People

Below are profiles for Center Staff, Executive Committee Members, Advisory Committee Members, and Postdoctoral Scholars. Please scroll down for affiliated and associated members listing. 

  • Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she also serves on the Executive Council of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and is affiliated with the Institute for Research in African American Studies.

    Before teaching at the university level, she taught for three years in Atlanta Public Schools, at Collier Heights/Usher Elementary and KIPP WAYS Academy. She earned her PhD from the joint program in Anthropology and French Studies at New York University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia's Society of Fellows in the Humanities. From 2014-2016 I was on the faculty at Yale University.

    She is the former Managing Editor of two journals: Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Land to Learn, an organization committed to growing a movement for food justice and community wellness through garden-based education.

    Vanessa Agard-Jones serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Dr. Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He has broad interests in hydrology, climate dynamics, water resource systems analysis, risk management and sustainability. Dr. Lall has pioneered the application of techniques from nonlinear dynamical systems, nonparametric methods of function estimation and their application to spatio-temporal dynamical systems, Hierarchical Bayesian models, systems optimization and simulation and the study of multi-scale climate variability and change as an integral component of hydrologic systems. He has published in journals that focus on hydrology, water resources, climate, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, development, policy, and management science. He has been engaged in high level public and scientific discussion through the media, the World Economic Forum, and with governments, foundations, development banks, and corporations interested in sustainability. He has served on several national and international panels. He was one of the originators of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is currently the President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union.

    Upmanu Lall serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Stuart Firestein and his colleagues at the Department of Biological Sciences study the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. His laboratory seeks to answer the fundamental human question: How do I smell? Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Dr. Firestein seeks to reach broader audiences through nonscientific writing, public appearances, and his support of science in the arts. He also serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science. Recently he was awarded the 2011 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. His book on the workings of science for a general audience, Ignorance: How it Drives Science (Oxford, 2012) has received esteemed praise from the public and critics and has even become integrated into the curricula as required readings among several high schools and colleges.

    Stuart Firestein serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Stathis Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that ultimately come together around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism(Fordham 2013); and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two other book projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics, written in Greek over a period of 25 years, is forthcoming with the title Contingent Disorders. He is also an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek, most recent being Introduction to Physics (Athens, 2005).

    Stathis Gourgouris serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr. is Associate Professor of History (School of Arts & Sciences), Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health), and the former Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. He writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American history, medical and public health history, urban history, issues of policing and criminal justice, and the history of social movements. His book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (UNC Press, 2009), demonstrates the historical and continuing links between legal and de facto segregation and poor health outcomes. In 2013-14, Dr. Roberts served as the Policy Director of Columbia University’s Justice Initiative, where he coordinated the efforts of several partners to bring attention to the issue of aging and the growing incarcerated elderly population. This work led to the publication of the widely-read landmark report, Aging in Prison Reducing Elder Incarceration and Promoting Public Safety (New York: Columbia University Center for Justice. November 2015).

    Dr. Roberts currently is researching a book project on the history of drug addiction policy and politics from the 1950s to the present, a period which encompasses the various heroin epidemics between the 1950s and the 1980s, therapeutic communities, radical recovery movements, methadone maintenance treatment, and harm reduction approaches.

    Samuel Roberts leads the Historical Study of Race, Inequality, and Health Research Cluster and serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Ruth DeFries uses images from satellites and field surveys to examine how the world’s demands for food and other resources are changing land use throughout the tropics. Her research quantifies how these land use changes affect climate, biodiversity and other ecosystem services, as well as human development. She has also developed innovate education programs in sustainable development. DeFries was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s highest scientific honors, received a MacArthur “genius” award, and is the recipient of many other honors for her scientific research. In addition to over 100 scientific papers, she is committed to communicating the nuances and complexities of sustainable development to popular audiences, most recently through her book The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.

    Ruth DeFries serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Robert E. Remez is Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, where he has taught since 1980. His research examines the perceptual organization of speech, a function underlying the robustness of spoken communication; and, the ability to identify an individual by listening to a sample of vocal sound. At Barnard, he has held an Ann Whitney Olin Chair, has been Chair of the Departments of Psychology and Sociology, and is presently Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Language and Cognition. He is Co-editor of the Handbook of Speech Perception, and was Associate Editor of the journals Perception and Psychophysics and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. In service to the research community, he was a member of the Committee of Visitors for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, and was a sitting member of the Communication Sciences Study Section of the Division of Research Grants and the Language and Communication Study Section of the Center for Scientific Review of the National Institutes of Health. He has been elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Psychonomic Society. The Speech Perception Lab in Milbank Hall has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and is presently supported by the National Science Foundation.

