Advisory Council

Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA is Executive Vice President of Columbia Global, the Dr. Mathilde Krim-amfAR Chair of Global Health at Columbia University, Founder and Director of global health center ICAP at Columbia University, and University Professor in Epidemiology and Medicine. Her vision for Columbia Global is to establish a unifying and strategic platform to promote and facilitate impactful engagement of the University’s faculty, students, and alumni with the world to enhance understanding, address global challenges, and advance knowledge and its exchange. Under her strategic leadership, Columbia Global aligns some of the University’s key global initiatives, including Columbia World Projects, the Columbia Global Centers, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

An expert in global health and infectious diseases with longstanding experience in supporting diverse major health challenges around the world, Dr. El-Sadr has focused her career on advancing public health knowledge and putting that knowledge into action, establishing collaborative partnerships to strengthen health systems, and engaging with communities to meet health threats and improve health outcomes, especially among vulnerable populations around the world. She has led large-scale, innovative projects that have had decisive impacts on such pressing global health challenges as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, antimicrobial resistance, non-communicable diseases including cancer, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. El-Sadr received her medical degree at Cairo University, a master’s in public health from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She is a MacArthur fellow as well as a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Council for Foreign Relations, the African Academy of Sciences, and the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. She is principal investigator for numerous ICAP-led initiatives, including the NIH-funded HIV Prevention Trials Network and the New York City Pandemic Response Institute. She is also the director of Columbia World Projects and director of the Mailman School’s Global Health Initiative.

Valentina Izmirlieva, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages, is a scholar of Balkan and East Slavic religious and political cultures with a focus on multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires and their successor states. The topics of her publications range from the medieval societies of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions to the post-Soviet cultural space. Professor Izmirlieva is the recipient of many awards and distinctions, including a Fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (New York Public Library), the President’s Global Innovation Fund Grant, and a Lenfest Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award. She founded and leads Black Sea Networks, a global initiative to investigate the Black Sea as a hub of cultural, political, and historical interest, and is currently the Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Research Interests 
History of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, he holds an agrégation in Philosophy (1978) and he took his Doctorat d’État in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). Before joining Columbia University in 2008 he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University. His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. He is the author of African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, (Dakar, Codesria, 2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018). His book, Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal, (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) is forthcoming in an English version to be published by Fordham University Press. That book was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year professor Diagne received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work. Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth century French philosophy.

Selected publications

Ruth DeFries is a professor of ecology and sustainable development at Columbia University in New York and co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. She 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 aims to contribute to realistic pathways for people and nature to thrive.  A particular geographic focus is central India, which is globally important for tiger conservation and a hotspot for climate impacts on vulnerable populations. 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 200 scientific papers, she is committed to communicating the nuances and complexities of sustainable development to popular audiences through her books “The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis and “What Would Nature Do?: A Guide for Our Uncertain Times”.

DeFries is committed to linking science with policy, for example through her involvement with the Environmental Defense Fund, Science for Nature and People, and World Wildlife Fund, she founded and continues to direct the Network for Conserving Central India.

Professor Hubbard is a specialist in public economics, managerial information and incentive problems in corporate finance, and financial markets and institutions. He has written more than 100 articles and books on corporate finance, investment decisions, banking, energy economics and public policy, including two textbooks, and has authored The Wall and the Bridge and coauthored Balance, The Aid Trap, and Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. Hubbard has applied his research interests in business (as a corporate director consultant on taxation and corporate finance), in government (as a former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and the OECD Economic Policy Committee, as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department and as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and many government agencies) and in academia (in faculty collaboration or visiting appointments at Columbia, University of Chicago and Harvard). He is co-chair the Committee on Capital Markets and Regulation and past chair of the Economic Club of New York and the Study Group on Corporate Boards. Hubbard is chair of the MetLife and BlackRock Fixed-Income boards and serves on the board of TotalEnergies. His past board service includes ADP, Duke Realty, and KKR Financial Corporation, along with private firms.

Dr. Monica Lypson is the Vice Dean for Education at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and holds the title of Rolf H. Scholdager Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She is dedicated to advancing medical education, improving equity in healthcare, and preparing a culturally competent workforce.

Dr. Lypson served as the Director of Medical and Dental Education for the Veterans Health Administration, where she oversaw national programs aimed at improving training and delivering care to our nation’s veterans. She has also held roles as Vice-Chair of Medicine and Division Director of General Internal Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medical and Health Sciences and served as Secretary and President of the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Board-certified in general internal medicine, Dr. Lypson has significant leadership experience in clinical, educational, and administrative settings. At the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System, she served in roles including Acting Chief of Staff. At the University of Michigan Medical School, she was Assistant Dean for Graduate Medical Education and Faculty Director of the Standardized Patient Program.

Dr. Lypson has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications on learner assessment, communication skills, and cultural humility and workforce. She has worked with organizations like the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the National Board of Medical Examiners to address healthcare workforce development and education.

She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Brown University, her medical degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and a Master’s degree in Health Professions Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She completed her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and trained as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago. She is a former Aspen Health Innovators Fellow and a trained executive coach.

Dr. Lypson has written about physician marriages and academic medicine. She is married to Dr. Andrew D. Campbell, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, and has two children, one of whom is in middle school.

