It turns out that halofuginone (HF) triggers a stress-response pathway that blocks the development of a harmful class of immune cells, called Th17 cells, which have been implicated in many autoimmune disorders.

“HF prevents the autoimmune response without dampening immunity altogether,” said Malcolm Whitman, a professor of developmental biology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine and senior author on the new study. “This compound could inspire novel therapeutic approaches to a variety of autoimmune disorders.”

“This study is an exciting example of how solving the molecular mechanism of traditional herbal medicine can lead both to new insights into physiological regulation and to novel approaches to the treatment of disease,” said Tracy Keller, an instructor in Whitman’s lab and the first author on the paper.

This study, which involved an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and elsewhere, will be published online Feb. 12 in Nature Chemical Biology.

Prior research had shown that HF reduced scarring in tissue, scleroderma (a tightening of the skin), multiple sclerosis, scar formation, and even cancer progression. “We thought HF must work on a signaling pathway that had many downstream effects,” said Keller.

In 2009, Keller and colleagues reported that HF protects against harmful Th17 immune cells without affecting other beneficial immune cells. Recognized only since 2006, Th17 cells are “bad actors,” implicated in many autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. The researchers found that minute doses of HF reduced multiple sclerosis in a mouse model. As such, it was one of a new arsenal of drugs that selectively inhibits autoimmune pathology without suppressing the immune system globally. Further analysis showed that HF was somehow turning on genes involved in a newly discovered pathway called the amino acid response pathway, or AAR.

Scientists have only recently appreciated the role of the nutrient sensing-AAR pathway in immune regulation and metabolic signaling. There is also evidence that it extends life span and delays age-related inflammatory diseases in animal studies on caloric restriction. A conservationist of sorts, AAR lets cells know when they need to preserve resources. For example, when a cell senses a limited supply of amino acids for building proteins, AAR will block signals that promote inflammation because inflamed tissues require lots of protein.

“Think about how during a power outage we conserve what little juice we have left on our devices, foregoing chats in favor of emergency calls,” said Whitman. “Cells use similar logic.”

For the current study, the researchers investigated how HF activates the AAR pathway, looking at the most basic process that cells use to translate a gene’s DNA code into the amino acid chain that makes up a protein.

The researchers were able to home in on a single amino acid, called proline, and discovered that HF targeted and inhibited a particular enzyme (tRNA synthetase EPRS) responsible for incorporating proline into proteins that normally contain it. When this occurred, the AAR response kicked in and produced the therapeutic effects of HF treatment.

Providing supplemental proline reversed the effects of HF on Th17 cell differentiation, while adding back other amino acids did not, establishing the specificity of HF for proline incorporation. Added proline also reversed other therapeutic effects of HF, inhibiting its effectiveness against the malaria parasite as well as certain cellular processes linked to tissue scarring. Again, supplementation with other amino acids had no such effect. Such mounting evidence clearly demonstrated that HF acts specifically to restrict proline.

The researchers think that HF treatment mimics cellular proline deprivation, which activates the AAR response and subsequently impacts immune regulation. Researchers do not yet fully understand the role that amino acid limitation plays in disease response or why restricting proline inhibits Th17 cell production.

Nevertheless, “[the] AAR pathway is clearly an interesting drug target, and halofuginone, in addition to its potential therapeutic uses, is a powerful tool for studying the AAR pathway,” said Whitman.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and a Harvard Technology Accelerator Award.

CEO was established by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to design, implement, and evaluate unique initiatives that combat urban poverty among New York City’s low-income workers, at-risk youth, and families with children. Over the past five years, CEO has collaborated with 28 city agencies to launch and scale up more than 50 programs and policy initiatives in the areas of asset development, employment and training, and education.

“Not only is the Center for Economic Opportunity innovative, it demonstrates a sea change in how a city can unite the disparate interests of previously siloed agencies, funders, providers, and businesses to tackle poverty, one of our nation’s major growing challenges,” said Anthony Saich, director of the Ash Center. “In honoring CEO’s efforts as an Innovations in American Government Award winner, it is our hope that jurisdictions across the country can benefit from best practices in financial literacy, education, and employment training to move the working poor up the economic ladder.”

CEO’s commitment to reducing poverty expands to key policy efforts: as a result of CEO’s work, New York City was the first jurisdiction in the country to introduce an alternative to the much-criticized federal poverty measure. The new measure of poverty for New York City is based on recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences. Informed by CEO’s work, the U.S. Census Bureau released its first report on a new Supplemental Poverty Measure for the nation in 2011.

“Time and again New York City eagerly tries bold ideas even at the risk of failure — and that is precisely why our programs are so successful,” said Bloomberg. “Not only are our results improving the lives of New Yorkers, but as the award from Harvard shows, we are a leading model for the nation in the charge to find solutions to deeply entrenched challenges.”

Poverty in the Big Apple
The Center for Economic Opportunity was established by Bloomberg in 2006, allowing the city to design and test effective programs before and during the economic downturn. According to CEO’s most recent metrics, 19.9 percent, or 1.6 million, of the city’s 8.2 million residents are classified as poor. Employers are increasingly making a high school diploma a prerequisite for employment, yet 18 percent of New Yorkers have earned less than a high school diploma and 23 percent have only attained a high school diploma. The center’s evidence-based literacy, GED, and other employment and training programs offer important opportunities to the city’s low-income workers and job-seekers.

“Poverty is one of the great challenges of our time, and as someone who has spent a great deal of time working on the issues of poverty and social policy, I’m particularly pleased that the Center for Economic Opportunity was selected as our Innovations in American Government Award winner,” said David Ellwood, dean of Harvard Kennedy School. “The award honors the center’s efforts to support the working poor at key transition points — starting school, entering the workforce, and having a family.”

The Innovations in American Government Awards program was created by the Ford Foundation in 1985 in response to widespread pessimism and distrust in government’s effectiveness. Since its inception, nearly 500 government innovations across all jurisdiction levels have been recognized and have collectively received more than $20 million in grants to support dissemination efforts. Applications are now being accepted for the 2012 Innovations in American Government Award. Government applicants are encouraged to apply here by March 1.

To read the full release.

The pedestrians moving through it are not ordinary gallery-goers either. These bustling students, brisk professors, and harried lab technicians are usually in a hurry.

But the gallery’s latest show — “Phantom Limbs and Nostalgic Technologies,” up through April 9 — relays a longtime artistic plea: Slow down. Look. Imagine.

Imagine, for instance, the ways that art and science are alike. “A lot of what happens in a lab is about trial and error, and repeatedly trying and not seeing results,” the same as in an artist’s studio, said exhibitor Deb Todd Wheeler. “Persevering in the face of failure — sometimes that’s when the most beautiful things come to you.”

She remembered delivering an artist talk at the Medical School a couple of years ago. “It was about the beauty of failure,” said Wheeler, a media artist, sculptor, and inventor who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and whose work is on display at the Yale School of Medicine. “Isn’t that what every theory is about? Every hypothesis is laced with the terror of failure.”

Art and science are often a matter of “risk-taking, in a slow, methodical way,” she said. “A lot of what happens in an artist’s studio is a labor not unlike medical research, except that the risks or consequences are much lower. No one is going to die.”

Art and science do often have similar methodologies, said gallery curator Tania Rodriguez, a project coordinator with HMS human resources: Start with a question, roll out a lot of ways to answer it, and maybe get surprised in the end.

Many medical school professors “talk about art,” she added, as a way to improve powers of observation, diagnostic skills, and communication skills.

“Artistic invention and scientific invention have a lot in common,” agreed exhibitor and Harvard Professor Svetlana Boym, who a year ago gave the Transit Gallery its name. “Scientists and artists work with error. [Both] have to be prepared for the chance encounter.” What follows? “Maybe invention,” she said. (Boym, an experimental photographer, is Harvard’s Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and a professor of comparative literature.)

Svetlana Boym: “Artistic invention and scientific invention have a lot in common."

The show includes 11 photographs from her “Phantom Limbs” series, a project that started last spring with offhand pictures of reflections, swirls, dried branches, and other debris. “When I came home, I discovered a face made of skywater, litter, and light,” Boym wrote for the exhibit. Afterward came regular “pilgrimages” to a river, in search of “nature’s drawings,” she said while hanging the show. It’s a matter of probability and replicates scientific effort, said Boym. “It was very patient and difficult work. It would take hundreds of pictures to find a face.”

At the other end of the gallery space, images by Boym and Wheeler appear on opposite walls. Wheeler offers passersby a witty, 4-minute video called “Blow Me Up, Blow Me Over” (2011, with cinematography by Kevin Sweet). It’s about those “moments of concentrated effort,” frustration, and exhaustion that both art and science share, she said. A woman (performer Stacy Peterson) dons a dress of welded polyethylene bags, then attempts to inflate it with a foot pump. “It takes forever,” said Wheeler, and “she collapses from the effort.”

Arrayed beyond are stills from the video, in small black frames that Wheeler said “co-habitat” with the gallery’s checkerboard black-and-white floors. It’s a challenging space to hang art, she said. “That’s why I chose an animated sequence. If you can’t stay for the video, you get the feel of it as you’re walking by.” (The video soundtrack, by the way, is the sound of stomping feet.)

Boym’s art acknowledges corridor gallery space too. At one end is a video of her river project, showing the “flow” of her process. At the other end, opposite Wheeler’s work, are Boym’s haunting photographs of fleeting urban landscapes, some reprised from previous Harvard shows. They share a common theme: transit. Each title in one series begins with the same first word, “leaving,” and depicts departures from her native St. Petersburg, Manhattan, Sarajevo, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and Miami.

“The river [project] is about the same kind of movement,” said Boym, acknowledging Transit Gallery’s fast-moving audience. “It’s about flow and passage. But I still hope to slow people down.”

Co-exhibitors Svetlana Boym and Deb Todd Wheeler will discuss their work and attend a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. on Feb. 15 in Room 563 of Harvard Medical School’s Warren Alpert Building, 200 Longwood Ave., Boston.

Fein has held positions in the Department of Justice and has served as research director for Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran and on the American Bar Association’s Committee on Presidential Signing Statements.

During the talk, which was called “America’s Lawless Empire: The Constitutional Crimes of Bush and Obama,” Fein gave examples of what he called constitutional crimes perpetrated under the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, such as detaining enemy combatants indefinitely, diverting funds authorized for fighting terrorism to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and using predator drones against persons never formally charged with crimes.

Nader, a consumer advocate, author, attorney, and five-time candidate for president, said the government and the American people have rationalized illegality because the country has gotten used to the military-industrial complex and the corporate state under which it has been operating for more than half a century.

He also argued that there are many national security threats on American soil that, because they don’t stem from foreign terrorists, are ignored by the government. Thousands of Americans die each year because of workplace accidents, preventable pollution, and lack of access to health insurance, he said, all under the apparent protection of government agencies. He said that the money spent on the war on terror should be diverted to child health care, advancement of education opportunities, public works, and environmental protection.

“I want to underscore that it is not an option in a democracy to be a spectator to politics, because it’s a collective endeavor,” Bruce Fein said. “We have a moral obligation to use our eyes and ears to check government abuses because, even if they don’t affect you, they could affect your neighbor.”

“The 300,000 Americans who die from preventable causes should reside under the definition of national security, but they aren’t the priority of any major party. Obama is more concerned with terrorists overseas than with the preventable deaths of these people directly under his authority and responsibility,” Nader said.

Both men took issue with the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets the budget and policies of the Department of Defense and has expanded the power of the government to fight the war on terror. The act permits, among other practices, the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without trial. Fein encouraged those in attendance to contact their members of Congress about repealing it.

“I want to underscore that it is not an option in a democracy to be a spectator to politics, because it’s a collective endeavor,” Fein said. “We have a moral obligation to use our eyes and ears to check government abuses because, even if they don’t affect you, they could affect your neighbor.

Lawyers in particular have a duty to be more than spectators, Nader concluded. Rather than profiting from conflict, he said they should work to prevent conflict and act with moral urgency to demand answers and transparency from the government, particularly when it is involved in acts of war.

HLS Forum is a nonpartisan student organization dedicated to bringing open discussion of a range of legal, political, and social issues to the Law School. It was founded after World War II by 30 returning soldiers as a memorial to their fellow students who died in the conflict. The Harvard Law Record, published since 1946, is the oldest law school-affiliated newspaper in the nation.

The success resulted from a partnership between the city and Harvard, since the University holds the ground lease for the building, and the agreement was the first implementation of the state’s new preservation statute, Chapter 40 T.

“The accomplishment of preserving affordable units in the heart of Harvard Square is such a tribute to the commitment of the Cambridge City Council,” said Bob Healy, city manager, who is also the managing trustee of the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust and has worked to strengthen affordable housing during his 30 years with the city. “It’s also important to remember all that Harvard has done in partnership with the city of Cambridge in the area of affordable housing.”

“This is what it means to preserve homes, and it’s not just preserving where people sleep at night, but how they live their lives,” said Marjorie Decker, the Cambridge city counselor who received word last spring that the apartments were in jeopardy. The officials had gathered for the celebration in a crowded room at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Last April, residents of Chapman Arms, which is also known as Craigie Arms, grew concerned when their apartment building of 25 affordable units was put up for sale. With affordability restrictions on the units scheduled to expire in 2016, the units were an attractive investment for buyers interested in converting them to market-rate housing.

Cambridge officials, residents, Harvard, affordable-housing advocates, developers, funders, and the state all participated in solving the problem.

