising CO2 emissions.
Frontiers of Science
Frontiers of Science – conceived by astronomers David Helfand and Jacqueline Van Gorkom and biologist Darcy Kelley – took a new approach to the problem. Since 2004, Frontiers students have immersed themselves in the latest research in four especially dynamic or socially relevant fields (presently neuroscience, astrophysics, Earth science and biodiversity). In weekly lectures, expert researchers present new discoveries in that semester's chosen fields. Students then meet with seminar leaders to discuss relevant texts and "scientific habits of mind" integral to each field.
