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The Low Down

Columbia Alumni Association•alumni.columbia.edu
Society & Culture
Columbia University is a mecca of great ideas in one of the world's great metropolises. And with more than 365,000 Columbia alumni who are leaders in every field imaginable and spread across the world, the Columbia Alumni Association (CAA) Low Down brings you the latest musings, updates, and insights to delight the left and right sides of the brain. http://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/
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Episodes

Leaders Experience Promo

Interested in learning more about the programming for Columbia Alumni Leaders Weekend 2022? Hear Columbia Alumni Leaders Experience Chair Shaun Hoyte ’16SPS and Co-chair Courtney Cesari ’04CC on what to expect during the weekend.

Aug 18, 2022•4 min

CALE 2020: Who's Saving The Planet - Economics, Energy, Environment, And National Security

Join Lex Kiefhaber '17BUS, of the Who's Saving the Planet Podcast, and Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs, for a timely conversation on the intersection of economics, energy, environment, and national security. These need to be addressed holistically and coherently rather than as separate issues if we are to save our planet.

Nov 02, 2020•45 min

CALE 2020: From Sharecropper to Shareholder

In this new podcast, Rendel Solomon '05BUS shares his story and his mission. His great-grandparents were sharecroppers, picking cotton for meager wages. Nearly 70 years later, Rendel bought his 8-year-old niece shares in public companies, creating a new family legacy. Now, through his non-profit One Stock One Future, Rendel is on a mission to instill hope and turn 1 million underserved youth into empowered shareholders.

Oct 26, 2020•1 hr 6 min

CALE 2020: Leadership Innovator Podcast | Becoming a Trusted Leader

Leadership Innovator Podcast | Becoming a Trusted Leader Caroline Ceniza-Levine ’93BC - Speaker Co-Founder and Career Coach SixFigureStart Inspiration is important, but truly effective leadership requires the ability to engender trust— both within your organization and among your audience. In this segment, Caroline Ceniza-Levine '93BC analyzes this key leadership trait and offers tips on how to cultivate it yourself. Caroline Ceniza-Levine '93BC is a longtime recruiter, media personality on care...

Oct 19, 2020•38 min

CALE 2020: Leadership in Times of Crisis

To kick off the the Columbia Alumni Association's (CAA) Columbia Alumni Leaders Experience (CALE) 2020, tune in to a timely episode of What in the World?, a podcast by Bunmi Akinnusotu '14SIPA, which has been specially prepared for alumni leaders. What in the World (https://soundcloud.com/what-in-the-world-podcast) normally explains policy issues such as elections in other countries and trade wars. But behind every policy, is a person. A person or group of people researching ideas and writing ar...

Oct 11, 2020•50 min

Buchla

In 1963, a man named Don Buchla made history. Under commission by a pair of avant-garde composers, Buchla designed one of the world’s first modular synthesizers, helping to change the course of pop music. Today Buchla’s earliest creations are prized commodities—the Library of Congress currently owns one, and the Smithsonian reportedly tried to acquire the one belonging to Mills College. Columbia’s Computer Music Center is home to not one but three of his seminal instruments, much of which were m...

May 17, 2019•10 min

Posing Modernity

The Low Down's Acacia O'Connor '18JRN brings you the story of Denise Murrell '04, '10, '14GSAS, curator of the groundbreaking "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today," at the Wallach Art Gallery on Columbia's new Manhattanville campus, who discusses the story behind the hugely popular exhibit.

Jan 03, 2019•13 min

The Low Down Goes to the Opera

The Cagliari Opera House, one of Italy’s most renowned opera companies, presented the first modern rendering of the opera in the Rotunda of Columbia's Low Library. In this episode of The Low Down, we take you on a trip to the opera with the works of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the author of Mozart’s most important opera librettos, and the first Professor of Italian at Columbia.

Oct 21, 2018•24 min

The Doctor's Office

Nuclear war. Jimmy Kimmel. Lionel Richie. What do these things have in common? Dr. Irwin Redlener. We take you inside the doctor's office on this episode of The Low Down.

Apr 11, 2018•16 min

Chef Mike

On the latest edition of The Low Down podcast, Columbia University's Acacia O'Connor spoke with everyone's favorite chef, Michael DeMartino of Columbia Dining, about his cooking beginnings, what he loves about his job, what his last meal would be, and the special thing he does for students during his impressive commute.

Mar 27, 2018•16 min

Talking Science with Brian Greene

You may have noticed that we’ve been digging into our archives a lot. To be fair, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at Columbia and we want to revisit some talks that haven’t gotten a lot of attention lately. One of those talks was with Columbia physicist Brian Greene. In 2014 he sat down with the writer, and award-winning TV correspondent, Gideon Yago '00CC to talk about World Science U, Columbia's Science Initiative, and some of his out-of-this-world ideas. This episode includes exce...