Working together, the city, Harvard, and the nonprofit Homeowner’s Rehab Inc. (HRI) were able to orchestrate HRI’s purchase of the building to ensure affordability of the 25 units for a minimum of 50 years. Harvard amended and extended its ground lease on the property in a manner that allowed HRI to secure the necessary financing from the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust and the Community Economic Development Assistance Corporation (CEDAC). HRI purchased the building in a preservation transaction that was finalized on Dec. 19.

Attending the ceremony were Cambridge City Manager Robert W. Healy (from left), Harvard Vice President for Campus Services Lisa Hogarty, Cambridge City Councilor Marjorie Decker, Undersecretary of the DHCD Aaron Gornstein, Executive Director of HRI Peter Daly, and Executive Director of CEDAC Roger Herzog.

Chapman Arms was the first preservation acquisition to utilize Chapter 40T, the state’s new innovative expiring-use law that was pushed through by housing advocates and elected officials, including Rep. Kevin Honan of Allston-Brighton and longtime Rep. Alice Wolf of Cambridge, who spearheaded passing the legislation.

Healy noted Harvard’s long history of supporting affordable housing in Cambridge, from the sale in the 1990s of 100 units to the city for the below-market rate of $32,000 each, to the creation of the 20/20/2000 program, a $20 million, 20-year, low-interest, revolving loan program that has helped to create 465 affordable units in Cambridge. He also acknowledged Harvard’s involvement in the effort, as holder of the ground lease on the property, which allowed the deal to come together.

“It’s always nice to thank your host, but they deserve it,” said Healy. “They really have been a key player in the support of affordable housing in Cambridge for a very long time.”

Lisa Hogarty, Harvard’s vice president for campus services, lauded the town-gown partnership, saying, “The city of Cambridge and Harvard have enjoyed a long and successful track record of working together to address the quality of life in the city. By any measure, Chapman Arms is an affordable-housing success story.”

For Chapman Arms resident Linda Jordon, the success story is personal, since “This means 25 people will have a home.”

The student-organized event that aims “to bring big ideas back to the center,” according to co-founder Peter Davis ’12, took on the trappings of permanence with T-shirt sales, live-streaming online, a big-screen Tweet display, and on-stage interludes by The Nostalgics, a student band. Although students were not queued up in the cold like last year, thanks to a better ticketing process, members of the Harvard University Band played outside Sanders Theatre before the show, lending a festive air.

The short-course format harks to the example of the TED talks, the online sensation created 28 years ago by a nonprofit to foster exchange of the latest thinking on technology, engineering, and design by cutting-edge thinkers.

“We genetically modify foods. Why not stimulate muscle cells and inhibit fat stem cells and brain stem cells?” asked Douglas A. Melton, a leading light in stem cell research.

While many of the eight faculty speakers in the third “Harvard Thinks Big” prodded the student audience to think deeply about how to solve major national and global issues, Kaia Stern, a lecturer in ethics at Harvard Divinity School, implored them to “act big.”

She urged students to think of the one in 31 Americans behind bars or on parole or probation, according to a Pew Center study, and to tackle the accelerating rate of imprisonment in the United States, which she said has a higher incarceration rate than Russia, Iran, Iraq, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico combined.

Stern, who also is affiliated with the African and African American Studies Department and teaches sociology to inmates at the Norfolk and Framingham state prisons, said the surge in mass imprisonment in America is everyone’s problem.

“For as long as we tolerate poverty and live in fear, Americans are complicit in the cycle of crime,” she said.

Douglas A. Melton, a leading light in stem cell research, urged the audience to consider a different context for what it means to be human. He offered a clear, concise explanation of stem cells and how they are important because they can self-renew, make exact copies of themselves, and specialize.

Melton, who is co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, was inspired decades ago to focus on stem cell research for the pancreas following the diagnosis of two children with type I diabetes. He said the goal is to find the switch that inhibits stem cell growth. He showed a slide of a heavily muscled bull that had just kept growing muscle because the inhibitors to muscle cell growth had been turned off.

Medical Sociology Professor Nicholas Christakis’ research has been the topic of two TED talks and earned him a place as one of the most influential thinkers in Time 100.

Melton proposed using modern recombinant DNA biology — which is being applied to crops to make them disease- and insect-resistant — to grow foods that stimulate the growth of desirable stem cells.

“We genetically modify foods. Why not stimulate muscle cells and inhibit fat stem cells and brain stem cells?”

Evolutionary Biology Professor Daniel Lieberman zeroed in on the problem at the core of many diseases: runaway obesity. By 2015, he said, there will be 3 billion obese adults, largely because we have evolved over a relatively short period of industrialization to crave sugar, fat, and salt.

“The message of Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ program is drowned out by the $2 billion spent to market unhealthy food to children,” he said.

Lieberman, who chairs the Human Evolutionary Biology Department, said the cascading effects on human health and medical costs are so catastrophic that government should require exercise just as it mandates vaccinations and other public health measures.

The trend has been negative even at Harvard, which had a physical education requirement of four hours a week from 1920 to 1970.

“Instead of thinking big, maybe we should think small and require physical education again,” Lieberman said to hearty applause.

Donhee Ham, Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, showed how symmetry is as integral to the classical music of Chopin and Bach as it is to engineering feats.

Medical Sociology Professor Nicholas Christakis told the Web-savvy students that actually social networks have been vibrant and important to human happiness for thousands of years. Christakis’ research has been the topic of two TED talks and earned him a place as one of the most influential thinkers in Time 100. He talked about how happiness has been mapped as something that travels among associates in a network.

“It is the ties between people that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts,” said Christakis.

In addition, the popular Donhee Ham, Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, showed how symmetry is as integral to the classical music of Chopin and Bach as it is to engineering feats. Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt described how Shakespeare built audiences and changed societal thought as he introduced new words and changed thinking about life and death with each play performance.

History professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore described how the goals of life changed in iterations of the board game of “Life” from the time that Harvard dropout Milton Bradley developed “The Checkered Game of Life” in 1860 to present-day products. And Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Eleanor Duckworth discussed how teaching is best when it’s about “helping people learn rather than telling people what you know.”

Teaching is best when it’s about “helping people learn rather than telling people what you know," Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Eleanor Duckworth told the audience.

The island is Midway, near one of World War II’s most important naval battles and now a quiet backwater where seabirds far outnumber the tiny human population. But Midway’s location near the center of the Pacific Ocean makes the nearby Great Pacific Garbage Patch accessible to the island’s seabirds scouring the ocean surface for food.

The plight of Midway’s birds took center stage Thursday night during a “Trash Talk” in the Geological Lecture Hall, sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and co-sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Presented by Max Liboiron, regional co-director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and a graduate student at New York University, the talk was titled “Terrible and Charismatic Waste: A Close Reading of Ocean Plastics.”

Liboiron provided an overview of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, describing everything from the computer modeling that shows how ocean currents concentrate floating plastics in the middle of the great gyres that stir the seas to the difficulty that scientists have had getting reliable measurements of how much is out there.

The heart of the problem, Liboiron said, is that the oceans are downstream from literally everywhere, so plastic debris ranging from discarded water bottles to stray supermarket bags washes into streams, flows down rivers, and eventually to the sea. There it joins oceanic waste, such as enormous “ghost nets” abandoned by fishermen. And it all floats with the currents.

Because plastic is stable and long-lived, trash made from it that flowed into the ocean decades ago is still there, Liboiron said, swelled by the steadily accumulating streams of the materials. Scientists are concerned about the effects of the accumulating trash, but Liboiron said there remain questions about the quantity and fate of plastics in the ocean.

Max Liboiron visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History and noted that it was in the early 1960s when an elastic band was found inside a puffin in England. The first recorded instance of plastic pollution, according to Liboiron.

While the images of dead birds, abandoned fishing nets, and inlets coated with floating bottles provoke a visceral reaction, Liboiron said scientists have had difficulty getting baseline measures of ocean plastics on which to evaluate changes year to year. Trawls performed in different years regularly turn up plastic, even in remote oceanic stretches, but the amount collected varies widely from year to year. Even the effect of ingested plastic on seabirds is debatable, with one study indicating that the plastic itself doesn’t harm the birds, though a belly full of plastic can leave little room for food, Liboiron said.

While the idea of ocean currents concentrating plastics may conjure up images of large, mid-ocean accumulations of floating garbage, the reality is more akin to a “soup” than an island, Liboiron said. Plastics of various sizes are scattered throughout the water column, and some is even co-opted by marine life as habitat, as illustrated by the image of a reef fish living in floating plastic piping far from the nearest reef.

While the precise extent of the problem remains elusive, there’s every indication that we now live on a “plastic planet,” Liboiron said, and that we need to consider how to manage the problem rather than envision a return to pre-plastic days.

Plastic can float for centuries. It doesn’t biodegrade into component materials, but can be broken down mechanically into tiny bits of plastic. It can act to magnify chemical pollution in the seas, since it attracts some types of pollutants, which are passed on to creatures that ingest it. One estimate is that there’s more plastic floating in the oceans today than plankton, the tiny drifting plants and animals that form the base of the ocean’s food web.

Though consumers may want to help, plastic recycling is hampered by the many different kinds of plastics in use today, Liboiron said. That means the problem is largely one that is industrial, fed by debris from transfer stations and the use of long-lived plastics on food and other items that by their very nature are short-lived and disposable. One solution, Liboiron said, would be to eliminate the use of plastics for disposable products, while retaining them for longer-lived household items. Another solution, already in effect in Germany, would be to make companies responsible for their products throughout the products’ life cycles, from production to disposal.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

Earlier this week, President Faust wrote to you about the singular importance of Harvard’s libraries and why changes are essential to ensure that they continue to set the standard for academic libraries worldwide. Today, I write to share how a new organizational design and strategic direction, recently recommended by the Library Board, will position the Harvard Library to respond to the evolving expectations of the 21^st century scholar.

The new Library organizational design enables Harvard to respond nimbly to the constantly shifting demands of the Information Age. It replaces a fragmented system of 73 libraries spread across the Schools with one that promotes University-wide collaboration. The new Library will harness both the power of a unified Harvard and the distinctive contributions of the Schools, which will retain responsibility for work that requires deep knowledge of research, teaching and learning needs within their respective domains.  These changes will benefit everyone who uses the Harvard Library. A single access policy will make borrowing easier at every library location. Library experts in all subject areas will be available to answer questions and deliver information quickly. Working together, we can leverage Harvard’s buying power, set a high and consistent standard for service delivery and pursue a University-wide collection development strategy that strengthens our holdings.

In pursuing this new strategic direction, we will make better use of the resources we commit to acquisitions and collection management. There also will be changes that affect staff at every level of the library system. The details of many of these changes are being developed, and they will be announced in the coming weeks. It is clear at this point, however, that they will include but not be limited to adjustments in how and where many staff members perform the work that has made the library one of the University’s greatest treasures.

Crews are mobilizing to clear paths between the victims and two medical centers. Which roads should they open first, in order to quickly reach the largest number of victims? How many of those roads can they actually clear each day with the equipment available?

This was the problem posed to two teams of tech-savvy students participating in the IACS Computational Challenge in January. The competition was part of ComputeFest, a two-week program hosted by the recently created Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) within the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

“The amount of debris created by regularly occurring disasters is huge,” said Özlem Ergun, visiting associate professor of applied mathematics at SEAS. In her usual post, Ergun is co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she helps emergency management officials plan their response to disasters.

“The first problem,” she said, “is really to figure out in what order to open the streets so that you create connectivity between the population and the critical infrastructure.”

“The amount of debris created by regularly occurring disasters is huge,” said Özlem Ergun, visiting associate professor of applied mathematics at SEAS. Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS

The Cambridge debris data was generated by Georgia Tech graduate students using the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Hazus software, which visually models the human and environmental impacts of earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods.

In the Computational Challenge scenario, 2,478 disaster victims were distributed unevenly across 443 Cambridge locations served by two hospitals (one large, one small), connected by 604 road segments (blocked by varying amounts of debris), and accessed via a fleet of bulldozers that roughly doubled in size over a nine-day cleanup period. A penalty was imposed to simulate the real-life pressure of time — the chance of people losing their lives if help took too long to arrive.

In short, the number of data points and constraints was huge.

The two teams were asked to write code that would find a decent solution within three hours’ time on the high-performance computing cluster at SEAS.

“It’s very tricky in that there are these simultaneous competing goals,” said Chris Beaumont, a visiting student in astronomy at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “If it was just, ‘Here’s a map of a city and you have to establish the most efficient path to clear the debris to connect everybody,’ that would be pretty easy — that’s a well-known problem. Or if it was just, ‘Clear things as fast as possible,’ that might be easy. But it’s a combination of different factors, which means you may not take the most efficient path. You might dig some kind of awkward path to get to a really important area as quickly as possible.”

For a problem this complex, the teams had to translate every parameter and constraint into the vocabulary of network theory. Hospitals became “source nodes”; population points became “demand nodes.” Roads became “edges,” each with a weight corresponding to the resources required to clear it. Through the lens of computational science, the storm-ravaged city became a vast data set and a question of multi-period network expansion.

“Most of our creativity went into formulating the problem,” reflected Ariana Minot, a first-year graduate student in applied mathematics. “I’ve never tried to solve a problem that wasn’t in the context of the course I’d taken, where there were assumptions about what kind of methods to use, so that was really different.”

Minot and her teammates, Yu Qin and Yifan Wu ’14, knew early on that they would need to devise an algorithm that could see the “big picture.” A poor algorithm might start opening roads in a westward direction to reach a nearby pocket of 20 people, blind to the fact that a group of 100 people were only slightly further away, to the east.

