Chile

I’m standing in my too-warm room with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil between my teeth. It’s the summer before college, but the woody taste reminds me of being in elementary school––maybe because I haven’t used pencils to do my homework since then, or felt particularly inclined to chew on them. But I’m doing this right now because an eHow article told me that speaking with a pencil in my mouth would help me learn how to roll my R’s.

It's before dawn, but I can already hear my dad on the house phone.

Reconstruction efforts after the 2010 Chilean earthquake and the economics of public education are some of the topics eight faculty members will study in Chile after receiving grants of up to $30,000 as part of a new global center grant program.

The School of Social Work is partnering with a Chilean university to launch a grief facility in New York.

Last December, Katherine Shear, a psychiatry professor at the School of Social Work and the founder of Columbia's Complicated Grief Program, outlined the collaboration with Guillermo Marshall Rivera, prorector of the Pontificia Universidad Católica.

Shear said that the goal of the new Chilean center, in addition to providing training to medical practitioners, is to "improve the lives of people with complicated grief," a newly recognized condition that consists of an interrupted healing process following a close personal loss.

"The issue of grief is one that touches everyone, and it is particularly poignant in some ways in Chile," Shear said.

Though she noted that very few universities have facilities for research and treatment of complicated grief, she said that the Universidad Católica "is very prominent in the area of psychotherapy research."

Shear said that she contacted Karen Poniachik, director of Columbia's Global Center in Santiago, to schedule a meeting with faculty from the Universidad. Then, on Dec. 18, Shear delivered a lecture in Chile to nearly 350 people about her research on the disorder before agreeing to the collaboration with the university.

Alex Behn, TC '15, a Ph.D. student from Chile and a fellow at Columbia's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, said that the ability to diagnose complicated grief properly requires unique training.

"Complicated grief requires a very specialized treatment," Behn said. "What's important to understand is that complicated grief is a very complicated diagnosis that's often misdiagnosed as depression."

Behn, who attended Shear's lecture in December, said that the collaboration will focus on training, but may evolve into research opportunities.

"The idea is to disseminate the treatment of complicated grief," Behn said. "In the future, the schools will develop a research-based collaboration."

The Universidad already collaborates with the Mailman School of Public Health, a partnership that led to the establishment of Pontificia's Ph.D. program in epidemiology.

Additionally, the Chilean Global Center has an agreement in place with the Chilean government's center for research to fund Chilean Ph.D. students at Columbia fully—including Behn.

"Chile is a developing country that provides many opportunities for researchers," he said.

Shear, who first identified the complicated grief disorder in the mid-1990s with colleagues, established Columbia's Program for Complicated Grief only in 2008.

She said that she is committed to expanding research across borders. Columbia's Complicated Grief Program already has collaborations in place with universities in Japan, which focus on grief as a response to natural disasters and violent deaths, and universities in Norway, which specialize in suicide bereavement.

"We all have to gain from one another," she said. "As we work together to learn more about complicated grief in other cultures, we almost by definition learn more about it in our culture as well."

natalie.felsen@columbiaspectator.com

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera doesn't think that Chile needs to be the economic giant of South America.

University President Lee Bollinger signed an agreement with Banco de Chile on Monday, officially establishing Columbia's global center in Santiago. Bollinger and Banco de Chile's Vice Chairman of the Board Andronico Luksic signed the agreement at a ceremony in Faculty House Monday afternoon. The ceremony was attended by Columbia faculty and administrators, as well as dignitaries—including Chile's ambassador to the United States—and was preceded by a roundtable discussion with Columbia professors. During the ceremony, Bollinger said that the agreement would put Columbia on firm footing in Chile. "We at the University are trying to facilitate the opportunity to work with local institutions and people and connect that in a global way," he said. "This requires, in every instance, because our resources at this University are so thin, we need to have friends and have people to help us do this." Karen Poniachik, the director of the Santiago global center, told Spectator before the ceremony that Columbia students—undergraduate and graduate—would be able to study at the center starting in December. She said that programs at the center will focus on sustainable development, entrepreneurship, journalism, human rights, and gender issues. "Chile, and Santiago in particular, are very well connected ... very thriving from the economic, academic, and business perspectives," Poniachik said. "And there's a lot of outreach that can be done out of Santiago toward the rest of Latin America." Columbia has now opened five global centers—Santiago joins Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, and Amman, Jordan. Three more centers are on the way, in Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Nairobi, Kenya. Ken Prewitt, Columbia's vice president for global centers, said that the five operating centers will enhance educational and research experiences at Columbia by creating a network of partnerships that merge scholars and disciplines. "It is not just having different bilateral parts around the world, but getting all of those parts to talk to each other," Prewitt said. "For the first time since we started this project, we can say we are a global network." At the Santiago center, Columbia will use existing programs such as the Business School's Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness in Latin America Program. The Earth Institute wants to use the center to try out its Climate Risk Management system, an approach to giving locals knowledge of how climate interacts with fields such as agriculture, natural ecosystems, water resources, and health. The Journalism School, too, plans to work with the center's leadership. Before the document was signed, seven faculty members participated in a roundtable discussion, during which they reflected on regional themes, their personal interest in Chile, and why Columbia should have a presence there. Panelist Nara Milanich, an associate professor of history specializing in Chilean studies at Barnard, explained her desire to more closely examine the nature of inequality both in Chile and in South America. "It wouldn't be hyperbolic as a historian to say that inequality has characterized the societies of South America since their founding," she said during the discussion. "As a country with the first democratically-elected Marxist president in the world, Chile, in the present, is inadvertently a laboratory in inequality." The panelists also discussed human rights violations, agriculture and climate, the Chilean economy, and the changing educational system in Chile, noting that the global center will create opportunities for further examination. "I do see having a global center as an opportunity to create small constellations of research that can provide possible mechanisms for students and visiting scientists to participate in the work that we do," Earth Institute researcher Lisa Goddard said. During the ceremony, Bollinger expressed similar sentiments. "This is truly a great moment for us. It is not possible any longer to think about your field, in all probability, unless you have a deeper knowledge of what is happening around the world," Bollinger said at the ceremony. "The world is changing faster than our knowledge; we have to, in universities, figure out ways for us to catch up." Melissa von Mayrhauser contributed reporting. news@columbiaspectator.com

Chilean President Michele Bachelet stepped up to the podium last night to conclude a historic day for Columbia's World Leaders Forum, discussing the status of democracy in Latin America and asserting her place as a woman in the man's world of politics.