    Robert E. Remez serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Robert Pollack, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences, joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1978. His laboratory research focuses on the potential utility of stable reversion from the oncogenic phenotype. His teaching focuses on the application of knowledge of the natural world to problems that require decisions that cannot be based solely on such data-driven knowledge. 

    He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Green at NYU Medical Center from 1966-1969, a Research Scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1969-70, a Senior Scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1970 to 1975, and an Associate Professor of Microbiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1975 until he joined the faculty of the Biological Sciences Department as a Professor in 1978. In 2010 he became the fifth Director of the University Seminars, and in 2016 he established the Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity within the Columbia University Center for Science and Society. He continues to write, teach, and learn from his colleagues of all ages.

    Robert Pollack leads the Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity and serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Rishi Goyal is Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and Director of the Major in Medicine, Literature, and Society at Columbia University. His research, writing, and teaching focus on the reciprocal transformation that results when new ideas about health, disease, and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places.

    Rishi Goyal serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Rhiannon Stephens is Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. Her research focuses on gender, economic difference, and political organization. She has written on the history of motherhood and its intersection with politics and economics in precolonial Uganda. Her new book, Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), traces the history of poverty and wealth as economic and social concepts in Uganda over the past two thousand years. Most recently, her research has turned to engaging with historical climate change and how East African communities responded to the challenges and opportunities it posed. At Columbia, she is a faculty affiliate at the Earth Institute, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Her work has been published in The American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, Past & Present, and the African Studies Review.

    Rhiannon Stephens co-leads the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Research Cluster and serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Rebecca Jordan-Young is the author of Brain Storm: The flaws in the science of sex differences (Harvard University Press, 2010), and more than three dozen articles and book chapters at the intersection of science and social differences, especially gender, sexuality, and race. Jordan-Young holds a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. She teaches such courses as Science and Sexualities; Introduction to Women and Health; Pleasures and Power (an Introduction to Sexuality Studies); and the Senior Seminar in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Jordan-Young directs the Science and Social Difference Working Group in the Center for Study of Social Differences at Columbia University, and co-directs the Columbia University Seminar on Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights. Before coming to Barnard College, Jordan-Young spent more than ten years conducting research on HIV/AIDS and urban health, and ran street outreach programs to prevent HIV among drug users and street-based sex workers. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation; the Tow Family Foundation; the Brocher Foundation; the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a Presidential Research Award from Barnard College, among others.

    Rebecca Jordan-Young serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Paul Linton is a neuroscientist and philosopher specializing in 3D vision. He received his PhD in 2021 from the Centre for Applied Vision Research, City, University of London, where his research challenged our understanding of distance perception by showing the visual system is unable to triangulate distance using the two eyes. He was also part of the DeepFocus team at Meta Reality Labs. Paul is the author of The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Before vision science, he was a stipendiary lecturer in law at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and a teaching fellow in philosophy at University College London. As a Presidential Scholar, Paul will develop his new two-stage theory of 3D vision using the latest techniques in machine learning and fMRI in the hope of explaining how we experience the 3D world. 

    Paul Linton is a 2022-23 Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. 

    Project Title: New Approaches to 3D Vision

  • Paul Kreitman is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research interests include the environmental history of Japan, science, technology and society studies, and the global history of sovereignty since the 19th century. His article "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo" won the American Society of Environmental History's Leopold Hidy Prize in 2018. His monograph Japan's Ocean's Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2023.

    Paul Kreitman serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Pamela H. Smith is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and Founding Director of the Center for Science and Society. At Columbia, she teaches history of early modern Europe and the history of science. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton 1994; 1995 Pfizer Prize), and The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 2004; 2005 Leo Gershoy Prize). Her work on alchemy, artisans, and the making of vernacular and scientific knowledge has been supported by fellowships at the Wissenschafts-Kolleg, as a Guggenheim Fellow, a Getty Scholar, a Samuel Kress Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

    Pamela Smith leads the Making and Knowing Research Cluster and serves as an Executive Committee and Advisory Board Member. 

