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Full Collection
All of the e-seminars below, plus titles in a number of other subject areas including the arts, teaching, business, and finance.

History
Over 25 e-seminars on subjects ranging from the Civil War to slavery and the British Empire.

International Affairs
Over 15 e-seminars on subjects ranging from Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, to U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

Public Health and Science
Over 20 e-seminars on subjects ranging from the history of Dinosaurs to an introduction to cardiac care.

Author Bios

Arnold Aronson
Randall Balmer
Ronald Bayer
Ian Bent
Volker R. Berghahn
Casey Nelson Blake
Alan Brinkley
Richard W. Bulliet
Mary Marshall Clark
Peter Cookson
David Crystal
Dennis Dalton
Dickson Despommier
Brian Donnelly
Eric Foner
Milos Forman
Oren Fuerst
Ken Jackson
Michael Janeway
Paul Johnson
Conrad Johnson
Darcy B. Kelley
Tom Lansner
Barron H. Lerner
Art Lerner-Lam
Marc Levy
Benjamin Lewis
Kristin Linklater
Manning Marable
Gerald Markowitz
Melvin Mencher
Brigitte L. Nacos
Andrew Nathan
Philip Oldenburg
Paul E. Olsen
Gerald Oppenheimer
Joe Ortiz
John Pavlik
Eric Rose
David Rosner
Michael Rubin
Simon Schama
Bernd H. Schmitt
Freya Schnabel
Michael Seidel
Jean-Francois Seznec
Gary Sick
Mikhail Smirnov
Michael S. Sparer
Naomi Weinberger

Arnold Aronson
Arnold Aronson is Professor of Theater at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History; Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban; American Set Design; and The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Cambridge History of American Theatre, Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, and the New York Times Book Review. He served as Chair of the Theatre Arts Division at Columbia (1991–1998), and prior to that he chaired the theater departments at Hunter College and the University of Michigan.
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Randall Balmer
Randall Balmer is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of six books, including A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies; Religion in Twentieth Century America; and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. An award-winning, three-part PBS series for which Professor Balmer received an Emmy nomination was based on Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. He has produced, written, and hosted two other PBS series, and his commentaries and op-ed pieces have appeared in newspapers across the country.
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Ronald Bayer
Ronald Bayer is Professor of Public Health at the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He serves as Codirector of the Program in the History of Medicine and Public Health. For the past 18 years his work on the ethics of public health has centered on AIDS, and he has also studied tuberculosis policy and tobacco regulations in liberal democracies.
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Ian Bent
Ian Bent is Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University. He is best known for his work on the history of music theory and music analysis, especially that of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, but he has also studied the later Middle Ages and has a strong interest in contemporary music. Among his publications are Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century and many scholarly articles. Professor Bent is general editor of Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis and senior editorial adviser to La Magnus Liber Organi de Notre-Dame de Paris.
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Volker R. Berghahn
Volker R. Berghahn has been the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University since 1998. He is the author of more than ten books, including Germany and the Approach of War in 1914; Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century; The Americanisation of West German Industry, 1945-1973; and America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe.
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Casey Nelson Blake
Casey Nelson Blake is Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Columbia University. He is the author of many works on U.S. intellectual and cultural history, including Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. Blake's essays and criticism have appeared in the American Scholar, Commonweal, Dissent, the Nation, Tikkun, and other journals of opinion. He is currently writing a book on public art and civic culture in the United States.
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Alan Brinkley
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1991. He is currently Chair of the Department of History. His published works include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the 1983 National Book Award, and Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is presently writing a biography of Henry R. Luce.
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Richard W. Bulliet
Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University, where since 1976 he has taught all periods of Middle Eastern history and for twelve years served as Director of Columbia's Middle East Institute. His publications include works on Islamic social history and four novels set in the modern Middle East. Bulliet served four years as Executive Secretary of the Middle East Studies Association and has participated in the production of documentaries about the Muslim world.
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Mary Marshall Clark
Mary Marshall Clark is Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, the first university-based organized oral-history program and archive in the world and an international center for research and scholarship in the field of oral history. Clark is also President of the United States Oral History Association. She directs the annual Columbia University Summer Institute on Oral History, which attracts faculty and fellows who gather from around the world. She has lectured and delivered seminars internationally and at colleges and universities across the United States.
