Newsmakers

Gardner honored in Italy

Howard Gardner, the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Graduate School of Education, was recently awarded the medal of the presidency of the Republic of Italy at a meeting of the Piu Manzu Foundation in Rimini, Italy. Secretary of State Colin Powell, geneticist Craig Venter, and philosopher John Searle, among others, also received the medal this year.

Stavins’ term extended

The Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Robert N. Stavins, faculty chair for the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) and director of the Environmental Economics Program (EEPHU), has accepted an invitation from administrator Christine Todd Whitman to extend his term for one year as chairman of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (EEAC) of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.

Lisanti awarded IEEE scholarship

Harvard freshman Mariangela Lisanti received the President’s Scholarship award from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her project “Conductance Quantization in Au Nanocontacts.” The scholarship coincides with her first-place awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held earlier this year in San Jose, Calif. In addition to the scholarship, Lisanti will attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Sweden as part of the award.

Ziegler wins Reed Prize

Sophomore Mary Ziegler has won the 2001 Dana Reed Prize, the annual award for the best piece of writing by an undergraduate in a Harvard student publication, for her story “fireproof” in the Harvard Advocate. Junior David C. Newman picked up an honorable mention for his article “Lift High the Cross: Evangelical Christians Increasingly Call Harvard Their Home,” which appeared in the Crimson. This year’s prizes were judged by Jordan Pavlin, an editor at Alfred S. Knopf; Mark O’Donnell, a playwright and humorist; and David Samuels, a journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Roman receives MCBI grant

The Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI) has awarded Joseph Roman, a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, a Mia J. Tegner Memorial Research Grant. These grants are among the first in the world awarded specifically to help scientists document the composition and abundance of ocean life before humans altered marine ecosystems. Roman will use DNA sequences to estimate populations of great whales before commercial whaling reduced their numbers.

– Compiled by Andrew Brooks