  • Nicholas Dames is a specialist in the novel, with particular attention to the novel of the nineteenth century in Britain and on the European continent. His interests include novel theory, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the seventeenth century to the present. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford, 2001), which was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007). His scholarly articles have appeared in The Henry James Review, Representations, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Victorian Studies, as well as edited volumes such as Oxford’s Encyclopedia of British Literature, and Cambridge’s History of Literary Criticism. He has been a recipient of numerous awards including the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching (2013). From 2011-2014 he was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. His current project is a history of the chapter, from the textual cultures of late antiquity, particularly the editorial and scribal practices of early Christianity, to the modern novel.

    Nicholas Dames serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Nedah Nemati researches the role of lived experience in neuroscientific experimentation and the influence of such experience in characterizing behavioral and cognitive concepts. Her doctoral work parlayed this interest into an examination of how behavioral neurobiologists have drawn from many kinds of experiences to develop and understand the concept of ‘sleep’. This scholarship is informed by Nedah’s prior laboratory research on the relationship between circadian rhythms and addiction in rodents at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), and on sleep deprivation and death in Drosophila melanogaster (common fruit fly) at Harvard Medical School. She received philosophical training at Millsaps College (BSc), earned her MSc in biological sciences at UMMC, and will defend her PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh in May 2022.   

    As a Presidential Scholar, Nedah will draw from historical and phenomenological traditions to characterize an account of lived experience in neuroscience and to develop a philosophy and science of behavior in neuroscience - one that includes what should count as a behavior. Her investigations reflect a longstanding interest in the potential and limitations of using neuroscience to impart information about the mind. By characterizing the role of lived experience in scientific practices, Nedah’s project will aim to impart greater clarity in scientific uses of behavioral concepts and their clinical translation. Her interests also include the use of AI in neuroscience, intersections of neuroscience and medicine, interrogating the aims of science, and the metaphysics of science.  

    Project Title: Moving from Flies to Frogs: Understanding Behavior through Lived Experience 

  • Natalia Pasternak is a microbiologist, with a PhD and post-doctorate in Microbiology, in the field of Bacterial Genetics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is the former director in Brazil of the international festival of scientific communication “Pint of Science," columnist for the Brazilian national newspaper "O Globo", for the Skeptic magazine, and former columnist for Medscape. She also hosts two weekly radio shows “The hour of Science” at Brazil's CBN national radio station. She is a professor at the Public Administration School at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo, and a research collaborator at the University of São Paulo, in the Vaccine Development Laboratory, Biomedical Sciences Institute. She is currently the publisher of Question of Science magazine and president of Question of Science Institute, the first Brazilian Institute for the promotion of skepticism and rational thinking. She is the first Brazilian to become a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in recognition of outstanding work in the promotion of science, skepticism and critical thinking. In 2020, and again in 2021, she was chosen Brazilian of the year in Science by IstoE Magazine. She was chosen Personality of the year by the Group of Latin America Daily Newspapers, and received the Ockham Award from The Skeptic magazine, for the promotion of skepticism and rational thinking in Brazil. 

    She has written three books on popularization of science, Science in our daily lives, which won Brazil's National Literature prize for best science book in 2021, Against Reality: science denialism, its causes and consequences, and Such Nonsense, pseudosciences and other crazy allegations that should not be taken seriously, the last one became a best-seller a month after the launch, reaching number 1 in the non-fiction category in all major book sales lists in Brazil. She was the only Brazilian listed by BBC as the 100 most influential women of 2021, at the Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world in 2022, she won the Balles Prize for the promotion of critical thinking in 2022, and she is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Science and Society and an Adjunct Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she teaches on the use of science for policy making. Her research focuses on how to improve science communication, vaccine uptake and combat denialism and misinformation, bringing scientific thinking for future policy makers, and helping to create an international collaboration for science-based global policies. 

  • Naomi Rosenkranz is the Associate Director of the Center for Science and Society and its research cluster, the Making and Knowing Project. She oversees the development and administration of the Center and its research clusters, Scholars, grant programs, activities, and events. For the Making and Knowing Project, she serves as the main administrative liaison between the various research, editorial, and digital activities of the Project staff, collaborators, and participants. She supports the historical reconstruction research, oversees the Project’s chemical laboratory, and maintains the digital collaboration systems. She studied physics at Barnard College (class of 2015), concentrating her research experiences in materials science and engineering (including synthesis and characterization of superconductors and photoconductive properties of organic nanorods). In 2014-15, she served as the inaugural Science Resident in Conservation with Columbia’s Ancient Ink Lab, identifying and characterizing ancient carbon-based inks. She continued her investigation of inks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, working with the departments of Scientific Research and Paper Conservation to examine medieval iron-tannate black inks through recipe reconstructions and spectral analysis of museum objects.

