Campus & Community

Harvard’s Summer Youth Employment Program puts local high school students from Boston and Cambridge to work on campus during the summer months. For many young people, it’s their first job.

Ruth Goins ’13 and Kabungo “Yanick” Mulumba ’15 were presented with the Joseph L. Barrett Award at a special ceremony on Wednesday.

This week at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) 10 teams of students from across Harvard demonstrated their projects as finalists in the President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship.

Richard J. Murnane, the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), will serve as acting dean of the HGSE, President Drew Faust announced May 9.

One senior from each of Harvard’s Houses will speak during Morning Prayers as part of “Senior Talks.” The May 9 speaker is Fred-Ivo Baca of Leverett House, with the series concluding on May 16 with Cassandra Thomson of Winthrop House.

Eighty-two percent of students admitted to the Class of 2017 plan to enroll at Harvard this August. This is the highest yield since the Class of 1973 entered approximately two generations ago. The yield for the Class of 2016 was 80.2 percent.

Soledad O’Brien, a CNN special correspondent, will speak to graduating seniors on Senior Class Day, held in Tercentenary Theatre.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study announced 49 artists and scholars who have been selected as its 2013-2014 fellows, among them are 15 Harvard faculty.

Harvard Law School’s David Barron will lead a task force that will develop a set of recommendations regarding Harvard’s email privacy policy.

The members of the email policy task force, which David Barron, Harvard Law School’s Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law, will chair.

Korean pop trailblazer PSY will speak at Harvard on May 9. A live stream of the event will be available online at harvard.edu/live-stream.

The city of Cambridge, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have signed a “Community Compact for a Sustainable Future,” aimed at leveraging the intellectual and entrepreneurial capacity of the public-private sectors in Cambridge to build a healthy, livable, and sustainable future.

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.

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.

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

“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 Providence ’14.

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.

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 life sciences.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected 11 from Harvard as its newest members.

As a region-wide lockdown closed Harvard, University officials struggled with the difficult decision to cancel Visitas, Harvard College’s program for newly admitted students. Members of the Harvard community used social media to reach out to those who had planned to attend the event.

After a tense Friday that saw the campus and the Greater Boston area on lockdown, Harvard came to life again Saturday as students and visitors flooded into Harvard Square.

As Greater Boston shut down during Friday’s manhunt for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, Harvard halted too — and found peace, togetherness, and hope.

For the many members of the Harvard community seeking to help the victims in the marathon tragedy and their families, please consider donating to the fund established by Governor Patrick and Mayor Menino, The One Fund Boston.

Harvard Professor of Economics Raj Chetty has been awarded the 2013 John Bates Clark Medal in recognition of his work, which combines empirical evidence and theory to inform the design of more effective government policies on everything from taxation to unemployment to education.

The innovative international scholar Tamar Herzog has been appointed the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also will become the Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.