Their final algorithm drew on a concept from biology, imitating the strategy of foraging ants. As the insects explore the environment around the nest, they leave a trail of pheromones that gradually evaporates. The ants follow their neighbors’ familiar scent, so the shortest, most efficient paths become more frequently traveled. As a result, despite the randomness of the ants’ initial explorations, the colony as a whole is able to quickly select the optimal route to the food.

Beaumont and his teammate Blessing Okeke, a teaching fellow in applied mathematics, chose a different approach. They wrote an algorithm that finds a viable (though inefficient) solution quickly and then “perturbs” it with random changes to try to improve it in the remaining time.

“I think we got a good high-level idea of what the problem was pretty quickly,” said Beaumont. “The main problem is that there are so many potential solutions you can try, so you have to be intelligent about the different options you explore.”

They found success with simulated annealing, a technique inspired by metallurgy, in which a metal is repeatedly heated and cooled so that the particles can settle into place and harden. In an algorithmic sense, it’s a way to repeatedly identify slight improvements to a solution.

“It’s a really interesting application of physics, computationally, to a real system,” said Rosalind Reid, executive director of IACS.

The teams, coached by lecturers Mauricio Santillana and Pavlos Protopapas, presented their approaches for feedback from Ergun and members of the IACS advisory board partway through the challenge.

“When you characterized the problem, I think you characterized it correctly as saving lives rather than finding the very best solution,” IACS board member and Oracle software architect Guy Steele ’75 told the first team. “If you’re in a search space where just finding a ‘good enough’ solution is adequate, you can probably find much faster algorithms.”

To win the challenge, he added, “you don’t necessarily have to find the very best answer.”

With a hypothetical population of 2,478 victims, and penalties accruing at the end of each period, the final scores were expected to be somewhere between 5,122 (the estimated best possible solution given unlimited computing power) and approximately 10,000 (clearing roads at random).

Beaumont and Okeke won the challenge by saving the most people in the shortest time, achieving a final score of 6,793.

It was clear, however, that the winners’ excitement had less to do with the iPad prizes and more to do with the challenge experience — just what Protopapas had expected when he conceived of organizing a student challenge during the winter break.

“It gives them an opportunity to get down to doing a hard problem,” said Ergun. “I imagine that’s an empowering thing to do.”

To read more about the IACS Computational Challenge and the winning approach, visit Chris Beaumont’s blog.

“The students and faculty of the Harvard Foundation are honored to present multi-platinum artist John Legend with the 2012 Artist of the Year award,” said S. Allen Counter, director of the Harvard Foundation. “His contributions to music and distinguished history of creativity have been appreciated by people throughout the world, and he is greatly admired for his excellent humanitarian efforts through his Show Me Campaign, an initiative that uses education to break the cycle of poverty.”

Legend launched his career as a session player and vocalist, contributing to best-selling recordings by Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, and Kanye West before recording his own unbroken chain of top 10 albums — “Get Lifted” (2004), “Once Again” (2006), and “Evolver” (2008) — each of them reaching No. 1 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts.

Most recently, Legend and the band The Roots released “Wake Up!” (2010), a compilation of music from the ’60s and ’70s all with an underlying theme of awareness, engagement, and social consciousness, which won two Grammy Awards for best R&B album and best traditional R&B vocal performance.

Throughout his career, Legend has worked to make a difference in the lives of others. He was awarded the 2010 BET Humanitarian of the Year Award, the CARE Humanitarian Award for Global Change in June 2009, and the 2009 Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award from Africare.

“A champion for both social justice and quality education for all, Legend remains a true inspiration through his philanthropy work, and Harvard University is proud to honor his humanitarian efforts both domestically and internationally by awarding him with the Harvard Foundation’s Artist of the Year award,” Counter said.

The Harvard Foundation, Harvard’s center for intercultural arts and sciences initiatives, honors the nation’s most acclaimed artists and scientists each year.  Previous Harvard Foundation awards have been presented to several distinguished artists including Shakira, Quincy Jones, Sharon Stone, Andy Garcia, Will Smith, Matt Damon, Halle Berry, Jackie Chan, Denzel Washington, Salma Hayek, Wyclef Jean, and Herbie Hancock.

For additional information about the Cultural Rhythms Festival, including ticket information, visit its website.

It’s also one that’s almost completely misplaced, said George Lauder, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology.

Experiments conducted in Lauder’s lab and described in the Feb. 9 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology reveal that, while sharks’ sandpaperlike skin does allow the animals to swim faster and more efficiently, the surface of swimsuits such as the Speedo Fastskin II has no effect when it comes to reducing drag as swimmers move through the water.

“In fact, it’s nothing like shark skin at all,” Lauder said of such swimsuit material. “What we have shown conclusively is that the surface properties themselves, which the manufacturer has in the past claimed to be biomimetic, don’t do anything for propulsion.”

That’s not to say that the suits as a whole do nothing to improve performance.

“There are all sorts of effects at work that aren’t due to the surface,” Lauder said. “Swimmers who wear these suits are squeezed into them extremely tightly, so they are very streamlined. They’re so tight they could actually change your circulation and increase the venous return to the body, and they are tailored to make it easier to maintain proper posture even when tired. I’m convinced they work, but it’s not because of the surface.”

By comparison, Lauder said, the research showed that the millions of denticles — tiny, toothlike structures — that make up shark skin have a dramatic effect on how the animals swim by both reducing drag and increasing thrust.

“What we found is that as the shark skin membrane moves, there is a separation of flow. The denticles create a low-pressure zone, called a leading-edge vortex, as the water moves over the skin,” he said. “You can imagine this low-pressure area as sucking you forward. The denticles enhance this leading-edge vortex. So my hypothesis is that these structures that make up shark skin reduce drag, but I also believe them to be thrust-enhancing.”

Importantly, however, the phenomenon was only found when the skin was attached to a flexible membrane. When placed on a rigid structure, no increases in swimming speed were seen.

“In life, sharks are very flexible. Even hammerheads and large ocean sharks are quite flexible,” Lauder said. “If you watch a shark swim, the head does not move very much, so it could be that the denticles on the head are mostly reducing drag, but those on the tail are enhancing thrust. But we don’t know what that balance may be. Ultimately, though, one of the key messages of this paper is that shark skin needs to be studied when they’re moving, which hadn’t been done before.”

Studying how shark’s skin helps them move through the water, however, is no easy proposition, and one that, for obvious reasons, can’t be done using live animals.

To perform the tests, Lauder and his team obtained samples of the skin of mako and porbeagle sharks and tested them alongside two other materials, the high-tech swimsuits and a material that featured tiny grooves, or “riblets,” which has been explored as a way to cut fuel consumption on aircraft and reduce drag on sailboats.

To conduct the tests, each of the materials was mounted on two forms, one a rigid, winglike structure and the other a flexible membrane. Each was then attached to a robotic arm mounted on a low-friction device suspended over a recirculating tank. To measure the speed at which the apparatus “swims,” researchers turned up the flow in the tank until the device returned to its starting point.

Understanding how water flowed over each material, however, was trickier.

To get at the problem, Lauder and his team relied on a technique called particle image velocimetry, which uses a laser to illuminate millions of reflective particles in the water. Using a high-speed camera that records at up to 1,000 frames per second, researchers can observe how the particles move and see where and when vortices form.

“I’ve thought for years that the literature on shark skin needed an upgrade,” Lauder said, explaining his motivation for the research. “Once we got going, I thought it would be fun to look at the Speedo materials, because we don’t have a lot of quantitative information on the effect of surface structure.

“Going forward, we want to try to image the flow as close to the surface as we can reasonably get,” he continued. “The other direction we are exploring is to make an artificial shark skin and then manipulate it — delete every other denticle, make them twice as large, or change the spacing — and see what effects that may have.”

Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation.

“Entrepreneurs are always in search of ideas, and artists have a knack with creativity and original thinking, which entrepreneurs can learn from,” said Mihir Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, who moderated an afternoon panel with Marsalis and professors from Harvard Business School (HBS) at the Harvard Innovation Lab, or i-lab, a new University initiative aimed at fostering innovation and collaboration. The conversation was the first in a series of planned events for the i-lab that will explore the connections of artists as entrepreneurs.

Following his Monday night lecture, the third of six in a two-year presidential series, Marsalis pointed to Duke Ellington, the composer, musician, and big band leader as an example of a true innovator.

Marsalis (center) spoke about the “Artist as Entrepreneur” at the i-lab. Also attending the event were Nancy Koehn (from left), Mukti Khaire, Rohit Deshpande, and Mihir Desai. Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Ellington stuck fast to his mission of creating a fusion of sound based on musical tradition. He surrounded himself with other expert musicians who could help him realize his musical vision, and he worked harder than anyone, making up for a lack of resources by constantly sacrificing for his dream, said Marsalis during the HBS panel.

“He so believed in his music that he would sacrifice whatever he had to sacrifice for that music to be right. And the first thing he sacrificed was time. When everybody else was sleeping, he was up,” perfecting his music, said Marsalis.

Like music, business requires a profound understanding of the subject matter at hand, said the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and confident professionals who know their material and are ready to lead. Marsalis said he examines a spreadsheet the same way he reviews a complicated musical score, by studying every number on the page.

“There’s not a conductor in the world who gets the score of [Igor Stravinsky’s] “The Rite of Spring” and goes, ‘Wow, there are a lot of notes here.’ You don’t sit in front of an orchestra with a score and say, ‘Well, I don’t understand these 20 measures, but we’ll make it through that OK.’ ”

In a story that resonated with the innovators and dreamers in the crowd, Marsalis recalled important advice he received from his father as he prepared to leave home as a teen. Friends and family told him to have something to fall back on if his plans for a musical career didn’t work out. Others cautioned that if he stuck with music he would struggle, like his father, a pianist, who worked hard just to make ends meet.

“My daddy said, ‘Man, the only thing I can tell you is, don’t have nothing to fall back on.’ ”

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (left) was among those who shared the stage with Marsalis during a discussion at the Graduate School of Education. His topic: “Education for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship.” Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Music and the arts can be a guiding force in helping students to develop solid, moral foundations, several Harvard professors agreed during a talk with Marsalis titled “Education for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

During the discussion, Marsalis touched on many of the themes in his 2008 book “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life.” The book discusses how concepts in jazz can be applied to broad life lessons involving integrity, creativity, empathy, and humility.

The trust, collaboration, experience, and communication that unfold on a stage filled with jazz musicians are applicable to the classroom as well, said Marsalis.

“Music forces you to hold two opposite thoughts in your mind, and it forces you to act on both of those things … all the time.” As part of a band, he said, you have to always be aware of what you are playing and what somebody else is playing. That art of listening, he argued, is essential to education.

As a young man, Marsalis played with an ensemble that included many members of Ellington’s band. The experience taught him a lesson in communication and understanding.

“The old men were always cussing us out and saying, ‘you all are playing too loud, too loud, too loud, too loud’ … Being around them forced you to play softer. Then, when you played softer, you could hear what somebody else was playing.”

Holding students to high standards and expecting them to bring ideas, energy, and commitment to their music is another Marsalis hallmark. He challenges young musicians, he said, as a means of getting them to take their craft seriously and bringing out their best.

His message was an important one for educators to remember, said panelist Diane L. Moore, a senior lecturer in religious studies and education at Harvard Divinity School.

“You take them seriously. You expect that they can rise to a standard,” said Moore. “Too often, we don’t involve and invite our students in any context of any classroom to collaborate, to assume they come into the classroom with valuable information that they can share.”

A new art exhibit at Harvard tells a different tale. “Queloides,” a show whose name is the Spanish word for scar, is a counterpoint by Cuban visual artists, many of them persons of color. Its collective intent shows how race and racism — a sort of social scarring — continued in post-revolution Cuba, simmering beneath a cultural facade of social equality and justice.

“Queloides” was shown twice in Havana, first 15 years ago. Its creators grew up in a communist Cuba that was economically diminished by the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Soviet support. “They began to talk about subjects that were unspeakable in Cuban official culture,” said University of Pittsburgh historian Alejandro de la Fuente, a scholar of race and slavery. “In art, you can talk about unspeakable topics.”

More recently, an expanded version of the show, organized and curated by de la Fuente, made the rounds in New York and Pittsburgh. In Cambridge, a stunning (though abbreviated) version is on display through May 30 at the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery, sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

For the opening in late January, de la Fuente joined in a panel discussion on art, race, and Cuba. With him in the institute’s cozy Hiphop Archive were Cuba-born artist Elio Rodriguez and moderator Henry Louis Gates Jr., the institute’s director and Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.

"Queloides" will be at the Rudenstine Gallery through May 30. Du Bois Institute Director Henry Louis Gates Jr. views a piece included in the art exhibit.

A few years ago, de la Fuente was researching the show. He was stung that “Queloides” (pronounced “Keyloids”) got so little attention in the official Cuban press in 1997 and 1999. Even on the Internet, he said, mentions were few and slight. But he thought this was a corrective story that needed to be told, and he called the show’s revival “a history project.”

It is possible to criticize racial disparities in Cuba and still hew to your national identity. “I’m a Cuban and a black artist,” said Rodriguez. “You can’t separate it. … You can’t pull against the way you are.” Yet racism remains a reality in Cuba for the dark-skinned, he said. He described routine police stops that ignored his white-skinned friends, and later a lexicon of jokes and insults that apply to black Cubans.