  • Nadia Abu El-Haj is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities. She also serves as Vice-President and Vice-Chair of the Board at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today.

    Nadia Abu El-Haj serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Mike Petriello is an interdisciplinary conservation social scientist interested in the many connections and feedbacks between human cultures and the environment. In particular, his work centers on the recognition, inclusion, and maintenance of Indigenous and local knowledge in conservation and natural resource management, empowerment, and transdisciplinary approaches to collaborations such as knowledge co-production. He received his PhD in Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences and Applied Biodiversity Science in 2020 from Texas A&M University, where he worked with small-scale farmers (campesinos) in Nicaragua to explore the cultural significance and boundaries of local knowledge tied to wildlife hunting. Mike continues to work with many past and present research partners, including Labrador Inuit collaborators from his previous knowledge co-production work as a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University with the Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures Project. As a postdoctoral research scholar in the Center for Science and Society, Mike will build on his experience to explore good practices for the ethical co-production of knowledge in climate change research while co-developing research with diverse groups at Columbia University and beyond.

    This postdoctoral position is supported by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

  • Merlin Chowkwanyun is the Donald H. Gemson Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. His work centers on the history of community health, environmental health regulation, racial inequality, and social movement/activism around health. His upcoming book, All Health Politics is Local: Battles for Community Health in the Mid-Century United States, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. He is working on another book on political unrest at medical schools and neighborhood health activism during the 1960s and 1970s. He is also the PI (Co-PI David Rosner) on a recent National Science Foundation Standard Research Grant for ToxicDocs.org, a depository of millions of pages of once-secret documents on industrial poisons. He teaches courses on health advocacy and mixed methods, and in the CORE, co-teaches the social determinants module. He is most proud of the two teaching awards he has won at the Mailman School of Public Health for Excellence in Teaching and Innovation in Teaching. 

    Merlin Chowkwanyun serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Mary Putman is Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University. Previously, she was a faculty member at the University of Michigan and a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado. She is an expert on the gas in and around galaxies that leads to the formation of stars and uses telescopes on the ground and in space as her tools. She has over 100 publications in peer-review journals with close to 9000 citations and gives numerous invited talks on her work.

    Mary Putman serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Marwa Elshakry, Associate Professor, teaches on a broad range of subjects in the history of science, technology, and medicine and modern Arabic intellectual history. Her first book, entitled, Reading Darwin in Arabic was published in 2013 with the University of Chicago Press. Among her other publications are: “Translation” in Blackwell Companion to the History of Science (Wiley Press, 2016); “Islam” in Michael Saler, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle World (Routledge, 2014; Elshakry and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds., Science, Race and Imperialism [Victorian Literature and Science series: vol. 6], (Pickering and Chatto, 2012); and ‘When Science became Western: historiographical reflections’, Isis, 101:1 (March 2010), 98-109. She is currently working on the idea of golden ages, universal histories and the history of science and orientalism from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

    Marwa Elshakry co-leads the Global Histories of Science Research Cluster and serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • Marguerite Holloway has written about science—including natural history, environmental issues, public health, physics, neuroscience and women in science—for publications including the New York Times, Discover, Natural History, Wired and Scientific American, where she was a long-time writer and editor. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, the story of John Randel Jr., the surveyor and inventor who laid the grid plan on New York City, and of the researchers who use his data today (W.W. Norton, 2013); she recently wrote the new introduction to Manhattan in Maps (Dover, 2014). Holloway is currently working on several innovative digital projects, including the Metropolis of Science website and smartphone app.

    Marguerite Holloway serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Manan Ahmed is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000 to 1800 C.E. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia, critical philosophy of history, and colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.

    Manan Ahmed serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Madi Whitman is a postdoctoral research scholar and assistant director of curriculum development in the Center for Science and Society. As a sociocultural anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher, Madi studies how technologies, institutions, and subjectivities are made together. This research is currently animated by questions about surveillance and marginality in changing regimes of data collection in higher education in the United States.

