Physician and acclaimed novelist underlines immigrants’ contributions to Harvard and the nation, urges graduates to show courage, character in the face of hardship
Boston police Captain James Claiborne, who was once a candidate for commissioner of the department and was at one point the highest-ranking minority member on the force, is leaving to become deputy police chief at Harvard University.
Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, on a panel with three other university presidents at the First Draft of History conference, noted that the crash has occasioned a moment of stocktaking, in which universities have been reminded the importance of keeping focus on the “the long view.” Universities, unlike corporations, should not be focused on the next quarter but rather on the ages. Cultivating this sense of the long view, Faust said, and instilling critical, skeptical thinking in students, might have helped to forestall or mitigate the economic cataclysm of the last eighteen months.
The Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) is pleased to announce the hiring of two senior level managers, James Claiborne and Michael Giacoppo, to serve as deputy chiefs for operations.
Three American scientists, including Jack W. Szostak, genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for research linked to telomerase, an “immortality enzyme” that allows cells to divide continuously without dying and could play a role in the uncontrolled spread of cancer cells.
Jack W. Szostak, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, is one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year, with Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine….
Jack W. Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for work on cellular structures called telomeres, which protect chromosomes from degradation.
The nation’s oldest university, which has been handing out homework since 1636 and handing off footballs since 1874, will host its first homecoming this fall, a potential new tradition designed to attract alumni to campus in years that The Game is played at Yale.
Law Professor Asish Nanda (pictured) said he is leading a movement to reform the recruiting process that would entail transitioning law schools to a system similar to the method medical schools use to match students with residencies.
Jerome Kagan’s “Aha!” moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things.
At its third meeting of the year (Sept. 30), the Faculty Council heard a review of the Ph.D. Program in Biological Sciences in Dental Medicine. The council also continued a discussion of the nomenclature of the Harvard Extension School and its degrees, as well as a proposal to change some of the procedures of the Administrative Board of Harvard College.
Tea time at Harvard is a longstanding tradition. The Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes remarks on drinking tea at Harvard in 1968 while drinking tea today.
Historian Caroline Elkins, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” has been named professor of history at Harvard University.
Researchers at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston will sequence the genomes of at least 85 people diagnosed with autism in a bid to tease out the genetic basis for some cases of the neuropsychiatric disorder.
“If we really want to understand what’s happed in the history of Earth, we really have to understand this cross talk between the physical and biological processes,” says study coauthor Andrew Knoll of Harvard University.
Donna Tremonte of the Harvard Herbaria loves plants so much that she travels to far-flung locales like Africa and Venezuela to study them. But that’s just part of her job.
The Radcliffe Institute’s first decade is being celebrated this fall, starting with a two-day symposium Oct. 8 and 9 — a star-power taste of the institute’s signature interdisciplinary exchanges.
This spring Harvard launched a certification program for “green offices,” bringing the University’s big ambitions for energy savings down to the personal scale.
In the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, faculty and staff are honing in on saving energy and materials, helping the University to significantly reduce its greenhouse emissions by 2016.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Michael D. Smith Sept. 25 announced the appointment of Leslie Kirwan as the new FAS dean for administration and finance, effective Nov. 2, 2009. A graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Kennedy School, Kirwan has served as the secretary of administration and finance for the commonwealth of Massachusetts since 2007.
The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School recently announced the 2009 winners of the Innovations in American Government Awards on Sept. 14.
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