Michael S. Sparer, J.D., Ph.D. is Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Professor Sparer studies and writes about the politics of health care, with a particular emphasis on the health insurance and health delivery systems for low-and-middle income populations, both in the United States and globally. His current projects include an evaluation of federal and state efforts to stabilize and revitalize the nation’s public health workforce, an analysis of Medicaid’s role in addressing the social determinants of health, and a book examining the impact of American federalism on the evolution and current status of the American health care system. He is a two-time winner of the Mailman School’s Student Government Association Teacher of the Year Award, the recipient of a 2010 Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and the winner of the Core Curriculum Teaching Excellence Award. Sparer spent seven years as a litigator for the New York City Law Department, specializing in inter-governmental social welfare litigation. After leaving the practice of law, Sparer obtained a PhD in Political Science from Brandeis University. Sparer is the former editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and the author of Medicaid and the Limits of State Health Reform as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

María Victoria Murillo is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. She received her BA at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and her MA and PhD at Harvard University. Previously, she has been faculty at Yale University and has been a Visiting Professor at Universidad Di Tella and Paris I, a Fullbright fellow, and a Harvard Academy, a Peggy Rockefeller and a Russell Sage Scholar. She has published widely in the US and Latin America. Her most recent books include Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voter, Poorer Voter and the Diversification of Parties Electoral Strategies with Ernesto Calvo (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky (Cambridge University Press 2019), which was published in Spanish by Siglo XXI as La Ley y la Trampa (2021). The three of them have edited The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her prior books include Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, Comparative Politics Series, 2001).

Professor Nguyen specializes in the study of the United States in the world, with spatial focus on Southeast Asia and temporal interest in the Cold War. She is the author of Hanoi’ s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012), which won the Society for Military History Edward M. Coffman Prize, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Stuart L. Bernath Prize, was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. Professor Nguyen is also General Editor of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 volumes (2024). She is currently working on two projects: a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive with Random House and the second explores the role of gender, people’s diplomacy, and transnational networks of anti-war activism during the Vietnam War.

Professor Nguyen serves on Fulbright University Vietnam’s (FUV) Board of Trustees. She is also Principal Investigator of the Henry Luce Foundation-funded, “Digitizing Vietnam: The Virtual Future of Global Vietnam and Vietnamese Studies,” with FUV.

Before coming to Columbia University, Professor Hochberg was a professor of Comparative Literature and Gender studies at UCLA for fifteen years. Professor Hochberg’s research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Hebrew Literature, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema, Mediterraneanism, Trauma and Narrative.

Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures and cultural imagination. Her second book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian terrain and the emergence of a “conflict” or the sight of a conflict. Her latest book, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University Press, 2021), invites readers to learn how to use archives as a break from history, rather than as history’s repository. The book presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive’s liberatory potential in the context of a Palestine in becoming.

Anu Bradford is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School, a Director for Columbia’s European Legal Studies Center, and a Senior Scholar at Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School. Bradford is also a nonresident scholar in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on European Union law, digital regulation, international trade law, and comparative and international antitrust law.

Bradford earned her S.J.D. (2007) and LL.M. (2002) degrees from Harvard Law School and also holds a law degree from the University of Helsinki. After completing her LL.M. studies as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School, Bradford practiced antitrust law and European Union law at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels before returning to Harvard for her doctoral studies. She has also served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant to a member of the European Parliament. Bradford is the author of “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World” (OUP 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her most recent book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023. It was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times and awarded the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Angela V. Olinto is Professor of Astronomy and of Physics and Provost of the University.

As Provost, Olinto is Columbia’s chief academic officer, and works to advance the academic distinction, intellectual richness, creativity, and integrity of the many facets of Columbia University. She supports the President in the development and implementation of the University’s strategic academic priorities, and leads the deans and faculty in their pursuit of research and teaching excellence.

Olinto directs the development and implementation of Columbia's academic plans and policies, and supervises the work of its schools, departments, institutes, and research centers, with the support of a dedicated team of Vice Provosts and staff of the Office of the Provost. She manages faculty appointments and the tenure review process, supports faculty recruitment and retention as the University collectively aspires to diversify talent and expand excellence, seeds new education initiatives, and heads efforts to lower barriers to cross-disciplinary initiatives that expand the individual and collective impact of our faculty and students. In addition to the Office of the Provost, she oversees a number of centers and institutes, offices, and other academic resources, including the Data Science Institute, University Libraries, the Italian Academy, and the Columbia University Press.

Prior to joining Columbia in March 2024, Olinto was Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. She previously served as Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics there from 2003 to 2006 and again from 2012 to 2017.

As a scholar, Olinto is best known for her contributions to the study of the structure of neutron stars, primordial inflationary theory, cosmic magnetic fields, the nature of the dark matter, and the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma-rays, and neutrinos. She is the Principal Investigator of the POEMMA (Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) space mission and the EUSO (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) on a super pressure balloon (SPB) missions, and was a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, all designed to discover the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles, their sources, and their interactions.

Olinto is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Brazilian Order of Rio Branco medal at the rank of Commander in 2023, a Chaire d’Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de Recherche in 2006, the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2015 at the University of Chicago. She received a BS in Physics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1981, and PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

Adam Tooze is an English historian and the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He is Director of Columbia's European Institute and Chair of the Committee on Global Thought. He is also a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Previously, he was Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Cambridge and Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 2009, he spent six years at Yale University as Professor of Modern German History and Director of International Security Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, succeeding Paul Kennedy. Through his books (such as Crashed) and his online newsletter (Chartbook), he reaches a varied audience of historians, investors, administrators, and others.