    Madi’s pedagogical work includes supporting interdisciplinary co-teaching at Columbia, developing curricula in science and society, and investigating the landscape of STS education in the U.S. Prior to coming to Columbia, Madi was involved in collaborations with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information in creating critical data modules for students. Madi earned a PhD in anthropology from Purdue University in 2020, completed a BA in anthropology at the University of North Dakota, and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

  • Lydia Gibson is an anthropologist and ecologist exploring forest use, ritual practices, and traditional knowledge of Jamaican Maroons and how these are affected by geopolitical shifts, climate change, and colonial legacies. Lydia is also interested in the technical arrangements of environmental sciences and how these are disrupted by the particular conditions of island tropical montane cloud forests (in the Caribbean), which render many technologies and methodological approaches untenable. As well as working with local communities and knowledge-holders to monitor environmental conditions, countermap large areas of the forest, observe population changes, and position their expertise as central to forest ecology, Lydia also collaborates with other stakeholders and international experts to establish baseline data of local bird populations through satellite telemetry and banding efforts. Lydia is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission and contributes to the monitoring and assessment of endemic parrots. Lydia holds a PhD in Environmental Anthropology from University College London, a Masters in Anthropology from UCL, and a Bachelors in Mathematics and Biology from the University of Bristol. Prior to this current postdoctoral role, Lydia was an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at University College London. Lydia remains an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London's Anthropology Department.

  • Laura Fair is a Professor of African History, specializing in twentieth-century East African social, cultural, and gender studies. Her books include Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar (Ohio University Press, 2001), Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad (African Books Collective, 2013), and Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth Century Urban Tanzania (Ohio University Press, 2018). Her current research traces transformations in food, farming and eating habits in Zanzibar.

    Laura Fair serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is a public health historian with a focus on the history of medical global health concerns. Her most recent research is on the cultural politics of aging in South Asia. Prior to joining the Mailman School faculty as assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Kavita was a David Bell Research Fellow at the Center for Population Studies and Development Studies at Harvard University and also was awarded the Balzan Fellowship for her work on social inequalities and health by University College London. Her training in history at Trinity College, Cambridge University and experience in archival work, policy debates and public health practice in developing settings brings together a rich interdisciplinary perspective anchored in rigorous historical method.

    Kavita Sivaramakrishnan co-leads the Global Histories of Science Research Cluster and sits as an Executive Committee Member. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Kavita also served as the Center's Interim Director. 

  • Julia Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell Laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in text-to-speech (TTS) systems. She joined the Columbia faculty as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2002. She and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems; on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. She now serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the Executive Board of the CRA, the AAAI Council, the Executive Board of the NAACL, and the board of the CRA-W. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014 and as an Honorary Member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology in the same year.

    Julia Hirschberg serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jozef Sulik is the assistant director of the Center for Science and Society and Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program. Jozef manages events, grants, communications, and budgets. He also provides administrative support for the postdoctoral scholars affiliated with the Center and their research projects. Before joining Columbia University, Jozef worked in the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships at Harvard College and spent several years as an agent in talent management in the UK. Jozef received his BA in government from Harvard University Extension School. 

  • Jonathan R. Cole is the John Mitchell Mason Professor of Columbia University where he has spent his academic career. From 1987 to 1989 he was Vice President of Arts and Sciences, and from 1989 to 2003, he was Provost and Dean of Faculties of Columbia University—the second longest tenure as Provost in the University's 258-year history. His scholarly work focused principally on the development of the sociology of science as a research specialty. This is seen in early published papers and in his 1973 book with Stephen Cole, Social Stratification in Science (University of Chicago Press). Among his other published works on science are: Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community (1987); The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community (1991). In recent years, his scholarly attention has focused on issues in higher education, particularly problems facing the great American research universities. His edited book The Research University in a Time of Discontent (Johns Hopkins University Press 1994), contains essays by prominent educators, including his own opening chapter.

    Jonathan R. Coles serves as an Advisory Committee Member. 

  • John Mutter is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Department of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research focuses on the role of natural disasters in constraining development opportunities for poor and emerging societies. Meteorological extremes are expected to increase as a result of human-induced climate change, and his work attempts to assess who are most vulnerable to disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Katrina. John Mutter directs the Earth Institute’s postdoctoral Fellows Program and is director of graduate studies for the Ph.D. in Sustainable development. Mutter is also one of the principal investigators on the Earth Institute’s National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCE program, which is designed to create institutional change that will improve the opportunities for women in earth science and engineering at Columbia. Mutter has authored or co-authored more than 80 articles in scientific journals in the natural and social sciences and many popular publications. His fieldwork included over three years at sea in all parts of the world’s oceans.

