Columbia University is delighted to offer two Laidlaw programmes to its students. The first is the Research and Leadership programme given by Columbia College to first year undergraduate students to allow them to get involved in the university’s research, working with academic staff on questions of global significance. The second is the Lord Irvine A.S. Laidlaw ’65 Scholarship at Columbia Business School, which provides crucial financial assistance to full-time female MBA students each year, giving them access to an unparalleled business education and network. To date, over 300 exceptional women have received Laidlaw Scholarships.

Developing ideas and leaders that transform the world—from the very center of business. As the only top Ivy League business school immersed in the global business hub that is New York City, we offer students unparalleled access to leaders from across industries — in the classroom, throughout the city, and around the globe. The Lord Irvine A.S. Laidlaw ’65 Scholarship at Columbia Business School provides crucial financial assistance to female MBA students, giving them access to an unparalleled business education and entrée into an expanding community of incredibly talented and supportive Laidlaw Columbia Business Scholars.

Greetings! I am a Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Linguistics at Columbia University. I teach courses on sounds, structure, and meaning in language as well as fieldwork methodologies and the diversification of language over time and space. I am interested in all things linguistic. My area of specialization is semantics.

I am an undergraduate student at Columbia University on the pre-medical track and studying Medicine, Literature & Society and Business Management. Currently, I am a research assistant in the Salzman Lab at Columbia's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.

This summer under the auspices of the Laidlaw Scholars Program I will be researching Hippocratic works and other texts from ancient Greek medical discourse in order to ask questions around female agency and challenges to the female body. How are female bodies governed? How are bodies feminized in medical discourse? If one can consider a body as an object from which forces of political, social, and psychological agency or governance emerge, how does a body’s female identity confound this? I am interested in how material bodies are formed and gendered, how they are a site of biological or social domains. It is through medical writings and interrogating perceptions of the ancient Greek body that one may more clearly understand what elements of the human experience are valued.

Midori was born in Tokyo, Japan and spent her elementary school years in New York and Boston before returning to Tokyo for middle and high school. She graduated from Columbia College, where she double majored in Biology and Medical Humanities through the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Midori was a member of the Veenstra-VanderWeele Lab at Columbia University Medical Center, researching autism spectrum disorder risk factors and their implications on brain and behavior using a mice model. On campus, Midori was president of CU STRIVE, supporting youth living with sickle cell disease through mentorship and advocacy. Midori spent the summer of 2019 in Bhutan, researching the perceptions and usage of biomedical, traditional (Sowa Rigpa), and local healing practices and their implications on healthcare. She spent the remainder of the summer as a research fellow of a predictive oncology lab at Marseilles Cancer Research Center in France. Her passion lies in addressing social determinants of health to achieve global health equity. Midori plans to use such experiences to inform her future practice as a physician who will work for international humanitarian organizations.

Manasi Sharma is a junior studying Computer Science and Physics at Columbia University. She lives in Bangalore, India and grew up in the Bay Area, California. She is deeply interested in applying computational Machine Learning techniques to a variety of fields such as Astrophysics, and this summer, worked on developing a Deep Learning Real/Bogus image classifier for the Palomar Gattini-IR telescope at Caltech. In her free time, Manasi can be found practicing for her dance team, Columbia Raas, organizing fun, social events for the Columbia Society for Women in Physics, or simply binge-watching her favorite TV show Castle.