A Passion for Science - Columbia College - Columbia University

A PASSION FOR SCIENCE Columbia CollEgE Today
Hechen Ren ’11 examines the
properties of graphene at her
lab in the Northwest Corner Science
Building.
Andrew gelman is a Professor of Statistics whose work
touches on topics as varied as how voting patterns
differ depending on religious commitments and economic
status, and (along with researcher Alexander
van Geen) how to find safe drinking water in Bangladesh.
In his book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans
Vote the Way They Do, Gelman and his colleagues David Park,
Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina ’03 SIPA, ’07 GSAS,
dispelled several of the most common notions of who is voting for
the different political parties. Their research showed that the differences
in voting between “red America” and “blue America” are concentrated
among upper-income voters. It is the rich, more than the
poor, who are voting based on culture, on “God,
guns and gays,” Gelman says.
“Within any given state, the richer you are,
the more likely you are to vote Republican,” he
says. “It’s not the Prius versus the pickup truck.
It’s the Prius versus the Hummer. The culture
war is happening among the upper middle class
and the rich.”
Gelman has worked on many other projects
at Columbia on topics including structure in social
networks, reversals of death sentences, pub-
While she enjoys reading the
great books of Western Civilization,
Ren, a math and physics major,
devotes a lot of time to examining
graphene, a one-atom thick
sheet of bonded carbon, whose
properties let her explore correlated
electron systems in condensed
matter physics.
Many inspirations for her experiments
come from theoretical
physicists, who propose a hypothesis
that Ren can then explore
through graphene.
Using Statistics Across Many Fields
Assistant Professor of E3B Maria uriarte studies the ways
in which forests regrow after humans abandon agriculture,
and the effect of this process on the community composition
genetics of plant species. She wonders whether
biodiversity can be preserved as human beings encroach upon, and
then retreat from, nature. She also investigates the ways in which
climate change alters our relationship with the natural world.
Uriarte, who teaches in the Department of Ecology, Evolution
and Environmental Biology, does her research in the tropical forests
of Puerto Rico, Brazil and Peru. Her work is an attempt to
understand the effects of human interactions with forests in time
to prevent further damage.
“People are moving away from agricultural land all over the
world,” she says. “To what degree can these forests that grow
after agricultural abandonment resemble the primary tropical
Gelman explores the world through statistics
with GSAS student Zach Shahn.
How People Impact the Growth of Forests
MAY/JUNE 2011
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“The field is very cool for undergraduates,” she says. “For us,
it’s many small projects we can do. We can start from scratch, fabricate
our devices, measure them and analyze the data, and really
feel like we’re doing physics.”
She also works with students from Engineering to explore
graphene’s potential applications, such as high-frequency FET, a
possible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips.
The work she has done with Associate Professor Philip Kim
has given her a deep understanding of the sciences she has studied
and landed her in an extremely enviable position: Ren has
been accepted to do graduate work at Harvard, MIT, Princeton,
Stanford, UC Berkeley and Columbia.
“It is a hard decision,” she said. “I’m still trying to figure out
where to go.”
lic opinion on gay rights, patterns in stops by NYPD officers and
measurements of cockroach allergens in New York apartments. He
currently is working with researchers Matt Schofield, Ed Cook and
Upmanu Lall at Lamont-Doherty on reconstructing climate history
based on tree ring data. The scarcity of the data and the approximate
nature of the models make reliable reconstruction a statistical and
scientific challenge.
Still, Gelman’s biggest project is creating a new introductory statistics
course and writing a corresponding textbook. In an intro class,
he says, there isn’t enough time to prove everything mathematically,
so he is relying on a lot more showing and a lot less telling.
The class involves a great deal of active learning and contains
very little lecturing. An early project has students
select what they believe is a random sample
of candy from a bag and guess the weight
of the entire bag based on the sample. An envelope
hidden in the room before class always
correctly predicts that all estimates will be too
high because the larger candies will float to the
top, skewing the results.
“It’s like a survey of people,” he says. “You
get the most talkative people. That’s why we
need to do random sampling.”
forests that were once there?”
In Puerto Rico, Uriarte is examining the regrowth of forests that
were once cleared to grow coffee, tobacco and sugar. She is trying
to find out if new forests will support the biodiversity of the
original primary forests, as well as offer the benefits that tropical
forests provide to humans, such as clean water and carbon uptake.
This is an issue of global importance because the area of degraded
and secondary forests in the tropics covers an estimated 850 million
hectares and is likely to increase.
In Brazil, Uriarte explores how forest regrowth between remnant
fragments of primary forest influences the genetic structure of the
species that have survived inside of these fragments. She expects
deep insights from this project because genetic data dates back 13
years, making it possible to see firsthand what the genetic composition
of species in remnant fragments looked like before and after