In March, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick ’82 nominated Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute clinical instructor Gloria Tan to a seat on the Massachusetts Juvenile Court. Tan came to CJI, which supervises third-year law students representing indigent criminal defendants in local district and juvenile courts, after serving as a public defender for the Committee for…

The biennial Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law attracted scores of IP lawyers, business people, academicians, and judges to the school April 12 to discuss recent developments in IP law. According to William W. Fisher, the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at HLS and co-chair of the event since its inception 10…

Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 received the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award from the Harvard Federalist Society in April. The award is bestowed upon a faculty member who has furthered the cause of intellectual diversity and free and open debate at Harvard Law School, both inside and outside of the classroom, regardless of…

Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a professor of practice. The professorships of practice at Harvard Law School are given to outstanding individuals whose teaching is informed by extensive expertise from the worlds of law practice, the judiciary,…

Environmental lawlessness was the topic of discussion on April 10, as Richard Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law, gave a lecture marking his appointment to the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professorship of Law. Speaking before a crowd of family, students, colleagues, and friends—including Supreme Court Chief Justice John…

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has selected 24 journalists as members of the 76th class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard University. The group includes reporters, editors, columnists, digital media leaders and producers in print, broadcast and online who work around the globe and across media platforms. Announcing the class, Nieman Curator Ann Marie Lipinski said,…

Ninety-three students spent April 26-28, 2013 learning how to rapidly respond to a refugee crisis while being faced with a host of stressful distractions from confrontational child-soldiers to rogue journalists. It was all part of the annual disaster simulation organized by The Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative, the flagship training and professional development program of…

Researchers from several Harvard Schools and initiatives were instrumental in developing the city of Boston’s first Cyclist Safety Report released on May 15, 2013 by Mayor Tom Menino. The report examined four years of bicycle crash incident data supplied by Boston Police and Boston EMS that will now inform city officials in their continued efforts…

A grandmother’s gift was the inspiration for this year’s winner of the Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting. Catherine Katz ’13 was the first place winner for her entry “My Grandmother’s Childhood Library: Collecting Early 20th Century Stratemeyer Syndicate Children’s Series.” Katz said her grandmother’s gift of a half dozen original editions of favorite…

Spring flowers and new leaves at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University signal the return of schoolchildren for outdoor field study experiences. For three decades, the Arboretum has reached out to students from Boston schools to participate in structured explorations of the collections, life science instruction, and engaging interactions with the natural world. This season…

Quan Lu, Mark and Catherine Winkler Assistant Professor of Lung Biology in the Departments of Environmental Health and Genetics and Complex Diseases, is the 2013 recipient of the Armen H. Tashjian, Jr. Excellence in Endocrine Research Award. He presented the talk, “Message in a Nano-Vesicle: A New Way of Receptor Signaling and Cell Communication” at…

John W. Hutchinson, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics Emeritus, has been elected to foreign membership in the Royal Society. He was among eight foreign members and 44 new fellows welcomed on May 3 by the United Kingdom’s elite national academy. Hutchinson is a seminal scholar in…

The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) was honored to host an essay contest on Europe with the students in Professor Muriel Rouyer’s class at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Global Europe: Democracy, Policy and Governance” (DPI 431). Students were tasked with an unusual assignment: they were asked to pretend that, in a quest…

The Music Department awarded $236,735 in 2013 awards and fellowships to support the scholarly and artistic work of its current graduate and undergraduate students. Research awards were given for projects ranging from the study of gospel music in Houston to Ugandan language study, and fieldwork in Israel, Finland, China, and Benin. The funds will also…

Yaendy Matos, a student at Fenway High School in Boston, says she is interested in a medical career but the field of public health has not been on her radar. “We don’t know what public health is. We’re just checking it out,” Matos said, as she sat with her friends in the Kresge cafeteria at…

The European Physical Society (EPS) will award its most prestigious prize in quantum electronics and optics to Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The prizes are awarded only once every two years, and recognize…

A new study has shed light on why a monkey malaria parasite that typically caused only mild infection in humans is now beginning to cause severe disease and death—and how it has the potential to become a dangerous human-to-human pathogen. In a multidisciplinary study using experimental and modeling approaches, researchers at Harvard School of Public…

Two affiliated projects proposed by a Harvard/MIT team and a Metropolitan New York Library Council/Brooklyn Historical Society team each received a 2013 Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian Program Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The awards will support the projects “Testing the National Digital Stewardship Residency Model in Boston, MA” and “National…

Three years ago, Oregon native Ali Chisti, MPH ’13, was on course to become a private practice neurosurgeon, studying medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. During the summers he worked as a caddie at a golf course in Bandon, along Oregon’s rural southern coast, to help pay for school. But in the…

The Awesome Box allows library patrons to return materials to a box set aside for items they deem to be awesome. “If you interact with an amazing or useful item from the library and return it to the Awesome Box, that item gets recorded as awesome so the community can see what others have found…

StackLife combines the familiarity of ordinary shelves with the dexterity of the virtual to let users explore the 12.3 million items in Harvard’s 73 libraries, with the Harvard community as a guide. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, StackLife is an open-source project that displays works on a virtual shelf that combines shelves from…

A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed…

Last May on Lilac Sunday, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University introduced visitors and online audiences to two mobile applications for mapping and sharing information on the Arboretum’s living plant collections—Mobile Interactive Map (MIM) and Arboretum Navigator. Following a year of rigorous testing and evaluation, the Arboretum has combined the best attributes of both in…

Robert Darnton, Harvard University Librarian and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, was awarded the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France. The Prix Mondial is awarded each year to an author whose work “conveys a message of modern humanism.” The Institut de France noted it wanted to recognize Darnton for “his research…

New findings from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment show that Medicaid coverage had no detectable effect on the prevalence of diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure, but substantially reduced depression, nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures, and increased the diagnosis of diabetes and the use of diabetes medication among low-income adults. The Oregon Health Insurance…

The influence of a minister of finance in shaping broad public policy, building sustainable health financing, and increasing efficiency in implementation and delivery of health and social services while securing fiscal and economic stability and growth were the key topics of the recently convened inaugural Ministerial Forum for Ministers of Finance, held at Harvard on April…

Harvard’s recently acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection centers on art, literature, and popular culture artifacts related to the chief avenues to altered states of mind: sex and drugs.  It is the largest collection of its kind in the world, and since its arrival at Harvard, this collection has sparked great interest. A new page…

The April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing killed three people and injured 264—20 critically—but every patient who was transported to a hospital survived the tragedy. One reason is that Boston is a “medical mecca,” with an unusually high number of teaching hospitals and trauma centers. But another crucial reason is that the Boston medical community…

Like others in Harvard Law School’s LL.M. class of 2013, Maryna Kavaleuskaya practiced law abroad before coming to America for additional legal training. And, like many of her 187 classmates—most of them from overseas—she had to overcome obstacles along the way. But unlike most others, Kavaleuskaya will be unable to return to a normal life…

Last month, as an historic trial continued in Guatemala against a former dictator charged with the genocide of indigenous Mayans, Lauren Herman ’13—a student in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC) —stood in court in Boston as a judge announced he was granting asylum to her Mayan client, who, with his family, had suffered…