The Weissman International Internship Program, established by Paul (’52) and Harriet Weissman in 1994, provides sophomores and juniors with the opportunity to intern abroad in a field of work related to their career and academic goals. The Weissman Program enables students to develop a richer understanding of the global community in which they live and work, and provides an opportunity for them to share their experiences with the Harvard community when they return. This year’s 39 interns will join the 292 Weissman program alumni who have completed a work experience abroad since the program’s inception.
The South Asia Initiative (SAI) recently announced its study grants for Harvard graduate and undergraduate students. Sixteen students have also received SAI internships.
“Time is of the essence,” Henry Paulson told the capacity crowd at Burden Hall on the Harvard Business School (HBS) campus Thursday afternoon (May 3). China needs to make some critical economic reforms — floating its currency, reforming its capital markets, and restructuring so that domestic consumption plays a bigger role — and the time to make them is now, when China is booming and the global economy is strong.
The Chinese government’s restrictions on Beijing motorists during a three-day conference last November — widely viewed as a dress rehearsal for efforts to slash smog and airborne pollutants during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing — succeeded in cutting the city’s emissions of one important class of atmospheric gases by an impressive 40 percent.
“Iran has a constitution and specific laws that on closer scrutiny turn out not to be laws at all, because they can be interpreted in any way to the advantage of the rulers.”
A new national poll by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government finds former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama as 18- to 24-year-olds’ first choices for president in 2008. Nearly six in 10 young people (59 percent) believe the country is “on the wrong track” while only 13 percent believe the country is headed in the “right direction.” On issues facing the nation, 50 percent of young people today say that either “Iraq,” “the war,” the “War on Terror,” or “domestic security” is the most concerning national issue, with no other issue registering higher than 6 percent.
From March 24 to April 2, a unique group of volunteers came together in the community of Ghor Al Safi, Jordan, to build two homes in that community through Habitat for Humanity Jordan. The group consisted of 12 women from Harvard University in the United States and 12 from Dar Al-Hekma College in Saudi Arabia.
Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained. Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them.
It is the best of times, and it is the worst of times. At Harvard’s fourth National Symposium on the Advancement of Women in Science, it was clear why female scientists need to keep meeting like this.
Does the military have anything to teach educators? Absolutely, said Brookings Institution senior fellow Hugh Price, who, 18 months out of Yale Law School in 1968, gave up his career to become a youth counselor.
In the United States, a child is born into poverty every 36 seconds. Every six hours, an American child dies of neglect or abuse. And every year, the number of children in abuse investigations could populate a city the size of Detroit.
In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state-level rates of suicide in the United States, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that suicide rates among children, women, and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have guns.
In a perspective article in the April 12 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Association of European Cancer Leagues describe the growing momentum for indoor smoking bans in countries across the globe. They identify Ireland’s pioneering 2004 comprehensive indoor smoking ban as a likely tipping point for fundamental change in social norms and public health worldwide.
The seeds of a new, more efficient government able to nimbly handle the challenges of a new century are sprouting in the corridors of today’s slow-moving bureaucracy, according to Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
While a handful of presidential front-runners dominate the headlines and airwaves, less prominent hopefuls for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination are playing a waiting game, staying alive and watching for an opportunity like an early primary victory or a stumble by a front-running candidate.
Like a courtroom version of “High Noon,” legal guns are squaring off this year in a confrontation over the Second Amendment. And whoever wins, the battle will touch off a longtime culture war that rivals Roe v. Wade, said National Rifle Association (NRA) President Sandra Froman in an April 5 visit to Harvard.
The carved stone monolith tells the story of Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the 16th and last ruler of the Maya city of Copan, one of the most important sites in Maya history.
In Nigeria, where Jacob Olupona was born, there are more Anglicans than there are in England. There is also a growing Pentecostal movement as well as a large Roman Catholic presence. In 2005 when the College of Cardinals met in Rome to choose a new pope, one of the leading contenders was a Nigerian, Cardinal Francis Arinze.
How to address “America’s leadership deficit” was the focus of discussion Wednesday night (March 21) at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Describing the deficit as a “canyon, not a gap,” David Gergen, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL), argued that the challenges facing the country are growing more complex and intractable at a time when its political leaders seem paralyzed and inert.
Andrew Ruben’s business card is tiny: 2 11/16 inches by 1 5/16 inches, or about half the normal size. It’s also made of 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper.
Representatives of three of the world’s major religions tangled over the beginnings of human life, the disposal of surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics, and the conduct of embryonic stem cell research Wednesday (March 14) at Harvard Divinity School. Panelists at the event, representing Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, each briefly presented their faith’s teachings about the beginnings of human life and then embarked on a lively discussion about embryonic stem cell research.
It is a truism that “politics makes strange bedfellows,” but late Tuesday afternoon (March 20), in the Ames Courtroom of Harvard Law School’s (HLS) Austin Hall, bioethics made two sets of philosophical bedfellows as strange as any Washington has seen.
Call him Ishmael. But don’t call him part of a “lost generation.” It’s a phrase that “I absolutely detest,” Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone, told his audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government March 14 at an event co-sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the world now stands at a major crossroads, but that acting together the United States and Europe could lead the way in solving economic imbalances, ethnic and religious tensions, and the threat to the planet’s natural resources.
Top campaign strategists for Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama brought the early intensity of the 2008 presidential race to Harvard Monday night (March 19), scrabbling for position on a key campaign issue: the Iraq War.
Paul Tough’s prescription for making children better students sounds like a license to have fun: Read to them, sing, play, emphasize encouragement over criticism, and converse a lot. Research shows a correlation between how many words a child hears in the first three years of life and brain development, he said. The more words, the smarter the child.
Guido W. Imbens, now in his first year as a professor of economics at Harvard, was still in high school in the Netherlands when he decided to study economics. For a bright, energetic boy who had always excelled at mathematics, there was nothing dismal about the so-called “dismal science.” At Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Imbens studied econometrics, an academically rigorous combination of mathematical economics and statistics. The tools of econometrics are used to test economic theories using data, and to measure economic variables that are important for public policy.
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