Then there is sex, a factor in racial fears in Cuba as elsewhere. Rodriguez, whose website is called Macho Enterprise, chooses to be playful about the matter. One series of posterlike paintings portray a black man (looking much like himself) as a sort of superhero. “Macho Forever” (1997) is one; another is “Gone with the Macho” (2007), in which a Rhett Butler figure (again, looking like Rodriguez) is suddenly very black. Other paintings in the series depict black figures as leering cherubs or as a pouncing bull.

At the same time, Rodriguez, who now lives in Spain, does not regard himself or his friends of that era as political artists. “We just wanted to make some art,” he said, and dreaded getting boxed into categories. But the political label was unavoidable in Cuba, said de la Fuente. “‘Queloides’ was a transgression.”

Still, even in repressive Cuba, art has made its place, he added. “Cuban authorities have come to realize a Cuban painting, however good, doesn’t topple the government.”

Censorship is a fact of life for artists in Cuba, said Rodriguez. “You have to know your limits, [but] it’s a game,” he said. Artists would devise one explanation of their work for timid bureaucrats and another for buyers and friends. “It’s not a lie,” said Rodriguez of the practicality of deception. “It’s a different truth.”

The panelists agreed that racial stereotypes and divisions endure worldwide, whether in Spain, said Rodriguez, or in the United States, said de la Fuentes, a professor here for two decades. In Cuba, there is racism, but there is integration in housing, street life, and the workplace.

Years ago, when he moved to the United States from his native Cuba, de la Fuente was struck by “the degree of separation, physical separation” of the races here. “For somebody who came from the Caribbean,” he said, “that looked terribly foreign.”

The roots of hunger, eating, and weight are based in the brain’s complex and rapid-fire neurocircuitry. Over the years, nerve cells containing agouti-related peptide (AgRP) protein and pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) protein have emerged as critical players in feeding behaviors. Located in the hypothalamus, the brain area that controls automatic body functions, AgRP neurons have been shown to drive eating and weight gain while POMC neurons inhibit feeding behaviors, causing satiety and weight loss.

Described in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Neuron, the findings show that during fasting, the AgRP neurons that drive feeding behaviors actually undergo anatomical changes that cause them to become more active, which results in their “learning” to be more responsive to hunger-promoting neural stimuli.

“The role of plasticity has generally not been evaluated in neuronal circuits that control feeding behavior, and with this new discovery we can start to unravel the basic mechanisms underpinning hunger and gain a greater understanding of the factors that influence weight gain and obesity,” explains senior author Bradford Lowell, an investigator in BIDMC’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

Adds BIDMC Chairman of Neurology Clifford Saper, “For most animals, finding enough food to survive is their biggest daily challenge, and so the brain’s increase in feeding drive may be adaptive. But, for humans who are overweight, reducing this drive to the AgRP neurons may prove to be a path to future weight loss therapies.”

Previous work by the Lowell lab and others had demonstrated that when AgRP neurons in mice are artificially switched on, the animals eat voraciously, consuming four times more than control animals. “The ‘switched-on’ animals search in an unrelenting fashion for food, and when given a task to obtain pellets, will work five times harder to get them,” Lowell explains. “Given the important role played by AgRP neurons, we had a great interest in understanding the factors that regulate their activity.”  While much focus had centered on hormones, including leptin, insulin, and ghrelin, the Lowell team hypothesized that other nerve cells might be the mechanisms that were regulating neuronal activity.

Neurons communicate with one another via neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that traverse synapses, the specialized junctions between upstream and downstream neurons. Glutamate is one such excitatory neurotransmitter.

“Studies in other regions of the brain [for example, those controlling learning and reward and addiction behaviors] have demonstrated that glutamate synapses are highly plastic, changing in their strength and sometimes even in their number,” explains Lowell. Shown to exert powerful control over behavior, synaptic plasticity is brought about when glutamate binds to NMDA receptors on downstream neurons.

“When glutamate gets released by upstream neurons and binds to NMDA receptors, calcium enters the downstream neuron. This, in turn, engages signal transduction pathways that cause synaptic plasticity. In other parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, NMDA receptors drive plasticity which serves to encode memories,” Lowell adds.

Led by co-first authors — Tiemin Liu, Dong Kong, Bhavik P. Shah, and Chian Ping Ye — the investigators created and studied mice genetically engineered to lack glutamate-binding NMDA receptors on the AgRP neurons. For the sake of comparison, they also created mice genetically engineered to lack NMDA receptors on POMC neurons.

They found that while mice lacking NMDA receptors on POMC neurons showed no change in feeding behavior, the situation was dramatically different in the mice lacking NMDA receptors on AgRP neurons.  “These mice ate a lot less and were much skinnier than a group of control mice,” explains Lowell. Furthermore, the scientists found that a 24-hour period of fasting — which causes intense hunger in the control mice — was associated with a 67 percent increase in the number of dendritic spines on the AgRP neurons.

“Dendritic spines are tiny structures attached to the neuron’s dendrites, the treelike branches that receive incoming signals from upstream neurons,” explains Lowell. “These structures are the physical site, the subcellular communication hub, where synaptic input from upstream glutamate-releasing neurons is received, typically one synaptic input per spine.”

“I’ve been studying spines for a long time and I’ve never before seen a manipulation that triggered such rapid and robust changes in spine number,” says co-author Bernardo Sabatini, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “Clearly, feeding is plugging in to the most basic mechanisms that control synapse and spine number in these cells. This may be a great system to understand not only feeding behavior, but also to understand the cell biology behind dynamic synapse formation and retraction.”

When the control mice were re-fed — and their hunger alleviated — the number of spines dropped back to normal. (In contrast, fasting had no effect on spine number in the mutant mice lacking NMDA receptors on AgRP neurons.) These dramatic changes in spine number and their tight association with states of hunger and satiety in control mice — and the absence of changes in spine number in mice lacking NMDA receptors on the downstream AgRP neurons — strongly suggests that structural plasticity of excitatory glutamate synapses on AgRP neurons is an important regulator of feeding behavior, says Lowell.

“Obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer,” he adds. “By understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying feeding behaviors, we can work on treatments for a problem that has now become a global epidemic. These findings move us closer to a mechanistic understanding of how various factors controlling hunger might work.”

This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association, as well as support from the Shapiro Predoctoral Fellowship and the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation postdoctoral fellowship programs.

In addition to Lowell, Sabatini, and the paper’s first authors, other co-authors include BIDMC investigators Shuichi Koda and Zongfang Yang and HMS investigators Arpiar Saunders and Jun B. Ding.

The program was launched in December 2011 and received a large number of applications from around the world. Candidates were asked to submit a personal statement detailing their interest in their chosen field and what they hoped to gain from attending the summit.

“My interest in economics revolves around developmental economics, as I believe that the key to fighting poverty in many underdeveloped countries is through investment in human capital and public infrastructure,” said Agrawal. “The Warwick Economics Summit is an amazing opportunity to meet and share ideas with students, professors, and economists from around the world who share a similar vision, and I am looking forward to learning from so many great minds.”

As described in a recent paper in the journal Nature Methods, the research is aimed at answering one of the most fundamental, long-standing questions about how the brain gives rise to behaviors.

“What we have shown is that the larvae really make left- and right-steering decisions based on sensory input,” said Aravinthan Samuel, professor of physics and co-author of the paper. “We now believe we have a complete algorithmic picture of how those decisions are made, based on the ways in which motor activity is regulated by these inputs. We know smells cause the animal to initiate a navigational decision. And once that navigational decision starts, we know how it’s carried out.”

At the heart of the work was an unusual piece of technology, the Linear and Dynamic Gaseous Gradient Apparatus — or LADY GAGA for short — that allowed researchers to precisely control odors in the air.

“This was the most challenging stimulus-control system we’ve ever built,” Samuel said of the device. “It works by pushing air across a plate to create a very slight breeze — approximately one centimeter per second — while a series of switches injects scents into the airflow.”

Using a computer program to control precisely when, where, and how much scent is injected enables the device to produce a perfectly linear gradient of odor across the plate. At one end, Samuel said, the scent is absent, while it is unavoidable at the other. Unlike similar experiments, which typically used a droplet of an odor-producing chemical, the breeze prevents the odor from diffusing throughout the device. As long as it is renewed by the injector, the scent effectively stays put.

“The problem with earlier experiments is that when you put a scent on one side of the plate, you can’t keep it there,” said Marc Gershow, a postdoctoral fellow in physics and designer of the device. “Over time, it will diffuse.”

In addition to LADY GAGA, Samuel and his team relied on another oddly named piece of technology to unlock navigational behavior, the MAGAT analyzer.

Short for Multiple Animal Gait and Trajectory Analyzer, the technology is a software package that uses a high-resolution camera to track dozens of larvae as they move in reaction to stimuli. Once placed on the plate inside LADY GAGA, the analyzer showed that larvae sweep their heads to the left and right to sample the environment, then made a decision on which way to move based on the input they receive.

Using that data, Samuel said, the next step is to understand “how that algorithm is written in the wiring diagram of the brain.”

Doing so will require another device with a celebrity namesake, CoLBeRT — short for Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time — a tracking microscope that allows researchers to track individual larva and stimulate specific neurons using pulses of laser light.

“The nice thing about the larva is that it’s optically transparent,” Samuel said. “It also has a small brain, with less than 10,000 neurons, so we should be able to map all the processing of odor information to the increased or decreased activity of a specific circuit in the brain.

“Once we figure out what that circuit is, we can determine how the patterns of activity in that circuit correlate with observable behavior. Using CoLBeRT, we may also be able to ‘push’ the activation into a neuron, even in the absence of a sensory input, and get the animal to behave as if the input was actually there.”

The larvae may seem relatively simple creatures, but Samuel believes that studying them will ultimately uncover the general principles for how the nervous systems of higher animals work.

“If there are general principles for understanding how an entire nervous system orchestrates itself to do purposeful things, those principles will be ferreted out with simple organisms,” he said. “And if that’s true, maybe we don’t give these little organisms enough credit.”

The researchers found that such belated conversations tend to occur under particularly stressful conditions — when patients have been admitted to a hospital for acute care. And the doctor who shares in the end-of-life care talk is often a hospital physician rather than an oncologist who has treated the patient for much of his or her illness.

Together, these circumstances may deprive patients of the opportunity for extended reflection and deliberation that would have been possible months earlier, when the conversation also could have occurred under less trying and hectic conditions, the authors suggest.

“Previous studies have shown that patients who discuss their end-of-life care preferences with a physician are more likely to choose palliative, comfort-focused care over aggressive measures, and [to] receive hospice or other care consistent with their wishes. But studies haven’t looked at the timing of these discussions, or where and with whom they occur,” says the study’s lead author, Jennifer Mack of Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center. Mack is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

The new study, which involved 2,155 patients with stage IV (highly advanced) lung or colorectal cancer, found that 73 percent of the patients had a conversation about end-of-life care with a physician, according to medical records or an interview with the patient or a companion. Among the nearly 1,000 patients who passed away and whose records document an end-of-life care discussion with a physician, the median time of those discussions was 33 days before death.

Other findings pertain to the location of those discussions and the type of physician involved. Of the more than 1,000 end-of-life care discussions in medical records, 55 percent occurred in the hospital. Oncologists documented end-of-life care talks with only 27 percent of their terminally ill patients in the study.

Data for the study was provided by the Cancer Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium (CanCORS), a multi-region, population- and health system-based study of more than 10,000 patients with lung or colorectal cancer. Researchers interviewed patients at two time points and analyzed their medical records 15 months after diagnosis.

“It’s encouraging to see such a high percentage of patients had end-of-life care conversations with a physician,” Mack says. “There’s a concern, though, that so many of these talks are taking place late in the trajectory of the disease.”

Previous studies had estimated that fewer than 40 percent of patients with advanced cancer had end-of-life care discussions. Mack theorizes that this lower figure may reflect that earlier studies didn’t record end-of-life talks that took place shortly before patients’ death.

Other research has suggested that physicians may delay end-of-life care discussions because of a natural reluctance to broach the subject, or because it conflicts with physicians’ problem-solving, hope-giving image. While such motivations are understandable, Mack says, they may work to patients’ detriment if they postpone the conversations too long.

Mack and her colleagues are planning future studies to examine the quality and content of end-of-life care conversations, and then explore whether having such talks earlier in the course of illness can benefit patients.

The study’s senior author is HMS Professor of Medicine Jane Weeks of Dana-Farber. Co-authors include Angel Cronin and Nathan Taback of Dana-Farber; Haiden Huskamp and Nancy Keating of Harvard Medical School; Jennifer Malin of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Craig Earle of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

The study was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the American Cancer Society, and the National Palliative Care Research Center.

“The difference between famine versus not famine for most Somalis is a distinction without a difference,” said Ken Menkhaus, professor of political science at Davidson College, whose research focuses on Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

Menkhaus said it was profoundly disappointing to be discussing another Somali famine, after he worked in the country during the 1991-92 one. Each famine, he said, has distinct characteristics, and this one unfolded in slow motion over the past couple of years. That’s at least partly because the Somali diaspora sent money home that delayed the worst effects.

Paul Farmer (left) speaks with Caroline Elkins prior to the opening remarks during the “Sound the Horn: Famine in the Horn of Africa” event.

Menkhaus was among four experts on Somalia and famine who spoke at the Radcliffe Gym Monday evening. The event, “Sound the Horn: Famine in the Horn of Africa,” was sponsored by the Committee on African Studies, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard Undergraduate Council.

The event was introduced by Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health. It featured opening remarks by Caroline Elkins, history professor and chair of the Committee on African Studies, and Salmaan Keshavjee, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Program on Infectious Disease and Social Change.

Other speakers included Michael Delaney, director of humanitarian response for Oxfam America, William Masters, chair of the Department of Food and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University, and Robert Paarlberg, adjunct professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a political science professor at Wellesley College.

Elkins said the event was part of a University-wide effort to respond to the Somali disaster. Harvard President Drew Faust sent a message that Elkins read to the audience. Faust said the crisis deserves the world’s attention in an era when it is easier than ever to be informed about any subject, but perhaps harder to be aware of what’s important.

Farmer drew on his experience treating malnourished people in Haiti, where he has worked for decades, and said the human and social context of hunger need as much attention as the patients do. A malnourished child is typically an indication of poverty at home, and aid to families should be part of treating the child, he said. Similarly, broader agricultural interventions and fair trade policies are needed to boost local agricultural economies.

Though famine is often thought of as a natural disaster, Monday’s speakers said that is a false impression. Though Somalia suffered through a severe drought, with today’s instant communications, transport systems can move massive amounts of food. Given today’s global food markets, famine is too often a failure of local government and international response.

“In today’s 21st-century world, just about everything about famine is man-made,” Paarlberg said. “We’re no longer in a world of man against nature.”

Paarlberg’s assertion echoed that of other speakers, who pointed out that several of the most deadly famines in history occurred because of government action or inaction.

“In today’s 21st-century world, just about everything about famine is man-made. We’re no longer in a world of man against nature,” said Robert Paarlberg, adjunct professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Ethiopia, which was also affected by the recent drought, fared much better this time because of reforms implemented after the 2001 one. Likewise, Paarlberg said, northern and central Somalia, regions that fall outside of the influence of the Al-Shabaab militia, also fared better.

There were several man-made features of this famine, which affected more than 10 million people and killed between 50,000 and 100,000, half of them children under age 5.

The largest man-made feature was the role of the Al-Shabaab militia that rules the region and that kept food aid from reaching those in need. But the international community isn’t blameless. As early as November 2010, an international famine early warning system was predicting the failure of rains in the region, but the international community didn’t respond fully until an official famine was declared in July 2011. On top of that, U.S. anti-terrorism laws cut off food aid because Al-Shabaab, listed as a terrorist group, was taking some of it.

Though the United Nations has declared the famine over, that was based on statistical measures, such as the number of people dying each day and the number of children who are malnourished. Though the official famine may be over, both U.N. officials and Monday’s speakers said the crisis continues for the people of Somalia. Almost a third of the population remains dependent on humanitarian assistance, crops growing from recent rains will take months to reach maturity, and herds of cows, goats, and other animals were greatly reduced during the crisis.

Delaney warned that the world will have another chance to get its response right, because the warning signs are pointing to an impending famine in Africa’s Sahel, the arid, continent-spanning transition zone just below the Sahara Desert.

“Meet Me at the Crossroad,” the third of six lectures in his two-year presidential lecture series, “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music,” took the audience in Sanders Theatre on an aural tour of American history. Marsalis was supported in his task by accomplished performers: Doug Wamble on guitar and vocals, Herlin Riley on drums, Houston Person on tenor sax, Lucky Peterson on organ and piano, Reginald Veal on bass, and female vocalist Brianna Thomas.

In a wide-ranging lecture that spanned more than 150 years of American history — and in a loose, at times improvisational, but always seamless performance with his band — Marsalis explored “the mulatto identity of our national music.” In Americans’ willingness to mix genres while simultaneously cultivating distinct regional sounds, he said, they have used music both as a force for racial integration and as a celebration of diversity for centuries.

“We readily accept new styles as a way to enrich our style, our form, and our technique,” Marsalis said. “While other [countries’] traditions may seek purity and perfection of form, we seek cross-pollination as an important step in achieving a more inclusive and complex musical language.”

Music has always been a part of American culture. In 19th-century America, ragtime was a national craze, music was taught in schools, and households had 5 million pianos. After the Industrial Revolution, Marsalis said, a musical culture emerged that incorporated a variety of “root genres,” from jazz and Latin to country western and bluegrass to folk and gospel music.

In the 20th century, those genres were brought together under the dominant aesthetic of the blues, Marsalis said.

Singer Brianna Thomas performed a soulful rendition of a Bessie Smith number.

“The blues came right up from the bowels of the American soul,” he said. “The blues didn’t given a damn what anybody in Europe thought, or anybody else for that matter.”

The blues united all American root styles, he said, and brought together diverse musicians, black and white, under one musical language. “This embracing of the blues issued a deep indictment of racial injustice,” he said. It exposed “the irony of living in a deeply segregated nation in which performers from all regions and classes chose to express [themselves] through an Afro-rooted music.”

Marsalis and his band explored some of those unlikely marriages of genres and regional sounds, playing hits by such greats as Thomas Dorsey (a writer of “dirty” songs who found the Lord and became a gospel legend), Bessie Smith (“a mastress of metaphor … innuendo, and just the lowdown truth”), Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Rosetta Tharpe.

The early 20th century was a golden era of experimentation, Marsalis said, when musicians of all races were surprisingly free to play together and to borrow songs and techniques. Musical genres “were only labeled so that the record companies could sell them,” he said.

After World War II, however, things changed. America became a country of highly educated, wealthier citizens who, thanks to the rise of the suburbs, were more segregated than ever. American music, long a bastion of racial integration and a celebration of regional diversity, lost out to the increasingly popular medium of television, which presented a “white bread” portrait of American life that came to dominate the popular imagination.

Meanwhile, Marsalis recounted, another battle was being waged between big bands and vocalists. In 1942, bands went on strike against the major labels and refused to put out new records; vocalists began releasing their own music. Meanwhile, a 20 percent-wartime tax on ballrooms kept people out of the dance halls where bands ruled.

“Eventually, singers eclipsed band leaders as pop stars,” Marsalis said. “By 1946, the bands were doomed, and by 1950 they were gone.

The end of the war also saw the rise in clout of the American teenager, a demographic to be reckoned with and marketed to. With their disposable income, teenagers helped give rise to genres like shuffle and R&B and rewarded entertainment above artistry. Even today, Marsalis said, America recognizes “absolutely no public distinction between entertainers and musicians.”

Still, the era produced some catchy rock ’n’ roll, as Marsalis’ band proved with a rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” that brought down the house.

Turmoil in the 1960s finally severed Americans from their musical tradition, Marsalis said. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, American schools pushed math and science over music and arts. Young people, caught up in political rebellion, developed their own musical traditions of rock and folk to break from what they saw as a corrupt past.

“Our music, genetically engineered to bring us together, became the principal tool for keeping us apart,” Marsalis said. After the Vietnam War ended, he added, “What remained were generations whose social, political, and musical agendas barely survive beyond satire, beyond commerce, beyond apathy.”

Modern Americans can’t appreciate a musical past that they don’t know existed, Marsalis told the crowd. Indeed, a large part of his mission is to bring the importance of that shared past to life by sparking conversation not just among musicians but with leaders in education, business, and other fields.

The next day, Marsalis was scheduled to appear in a panel discussion on “Educating for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, as well as a discussion of the artist’s role as entrepreneur at the Harvard Innovation Lab.

There are instructive lessons for America’s cultural future that can only be found in “knowing and embracing the root styles, and in mastering the regional and national particulars of our identity as sung by our greatest poets,” Marsalis said.

Marsalis’ lectures inspire deep thinking about how to both celebrate and overcome our differences, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Du Bois Institute and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.

In his work as an educator and a musician, Gates said, Marsalis “shows us how to combine the long list of American differences … and then composes them into the uniquely American symphony that we all are.”

In his work as an educator and a musician, Marsalis “shows us how to combine the long list of American differences … and then composes them into the uniquely American symphony that we all are,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Du Bois Institute.

“It’s a stain on our nation that today one in four American students fails to finish high school on time or drops out … that is absolutely morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable,” Duncan told a crowd Monday at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Longfellow Hall.

In an Askwith Forum talk titled “Fighting the Wrong Education Battles,” he said that too often “well-intentioned advocacy goes awry.” Frequently, decision-makers search for an ideal solution to educational reform instead of collaborating and compromising on “imperfect” but important initiatives that could bring lasting change.

“We shouldn’t be asking, ‘Is this the perfect solution?’ We should be asking, ‘Is this a much better solution? Can it help us challenge the status quo and accelerate student achievement?’”

Stakeholders must consider in- and out-of-school influences as part of that overall solution, said Duncan. While poverty greatly affects a child’s performance, great schools and teachers are the “most effective anti-poverty tool of all.” He suggested creating full-service community schools that can offer educational as well as health and social services to disadvantaged children, and pointed to the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods, an initiative that funds organizations that develop similar, inclusive school models.

Reform also involves developing rigorous assessments and college and career-ready academic standards like those created by the Massachusetts educational system, said Duncan. Boosting student achievement is not an “either/or solution,” he said. “Educators and the broader community should be attacking both in-school and out-of-school causes of low academic achievement.”

For Duncan, the argument over whether teacher evaluations should include measures of student achievement is another “false choice.”

Critics of standardized tests are right to complain that such tests are flawed can’t accurately gauge factors like “classroom management, teamwork, collaboration, and individualized instruction,” said Duncan. He acknowledged that teacher evaluations must never be based solely on test scores and should include principal observations, peer reviews, student work, and surveys.

“Still, the shortcomings of today’s tests,” he said, “doesn’t mean we should simply abandon the use of standardized testing.”

Another important part of education reform involves getting managers and labor leaders to work together to engage in “tough-minded collaboration and step outside of their comfort zones,” Duncan said.

He suggested that No Child Left Behind, the 2001 act that includes educational reforms that critics say place too much emphasis on testing and standardized measures, is “fundamentally broken.” Duncan said that states, districts, neighborhoods, and schools need to be held to rigorous standards, but simultaneously be given room to find their own means of meeting high benchmarks.

“In my mind, it’s tight on goals, being absolutely clear about goals, but give folks a lot more room to hit them.”

“There’s no room for academic blather,” said Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history professor who studies colonial rule in East Africa. In court, she said in a recent lecture, the judge is the “teacher” and the academics — famous for squabbling — have to give up their “sandbox.”

In 2008, Elkins was named the first of three “expert witnesses,” historians who were called upon to provide evidence to the High Court of Justice in London. (She and the others are advisers to the British law firm Leigh Day.) At issue is a coming trial that gives aging Kenyan Mau Mau insurgents and sympathizers the opportunity to prove claims of rape, torture, murder, and other crimes that they allege happened in the waning days of British colonial rule in the East African country.

The Mau Mau led a 1952-1960 rebellion that British officials at the time called “the Emergency.” In that era, 32 white civilians were killed. At least 11,000 — and perhaps as many as 50,000 — black Kenyans died, half of them children. About 80,000 were imprisoned, and up to 1.5 million were displaced and shuttled into what Elkins called a “pipeline” of prisons and forced settlements.

Elkins is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya” (2005). This month, she will send the third installment of her testimony to the court, a 75-page document. The two British historians who recently joined her as expert witnesses, are David Anderson, whose book about Kenya, “Histories of the Hanged,” also appeared in 2005, and young defense studies scholar Huw C. Bennett.

Elkins studies the civil side of the conflict: the Mau Mau era’s camps and prisons. Anderson studies capital cases from a time when due process was suspended and 800 insurgents were sent to the gallows. Bennett studies the role of the British Army in putting down the rebellion, including controversial interrogation and intelligence-gathering methods.

“We each have our own specialties,” said Elkins during a Jan. 25 lecture, the first in a weekly spring colloquium series sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. But all of them are “revisionists” who challenge traditional interpretations of the war, including the usual assumption that British colonial abuses in Kenya were the exception and not the rule.

Collectively, said Elkins during her Thompson Room lecture, their scholarship provides what she called in a recent article an “alchemy of evidence,” a portrait of “systematic violence over time” by colonial authorities against the Mau Mau.

On a screen behind her, she showed a chart of how the punitive British pipeline worked, circa 1954. “I had to reconstruct the logic of the pipeline itself,” she said, a task that took her five years in British and Kenyan archives. “This case rests on historical evidence,” said Elkins. Without it, Mau Mau plaintiffs never would have won the right to trial.

Contact with the courtroom offers a cautionary tale, she said. The intellectual tumult of historical debate in journals and in the press reveals fault lines, and scholars consider a little battering the price of doing business. (Elkins called such paper battles “a nerd-off.”) But the particulars of such scholarly debates will be used in court. If a book review criticized one of the historians on methodology, for instance, that contention becomes grist for a defense lawyer and is open to legal scrutiny. That’s what makes this case novel, said Elkins. “History is on trial.”

Her own use of African oral histories in “Imperial Reckoning” led some reviewers to call the book speculative and lightweight, she said, as if it were “some kind of fictive account of Mau Mau memory.” But if you look at the book carefully, Elkins said, there are 600 footnotes and fewer than 300 citations from oral histories.

At the same time, having to send documents to court gave historians lessons in compression. For her first expert testimony, Elkins said, she boiled down her book into a 100-page document. It contained just the facts, without shading, asides, or opinions. After all, objective reasoning is at the core of the legal system, said Elkins. But there can be a culture clash between the law and humanistic scholarship. In the law, she said, “there is none of the kind of indeterminacy that we like.”

