Skip navigation.
Academic Life Campus Life New York The World

Columbian Wins Nobel Peace Prize

COLUMBIAN WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

President Barack Obama (Columbia College Class of 1983) was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. This honor brings the number of Nobel laureates counted among our faculty, former faculty or alumni to 79, including the nine Nobel laureates currently teaching at Columbia University. Here are just a few of our past Nobel Prize winners:

  • Martin Chalfie, Chemistry, 2008: Chair of Columbia’s Department of Biology, Dr. Chalfie was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in discovering and developing the green fluorescent protein. He currently supervises several undergraduates in his lab.
  • Orhan Pamuk, Literature, 2006: The internationally acclaimed Turkish novelist is a fellow with Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and at the School of the Arts. He recently taught an undergraduate course in Comparative Literature.
  • Edmund Phelps, Economics, 2006: The McVickar Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at the Earth Institute, Phelps has been teaching at Columbia since 1971. His work has deepened understanding of the relationship between short-run and long-run effects of economic policy.
  • Richard Axel, Medicine, 2004: University Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and professor of pathology, Richard Axel is a 1967 graduate of Columbia College and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in mapping the genes that govern the sense of smell and for determining how the brain processes olfactory information into perception and memory, an achievement that ranks among the greatest discoveries in brain science in the last fifty years.
  • Horst Stormer, Physics, 1998: Professor of physics and applied physics, Stormer shared the prize for the discovery of bizarre motions of electrons in thin layers of semiconductors; his is one of the 27 Nobel Prizes won by Columbia physicists since 1931. Dr. Stormer often teaches the first-year Core Curriculum course, Frontiers of Science.
  • Joseph Stiglitz, Economics, 2001: University Professor of Economics and former chief economist at the World Bank, Stiglitz has appointments at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the economics department of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Business. He is chair of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought and co-founder and executive director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia.

For more information on Columbia’s renowned faculty, visit www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/admissions/university/academic/faculty.php.