Logic(s)—the first Black and Asian queer tech magazine—is set to detonate, remix, and reclaim the tech journalism genre. Logic(s) is now accepting pitches for its inaugural issue, supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things).

Logic(s) is deeply interested in pieces reflecting on a critical caste, abolitionist approach that moves beyond demands for corporate inclusion or police prosecution of hate crimes. The magazine is also looking to receive submissions thoughtfully engaging with the distinctions and connections between caste, race and nationality in the development of new technologies or grassroots campaigns refusing them.

Compensation for successful submissions begins at $1,200 for shorter essays of 1200-1600 words, and $2,000 for longer features of 2000-4000 words and up. Other media will be compensated at the same rate depending on length.

About our partnership with Logic(s)

Logic is a magazine founded in 2016 with the goal of deepening conversations about tech in journalism.

In 2023, Logic is taking an even bigger step in that direction by relaunching as Logic(s) with the help of INCITE at Columbia University. In its new form, Logic(s) will be headed by Xiaowei Wang and J. Khadijah Abdurahman and will become the world's first Black, Asian and queer tech magazine. Logic(s) will critically engage with tech in ways that—simply put—no other publication has been able to.

INCITE has committed to providing administrative and other support to the magazine over the course of three years—with the aim of making Logic(s) a sustainable venture. As INCITE’s mission is to create knowledge for public action, this partnership—which gathers critical knowledge in forms for the public—is an opportunity to meet our mission and develop models for platforming critical knowledge.

New York, New York City, August 8, 2022 –  MyVote Project, is pleased to announce a partnership with INCITE at Columbia University to engage young volunteers in leading nonpartisan community conversations. This new model of voter education builds upon MVPs mission of creating voters who are more informed and engaged at the local level. MVP was founded in 2018 by Sari Kaufman, a survivor of the Parkland, FL school shooting and now a student at Yale, David McAdams, a professor at Duke University and Gita Stulberg, a native New Yorker and experienced community organizer.

According to Gita Stulberg, Executive Director of MVP, “New York City being the most diverse and multicultural city in this country, is the clear and most consequential place for developing this community conversation model which MyVote Project has only started to build. INCITE is our natural partner bringing their expertise in promoting community dialogues and mentoring us through the process of creating this model. It is our hope to replicate this model across the country and have it eventually serve as a vehicle for informing local political platforms on the issues and/or policies that captivate voters and bring them to the polls.”

MyVote Project (MVP) began as a grassroots movement in 2018 linked to escalating gun violence in America, and evolved into a robust, nationwide movement -- largely due to the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, a flood of young volunteers discovered MVP. Overnight, the nascent project blossomed, with hundreds of students signing up to volunteer virtually.

Michael Falco, Executive Director of INCITE says, “MyVote Project first came to our attention during the 2021 NYC primaries and we have continued to watch the youth-led organization grow. When Gita brought this idea to us, it was a natural fit, aligning perfectly with our mission to facilitate innovative forms of communication and create new resources for public understanding.”

The New York Community Trust will support this partnership as it expands into NYC.

For Sari Kaufman, this partnership “is a perfect example of what MyVote Project is all about. It’s an opportunity for our volunteers, under the tutelage of experts, to engage with local communities by talking to voters and learning directly from them what they care about, and what brings them out to vote. Simply put, we want to help communicate to candidates what their constituents care about and we want voters to know who they’re electing and why.”

The first Community Conversation is scheduled to take place on Sunday, September 18th, 2022. Please check MyVoteProject.com for updates.

About INCITE

INCITE brings research to bear on public problems and creates new resources for public understanding, in order to strengthen the forms of trust and deliberation that make democracy work. By facilitating inventive forms of communication and collaboration between researchers, students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy, we seek to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

About MyVote Project

Powered by a network of nearly 300 student volunteers, MyVote Project combines old-school community outreach with digital-themed voter-engagement techniques using social media, virtual convenings, and an interactive website designed to inform, not influence, voters. MVP is countering the wave of misinformation online by serving as a credible, verified source of information taken from respected sources with no partisan, biased opinions or embellishment. MVP is cultivating and nurturing a younger generation of future voters and leaders, who will play a role in strengthening democracy.

Media Contact: media@myvoteproject.com

Will partner with INCITE under new leadership and mission, with continued focus on critical commentary on the role of tech.

