Always have a goal and know where you are headed, Julie Gerberding, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) students October 27, 2011. She shared leadership tips at the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development’s lecture series, “Decision-making: Voices from the Field.”…

With the continuing trend toward ever-more “natural” diets, the raw milk debate has gathered steam, including here in Massachusetts where lawmakers have been considering legislation to loosen restrictions on selling raw milk for the nearly 30 dairy farms in the state. While the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), like other public health agencies and…

Graduate students with aspirations for public service are more inclined to follow their dreams when they have opportunities to connect their coursework with the world of practice. That is the takeaway from a new analysis of the Rappaport Public Policy Fellows Program carried out by Professor Edward Glaeser, who directs HKS’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, and…

At the renowned Harvard Faculty Club the latest guest amenity comes in the form of an elegant clear glass bottle. For more than a month, Faculty Club employees have been filling those glass bottles with filtered carbonated or still water from new machines that eliminate the use of over 15,000 plastic and glass bottles annually.…

Fissures in the Eurozone are bubbling over as the Greek government stumbles to come to grips with a new loan deal with the European Union. And troubles in Greece may just be the tip of the iceberg as several other European nations also struggle with crippling debt, high unemployment and citizen unrest. Jeffrey Frankel, the…

On Tuesday, Oct. 25th Earthwatch — an international nonprofit environmental organization — held its first community lecture in a new fall series hosted at its headquarters. The fall lecture series is funded by the Harvard Allston Partnership Fund. “Earthwatch has been on the ground less than 18 months and is already giving back to the…

The Harvard Graduate School of Design will present the 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Festival, Nov. 7-8. The festival is a joint presentation of the Loeb Fellowship and the Department of Urban Planning and Design, and hosted by Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of Urban Planning and Design. The Curry Stone Design Prize, an annual international award,…

Computer scientists at Harvard, Boston University, and Yale stumbled upon a privacy leak in the mobile version of the popular Yelp social networking review site (m.yelp.com) in late October. In the course of their ongoing research, which studies the interplay between social networks and Internet commerce, the team—Michael Mitzenmacher, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science…

Even as a young child, growing up in Guanajuato, Mexico, Edgar Barroso remembers being fascinated by the possibility of creating something meaningful out of sound. Over the course of the years — having learned to play several instruments along the way — this gifted composer and Harvard PhD candidate in the Music Department has created…

Mark Zuckerberg will visit Harvard Monday to recruit students for jobs and internships at Facebook, the University announced today. Zuckerberg, along with Facebook Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, will meet with more than 200 computer science students at Farkas Hall for a discussion moderated by computer science lecturer David J. Malan. It is Zuckerberg’s…

The Vampire in Film & Literature “The vampire story has been used by authors and filmmakers alike as an encoded way of talking about a lot of things besides vampirism,” says Sue Weaver Schopf, who teaches the fall Harvard Extension School course, ENGL E-212 The Vampire in Literature and Film. “It’s been a useful metaphor…

Washington, DC—Two major digital library networks have reached an agreement to collaborate in ways that will make a large part of the world’s cultural heritage available to a large part of the world’s population.  The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which will provide access to digital collections from libraries, museums, and archives in the…

Washington, DC—The Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund today announced a major contribution for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in the form of combined $5 million in funding. The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific…

Laura Salah Nasrallah, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), has received funding from the Battelle Memorial Institute to organize a symposium. Scholars of diverse disciplinary training will meet for a symposium during the 2012-13 academic year to discuss the topic “How Bodies Matter: Religion, Archaeology, and Physical Anthropology in…

The Graduate School is pleased to announce that for the third year running, it will curate a flexible January series of seminars, workshops, and social opportunities, on January 9-20, 2012, designed to help graduate students get something valuable from the winter break. GSAS students never really take a “break” from their research, of course, but…

The Office of Career Services and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are offering a number of don’t-miss events this year as part of their ongoing Becoming Faculty career series. These special programs run through the end of January and are geared toward helping graduate students in GSAS prepare for the academic job search. The series…

To honor the University’s dynamic history, the Harvard University Archives has mounted an extensive 375th anniversary exhibition entitled “A Transcendent Vitality.” Through this seven-month, commemorative exhibition in Pusey Library, the Archives shines a celebratory light on its unique research collections as they illustrate Harvard’s history and anticipate the University’s continuing impact. According to University Archivist…

“Times have never been tougher or bleaker,” said Peter Hart, chairman of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, at an event sponsored by the Shorenstein Center and Institute of Politics. After 50 years of public opinion polling, Hart said that he has “never felt less certain of the outcome than I do in [the 2012] election.”…

For Jeanne Gang, who was just awarded one of the twenty-two $500,000 no-strings-attached MacArthur Fellowships, her time as a student and (last semester) as a studio critic at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) has meant primarily an experience of  intellectual intensity and broadening. “My fellow students were the most important part of my life…

Harvard University and The University of Texas at Austin have received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop open-access research-based tools for advancing learning in science and engineering. Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will serve as lead…

Two astronomers who received their Ph.D.s from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences were named today as among the three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate — a discovery that shook cosmology “at its foundations,” said the Royal Swedish Academy…

This past Monday morning (Oct. 3), the giraffe and okapi were safely back behind glass after spending a couple weeks released from ‘captivity’ in the museum’s Great Mammal Hall for the first time in nearly a century.  It took a half dozen staff from HMNH and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), which owns the…

A new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that, among women, drinking coffee may reduce the risk of depression. The researchers, led by Michel Lucas, research fellow in nutrition, found the risk of depression to be 20% lower among women who drank four or more cups of caffeinated coffee than…

Eating fish a few times a week may be beneficial in lowering stroke risk, according to a new meta-analysis. Researchers examined results from 15 previous studies to summarize the evidence linking fish consumption and stroke risk. According to the Swedish study, published online Sept. 8, 2011 in the journal Stroke, eating three extra servings of…

Harvard Divinity School (HDS) announces a major gift to support and expand its program in Buddhist ministry studies. The gift will provide exceptional funding to enhance and expand the strength of the School’s current offerings and will help to form a new generation of students who will make a lasting impact in Buddhist communities. The…

Wall Street and Washington share responsibility for the current economic crisis, according to Jeff Madrick, who discussed his new book Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, at the Shorenstein Center. Madrick, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and editor of Challenge magazine,…

Many of this year’s Arab uprisings are evolving from angry popular revolts into drawn-out political struggles to build democratic systems that will protect basic civic rights and social justice, analysts told a Harvard Kennedy School forum. Rami G. Khouri, an associate in the school’s Dubai Initiative and a prominent Beirut-based journalist, said that in Egypt,…

Experiments in Place and Collaborative Documentary: UnionDocs’ Looking at Los Sures Director Diego Echeverria and UnionDocs artists will be in person Tuesday, Oct. 18, 7 p.m. at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge. In the late seventies and early eighties, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods…

On Wednesday, Sept. 28, at 2.30 p.m. in Maxwell Dworkin G115, APJ Abdul Kalam , former president of India and current chancellor of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, will discuss science, technology, and India’s policy as they relate to energy, nuclear power, space, and IT. In particular, his focus will be on…

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs this week announced its 2011-12 research fellows. While the Belfer Center is the hub of research, teaching, and training in international security affairs and diplomacy, environmental and resource issues, science and technology policy, and conflict studies at Harvard Kennedy School, the heart of the Center…