In her hour-long presentation at the Cambridge Public Library,  “Addressing the Challenges Facing Public Education,” McCartney outlined the full extent of the achievement gap in terms of educational and life outcomes, including obstacles to effectively closing it. She concluded by detailing reforms she believes would improve the status quo. McCartney illustrated her arguments with research from the social sciences.

McCartney started by describing the scope of the problem. In large school districts across the nation, she said, about half of low-income high school students fail to graduate with their class. The United States is falling behind other nations in both math (the U.S. is ranked 25th) and science (17th).

McCartney broadened the achievement gap debate well beyond issues of social justice, asserting that our educational failures also come at a high economic cost. Underperforming students, she said, face “lower earnings, poorer health, and higher rates of incarceration,” which we all pay for directly or indirectly.

McCartney rejected the claims of those who say the achievement gap is impossible to remedy. “I don’t agree,” she said, “because I see examples of success every day.” She then defined “areas where I would invest funds” to optimize educational and life outcomes. First, she said, “teachers matter a lot” in student achievement (or lack thereof). “We need to get better people to enter the field and we need to support them better.” McCartney lamented that “half of [new] teachers drop out after four years.” She also called for more initiatives to develop leaders in education, describing the development of good leaders as “the single most promising strategy for transforming education.”

McCartney also recommended a longer school day and year. She presented data that connected extending classroom time to better educational outcomes. “We have a short school year now,” McCartney said, “because we used to be an agrarian society where students were needed to farm.” We need to keep students in school longer, McCartney argued, to enable “a broader and deeper coverage of the curriculum,” and “to deepen adult-child relationships” within schools.

Most of all, McCartney emphasized the cost-effectiveness of early childhood intervention. “For every dollar we invest in early intervention,” she said, “we get a return of four dollars,” far more bang for the buck than other forms of remedial intervention. Equally important, early intervention (such as the Head Start program) leads to improved outcomes in terms of increased earning potential, better health, and lower levels of delinquency. McCartney cited research from Nobel laureate economist James Heckman to support her view that early intervention addresses both social justice and cost-efficiency, leading to reductions in public outlays and a better economic future for more people.

Audience members reacted to the talk with support and surprise. “I hadn’t fully realized the significance of intervention before kindergarten,” said Mike Harrison of Brighton. “It’s clearly much more effective and efficient than later interventions.” Robert Principe, a consultant, noted McCartney’s focus on life outcomes and economics: “If economists start to say more about how these improved life outcomes make a big difference in the financial bottom line, that could change the whole political conversation” about the “cost” of educating low-income students.

Linda Greenhouse of Yale and The New York Times will talk about the Supreme Court in the next installment of the John Harvard Book Celebration, 5 p.m. on May 22 at the Honan-Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library.

Candidates for the prize are nominated by undergraduate members of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) and are chosen by a committee of PBK marshals, officers, and former prize-winners. The recipients will receive their prizes at the annual Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises on May 22, in Sanders Theatre.

The scholarships are awarded annually by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation of Canada to support up to 15 doctoral candidates pursuing research of compelling present-day concerns that address one or more of the foundation’s themes: human rights and dignity, responsible citizenship, Canada in the world, and people and their natural environment. Trudeau Scholars are highly gifted individuals who are actively engaged in their fields and expected to become leading national and international figures.

Hoffman, who came to Harvard last year as the recipient of a 2011-12 Fulbright Canada Student Award, is pursuing a Ph.D. in health policy. Awarded by GSAS, the degree is part of a collaborative program that includes faculty from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and five Harvard Schools: the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School.

The Lagakos award honors the career of Professor Stephen Lagakos by recognizing department alumni whose research in statistical theory and application, leadership in biomedical research, and commitment to teaching have had a major impact on the theory and practice of statistical science.

Begg graduated from the Department of Biostatistics in 1989, and she currently serves as professor of clinical biostatistics and as vice dean of education at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The award recognizes Begg’s accomplishments in education, scientific collaboration, and statistical methodology, as well as her leadership role in academic administration.

Read more.

Oliver will receive the School’s prestigious Healthy Cup Award at a sold-out May 22 lecture and reception at the Joseph P. Martin Conference Center, 77 Ave. Louis Pasteur, Boston, at 4:30 p.m.

“The Ash Center is committed to supporting students throughout their time at HKS and best equipping them with the tools to succeed in the world of practice upon graduation,” said Tony Saich, director of the center. “These summer immersive experiences are an important component of the HKS curriculum, and allow students to actively apply the theory, ideas, and scholarship they have learned in the classroom while gaining real-world career experience.”

For a list of the grantees.

Samuel Evan Milner ’13 won the Podhoretz Prize for his essay, “To Exercise Firm Leadership: Conservative Judaism’s Directives on Civil Rights,” and Daniel Joseph Frim ’14 won for his essay, “The ‘Folk,’ Folk Knowledge, and Folk Wisdom as Discursive Categories in the Babylonian Talmud.”

Leah Reis-Dennis ’13 and Yair Rosenberg ’12 both won this year’s Selma and Lewis Weinstein Prize in Jewish Studies. Reis-Dennis’ entry was “Halfway to Respectability: A Jewish Prostitute in the Progressive Era U.S.” and Rosenberg’s entry was “Einstein and the Rabbi – Conversations with Chaim Tchernowitz on the Talmud and Zionism.”

For the full list of grantees, visit http://bit.ly/ashcenter.

Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,152 and the total number of foreign associates to 430. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

In January, the NAS honored 17 individuals, including four Harvard faculty members: Michael J. Hopkins, Andrew H. Knoll, Jonathan B. Losos, and Jason P. Mitchell.

View the complete list from the April election.

Scientists already know of two ways that the body detects disease-causing germs. In one, our innate immune system is pre-programmed to recognize certain pathogens before they do damage. In another, our bodies are on the lookout for free-floating molecules normally found inside cells, a sign that a cell has been damaged and spilled its contents.

Now, Justine Melo, a research fellow, and Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), have reported in the journal Cell that animals can also detect disruptions in important cellular processes that occur before the cell itself dies, which allows an earlier immune response that can potentially rescue the cell.

Melo said that the research further fleshes out how the innate immune system recognizes pathogens, a key research question. Innate immunity is the older and less well-known of the body’s two immune systems. The other, the adaptive immune system, allows us to “learn” to attack pathogens after being vaccinated or infected with ailments like chicken pox.

“It provides a new mechanism of pathogen detection by organisms,” Melo said. The mechanism “allows us to defend ourselves against the myriad molecular approaches that pathogens take.”

Melo’s research concerns how animals make choices about which foods to eat and which to avoid. Because such decision-making is critical to the survival of all animals, she is able to explore its roots in a simple animal model, the roundworm C. elegans.

“It’s so fundamental to life, we believe the mechanism that worms use to decide if food is pathogenic or not is the same mechanism humans use,” Melo said. “When you put the animals down on a plate of pseudomonas [a pathogen of worms and humans], how do they know to run away?”

C. elegans are normally voracious feeders, Melo said, and will rarely leave a food source. Melo and Ruvkun took advantage of this fact for their work, in which they used genetic techniques to disrupt cellular processes and then looked for behavioral cues from the worms to see if there was an effect.

Specifically, they used interfering RNA (RNAi), which when ingested by the worms turns off genes for specific cellular processes. They planted the RNAi inside the worms’ normal food, the bacteria E. coli. Then they waited and observed. Over time, they used RNAi that disrupted more than 4,000 worm genes. For 379 of them, the worms eventually developed an aversion to E. coli and turned and swam away from their food.

When the researchers examined which genes were altered in those 379 cases, they invariably were those that affected important cellular processes that would also be targeted by pathogens. Disruption of cellular ribosomes, the protein-making machinery that is a common target of pathogen attack, prompted a particularly strong reaction.

“We fed worms RNAi against these core processes and saw that they developed strong aversion to that food source,” Melo said. “These are the processes that are often targeted by pathogens in the course of pathogenic assault. We found that ribosome was a robust activator of this assault. The animals really run away.”

In another sign that the worms thought they were fighting germs, the worms mounted an immune response to fight the nonexistent pathogen, detoxify the nonexistent poison, and repair the damage.

Melo said the worms’ avoidance behavior may provide insight as to why nausea and diarrhea — symptoms of food poisoning — result during chemotherapy. Since food poisoning has been a common way that humans ingest pathogens over the long reach of history, it may be that the body interprets the cellular disruption brought on by chemotherapy as a result of something we ate.

Instead, newspapers and magazines now grapple with clunky pay walls and their circulation remains in freefall, as the mainstream media struggle with the dizzying pace of change in the Internet age. The iPad disrupted the news business. People used the apps on it to get their news from Facebook or Google+.

“It’s important we focus on the future, not the past,” warned Richard Gingras, head of news products for Google. “We can’t reverse time.”

Gingras came to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard Friday not as doomsayer from Silicon Valley to predict the demise of the news business, but rather to foresee a bright future.

“I do feel these are extraordinary times,” Gingras said. “We are in the beginnings of a renaissance in journalism.”

But to get there, the business needs to change. Gingras spelled out a prescription in “Innovation in an Age of Disruption,” hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Ann Marie Lipinski, the Nieman Foundation’s curator, was the moderator.

Focusing on newspapers, Gingras said that they need to toss out the concept of editions. A newspaper website needs to look more like a Wikipedia page — continuously updated by a single reporter and editor with a single URL.

“A story with its own URL goes into the archive and we used to call that the morgue,” Gingras said.

As readers click from social media to straight stories, websites should focus on the design of the story page, not the home page, Gingras said.