In partnership with INCITE, the technology magazine Logic will re-launch in January 2023 as Logic(s), and will transfer leadership to longtime staff member Xiaowei Wang and Director of “We Be Imagining,” J. Khadijah Abdurahman. Wang and Abdurahman expect to produce three issues of the magazine annually, taking it in creative and urgent new directions.

“This will mark the beginning of the first Black and Asian queer tech magazine in existence,” said Abdurahman. “Black, Asian, and queer are not only descriptors of our individual identities but also mark the kind of theoretical and political approaches we hope to infuse the magazine with.”

Logic initially launched following the 2016 US election cycle. Since then, it has released 16 issues and published multiple books, providing a much-needed platform for critical and nuanced longform reflection on technology.

“Our aspiration when we started Logic was to deepen the conversation around technology. We wanted to intervene in a genre that, at the time, was far too deferential to the industry, and often deeply incurious about how 'tech' actually worked," said Ben Tarnoff, one of the magazine’s co-founders along with Moira Weigel. “Five years later, I'm proud to say that we've played a role in making tech criticism less foolish. But magazines inevitably need to evolve past the moment that produced them in order to remain of use. Abdurahman and Wang are the ideal people to lead Logic into its next phase by finding new ways for the magazine to serve the organizers, scholars, artists, and workers who are working to remake technology from below."

Logic(s) will retain the core commitments of the magazine’s founding while laying the groundwork to radically shift both the tech journalism genre and dominant publishing models. The recently published Beacons edition (edited by Abdurahman) was a pilot for what this transition will look like, including a commitment to an interdisciplinary mode which places poetry, visual art, and sci-fi on the same axis as the longform essay. Logic(s) will seek to elevate work that draws on the conceptual frameworks of impoverished and marginalized people; commission stories about the public sector adoption of automated decision-making systems like Medicaid eligibility determination or coordinated housing entry for child welfare; and increase the magazine’s engagement on international issues.

“We already have several stories and themes in mind to address, from Facebook’s installation of submarine cables in Djibouti, to shifts in how mail and other services are delivered by US carceral institutions, to queer organizing for mesh networks in Appalachia,” said Wang. “In the process, we will continue to deepen and broaden the invitation to fields traditionally outside of tech discourse that have a set of methods and tools to think through the social implications of digital technologies and data collections.”

Abdurahman and Wang will serve respectively as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the magazine and will be supported by an editorial or related board of advisors. INCITE has committed to providing administrative and other forms of support for the next three years, to help Logic(s) establish a stable foundation and sustainable path for the future. The project will also receive financial support from UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2I2) and the Omidyar Foundation. Prior to the transition, Khadijah and Xiaowei will work closely with the magazine’s existing staff to prepare to take on the duties of day-to-day production and distribution in the new year.

The new team will build upon the foundational infrastructure and editing that has been a labor of love by a network of people over the past six years, including Aliyah Blackmore, Alex Blasdel, Sarah Burke, Jim Fingal, Jen Kagan, Christa Hartsock, Celine Nguyen, Ben Tarnoff, Max Read, Moira Weigel, and many others.

Project will equip 10 distinguished writers and storytellers to capture oral histories and artifacts from hundreds of elders from across the country

Jacqueline Woodson. Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics is partnering with the Emerson Collective and Baldwin For The Arts to support acclaimed author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Jacqueline Woodson’s new project: I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders. Through Baldwin For The Arts, a group of talented and award-winning writers will be deployed to conduct oral history interviews with people in various regions of the country, capturing unrecorded memories and life experiences before these stories are lost to history.

“From aging Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders, to survivors of Stonewall, many stories remain untold or beyond the grasp of museums and institutions,” Woodson said. “When these elders pass away, their records and accounts may go with them. Our project seeks to fill these gaps before it’s too late.” 

Woodson will guide the project creatively and has selected the cohort of 10 writers who will collect these histories, which will be housed in the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, one of the largest oral history collections in the world. 

We are pleased to announce this remarkable group of Baldwin-Emerson fellows:

• Natalie Diaz

• Eve Ewing

• Denice Frohman

• Caleb Gayle

• Robin Coste Lewis

• April Reign

• Carolina De Robertis

• Ellery Washington

• Renee Watson

• Jenna Wortham

Each fellow will conduct approximately 30 interviews with people in targeted geographies across the United States, from New York City, to the American Deep South, to the Greenwood District in Tulsa, to Native American reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. 

Those who are interviewed will also have the opportunity to have their family archival records preserved, including “home movie” footage, photographs, letters, and additional ephemera. The product will be an expansive archive of 300 interviews, alongside other media and documents, made available publicly and online, and with the potential to furnish museum exhibitions for visitors of all kinds. 

