Campus & Community

The Tennis Camps at Harvard (TCH), one of the areas most appealing summer activities for children and adults, will start its 16th season on June 12 at the Beren Tennis Center at Soldiers Field Athletic Complex.

David Westfall, who held the John L. Gray and Carl F. Schipper Jr. professorships at Harvard Law School (HLS), died Dec. 7 surrounded by his family. He was 78.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and American Literature and Language Marjorie Garber has won the 2005 Christian Gauss Award for Shakespeare After All (Pantheon Books, 2004). The $2,500 award is offered annually by the Phi Beta Kappa Society for books in the field of literary scholarship or criticism.

The music industry should embrace the passion of fans for their tunes and find ways to encourage consumer tools like online playlists rather than fighting such innovations as yet another form of file-sharing, a new report says.

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus of biology at Harvard, is celebrated worldwide for his contributions to evolutionary biology, spurred by a lifelong passion for ants. He is also the distinguished recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction writing. But on Nov. 29, Wilson assumed the role of amateur historian to commemorate another famed scientist and writer. The Geological Lecture Hall was filled to capacity when Wilson delivered a lecture on Darwin in the Twenty-First Century. This lecture was hosted by the Harvard Museum of Natural History to celebrate the release of From So Simple a Beginning, a four-volume anthology of selected works by Charles Darwin published by WW Norton and edited by Wilson.

Jill Lepore calls it one of the saddest, most tragic stories Ive ever come across. And its even sadder because no ones ever heard about it.

Brad Noblet and Elizabeth Hess have been named to senior computing posts in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Monique Rinere, dean of Butler College at Princeton University, has been named associate dean of advising programs for Harvard College, effective Feb. 27. In this newly created position, the associate dean will coordinate, manage, and monitor the academic advising systems for all undergraduates.

The official portrait of beloved former Dean of Students Archie Epps III was unveiled recently in its permanent home in University Hall. The framed, oil-on-canvas portrait was painted by Stephen Coit 72. Valerie Epps, professor of law at Suffolk University, spoke at the unveiling of her late husbands picture. Archie Epps, who received a degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1961, became assistant dean of students at Harvard College in 1964. Six years later, he became the dean of students and remained in the position for more than 30 years. He retired in 2001.

In the 1800s, the railroads crisscrossing New England had a problem.

Forty-three hundred members of the Harvard community signed the Campus Sustainability Pledge in a two-week campaign that ended on Nov. 23. In so doing, pledgers promised to support Harvards official Campus-wide Sustainability Principles and to implement those principles in their own lives by taking simple actions to conserve resources.

After a semester studying everything from the press in China to the culture wars in the United States, five research fellows from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy shared their findings during a discussion Monday afternoon (Dec. 12) at the Kennedy School of Government.

A group of 25 Harvard students is reaching far beyond the boundaries of Harvards Cambridge campus – into developing nations to lend a hand to microfinance organizations seeking to help low-income residents pull themselves out of poverty.

Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia, according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended up millennia ago in places as far removed as modern-day Florida, Kentucky, Mexico, and Peru.

The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics recently announced that Harvard College students are eligible to apply for a Lester Kissel Grant in Practical Ethics to support research and writing that makes contributions to the understanding of practical ethics. A number of grants will be awarded on a competitive basis for projects to be conducted during the summer of 2006. The projects may involve research for senior theses, case studies for use in courses, essays or articles for publication, or similar scholarly endeavors that explore issues in practical ethics.

Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) researcher Martin Nweeia has just answered a marine science question that had eluded the scientific community for hundreds of years: why does the narwhal, or unicorn, whale have an 8-foot-long tooth emerging from its head, and what is its function? Nweeia, a clinical instructor in restorative dentistry and biomaterials sciences at HSDM, will be presenting his conclusions at the 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in San Diego.

Undaunted by whiteout conditions during the surprisingly violent Dec. 9 blizzard, a couple of brave souls stroll casually through Harvard Yard.

The 2005 Annual Report of the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR), a subcommittee of the President and Fellows, is now available upon request from the Office for the Committees on Shareholder Responsibility. Please call (617) 495-0985 to request copies.

Math homework is not one of 10-year-old Aubrey Cappuccis favorite things, but at The East End House after-school program in her East Cambridge neighborhood, shes found a way to learn about math and love it – through games.

The day before she visited Harvard, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, was criticized by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Arbour had just issued a statement on terrorists and torturers, in which she said that the absolute ban on torture, a cornerstone of the international human rights edifice, is under attack. The principle once believed to be unassailable … is becoming a casualty of the so-called war on terror. To which Bolton responded that it was inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that were engaged in in the war on terror. The next day, Dec. 8, Arbour visited the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) to have an informal, public conversation with Michael Ignatieff, Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice.

From the perspective of Harvards 369-year history, the gates in and around the campus are a relatively new phenomenon. For more than two-thirds of its existence, Harvard had nothing more to guard its perimeter than a low post-and-beam fence. When the Johnston Gate – the initial component of the present-day enclosure – went up in 1889, many decried its towering piers and elaborate ironwork as a pretentious imposition on the schools austere Puritan heritage. But as time went on and succeeding Harvard classes raised generous sums to extend the fence and punctuate it with stately apertures, the structure grew to be as familiar and beloved as any of the schools more venerable monuments.

The 50th anniversary conference of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research took place over three days (Dec. 9-11), attracting hundreds of scholars from around the world, who gathered to hear and participate in panels on Chinas domestic politics, international relations, economy, social conditions, literature, and philosophical traditions.

Anita Goel is using the tools of physics to examine one of the most basic processes of biology, the way genetic information is extracted from DNA molecules and how this…

Scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have sequenced the domestic dog’s DNA, thanks to the blood of a boxer named Tasha. Now they hope to follow Tasha’s…

Stem cell science is revolutionizing the field of cancer biology, changing the understanding of the structure of some tumors, and potentially shifting the treatment emphasis from eliminating all tumor cells…

With 82 students registered, “The Cognitive Dog: Savant or Slacker” is the second-largest Extension School psychology course this semester. When Bruce Blumberg proposed the course to Assistant Dean of Continuing…

Whether teasing out inconsistencies in quantum theory or figuring out what it means for one event to cause another, Ned Hall is asking questions about the forces that rule the…

Patricia A. King, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics and Public Policy at Georgetown Law Center, has been elected to become the newest member of the Harvard Corporation, the University announced Sunday (Dec. 4).

This stained glass window at Memorial Hall reminds the viewer of a time when the word ‘awesome’ referred to something that filled one with reverence, wonder, and awe.

Although there have not yet been any reports anywhere of human-to-human transmission of avian influenza, administrators from across the University gathered at Maxwell-Dworkin on Monday (Dec. 5) for a two-hour presentation by the Universitys Incident Support Team (IST) to further planning for dealing with a possible pandemic of the bird flu.