Jul 20, 2017•25 min

Jack Dorsey's Tools for Entrepreneurs

Odds are good you’ve heard of Jack Dorsey. He’s the co-founder of Twitter and the co-founder of the mobile payment company, Square. In 2013, Dorsey gave a talk at Columbia and, at the time, it was the largest entrepreneurship event in Columbia history, attracting over 1,000 Columbia students, alumni, and friends. Since we’ve been digging into the archives lately, we thought we’d play you some highlights from that keynote address where he talks about how he turned his obsession with urban maps, p...

Jul 07, 2017•25 min

Can Engineers Help Deliver Babies?

Last year, Kristin Myers gave a lecture to Columbia alumni returning to campus for reunion. Myers is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and her talk offered an engineering perspective on why women give birth preterm. Specifically, she explored the biomechanics of pregnancy and how engineers work with clinicians to try to understand why some women give birth before term and how we can stop it. You’re about to hear some exce...

Jun 26, 2017•22 min

Jazz, Mind, Brain

If you haven’t heard of the Columbia Center for Jazz Studies, that’s a shame, but we can’t be too disappointed in you. After all, the center is still relatively new. It was founded in 1999 and, since then, it has been integrated into the Core Curriculum at Columbia College. That means a lot of College students are getting exposed to music that isn’t exactly topping the charts nowadays. But the Center for Jazz Studies takes a more broad view of the genre than one might initially think. Courses at...

Jun 07, 2017•25 min

Pomp & Circumstance (Rebroadcast)

THIS IS A REBROADCAST OF AN EPISODE ABOUT THE 2016 COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY. Columbia's Commencement week ended two weeks ago. New graduates moved out of University housing to start their lives off-campus and the streets of Morningside Heights have emptied out for the summer. In September, new and returning students will move in and the streets will vibrate with excitement and energy again. But, in this episode, we're not going to look ahead. Instead, we're going to look back at the height of Colum...

May 17, 2017•13 min

Our Brains, Ourselves

For this episode, we’re diving into the archives to play you excerpts from a discussion that took place in 2012. The discussion was called “Understanding Our Brains, Understanding Ourselves” and it brought together an expert panel of Columbia alumni and professors to talk about the brain. So, if you’ve ever wondered what smell New Yorkers like the most and what smell they hate, that is an odd thing to wonder but you’ve definitely come to the right place. --- To watch the full talk, check out the...

May 09, 2017•26 min

An Essential Friendship: Buffett and Gates

Earlier this year, Columbia hosted a conversation between two iconic public figures — billionaire investor Warren Buffett '51BUS and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. For that conversation, Buffet and Gates sat down with PBS and Bloomberg TV host Charlie Rose to discuss their friendship, philanthropy, and business, innovation, and leadership. In this episode, you will hear some highlights from that talk. If you’re interested in hearing the entire conversation, you can find the full recording here: h...

Apr 20, 2017•27 min

BONUS: Looking for Thinkspiration

We enjoyed talking to the Design Studio so much last week that we wanted to share more of the candid conversations we had about Design Thinking (and much more). We wanted to get a better idea of who Adam and Alice are, not just as Design Studio representatives, but as design thinkers in general. What we got was a look into how they look at the world around them and what they see in the future of design thinking. Spoiler alert: there’s a blooper reel at the end!

Mar 28, 2017•9 min

Think Human

For this episode, we visited one of the forward-thinking initiatives taking place at Columbia. Tucked away on a side street near the Morningside campus, we found a place where thinkers, doers and general challengers of the status quo come together to design a better future. It’s called the Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio and it’s a project that developed through the Columbia Entrepreneurship program. The Studio brings innovators and entrepreneurs from across campus to pitch human-centere...

Mar 09, 2017•25 min

BONUS: Here's Looking at You, Casablanca

Last week, we heard from Professor Robert Young, an eminent humanities scholar, who gave a lecture last year at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. Professor Young recounted the story of Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany but was caught at the border of France and Spain, where he resorted suicide rather than be sent back. During the lecture, Professor Young played a clip from Casablanca, drawing parallels between the Hollywood story and the truth behind it. We did not have room...

Feb 16, 2017•12 min

The Lucky Few

We went into the vault for today’s episode, all the way back to a lecture that Professor Robert Young gave last year at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. We chose this particular lecture because Professor Young offers a historical perspective on an issue facing today’s society: migration. Young is the Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University. As a distinguished humanities scholar and prolific author, he specializes in the history and literature of post-colonialism. In the lecture ex...

Feb 10, 2017•17 min

The Power of the Sun

In sub-Saharan Africa, 650 million people lack access to electricity. In Sierra Leone in particular, only 5% of the population is on the grid. That means that six and a half million people can’t study, cook, eat or work after the sun goes down except by dim candlelight or expensive kerosene lamps. To charge their mobile phones, most Sierra Leoneans have to go to public charging kiosks. Three Columbia alumni from the School of International and Public Affairs found a solar solution to this challe...

Jan 04, 2017•15 min
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