Campus & Community

Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics Frederick W. Alt, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Childrens Hospital Boston (Department of Molecular Medicine), has received the Clowes Memorial Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), acknowledging his three decades of seminal discoveries in genomic instability and cancer. The Clowes is the oldest award given by the AACR, and recognizes outstanding, recent accomplishments in basic cancer research.

A Kennedy School expert on democracy and leadership in the developing world is assisting a new African effort to improve leadership on the continent by training young leaders and drawing inspiration from current and former best practices and success stories.

A. Bernard Ackerman, a physician and professor who has devoted his career to finding inventive and engaging ways of teaching, is creating a new endowment at Harvard for the study of culture and medicine. The A. Bernard Ackerman Endowment for the Culture of Medicine will establish a professorship and support a wide range of activities that encourage collaboration among the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and other departments throughout the University. The endowment will help Harvard educate students – both those who will become physicians and those who will someday be patients – about the interdisciplinary dimension of the physician-patient relationship.

You go to China, its dazzling, says Erik Eckholm, one of three contributors to an exhibit of photographs called The Reporters Eye: Images from Chinas Socioeconomic Frontiers. Tall buildings. Cars. Growing fast. But there are also all these casualties and cast-offs. I think its important not to forget them.

The Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has named mathematical statistician Stuart Baker of the National Cancer Institute the recipient of the 2004 Distinguished Alum Award. As the winner, Baker will deliver a lecture at the School this June about his career and life.

A recent, highly controversial series of papers published by two researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Peter Gotzsche and Ole Olsen, concluded that mammography does not save lives and instead exposes women to unnecessary diagnostic and surgical procedures.

Doing things solo was never a problem for Alesia Johnson. After all, the Charlestown High senior from Dorchester held down a part-time job at a local bank, paid her own living expenses, and kept up pretty good grades without parental involvement. But when it came to applying to college, the first-generation college-bound senior was stumped.

Fitting in and looking as if it belonged was never the point. Otherwise, it would have been made of red brick, not slabs of barefaced concrete. It would have shuffled its interior spaces into neat stacks so people would know where they were and where they were going instead of feeling a sense of perpetual disorientation. It would have faced Quincy Street with an honest, straightforward facade instead of peering down over its barrel shoulder and uncoiling its ramp to the sidewalk like an animal sipping water at a stream.

Fakes. Phonies. Forgeries. Institutions are careful not to acquire them – as a rule. But this month, as it has done for five years, the Fogg Art Museum makes an exception to show some Fabulous Fakes and Poignant Poetry, the work of art teacher Deb Whitmores fifth-grade students at Captain Samuel Brown School in Peabody. Copies of dozens of works by Picasso, van Gogh, Degas, Renoir, and many other important painters are sharing the walls with the real McCoys, but theres no art fraud here.

This sweet row of Dutch spring tulips seems to have sprung spontaneously out of the cold New England stone fronting the Holyoke Center Arcade. (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

Whats smaller than a microbrewery but bigger than a cauldron of homebrew stinking up the kitchen?

Now that the franc, the mark, and the lira have followed the ducat, the doubloon, and the Louis dOr into numismatic superannuation, economists have been watching with great interest to see how well the successor to these national currencies – the euro – has been doing at replacing the monetary systems of a dozen linguistically and culturally diverse countries.

From physicians and therapists to Reiki practitioners and spirit singers, a wide range of religious and medical professionals shared their projects and findings from the 18-month Women Healing Women project at Harvard Divinity School in March. Sponsored by the Religion, Health and Healing Initiative of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Women Healing Women convened 20 female religious leaders and health care professionals across disciplines to share information and create specific projects that enhance womens health.

Tuesdays mean a full house in Pat Goffredos second-grade classroom at the Amigos School in Cambridge. I rarely have any absences on Tuesday, says Goffredo. Even if they have dentists appointments, they make it in.

Funds and fellows will be made available to Harvard faculty in an effort to spark wide-ranging implementation of the powerful array of educational technology pioneered at the University in recent years, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and Provost Steven E. Hyman announced.

The Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University (WKU) has named Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, the recipient of the 2003 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. Buell will receive the award for Emerson (2003, Belknap Press), an assessment of Ralph Waldo Emersons works, at the Robert Penn Warren Symposium at WKU on April 25.

Vicki Norberg-Bohm, a pioneer in the study of technology innovation, died March 21 at the age of 48 after a courageous fight with cancer.

In the freshman seminar Painting Natural History, Faith Imafidon 07 sketches a plant called Magic Bells. The seminar is held in the Carpenter Center.

Harvard has long been recognized for its strength in neuroscience: Researchers in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) are leaders in studies of behavior, perception, and brain development, while Harvard Medical School (HMS) was the first in the nation to establish a department of neurobiology.

A common antibiotic used to treat arthritis and acne shows promise for limiting the severity of spinal cord and brain injuries.

Kirkland House is reflected in Belfer Hall at the Kennedy School of Government. Undaunted by the illusion of a leaning tower of Belfer, a student opens the front door.

At its 10th meeting of the year (March 24) the Faculty Council discussed the Report of the Harvard University Committee on Calendar Reform with the chair of the committee, Professor Sidney Verba (government).

March 6, 1945 – The last spring term under the wartime trimester schedule begins. Final figures University-wide show an enrollment of 1,817 civilians, and 4,100 Army and Navy officer specialists.…

Shearman memorial April 4 A memorial service for John K. G. Shearman will be held Sunday, April 4, at 2:30 p.m. in the Faculty Room in University Hall. A reception…

Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department for the week ending March 20. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor.

President Lawrence H. Summers will hold office hours for students in his Massachusetts Hall office on the following dates:

The Harvard Divinity School (HDS) faculty members and guests who gathered Thursday (March 18) to discuss the much-talked-about new film The Passion of the Christ dissented only in their choice of adjectives.

International complicity and the lessons learned 10 years after the Rwandan genocide, in which almost a million people were slaughtered in eight weeks, was the topic of a compelling session at the Kennedy Schools John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Tuesday night (March 23).

Eliot A. Cohen was awarded the first Huntington Prize on Monday (March 22) for his book Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).

Harvards Modern Greek Studies Program invites graduate students in modern Greek studies or in related fields to participate in a grad student conference taking place in April 2005. The goal of the conference, titled The Cankered Muse: In Search of Modern Greek Satire, is to account for the prolific and uninterrupted presence of satire in modern Greek literature.