From 2006 to 2009, critics waged a war of opinion over revised histories of the Mau Mau era. But in the end, the collective evidence of the case “is overwhelming,” said Elkins, and points to systematized British abuse of Kenyan civilians. “Like most things in the British Empire, this was very well thought out.”

Last year, more evidence came to light, when 300 boxes of British documents from the Mau Mau era (1,500 files) turned up in a secret repository in a village in Southeast England. It was a rare find. (Elkins estimated that from 1958 to 1963, up to 3.5 tons of documents were destroyed by the British in Kenya.)

The new papers are being digitized and assessed by what Elkins called her “Team Mau Mau” at Harvard, as well as by a team at the University of Oxford. The files reveal fresh evidence of torture and cover-up, and detail more than 450 cases of abuse.

Her role in the civil court case has shown that history can be a “complementary knowledge set” useful in litigation. At the same time, her involvement with the law provided a rare sort of satisfaction. “There’s nothing more satisfying,” said Elkins, “than doing this kind of work and having it matter.”

The annual honor, bestowed on notable buildings built in the past decade, is co-sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects and the city of Boston. The Harvard building was selected from nearly 100 projects and cited by jurors for its contextual, compelling design, its unexpected public spaces, and its strong sense of balance. According to the jurors, “The building continues to surprise and delight even after repeated viewing.”

“We partnered with architect Kyu Sung Woo to create a simple but elegant building suited to its prominent location along the Charles River,” said Lisa Hogarty, vice president of Harvard Campus Services. “Contemporary and highly sustainable, this building also respects the architectural traditions of Harvard and the neighborhood surrounding it. We are honored by this award and delighted to count 10 Akron St. among the most beautiful buildings in Boston.”

This is the 14th time that a Harvard building has been awarded the medal.

Situated along the Charles River at the corner of Memorial Drive, 10 Akron is a LEED Gold-certified property that contains 151 apartments for Harvard graduate students, faculty, and staff, along with common areas to support the Graduate Commons Program, which fosters intellectual collaboration and social interaction among students from various academic disciplines.

From the riverside, the six-story brick block building with glassy bay windows is scaled to Memorial Drive and the waterfront. Along Banks Street, the siding on the low-rise, wood-clad building refers to adjacent three-story, wood-frame houses and complements nearby Peabody Terrace, which was designed by Josep Lluís Sert. The composition of 10 Akron’s two-building elements forms a courtyard that opens toward a new three-quarter-acre public space along the river. The city of Cambridge built the public open space on land that Harvard granted to the city through an easement. Together, the courtyard gesture and the public space establish a contemporary and welcoming gateway. The housing and open space configuration was the result of a comprehensive public process that included many Cambridge officials and neighbors.

The Harvard project was designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, built by BOND, and project-managed by Jones Lang LaSalle. The project also included the construction of 39 affordable housing units (33 for home ownership and six for rental) for Cambridge residents, as well as underground parking. The project completed a multiyear effort by the University to provide housing for half of its graduate student population and had the ancillary benefit of reducing pressure on the local housing market.

Radcliffe’s Alice Longfellow Hall was the first Harvard building to receive the Harleston Parker Medal, in 1934. Other recipients include the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, the Cambridge Public Library, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and the John Hancock Tower.

The inaugural conference was part of the Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching (HILT), a University-wide presidential initiative launched through a $40 million gift from Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, aimed at catalyzing innovation in higher learning.

“What we hope to ask and answer with HILT is how can we fully embrace all the possibilities before us as teachers and learners, how can we make constant discovery and renewal a part of every teacher’s life, and, as we experiment, how can we best evaluate what is successful and then sustain and scale it?” said Harvard President Drew Faust during opening remarks for the conference at the Northwest Science Building.

Other early initiative-supported projects include developing a consortium of staff from across Harvard that will provide instructional and technological support, as well as an infrastructure for capturing and archiving video for teaching and other purposes, in collaboration with Harvard’s Academic Technology Group.

The initiative also has established the 2012-13 Hauser Fund Grants program that issues awards between $5,000 and $50,000 for innovative proposals in teaching and learning. Currently, 255 letters of intent, submitted from faculty, staff, and students at every Harvard School, are being considered for final proposals.

A professor of psychology from Washington University in St. Louis surprised some attendees of a morning session. Less studying and more testing enhances learning, suggested memory expert Roddy Roediger during a discussion on the science of learning. Roediger showed the audience how students who were frequently tested on a subject on the first day of an experiment in his lab performed better on the same tests two days later, compared with those who studied more but had fewer tests on the first day.

“What you really need to practice to be able to retrieve something two days later … [is] retrieving it.”

For Steven Pinker, Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, teaching students to write well is a fundamental charge of a good university. But, he lamented, “we are not succeeding.” To write effectively, an author must remember that he or she likely knows much more about a particular subject than readers do, said Pinker. Placing yourself in the shoes of your audience, he argued, “might be the most important cognitive process in the crafting of clear prose.”

“You should never underestimate the power of trying to do big, collective things as an organization,” said Youngme Moon (second from left), senior associate dean at Harvard Business School. Moon was joined in an afternoon panel by Harvard Provost Alan Garber (far left), Harvard Corporation member Lawrence S. Bacow, and Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

A series of interactive afternoon sessions gave a group of Harvard professors the chance to show their colleagues and contemporaries what goes on in their own classrooms.

Proving that the lecture format remains an effective teaching tool, Tom Kelly delivered a lively talk based on his popular General Education course, “First Nights,” in which he explores the performance premieres of five seminal works through a cultural, musical, and historical lens.

Waving his hands emphatically to the beat of accompanying audio and video clips, Kelly, Harvard’s Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music, carefully deconstructed Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Kelly’s presentation style, which during class often involves running to a piano to play an important chord or passage, offers students a new way of listening, and hopefully fosters in them a love for the subject matter.

I want them to know “how lucky they are to be alive on a planet like this that has music on it,” he said.

Eric Mazur was in his seventh year of teaching when he realized “my students were not learning; they were simple regurgitating back to me what I delivered to them, and then promptly forgetting it a few months later.” Effective teaching requires the assimilation or “sense-making” of that information, he said. And for that, the students themselves hold the key. In his classes, Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, uses his popular and effective peer-instruction method, in which he asks questions of students and then has them try to convince each other of their own reasoning during class.

“It is absolutely essential,” Mazur said, “that we engage them.”

But developing sustainable methods of teaching and learning also requires an infrastructure and a culture of innovation, said Youngme Moon, Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School (HBS), during an afternoon panel that included Harvard Provost Alan Garber. She pointed to the School’s new experiential learning program as an example of innovative pedagogy. In January, 900 HBS students took field trips to a dozen locations around the world as part of the School’s Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development, a new supplement to its traditional curriculum.

“You should never underestimate the power of trying to do big, collective things as an organization,” said Moon, adding, “the transformative nature of the [new HBS program] is palpable.”

The symposium’s attendees ranged from the deans of Harvard Schools and distinguished professors to staff, students, and participants from beyond the Harvard community who were eager to develop and share their thoughts on innovative teaching and learning.

“Getting all these great minds together from all across the University is a great thing,” said Harvard senior Senan Ebrahim, a neurobiology concentrator and former Undergraduate Council president, who helped to create a video for the conference that captured student perspectives on teaching and learning. “The opportunity for these experts to share what they do and explore how it can be applied to different disciplines is amazing.”

Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a longtime proponent of innovative pedagogy and excellence in undergraduate teaching, was impressed by the symposium. “This has been tremendous. … I think the culture is already changing on campus, and this is an example of it,” Smith said.

The conference showed that the University is “on the cutting edge of great change in learning and teaching,” said Rita E. Hauser, who attended the symposium with her husband, Gustave M. Hauser. “Harvard 50 years from now will be very different from Harvard today; it’s inevitable.”

The event also featured a resource fair with representatives from the University’s teaching and learning centers, related interfaculty initiatives, academic technology resources, museums, and libraries.

Over the past several years, Harvard University has been ramping up its involvement in India and South Asia, from the founding of the South Asia Initiative in 2003 to the opening of the Harvard Business School’s India Research Center in 2006 to projects launched by the Harvard School of Public Health, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and other Schools. The University’s understanding of the region’s importance was highlighted by President Drew Faust’s visit last month.

“What we’ve got happening in Egypt right now is a transition, a transition from a dictatorship maybe to another dictatorship … maybe to a democracy,” said Tarek Masoud, assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. “In transitions, they are inherently uncertain and you can’t judge them on a minute-by-minute basis. You really have to take a kind of long view.”

Masoud noted that a year after the revolution in Tahrir Square, Egypt is run by the military. “This is not what the people died in Tahrir Square for,” he said.  Additionally, the economy is worsening, and the country’s recent parliamentary election failed to produce a parliament reflective of the people’s ambitions for a more liberal and pluralistic country. Instead, he noted, the new parliament is dominated by Islamists who include not only the Muslim Brotherhood but the new, more radical and conservative Salafis.

“At the same time, ” Masoud said, “it was a freely elected parliament. This is the first time in Egypt’s modern history that you had a parliament that actually represents the will of the Egyptian people. If we compare where we are now to where we were in the dark days of Hosni Mubarak, “there are real reasons for us to be cautiously optimistic.”

Journalist Mona Eltahawy said that Egyptians finally have a chance to say “What we want, to go out and demonstrate when we want, and to acknowledge that these elections were not great, they were not free and fair, they were a mess. But they were our mess, and the next time around they will be a better mess. That’s our hope.”

Eltahawy condemned the gender-based violence against women that is on the rise at all levels of Egyptian society. It began in 2005, she said, with the government’s systematic campaign of sexually assaulting and intimidating female activists and journalists. “When the regime attacks women and holds no one accountable, it sends out a signal that women are fair game. When the street then attacks women and the police stand by and do nothing, that continues,” she said.

A columnist for the Toronto Star, The Jerusalem Report, and the Politiken, Eltahawy said a recent survey conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights showed that more than 80 percent of Egyptian women face sexual harassment, groping, and unwanted sexual attention. With casts on both arms as a result of an attack she suffered last fall by security forces, an attack that included sexual assault, Eltahawy said this is a problem the Egyptian people must not hide from.

“This is an opportunity in Egypt now to say, ‘Look, women are attacked by the regime, women are attacked by the street, women are attacked.’ There is something about gender-based violence in Egypt that is horrific. We have to look it in the eye and we must speak out about it, not just when it is the regime that is doing it to us, but when it’s our fellow Egyptian men on the civilian level who are doing it to us.”

Charles Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost, an online news company focusing on international news, and of Global Post’s-Open Hands, an initiative that brought together 16 reporting fellows from Egypt and the United States, noted that Egypt’s young journalists are making an important contribution to the country’s revolution.

“What we found are extraordinary young people who [are] part of this heroic movement,” he said. “I came away so hopeful about this generation of journalists.”

The event, co-sponsored by the Middle East Initiative, the Open Hands Initiative, and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was moderated by Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and Newsweek.

Creating new materials from abundant, natural plant sources, today’s biomedical and biochemical engineers are finding clinical uses for new “custom” materials that were not even remotely considered in recent decades.

Both renewable and remarkable, plant-based medical products are on the cutting edge of a field called “sustainable biomaterials,” a topic so intriguing that 23 undergraduates chose to spend an extra week at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to take a course on it during their winter break.

“It was engaging, comprehensive, and demonstrated just how ‘sexy’ science can be,” said Aubrey Walker ’15.

The seminar-style mini-course was led by Sujata Bhatia, assistant director for Undergraduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering, who arrived at SEAS last spring. As an industry scientist at DuPont, Bhatia had been at the forefront of research resulting in clinically relevant products, including plant-based tissue adhesives. She now brings that expertise to guide an agile and modern curriculum at SEAS.

Bhatia, who received a grant from the Harvard President’s January Innovation Fund for Faculty to offer the course, intended it as a “vehicle to really get undergraduates thinking about their paths in engineering, and to give a broader overview than they might get in any single course during the semester.”

“I hope that this will both draw undergraduates into the concentration and give concentrators the tools necessary to begin asking their own questions within the field,” she said.

For Walker, a freshman, the course was an inspiring introduction to the breadth of opportunities available in engineering.

“Through the lens of a bioengineer, I felt myself at the precipice of innovative solutions to some of our generation’s biggest problems,” he said. “I can’t imagine a more concise, intellectually stimulating, or rewarding program. I am very glad to have come back from my long break to gain this experience.”

During the week, the students attended foundational lectures on biomaterials and new methods of drug delivery. They also had the opportunity to survey some of the current research in the field by attending the Bio-Inspired Engineering International Symposium, which was hosted by Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems on Jan. 17.

Brandon Geller and Robyn Tsukayama of the Harvard Office for Sustainability gave a guest lecture on biopolymers, providing students insight into the strides that the University is making to integrate the fruits of bioengineering research into its operations.

In addition to seeing the work of experts in the field, students were able to learn about research that their classmates are undertaking. Seniors in engineering, including Erfan Soliman ’12, led one of the week’s sessions by discussing their thesis research and introducing the groups to the laboratory and design spaces that are available to students at SEAS.

Soliman’s work, which combines agar gel and corn-derived carbon nanotubes into a substrate for neural regeneration, extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of his own concentration, electrical engineering.

In addition to presenting a poster at the Bio-Inspired Engineering Symposium, Soliman was able to connect with other students, across disciplines. He teamed up in the lab with Godwin Abiola ’14, a biomedical engineering student, in January, teaching him about circuit theory in order to measure the electrical conductivity of the agar gels.

The partnership between Soliman and Abiola is typical of a trend of collaboration at SEAS that Bhatia believes is here to stay.