Story design must change. Radio broadcasters, Gingras noted, started out reading newspaper stories before adopting their own clipped, precise prose. Similarly, newspapers operating on the Web may incorporate footnotes, links, and document clouds to build trust with readers.

Computational journalism will become a larger part of storytelling. Gingras suggested municipal and other databases created for one story could automatically be maintained and serve to spawn future series. Data-driven stories will be more prevalent as an increasing number of students graduate with journalism and computer science degrees, Gingras said.

In the Internet age, reporters will face increased demands and need more than just a pen and spiral notebook in the field, Gingras reckoned. “We should rethink not only about the site but the reporter’s tools,” Gingras added.

As papers and reporters change, organizational roles must be reconsidered, too.

But the biggest change has to be sweeping, as news businesses reconsider their entire mission — what works and what doesn’t — in a race for survival.

Gingras said newspapers are burdened by always doing things a certain way while competing against companies without baggage.

“These were models that barely changed in 100 years — what, they added color? So people didn’t have a reason to evolve,” Gingras said. “You now have people on the outside looking at the problem with a clean slate.”

Gingras was a pioneer in online media, helping create an interactive broadcast teletext news magazine in 1979. He worked at Apple Computer, Google, and until July 2011 was CEO of Salon Media Group before returning to Google. As a member of Google’s board, Gingras also has been active in the development of new products, technologies, and companies.

A “technologist” rather than a reporter, Gingras said news companies must embrace a culture of change. They can’t, like the some media titans did with the iPad, expect to recapture the past.

“First it was about search, then about blogs, then about social [media] — what will it be three years from now?” Gingras said. “The pace of change continues.”

“The mosh pit,” she told them, “is the modern Globe Theatre.”

From Shakespeare to vaudeville to artists on the streets of New York City, the history of performance informs Paulus’ dynamic, 21st-century vision for the stage.

During a recent lecture, Paulus explained that even the experimental early endings to her reimagined production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” were rooted in the history of the story and its evolution from novel to play to opera. Her musical moved from the A.R.T. to Broadway late last year and recently garnered 10 Tony Award nominations.

“The show has many different endings, if you look back to the novel and the play,” said Paulus, adding that even the opera libretto leaves Bess’ final physical action on stage largely open for interpretation. “There is a big area to explore there.”

Growing up in Manhattan, Paulus trained as a classical pianist but quickly realized she craved a more collective approach to creativity, she told a crowd at the Cambridge Public Library during Tuesday’s discussion, which was part of the University’s John Harvard Book celebration. The lecture series brings distinguished Harvard speakers and other programs to each public library in Cambridge and Boston as part of the University’s 375th anniversary festivities.

“I remember thinking as a young person I could be on a piano practicing five hours a day by myself, or I could be in a room with a lot of people making theater. And there was no question in my mind where I wanted to be.”

When she was hired as artistic director in 2008, Paulus ’88 committed herself to “expanding the boundaries of theater,” in large part by asking the same questions she had always asked: “What does theater look like historically?” and “Can it look a little different?” Her inaugural season offered theatergoers a definitive answer, with works that both acknowledged the past, and brought the audience onto the stage.

“The Donkey Show” transformed the Athenian gardens of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a 1970s nightclub, with the crowd grooving around performers in their midst. “Sleep No More” was staged as a type of immersive haunted house, where the audience roamed 40 rooms of an eerie, deserted high school, encountering actors performing scenes from the Bard’s “Macbeth.”

“It was the living, breathing world of Macbeth,” said Paulus, who was “trying to make the audience feel like they were part of the show.”

The productions in her second season further reimagined the theatrical experience and her notion of the theater beyond the stage. “The Blue Flower,” a musical that unfolds against the backdrop of World War I and the cultural movement known as Dadaism, inspired the creation of a mini modern museum in the Loeb Drama Center’s lobby. Harvard undergraduates and members of the cast crafted the works of Dada-inspired art for what she called the theater “that happens after the show.”

For Paulus, the “whole ritual of the theater” needs to be addressed.  “Why do we come out? What is the evening? Does it start before the play begins? What happens after the event?”

The A.R.T.’s current musical, “Woody Sez,” charts the impact the American singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie had as “a crusader for the oppressed,” and incorporates Paulus’ interactive, holistic approach. In connection with the show, Paulus and her team have organized a series of hootenannies informal jam sessions,.

The idea that “you can bring your instrument to the show, and then, when it’s over, you can take your own instrument out and a make a community with your fellow audience members, to me is as important as the show on the stage.”

In the future, she hopes to further tap Harvard’s human capital, inviting experts and scholars not just to discussions about a show after the curtain has gone down, as she has done with recent productions, but into the creative process before the lights even go on.

“We are trying to engage them in the creation of new work … [and] get professors at the table with artists talking about subjects — special areas of research that might spawn the creation of new work.”

A critical part of her expanding audience, acknowledged Paulus, is Harvard’s undergraduate community. In addition to encouraging students to take part in some A.R.T. productions, she has gone into the classroom, instructing and probing them for ideas and feedback on upcoming projects. As professor of practice in the English Department, she has taught courses on Shakespeare and “Porgy and Bess” with Marjorie Garber, Harvard’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Offering the crowd a glimpse of the upcoming season, Paulus said she plans to stage the musical “Pippin” in collaboration with a “cutting-edge circus troupe” from Montreal that will add “bold physical expression” to the show. Also on tap are a work about French Queen Marie Antoinette, whom Paulus called “the most famous 1 percenter,” and a five-hour Kabuki-inspired play about a flower trying to find its place in the world, a metaphor, she said, for marriage equality.

Asked about her directing style, Paulus said her operating ethos invites inclusion and possibility. If someone has a good idea to share, she wants to hear it. If she doesn’t have the answers at the start of a show, she doesn’t worry; instead she feeds off “the sense of potential.” She likened her role to that of a motivational coach. “You just have to have enough stamina to keep everybody climbing up the hill nobody wants to go up anymore … you just have to keep pointing to the top of the mountain and say ‘that’s where we’re going.’”

Her approach has made believers out of some who were uneasy at her appointment.

“I was a big skeptic of what she was going to be doing,” said Cambridge resident and longtime A.R.T. patron Nancy Hurlbut after the discussion. “And I have just been so impressed with piece after piece. … She really wants to pull in all kinds of impressions.”

The next John Harvard Book talk will be 6 p.m. May 15 at the Cambridge Public Library, Main Library, 449 Broadway. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Kathleen McCartney will present “Addressing the Challenges Facing Public Education.”

The work, published this month in the journal PLoS One, uses techniques long utilized by the investment industry, and for which the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded in 1990.

James Watkins, an instructor in surgery at Harvard Medical School and a trauma surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he got the idea for the study during the lulls that occur while waiting for patient test results. He began to think about where he would put his money if he had to invest it for the best health return, and realized the issue was a portfolio problem similar to that faced by investors, who have to figure out the right way to invest a finite pool of money to give the best return for a calculated amount of risk.

“I was wondering if I wanted to save an extra life by investing more of my tax dollars in medical care, what I would do,” Watkins said. “I realized that this is a portfolio problem, and this has been solved.”

Watkins turned to the Internet to see whether there was data readily available and found information on federal research spending and figures for premature death from specific diseases. He contacted Andrew Lo, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management. The two, along with Dimitrios Bisias, Lo’s doctoral student, worked on the study over the past four years.

The analysis used National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding data from 1965 to 2005, and measured return in “years of life lost” in seven broad disease groups from 1979 to 2007. The study said that changes to how NIH funding is allocated could reduce years of life lost by between 28 percent and 89 percent compared with current funding.

Watkins and Lo emphasized that the work is intended to provide proof that the analytical method works and not to give specific reallocation advice to the NIH, the nation’s largest funder of medical research. The study has several shortcomings, they said, but could serve as a starting point for an objective system to allocate research dollars.

Among the problems they identified is the need for a better statistic to measure return than years of life lost. The national burden of disease includes suffering and productive time lost to illness before death. A modern statistic, disability-adjusted life years, would serve that purpose, the two said, but has not been kept long enough to account for the long lag time between investment in research and improvements in patient care. It is possible to reconstruct that statistic from other data, but it would require a significant effort, Lo said.

“From my perspective, the challenge is the data. The techniques have been around for years,” Lo said. The system would provide not just “better bang for the buck, but more transparent, systematic, and reproducible bang for the buck.”

The study shows that investment in disease research brings significant returns and that there is significant variation among diseases, with some harder to diagnose and treat, Watkins said. Investments in heart-lung-blood diseases take the longest to flower — 16 years from basic research funding to patient improvement — but also bring the best return for each dollar invested, gaining $9.80, measured in annual per capita GDP for each reduction in years of life lost. The study showed that the quickest return, for mental illness research, came in nine years.

“Three factors combined to increase the yield so significantly: the return of Early Action, the importance of our generous financial aid program in uncertain financial times, and a series of changes enacted over the past decade that greatly enrich the undergraduate experience,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid.

Harvard reinstituted Early Action this year after a four-year interval, admitting 774 students to the Class of 2016 in December. Students who apply early have a strong interest in Harvard and often do not apply elsewhere. In addition, offering preliminary financial aid awards to students admitted in December gave reassuring news about Harvard’s affordability.

Harvard’s financial aid program has been significantly enhanced in recent years, providing additional aid to low- and middle-income students. “With the unwavering commitment of Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, and Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, Harvard has kept its doors open to talented students from all economic backgrounds,” said Sarah C. Donahue, director of financial aid.

The Financial Aid Office was open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays during April, and staff talked with students and parents in person and on the telephone.  Seventy percent of Harvard students receive some type of financial aid.  Sixty percent of Harvard students receive need-based grants, and the average annual cost to their families is $12,000.  Twenty percent of Harvard families have annual incomes under $65,000 and pay nothing.

