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Campus & Community
Parkes named McKay Professor of Computer Science
David C. Parkes, a leader in research at the nexus of computer science and economics, has been appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), The appointment was effective July 1.
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Campus & Community
Jordan appointed first Niebuhr Professor at HDS
Mark D. Jordan has been appointed the first Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He will take up the new post in January 2009. Jordan has been Emory University’s Asa Griggs Candler Professor since 1999.
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Nation & World
Business School, China Fund open office in Shanghai
Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean Jay O. Light and William C. Kirby, T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies and chairman of the Harvard China Fund, announced the opening of a Harvard office in Shanghai on July 2.
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Campus & Community
Intellectual historian Fleming dies at 84
Donald Fleming, an intellectual historian who studied the impact of science on American thought and was a member of the Harvard faculty for more than 40 years, passed away at his Cambridge home on June 16. He was 84.
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Science & Tech
Creating semiconductor lasers
Lasers are often considered to be highly directional light sources: their beams are able to propagate over long distances without substantial spreading. This, however, is not always the case. Semiconductor lasers, the most commonly used among all lasers, suffer from a large beam divergence. Such divergence is governed by the principle of diffraction, which predicts…
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Health
GlaxoSmithKline and Harvard Stem Cell Institute announce major collaboration agreement
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) today announced that they have entered into a five-year, $25 million-plus collaborative agreement to build a unique alliance in stem cell science to hasten the development of treatments and cures for a range of diseases. GSK’s investment, one of the largest by a pharmaceutical company in…
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Science & Tech
Susan Carey receives David E. Rumelhart Prize
Susan Carey, a Harvard psychologist whose work has explored fundamental issues surrounding the nature of the human mind, has been awarded the 2009 David E. Rumelhart Prize, given annually since 2001 for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition. Carey, the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology in…
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Science & Tech
David Parkes named professor of computer science
David C. Parkes, a leader in research at the nexus of computer science and economics, has been appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS). Parkes, 35, was previously John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and associate professor of computer science at Harvard, where…
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Campus & Community
Business School summer program offers world of possibilities
Twenty-five years ago, a group of Harvard Business School (HBS) professors started a program they hoped would change lives. Their wish has come true.
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Science & Tech
Peter Ashton: A legacy written in trunk, limb and leaf
They were in a bind, no doubt about it. Wearing little but cotton shorts, the four men huddled on a streambank deep in the Bornean rainforest. Water dripped from their soggy clothes, making muddy pools around their feet as they assessed the situation. They were surrounded by a forest so vast that it would take…
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Health
BWH Asthma Research Center Awarded $2 Million Grant for Gene-based Clinical Trial; participants sought from Partners’ Network
The Brigham and Women’s Hospital Asthma Research Center (ARC) has received a $2 million Genetics Enters Medicine (GEM) grant from Partners to study the influence of one’s genetic profile on response to asthma therapies and involves examining whether patients with different versions of a receptor for commonly used asthma drugs have a better response to…
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Science & Tech
DARPA awards interdisciplinary research team $1.2 million grant to study surface enhanced Raman scattering
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $1.2 million grant to an interdisciplinary team of Harvard researchers to study surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for the first phase of a potential three-year effort. If all phases of the development programare completed, researchers could receive up a total of up to $2.9 million…
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Health
Tobacco industry used cigarette menthol to recruit new adolescents and young adult smokers
Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have found that tobacco companies have deliberately adjusted menthol levels in cigarettes to recruit and addict young smokers by creating a milder experience for the first-time smoker. Menthol masks the harshness and irritation of cigarettes, allowing delivery of an effective dose of nicotine, the addictive chemical in…
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Campus & Community
Christine Heenan named Harvard VP for Government, Community and Public Affairs
Christine Heenan, former director of community and government relations at Brown University and founder and president of the Clarendon Group, a communications and government relations consulting firm, has been appointed vice president for government, community and public affairs at Harvard University, President Drew Faust announced today (July 15).