“It’s very powerful, and it helps students appreciate early on the importance of bringing diverse perspectives to a project,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in the interfaces between different disciplines. That’s where all the cool things can happen.”

Those pondering the earliest stirrings of life expect that it will either turn out to be easy to create and a natural outgrowth of the primordial conditions found on planets like Earth: rocky, not too hot, not too cold, with water and other key elements. If that’s the case, the rapid acceleration of discoveries of extrasolar planets would mean there are potentially millions of other worlds that are Earth-like enough for life to arise.

Or, life may be hard to get going, requiring a precise combination of conditions and chemicals that were present on Earth, perhaps fleetingly and only once. If that’s the case, such conditions may be difficult to locate in other places, and we may find ourselves in thin company — or even entirely alone — in the universe.

So far, researchers have run into one knotty problem after another. But Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, and distinguished investigator at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, said Feb. 1 that we shouldn’t interpret the difficulty of the problems so far to mean that life is most likely rare in the universe.

“At this stage in our thinking, there are a lot of gaps in our understanding, places where we have no idea what happened,” Szostak said. But “problems that looked so intractable in retrospect look simple.”

Szostak, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, spoke at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in the kickoff lecture of the season’s “Evolution Matters” series. Szostak gave a packed Geological Lecture Hall an overview of the work of researchers like himself who are seeking to answer life’s most fundamental question: Where did we come from?

Szostak’s research focuses on understanding primitive cells, how they might have been created, and how they might have behaved and divided. Among other findings, Szostak and colleagues have shown that cell-like vesicles are relatively easy to create from fatty acid molecules suspended in water. He has also shown that vesicles divide naturally when passed through a smaller pore, and explored other possible methods of early cell division.

One of the early problems researchers in this field faced was how genetic information in the first cells was transmitted. The way cells work today, Szostak said, is that the information in DNA is taken by RNA and used to create a vast array of proteins, which do much of the body’s work. This DNA-to-RNA-to-protein process feeds back on itself, with proteins playing key roles in creating RNA from DNA. Scientists found such a closed loop difficult to unravel: With no proteins in an early cell, how do you get the DNA’s information out to create RNA and then more proteins?

That changed in the early 1980s, when researchers discovered that RNA, in addition to having the ability to carry genetic information, also can catalyze chemical reactions, something thought to be the domain of proteins. The discovery gave rise to the possibility that early cells held their genetic information not in DNA, but in RNA molecules, as some viruses do today, and that RNA, not proteins, could have played a role in catalyzing the cellular processes. The problem changed from needing three kinds of molecules that interacted in complex ways to needing just one kind.

While that presented a plausible scenario, many details remain problematic. Two of them, it turns out, are solved with a single solution, Szostak said. One issue is that when two RNA molecules are joined to form a double helix, pulling them apart to get at their genetic information is very difficult without using cellular enzymes, which wouldn’t have been present in early cells.

The second problem is that the molecular backbone occurring in RNA that is created through chemical processes like those possible on early Earth is not the same as that manufactured inside cells. When cells make RNA, the molecular backbone bonds with different atoms at specific locations. When RNA is made through primitive chemical processes, there is more sloppiness, with atoms attached in the wrong spot in some cases.

Both seemed intractable problems, Szostak said. But when members of his lab replicated the situation, evolving an RNA molecule through chemical processes, they realized that instead of being a problem, the sloppiness in the backbone was actually a solution. A few misplaced atoms didn’t affect the whole RNA molecule’s structure, and with those atoms out of place, it didn’t bond quite as strongly to another RNA molecule, allowing them to come apart more easily and letting replication proceed, solving the first problem as well.

“Instead of being a fatal problem for RNA, we now think that backbone heterogeneity may be what allowed RNA to emerge as primordial genetic material,” Szostak said. “Our thinking on this problem is just completely inverted.”

The Radcliffe Pitches, Harvard’s oldest female a capella group, serenaded Segel on the steps of the Memorial Church, performing numbers such as “Orange-Colored Sky” and “Peel Me a Grape.” Segel, who sang a number of songs in last year’s film “The Muppets” — including “Man or Muppet,” which is nominated for an Academy Award for Original Song — appeared delighted by the surprise performance. During the final number, the Pitches’ signature song “You’d Be Surprised,” Segel even burst into a spontaneous waltz with soloist Haley Bennett ’13.

“That was amazing!” Segel said at the end of the performance. “You guys sound fantastic; thank you so much.”

When two students approached Segel to ask for a picture, he immediately agreed. “He’s just awesome,” said Alex Almore ’12, who snapped the picture with her phone. “We’re really excited that he’s here — and then we were so close!”

“He seems like such a personable guy, so we didn’t think that he would reject us,” said Sarah Cirone ’14. “He was so nice.”

Segel waved when he saw a woman in the window wearing a handmade field-goal post on top of her headband, in preparation of the upcoming Super Bowl. “That’s not just me, right?” Segel asked, laughing. “You guys see her, too?”

At the John Harvard Statue, Segel interrupted the tour guide to ask if others also saw a woman in the window wearing a handmade field-goal post on top of her headband, in preparation of the upcoming Super Bowl. “That’s not just me, right?” Segel asked, laughing. “You guys see her, too?”

Patriots fan and Harvard employee Elaine Cox, financial and executive assistant, then emerged from Harvard Hall to offer Segel a Harvard knit cap. “We have a Giants fan in our office, and I just wanted to tease her,” Cox said, laughing. “I didn’t get a picture (with Segel), but I did get a hug!”

Shannon Inghram, assistant to the dean, had kept watch to see when Segel arrived at the statue. “He’s adorable,” Ingram said of Segel. “I saw him on ‘Saturday Night Live’ a few weeks back, and loved “The Muppets.’ He’s such a good writer and actor, and it was great to see him on campus.”

Later this evening, the producers of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Jyotika Banga ’13 and Mary Jane Sakellariadis ’13, hosted a celebrity roast for Segel and presented him with his Pudding Pot in Farkas Hall. Also tonight, the Hasty Pudding will open its 164th production, “There Will Be Flood.” The Hasty Pudding Theatricals named Claire Danes its Woman of the Year. She was honored with her Pudding Pot on Jan. 26.

The event marks the official opening of Arts First (April 26-29), Harvard’s annual festival showcasing student and faculty creativity, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The award ceremony, presented by the Office for the Arts at Harvard’s Learning From Performers  Program and the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, will be held at 3 p.m. at Sanders Theatre. In a talk moderated by fellow actor and Harvard alumnus John Lithgow ’67, Jones will discuss his life and career.

Revered for his deadpan portrayals of law enforcement/military officers and other authority figures, Jones has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as best supporting actor for his portrayal of federal marshal Samuel Gerard in the 1993 thriller “The Fugitive.”

Jones’ first film as a director was “The Good Old Boys” in 1995, a made-for-television movie. Recently Jones co-starred with Ben Affleck in the recession drama “The Company Men” and appeared in the film “Captain America: The First Avenger.” His current projects include “Men in Black III,” “Great Hope Springs,” and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” in which he plays Vice President Thaddeus Stevens.

As an upperclassman at Harvard, Jones shared a room in Dunster House with Al Gore. Jones appeared in undergraduate theater productions, notably with John Lithgow in Christopher Fry’s “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” in 1967. Offstage, Jones played offensive tackle on Harvard’s undefeated 1968 varsity football team and was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection. Jones played in the memorable 1968 game in which Harvard made a last-minute 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounts his memory of “the most famous football game in Ivy League history” in the documentary “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.” Jones graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor of arts in English in 1969.

The Harvard Arts Medal honors a distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe graduate or faculty member who has achieved excellence in the arts and has made a contribution through the arts to education or the public good. Previous medal recipients include photographer Susan Meiselas, Ed.M. ’71; visual artist and essayist Catherine Lord ’70; saxophonists/composers Joshua Redman ’91 and Fred Ho ’79; composers John Adams ’69, M.A. ’72, and John Harbison ’60; playwright Christopher Durang ’71; poets John Ashbery ’49 and Maxine Kumin ’41; cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76; film director Mira Nair ’79; conductor and founder of Les Arts Florissants William Christie ’66; stage director Peter Sellars ’80; National Theatre of the Deaf founder David Hays ’52; author John Updike ’54; songwriter/musicians Bonnie Raitt ’72 and Pete Seeger ’40; and actor Jack Lemmon ’47.

Admission is free but tickets are required (limit two per person), available through the Harvard Box Office at Holyoke Center beginning April 17. Some remaining tickets may be available at the door one hour prior to event start time. For more information, call 617.496.2222 (TTY, 617.495.1642).

Clements said that the court’s decision exacerbates two problems that the American political and electoral system had already been facing — the large amount of campaign spending and the growing influence of corporate power on the political process. Clements said that both problems need to be fixed in order to restore democracy but that, rather than addressing these problems, the Citizens United decision instead requires that the American people fundamentally reframe their notion of corporations.

“We need to look at what Citizens United really asks us to do, which is to accept a lot," said Jeff Clements, author of “Corporations Are Not People.”

“We need to look at what Citizens United really asks us to do, which is to accept a lot. The court asks us to pretend that corporations are not massive creations of state, federal, and foreign laws. It asks us to pretend that they’re just like people, that they have voices, and that we’re not allowed to make separate rules for them,” he said.

Although some legal observers regard the decision as simply a bad day on the court, Clements said that Citizens United actually represents the culmination of a steady creation of a corporate rights doctrine that is radical in terms of American jurisprudence. He provided a history of the idea of corporate personhood and corporate speech, which began only in the 1970s under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Lessig added that the system that has resulted is one in which elected officials must spend 30 to 50 percent of their time fundraising, and thus make decisions based not on what is best for their constituents, but on what their super PACS and other major donors want to see.

“We have a corrupt government, yet one that is perfectly legal,” said Lessig. “We’ve allowed a government to evolve in which Congress isn’t dependent on people alone, but is instead increasingly dependent on its funders. As you bend to the green, that corrupts the government.”

As a result, he said, members of Congress develop a sixth sense as to what will raise money, which has led them to bend government away from what the people want government to do and toward what their funders what government to do. To fix the problem, we need to produce a system where the funders and the people are one and the same. The solution, Lessig said, is a multipronged approach that includes a constitutional amendment explicitly stating that corporations are not people, as well as a movement to publicly fund elections and provide Congress with the power to limit independent expenditures.

Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Clements is the co-founder and general counsel of Free Speech For People, which is a national nonpartisan campaign working to restore democracy to the people and to return corporations to their place as economic rather than political entities.

This year’s gift options are a bouquet of 10 daffodils, for $10; bear and a bunch, $25; potted daffodil bulbs, $15; Gift of Hope (a bunch of daffodils delivered to a local hospital), $25; and Bear Hug of Hope (a Daffodil Days teddy bear delivered to a local hospital), $25.

All orders must be placed through a department coordinator via check, money order, or online. For more information.

The Goldsmith Prizes are underwritten by an annual gift from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation. The prizes recognize and encourage journalism that promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government, the making of public policy, or the practice of politics by disclosing excessive secrecy, impropriety and mismanagement, or instances of particularly commendable government performance.

The six finalists for the 2012 Goldsmith Prize:

Brian Ross, Anna Schecter, and the ABC News Investigative Team
ABC News 20/20
“Peace Corps: A Trust Betrayed”

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan, and Chris Hawley
Associated Press
“NYPD Intelligence Division”

Jim Morris, Ronnie Greene, Chris Hamby, and Keith Epstein, Center for Public Integrity; and Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett, and Susanne Reber
National Public Radio
“Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities”

Mark Greenblatt, David Raziq, and Keith Tomshe
KHOU-TV (CBS Houston)
“A Matter of Risk: Radiation, Drinking Water, and Deception”

Danny Hakim and Russell Buettner
The New York Times
“Abused and Used”

Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur
ProPublica (co-published with The Washington Post)
“Presidential Pardons”

Read more about the journalists and their stories.

“Lightfall: Herta & Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art,” the exhibit on display at Gund Hall through March 4, is the story of a new building so unexpected and quirky that one critic called it “a surprise package” delivered to the city in Israel that is dominated otherwise by Brutalist and Bauhaus styles of architecture.

Preston Scott Cohen’s Herta and Paul Amir Building, a dramatically prismatic structure of concrete and glass, rises out of a city arts plaza like the prow of a ship. Three of the five stories are below ground and hidden from the street, making them hard to see until you are very close. But inside it is hard not to see. A spiraling, 87-foot slash of curving light — a top-lit atrium called the “Lightfall” — reaches toward stacked galleries that spiral along a void within hyperbolic parabolas.

Planning for the $55 million wing of the Tel Aviv Art Museum started in 2003; design and development spanned 2005 and 2006; groundbreaking was in 2007; and the wing’s grand opening was last November. The building houses the largest collection of Israeli art in the world.

Cohen, who is a principal of a Cambridge, Mass., architecture firm, is the Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at GSD, and chair of the Department of Architecture. At the exhibit’s late-January opening, he explained the building’s origins, challenges, and statements to a capacity crowd in Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium. Afterward Cohen had a public conversation with former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.

In the beginning, Cohen faced a puzzle: How do you fit five stories of building (200,000 square feet) onto an eccentric, triangle-shaped space whose footprint was less than 50,000 square feet? (He and his team designed the three stories that were below grade but lit them from above, and created a complex geometry of levels along different axes.)