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Peter Cookson
Peter W. Cookson, President of TC Innovations, is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and has been published widely in the area of school change and school improvement. He has authored numerous books on education policy and reform. The founder and former director of the Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation at Teachers College, Cookson has been involved in professional development for nearly a decade.
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David Crystal
David Crystal is a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. He published the first of his many books in 1964, and became known chiefly for his research work in English-language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational, and clinical contexts. He is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. He divides his time between work on language and work on general reference publishing. He is perhaps known best for The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
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Dennis Dalton
Dennis Dalton is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he has been lecturing on the history and philosophy of nonviolence since the late 1960s. Dalton went to India for the first time in 1960, only 12 years after Gandhi was assassinated, and had the opportunity to become well acquainted with several key associates of Gandhi. He has been back numerous times since then and has expanded his areas of research to include Martin Luther King Jr., the righteous gentiles of World War II, and other disciples of Gandhi.
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Dickson Despommier
Dickson Despommier is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at Columbia University. He is the author of West Nile Story and coauthor of Parasite Diseases. Despommier spent three years as a guest investigator at Rockefeller University before joining the faculty at Columbia University, where he has taught and conducted biomedical research the past 30 years.
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Brian Donnelly
Brian Donnelly is Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, where with Conrad Johnson he coteaches the seminar Lawyering in the Digital Age. Mr. Donnelly also serves as Director of Instructional Services at the Law School.
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Eric Foner
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. He has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. His many publications include Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863—1877, winner of the Bancroft Prize.
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Milos Forman
Milos Forman, born in Caslav, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in 1932, is one of a few foreign filmmakers to enjoy Hollywood success. He attended the prestigious Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Prague, and his early films made him a leader of the Czech New Wave. His first feature film, Black Peter (1963), won an award at the Locarno International Film Festival. After emigrating to the United States in 1968, he did not return to his country until the 1980s to film Amadeus (1984). His body of work includes The Firemen's Ball (1967), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Hair (1979), Valmont (1989), The People vs. Larry Flint (1996), and Man on the Moon (1999).
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Oren Fuerst
Professor Oren Fuerst is Codirector of the Technology and Internet Valuation Executive Program at Columbia Business School, where he lectures in the Executive and MBA programs. He is a strategic technology advisor on bioterror preparedness for Becton, Dickinson and Company, and is also the managing director of Strategic Models LLC, a worldwide strategic advisory group handling all aspects of venture development. He has been a feature columnist for leading financial publications, including the Financial Times. He is coauthor of From Concept to Wall Street: A Complete Guide to Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital.
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Ken Jackson
Kenneth T. Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, where he teaches courses in urban, social, and military history. He is President of the New-York Historical Society. Professor Jackson is the author of Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States and the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City.
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Michael Janeway
Michael Janeway is Director of the National Arts Journalism Program, which is based at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in conjunction with Columbia's School of the Arts. This fellowship program for midcareer and senior arts journalists is dedicated to fostering broad-based, engaged, and thoughtful discussion of the arts and their place in society. Professor Janeway is the author of Republic of Denial: Press, Politics, and Public Life, and his essays and book reviews have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications.
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Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include the economics of retirement and old age, pensions policy, and British social history since 1850. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals and has been a consultant for institutions including the U.K. National Consumers Council and the World Bank. His publications include Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity. Since 1987, Professor Johnson has been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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Conrad Johnson
Conrad A. Johnson is Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He was named to the Columbia University faculty in 1989, where he cofounded the Fair Housing Clinic. He is also the cocreator of Columbia Law School's first distance-learning offering, Seminar in Race-Conscious Remedies, and has done extensive work on the impact of technology on the law and lawyering.
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Darcy B. Kelley
Darcy B. Kelley is Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is the editor of the Journal of Neurobiology and a Codirector of Columbia's doctoral subcommittee on neurobiology and behavior. Her laboratory group studies the biological origins of sexual differences and in particular the actions of the gonadal-steroid hormones androgen and estrogen. Kelley's studies focus on the vocal behaviors of the South African clawed frog Xenopus laevis.
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Tom Lansner
Thomas R. Lansner has taught international media and policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs since 1994, and served as Assistant Dean of SIPA from May 1999 to August 2001. Throughout the 1980s, Professor Lansner was a correspondent, principally in Africa and Asia, for the London Observer, the Guardian, Far Eastern Economic Review, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and other media outlets.
