Dear Members of the SPS Community:
Welcome to the Fall 2022 semester at Columbia University!
This fall, we welcome 1,700 new master’s program students, making our graduate community 3,500 strong. Many have spent the previous week at Orientation, getting to know our School and meeting their peers for the first time. I know they are all eager to continue making connections, so please look out for opportunities to engage with our new students in the coming weeks.
Two new interim program directors have joined us. Gaspare LoDuca, the vice president and CIO of Columbia University Information Technology, has been an esteemed member of our Technology Management program as a mentor, and stepped into the interim director role in July. Sarah Holloway, on faculty at SIPA, is leading our Nonprofit Management program. Both bring extensive experience in their fields as well as compelling visions for their programs.
We are celebrating recent awards and career milestones of many SPS faculty members. Enterprise Risk Management Lecturer Owen Lau was named AAPI Research Analyst of the Year by Wealth Solutions Report. SPS Chief Diversity Officer and Nonprofit Management Lecturer Dr. Erwin de Leon was named to the Crain’s Notable LGBTQ Leaders List for 2022. Information and Knowledge Strategy Lecturer Gregory Robinson recently retired as the program director of the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA. He teaches Leading Large Complex Projects, a class open to all SPS students this fall.
Integral to the SPS mission is the commitment to expand the reach and impact of a Columbia education for a greater number of deserving students. A recent example of this is the Wealth Management Advancing Diversity Fellowship, the first student-funded fellowship offered at SPS. We are grateful for the support of the program’s outgoing class and are excited to have inaugural recipient Armani Miller Jackson joining us this fall.
We also welcome our new cohort of the Columbia HBCU Fellows to SPS. They receive mentorship and career development opportunities over the course of their studies, and our alumni have gone on to enjoy impressive early careers with organizations such as the Yankees, Goldman Sachs, and the Obama Foundation, or have chosen to pursue medical school or their doctorates.
Our relationship with the Columbia University Center for Justice is emblematic of our School’s efforts to partner across the University to increase access to education to deserving students. Jay Holder, director of the National Executive Council at the Center, helps train Columbia faculty who teach imprisoned populations through the Justice-In-Education Scholars Program, an initiative supported by SPS. He is pursuing his M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. He and Ivan Calaff, a researcher at the Center, were co-authors of a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that revealed a public-housing-to-prison pipeline and offered possible remedies.
I proudly speak on behalf of our staff and faculty to say we are here to support all these dreams and aspirations—and we are thrilled to welcome you to the new academic year.
Sincerely,
Troy
