Madelaine “Maddie” D. Boyd ’12, a computer science concentrator in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), was among 20 female undergraduates from across the globe awarded a 2011 Facebook Grace Hopper Women in Computing Scholarship. Boyd and her fellow winners will receive an all expenses paid trip to attend the Grace Hopper…

Global population is expected to hit 7 billion later this year, up from 6 billion in 1999. Between now and 2050, an estimated 2.3 billion more people will be added—nearly as many as inhabited the planet as recently as 1950. New estimates from the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of…

The World Health Organization (WHO) needs major reform to regain its leadership as a trusted provider of scientific and technical knowledge, according to Barry Bloom, Jack and Joan Jacobson professor of public health at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), who has been associated with WHO in various capacities for 44 years. Bloom, a former…

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has been awarded a $14.1 million, four-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to test the effectiveness of an innovative checklist-based childbirth safety program in reducing deaths and improving outcomes of mothers and infants in 120 hospitals in India. The program was developed by the World Health…

Materials scientists and applied physicists collaborating at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have invented a new device that can instantly identify an unknown liquid. The device, which fits in the palm of a hand and requires no power source, exploits the chemical and optical properties of precisely nanostructured materials to distinguish liquids…

Gordon Dester Kaufman, Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, died on Friday, July 22, at age 86. A member of the Faculty of Divinity since 1963, Kaufman was a renowned liberal theologian whose research, writing, and teachings had a profound influence on constructive and systematic theology. He argued for a…

Following last year’s successful effort to achieve, at minimum, Green Leaf One certification for all staff workspaces in Widener, Houghton, Lamont, Pusey, and Tozzer libraries, six additional Harvard College Library (HCL) units have been recognized by Harvard’s Office for Sustainability for Green Leaf Four, the program’s highest level. Most recently, the Fine Arts Library (FAL)…

Wafaie Fawzi will assume the role of chair for the Department of Global Health and Population on September 1. Fawzi succeeds David Bloom, the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at HSPH, who served for 10 years. Bloom will continue as a faculty member in the Department, pursuing his research and global collaborations…

On August 29-30, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) will host a conference in celebration of computer scientist Michael Rabin’s 80th birthday. Speakers will include Yonatan Aumann, Michael Ben-Or, Richard Karp, Dick Lipton, Silvio Micali, Michael Mitzenmacher, David Parkes, Tal Rabin, Ron Rivest, Dana Scott, Madhu Sudan, Salil Vadhan, Moshe Vardi, and…

Several months after “The Social Network” pushed Facebook’s Harvard origins into the national spotlight, Harvard President Drew Faust visited the company’s headquarters in California to discuss how social networking could and should shape the future of higher education. Faust spoke at Facebook’s Palo Alto campus on June 16 at an event hosted by Elliot Schrage…

The Harvard University Archives has launched an online guide to the 17th- and 18th-century records of the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. “Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries” provides an online key to locating thousands of items — diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, legal documents, University records, drawings, maps, student notebooks,…

Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles retired at the end of June after 11 years on the job. During his tenure, he found new ways to strengthen the Nieman Fellowship program and expand the foundation’s critical role in discussions about the future of serious journalism. At a time when the profession was going through a period…

For students and scholars studying early American literature, Anne Bradstreet, is a hugely important figure, considered by many to be the first American poet, and the first woman to publish a book in America. Following the digitization of the only substantial surviving Bradstreet manuscript, scholars around the world will now have the opportunity to study…

The earthquake of January 12, 2010 turned the already critical shortage of housing in Haiti into a brutal crisis. A year and a half later, 80% of the rubble has yet to be cleared, and an estimated 680,000 residents still live in tent camps. Because of this precarious situation, political leaders are pushing hard for…

Members of the National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences gathered at the American Academy’s facility in Cambridge, Mass., on April 14, 2011 for a symposium on “Privacy, Autonomy, and Personal Genetic Information in the Digital Age,” organized by Cherry A. Murray, dean of the Harvard School of…

Two Latin American journalists will receive Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University to help them discover new ways to inform and engage their communities and foster a free press in their own countries, thanks to a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. The funding expands…

The Arab Summer follows the Arab Spring: Join us for this Harvard summer lecture series, starting on July 13. The Middle East and Islam Summer Series is a collaboration of the Middle East Initiative, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies Outreach Center, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program.   This summer, there…

Tracing the cultural, political and demographic roots of audience disengagement and mistrust of the media, Bob Calo examines the role of journalists in a new paper, Disengaged: Elite Media in a Vernacular Nation. Calo researched and wrote the paper while a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard…

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School has announced the 2011–2012 Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows. Supported by a generous gift from the Stanton Foundation, the  three fellows will spend a year in residence at the Belfer Center where they will conduct research under the auspices of the center’s International Security…

The global economy last year spent an estimated $300 billion on newly diagnosed cancer cases, $400 billion on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and billions more on diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and other noncommunicable diseases that are increasing in the developing world. The increase is thought to be related to rising risk factors, such…

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and University of California, San Francisco, researchers suggests that men with prostate cancer who smoke increase their risk of prostate cancer recurrence and of dying from the disease. A link also was found between smoking at the time of prostate cancer diagnosis and aggressive prostate…

Watching television is the most common daily activity apart from work and sleep in many parts of the world, but it is time for people to change their viewing habits. According to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers, prolonged TV viewing was associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes,…

A group of physicians and patient safety experts, including HSPH’s Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management, have written a report that calls for shorter shifts and increased supervision for resident physicians. Starting July 1, new rules will limit first-year residents to shifts of no longer than…

Kamiar Alaei, who received a master of science degree from HSPH in 2007, thanked David Bloom, chair, Department of Global Health and Population at HSPH, and the Physicians for Human Rights organization for working for his freedom from an Iranian prison, a Boston Globe June 17, 2011, article reports. Alaei’s first public remarks since gaining…

By applying a coating to individual silicon nanowires, researchers at Harvard and Berkeley have significantly improved the materials’ efficiency and sensitivity. The findings, published in the May 20, 2011, issue of Nano Letters, suggest that the coated wires hold promise for photodetectors and energy harvesting technologies like solar cells. Due to a large surface-to-volume ratio,…

A new professional development grant named in honor of Jan Merrill-Oldham has recently been approved by the Association of Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the American Library Association (ALA) and will be awarded in 2012. For more than 30 years, Merrill-Oldham has been a recognized leader in the…

Harvard University Hospitality & Dining Services’ (HUHDS) chefs took first place and prestigious American Culinary Federation (ACF) gold medals at the 17th Annual Chef Culinary Conference in Amherst, Mass., on June 17. The Team Mystery Basket competition is the only ACF-sanctioned event of its kind in the United States. HUHDS’ four-person team of Martin Breslin,…

Social media might prove critical in the electoral success of women political candidates, but is a “mixed blessing,” according to a new discussion paper, Digital Divas: Women, Politics and the Social Network, by Alexis Gelber, a longtime journalist formerly based at Newsweek. Gelber conducted her research during her time as a Goldsmith Fellow at the…

Beginning in fall 2011, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) will offer a secondary field in computational science and engineering (CSE) to graduate students across the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). An exciting and rapidly evolving field, CSE exploits the power of computation as an approach to major challenges…

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has named Harvard Professors Joanna Aizenberg, Leah Price, and Robert Sampson as faculty program directors of Academic Ventures. Together, these distinguished faculty members will lead new, multidisciplinary collaborations with faculty throughout the University and develop innovative programming across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences that…