Families with incomes from $65,000 to $150,000 and with typical assets pay from zero to 10 percent of their annual incomes, and families with higher incomes can still receive need-based aid depending on individual circumstances, including having multiple children in college or unusual medical expenses.  Students are not required to take out loans, and home equity is not used in determining financial aid.  As always, students are asked to contribute toward the cost of their own education by working 10 to 12 hours per week during the school year and obtaining a summer job.  This coming year, Harvard will spend $172 million on undergraduate financial aid.

Admitted students often noted that their decision to matriculate at Harvard was influenced by the many changes at Harvard in the past decade: a new core curriculum, the program in General Education; a fourfold increase in the number of small freshman seminars; the availability of more than 40 secondary fields of study (minors); the new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; an augmented advising system that doubles the number of freshmen advisers to more than 400 (and also includes 200 peer-advising fellows and 60 resident proctors); expanded opportunities for close collaboration with faculty through research and regional centers; an arts initiative and revitalized theater opportunities, including Farkas Hall; and many options for study abroad, supported by a $100 million gift from David Rockefeller.

Admitted students were invited to Visitas, which took place from April 21 to 23 with more than 1,300 students and their parents in attendance, a record. The program, directed by Valerie Beilenson and assistant director M. Amelia Muller, enabled students to experience Harvard firsthand, meet faculty and students, and explore Cambridge and Boston.  “We are extremely grateful to all the faculty, students, and staff who made Visitas such a great success,” said Marlyn E. McGrath, director of admissions. “We also want to thank our 15,000 alumni/ae who telephoned, emailed, and hosted gatherings for our admitted students in locations around the nation and the world.”

Personalized outreach to admitted students began in December at Early Action time.  Admissions staff sent individualized notes and (along with the Undergraduate Admissions Council, the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, and the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative) made telephone calls and sent emails informing students about opportunities in Cambridge.

At this time, men make up 52.5 percent of the class. Prospective social science concentrators constitute 29.1 percent, with 24.3 percent interested in the biological sciences, 17.5 percent in the humanities, 13.6 in engineering and computer science, 8.5 percent in the physical sciences, 6.4 percent in mathematics, and 0.6 percent undecided.  African Americans make up 9.4 percent of the class, Asian Americans 22.6 percent, Latinos 9.3 percent, and Native Americans and Native Hawaiians 1.7 percent.  International students constitute 11.3 percent of the class.

This year’s high yield means that only a small number (about 25) will be admitted from the waiting list.  In recent years, this number has ranged from zero to 228.

Harvard’s yield is particularly notable because the College does not offer athletic or other non-need-based scholarships.  In addition, Harvard’s Early Action program, unlike binding Early Decision programs, allows admitted students to apply elsewhere and asks only that they reply by May 1 after comparing other offers of admission and financial aid.  Such freedom and flexibility allow a student more time to choose the college that provides the best match, a contributing factor to Harvard’s nearly 98 percent graduation rate.

“The Class of 2016 was chosen through the most selective admissions process in Harvard’s history,” said Fitzsimmons.  “They have enormous potential in every way that is measurable. But most of all, they demonstrate the intangible strength of character that Harvard has sought since its founding in 1636. We look forward to following their progress over the next four years and beyond.”

In choosing a public service path, Redd faces a host of career unknowns, starting with where she’ll find her first post-law school job. (Nonprofits, after all, aren’t known for launching massive recruiting efforts on campus.) But thanks to University support, Redd feels ready to take the plunge and pursue her passion for community work.

“I think we need to let people know it’s OK to not know exactly what you’ll be doing after graduation,” said Redd, who will work this summer at the Advancement Project and with the Southern Center for Human Rights.

With that in mind, Harvard President Drew Faust sat down with Redd, who was one of 10 students chosen as a 2012 Presidential Fellow for their commitment to public service initiatives. They engaged in a candid discussion of what the University can do to promote public service across Harvard’s Schools. The University honored the group, only the second to be awarded the grants from the Presidential Public Service Fellowship Program, during a luncheon at the Harvard Faculty Club on April 27.

This year’s fellows, drawn from six Schools and programs at the University, will work with legal aid groups, school districts, and community theater groups. Chike Aguh (left) and Paul Perry discussed the program during the luncheon.

“We want to continue to build a culture here that’s supportive of public service,” Faust said. “We want public service to have a high profile as a very important consideration for a life’s work.”

Begun last year, the program provides grants of up to $5,000 for undergraduates and $8,000 for graduate students to fund summer projects across a wide range of areas and interests, from nonprofits and government agencies to community initiatives and social ventures. An anonymous donor funds the program.

Through the fellowship program and other initiatives, Faust said, the University hopes to broaden students’ conception of what public service can be, repositioning it not as a side interest but as a central part of a fulfilling career.

This year’s fellows, drawn from six Schools and programs at the University, will work with legal aid groups, school districts, and community theater groups. One fellow will head to the White House to help improve performance management in the federal government, while another will run a community garden for at-risk youth in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

The fellowship program, managed by the Office of the President, aims to expand its horizon beyond the summer by offering fellows resources to continue their public service once they return to campus.

Fellows will be able to take online courses through the Center for Workplace Development and the Harvard Extension School and will have access to Rosetta Stone language software, helping them to build their skills in accounting, foreign languages, website design, or other topics that might help them to launch their own social initiatives.

The fellows will be able to turn to each other, as well as to last year’s inaugural cohort, who also attended the luncheon to share their experience.

“This is a wonderful opportunity,” said 2012 fellow Mackenzie Hild, a College sophomore, who will spend the summer on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico collaborating with a doctor and the local community to improve nutrition. “It’s great to feel supported by your peers in doing this kind of work.”

Biographies of past and current fellows can be found here.

“Envision,” a tool released last month, provides a comprehensive framework for governments and industry to confront such challenges by evaluating infrastructure projects of all types and sizes based on environmental, economic, and community benefits. The goal of the rating and assessment system is to help policymakers assess and measure the sustainability features of projects, allowing them to set investment priorities based on which projects will deliver the most significant benefits for the surrounding community and environment.

“The development of this new rating system was based on the simple premise that you cannot improve something unless you have the means to measure it,” said Paul Zofnass A.B. ’69, M.B.A. ’73, sponsor of the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), which created the foundation for Envision and is partnering with the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) to perform project ratings and accredit professionals for its use. “We believe that the importance of sustainability is so great that no infrastructure project, large or small, should be planned, designed, or built without at least some serious consideration of its sustainability ramifications.”

Envision rates projects on five key areas that were developed based on the research of Harvard experts: quality of life, leadership, resource allocation, natural world, and climate and risk. As an example, using the new system to measure the impact of a road project could reveal positive contributions to the environment through the use of recycled materials and low energy construction methods. However, if the road project increases congestion, urban sprawl, and divides communities, its quality of life contribution might be low.

The launch of Envision was the culmination of four years of research directed by the Zofnass Program. Led by GSD Lecturer and Zofnass Research Director Andreas Georgoulias, a diverse project team created the rating system after a series of workshops and conferences that engaged engineering firms, public officials, faculty, and more than 50 students at GSD, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Harvard Center for the Environment, and Harvard Business School. “Our interdisciplinary approach was a model for collaboration within Harvard and beyond,” said Spiro Pollalis, GSD professor and director of the Zofnass Program.

Even before its launch, Envision was already attracting attention in government and nonprofit sectors. In March, the Zofnass Program facilitated a discussion about the tool at a conference of engineering firms, and federal procurement representatives organized by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Office for Public Engagement. As a result, federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Defense have reached out to learn more about how Envision could be used to assess and make decisions about the environmental and community impact of projects.

The Riverkeeper environmental watchdog group has also engaged the Zofnass Program to use the Envision system to assess and evaluate New York’s plans for the Tappan Zee Bridge. The state recently removed proposals to include public transit as part of the reconstruction of the 20-mile I-287 corridor. “Ensuring that all dimensions of sustainability are incorporated in major infrastructure projects is vital for the future of our cities,” said Anthony Kane, Zofnass Program Rating System Director and leader of the study.

The Zofnass Program was founded in 2008 at GSD with the support of Paul and Joan Zofnass and the primary goal of developing an objective rating tool for civil infrastructure projects. In 2012, Pollalis, Georgoulias, Stephen Ramos, and Research Professor Daniel Schodek edited “Infrastructure Sustainability and Design,” a book based on the contributions of leading academic and industry experts regarding key facets of sustainable infrastructure.

The Zofnass Program and ISI are now in the process of developing three companion tools to help companies and governments use Envision:  a pre-planning checklist for assessing project sustainability, a comprehensive guidance document and score calculator that allows users to analyze and rate a project’s levels of achievement for sustainability objectives, and an economic tool that will monetize non-cash benefits and costs of infrastructure projects in order to derive a sustainable return on investment.

“This new sustainable infrastructure rating system will evaluate, grade, and give recognition to infrastructure projects that provide progress and contributions for a sustainable future. Its purpose is to foster a necessary and dramatic improvement in the performance and resiliency of physical infrastructure,” said ISI Executive Director Bill Bertera.

For more information.

Its owners, Gye Hyun Baek ’13 and Madalina Persu ’13, apologetically followed close behind, revealing that its source of power was in fact a handheld laser pointer.

The first Design Fair at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) displayed the wealth of ideas that have emerged at SEAS throughout this past academic year.

The May 1 fair in the Maxwell Dworkin building featured final projects from at least a dozen courses in engineering, applied mathematics, and computer science.

