On Monday, April 28, 2025, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences hosted the annual Awards Dinner in celebration of the achievements of alumni and graduate students. As Dean Carlos J. Alonso said in his opening remarks, the ceremony celebrates the “superlative achievements of those who have gone into the world after being shaped intellectually by this institution.”
The evening began with the Campbell Award, given to a recent Columbia graduate in recognition of exceptional student leadership and Columbia spirit. This year’s recipient was Lauren P. Bernard (’25PhD, Music), for her extensive work as a mentor, including the Summer Research Program and her leadership while serving on the e-board of the Students of Color Alliance (SoCA). Upon accepting, Bernard said, “I worked with incredible students, undergraduates, and graduate students, and I got to support them through their tribulations, their struggles and also lift them up in their successes.”
Christina Hull Paxson (’87PhD, Economics), the current President of Brown University, was the recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Dean Alonso read Paxson’s acceptance remarks in absentia. "This was one of the best programs for labor economics, and it was a great match for my interests," wrote Paxson of her time in graduate school. "I truly enjoyed my time at Columbia, acquiring skills to employ the analytical tools of economics that can ultimately improve human welfare."
Each year, one master’s and one doctoral alumnus are recognized with the Deans’ Award for Distinguished Achievement. This year’s recipients were Colonel Matthew Bogdanos (’84MA, Classical Studies) and Gregory L. Verdine (’86PhD, Chemistry). An Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, Bogdanos founded the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, a task force that tracks down and returns stolen artwork sold on the black market. In his acceptance speech, read by Professor Dhananjay Jagannathan, Bogdanos ascribed his intellectual and professional pursuits to his mother, a waitress in the family’s Greek diner, who gave him a copy of The Iliad when he was twelve: “It was my fascination with [that] history—reinforced in these halls—that made me want to track down some of the world’s oldest and most precious antiquities.”
Gregory L. Verdine is a pioneer in the field of chemical biology, the co-founder of multiple biotechnology companies, and the Erving Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard University. Accepting his award, Verdine recounted his early days as a PhD student. “I fell under the spell of this amazing group of professors.” He praised the camaraderie he felt between the faculty and the students. “That closeness created a sense of fearlessness.” He credited that fearlessness to his success as the inventor of stapled peptides, a new class of therapeutics which treat cancers previously considered undruggable.
The Faculty Mentoring Award winners are chosen by graduate students, through the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council. This year’s recipients were Daniel Westervelt, Lamont Associate Research Professor in Ocean and Climate Physics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Axel Honneth, Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy. Honneth, whose words were read by Professor Christopher Peacocke, wrote of mentorship, “What is needed is not a specific kind of theoretical knowledge or expertise, but a mixture of empathy, good will, and an abundance of patience.” Westervelt noted that he was a new father to a ten-day-old baby, an achievement that, combined with the award, made him feel like he had just “won the Super Bowl.”
Tamara Hache (’21MPhil, Latin American and Iberian Cultures) received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. In her speech, Hache spoke of the classroom as a radical space of possibility and resistance and called for the importance of the university as “a place where ideas that cannot be commodified are valued, where students and faculty have a voice in shaping the world around them, where free speech is not just a slogan, but a living practice.”
The Outstanding Alumni Award was given to Gaisu Yari (’18MA, Human Rights Studies) and Tyshawn Sorey (’17DMA, Music Composition). Sorey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Chris Washburne, Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department, spoke on behalf of Sorey, and recounted first meeting him in a rehearsal for a new piece of music. “Tyshawn had all the parts, perfect. And then I looked at his music stand, and there was no music. Overnight, he had learned forty-six pages of the most complicated music I had ever played. I knew this was someone who was very, very special.”
The other Outstanding Alumni Award winner, Gaisu Yari, is a former Civil Service Commissioner in Afghanistan and a Visiting Professor at Clark University. In 2021, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, she founded the oral history project, Afghan Voices of Hope. Yari spoke about her student days at Columbia. “It was here that I first realized the power of knowledge, not just to illuminate the mind but to stir the soul, to spark change, to dare to make a difference.”
The evening ended with the announcement of the Devon T. Wade Mentorship Service, and Advocacy Award, given to Umiemah Farrukh (’25MA, South Asian Studies), the co-founder of the Farrukh Foundation, a non-profit that champions educational access in the US and abroad. While at Columbia, she co-founded the South Asian Graduate Student Council at Columbia and a reading program that provides Muslim and South Asian children with books. “Each winner today has made me proud to be an academic,” said Farrukh in her speech.
See a full list of award recipients and bios here.