The project is funded by Emerson Collective, an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. 

Columbia will serve in a curatorial and advisory capacity, adapting its longstanding expertise in oral history practice to help Woodson bring forth her vision. The work at Columbia will be co-directed by Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and Kimberly Springer, curator of the Oral History Archive.

“Our collection is distinguished for the inclusion of all those who shape our world, not just ‘Great Men.’ We have and continue to build an archive that includes a vast array of histories so that current and future generations learn lessons from our times,” said Springer. “That’s why we’re thrilled to support Jacqueline in a project so consistent with that spirit.”

“We could not be more excited to work with Jacqueline to support her extraordinary vision and the gifted writers she has chosen to carry out the oral histories. The scope of this project is breathtaking. Our world will be better with the collection and sharing of these rich historical stories,” said Clark.

To kick-off the project, the fellows will take part in a series of oral history training sessions that will be led by Columbia’s oral history team, to conclude by mid-April. The interviews will commence shortly after and be complete by December 2022, with the goal of making the project accessible in the libraries and online no later than December 2023.

“We see such great promise in this project, and the partnership with Jacqueline and Columbia,” said Anne Marie Burgoyne, Emerson Collective’s managing director for philanthropy. “It has the potential to produce something lasting, not just in the records and recollections gathered, but in creating a new model for the preservation and inheritance of previously neglected histories.”

ABOUT: 

Emerson Collective

Emerson Collective is an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. Using a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities.

Baldwin For The Arts

Founded by Jacqueline Woodson in 2018, the mission of Baldwin For The Arts is to create a nurturing space for artists of the Global Majority to explore, create, and breathe, free from the distractions and hindrances of everyday life. As a 501c3 non-profit organization, Baldwin endeavors to change the artistic landscape so that it may reflect the world in which we live, challenging this field's history of leaving too many talented Global Majority artists of all ages, genders, and backgrounds unrecognized and unsupported. As a residency exclusively devoted to people of the Global Majority, Baldwin For The Arts is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of artists of all disciplines.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research

As one of the world’s leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history, the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) seeks to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and teach and do research across the disciplines. CCOHR is housed at and administered by the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). 

Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics

Leveraging the ideas and empirical tools of the social and human sciences, INCITE conceives and conducts collaborative research, projects, and programs that generate knowledge, promote just and equitable societies, and enrich our intellectual environment. It administers CCOHR and the Oral History Master of Arts program, the first program of its kind in the United States training students in oral history methods and theory.  

Oral History Archives at Columbia University Libraries

The Oral History Archives was founded by historian and journalist Allan Nevins in 1948 and is credited with launching the establishment of oral history archives internationally. At over 10,000 interviews, the Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. The archives are housed at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library in Butler Library at Columbia University and is open to all.

The Research and Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration (REALM) project launched twelve funded projects this fall, located in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and the UAE. REALM aims to fund collaborative research that will advance our understanding of low skilled labor migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, with the objective of shedding light on the processes that sustain unfair practices in migrant labor.  The projects in this first funding phase represent significant gains in understanding the dynamics of labor migration. These include migration decisions, recruitment and obligations, migrant well-being, and the immediate effects of migration on sending country communities. 

REALM is now accepting letters of intent for a second round of funding, beginning in September 2017. The Request for Applications can be found here.

Peter Bearman won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, which are awarded to mid-career scholars and scientists whose work demonstrates “prior achievement and exceptional promise.” Bearman is among 178 scholars, artists and scientists who were named 2016 Guggenheim fellows.

Bearman's most far-fetched, difficult, and longest-running project is “Rocky Road Day,” a cultural and social history of the United States over the last century and the focus of his Guggenheim Fellowship.

View Bearman's fellowship page here.

Researchers behind landmark Adolescent Health Study – a study that almost didn't happen – will receive Golden Goose Award, announcement at event this evening in Washington, D.C.

Nearly Blocked by Political Concerns, Study Has Had Major Impact on Understanding of Social Factors Affecting Adolescent Health, and on Effect of Adolescent Health on Long- term Adult Well-being

Read an interview with Dr. Bearman on this landmark study

Five researchers whose determined pursuit of knowledge about the factors that influence adolescent health led to one of the most influential longitudinal studies of human health—with far-reaching and often unanticipated impacts on society—will receive the first 2016 Golden Goose Award.

The researchers are Dr. Peter Bearman, Barbara Entwisle, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Ronald Rindfuss, and Richard Udry, who worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in the late 1980s and early 1990s to design and execute the  National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, or Add Health for short.

