Campus & Community

The No. 25 Harvard women’s swimming and diving team swam and dove like champions this past weekend despite having to split up the team to compete in two different competitions. The swimmers placed first out of eight teams at the 2009 Ivy League Championships meet (Feb. 26-28) at the Nassau County Aquatic Center in East Meadow, N.Y., on Saturday (Feb. 28), and first out of 26 teams at the 2009 ECAC Championships (Feb. 27-March 1) at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool.

Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, will deliver a lecture, “Counteracting stress at Harvard: The relaxation response,” in which he will discuss the harmful effects of stress, lead the audience through his Relaxation Response strategy, and explain how stress can be counteracted with the Relaxation Response. The lecture will be in Hall D of the Science Center on March 10 at 7 p.m.

In an attempt to gauge how well the Harvard Gazette addresses the needs, tastes, and desires of its readers, the paper is conducting its first ever readership survey, which ends March 6. Among other things, the Gazette wants to know more about the demographics of its readership, their interests, and their preferences — what they like in the paper, what they’d like to see more of, less of, and how they’d prefer to receive their news. The survey is short and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to finish. We would love to hear from you.

Harvard Professor Cynthia M. Friend, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, is the 2009 recipient of the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry by the American Chemical Society.

As time expired on Cornell, just as it did on Columbia the night before, the age-old sports cliché proved ever so true: On any given day, any team can win.

The Woodrow Wilson Foundation has named W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Director Henry Louis Gates Jr. the 2009 winner of the Frank E. Taplin Jr. Public Intellectual Award. Gates is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced that seven Harvard professors are among the 118 recipients of the Sloan Research Fellowships for 2009. Sloan Fellowships “seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” The fellows, who receive a $40,000 grant for the two-year fellowship, are selected for their distinguished performance and unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

Provost Steven Hyman today (Feb. 27) announced the formation of a task force charged with developing recommendations to make the Harvard Library system stronger and more responsive to the needs of students and faculty at a time of both technological change and financial challenge.

Harvard University has signed an agreement with JPMorgan Chase that will provide graduate and professional students from abroad with access to private education loans. International students are not eligible for federal student loans.

Christopher T. Walsh, the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), has recently been elected by the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) to its Board of Governors — alongside five other newly elected microbiology scientists joining the board.

Nathaniel Treister has been named the new Post Graduate Program director of the Division of Oral Medicine at the Department of Oral Medicine, Infection, and Immunity (OMII) at Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM).

In an attempt to gauge how well the Harvard Gazette addresses the needs, tastes, and desires of its readers, the paper is conducting its first ever readership survey.

With influenza activity in the Boston area continuing to increase, the Harvard community is reminded that free flu vaccines are still available to all Harvard faculty and staff through Harvard University Health Services (HUHS). The flu shots will be given on the third floor of HUHS in Holyoke Center during regular weekly office hours. Similarly, faculty and staff may also receive flu shots at satellite HUHS offices at the Longwood Medical Area, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School during regular office hours.

The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, dedicated to fostering the study of European history, politics, culture, and society, has recently announced the arrival of its 2009 spring fellows.

Harvard has a new, high-technology ID card, and those who have not yet picked up their card should do so at the final card swap event, March 2-6, at the Holyoke Information Center, 1350 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass.

At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Nicolae Iliescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Iliescu’s scholarly work includes a study of the influence of Saint Augustine on the Canzoniere of Petrarch.

Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor Emeritus Martin V. Marshall, a driving force in the development of the School’s Owner/President Management Program (OPM) for entrepreneurs and a marketing and advertising expert whose practice-oriented approach to teaching and course development left a lasting impact on countless Harvard M.B.A. students and business leaders, died on Feb. 16 in Napa, Calif. He was 86 years old.

An acclaimed physics educator, an honored researcher in regenerative biology, and an Alzheimer’s-focused pathologist are among six winners of the 2009 Australia-Harvard Fellowships recently announced by the Harvard Club of Australia Foundation (HCAF).

For the sixth year in a row, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals presented a check for $10,000 to the Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) for the promotion of arts education. Since its inception in 2002, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Fund for Cultural Enrichment has subsidized tickets for thousands of Cambridge students to attend theatrical performances, cultural events, and museum exhibitions. To date, Hasty Pudding has donated more than $70,000.

With spring’s anticipated return still weeks away, there’s a beacon of yellow hope. Daffodils are an invigorating component in the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) efforts, and Harvard is again a key participant in Daffodil Days, the ACS’s annual flowery fight to help patients and eradicate cancer.

Al Witten worked as a teacher and principal for more than two decades in areas ravaged by poverty, crime, violence, and disease. Now the South African native is at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where he is figuring out ways to make schools central to facing these daunting challenges.

Nicholas and Erika Christakis have been appointed as master and co-master of Pforzheimer House.

The Harvard Black Law Students Association’s (HBLSA) Thurgood Marshall Mock Trial team won first-place honors at the Black Law Students Association’s Northeast Regional Conference this February. The team will move on to the National Conference in Irvine, Calif., on March 18.

In basketball, embarrassment can be excruciating, but it can also serve as a powerful motivator. It took an embarrassing first half against Princeton (Feb. 20), in which the Crimson trailed 6-28 at one point, for Harvard to muster a bit of motivation.

This season the Harvard women’s hockey team (17-9-3; 16-4-2 ECAC) didn’t quite match last year’s 27-1 regular season record, nor did they post a 22-0 record in the ECAC. But what they did do may be even more impressive — starting the season with a disconcerting 6-7-3 record, and ending it by clinching the 2009 ECAC regular season championship.

The Harvard women’s fencing team — ranked fourth in the nation — extended its winning streak to an impressive 14 games, as the Crimson dominated the Ivy League Championships to advance to an overall record of 20-1.

In just the second year under head coach John Tillman, the Crimson men’s lacrosse team — which went 6-8 last season — has already started with a bang as they upset fifth-ranked Duke on Saturday (Feb. 21), 9-6.

The Harvard Swim School is a program for all levels of swimming and diving ability taught by members of the Harvard men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams, under the supervision of the varsity coaching staff. The purpose of the school is to give individualized instruction to children and adults, ages 5 and up.

The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America invites Harvard undergraduates to make use of the library’s collections with competitive awards of up to $2,500 for relevant research projects.

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) is now offering the Traub-Dicker-HKS Summer Research Fellowship to support research by HKS students interested in human rights issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities.