The Columbia University Asian Faculty Association (CUAFA) is pleased to announce the recipients of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award and the Young Investigator Award. The two annual awards recognize outstanding Columbia faculty members of Asian heritage and allies, one for senior members who have made significant contributions at the highest national and international levels, and one for young investigates who are within the first ten years of their first faculty appointment.
This year’s awardees were selected by a highly distinguished faculty committee chaired by Sankar Ghosh. Other members of the selection committee include X. Edward Guo, Yiping Han, Anil Lalwani, David Ho, Gerard Karsenty, Eugenia Lean, Kam Leong, Andy Marks, Robert D. Mawhinney, Michael Morris, Samuel Sia, Simon Tavaré, and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a University Professor, the highest honor given to a handful of professors across the university, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is a critical theorist whose work has been particularly influential to the field of post-colonialism, for which she is often referred to as having been a pioneer.
She received her B.A. at the University of Calcutta (1959); her M.A. (1962) and Ph.D. (1967) from Cornell University. Professor Spivak has also taught at Brown, Texas at Austin, UC Santa Cruz, Université Paul Valery, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt, Riydah University, and Emory. Before coming to Columbia in 1991, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, the Center for the Study of Social Sciences (Calcutta), the Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio). She has been a Kent fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her Distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). She has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
An activist as well as an educator, she is involved in international women’s movements and issues surrounding ecological agriculture. She has been deeply involved in rural education in Asia for nearly two decades.
Harris H. Wang, Young Investigator Award
Harris H. Wang is an Associate Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Systems Biology. Dr. Wang received B.S. degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard, where he pioneered the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) platform for rapid and combinatorial genome editing.
Dr. Wang’s current research focuses on applying synthetic biology methods to manipulate microbial communities and mammalian systems. Using advanced approaches in genome engineering, gene synthesis, and next-generation sequencing, he studies how genomes are shaped and maintained by the environment, and how they evolve over time. His research group is developing enabling technologies in systems and synthetic biology to engineer microbial systems and mammalian cells in ways that could address key challenges in health, energy, and the environment.
Dr. Wang is the recipient of numerous awards including the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and was named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Science in 2012.
The CUAFA will honor the awardees on February 25 at the Hou and Li Family Gala Dinner, in collaboration with Columbia Global Centers | Beijing.