Millennium Magazine_2ndEd

94 MILLENNIUM-SECOND EDITION W ith a remarkable 60 years of professional excellence under his belt, Dr. Lambros Comitas has been the Gardner Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University for the past 30 years. Educated at Columbia, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1948 after service in the United States Army Signal Corps and a Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology in 1962. He rose through the Columbia ranks from being an instructor in anthropology to his current prestigious position, establishing en route the applied anthropology program at Teachers College and sponsoring more than 100 PhDs in anthropology. The latter, an astounding feat, is yet unsurpassed in his discipline. In tandem, he has carried out field research in the Caribbean, Bolivia, Greece and the USSR, among other places, on such far-ranging themes as sociocultural change, migration, maritime economy, rural education, occupation andwork, and, most notably, drugs and society, which was explored in the widely acclaimed book “Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use,” which he co-authored with Vera Rubin. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Spencer Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Comitas is also an elected member of the National Academy of Education, a distinguished member of the American Anthropological Association, a fellow of the NewYork Academy of Sciences, and a former president of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Research Institute for the Study of Man. His most recent professional affiliation is with the eponymous Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study, which he founded and directs. LAMBROS COMITAS, PHD GARDNER COWLES PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION Teachers College, Columbia University New York, NY