Campus & Community

As Hurricane Katrina made landfall and tore through the Southern coastline with now-legendary ferocity, millions of Americans sat in front of their TVs with a familiar feeling of helplessness. What can I do? Many reached for their wallets a few took to the road. S. Allen Counter, who was watching TV in far-away Stockholm, was one of the latter. The director of the Harvard Foundation grabbed the next flight home and started to organize relief efforts.

At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences May 17, 2005, the following Minute was placed upon the records.

Frederick Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), has been appointed George Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford for the 2007-08 academic year. Schauer will be the 66th holder of the chair, which was created in 1929 by an endowment from George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, to allow American scholars of the highest distinction to teach at the university on a visiting basis.

The American Australian Association (AAA) recently announced that it is sponsoring its second year of United States to Australia Fellowships. The program will provide up to four awards totaling $80,000 to outstanding American students to pursue graduate and postdoctoral studies and research in life and ocean sciences, medicine, engineering, or mining at top Australian universities and research institutions. Harvard students are encouraged to apply.

A Turkish psychiatrist, a theologian from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a legal scholar from Rwanda joined the Harvard community this fall to undertake research through the Scholars at Risk Program, which offers visiting fellowships to scholars whose work is jeopardized by political persecution in their home countries.

The women march in row after row of orderly columns, a battalion heading not to war but to work under the banner For Every Fighter, a Woman Worker.

Leroy David Vandam, M.D., the first Harvard Medical School Professor of Anesthesia at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, now Brigham and Womens Hospital, died April 8, 2004 in Needham, Massachusetts in the 90th year of his life.

Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison almost flopped into the mud of Arkansas Bayou de View in their haste to get out of the canoe. They crashed through the undergrowth after the flashing black and white bird that was threatening to vanish among the huge cypresses.

Behind Lyman Hall, workmen lay gravel and cement in the process of preparing the area for a new science building.

At its second meeting of the year (Oct. 5), the Faculty Council received a report from a subset of the council on their meeting with Fellows of the Harvard Corporation. The council also discussed a draft report of the Committee on General Education and received a report on proposed changes in policy concerning Harvard-sponsored undergraduate activities abroad.

Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department for the week ending Oct. 10. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

Thomas C. Schelling, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy Emeritus, has been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his instrumental research on game theory.

Center for the Environment accepting fellow applicants The Harvard University Center for the Environment recently announced that it will name its first eight environmental fellows in March 2006. The fellows’…

Harvard programs and initiatives to help Hurricane Katrina victims have been multiplying.

Doug Melton recalled looking at frog and salamander eggs in a pond when he was a child and wondering how the individual egg knew whether to make a frog or salamander.

Venturing into the crosscurrents of art and science, the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OfA) and the Department of Systems Biology (DSB) at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) are co-sponsoring a public art residency by artist Brian Knep for the 2005-06 academic year. For this novel initiative, the Office of the Provost has awarded a grant from its Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration.

The first three recipients of the postdoctoral fellowship in the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health have settled in to begin their two years of research in ethical issues arising in health care and public health. They are:

Fourteen Harvard faculty members were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) as fellows at a Sanders Theatre ceremony this past Saturday (Oct. 8). One of the newly named fellows, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, was among the featured speakers at the ceremony, the academys 225th annual induction event.

Editors note: Graduate student at the School of Public Health and resident tutor at Leverett House Jane Humphries 03 spent her summer working in Lesotho, Africa, in the village of ha Ntlama, under the auspices of Operation Crossroads Africa. In addition to assisting in a local clinic, distributing medicines and vitamins, watching after children while their mothers visited doctors, and teaching at the local school, Humphries and her fellow volunteers worked hard on AIDS awareness in this area where many families are affected by HIV. She also took the occasional run.

In a battle of Ivy League unbeatens, freshman defensive back Brian Owusu picked off two passes and freshman running back Treavor Scales scored two touchdowns as Harvard downed Cornell, 28-10,…

Felipe Fregni, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, has used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to improve the movement skills of people whose brains have been damaged by strokes, skills that…

Common wisdom holds that we can never see a black hole because nothing can escape it – not even light. Fortunately, black holes aren’t completely black. As gas is pulled…

Climate change from burning fossil fuels is probably already unavoidable, but it is still up to humans to decide just how bad it will be, Professor of Earth and Planetary…

Do Harvard doctors practice what they preach? The Harvard Health Letter, the country’s first health newsletter for the general public, recently surveyed more than 15,000 Harvard Medical School faculty physicians…

The following are excerpts from accounts that appear online. For more information, visit http://www.news.arvard.edu/press/pressdoc/pr-050901-katrina.html.

Perhaps Barry Bloom, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), expressed the feelings of the Harvard community best when he addressed a group of displaced students from Tulane University who are continuing their studies at Harvard:

Roy J. Glauber, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University, has won a 2005 Nobel Prize in physics for pioneering work on the nature and behavior of light. Glauber shares the prestigious prize with John L. Hall of the University of Colorado and Theodor W. Hansch of the Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany. He becomes the 42nd Harvard faculty member to be honored with a Nobel Prize.

Jackson Troutt considered himself a diehard, a special breed of New Orleanian who scoffs at hurricane warnings and is determined to stay put regardless of weather. But that changed the morning of Aug. 29 when he switched on the radio and heard New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin urging everyone to evacuate the city immediately.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the United States inability to care for its most vulnerable citizens, abandoning them to a disaster policy that approximated survival of the fittest, international disaster experts said Friday (Sept. 30).

For more than 15 years, Harvard has invited members of the Allston-Brighton community to enjoy lunch and a ball game. Nearly 500 Allston-Brighton neighbors turned out for the Harvard vs. Lehigh game Saturday (Oct. 1), including Karen Hocker and her son Declan. Eight-month-old Declan, son of Tom Hocker 76, is already displaying impeccable fashion taste.