THE VOTING DEADLINE FOR THIS HAS PASSED

We have recently launched an initiative to bring together a diverse group of New York-based leaders and change agents and equip them with tools to use oral history in service of their mission. The program, entitled Telling Lives, has already convened two workshops attracting 30 advocates from organizations like Picture the Homeless and Make the Road-NY.

We now have an exciting opportunity through an online competition with Good Magazine to receive seed funding to further develop and expand this initiative to more communities in New York. As longtime supporters of the Center, we ask that you take two minutes out of your day, vote for our project here, and encourage others to vote as well. 

The program is co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History and the Oral History Master of Arts program. Click here to learn more about the workshops.

Voting Instructions

• Visit the Telling Lives page at: http://jumo-organizations.maker.good.is/projects/Telling-Lives

• Click "Vote for this Idea" to vote for us!

• Log in with your GOOD account. If you don't have a GOOD account, it's free to join. All you need is an email address or a Facebook account to register.

•If you use an email address, you will be emailed a link that you need to click in order to verify your address.

• Once you've voted, you'll get a notification at the top of the screen verifying that your vote has been counted.

• Remember, you can only vote once during the entire voting period, so please let your friends know and spread the word!

A study from INCITE's Understanding Autism Project was published in Pediatrics. This study's objective was to describe the typical longitudinal developmental trajectories of social and communication functioning in children with autism and to determine the correlates of these trajectories.

The study, which examines a large dataset of case load files from the California Department of Developmental Services, found children whose symptoms were least severe at first diagnosis tended to improve more rapidly than those severely affected. One group of children experienced rapid gains, moving from severely affected to high functioning. Socioeconomic factors were correlated with trajectory outcomes; children with non-Hispanic, white, well-educated mothers were more likely to be high functioning, and minority children with less-educated mothers or intellectual disabilities were very unlikely to experience rapid gains.

The study was co-authored by Christine Fountain, Alix S. Winter, and Peter Bearman.

Click here to read the study.

Click here to read an article about the study in Crain's New York.

In September 2010, the Columbia University H&SS site (a partnership of INCITE and the Mailman School of Public Health) funded the seed grant "Linking spatial and social environment for population health." The study, made possible through the 10-month grant, was featured in the January 2012 Special Issue of Social Networks. The article "Capturing context: Integrating spatial and social network analyses," was co-authored by jimi adams (Cohort 5), Katherine Faust and Gina Lovasi (Cohort 4). Click here to read the article.

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

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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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Exploring the increasing prevalence of autism, The Los Angeles Times cited Peter Bearman's research into the environmental causes of autism. Bearman's research analyzes state data, finding that children who live near somebody with autism were more likely to have the diagnosis themselves. Bearman estimates that the influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005.

Researchers from the Understanding Autism Project, including the project's Principal Investigator Peter Bearman, have spent three years trying to disentangle the causes of Autism, which have increased roughly ten-fold over the past 40 years. As Bearman said in the latest edition of New Scientist-Health, they have now identified three factors that are driving up autism rates, but found that these account for only half of the observed increase. Autism experts say Bearman's work is notable because it provides a powerful overview of the potential causes. "Bearman is giving us the answers we've been looking for,"  Michael Rosanoff of Autism Speaks told New Scientist-Health.

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.