    John Mutter serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jeremy K. Kessler is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on First Amendment law, administrative law, and constitutional law generally. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2015. His forthcoming book, Fortress of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of the Draft and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard) explores how legal and political contests over the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. Kessler also writes about law and history for non-academic publications including The New Republic,n+1, The Boston Review, and Jacobin. Prior to joining Columbia Law School, Kessler clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. He previously served as the David Berg Foundation Fellow at the Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University, as a graduate fellow at Cardozo School of Law, and as the Harry Middleton Fellow in Presidential Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. He currently sits on the board of the American Society for Legal History.

    Jeremy Kessler serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

    Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017). A new monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, is forthcoming from Fordham in late 2019.

    Jennifer Wenzel serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jason Smerdon is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He also holds appointments within the Columbia Climate School as an Earth Institute Faculty Member, Co-Senior Director for Education, and Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development. Smerdon teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on climate, environmental change, and sustainable development, while also lecturing widely in public and private settings on the subject of climate change and its social dimensions. He is the author of Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future (Columbia University Press, 2018).

    Smerdon’s research focuses on climate variability and change during the past several millennia and how past climates can help us understand future climate change. He publishes widely on paleoclimate reconstruction techniques, the dynamics of past climate change and variability, and on assessments of climate models using paleoclimatic information.

    Jason Smerdon co-leads the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Research Cluster and serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • James Yardley served as Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana from 1967 until 1977 where he received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He directed research at Honeywell International from 1977 until 1991, where he served in a number of research and management positions before becoming Vice President of Technology for the Electronic Materials Business. At Columbia, he has served as director of the Center for Integrated Science and Engineering, and has been Managing Director of the Columbia Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, a National Science Foundation program to understand fundamentals for Nanotechnology. This program has opened new vistas in understanding charge transport in molecular systems and has pioneered explorations of the unique properties of graphene. He also is Managing Director for the Columbia Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the Department of Energy to develop fundamental understanding of solar cell technology. In his scientific career spanning academia and industrial research, Prof. Yardley has been involved in a wide range of activities including scientific research, technical development, and new business development. In 2014 he was appointed as Acting Executive Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative, a new initiative at Columbia University to develop, support, and foster new research at Columbia in Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

    James Yardley serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jim Neal served as the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University during 2001-2014, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of twenty-two libraries. Previously, he served as the Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University, and held administrative positions in the libraries at Penn State, Notre Dame, and the City University of New York, and recently completed a three-year term as ALA Treasurer. He has served on the Board and as President of the Association of Research Libraries, on the Board and as Chair of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), on the Board and as Chair of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and on the Board of the Digital Preservation Network. He has represented the American library community in testimony on copyright matters before Congressional committees, was an advisor to the U.S. delegation at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on copyright, has worked on copyright policy and advisory groups for universities and for professional and higher education associations, and during 2005-08 was a member of the U.S. Copyright Office Section 108 Study Group. He is chair of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 2017 National Conference, and is coordinating the fundraising for the IFLA 2016 scholarship program. In 2010, he received the honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Alberta. And in 2015, he received the ALA Joseph W. Lippincott Award for “distinguished service to the profession of librarianship”, and the Freedom to Read Foundation Roll of Honor Award.

    Jim Neal serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Jacqueline Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs - and ignores what it doesn’t - during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity. Her research could offer insight into disorders that involve deficits of attention, such as attention deficit disorder, depression, and drug addiction.

    Jacqueline completed her undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her PhD in Neurobiology at Yale University, and her postdoctoral training at the National Eye Institute. She joined the neuroscience faculty at Columbia University in 2001.

    Jacqueline Gottlieb led the Research Cluster on Curiosity.

  • Harriet Zuckerman’s research has focused on the social organization of science and scholarship. She is the author of Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States (1979). This book, in addition to being a study of the scientific elite, constitutes a fascinating introduction to the phenomenon of multiple discovery, particularly in science and technology. Its findings, particularly in relation to “accumulation of advantage”, are relevant to the question of eminence, exceptional achievement, and greatness.

    Harriet Zuckerman serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Hadeel Assali is an anthropologist and former engineer whose work looks at the ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2021 from Columbia University, where her research looked specifically at the development of geology in Britain and how it was exported to the colonies for extraction, mapping, and eventual state-making technologies. More broadly, she examines the narratives deployed to produce space(s) and how they become imbued with the authority to do so. She will be running the “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” seminar, which was founded by earth science graduate students, with the goal of exploring ways of decolonizing the earth sciences. She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work draws heavily from her family stories based in Gaza, Palestine. Her new research seeks to focus on waterways and the colonial legacies access to, relations with, and knowledge of them.