Students in ES 50, “Introduction to Electrical Engineering,” and ES 51, “Computer-Aided Machine Design,” designed and built more than 30 diverse projects, including many small vehicles that roamed the display tables and floors, a hovering quadrotor helicopter, a playable infrared harp, a device that helps a child test the safety of drinking water, a pair of gloves wired with pressure sensors to enable typing without a keyboard (with optional encryption), and a tube amplifier for an electric guitar.

Nearby, computer scientists in CS 179, “Design of Useable Interactive Systems,” talked about the rigorous testing process they had completed during the semester while perfecting their user interfaces. Jack Greenberg ’13 created a tactile content map for course materials that helps teachers and students confer about their interests and the organizational structure of a course. Greenberg and his teammates, Neal Wu ’14 and Carl Gao ’15, incorporated feedback from four rounds of user testing.

Although building physical devices is an essential part of an SEAS education, the fair may have served as a reminder that design involves far more than the physical prototype.

“Design goes much deeper than most people think,” said Anas Chalah, director of the Undergraduate Teaching Labs, who helped organize the Design Fair. “The minute you say ‘design,’ people think about devices — designing something that you can hold in your hand,” he explained. “If you belong to that school, that’s fine, but let’s convert you.”

Michaela Tracy ’13, an applied math concentrator who is pursuing music as a secondary field, created a project for AM 120, “Applicable Linear Algebra,” which combined both of her interests. Inspired by modern, experimental composers such as John Cage who used analytical tools — or simple chance — to create entire works of music, Tracy used mathematical principles to explore the elements of musical style.

“What I wanted to do was use music of another time and see if I could recreate it … [and see] if statistics could provide an example of baroque harmony, which it did! My project uses the data from the timing between events to compose entire works,” Tracy said.

Upstairs, students from AM 207, “Stochastic Optimization,” showed off their models of tornado frequency and climate, crowd patterns in shopping malls, and even strategies for defeating an opposing team in foosball.

Other students approached their projects with a social goal. Rabeea Ahmed ’14 and Zamyla Chan ’14, students in CS 171, “Visualization,” used numerical tools to make an interactive, visual representation titled “The Socioeconomics of Water” that displayed levels of water consumption and availability in several Asian and South American countries.

Ahmed explained, “You can choose what you want to display on each of the two axes. So I can say ‘plot population’ for South America, and you can see that Brazil has the largest population for South America. And then it can show you the GDP trends over time. You can then go deeper and plot interesting data such as the freshwater withdrawal per capita, and it’s clear that freshwater per capita is extremely variable [across countries]. You can look at countries that are clearly outliers. You can also use the tool to view freshwater resources.”

Ahmed and Chan envision their creation not as an invention to be simply consumed and enjoyed by curious students, but as a tool that could potentially be useful to policymakers, researchers, and more.

“We aim to make it easy for people to get the data that they want and see different dimensions of the data,” said Ahmed. “This allows others to then think about the non-numerical (historical, geographic) factors causing these trends.”

“One of the great aspects of the fair is that the students get to learn from each other by seeing what they have done,” said Michael Mitzenmacher, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and area dean for computer science, who helped organize the fair. “They have the chance to see the broad spectrum of work going on at SEAS, and talk with each other about what they have accomplished. It changes their work from an individual or small-group activity to a community activity.”

“We know that adding social aspects to students’ work makes their projects more fun,” he said. “And when they’re having fun, they work hard. That’s evident here today.”

These new findings, led by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and published in Tuesday’s online issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), identify a novel strategy for preventing thrombosis, and help pave the way for clinical testing of this popular flavonoid as a therapy for the prevention and treatment of stroke and heart attack, as well as deep venous thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism.

“It’s not always fully appreciated that the majority of Americans will die as the result of a blood clot in either their heart or their brain,” says senior author Robert Flaumenhaft, an investigator in the Division of Hemostasis and Thrombosis at BIDMC and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Approximately half of all morbidity and mortality in the United States can be attributed to heart attack or stroke.”

The study focused on protein disulfide isomerase (PDI), which is found in all cells. Investigators in BIDMC’s Division of Hemostasis and Thrombosis had previously shown that PDI is rapidly secreted from both platelets and endothelial cells during thrombosis, when a clot forms in a blood vessel, and that inhibition of PDI could block thrombosis in a mouse model.

“This was a transformative and unanticipated finding because it identified, for the first time, that PDI is secreted from cells in a live animal and is a potential target for preventing thrombosis,” says Flaumenhaft. However, because intracellular PDI is necessary for the proper synthesis of proteins, the scientists had to identify a specific compound that could block the thrombosis-causing extracellular PDI — without inhibiting the intracellular PDI.

They began by conducting a high-throughput screen of a wide array of compounds to identify PDI inhibitors. Among the more than 5,000 compounds that were screened, quercetin-3-rutinoside (rutin) emerged as the most potent agent. “Rutin was essentially the champion compound,” says Flaumenhaft.

A bioflavonoid that is naturally found in many fruits and vegetables, including onions, apples, and citrus fruits, as well as teas, rutin is also sold as an herbal supplement, having received a special designation for safety from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Surprisingly, studies of the rutin molecule demonstrated that the same part of the molecule that provides rutin with its ability to inhibit PDI also prevents the compound from entering cells.

“That finding explained how this compound can be both a potent inhibitor of PDI and a safe food supplement,” says Flaumenhaft. “Our next questions were: Is this compound anti-thrombotic? Can it prevent blood clots?”

The team went on to test rutin in a mouse model of thrombosis. Because they knew that humans would be taking rutin in pill form, they included studies in which the compound was administered orally and determined that it successfully retained its anti-thrombotic properties when it was metabolized following oral ingestion.

“Rutin proved to be the most potently anti-thrombotic compound that we ever tested in this model,” says Flaumenhaft. Of particular note, rutin was shown to inhibit both platelet accumulation and fibrin generation during thrombus formation. “Clots occur in both arteries and in veins,” explains Flaumenhaft. “Clots in arteries are platelet-rich, while those in veins are fibrin-rich. This discovery suggests that a single agent can treat and prevent both types of clots.”

Even with the use of existing anti-clotting therapies, such as aspirin, clopidogrel (Plavix), and warfarin (Coumadin), each year there are approximately 400,000 recurrent episodes among patients who previously experienced a stroke or heart attack, says Flaumenhaft.

“A safe and inexpensive drug that could reduce recurrent clots could help save thousands of lives,” he adds. “These preclinical trials provide proof-of-principle that PDI is an important therapeutic target for anti-thrombotic therapy, and because the FDA has already established that rutin is safe, we are poised to expeditiously test this idea in a clinical trial, without the time and expense required to establish the safety of a new drug.”

Morrison was honored for founding a Harvard chapter of Actively Moving Forward, a national student grief support and service group. Rooney was honored for his work as an Award Peer Tutor at the Bureau of Study Counsel, in particular for his strong dedication to helping other students learn and grow.

This annual award recognizes educational research and writings of women authors whose work may influence the direction of thought and action necessary to meet the needs of today’s complex society. The honor includes a $2,500 monetary award, and Hicks will speak at the society’s international convention on July 25 in New York City.

Those working to combat the illegal wildlife trade, however, could soon have a powerful new tool at their disposal, courtesy of Harvard University.

Work is under way to integrate WorldMap, an open-source online application developed by Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), with the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) of the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS).

Once complete, the system will allow anyone — from curious members of the public to national policymakers — to map and track wildlife crime,  and to understand how it is related to a host of socioeconomic data — such as ethnicity, income, and environmental conditions — already included in the AfricaMap layers of WorldMap.

“I think there are three areas where this will have some impact,” said Wendy Guan, director of GIS Research Services at CGA. “The first is with a public-facing site that will allow the UNU to put their data in visual form, giving them an opportunity for more public awareness and education.

“Perhaps more important is how the system can be used by policymakers,” Guan continued. “Because users can view multiple ‘layers’ in WorldMap, they’ll be able to see how some demographics interact, and do very in-depth analyses. They’ll be able to see whether economic conditions correlate with the frequency of violations, whether crime goes up if there’s a drought or other environmental conditions. That will help them identify patterns that might be addressed through policy changes or other actions.”

Guan expects the new system to assist law enforcement agencies combatting wildlife crime. The goal, she said, is to simplify the system for reporting crimes by allowing people to enter data rapidly, which can instantly be added to maps to check its accuracy.

Though first discussed several years ago, the notion of adding a mapping capability to the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System didn’t gain traction until last year, when the CGA released WorldMap. Hoping to merge the software with their system, UNU staff contacted Harvard. Late last year, the two sides signed an agreement that spelled out how the two systems will be integrated, the technical assistance that Harvard will provide, and the new features that might eventually be added to the integrated system.

“By merging Harvard’s WorldMap with WEMS, the enhanced system will be able to provide a socioeconomic angle for users, which was missing in the original database,” said Govindan Parayil, UNU vice-rector and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies. “The integrated system will be a vital tool for not only those in wildlife management, but also for researchers and policymakers looking for economic, social, and geographic data across Africa. This is precisely the kind of interdisciplinary approach and bridging function between research and policymaking that UNU aims to undertake.”

Once up and running, Guan said, the new system will allow users to “slice and dice the data to see whatever you want.”

“That’s the idea. It’s more than just a map per se,” she said. “It’s a database, it’s a user interface. It allows you do to do analysis, not just put the data on a map and be done with it.”

