Campus & Community

All Campus & Community

  • Across-the-pond comparisons

    Law School Dean Elena Kagan (above left) moderates a discussion among The Right Honourable The Lord Scott of Foscote (above center), Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (above right), Justice Antonin Scalia (below right), and The Right Honourable The Lord Rodger of Earlsferry (below, second from right). The jurists talked about The Practice of Judging: Comparative Perspectives in the Ames Courtroom at the Law School on Wednesday (Sept. 28).

  • Ig Nobels set to celebrate dumb smarts

    The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize winners will be announced and showered with applause and paper airplanes at Harvards Sanders Theatre on Oct. 6. Organized by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research in cooperation with several Harvard student groups, the Igs honor achievements in science that make people laugh and think.

  • A musical feast honors Christoph Wolff

    This past week, Harvard reverberated with some of the greatest music ever composed, performed by some of its finest interpreters.

  • What lies beneath

    A reproduction could never do justice to Rudolf de Crignis 1999 painting Untitled. The most any photographic process could possibly show would be a blue square. But walk up close to the painting and you realize there is more to it than that. The Swiss-born painter has covered his canvas with about 40 layers of color, the coats of ultramarine blue alternating with cinnabar green. The result is a subtly pulsating surface that seems to dissolve into shifting depths like the sky on a cloudless day.

  • Harvard launches new photo conservation program

    With the Oct. 1 arrival of Brenda Bernier as senior photograph conservator in the Weissman Preservation Center (WPC), the Harvard University Library will officially launch a University-wide photograph preservation program. The Universitys photographic holdings, estimated at more than 7.5 million items in 48 Harvard repositories, date to the emergence of photography in the 1840s.

  • Reclaiming religion from the right

    Divinity School lecturer and evangelical Christian leader Jim Wallis said the time has come to end the religious rights monologue on national moral values and begin a new, broader-based dialogue that goes beyond a fixation on gay marriage and abortion.

  • Philip S. Holzman

    Dr. Philip S. Holzman, a preeminent figure in the world of schizophrenia research and one of the countrys leading schizophrenia researchers, died on June 1, 2004, at the age of 82. Dr. Holzman is survived by Ann Holzman, his wife of 58 years his children Natalie Bernardoni, Carl Holzman and Paul Holzman his son-in-law Gene Bernardoni his daughter-in-law Mira Kopell his grandchildren Joseph, Neena and Daniel and his sister, Sylvia Steinbrock. Born in New York City in 1922, Dr. Philip Holzman graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1943 and later in1952, completed a doctoral degree from the University of Kansas. After working at the Menninger Foundation and the University of Chicago, he founded the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, in 1977, and became an integral part of the research group at the Mailman Research Center that Seymour Kety had organized.

  • Stampfer and Willett named ‘most-cited scientists of the decade’

    Meir Stampfer, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and Walter Willett, chair of the Schools Department of Nutrition, were recently ranked the No. 1 and No. 2 most-cited scientists, respectively, in clinical medicine for the past decade.

  • New cancer detector developed that’s fast, sensitive, reliable

    Cancers and many other diseases often reveal themselves by the presence of proteins absent or inactive in people who do not suffer from such ailments. Researchers are finding new biomarkers,…

  • Chinese salt evidence spared from flood

    American and Chinese researchers digging at an imperiled site of ancient salt production found the earliest known evidence of salt manufacturing in China.

  • Practicing ‘best practices’

    Dual concerns about Harvard’s environmental impact and skyrocketing energy costs have prompted facilities managers across the University to come together monthly to share thoughts, tips, and techniques for making Harvard…

  • Pre-empting disaster

    The mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina response was as much a failure of emergency systems as it was of leadership and may have been avoided had a new management system, originally created to fight forest fires, been fully implemented nationally, Kennedy School experts said Friday (Sept. 23).

  • Peters named associate dean at GSD

    Hannah Peters has been named the associate dean for external relations at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Dean Alan Altshuler recently announced. The appointment became effective Sept. 9. Peters comes to GSD from the Harvard Business School (HBS), where, since 1999, she has served as a member of the development leadership team working on the Schools recently completed capital campaign. 

  • Harvard, others challenge amendment with brief

    Harvard and six other universities filed a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court last week (Sept. 21), challenging a law that requires universities to provide military recruiters access to campus that is equal in quality and scope to other recruiters.

  • Taking a look at how ant (and human) societies might grow

    Edward O. Wilson has learned a great deal about life by studying ant societies. In this knowledge, he finds parallels between the social interactions of insects and those of birds, lions, monkeys, apes, and even humans. The last parallel got him into trouble in the late 1970s, but he now enjoys credit for establishing a new field of science – sociobiology, the influence of biology on human behavior.

  • Evening With Champions heats up the ice

    The color! The glitter! The hot sizzle of skates on ice! Top Olympic and world skaters will continue to fight cancer this fall as they gather once more at America’s…

  • Honan Apartments open in Allston-Brighton

    Fifty new units of affordable housing and the innovative partnership that helped make the development happen were the subject of celebration on Friday (Sept. 23) as the ribbon was cut on the Brian J. Honan Apartments at 33 Everett St. in Allston-Brighton.

  • State fair, films ring in semester

    Corn dogs, cotton candy, a mechanical bull, scattered bales of hay, and a dunking booth transformed usually staid Tercentenary Theatre into the first Harvard State Fair on a shady Sept. 23rd evening.

  • MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant awarded to Goldie

    Public health researcher Sue Goldie, associate professor of health decision science at Harvard School of Public Health, has been awarded a $500,000 MacArthur grant for genius and creativity in applying the tools of decision science to evaluate the clinical benefits, public health impact, and cost-effectiveness of alternative preventive and treatment interventions for viruses that are major public health problems.

  • Rights, equality center stage at HLS events

    Two events at Harvard Law School (HLS) last week (Sept 15-18) focused attention on civil rights and economic equality and included a call to action from U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.

  • Faculty council meeting Sept. 21

    At its first meeting of the year on Sept. 21, the Faculty Council discussed the recommendations of the Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering.

  • Step right up to first state fair

    Tercentenary Theatre will take on the look and feel of a state fair this Friday evening (Sept. 23) as students get the chance to ride a mechanical bull, dunk their deans and House masters, and milk a mock cow. Presented by the College Deans Office, the event – the first-ever campus-wide, welcome-back celebration – will run from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.

  • Fundraising reaches $590M in fiscal year ’05

    Fundraising receipts for the University totaled $590 million in fiscal year 2005, a $50 million increase over fiscal year 2004, Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Donella M. Rapier announced today (Sept. 22).

  • This month in Harvard history

    September 1902 – More than 600 undergraduates arrive in the Class of 1906. Until just before World War I, entering Classes stabilize around this size. September 1906 – The Medical…

  • ‘Movie Time’ rolls out double feature in the Yard

    The fourth annual Movie Time at Harvard – a free, outdoor film screening presented by President Lawrence H. Summers – will be held Sunday (Sept. 25) at 7:15 p.m. in Tercentenary Theatre (between Memorial Church and Widener Library). This years event will be a double feature. Movie Time is open to the entire University community and their families.

  • Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department for the week ending Sept. 19. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

  • Bhabha joins Radcliffe as senior adviser in humanities

    Homi K. Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Languages in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 2004 – 05 Radcliffe Institute fellow, and faculty associate at the institute for the past three years, is now also affiliated with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University as senior adviser in the humanities. He will retain his position in the FAS and at the Humanities Center during the three-year appointment. As a senior adviser, Bhabha joins other faculty of the University who devote a portion of their time to Radcliffe Institute program development and administrative leadership.

  • Lukin illuminates quantum science

    Mikhail Lukin thinks that devices based on quantum science are at the same stage as radios were about 100 years ago. To catch up, the recently tenured professor of physics is stopping and storing light, making artificial atoms behave in new ways, and doing engineering with superconductivity. When quantum does overtake kilowatts, you can expect novel products like quantum transmitters and quantum computers that will change the world the way that radios and electronic computers have.

  • Japan scholar Donald Shively dies

    Donald Howard Shively, an authority on Japanese urban life and popular culture in the Tokugawa period and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, where he also served as director of the Japan Institute (now the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies), died on Aug. 13 in a nursing facility near his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 84.

  • The Big Picture

    Harvard Police Officer Jack OKane got his first tattoo on a visit to Ireland from a guy named Danny Bullman, someone he says hell never forget.