All articles


  • Campus & Community

    The tools of art

    Inspired by creative solutions that evolved in Colombia and Argentina, Harvard Professor Doris Sommer showed her Ed Portal audience how the arts could transform the ways in which a developing society perceived itself and the values inherent in its culture and community.

  • Science & Tech

    Robotic insects make first controlled flight

    The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

  • Campus & Community

    Faculty Council meeting held April 24

    At their last meeting of the year on April 24, the members of the Faculty Council approved preliminary versions of the University Extension School courses for 2013-14 and Courses of Instruction for 2013-14.

  • Nation & World

    Reflections on a nuclear mission

    Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Nobel laureate Roy Glauber reflected on his two years in Los Alamos, N.M., during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first atomic bomb.

  • Arts & Culture

    Digitizing a movement

    A team of Harvard scholars is cataloging, and transcribing, and digitizing thousands of 18th- and 19th-century anti-slavery petitions held in the Massachusetts State Archives.

  • Nation & World

    Talent on the sidelines

    Every spring, high-achieving high school seniors around the country play the college admissions game in the lead-up to the May 1 decision deadline. Research by Christopher Avery of HKS research shows that many poor but promising students are sitting out.

  • Campus & Community

    Sorensen named trustee of National Humanities Center

    Diana Sorensen is one of four new trustees of the National Humanities Center.

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Pippin’ meets Tony

    When artistic director Diane Paulus gave the classic “Pippin” a facelift for 2013-13 lineup of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), people took notice. Now “Pippin” has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including best director of a musical for Paulus.

  • Arts & Culture

    Making poetry sing

    Radcliffe fellow and classically trained pianist Tsitsi Jaji uses her musical expertise and knowledge of comparative literature to explore how composers of African descent set poetry to music for solo voice and piano.

  • Nation & World

    The price of women’s immigration

    Author Sonia Nazario told a Radcliffe conference that people don’t generally know that large numbers of women who immigrate to the United States illegally to get jobs and support their families back home leave their own children behind to do so.

  • Science & Tech

    Understanding student weaknesses

    As part of an unusual study that surveyed 181 middle school physical science teachers and nearly 10,000 students, researchers found that the most successful teachers were those who knew what students would get wrong on standardized tests.

  • Campus & Community

    Discovering the path to Harvard

    “In my first semester at Harvard, I worked with several other students to create a chapter of the national DREAM Program here. It was my first foray into working with youth, and I was excited to give Cambridge kids a taste of the campus that was so close to their homes,” says Harvard student Sara…

  • Science & Tech

    Seeking fairness in ads

    Latanya Sweeney, Harvard professor of government and technology in residence, wants to add a new factor to the weighting Google uses when delivering online ads, one that measures bias. In a new paper, she describes how such a calculation could be built into the ad-delivery algorithm Google uses.

  • Health

    Giants behind, challenges ahead

    Fifty years after its founding, the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population took time for reflection and a look ahead on April 25 during an all-day symposium at the School.

  • Campus & Community

    In plaza, ‘remembrance walls’ rise

    In the wake of tragedy, people gather to support each other, and to give thanks for family, friends, and community. After the Boston Marathon bombings and the area shutdown during the search for suspects, the Harvard community has been doing just that.

  • Health

    Melding the Web and the tactile

    An organismic and evolutionary biology course this semester has formed a virtual classroom with other universities to examine the holdings of museum collections and the vast amount of data they contain and integrate them into the classroom.

  • Campus & Community

    $50M gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation

    The Blavatnik Family Foundation, headed by Len Blavatnik, M.B.A. ’89, has donated $50 million to Harvard University. The gift will launch a major initiative to expedite the development of basic science discoveries into new breakthrough therapies for patients and cures for disease. The gift underpins Harvard’s growing commitment to creating an entrepreneurial culture in the…

  • Arts & Culture

    Music as fine medicine

    For the first time, students at Harvard Medical School in the Longwood area are participating in the annual Arts First festival, the University’s four-day celebration of the visual, literary, and performing arts.

  • Campus & Community

    View from the Porch

    Harvard officials dedicated a new common space, called the Porch, in the Yard on Wednesday, and welcomed the reopening of the science plaza after a reconstruction project.

  • Arts & Culture

    Mapping blackness in creativity

    Art historian Steven Nelson inaugurated the Richard Cohen Lecture Series at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute with a look at how black American artists draw from centuries of the African diaspora.

  • Nation & World

    Reshaping Manhattan’s Midtown

    Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni working in New York City outline a plan to revamp a 70-block area around Grand Central Station, where zoning restrictions have long restricted the height of buildings, to allow for structures twice as tall.

  • Campus & Community

    What rocks can teach

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History has opened its renovated Earth and Planetary Sciences gallery, linking the fantastic mineral displays to the story of the Earth and the work of faculty members who conduct research on geological processes.

  • Arts & Culture

    Matt Damon, on his craft

    Actors Matt Damon and John Lithgow met at Sanders Theatre on Thursday for a spirited conversation that kicked off Harvard’s annual Arts First celebration.

  • Nation & World

    Reflections on week of terror

    A panel at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum examined the interplay of law enforcement coordination, leadership, and social and traditional media during the Boston Marathon bombing investigation.

  • Health

    Potential diabetes breakthrough

    Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have discovered a hormone that holds promise for a dramatically more effective treatment of type 2 diabetes, a metabolic illness afflicting an estimated 26 million Americans.

  • Campus & Community

    Resources in the aftermath of tragedy

    The following events are being held to help the Harvard community cope with Monday’s tragedy during the Boston Marathon.

  • Campus & Community

    Radcliffe Gymnasium renamed

    At a celebratory event on Wednesday, the Radcliffe Gymnasium was renamed the Knafel Center in honor of Sidney R. Knafel ’52, M.B.A. ’54, and in recognition of the center’s increasing role in promoting intellectual exchange across Harvard’s Schools and with the public.

  • Science & Tech

    Science in service

    Teams of students from “Engineering Sciences 20: How to Create Things and Have Them Matter” in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are working to create unusual products that are designed to change the world.

  • Science & Tech

    The problem with predictions

    People would like to predict the future, says author and mathematician David Orrell, but it remains quite a difficult thing to do, even with lots of data at hand.

  • Campus & Community

    To protect, serve, mourn

    The Harvard University Police Department joined thousands of colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday to pay tribute to Sean Collier, the officer slain in aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.