Cohen and his team faced another puzzle, one that was both aesthetic and political. How do you satisfy a museum director who at first insisted on a building made of stone, the stuff of permanence and monuments? (Cohen argued for a modern look-alike, with a façade of 460 precast, reinforced concrete panels.)

Cohen faced an additional problem, one that reflected a debate within architecture: What should an art museum look like? On one hand is “the universal art museum,” he said, a place of “neutral boxes” designed to foreground the art within them. Cohen used the example of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which he called “a processional sequence of rooms,” designed to lead a viewer along linear pathways. According to this prevalent model of museum space, said Cohen, “If architecture is anything but neutral, it runs into difficulties.”

The other hand is the idea of the museum itself as an artlike spectacle, a structure on a par with, or even surpassing, the art within it. Cohen used the example of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, architect Frank Gehry’s audacious, curving 1997 masterpiece of glass, titanium, and limestone. Ouroussoff later called the Guggenheim Bilbao a sign of “the triumph of capitalism” in the mid-1990s, and agreed that it placed the architect “on the same level as the artist.”

During the public conversation, Ouroussoff (left) praised Cohen for his quest for “the middle ground between the two extremes” of museum architecture. The solution seemed to the critic “an almost romantic, idealistic idea."

But with the Amir Building, Cohen sought a hybrid of the two trends. “Something else happens” in the new building, he said. Outwardly, the museum wing does not stand out. It’s crafted of horizontal planes meant to house and not shock. But inwardly, said Cohen, the spatial effects are “deep and vertical,” an “infinity of heaven.” Its sunlit small galleries and walls, large enough for big installations, will impart “curatorial flexibility.”

This third paradigm for art museums of the future acknowledges architecture as art, but also preserves the neutrality and efficiency of the “white boxes” meant to display the art. In the Tel Aviv structure, curves and twists predominate, creating the geometric challenges of making galleries rectangular. (Putting rectangles in a space like that, said Cohen, “is a delicious game to try to play.”)

During the public conversation, Ouroussoff praised Cohen for his quest for “the middle ground between the two extremes” of museum architecture. The solution seemed to the critic “an almost romantic, idealistic idea.”

There is strength and sense in the middle way, said Cohen — having an art museum be art, yet not be dominant over what it holds. “The building should be about something else,” he said, “yet not disappear.”

But to Samuel, working on anesthetized or immobilized worms can only tell you so much about how the brain and nervous system work. To truly understand the system, researchers need to see it in action.

So Samuel and researchers in his lab set to work designing equipment that could measure nerve activity in living, wiggling worms. They first succeeded three or four years ago, becoming the first to record neural activity in freely moving worms. Then, last year, they topped that, using pulses of green and blue light on worms that had been genetically modified so that their nerves contained light-activated proteins. This allowed researchers to exert control over the worms by aiming pulses of light at specific nerves.

To do this, they had to design some sophisticated equipment: a tracking microscope to follow the worms’ movements and image-processing software to estimate the location of individual neurons and control a mirror to direct light to the target nerve cells.

The system worked spectacularly. Researchers were able to simulate a touch that caused the worms to recoil by shining a light at a nerve near the worms’ front. They were able to goose the worms into action by shining a light at a nerve toward their back end. They were able to steer a worm left and right and even get it to lay an egg, all without a single physical touch.

At the time, Samuel described the method as perhaps his lab’s “greatest invention” and said it would provide a new tool in the arsenal of researchers seeking to understand the nervous system.

Today, Samuel and members of his lab are moving ahead with their work on the roundworm. Samuel, a physics professor who uses the tools of that field to explore important biological questions, said he chose to work on C. elegans, a millimeter-long roundworm often used in laboratory research, for several reasons. It is transparent, so researchers can see what’s going on inside it, and it’s so simple that researchers have all of its 302 neurons mapped out. That means researchers seeking a beachhead from which to explore the complex workings of the nervous system can look for basic principles in C. elegans that would also apply to more complex creatures.

After years working on C. elegans, Samuel’s laboratory is tackling increasing complexity. A few years ago, the researchers began working on larva of the fruit fly Drosophila. While Drosophila is another commonly studied laboratory animal — favored for genetics research because of its short life span — it is usually studied in its adult fly form. Its wormlike larva, which Samuel said has a nervous system an order of magnitude more complex than C. elegans, is not as widely studied. One project, if successful, will yield a complete map of the nerves involved in the larvae’s sensitivity to light and heat.

Although he has been on Harvard’s faculty since 2003, Samuel has been at the University far longer, for 23 years. After growing up in Sidney, New York with an interest in mathematics and physics, Samuel came to Harvard as an undergraduate. While looking for laboratories where he could conduct biological or physics research, he visited the lab of Howard Berg, a biophysicist who studies movement in bacteria. Samuel found a home there, conducting both undergraduate and graduate studies under Berg.

“Everything he touched seemed to work. He roamed and read widely. At one point he was learning Japanese … and reading James Joyce,” Berg said. “We are lucky to have him here.  He is working at the interface of physics and biology and needs the support of both communities.”

Samuel said he was attracted to Berg’s lab — and biophysics generally — because so many fundamental biological questions remain unanswered that he felt there were ample opportunities to conduct basic research.

“You can do fundamental work quickly. That’s not so easy to do in physics,” Samuel said.

Samuel received his doctorate in biophysics in 1999, spent four years doing postdoctoral research at Harvard, and then became an assistant professor of physics in 2003. He became an associate professor in 2007 and professor of physics in 2010.

Over his career, Samuel has come to understand what he calls the “inefficiencies” in science, the research down blind alleys that can consume a lot of effort but yield no results. As the leader of his own lab, Samuel said he tries to touch base with each lab member daily instead of waiting for lab meetings, to head off forays down paths that won’t prove fruitful.

“I try to make sure everyone is working on solvable problems,” Samuel said.

The material, made from discarded shrimp shells and proteins derived from silk, is called “shrilk.” It is thin, clear, flexible, and strong as aluminum at half the weight, according to postdoctoral fellow Javier Fernandez, who began work on chitin-based material as a doctoral student at the University of Barcelona and developed shrilk during a year-and-a-half stint working at the Wyss Institute with Director Donald Ingber.

Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital and professor of bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said companies have already expressed interest in the material, particularly for medical applications. Possible medical uses are boosted by the fact that the ingredients in shrilk have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Potential uses include sutures that would dissolve over time in hernia repair, protective coverings for burns and wounds, and a scaffold on which cells can grow to regenerate tissue.

A major benefit of the material, which was described in a December issue of the journal Advanced Materials, is its biodegradability, Ingber and Fernandez said. Plastic’s toughness and moldability represented a revolution in materials science during the 1950s and ’60s. Decades later, however, plastic’s very durability is raising questions about how appropriate it is for one-time applications such as plastic bags, or short life-span consumer goods, used in the home for a few years and then tossed into a landfill where they will decompose for centuries.

“All this plastic, what’s the point of making something that lasts 1,000 years?” Fernandez asked.

Shrilk not only will degrade in a landfill, but its basic components are used as fertilizer, and so will enrich the soil.

Natural materials, Fernandez said, were supplanted by synthetic materials partly because synthetics can be easily controlled in manufacturing and made into a wide variety of goods. Natural materials are making a comeback, however, as scientists learn from nature the manufacturing techniques needed to mimic the properties that make them desirable. Shrilk is a good example of the Wyss Institute’s mission, which is to learn how to make things from nature’s own engineering.

“This is the second chance for natural materials,” Fernandez said.

Shrilk’s secret, Fernandez and Ingber said, is not just its chemistry but also its design. There are two basic ingredients, a variation on the material chitin that makes up a large part of an insect’s tough outer layer, called chitosan, and fibroin, a protein derived from silk. But just combining those two ingredients doesn’t produce a hard, flexible material. Instead of blindly combining the materials, Fernandez and Ingber looked to nature to see not just what materials were used, but how.

In an insect’s body, the fibroin protein and chitin are layered, creating the kind of stiff design that gives plywood its strength and rigidity. By mimicking nature’s design and layering the chitosan and fibroin protein, shrilk was born.

“Much of the structural properties found in nature are not just chemistry, they’re architecture,” Ingber said.

Shrilk has great potential, the two said. Chitin is one of the most abundant materials in nature, found in everything from shrimp shells to insect bodies, snail and clam shells. That makes shrilk not only low cost, but also potentially scalable should it be used in applications demanding a lot of material.

Work on shrilk is continuing in the lab, the two said. Ingber said the material becomes flexible when wet, so they’re exploring ways to use it in moist environments. They’re also developing simpler manufacturing processes, which could be used for products in non-medical applications, like for computer cases and other products inside the home. They’re even exploring combining it with other materials, like carbon fibers, to give it new properties.

But fame did follow. A collected edition of Austen’s novels appeared in 1833, and they have been in print ever since. By 1880, Austen was the subject of a public adulation so wild that Victorians called it “Austenolatry.” In the 21st century, this fervent literary fandom remains unchecked.

But Austen’s fame is a problem for scholars in search of scarce clues to her life.  Consider, for one, the fate of her letters. By some estimates, Austen wrote 3,000, but only about 160 survive.

Harvard’s Houghton Library owns five complete letters and one fragment. They are little storms of gossip, fashion, and drawing-room intrigue — novels in miniature that show off Austen’s ready humor and astute powers of observation.

Even in their lightness, they remain valuable to scholars. In the fall of 2010, Harvard Assistant Professor of English Andrew Warren arranged for his class to see one of the Austen letters, because the experience “draws us into Austen’s social world, which after all is the inspiration for the novels,” he said. “The world of the novels is uncannily close to the world depicted, or rather enacted, in the letter.”

For Harvard, it’s only a matter of sense and sensibility to treat the Austen letters well, with temperature and humidity controls, flat storage in acid-free folders, protection from ultraviolet light, and limited physical access.

Add to those protections the expert ministrations of the Weissman Preservation Center, an arm of the Harvard University Library. Last month, experts there finished restoring two of the University’s Austen letters, one written in 1805 and the other in 1813.

Both are “autograph letters,” handwritten missives addressed to Austen’s sister and lifelong confidante Cassandra. They were gifts from Amy Lowell, the Brookline poet and John Keats biographer who in 1925 bequeathed to Harvard an extensive literary collection of books and autographs. (A Houghton exhibit of the Lowell collection is planned for the fall.)

The letters, on cream-colored writing paper, are in remarkable shape, despite the intentional creases common in Austen’s day, when letters were folded for mailing. (The modern envelope appeared nearly a century later.)

The two letters are also full to the edges with Austen’s neat, small handwriting, in lines as straight as a ruler. “Keats wasn’t so tidy in his letters,” said Debora Mayer, the Weissman’s Helen H. Glaser Conservator. (Lowell’s Keats collection is ample and comprehensive.) But however neat the handwriting, she added, the Austen letters illustrate one joy of the conservation business: the thrill of proximity to the greats of history and literature.

“We’re artists, we’re historians, and we like to be connected,” said Mayer of conservators. “Working on objects connects us, very much so … to another place and time.”

Closest to the Austen letters was Harvard conservation intern Allison Holcomb, a master’s degree student in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Late last year she examined the letters and wrote a detailed “proposal record” for repairing each. It’s a technical job, but a private thrill, said Holcomb. She emailed a friend about the project, filling in the subject line with exclamation points.

Holcomb showed her tools, which illustrate the cleanliness, care, and precision required for literary conservation: specialized blotters to protect text, needle-like awls, delicate brushes, magnifying glasses, long-fibered Japanese tissue for mending tears, surgical scalpels, and a stainless steel tool for turning pages — aptly called a “micro spatula.”

Before treatment, Holcomb examined the Austen letters under magnification, traced water marks to determine the origin of the paper, took documentary digital images (a step repeated after restoration), and used “raking” (oblique) light to search for minor distortions in the paper. Conservation work, said Mayer, first involves “looking closely and intently.”

During the treatment, Holcomb used vinyl eraser crumbs to gently clean the letter surfaces. (Using water was out of the question; it would accelerate the destructive chemistry of the iron gall ink common to Austen’s era.) But she left the graphite marks within each letter untouched, because they are editorially significant attempts on the part of early editors to mark logical paragraph breaks. To finish, Holcomb removed old repairs, flattened bent corners, and fixed several tears.

The two letters bring Austen alive — observant, funny, gossipy, and irreverent. The 1813 missive closes with what might be a message to anyone still under the spell of Austenolatry today. “Now I think I have written you a good sized Letter & may deserve whatever I can get in reply,” she wrote. “Infinities of Love.”

Conservationist

Allison Holcomb, an intern at Harvard Library’s Weissman Preservation Center, repairs two 19th-century letters written by Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra.

Lettres de Austen

Holcomb has read the translations for each and refers back to them when necessary.

How do you do?

This letter from Jane to Cassandra begins halfway down the page, as was the practice, with “How do you do?” It is written on hot-pressed paper in corrosive iron gall ink.

Worlds ago

Holcomb, who attends the Winterthur Museum at the University of Delaware, uses a micro-spatula to repair this letter written in 1805.

Tricks of the trade

Because her field of conservation is so small, Holcomb appropriates materials from other fields. The tweezers, water pen, and micro-spatulas are all utensils she is using on this current project.

Flourish

Through the microscope Holcomb can see minute details of the lettering.

Tedious work

Using her fingers and eraser crumbs, Holcomb cleans each letter.

Near perfect

This letter, containing a previous repair (upper left), will be restored to its original form.

Sincerely

Austen’s signature appears at the bottom of this 1813 letter.

Photo slideshow: Yours truly

Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer