Philanthropy and Social Difference
Taught by Lisa Rosen-Metsch and Geraldine Downey
Department of English & General Studies

Dr. Lisa Rosen-Metsch is the 9^th Dean of the Columbia School of General Studies. She is the first alumna to serve as Dean of GS. Previously, she was the Chair and Stephen Smith Professor, Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch is a medical sociologist and an internationally recognized scholar whose work has focused on the social determinants of health with special focus on access to care for persons living with HIV and substance use disorders. For the past two decades, her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has resulted in over 250 publications in high impact journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Addiction, and the American Journal of Public Health. Mentoring and teaching has always been a high priority for Dean Rosen-Metsch and she has won numerous teaching awards and co-directs a NIH-funded training program with the Columbia School of Social Work.

Dr. Rosen-Metsch taught this spring a new seminar course in the Department of Sociology for undergraduates entitled “AIDS and US Society” that explored how the HIV/AIDS epidemic transformed American society. In her time as Dean, Columbia GS has significantly increased fundraising for student financial aid scholarships, created and launched new international dual-degree programs, and created new initiatives focused on social justice and women student veterans.

Philanthropy and Social Difference
Taught by Lisa Rosen-Metsch and Geraldine Downey
Department of English & General Studies

Dr. Geraldine Downey‘s main interest is the study of personal and status based rejection. In her current work, she is exploring people’s expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people’s behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters.

Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent it. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. She has sought to investigate the effect of rejection sensitivity on people’s behavior by utilizing various techniques including established social cognition paradigms, experimental studies, physiological recordings, brain-imaging and diary studies.

Recently, Dr. Downey has been using the knowledge acquired from her research on rejection to develop models of personality and attachment disorders. She has also been interested in the study of identity, specifically on the way in which individuals use their multiple social identities strategically to cope with daily stressors.