“Preserving Africa’s rich flora and fauna, while also providing the means to analyze and better understand these natural forms in relationship to socioeconomic, environmental, and other data, is an important part of our broader mission,” said Suzanne Blier, the Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and professor of African and African-American studies and AfricaMap’s co-chair. “This system will be a powerful tool for visualization, but it’s also an avenue for data creation, and for data re-engagement. Suddenly, users aren’t looking at this solely from the vantage point of the political issues or the legal issues, but thinking about a broad array of different ways in which these factors are engaged with the environment.”

That was the summation Wednesday of prominent evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago professor of ecology and evolution who has worked for years to counter creationists’ anti-evolution arguments.

Coyne, author of the 2009 book, “Why Evolution Is True,” cited surveys that indicate American acceptance of evolutionary theory is near the bottom among its peer nations. A 2006 survey showed that just 40 percent of Americans accepted the truth of the statement that “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” That was roughly half the number in France, Japan, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In fact, out of 34 countries, America’s acceptance of evolution was next to last, only ahead of Turkey.

Other surveys show that 40 percent of Americans believe God created humans as they are and that just 12 percent believe that evolution should be the only theory of how species originated that is taught in American science classrooms.

Coyne called the situation “a national embarrassment” and traced America’s low acceptance of evolution ultimately to a dysfunctional society, with high levels of income inequality, drug use, infant mortality, and other negative measures, relative to other industrialized democracies.

This social insecurity promotes high levels of belief in religion, whose tenets disagree with the central ideas of evolution, Coyne said. He cited a 2009 study that showed that the more dysfunctional a society, the higher its level of religious belief.

“If you live in a society that is dysfunctional and unhealthy, where people are doing better than you, you need solace from somewhere. You get it from religion,” Coyne said. “The thing that blocks acceptance of evolution in America is religion.”

In his talk, sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History as part of its “Evolution Matters” lecture series, Coyne gave an outline of evolutionary theory along with specific examples that bolster its accuracy.

He addressed the common “it’s only a theory” argument by pointing out that the understanding of “theory” in everyday speech and in scientific terminology is different. Among scientists, a theory is not the same as a guess or a hypothesis. A scientific theory is an explanation of a natural phenomenon that is bolstered by data. With enough supporting data, a theory approaches fact. He compared the theory of evolution to “atomic theory” (the idea that matter is made up of atoms) and “germ theory” (which posits that diseases are caused by germs), both widely accepted as fact today.

The overall trend in the fossil record presents a strong argument for evolution, Coyne said. If evolution is true, one would expect to see more complex creatures evolving from simpler ones over long reaches of time, with ones most resembling today’s creatures found among most recent fossils, which is the case.

Other evidence in favor of evolution continues to mount, with scientists directly observing evolution in action for some 300 species and uncovering more and more transitional species in the fossil record. Birds have long been thought to have evolved from reptiles, because they share some characteristics and because reptiles are found much further back in the fossil record. In recent years, Coyne said, paleontologists have uncovered feathered dinosaurs, further bolstering the idea that birds evolved from reptiles. Another example is the fairly complete record of horse evolution from a smaller, many-toed relative to the large animal we know today that runs around on one large toe on each foot.

The evolution of whales and dolphins is another example. Scientists have long held that they descended from air-breathing land mammals, but that has been doubted by creationists because of the radical changes required in their body plans. Fossil evidence has slowly filled in the transitional species, Coyne said, until today there is a fairly complete record of what was a rapid transition over just 8 million years from four-legged land mammals to fluked and finned deep-diving whales.

More evidence comes from embryology, where vestiges from ancestral species still crop up. Dolphin embryos, for example, still bear rear leg buds, and human embryos develop a hairy lanugo coat, normally lost 36 weeks into gestation. Genetics also shows evolution’s traces, with inactive genes identified from precursor species. In humans, genes exist to manufacture vitamin C, something we, along with gorillas and chimpanzees, lost, presumably because of our ancestors’ fruit-rich diet. There are also genes for enough olfactory receptors that our sense of smell could rival that of dogs and cats. In both cases, the genes have been silenced.

“Our genome is a graveyard of dead genes,” Coyne said.

Despite this evidence, many Americans refuse to believe in evolution because they hold tightly to religious beliefs, most of which are taught in childhood well before young people learn of evolution, Coyne said. Three-quarters of Americans profess an absolute belief in God, and 63 percent believe in angels.

The problem with evolution from a religious point of view, Coyne said, is that it doesn’t just assail religious views of human origin, it also erodes the religious underpinnings of the idea that humans are somehow special, that our lives have purpose and meaning, and that we need to be moral. He cited another poll that asked Americans what their response would be if presented with a scientific fact that contradicted their religion. Sixty-four percent said they would reject fact in favor of faith.

The answer, Coyne said, is to address society’s ills so Americans live in a more secure and level society.

“We should create a society that is more just, more equal, more caring,” Coyne said. “Regardless of how you feel about religion, I think that’s one thing we can all care about.”

This is the first study to show that a small protein, apolipoprotein C-III (apoC-III), that sometimes resides on the surface of HDL cholesterol may increase the risk of heart disease and that HDL cholesterol without this protein may be especially heart protective.

The study was published in an online issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“This finding, if confirmed in ongoing studies, could lead to better evaluation of risk of heart disease in individuals and to more precise targeting of treatments to raise the protective HDL or lower the unfavorable HDL with apoC-III,” said Frank Sacks, professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at HSPH and senior author of the study.

A high level of HDL cholesterol is strongly predictive of a low incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD). But trials of drugs that increase HDL cholesterol have not consistently shown decreases in CHD, leading to the hypothesis that HDL cholesterol may contain both protective and nonprotective components.

ApoC-III, a proinflammatory protein, resides on the surface of some lipoproteins — both HDL and low-density lipoproteins, or LDL (bad) cholesterol. The researchers, led by Sacks and Majken Jensen, research associate in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, examined whether the existence or absence of apoC-III on HDL cholesterol affected the good cholesterol’s heart-protective qualities, and whether its existence could differentiate HDL cholesterol into two subclasses — those which protect against the risk of future heart disease and those which do not.

Blood samples collected in 1989 and 1990 from 32,826 women in the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses’ Health Study were examined, along with blood samples collected from 1993 to 1995 from 18,225 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. During 10 to 14 years of follow-up, 634 cases of coronary heart disease were documented and matched with controls for age, smoking, and date of blood drawing. 

The researchers compared plasma concentrations of total HDL, HDL that has apoC-III, and HDL without apoC-III as predictors of the risk of CHD.

After adjusting for age, smoking status, and other dietary and lifestyle cardiovascular risk factors, the researchers found that two different subclasses of HDL have opposite associations with the risk of CHD in apparently healthy men and women. The major HDL type, which lacks apoC-III, had the expected heart-protective association with CHD. But the small fraction (13 percent) of HDL cholesterol that has apoC-III present on its surface was paradoxically associated with a higher, not lower, risk of future CHD. Those men and women who had HDL apoC-III in the highest 20 percent of the population had a 60 percent increased risk of CHD.

The results suggest that measuring HDL apoC-III and HDL without apoC-III rather than the simpler measure of total HDL may be a better gauge of heart disease risk (or of HDL’s protective capacity). “Reduction in HDL-apoC-III by diet or drug treatments may become an indicator of efficacy,” said Jensen.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Villum Kann Rasmussen Foundation (Denmark).

But an intimate exhibition titled “Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939,” in the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler’s fourth-floor gallery, offers viewers a comprehensive look at his largely unknown photographic work.

A painter largely committed to oil on canvas, Feininger was initially skeptical about photography, what he called a “mechanical medium,” said Laura Muir during a “Two-Point Perspective” gallery talk in April, part of an ongoing series of discussions sponsored by the Harvard Art Museums that explore works from various viewpoints.

But as a Bauhaus teacher — Feininger was hired by movement founder Walter Gropius as its first faculty appointment — the 57-year-old was greatly influenced by his two sons, both photography enthusiasts, who had installed a darkroom in the basement of their home, and by his friend and Bauhaus colleague, Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, who led the school’s metal workshop and who championed experimental photographic techniques.

The show, which was in Germany and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles before making its final stop at Harvard, covers Feininger’s most prolific period with photography, 1928-39.

The exhibition’s earliest images reveal Feininger’s skill with the medium and his ability to transform “something familiar into something otherworldly,” said Muir, the show’s curator and assistant curator of the Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum. The pictures show deserted streets and Bauhaus campus buildings, and often involve a ghostly, halo lighting effect, which the artist achieved by positioning himself so that the direct light from a streetlamp or window was largely obstructed by another object. Feininger, who liked to work alone and often after dark, captured moody, black-and-white images from the late 1920s as he prowled his German neighborhood and the Bauhaus campus.

His son T. Lux once wrote that his father “likes halos; he just wants to control them,” said Penley Knipe, Philip and Lynn Straus Conservator of Works of Art on Paper, who helped to prepare many of the images for the exhibition.

The show, which was in Germany and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles before making its final stop at Harvard, covers Feininger’s most prolific period with photography, 1928-39, and chronicles his experimentation with innovative techniques promoted by Moholy-Nagy, including the use of closely cropped images, multiple exposures, and unusual perspectives.

In a series of images from 1932-33, Feininger captured the ornate window displays of Weimar Germany. Elaborately dressed mannequins gaze back at the viewer, recalling, said Muir, the “eccentric characters” at the heart of many of his cartoons, caricatures, and early drawings. The images, the exhibition’s accompanying text notes, “emphasize not only the eerily lifelike and strangely seductive quality of the mannequins, but the disorienting, dreamlike effect created by reflections in the glass.”

In contrast to his photographic work, an adjoining gallery contains a selection of Feininger’s drawings and watercolors. His skills as a master caricaturist are evident in “Ghosties,” a whimsical, cartoonlike work of ink and watercolor. Nearby, a black ink and charcoal drawing depicting sharp angles and shapes evokes his unique style of cubism.