The social scientists’ landmark, federally funded study has not only illuminated the impact of social and environmental factors on adolescent health—often in unanticipated ways—but also continues to help shape the national conversation around human health. Their work has provided unanticipated insights into how adolescent health affects wellbeing long into adulthood and has laid essential groundwork for research into the nation’s obesity epidemic over the past two decades.

The award will be announced this evening at 7:00 PM EDT at an event at the Long View Gallery in Washington, D.C. celebrating the 50th anniversary of the University of North Carolina Population Center, in conjunction with a meeting of the Population Association of America. Some of the awardees will be in attendance.

“Four bold researchers wanted to learn more about adolescent health. Who knew that one federal study would change the way doctors approach everything from AIDS to obesity?” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), who first proposed the Golden Goose Award. “Decades later, this work is still paying off, helping Americans lead longer, healthier lives. America always comes out ahead when we invest in scientific research.”

The pathbreaking nationally representative Add Health study has answered many questions about adolescent behavior, with particular attention to sexual and other risky behaviors, but it was almost stopped in its tracks by political concerns.

The study’s design grew out of the American Teenage Study, a project developed by Drs. Bearman, Entwisle, Rindfuss, and Udry. This initial adolescent sexual health study was designed to look at adolescents’ risky behaviors in a social context, rather than focusing only on individuals, in hopes of helping the nation address the growing AIDS epidemic and other public health concerns. After two years of planning work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Teenage Study passed peer review and was funded by the NIH in 1991. But the grant was subsequently rescinded due to objections regarding the study’s focus on sexual behaviors.

In 1993, Congress passed legislation forbidding the NIH from funding the American Teenage Study in the future, but at the same time mandating a longitudinal study on adolescent health that would consider all behaviors related to their health – implicitly including sexual behavior.

“I congratulate Dr. Rindfuss and his colleagues on this award, which underscores the vital importance of federal funding for research,” said Rep. David Price (D-NC), who was a key advocate in the House of Representatives in the 1990’s for continuing to pursue this research. “Federally supported research projects not only produce new life-saving treatments and expand our understanding of the world around us, they also spur economic growth and innovation in ways we cannot always anticipate.”

In 1994, Drs. Udry and Bearman, now joined at UNC by Dr. Harris, proposed Add Health to meet Congress’s new mandate. The new study maintained the American Teenage Study design’s strong focus on social context, but significantly expanded the scope of inquiry to include all factors influencing adolescent health.

The study has followed its original cohort for over 20 years, and it is now providing valuable information about the unanticipated impacts of adolescent health on overall wellbeing in adulthood. For this reason, the researchers recently changed the study’s name to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, and it is a landmark example of how longitudinal research can yield extraordinary and unexpected insights.

"Science often advances our understanding of the world in ways we could never have foreseen,” Rep. Bob Dold (R-IL) said. "Regardless of how this research began, it has served as a breakthrough for understanding the way society molds our personal health.  That’s why congressional funding and support for breakthrough research is so important to push us forward as a country.”

The nationally representative sample and multifaceted longitudinal data paired with a revolutionary open-access model have enabled more than 10,000 researchers to publish almost 3,000 research articles on human health. These scientific studies have strengthened an understanding of the importance of family connectedness to adolescent health, allowed researchers to track and scrutinize the rising tide of the obesity epidemic, and demonstrated the social, behavioral, and biological importance of adolescence to lifelong health and wellbeing

What began as a study driven both by social science curiosity and public-health concerns has been central to shaping the national conversation around adolescent health for more than two decades.

The Golden Goose Award honors scientists whose federally funded work may have seemed odd or obscure when it was first conducted but has resulted in significant benefits to society. Drs. Bearman, Entwisle, Harris, Rindfuss and Udry are being cited for their extraordinary multidisciplinary, longitudinal study of the social and biological factors that influence adolescent health, and their work’s wide-ranging and often unexpected impacts on society.

The five researchers will be honored with two other teams of researchers – yet to be named – at the fifth annual Golden Goose Award Ceremony at the Library of Congress on September 22. Descriptions of the past winners can be found  at the Golden Goose Award website.

About the Golden Goose Award

The Golden Goose Award is the brainchild of Rep. Jim Cooper, who first had the idea for the award when the late Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) was issuing the Golden Fleece Award to target wasteful federal spending and often targeted peer-reviewed science because it sounded odd. Rep. Cooper believed such an award was needed to counter the false impression that odd- sounding research was not useful.

