Newsmakers

Khoshbins named interim Currier House masters

Shah and Laura Khoshbin were recently named interim masters of Currier House for the 2007-08 academic year.

An associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Shah has served Currier House for more than 30 years as a tutor-in-residence and chair of the Currier Pre-Medical Advisory Committee. His wife, Laura, is a senior attorney in the Office of the General Counsel for Partners HealthCare System Inc. (the law office for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and McLean Hosptal). At Currier, she has served for more than 10 years as a tutor-in-residence and for seven years as the chair of the

Currier Pre-Law Advisory Committee. Additionally, the Khoshbins have taught a Currier House seminar on medicine, law, and professional ethics for many years. The couple has a five-year-old daughter, Amy.

In September, a committee of Currier House staff and students will reconvene to continue the search for a House master.

HBS doctoral student Pathak elected to Society of Fellows

Parag A. Pathak, who recently earned his Ph.D. in business economics after four years of study at both Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Department of Economics, has been elected a junior fellow in Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows. Pathak is the first graduate of the HBS doctoral program to be elected a junior fellow by the society.

Organized in 1933, the society provides outstanding young scholars from all fields of study with a three-year fellowship at Harvard. According to the society, junior fellows “must be persons of exceptional ability, originality, and resourcefulness.”

A summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College, Pathak received both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree (in applied mathematics and economics) in 2002. As a graduate student, he won the State Farm Companies Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis, “Essays on Market Design,” and a National Science Foundation research fellowship, among other awards. After completing his tenure as a junior fellow, Pathak will join the MIT Economics Department as an assistant professor.

Georgetown confers Bailyn with honorary degree

Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor Emeritus, was awarded an honorary degree by Georgetown University, where he delivered the commencement address to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in May. The citation emphasized his devotion in recent years to his special seminar on Atlantic history: “This turn to the Atlantic context is beyond question the most important recent shift in our understanding of early American history. Such shifts in scholarly conceptions of long-established fields of inquiry are rare in any case, and are always led by someone who combines the highest intellectual standards with the skills of a master teacher.”

Chemistry Ph.D. candidates receive Roche award

The Roche Group recently named Harvard Ph.D. candidates Jonathan Lawrenceand Yi Zhang two of its 2007 Excellence in Chemistry Award winners for research and accomplishments in the field of organic chemistry.

As two of the 12 Ph.D. students and professors selected for the award, Lawrence and Zhang participated in a symposium earlier this month where they discussed their research projects and received overviews of the drug discovery process by Roche scientists. Roche chemists in Palo Alto, Calif., and Nutley, N.J., selected the winners.