David Helfand

Columbia College, the university's undergraduate liberal arts and sciences division. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst

tenure track position. He has, at times, been part of both the department of Astronomy and the Department of Physics. As part of the department of Astronomy he served as chair from 1986 until 1992, and again from 2002 until the present.^[1] During his time at Columbia he has mentored 22 PhD students, although he tends to focus more on undergraduate education.^[2] As part of Columbia University, he along with Darcy Kelley, a professor of biological sciences, pushed for and succeeded in creating a new science core curriculum class called Frontiers of Science, which is claimed to "make (students) aware that they can think about problems the way scientists think about problems".^[3] Rather than being taught by a single professor on a single topic, "four scientists in different disciplines deliver a series of three lectures each describing the background, context, and current state of an area of research".^[4]

climate change debate.^[9]

tenure. He believes that it also selects the wrong fraction of smart people in society to play the important role of advancing knowledge and passing it on to the next generation. He advocates a system in which each senior professor's job performance is reviewed^[7] every six years by a five-member ad hoc faculty committee, which would then recommend whether the professor should be retained or dismissed. In such a system, each professor would serve on one such ad hoc committee per year, except for the year in which he or she is being reviewed. Although his proposed system is unorthodox, Columbia agreed to implement it in Helfand's case.^[8]