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Barron H. Lerner
Barron H. Lerner is Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is the author of The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America, on which this e-seminar is based. In addition to conducting research in the history of medicine, Lerner teaches medical ethics and practices internal medicine at Columbia. He is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed medical articles and writes for the Washington Post and MAMM magazine.
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Art Lerner-Lam
Art Lerner-Lam is Associate Director for Geology and Geophysics, Senior Research Scientist, and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York.
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Marc Levy
Marc Levy is Associate Director for Science Applications at CIESIN, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, an environmental-data and research institute associated with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He oversees programs focused on issues involving environmental sustainability, information tools for international environmental agreements, and other work aimed at integrating natural- and social-science information on the environment. Levy has also taught political science and international environmental policy since 1980 at Harvard University, Princeton University, Williams College, and Columbia.
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Benjamin Lewis
Benjamin H. Lewis is Associate Professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Lewis has devoted his career to the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease through lifestyle approaches, medical therapies, and noninvasive, nonradioactive techniques—especially ultrasound—for the diagnosis and management of heart-disease patients.
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Kristin Linklater
Kristin Linklater, originally from Scotland, trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and moved to the United States in 1963. She has held academic positions in the New York University Graduate Theatre Program and Emerson College in Boston. Professor Linklater is currently Chair of the Graduate Theatre Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia, where she teaches voice, text, and Shakespeare. At the same time, she continues an active career as an actor, author, director, and vocal coach.
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Manning Marable
Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Founding Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Marable was the founding director of Colgate University's Africana and Hispanic Studies Program. He was the Chairman of the Department of Black Studies at Ohio State University and was Professor of Ethnic Studies, History and Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Marable is the author of thirteen books, including—among others—Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African-American Experience and Black Leadership.
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Gerald Markowitz
Gerald Markowitz is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Thematic Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He also serves as an adjunct professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
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Melvin Mencher
Melvin Mencher is Professor Emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before coming to Columbia he worked for the United Press and newspapers in New Mexico and California, and covered Central America for the Christian Science Monitor. He was also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is a frequent contributor to many publications and lectures at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and at universities throughout the country, and he is the author of Basic Media Writing (now in its sixth edition) and News Reporting and Writing (ninth edition). He is also the coauthor of Brush Up: A Quick Guide to Basic Writing and Math Skills, a self-teaching, interactive CD-ROM.
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Brigitte L. Nacos
Brigitte Nacos has taught American government at Columbia University for more than a dozen years. She is the author of Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the World Trade Center Bombing and Mass Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Professor Nacos's particular fields of interest include the role of the mass media in American politics and government; the links among terrorism, the mass media, public opinion, and crisis management; and domestic and international terrorism, antiterrorism, and counterterrorism.
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Andrew Nathan
Andrew J. Nathan is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His many publications include The Tiananmen Papers, which provides the underpinnings of this e-seminar. His current research involves collaborative survey-based studies of political culture and political participation in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Asian societies. He has served as Director of the East Asian Institute, on the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, and on the board of Human Rights in China. He is frequently interviewed about East Asian issues in print and electronic media, and he has served as an advisor to several film documentaries on China and as a consultant for businesses and government agencies.
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Philip Oldenburg
Professor Philip Oldenburg, a leading scholar of South Asian politics and government, unravels the story of Pakistan, delving into the tumultuous past of this Muslim nation. Carefully examining its struggle to establish a national identity throughout the half-century of its existence, Oldenburg narrates Pakistan's history from the viewpoint of its Muslim-majority population while also explaining the perspectives of those nations with whom Pakistan has been at war. He looks at the roots of Pakistan's formation in 1947, its effort to redefine itself as a Middle Eastern rather than a South Asian state, and its complex history of conflict with India and Bangladesh, the new nation formed out of territory that was once Pakistan.
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Paul E. Olsen
Paul E. Olsen is Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he has taught since 1984. He is coeditor of The Great Rift Valleys of Pangea in Eastern North America (in press). Olsen serves as an advisor and research associate for several geological and paleontological associations, has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers, and is regularly interviewed on television, radio, and for popular magazines.
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Gerald Oppenheimer
Gerald Oppenheimer obtained his M.P.H. from Columbia University and is Associate Professor of Clinical Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Professor of Public Health at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His research focuses on epidemiology, AIDS health policy, health-insurance issues, and the history of public health.