Included in the exhibition are Feininger’s original cameras, a Voigtländer Bergheil and a Leica I Model A camera from 1931. Displayed under glass in the center of the gallery, they offer viewers a tangible and tactile connection to the deeply personal, often ethereal works on the walls.

Fearful at the rise of Nazi Germany, the artist eventually relocated to the United States with his family in 1937. In 1938, he rented an apartment in Manhattan where he continued his photography, much of which is now preserved in the Harvard Art Museums’ collection of more than 18,000 negatives and slides in the Lyonel Feininger Archive of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The work in the show is drawn primarily from Harvard’s Houghton Library’s comprehensive Lyonel Feininger collection. The exhibit will be on view through June 2.

James Mitchell, assistant professor of genetics and complex diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health, outlined work on laboratory animals that measured whether a restricted diet or restriction of key nutrients to trigger similar physiological responses could protect against organ damage. The results showed improved resistance to kidney damage after blood was cut off to the organs for 30 minutes and then allowed to flow again. In one experiment, 40 percent of the control mice died from kidney injury, while all of the treated mice survived.

Though earlier experiments on life span examined long-term dietary restriction, in this case, Mitchell said, the benefit appeared to accrue after only a few days and then disappear again after a return to normal feeding. This raises the possibility, he said, of extending its use to humans by asking them to fast a few days before surgery.

Mitchell reported similar benefits in animals infected with cerebral malaria. The animals resisted the ailment better after being on a restricted diet for several days before infection. Though that result raises the possibility of humans fighting disease using dietary restriction, Mitchell pointed out that there remains the practical problem that people would have to know in advance they were about to become infected in order for it to help.

Mitchell discussed recent developments in the area of dietary restriction Wednesday at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Nutrition and Global Health. This year’s topic was “Nutrition and Child Health: Undernutrition.” The event, presented by the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Nutrition and Global Health Program, featured presentations on child nutrition in Peru, the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome on growth, premature birth, and HIV and stunting.

The symposium was introduced by Wafaie Fawzi, chair of the HSPH Department of Global Health and Population and Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences. Malnutrition remains a problem even as obesity spreads. Of the 8 million children who die each year around the world, an estimated 35 percent of them succumb to conditions directly or indirectly related to malnutrition, Fawzi said.

Over the past 15 years, the world has made significant progress in reducing child mortality, Fawzi said, but there is still a way to go to reach the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds from 1990 levels by 2015. Vaccines and nutrition programs have been responsible for significant progress, Fawzi said, but some children have seen little change in mortality: those in their first month of life. Children that young will need interventions aimed not only at them, but at their mothers during gestation.

Some nations, such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, have made significant progress in improving child nutrition, showing that gains can be made, Fawzi said. In Bangladesh, the percentage of children under 5 who are moderately or severely underweight fell from 67 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2008. Similarly, in Vietnam, those numbers fell from 46 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2008.

Mary Penny, of Peru’s Instituto de Investigación Nutricional, outlined a successful program to improve nutrition among urban poor children in the city of Trujillo.  The program, conducted at six community health centers, required limited resources because it focused on improved education of mothers, offering no supplemental feeding or money for food. About one in four Peruvian children under 5 are stunted.

The program devised three key nutritional messages: to serve children a thick puree instead of soup; to add special ingredients to it, like liver, egg, or fish; and to use patience, love, and good humor to get children to eat. While previously only the clinics’ nutritionists gave out dietary information, they taught the message to everyone at the health center, from the cleaning staff to the physicians. That way, everyone would be able to give the same advice if a mother asked.

The educational message, also contained in fliers, was combined with better counseling for mothers, and cooking demonstrations. The program resulted in an improved nutritional profile in the clinics’ catchment areas, which saw moderate stunting — an international measure of malnutrition — 18 months after implementation at just 5 percent, compared with 16 percent for a control area.

The study also identified barriers to improved nutritional education, including a lack of even the low level of resources required and high turnover of clinic personnel, Penny said.

Tillich was 69 when he began his sojourn at Harvard. He had longed for a setting where he could reconnect the deep inquiries of art, science, and religion that modern culture seemed bent on dividing. Harvard became that setting, an intellectual crossroads where poets, scientists, artists, and philosophers were gathered. The University witnessed Tillich’s final flowering as a great synthesizer; his goal was to connect the myriad ways we grapple with what he called ultimate concerns.

This important scholar of theology, art, and philosophy — author of the landmark “The Courage to Be” (1952) — was celebrated last week in an evening symposium at the Memorial Church. It marked the 50th anniversary of his retirement from Harvard and — by chance — the 100th anniversary of his ordination as a Lutheran minister.

The occasion was the 39th of the Paul Tillich Lectures, founded in 1990 by William R. Crout, S.T.B. ’58, A.M. ’69, and delivered once a term. Previous lecturers have included former Harvard President Nathan Marsh Pusey (1993), who had hired Tillich to revive a sagging divinity program; humanist and eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson (1997), Harvard’s Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus; and the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes (1999).

Gerald Holton (from left), Ann Belford Ulanov, Harvey G. Cox Jr., and Richard M. Hunt recalled the spiritual and intellectual ambition of theologian Paul Tillich in an event marking the 50th anniversary of his retirement from Harvard.

This term’s lecture was unusual: four speakers instead of one. They all remembered Tillich in person.

Called “Paulus” by his friends, Tillich loved being at Harvard. “Part of the reason is this University’s fortuitous openness,” especially in the years just before and just after World War II, said onetime University Marshal Richard M. Hunt.

Like his contemporary Albert Einstein, Tillich was a product of a particular educational ideal in the Europe of his boyhood: Master Kultur, then hew to a specialization. Harvard offered a matching intellectual depth, along with an engaging émigré community of European scholars who came up in the same way.

Then, said Hunt, there was Tillich’s title of “University Professor,” shared by only four others at the time. (There are 24 University Professors at Harvard today.) It conferred on him the freedom to teach undergraduates — something Tillich had never done before — as well as lecture widely to students in law, medicine, divinity, public health, art, and education.

Charming, modest, intellectually eager, a great listener —“he seduced us all,” said speaker Gerald Holton, remembering Tillich at a faculty dinner in 1955. (Holton, whose relationship with Harvard began in 1943, is Harvard’s Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and professor of the history of science emeritus.)

Tillich lived to regard his time at Harvard as “the fulfillment” of his career, said Holton, and in the meantime added a presence that was “magisterial and accessible, and just fun.”

Harvard was also where Tillich arrived at his final sense of where science stands in the quest for meaning. Early in his life science was “a respected part of Kultur,” said Holton. Then came a long middle period of doubt about science and technology. As late as 1957 Tillich wrote that “the dimension of faith is not the dimension of science.”

Yet Harvard inspired a third phase — not one of harmony between science and religion, but at least a “fruitful tension,” said Holton. In a 1959 Harvard lecture, Tillich held that “ultimate questions appear in different disciplines.”

Holton delivered a Tillich lecture in 2004 on the “quest for the ultimate” that Tillich shared with Einstein, a man who was sometimes his philosophical adversary.

“They both reached out to the limits of human understanding,” Holton said then — and the two men shared a common theme: “the quest for the unification of apparent irreconcilables.” Einstein’s quest was to unify the major threads of physics; Tillich’s was to synthesize the seemingly divergent paths of science, art, and religion in the modern age — “the reunion of what eternally belongs together,” he wrote, “but what has been separated in history.”

The first non-Jewish scholar that the Nazis dismissed from a university, Tillich immigrated to the United States in 1933. He found a 20-year haven at Union Theological Seminary, but only at Harvard did he open his arms wide, happy, he said, to be among more than just theologians.

Tillich was ready for years of “conversation at the heart of reality,” said Ann Belford Ulanov, a 1959 Radcliffe College graduate who saw him lecture in the 1950s. She teaches psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary, and delivered Tillich lectures in 1995 and 2002.

Start with his collected sermons, she advised, which were delivered in the pared-down English he started to learn only in his late 40s. They provide a pathway to his more complex academic work. (It was at Harvard, for one, that Tillich finished his three-volume “Systematic Theology.”)

Another speaker, Harvey G. Cox Jr., the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, was a Harvard graduate student during the Tillich era. He remembered the great man’s final home seminar, the last of a series of gatherings at his apartment on Chauncy Street. A print of Picasso’s “Guernica” hung in the apartment’s seminar space, a rendering of the mural-size painting of German and Italian warplanes bombing the civilians of Guernica, Spain, in 1937. Tillich, no stranger to war, regarded the iconic Picasso image as “the greatest religious painting of the 20th century,” said Cox.

A visual thinker, Tillich saw great art, music, and literature as a natural font of the symbols and analogies necessary to understand the nature of the divine in a modern age that eschewed religious expression.

He had a “willingness to stare modernity in the face,” said Cox — and a willingness to let go of traditional religious expressions like “God” and “faith” and “grace” that had “lost their original power.”

Finding analogs to these old concepts meant spirited inquiries into other disciplines, and Harvard allowed Tillich that room, said Cox — “the scope he needed to pursue his lifelong project: crossing boundaries.”

Addressing his audience as if he were a scientist, Black said, “Here is how it works: The air resistance keeps things from falling really quickly.”

He dropped the cup. Then, he released his handmade parachute. The orange paper billowed out and the second cup slowly sank to the ground. Black continued his demonstration, launching a rainbow of parachute cups and sharing his observations of the performance of each to the gathering crowd.

“He doesn’t need my help any more, I’m in the way now,” said Ed Portal mentor Tri Huynh ’13, as he proudly stood by his mentee.

Huynh is the Harvard College junior who worked with Black for the past 10 weeks to develop dozens of parachutes of all shapes, sizes, and materials to test their impact on air resistance and discuss basic laws of physics.

The demonstration was just one of more than 20 featured presentations by mentees in science, math, and writing that engaged and informed those gathered at the Harvard Allston Education Portal on April 29 for the end of the semester “Showcase.”

The event drew nearly 100 people, including Ed Portal mentors, the Allston youngsters they’ve worked with, family members, and Harvard faculty and staff, to celebrate the conclusion of yet another semester of learning.  Both mentees and mentors demonstrated the special connections that form at the Ed Portal and how contagious the excitement of learning can be.

Since 2008, the Harvard Allston Education Portal has fostered learning and exploration between the Harvard and Allston-Brighton communities.  But this particular “Showcase” offered something special.

Visitors were treated to a preview of the Ed Portal Annex, a new flexible space that will triple the size of the Ed Portal, allowing it to extend beyond its hallmark mentoring program to add new academic, recreational, and cultural programming.

In his welcome remarks, Ed Portal Faculty Director Rob Lue said the Ed Portal was opening a new chapter.

“The Ed Portal is meant to be a doorway through which the Harvard and the Allston-Brighton community can come together to share the excitement of learning — and now the Annex has expanded the doorway even further,” said Lue, professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology and director of Life Sciences Education at Harvard.

“With this much larger, extremely flexible space, we can explore new activities involving the arts, social sciences, literature, and recreation and provide new kinds of meaningful interactions for families, adults, and children in the community,” he said.

With that, it was Harvard’s turn for demonstrations. Lue led everyone through new double doors into a massive multicolored exhibition space, which prompted a chorus of “wows” and “cools” behind him.

A group of Harvard students, called the Harvard Breakers, christened the Annex with an explosive performance of break dancing, demonstrating what Lue referred to as “a different side of what Harvard students can do.” He pointed to it as an example of the kind of performances and programming Ed Portal faculty and staff can provide in partnership with Harvard students, noting that there are there are more than 400 Harvard student groups on campus.

Visiting scholar Benny Shilo, a Radcliffe Institute fellow and professor of molecular genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, introduced a temporary photo exhibition, where pairs of scientific and human images are employed as metaphors for the underlying concepts of embryonic development.

“This is like a blank canvas,” said Allston resident Greg Lyons after the presentations. Lyons brings his daughter, Nora, to the Ed Portal for weekly science mentoring. “There is a lot of potential here.”

The Ed Portal’s hallmark program is the academic mentoring for school-age children by Harvard undergraduates. The Ed Portal also hosts workforce development classes for adults, presents public lectures, and offers scholarships to Harvard athletics programs, museum programs, and classes at the Harvard Extension School. More than 1,465 neighbors participate in Ed Portal programming, including the 110 children mentored each semester by 24 Harvard undergraduates.

With the Annex’s expansive, flexible space, the Ed Portal will offer new opportunities to develop and enrich the “whole person” through meaningful recreational, artistic, and leisure activities for all ages that connect Harvard and the community, said Lue.

The Annex officially opened in May with an activity area that included board games, an art gallery, and the forthcoming addition of seven holes of educational mini-golf.  The Annex will hold special events throughout the summer, with additional Annex programming launching this fall.

VanRooyen, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, described Tuesday how a 6-year-old orphan named Fatima helped him to understand the harsh conditions and stark, life-or-death choices being made by refugees every day — and also showed him how much he still had to learn.

VanRooyen is part of a generation of disaster responders who learned on the job, relying on the advice of co-workers, on their own wits, and on hard-won experience to apply medical and other skills to the unique environment that exists in a war zone, after a devastating earthquake, amid a hurricane’s floodwaters, and in other relief settings.

VanRooyen, Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk, Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights Jennifer Leaning, and dozens of others launched a comprehensive training program for humanitarian workers to help a new generation avoid the shock and steep learning curve currently experienced by thousands of humanitarian workers around the world.

Called the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard, the program will be offered by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), an interfaculty effort that VanRooyen directs and that is focused on using research to improve aid response.

VanRooyen and Leaning, who together founded HHI, have been toiling for years to improve the work of disaster responders, using research to sort out effective responses from non-effective, wasteful, and even harmful ones, fostering a new generation of humanitarian leaders through their teaching and maintaining a steady drumbeat calling for creating formal institutions to foster best practices and help the next generation of disaster workers avoid the mistakes of their predecessors.

On the day VanRooyen met Fatima at the Somali refugee camp, she was malnourished, with thinning hair, and looked closer to 3 years old than 6. When he asked the women he was treating who the girl was, they answered that she was an orphan, and nobody cared for her. When he expressed astonishment that nobody had taken her in, one woman took him by the arm into the rows upon rows of plastic tarps that passed for shelter and showed him her own hungry and coughing children, whom she was struggling to keep alive.

“She decided to save her own children and let another child die on her own doorstep. I realized I knew nothing, nothing about what that lady was going through,” VanRooyen said. “We need a way to prepare people like me. The consequences of our ignorance affect the lives of an enormous number of people.”

There’s an increasing awareness of the need for formal training for the 250,000 relief workers around the world, Frenk said. There’s also an understanding that the next generation of global health leaders must be versed in humanitarian relief, an appropriate role for a university to provide, he said.

“There’s a huge humanitarian effort around the world, but so far there hasn’t been a systematic educational effort in service of humanitarian workers,” said Frenk. “This really represents a major stride forward.”

The academy will be built on three main pillars. The first will be the Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative, an expansion of the existing Humanitarian Studies Initiative, which is a program for humanitarian professionals offered through Harvard, Tufts University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The program’s expansion was enabled by what VanRooyen termed “a transformative gift” by Harvard alumni Jonathan and Jeannie Lavine, who on Tuesday said they saw their gift as a way to give back and hopefully inspire others to help.

The second pillar will be a new, interdisciplinary concentration in humanitarian studies, ethics, and human rights, to be offered through the Harvard School of Public Health beginning in 2013. The last pillar will be an emphasis on hands-on training through internships with humanitarian relief agencies.

“We have a daunting task ahead of us, but we’re hopeful,” VanRooyen said.

In its 10th year, citywide cleanup event brought together staff from across the University, all of whom rolled up their sleeves to contribute to the cause on April 27.

“We’re really proud to be making contributions to the community in a sustained and meaningful way,” said Christine Heenan, vice president of Harvard Public Affairs & Communications, the University department that coordinated Harvard’s participation along with Harvard Real Estate (HRE) for the 10th consecutive year. “Since last year’s Boston Shines, we’ve celebrated the opening of the i-lab, Stone Hearth Pizza, and Library Park. This is one more way for us to affirm our connection to the Boston community, and there’s even more to come next year.”

“Mayor [Thomas M.] Menino started Boston Shines 10 years ago for the city to come together on one day to make it a cleaner, better place to live,” said Angela Holm, neighborhood coordinator with the city of Boston. “Residents, businesses, and institutions together took pride in their community this weekend to make our neighborhoods better for everyone, and Harvard’s participation each year has contributed greatly to these improvements.”

Paula Alexander, a staff assistant at the Harvard Business School and an Allston resident, helped rake and gather bags of leaves at the Honan-Allston Library. “My husband and I own a house right on North Harvard Street,” she said. “We’re part of Friends of the Library, and we like to keep it looking nice. Allston is kind of a forgotten section of the city, so an event like this means a lot. For Harvard to step up, chip in, and provide all the manpower to brighten the area … as residents, we really appreciate it. It’s wonderful to see how it’s grown over the years, and how much more Harvard does every year.”

At William Smith Field, Berley McKenna of HRE gave a park bench a fresh coat of “Monster-green” paint. “I came out for Boston Shines last year,” she said. “It’s great to feel like you’re having an immediate impact. I hope it says that we’re a part of the community and that we feel as much of a responsibility to the area as the people who live here. We’re all in this together.”

On Western Avenue, Monette Salud of Harvard Planning and Project Management (HPPM) filled in tree wells with mulch, a procedure that helps rainwater get down to the roots of the tree. As Joe Jones of HRE rolled a new barrel of mulch to Western Avenue, he nodded at the trees lining the street. “Harvard actually planted these,” he said. “Events like this show that Harvard cares about how the neighborhood looks, and that they’re engaged in the community.”

Paint roller in hand, Monika Bankowski of HPPM stepped back from a freshly painted bench, double-checking for any spots she might have missed. “It’s great to help the community and get involved,” she said. “I know a lot of people who live in the area. I think being out here shows that we care, and that Harvard cares.”

In nearly three decades at Harvard, Evans and his laboratory have developed innovative new approaches to molecular design, creating new tools and techniques that have transformed the synthesis of complex organic structures. He was also responsible for replicating more than 50 bioactive molecules found in nature, enabling their therapeutic use in chemotherapies, antibiotics, and AIDS drugs.

“Dr. Evans has revolutionized the way scientists think about and carry out complex-molecule synthesis,” said Wilhelmina E. Robertson, chair of the Welch Foundation. “This has opened the door to produce large quantities of beneficial compounds found in nature to battle disease, as well as to ensure ever-more targeted delivery of chemotherapeutics.”

Duflo, who in 2003 co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal) at MIT, said that, historically, assisting poor people has taken the form of charity, providing intermittent aid without consulting them about what they need. That has led to mistrust and little progress, she said. On the right, the notion of aid to the poor has taken the form of libertarian paternalism, that individuals are freer if they have more choice.

