Sandel to Deliver BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures

Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has been chosen by the BBC to deliver its Reith Lectures for 2009. Sandel’s lectures, titled “A New Citizenship,” will address the prospect for a new politics of the common good.

The Reith Lectures, considered the most prestigious public lectures in Britain, will be recorded before live audiences in London, Oxford, and Newcastle, England, and in Washington, D.C., and will be broadcast on the BBC World Service in June 2009. Sandel is the first Harvard faculty member to receive the honor since John Kenneth Galbraith in 1966.

Sandel’s lecture topics include “Markets and Morals” (London), “Morality in Politics” (Oxford), “Genetics and Morals” (Newcastle), and “A New Politics of the Common Good” (Washington, D.C.). While in London, Sandel will participate in a discussion of his work with government advisers and ministers at the prime minister’s residence.

Jain and Vafa honored by NAS

Rakesh K. Jain, the A. Werk Cook Professor of Radiation Oncology for Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the affiliated faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and Cumrun Vafa, the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics, have been recently elected into the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for excellence in original scientific research. They will be inducted into the Academy next April during its 147th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.