A new partnership between the city of Boston and most of the city’s large supermarkets aims to help consumers choose healthier and less sugary beverages with a color-coded “Rethink Your Drink” campaign in stores and weekly circulars. Harvard School of Public Health’s Prevention Research Center (HPRC), directed by Steven Gortmaker, professor of the practice of health sociology at HSPH, and…

In the weeks before Evan Osnos delivered the 2013 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation, the problems facing journalists in China were prominent in the news: Veteran correspondent Paul Mooney, who has written hard-hitting stories about human rights abuses, had his resident journalist visa renewal request denied, and a recent New…

Across the globe, there are signs that human activity is causing changes to Earth’s natural systems that may result in risks to health—from Indonesia, where fires used to clear land have been linked to cardiopulmonary disease downwind in Singapore, to the U.S., where the rise in Lyme disease has followed a reduction in mammalian diversity…

Controlling blood pressure, serum cholesterol, and blood glucose may substantially reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke associated with being overweight or obese, according to a study from a worldwide research consortium led by a team from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Imperial College London, and the University of Sydney. Among the three…

Harvard faculty members, instructors, and the teaching and learning community are invited to attend the next HarvardX Town Hall meeting on course development and research that will take place in the Harvard Medical School/Longwood Medical area. To be held on Wednesday, December 11, at TMEC Walter Amphitheater, the main session will run from 3 to 4 p.m.…

Women with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) gain weight more rapidly and are more likely to be overweight or obese than women without the disorder, find researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It is the first study to look at the relationship between PTSD and obesity over time.…

Reflecting on the 2013 elections and what they might mean for 2014 and 2016, Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, shared with the Shorenstein Center three key outcomes that might shed light on future political developments. The three elections she pointed to were Bill de Blasio in the New York mayoral race, and the gubernatorial races of…

More than 300 Harvard School of Public Health alumni, students, faculty, and guests, from a dozen countries and 29 U.S. states, came back to campus to celebrate Alumni Weekend on November 2-4. More alumni than ever returned to the festivities in the School’s Centennial year, as the weekend also coincided with the American Public Health…

Vahid Tarokh, the electrical engineer who introduced space-time codes into wireless communications and who has been one of the world’s most cited researchers in computer science, has been chosen to receive an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal. Tarokh, the Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard…

The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) announced they have extended the Cultivation Grant application submission deadline to Friday, December 13. Cultivation Grants are awards of $100 – 200K designed to extend promising educational innovations into new intellectual and institutional contexts, and to rigorously investigate the potential of their wide-scale adoption across the University.…

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union invited musician/artist Kanye West to the School Sunday, November 17. West met with students and then toured the School. While visiting, West addressed the students who had gathered. After his remarks, West distributed tickets to his concert in Boston that evening. The following statement…

Immigrant women who live in regions of Spain with high unemployment rates are three times more likely to have stillborn infants than Spanish-born women living in more thriving areas of the country, according to a study by an international team of scientists led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Many poor women with low…

The number of homeless families in Massachusetts seeking shelter in hotels and motels is at an all-time high, while one in seven in Massachusetts relies on food stamps. Yet the Massachusetts legislature is considering a wallop directed at people in poverty—a welfare reform act aimed at fostering economic independence but which make access to cash…

Jennifer Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Committee on Degrees in American Studies, will give the Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts on Jan. 20. Roberts’ lecture will focus on the matrix – be it a plate, block,…

A new phase of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP)—which over the past five years identified the millions of microorganisms living on, and in, the human body—will focus on the roles played by these microbes both in health and disease. The new three-year “multi-omic” study at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT is being co-led…

The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) awarded seven Spark Grants for fall 2013 (about 10% of applicants): Repository of section plans. Kris-Stella Trump (FAS) will develop and pilot an open database of section plans for Teaching Fellows in the government department; Teaching genomics across Harvard schools. Winston Hide (SPH), William Gelbart (FAS), and…

The Woodberry Poetry Room’s rich collection contains rare and one-of-a-kind recordings of some of the 20th century’s most important poets. But because many of these rare recordings exist on fragile cassettes or on transcription discs made of lacquered metal or glass prone to separation and decay, these voices have essentially been silenced – until now.…

Traditional social science research tends to skew toward “WEIRD” subjects—that is, toward the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—according to four Harvard researchers who are trying to expand the reach of modern data collection and analysis. Pioneers in the field of crowdsourced, Web-based research, they offered a vision of large-scale citizen science experiments in a…

Epidemiologists at Harvard have a long legacy of groundbreaking findings, from a 19th-century study on the effectiveness of bloodletting as a treatment for pneumonia to recent work on the role various dietary factors play in chronic disease risk. Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) faculty, alumni, and students gathered to reflect on the past and future of…

New research led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) demonstrates a disease mechanism in type 1 diabetes (T1D) that can be targeted using simple, naturally occurring molecules to help prevent the disease. The work highlights a previously unrecognized molecular pathway that contributes to the malfunction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in T1D in human…

Ana Navarro, Institute of Politics fellow and political contributor at CNN and CNN en Español, describes herself as a “Republican without labels,” which she explained meant that she is “inclusive, not obstructionist.” Navarro, who served as the National Hispanic Co-Chair for Gov. Jon Huntsman’s 2012 Campaign, spoke to the Shorenstein Center about how punditry has changed political debate, and how politicians might…

The founding director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, Marvin Kalb spoke to the Shorenstein Center about the war powers of U.S. presidents and how the lack of congressional support has impacted military policy. Drawing on the example of Vietnam, Kalb argued that “the word ‘commitment,’…

When it comes to statistical analysis, “context matters,” according to Jesse Berlin. “Different people look at the same data and come to different conclusions.” This was one of the issues discussed by Berlin, ScD ’88, in a talk about challenges he’s encountered as a biostatistician on October 31, 2013 in FXB-G13 at Harvard School of…

A memorial gathering to celebrate the life and work of Professor Detlev Frederick Vagts ’51 will be held on Wednesday, November 13, at 3:30 p.m. in the Wasserstein Caspersen Clinical Building, 2019 Milstein West, Harvard Law School. A reception will follow. All are welcome. Vagts, a renowned scholar of international law at Harvard Law School and…

The rise of cardiovascular disease in two rapidly growing countries—Mexico and Brazil—was the focus of a symposium organized by Swiss Re and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) on October 15-16, 2013 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. Both institutions commemorated landmark birthdays at the event, as 2013 marks the…

Four Harvard College undergraduates who invented a chemotherapy patch have been named finalists in the national Collegiate Inventors Competition. Nikhil Mehandru ’15, Alydaar Rangwala ’15, Aaron Perez ’15, and Brandon Sim ’15, creators of the ChemoPatch, are one of six undergraduate teams selected to present their inventions to a panel of expert judges at the…

One hundred years from now what will people think of Post-it notes, wind-up toys, or the technological marvel of our generation, the smartphone? Future Harvard faculty, students, staff, and administrators will have the opportunity to examine these early 21st-century items. They are contained within a time capsule that was placed in the outside wall of…

CommuterChoice is pleased to announce that MBTA commuters can now pay for parking related expenses on a pre-tax basis. Here’s how it works: Commuters set aside up to $245 per month on a pre-tax basis and can then be reimbursed for work related, parking expenses incurred while commuting via the MBTA. Offered in conjunction with…

Women whose diet includes more foods that trigger inflammation—like sugar-sweetened or diet soft drinks, refined grains, red meat, and margarine—and fewer foods that restrain inflammation—like wine, coffee, olive oil, and green leafy and yellow vegetables—have up to a 41% greater risk of being diagnosed with depression than those who eat mostly the less inflammatory diet,…

The Harvard Business School African-American Alumni Association has launched a website featuring weekly profiles of accomplished black female graduates who represent the broad mosaic of the HBS community. The site was launched to complement the School’s celebration in 2012-13 of 50 years of women in the full-time MBA program. The new site focuses on black…