Celebrating 10 Years of Presidential Scholars
This month, we celebrated a decade of transformative interdisciplinary research through our Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at the Center for Science and Society. Founded by former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, the Presidential Scholars program (PSSN) helped advance our understanding of the mind, brain, and behavior.
Our Presidential Scholars are the core of this program. Over three years, each of our early-career scholars received support from a multidisciplinary team of faculty members. Their research projects investigated issues at the intersection of neuroscience and the arts, social sciences, or humanities. Past scholars have carried this interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to their new institutions and organizations.
10 years marks a natural reflection point, providing a chance to honor the scholars' achievements and anticipate another decade of discovery. We did this together on March 3, when we welcomed back many of our 16 scholars, along with their faculty mentors, members of the program's Executive Committee, and our broader Presidential Scholars community. It was a joyful and invigorating reunion that sparked new conversations and ideas.
We asked our scholars to consider the program's impact and continued legacy. Below are a selection of the responses.
Federica Coppola was a Presidential Scholar from 2017-2020 and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Law at IE Law School.
Can you share an example of a breakthrough or insight you’ve had that wouldn’t have been possible without the Presidential Scholars community and resources?
The PSSN experience has given me the opportunity to explore a unique approach to the study of law and criminal justice, integrating doctrinal legal analysis with scientific evidence regarding how the environment affects the human brain, as well as incorporating the lived experiences of individuals involved in the criminal justice system. This latter source of knowledge, in particular, has proven essential in guiding my research and in clarifying how social neuroscience can contribute to positive transformations in justice theories and practices. Currently, I apply this three-pronged methodology—law, science, and lived experience—in both my research and teaching. This holistic approach to studying and teaching law is something I could not have fully embraced without my years in the PSSN program, the mentorship I received, and the remarkable colleagues I was fortunate enough to collaborate with over those three years.
Looking back, what aspects of the Presidential Scholars program do you feel were most transformative for you as a researcher and as a person?
Certainly, the most transformative aspect was the work I did with my mentor, Geraldine Downey, at the Social Relations Lab and the Center for Justice. Geraldine introduced me to a unique method for integrating behavioral science into legal analysis, illuminating the true potential of my research to advance legal scholarship and drive proposals for justice reform. Additionally, exchanges with colleagues at the Center for Justice provided invaluable feedback, consistently helping me refine my ideas and develop legal arguments capable of making a concrete, meaningful impact by amplifying the voices of individuals affected by the criminal legal system. The most enlightening experience of this work was teaching incarcerated students alongside prosecutors as part of the Inside Criminal Justice program. There, I directly witnessed how interdisciplinarity between law and (neuro)science can serve as a powerful tool for bridging divides and breaking down prejudices among people on different sides of the law. This experience fundamentally reshaped my approach to legal scholarship and profoundly touched me on a personal, human level. Importantly, I am co-authoring a law review article with Jarrell Daniels (Center for Justice), in which we propose a collaborative justice paradigm inspired by this and similar co-educational and policy reform initiatives. This publication further underscores the lasting impact of the PSSN program on my work.
Matteo Farinella was a Presidential Scholar from 2016-2019 and currently serves as a Scientific Multimedia Producer at Columbia University.
How has PSSN’s emphasis on collaboration shaped your current academic or professional relationships?
In my work as a science multimedia producer, I have to collaborate with neuroscientists every day. I think my experience as a PSSN scholar gave me a framework to manage these relationships in a more constructive way.
Looking back, what aspects of PSSN do you feel were most transformative for you as a researcher and as a person? If you had to describe PSSN’s impact on your career in one sentence, how would you put it?
The PSSN program gave me the confidence to look at my artistic work as its source of expertise, not as subordinate or in service to science.
Andrew Goldman was a Presidential Scholar from 2015-2018 and currently serves as an Assistant Professor in Music Theory and Cognitive Science at Indiana University.
Looking back, what aspects of the Presidential Scholars program do you feel were most transformative for you as a researcher and as a person?
Explicit and implicit learning were both part of my experience with PSSN. Explicitly, I learned a number of tangible research skills, including all of the technical know-how to conduct EEG experiments. Implicitly, the members of the community modeled interdisciplinarity, with all of its benefits and challenges. In particular, I learned that it is possible to build new communities and programs within universities.
What does the next phase of your career look like, and how has your Presidential Scholars experience influenced your goals?
PSSN has allowed me the space to radically rethink how I conduct scientific research on music, for example in centralizing and legitimizing musical craft as a proper topic of study. As a songwriter, I feel I am on the cusp of discovering new ways to integrate my musical and scientific lives.
Paul Linton is a Presidential Scholar from 2022-2025 and a NOMIS Fellow of the Italian Academy.
How has your approach to interdisciplinary research evolved since participating in the Presidential Scholars program?
The challenge is to find some way of connecting philosophy with psychology/neuroscience by finding a middle ground that’s more empirical than traditional philosophy, but perhaps less data-focused than traditional psychology/neuroscience. One solution, that has been relatively neglected in recent years, is the development of new visual illusions. So my focus has been on developing five new visual illusions that grow out of my philosophical/theoretical work on the PSSN.
What does the next phase of your career look like, and how has your PSSN experience influenced your goals?
All five of these illusions provide a strong signal that something is fundamentally missing from our traditional understanding of visual experience. The challenge now, in my current work with the NOMIS Foundation, is to provide a comprehensive account of these illusions (and their significance) through the traditional tools of psychology/neuroscience: testing behavior, neural recording, and building computational models. The PSSN has provided a wonderful opportunity to develop a collaboration with Niko Kriegeskorte at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to pursue these questions.
Matthew Sachs was a Presidential Scholar from 2019-2022 and currently serves as a Data Scientist at Spotify and Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University
Can you share an example of a breakthrough or insight you’ve had that wouldn’t have been possible without the Presidential Scholars community and resources?
For my main postdoctoral research project, in order to study emotion dynamics in a naturalistic, yet experimentally-controlled environment, we realized that we needed to create a new stimuli set. Thanks to the PSSN, I was able to form connections with composers from NYU's Film Composing program, who we hired to write the exact stimuli that we needed. The PSSN was instrumental in not only bridging these relationships, but providing the funds needed to fairly compensate these artists for their time and work. The end result was not only exactly what we needed, but beautifully written.
Have you continued any collaborative projects that started within the Presidential Scholars network?
Yes, completely. I still work closely with other neuroscientists and psychologists that I came in contact with because of the PSSN program, including professors not just at Columbia, but now at UCLA and Northeastern. I have also been in talks with former scholars, like Andrew Goldman and Nori Jacoby, to work on collaborative projects that merge academic research with large-scale datasets available via the tech industry.