In 2012, a coalition of business, university, and scientific organizations created the Golden Goose Award. Like the bipartisan group of Members of Congress who support the Golden Goose Award, the founding organizations believe that federally funded basic scientific research is the cornerstone of American innovation and essential to our economic growth, health, global competitiveness, and national security. Award recipients are selected by a panel of respected scientists and university research leaders.

Golden Goose Award Founding Organizations:

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Association of American Universities (AAU)

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) Breakthrough Institute

Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Richard Lounsbery Foundation The Science Coalition (TSC)

Task Force on American Innovation

United for Medical Research

Golden Goose Award Congressional Supporters

Representative Jim Cooper Representative Suzanne Bonamici Senator Christopher Coons

Representative Charlie Dent Representative Bob Dold Representative Donna F. Edwards

Representative Randy Hultgren

Golden Goose Award 2016 Sponsors

Benefactor Elsevier Partner
United for Medical Research 

Contributors

American Mathematical Society
American Physical Society
Association of American Medical Colleges

Supporters

American Astronomical Society
American Physiological Society
Consortium of Social Science Associations
Texas Instruments

From March 11 to 13, 2015, INCITE faculty and staff traveled to Beijing to teach a three-day social science research introductory workshop, introducing the topic of "urban change" to high school students from all over China. This workshop was condensed version of our Social Sciences Summer program for Chinese high school students, in which students use the neighborhood of Harlem as a laboratory to begin to tackle complex social realities such as gentrification.

Students from Beijing 101 Middle School and their advisor, Emerson Miller

After reviewing the basic concepts of social science research in a lecture entitled The Social World, and learning Chicago-style field note-taking in Introduction to Fieldwork in Urban Environments, students sorted into smaller groups to explore a neighborhood in Beijing and practice taking their own field notes.

INCITE Assistant Director Michael Falco leads a discussion on his group's neighborhood, Qianmen

Students also practiced their interviewing skills with handheld audio recorders.

Two students interview each otherINCITE Mellon Fellows and TAs Abby Coplin and Kristin Murphy demonstrate an interview

Students also tried a hand at interview coding, using an excerpt of an interview from the Columbia Center for Oral History Research's Apollo Theater Oral History Project.

Audrey Augenbraum and Abby Coplin explain codes

The pleasure of working with such fabulous students made us very excited for the two upcoming iterations of our Social Science Summer program this year, from July 12 to July 28 and July 30 to August 12!

Special thanks to ICProjects and the Columbia Global Center East Asia for facilitating and hosting this workshop. All photographs by Zhuang Han.

New York, NY — Columbia University Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce the launch of a new center, the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE).

The mission of INCITE is to cultivate public intelligence about socially and culturally vital ideas that can be advanced by research, education, and conversation at the interdisciplinary seams that the social sciences share with the humanities and with the life and behavioral sciences.

INCITE culminates over a decade’s work of creating multi-disciplinary education, training and research initiatives. It assumes all the education and training initiatives of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, including the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Program, the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program and the Oral History Master of Arts.

“For the past decade Arts & Sciences has launched several collaborative research and education programs, centered around core priorities of the University, that all share a commitment to integrating the strengths of a variety of disciplines,” said Nicholas Dirks, executive vice president of Arts and Sciences. “By bringing some of these initiatives together under a united vision, we believe INCITE will become an important new site for innovative ideas that will lead to breakthroughs in knowledge and social engagement.”

The Center also catalyzes and oversees a variety of research initiatives. It houses the continuing projects on Understanding Autism and on Homelessness, and initiates  a collaborative research project to digitize and analyze New York Philharmonic subscriber roles over time to reveal a portrait of the role of the Philharmonic in the life of New York City. This project is overseen by Sociology Professor Shamus Khan and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The Philharmonic project is just one example of the Center’s expansive and innovative research activities. It reflects our commitment to the belief that, by bringing together appropriate methods and knowledge from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, we can advance public intelligence through collective research and conversation, especially in emerging fields such as digital humanities” said INCITE Director Peter Bearman.

INCITE descends directly from the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences and the Bureau for Applied Social Research, established by Paul F. Lazarsfeld. To honor his legacy and to foster conversations that span substantive domains, INCITE has launched the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series. This series features public lectures and ongoing workshops that embody and honor Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches to develop knowledge.

Seed funding supports interdisciplinary research, strengthens research infrastructure of Columbia Global Centers

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE

Media contact:  Michael Falco, 212-854-9489, mf2727@columbia.edu  

NEW YORK, January 12, 2012 — In an effort to enhance global research opportunities for Columbia University faculty and researchers, INCITE, Columbia Global Centers, and the Office of the President Lee C. Bollinger have launched a seed grant program to fund innovative and ambitious research at the Columbia Global Centers.

“This program is essential to deepening our engagement with global scholars, ideas and challenges,” said President Bollinger. “This is an important step in building vibrant global research programs that leverage Columbia’s diverse intellectual capacities with our growing network of Global Centers, while also engaging our Centers’ local and regional partners.”

The  Global Centers Research Grant Program facilitates Columbia’s emergence as a global university and promotes international collaborations. Seed grant funds are designed to strengthen the research infrastructure at the Global Centers, ensure the sustainability of an active program of research, and foster deeper connections with Columbia-based researchers and research institutions.

The seed grant program is open to Columbia University faculty and international research partners working on projects that can be facilitated by the Global Centers. INCITE anticipates awarding 8 to 10 grants during the next two years for approximately $30,000 each. The grants strongly encourage interdisciplinary research proposals, partnerships with Columbia-based social science researchers, and collaborations among the Global Centers.    

“Since its launch, Columbia’s network of Global Centers has aimed to bring together some of the world's finest scholars to address some of the world’s most pressing problems,” said Kenneth Prewitt, vice president of Columbia Global Centers and Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs. “These grants will bring more intellectual firepower to our burgeoning Centers and foster greater collaboration between the Centers to improve our understanding of critical issues that unite the Centers.”

The submission deadline for seed funding is March 15, 2012.  Global Centers Research Grants enable faculty to produce compelling, well-crafted external funding proposals by laying the groundwork for long-term research projects. A committee of affiliated faculty and members of the Columbia administration will assess the merits of proposals, such as whether the project contributes to the Global Center’s research capacity.

The first two Columbia Global Centers — in Beijing, China, and in Amman, Jordan —were launched in March 2009. Centers in Mumbai, India, and in Paris, France, opened in March 2010. In the fall centers in Santiago, Chile, and Istanbul, Turkey, were announced. A center in Nairobi, Kenya, will open in early 2012. 

About Columbia University

A leading academic and research university, Columbia University continually seeks to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to foster a campus community deeply engaged in understanding and addressing the complex global issues of our time. Columbia’s extensive public service initiatives, cultural collaborations and community partnerships help define the University’s underlying values and mission to educate students to be both leading scholars and informed, engaged citizens. Founded in 1754 as King’s College, Columbia University in the City of New York is the fifth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

About Columbia Global Centers     

Columbia Global Centers provide flexible regional hubs for a wide range of activities and resources intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the University. They establish interactive partnerships across geographic boundaries and academic disciplines by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise and innovators from many fields.

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NEW YORK, NY-The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman will receive the prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a $2.5 million award that will support Bearman's study of the social determinants of autism.

The Pioneer Award Program is a high-risk research initiative designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. This year, this program awarded grants to 12 researchers. NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni will announce the 2007 recipients of the award at the Pioneer Award Symposium in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, September 19.

"The autism epidemic is a huge and complex puzzle which impacts hundreds of thousands of children and families," said Bearman. "It is one of the most pressing population health problems of our time. The Pioneer award makes it possible for us to think new thoughts and take big chances in our understanding of the epidemic and hopefully to make major contributions to public health."

Numerous studies have investigated hundreds of factors believed to be associated with both the incidence and increased prevalence of autism. However, a significant dilemma facing researchers is that no single factor correlates very highly with the developmental disorder.

Peter Bearman's research aims to provide new insight into the increased prevalence of autism by comprehensively and simultaneously examining the major factors potentially driving this epidemic. Bearman's study seeks to identify to what extent each of the three competing theories-expanded criteria for diagnosing autism, environmental degradation, and genetic inheritance-is able to account for the rise in autism cases.

In the first stage of his project, Bearman will build new data sets that enable him to understand potential gene-environment interactions, and assess the impact of changes in diagnostic criteria, family dynamics, and other factors in accounting for the autism epidemic. The second phase of his research will focus on understanding the social networks of doctors, hospitals, schools, and interacting parents in neighborhoods and associations whose activities construct the epidemic as we observe it. The third stage of the project will extend the framework developed for analyzing autism to other non-contagious epidemics, ADD, ADHD and bi-polar disorder which, though biologically unrelated to autism, may share some underlying social dynamics.