But the rich benefit from a paternalism that offers them clean water and public health safeguards such as immunization against disease as a default. They don’t have to seek out these mainstays of modern industrialized life. That also means the rich are less likely to make mistakes that pose life-threatening health risks, she said.

“The emphasis on self-reliance can go too far. When you create the conditions where the basic constraints are more or less automatic, you give freedom, not take it away," said Esther Duflo, a development economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The emphasis on self-reliance can go too far,” Duflo said. “When you create the conditions where the basic constraints are more or less automatic, you give freedom, not take it away.”

Duflo is the rare economist to be selected to give the Tanner Lectures at Harvard, said Harvard President Drew Faust. Harvard is one of nine universities in the United States and the United Kingdom that annually host the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which Faust called one of Harvard’s “outstanding intellectual traditions.”

Duflo has gained renown for her trailblazing work as a development economist applying randomized experiments through J-Pal. Such use of randomized experiments, best known for their initial use in drug trials, has drawn criticism from colleagues, including Angus Deaton of Princeton. Deaton and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Harvard’s Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, were on hand to respond to Duflo’s lecture Wednesday. She also spoke on Thursday and Friday.

Duflo, 39, who completed her Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1999, has received numerous academic honors and prizes, including the David N. Kershaw Award, the John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist in America under 40, and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. She approaches poverty as a problem that can be solved.

What her research in India and other developing countries has shown is that too much choice about everyday needs, such as whether to boil water or trust the government to immunize children continually, imperils the poor. If your basic health relies on your remembering to boil the water, you are not more free, she said.

“You might manage to always boil your water and not get sick. But you have spent so much time and energy boiling water, you will no longer have the energy to do anything else,” she said.

Chlorine is easily available in Africa, she said, but its purchase is sensitive to price. If people are waiting for the price to be low and they have to go buy the chlorine, it is easy to stumble and wind up drinking unpurified water and getting sick. That’s why the simple change of supplying free chlorine and locating it next to water sources would improve the lives of many poor Africans, Duflo said.

“In Boston, I would have to go on a camping trip to drink unchlorinated water,” she said. “In both senses, the rich are subject to a more paternalistic policy than the poor. Does that make them less free?” she asked.

If basic services were provided to the poor as they are to the rich, the poor would be able to focus on higher concerns such as work.

“Without basic capabilities such as health and the capacity to achieve good nutritional status, one is not free.”

Duflo said research has shown that “choosing is not cost-less, it takes time, effort, energy, and stress. People don’t like to choose among many options.” Poor people have too much freedom if they have to juggle multiple jobs plus choices in how to meet their basic needs. That requires more effort than the rich are required to spend.

“The problem,” she said, “is not that people make the wrong choice but that they spend too much time pondering their choices.”

In his 2009 American Graduation Initiative, Obama outlined his support of community colleges and his plan to have 5 million more community college graduates by 2020.

On Monday, a panel of education experts convened at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to explore in detail what it will take to reach Obama’s benchmark goal. Unsurprisingly, money topped the list during an Askwith Forum discussion moderated by Bridget Terry Long, HGSE’s Xander Professor of Education and Economics, as did the need for greater collaboration and support from various stakeholders.

With students graduating from college with on average $25,000 in debt, the administration has taken aim at bringing down the skyrocketing costs, said panelist Martha Kanter, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education and an HGSE graduate.

The number of recipients of federal Pell Grants has grown from 6 million in 2008 to 9.8 million, and the government will increase the amount of the award by $900 this fall, Kanter said. It will also continue to ease access to federal student aid, and work to increase tax credits for higher education, promote and strengthen the income-based loan repayment program passed by Congress in 2010, and support public-service loan forgiveness.

But Kanter said that the federal and state governments need to help families and students make informed decisions about college by providing them with simplified information. And colleges have to figure out ways to constrain costs.

“Our strategy,” she said, “is shared responsibility.”

Bridget Terry Long (from left), moderated the discussion with Martha Kanter, Rolando Montoya, and Hilary Pennington.The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to improve the U.S. public education system. A big part of that effort involves supporting “brave leaders in taking risks,” said Pennington, the organization’s former director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives.

In addition to fighting disease, poverty, and hunger in developing countries, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to improve the U.S. public education system. A big part of that effort involves supporting “brave leaders in taking risks,” said Hilary Pennington, the organization’s former director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives.

As part of an effort to meet Obama’s goal, the private foundation focuses on funding networks of institutions to attack similar problems.

One such initiative, titled “Completion by Design,” involves 21 community colleges in four states that are attempting to overhaul their students’ experience. From the outset, the project insisted on the participation of representatives from state governments, said Pennington, in an effort to “understand the policy barriers” that make it difficult for organizations to effectively serve their student populations.

While each college is approaching the goal differently, said Pennington, the initiative encourages them to develop their practices “in consistent ways so that there will be a body of evidence at the end of their work that helps policymakers and institutions understand better how to get change at scale.”

Rolando Montoya lent his institutional perspective to the discussion from his post as the provost of Miami Dade College, a state school in Miami that has eight campuses and an enrollment of more than 174,000 students, many from low-income and minority households.

As part of an effort to understand how to do a better job of ensuring students graduate, he turned to the students themselves, conducting a series of rigorous focus groups.

The surprising findings revealed that the students wanted more structure and an “intrusive” administration that would be uncompromisingly strict over issues like deadlines, orientation sessions, and course enrollment options.

“A big issue is a lack of structure. … The kids are telling us: ‘Tell us what to do; guide us with more detail; don’t give us so many options; please, please, give us a prescribed curriculum, a prescribed pathway that we can follow. … That’s what they really want.”

Addressing a crowd of more than 100 students, faculty, staff, and alumni, Dean Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences hailed the groundbreaking as a celebration of Harvard’s residential system and its centrality to undergraduate education.

“Dean Smith has been extraordinary in the prototyping and ensuring that the materials used will really satisfy a need and meet the demands and expectations of the undergraduates. If we had done it 10 years ago, we might have ended up with something that wouldn’t endure the 50-year life span that we hope this project will have.” — Gwill York

“The House system is the institution at the very heart of the Harvard experience,” Smith said. “The Houses provide a structure that fosters transformative connections to peers, to faculty, to tutors. In turn, these connections further students’ intellectual, social, and moral growth.”

Smith, a computer scientist, spoke only hours after Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the launch of edX, a transformational partnership in online education. He said that the type of living and learning experience that Harvard will offer future students will only become more important and relevant in the digital age.

“Technology has expanded our social networks,” Smith said, “but the quality of these digital connections will never replace the rich, unexpected, face-to-face experience of a House community. In today’s plugged-in, always-on world, the kind of connection afforded by the House system is a truly precious resource.”

Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds spoke about the House system’s efforts to live up to the ideal of a diverse and inclusive community since its establishment in 1931. The addition of Dudley House in the 1950s, Hammonds said, brought commuters into the system. The late ’60s saw an increase in African-American students. Women were integrated in 1970 when the Harvard and Radcliffe Houses merged. The result of all these changes, Hammonds said, is a distinctive, lively, and diverse living and learning experience for undergraduates.

“Today, the Houses retain much of their historical character, while still hosting a lively spectrum of students, tutors, and faculty members,” she said. “They are centers of cultural, intellectual, and social life in an otherwise decentralized campus. It has been the work of many generations to turn each House into a real home.”

Quincy Co-Master Lee Gehrke said that the day’s ceremony was the end of a long road of planning, consultation, and preparation that involved the House community. He singled out architects Steve Kieran and Joanne Aitken, as well as Steve Needham, senior director of project management, Merle Bicknell, assistant dean of FAS physical resources, and Suzy Nelson, dean of the Office of Student Life, for their contributions. Gehrke joked that he and his wife were considering a career change because of the House renewal process.

“Deb and I have also acquired practical skills,” he said. “As a result of attending innumerable meetings, we now know more about bathroom tiles, window frames, and shower ventilation than we ever imagined. We may be qualified for post-Harvard careers in building design consulting!”

Catherine Katz ’13 and Scott Yim ’13, co-chairs of the Quincy House Committee, said that students had been involved in every part of the renewal planning process. Yim expressed enthusiasm for the effect that the test project is likely to have on residential life.

“Old Quincy will look the same on the exterior. But the inside will be improved, not only in a physical sense, but also in the way students are brought together as a community,” Yim said. “We look forward to the example that Quincy will set … in bringing students together through the basement and terrace-level public spaces, as well as the common rooms.”

Also participating in the day’s ceremonies were FAS capital campaign co-chair Carl Martignetti ’81, M.B.A. ’85, and Harvard College Fund Executive Committee co-chair Gwill York ’79, M.B.A. ’84. Martignetti said he was excited to think of the type of living and learning experience that Harvard will offer students after the test project is finished.

“I think House renewal is as important a priority as any on campus,” he said, “and will do as much as anything else to enhance the undergraduate experience beyond the bricks and mortar. There’s really an opportunity to enhance programming and the overall experience for students. To see the first piece become a reality is an important moment.”

Deborah Gehrke, co-master of Quincy House (from left), Catherine Katz '13, Scott Yim '13, Dean of Harvard College Evelynn M. Hammonds (podium), and Lee Gehrke, co-master of Quincy House, during the groundbreaking ceremony.

York shared Martignetti’s excitement and praised the University for taking advantage of a once-in-a-century opportunity to renew the Houses and enhance the learning experience at the College.

“I think the timing for this is exquisite,” she said. “Dean Smith has been extraordinary in the prototyping and ensuring that the materials used will really satisfy a need and meet the demands and expectations of the undergraduates. If we had done it 10 years ago, we might have ended up with something that wouldn’t endure the 50-year life span that we hope this project will have.”