    Prior to her anthropological training, Hadeel was trained as a chemical engineer at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and in a joint MS program with the National University of Singapore. Her nearly ten years of experience with a major oil company, several of which were as a project manager for environmental remediation projects, have largely informed the direction of her research. After receiving her PhD from Columbia, she was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (2021-2022), where she worked on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, which she plan to continue developing while back at Columbia University. 

    This postdoctoral position is supported by a grant from the Arts & Sciences’ Graduate Equity Initiative.

  • Eugenia Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, emotions and gender, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press, 2007), which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association. Professor Lean is currently researching a project titled “Manufacturing Knowledge: Chen Diexian, a Chinese Man-of-Letters in an Age of Industrial Capitalism,” which examines the practices and writings of polymath Chen Diexian, a professional writer/editor, science enthusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist. The project aims to explore the intersection among vernacular science, global commerce, and ways of authenticating knowledge and things in an era of mass communication. A third book project focuses on China’s involvement in shaping twentieth-century global regimes of intellectual property rights from trademark infringement to patenting science. It investigates the local vibrant cultures of copying and authenticating in China, as well as enquires into how China emerged as the “quintessential copycat” in the modern world. She was featured in “Top Young Historians,” History News Network (fall 2008) and received the 2013-2014 Faculty Mentoring Award for faculty in Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is the Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

    Eugenia Lean co-leads the Global Histories of Science Research Cluster and serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Elaine van Dalen is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is a philologist working on medical, botanical, and agricultural texts from the Classical Islamic world. Her research questions relate to the transmission and translation of knowledge, history of scholarship and writing, history of ideas, and philosophy of science. She teaches Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course, and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies’ core course Asian Humanities.

    She received her PhD in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Manchester in 2017. She obtained BA degrees in Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic Languages and Cultures from Leiden University, Netherlands (2011), and an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo (2014). She was the recipient of the Magda Nowaihi Award in gender studies in 2014. Before joining Columbia University, she taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester, and she was a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC project PhilAnd at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

    Elaine Van Dalen serves as an Advisory Committee Member. 

  • Dilshanie Perera is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer whose work examines the politics of the climate crisis and its relationship to pervasive and durable forms of inequality and dispossession. Dilshanie’s research takes a broad view of risk temporalities, emphasizing the multiple histories and enduring inequities that structure hazard and vulnerability in particular places. Their doctoral dissertation, titled Barometer Falling: Weather, Risk, and the Meteorological Imagination, examined changing perceptions of risk in Bangladesh — a postcolonial context grappling with the present-day effects of climate change, where weather and landscape have historically been construed as problems of governance. 

    Dilshanie holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, an MA from the New School for Social Research, and a BA from the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Columbia, Dilshanie was the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum, the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to inspiring action on the climate crisis.

    This fellowship is supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.

  • Dhananjay Jagannathan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies of the Classical Studies Program at Columbia University. His recent scholarly work has focused on Aristotle's ethics and political philosophy, but his research interests range over ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, philosophy and literature, the history of ethics, and theories of practical reason. In his book manuscript Aristotle's Practical Epistemology, he argues against the conflation of practical knowledge with scientific knowledge, a conflation that continues to distort not only readings of Aristotle but also our understanding of how different kinds of knowledge are related and which are rightly thought of as basic.

    Dhananjay Jagannathan serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Film and Media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first academic monograph, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practice and practitioners. In her new research, Debashree is developing a media history of indentured labor and plantation capitalism in the Indian Ocean, exploring photography, communications infrastructures, and film traffic. She edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has published in journals such as Film History, Representations, and Feminist Media Histories. In a previous life, Debashree worked full-time in Mumbai's film and television industries.

    Debashree Mukherjee serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • David Rosner is the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Professor of History at Columbia University. 

    He researches the intersection of public health and social history and the politics of occupational disease and industrial pollution. He has been actively involved in lawsuits on behalf of cities, states, and communities around the nation who are trying to hold the lead industry accountable for past acts that have resulted in tremendous damage to America's children. His work on the history of industry and understanding the harms done by their industrial toxins has been part of lawsuits on behalf of asbestos workers and silicosis victims.

    Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, he was University Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York. In 2010, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences' National Academy of Medicine. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and a Josiah Macy Fellow. He has been awarded the Distinguished Scholars Prize from the City University of New York and the Viseltear Prize for Outstanding Work in the History of Public Health from the American Public Health Association. He is the author of many books on occupational disease, epidemics, and public health.

    David Rosner serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • David Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship (Iconoclasts and their Motives (1984), The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989) ). His more traditional art historical writing originally centered on Dutch and Flemish art, specializing in the history of Dutch printmaking. His recent work focuses on the history of science and on the importance of the new cognitive neurosciences for the study of art and its history. Following a series of important discoveries in Windsor Castle, the Institut de France and the archives of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, he has for long been concerned with the intersection of art and science in the age of Galileo. While much of his work in this area has been published in articles and catalogs, his chief publication in this area is The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2002). Although Freedberg continues to teach in the fields of Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian seventeenth-century art, as well as in historiographical and theoretical areas, his primary research now concentrates on the relations between art, history, and cognitive neuroscience. Taking up the psychological dimensions of the work outlined in The Power of Images (1989), he has been engaged in research and experiments on the relations between vision, embodiment, movement, and emotion.

    David Freedberg serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts and co-editor of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy. Her recent work in the history of philosophy has been supported by support from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Folger Library, American Council of Learned Studies, Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti Library, Florence, Italy.

    Christia Mercer leads the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy and serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Caroline Surman is the Project and Communications Manager with the Center for Science and Society and the Making and Knowing Project. She assists in planning events, administering the Center's grant programs, and oversees communications and social media. She is also responsible for training and overseeing the Center's Work Study Administrative Assistants. Caroline studied anthropology with a minor in environmental science at Barnard College and holds a masters of science in nonprofit management from Columbia University. Previously, she worked for Bank Street School for Children and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

  • Angelo Matteo Caglioti is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College. His research deals with the history of the environmental sciences, in particular the history of meteorology and climatology, and their entanglement with European colonialism in Africa. He is also interested in the history of eugenics and science under Nazi-Fascism. He received a PhD in History with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the European University Institute, the Rachel Carson Center in Environment and Society, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union.

    Angelo Matteo Caglioti serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Anamika is an undergraduate work-study student at the Center for Science and Society, studying civil engineering with a minor in computer science. Deeply passionate about leveraging engineering to bridge socio-economic disparities, Anamika actively participates in organizations such as Engineers without Borders and the Society of Women Engineers. In addition, she is actively engaged with the Columbia Community, assuming various leadership roles, which include serving as an orientation leader for the New Student Orientation Program and acting as a recruitment liaison for the Muslim Student House. Back home in Georgia, Anamika is very active in her community, having interned and volunteered at community-centered organizations such as Live Healthy Gwinnett. In her free time, Anamika loves to explore the boroughs of NYC, go on food crawls with friends, and create art.

  • Alma Steingart, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, researches the interplay between American politics and mathematical rationalities. Her current project, Accountable Democracy, examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted electoral politics in the United States in the twentieth century. Her first book, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (2023). Before joining Columbia University, she was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a predoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She earned her PhD in 2013 in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work has appeared in Social Studies of Science, Grey Room, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work is supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

    Alma Steingart serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

  • Ajit Subramaniam is a Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He is an oceanographer who uses knowledge of remote sensing, ocean optics, phytoplankton physiology, biological and physical oceanography, and geographical information systems to better understand how the marine ecosystem functions and can be managed. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, he worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Services Center in Charleston, SC, the University of Maryland in College Park, MD, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

    Ajit Subramaniam serves as an Executive Committee Member.

  • A. Tunç Şen is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of the Ottoman world from its beginnings in the fourteenth century through the early twentieth century, focusing on the history of sciences and divination, manuscript culture, the history of emotions, and the social history of scholarship. His forthcoming first book, based on his award-winning dissertation and tentatively titled Forgotten Experts: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600, will examine what “scientific authority” and “expertise” meant in the early modern context. His publications include “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bayezid II (r. 886/1481-918/1512) and his Celestial Interests,” “Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul,” and “The Emotional Universe of Insecure Scholars in the Early Modern Ottoman Hierarchy of Learning.” He is a member of an international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition (GHOST): Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities, funded by the European Research Council. He regularly teaches courses on Ottoman-Turkish history, the history of the occult in the Muslim world, and Islamicate manuscript culture.

    Tunç Şen serves as an Advisory Committee Member.

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