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Health
Middle Eastern families yield intriguing clues to autism
Research involving large Middle Eastern families, sophisticated genetic analysis and groundbreaking neuroscience has implicated a half-dozen new genes in autism. More importantly, it strongly supports the emerging idea that autism stems from disruptions in the brain’s ability to form new connections in response to experience – consistent with autism’s onset during the first year of…
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Health
Stem cells used to treat muscular dystrophy in mice
Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have for the first time demonstrated that transplanted muscle stem cells can both improve muscle function in mice with a form of muscular dystrophy and replenish the stem cell population for use in the repair of future muscle injuries. “I’m very excited about this,” said…
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Health
Amy Wagers – focusing on stem cell biology
Twenty minutes after her weekly lab meeting is scheduled to begin, Amy Wagers rushes into a conference room on the fourth floor of the Joslin Diabetes Center, where her lab team sits, chatting around a long oval table. “Sorry I’m late,” she calls out, closing the door behind her. “Oh good, the food’s here!” Grabbing…
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Campus & Community
Rescued Russian bells leave Harvard for home
In a succession of brief ceremonies outside Lowell House this week (July 8), Harvard University officially returned to authorities of the Russian Orthodox Church the last of a set of monastery bells saved from a Stalinist-era scrap heap.
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Health
Scientists use genomic tools to create maps of DNA methylation
Much of the field of stem cell biology and development remains uncharted territory. Just as famous explorers and astronomers mapped out landmasses and constellations, researchers are working fervently to chart the molecular landscapes within stem cells — especially embryonic stem cells. A clearer understanding of the cells’ unique properties, particularly their ability to give rise…
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Campus & Community
Harvard benefactor Katherine Loker dies at 92
Katherine Bogdanovich Loker, a major Harvard benefactor and one of the nation’s most active and generous supporters of higher education, died June 26 in Oceanside, Calif. She had suffered a massive stroke earlier in the week.
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Campus & Community
University aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions following new task force report
Harvard University today (July 8) released the report of its Greenhouse Gas Task Force. The task force, appointed by President Drew Faust in February, proposes elements of a framework for much-intensified efforts to reduce the University’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as part of a broader effort to promote environmental sustainability.
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Nation & World
Attacking the ties that bind poverty, illness
Jim Yong Kim remembers the drive home from the airport with his father, a dentist in the small Iowa city where Kim was raised. His dad asked Kim, who was on a break from Brown University, what he’d decided to study.
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Nation & World
Confronting tuberculosis
In the shadow of a hill where lepers once lived, a tuberculosis hospital designed for those infected with deadly, drug-resistant strains of the disease is giving hope to a new generation of medical pariahs in the tiny African nation of Lesotho.
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Nation & World
After years of talk, time for action
It was a tough assessment for a health clinic, and Jim Yong Kim was standing in the middle of one when he made it. “A lot of these are known as places where you go to die.”
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Nation & World
A pandemic’s front lines
Jim Yong Kim walked out of the small cinder block room where an underweight boy of 5 lay, his heart rate down to 115 from the dangerous 150 beats per minute at which it had been racing moments earlier. Kim stripped rubber gloves from his hands. “That was incredibly gutsy,” he said flatly…
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Health
Researchers identify promising cancer drug target in prostate tumors
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report they have blocked the development of prostate tumors in cancer-prone mice by knocking out a molecular unit they describe as a “powerhouse” that drives runaway cell growth. In a letter appearing in an advanced online publication by the journal Nature, the researchers said the growth-stimulating molecule called p110beta —…
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Nation & World
Shelter amid a health care storm
South Africa’s Valley of 1,000 Hills is a broad and breathtaking natural contradiction, an enormous valley whose floor is crowded with hills large and small, as if nature wasn’t quite sure what it was making.
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Nation & World
Fighting AIDS now and in the future
In the heart of the South African AIDS epidemic, at a medical school named for the nation’s legendary anti-apartheid leader, a fight against a different sort of oppression is being waged.
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Science & Tech
Researchers develop new technique for fabricating nanowire circuits
Scientists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating collaborating with researchers from the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen, have developed a new technique for fabricating nanowire photonic and electronic integrated circuits that may one day be suitable for high-volume commercial production. Spearheaded by graduate student Mariano Zimmler and Federico Capasso,…
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Health
New source of heart stem cells discovered
Harvard Stem Cell Institute(HSCI) researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston are continuing to document the heart’s earliest origins. Now, they have pinpointed a new, previously unrecognized group of stem cells that give rise to cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells. These stem cells, located in the surface of the heart, or epicardium, advance the hope of being…