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Joe Ortiz
Joseph D. Ortiz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology at Kent State University and formerly Adjunct Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. His primary academic interest is Earth-system history with an emphasis on paleoceanography and climate change. Ortiz uses a variety of research methodologies to approach problems in his field from a process-oriented perspective. These methodologies include marine micro-paleontology, carbon and oxygen stable-isotope geochemistry, noninvasive measurements of the physical properties of sediment, and statistics.
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John Pavlik
John V. Pavlik is Professor at the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies at Rutgers University and formerly Executive Director of the Center for New Media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was also professor. From 1995 to 2000, he was also a senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, one of two national supercomputer centers supported by the National Science Foundation. In 2000, Professor Pavlik was appointed the inaugural Shaw Foundation Visiting Professor of Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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Eric Rose
Eric A. Rose, who teaches "Surgical Decisions," is the Morris and Rose Milstein, Johnson & Johnson Professor of Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Chairman of the Department of Surgery. His research interests include novel anticoagulants, vascular biology, mechanical alternatives to transplantation, and surgical-outcomes research.
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David Rosner
David Rosner is Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.
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Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin began his career at Lucasfilm, where he was instrumental in introducing the Hollywood market to nonlinear editing for film. He assisted Academy Award-winning editor Gabriella Cristiani in her nonlinear postproduction of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. His pioneering book for professionals, Nonlinear: A Field Guide to Digital Video and Film Editing, is now in its fourth edition and is widely used in film schools; he has just released his first book for general readers, The Little Digital Video Book. He has lectured internationally on nonlinear film editing and continues to teach, write, and consult.
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Simon Schama
Simon Schama, University Professor at Columbia, is the author of ten books, including The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; and Rembrandt's Eyes. His work has been translated into ten languages. Professor Schama is currently writing and presenting the 16-part series A History of Britain for the BBC.
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Bernd H. Schmitt
Bernd Schmitt is Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Executive Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership. His best-selling books have been translated into 15 languages. He is the author of Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to SENSE, FEEL, THINK, ACT and RELATE to Your Company and Brands and coauthor of both Marketing Aesthetics and Build Your Own Garage. Schmitt is a frequent keynote speaker at national and international conferences and has worked with numerous corporate clients. He has also appeared on TV around the world and his articles on business issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Asian Wall Street Journal.
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Freya Schnabel
Freya R. Schnabel is Chief of the Breast Surgery Division of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She also serves as Medical Director of Women at Risk (WAR), a group founded by breast-cancer survivors for women at high-risk of developing breast cancer.
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Michael Seidel
Professor Michael Seidel came to Columbia in 1977 and is currently chair of Literature Humanities. He specializes in eighteenth-century literature, narrative theory, satire, and in James Joyce.
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Jean-Francois Seznec
Jean-Francois Seznec is a professor at both Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs and Georgetown University. He lectures widely on international financial markets and the Middle East and his research focuses on the influence that political and social variables of the Arab-Persian Gulf have had on the financial and oil markets in the region. A member of the advisory board of Human Rights Watch and of the finance committee of the Middle East Studies Association, Professor Seznec is a frequent guest at the Council on Foreign Relations. He began teaching following a career in international banking and finance.
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Gary Sick
Gary Sick is Adjunct Professor of International Affairs and Acting Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. Professor Sick is the author of two books on U.S.-Iranian relations. He is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy and the Executive Director of Gulf/2000, an international research project on political, economic, and security developments in the Persian Gulf.
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Mikhail Smirnov
Mikhail Smirnov is Professor and Director of the masters program in Mathematics of Finance at Columbia University. He has worked at Merrill Lynch and at Alpha Investment Management, a large hedge fund. Smirnov's research is in risk management of hedge funds, development of multimarket statistical-trading strategies, and dynamic portfolio management.
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Michael S. Sparer
Michael S. Sparer is Associate Professor at the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Sparer studies and writes about the politics of health care with an emphasis on the state and local role in the American health-care system. He is the author of Medicaid and the Limits of State Health Reform as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
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Naomi Weinberger
Naomi Weinberger is Director of the UN Studies Program of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is also an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia's Middle East Institute. Her publications include Syrian Intervention in Lebanon: The 1975–76 Civil War and numerous articles on the Middle East conflict. Weinberger has also participated in an international panel of consultants assembled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to facilitate Israeli-Palestinian security negotiations; the panel released a report entitled "Israeli-Palestinian Security: Issues in the Permanent Status Negotiations."
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