Barnard faculty members are at the forefront of shaping extraordinary students and advancing cutting-edge research. In late 2024, over four professors received distinguished awards and grants, celebrating their trailblazing work and offering vital resources to propel their projects forward, both on campus and in the wider world. The Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research (IFSR) team remains a steadfast partner, equipping faculty with the guidance and tools needed to secure funding that drives innovation and scholarly excellence.
Saima Akhtar received a grant from the Collaboratory Fellows Fund at Columbia University, in collaboration with Michael Krisch at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism, to help develop their course, Writing With/On Computing. Offered in Spring 2025 and 2026 in Barnard Computer Science, Writing With/On Computing is an interdisciplinary course at the intersection of data science, visual arts, and narrative journalism, designed to equip students with the tools to investigate and narrate the impact of technology on marginalized communities.
Rebecca Jordan-Young and Elizabeth Bernstein received a grant from the INCITE program at Columbia University for their project, Rethinking Recovery. With this grant, Jordan-Young and Bernstein will co-lead a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to examine how the concept of “recovery” is interpreted across different fields, including biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Using a feminist/intersectional STEM and transformative justice framework, the team will explore the connections between scientific practices and systems of power, focusing on creating the most equitable approaches to recovery.
Smaranda Muresan received a subaward from Columbia University for her work on the project, CHARM: Cross-Cultural Harmony through Affect and Response Mediation. Funds for the project originate from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The main goal of this effort is to use ideas from cross-cultural communication to identify behaviors that match social norms and help avoid communication problems.
The College received a renewal grant from the Laidlaw Foundation to fund three more cohorts of the Laidlaw Scholars Program.