The Low Down

Last year, Kristin Myers gave a lecture to Columbia alumni returning to campus for reunion. Myers is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and her talk offered an engineering perspective on why women give birth preterm. Specifically, she explored the biomechanics of pregnancy and how engineers work with clinicians to try to understand why some women give birth before term and how we can stop it. You’re about to hear some excerpts from her talk.

Now, if you’re still thinking, what is preterm birth and what does biomechanics have to do with it? Don’t worry – you’re about to find out.

If you want to find out more about the work that Kristin is doing, check out The Myers Soft Tissue Lab website: https://kristinmyerscolumbia.com/

If you haven’t heard of the Columbia Center for Jazz Studies, that’s a shame, but we can’t be too disappointed in you. After all, the center is still relatively new. It was founded in 1999 and, since then, it has been integrated into the Core Curriculum at Columbia College. That means a lot of College students are getting exposed to music that isn’t exactly topping the charts nowadays.

But the Center for Jazz Studies takes a more broad view of the genre than one might initially think. Courses at the center look at jazz as it relates to technology, community, innovation, and even neurology. It’s that last approach that you’re going to hear about in this episode.

You’re going to hear vibraphonist Stefon Harris demonstrate jazz improvisation as it relates to issues of mind-brain coordination and creativity. You’re also going to periodically hear questions posed by Columbia professor of neuroscience, Michael Shadlen.

To find out about upcoming events from The Columbia Center for Jazz Studies, visit jazz.columbia.edu.

THIS IS A REBROADCAST OF AN EPISODE ABOUT THE 2016 COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY.

Columbia's Commencement week ended two weeks ago. New graduates moved out of University housing to start their lives off-campus and the streets of Morningside Heights have emptied out for the summer. In September, new and returning students will move in and the streets will vibrate with excitement and energy again.

But, in this episode, we're not going to look ahead. Instead, we're going to look back at the height of Columbia excitement and energy: Commencement. If you've never experienced Columbia’s Commencement, that's ok. We interviewed alumni, faculty, staff, and students to give you a glimpse at the day.

For this episode, we’re diving into the archives to play you excerpts from a discussion that took place in 2012. The discussion was called “Understanding Our Brains, Understanding Ourselves” and it brought together an expert panel of Columbia alumni and professors to talk about the brain.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what smell New Yorkers like the most and what smell they hate, that is an odd thing to wonder but you’ve definitely come to the right place.

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To watch the full talk, check out the video: https://youtu.be/xG9rp6vbi3o

Earlier this year, Columbia hosted a conversation between two iconic public figures — billionaire investor Warren Buffett '51BUS and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. For that conversation, Buffet and Gates sat down with PBS and Bloomberg TV host Charlie Rose to discuss their friendship, philanthropy, and business, innovation, and leadership.

In this episode, you will hear some highlights from that talk. If you’re interested in hearing the entire conversation, you can find the full recording here: http://cualu.ms/GatesAndBuffet

We enjoyed talking to the Design Studio so much last week that we wanted to share more of the candid conversations we had about Design Thinking (and much more).

We wanted to get a better idea of who Adam and Alice are, not just as Design Studio representatives, but as design thinkers in general. What we got was a look into how they look at the world around them and what they see in the future of design thinking.

Spoiler alert: there’s a blooper reel at the end!

For this episode, we visited one of the forward-thinking initiatives taking place at Columbia. Tucked away on a side street near the Morningside campus, we found a place where thinkers, doers and general challengers of the status quo come together to design a better future.

It’s called the Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio and it’s a project that developed through the Columbia Entrepreneurship program. The Studio brings innovators and entrepreneurs from across campus to pitch human-centered design ideas, identifying problems and dreaming up solutions for everything from micro-gardening to a dream team of surgeons in East Africa.

Find out more about the Design Studio: http://entrepreneurship.columbia.edu/design-studio

Last week, we heard from Professor Robert Young, an eminent humanities scholar, who gave a lecture last year at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. Professor Young recounted the story of Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany but was caught at the border of France and Spain, where he resorted suicide rather than be sent back.

During the lecture, Professor Young played a clip from Casablanca, drawing parallels between the Hollywood story and the truth behind it. We did not have room to include his analysis in last week's episode, so we created a bonus mini-episode just for it.

So, take a listen and follow the intertwining stories of Walter Benjamin, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, as they flee south out of Europe.

We went into the vault for today’s episode, all the way back to a lecture that Professor Robert Young gave last year at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. We chose this particular lecture because Professor Young offers a historical perspective on an issue facing today’s society: migration.

Young is the Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University. As a distinguished humanities scholar and prolific author, he specializes in the history and literature of post-colonialism. In the lecture excerpts you’re about to hear, he applies that knowledge to the tragic case of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, drawing parallels between his quest for asylum and the refugee and immigration issues facing today’s society.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 650 million people lack access to electricity. In Sierra Leone in particular, only 5% of the population is on the grid. That means that six and a half million people can’t study, cook, eat or work after the sun goes down except by dim candlelight or expensive kerosene lamps. To charge their mobile phones, most Sierra Leoneans have to go to public charging kiosks.

Three Columbia alumni from the School of International and Public Affairs found a solar solution to this challenge. Their startup, Easy Solar, hopes to introduce solar-powered products into Sierra Leone households, replacing the kerosene lamps that have negative environmental and health impacts.

Each of the three business partners, Nthabi Mosia '16SIPA from Ghana and South Africa, Alexandre Tourre '16SIPA from France, and Eric Silverman '16SIPA from the United States, had lived or worked in West Africa prior to studying at Columbia. When they realized their mutual passion for the country and clean energy initiatives, they formed Easy Solar and took a pilot trip to Sierra Leone to test out their plan. It was a success, and they have since all moved to Sierra Leone to expand their work.

We had the opportunity to sit down with them before they left to chat about their plans, the current status of electricity in Sierra Leone, and their vision of improving access to sustainable energy for thousands of people.

Learn More: http://www.easysolar.sl/