Newsmakers

Seniors named CSWR fellowship recipients

Harvard seniors Hendrik Jan Slettenhaar and Melissa Borja have been selected to participate in the undergraduate thesis fellowship at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at the Harvard Divinity School. Chosen for their proposed research in religion, Slettenhaar will examine “The Reconciling Effects of E.U. Candidature on the Serbo-Croatian Cleavage,” while Borja will research “Religious Change Among Hmong Refugees in Stockton, California.”

Green named to president’s advisory council

Edward Green, research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has been appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS. Focusing on prevention, Green supports a model that emphasizes abstinence, faithfulness between partners, and condom use. Known as the “ABC” model (for abstinence, “be faithful,” or “use condoms”), the prevention strategy got its start in Uganda, where HIV prevalence has declined significantly since 1991.

President Bush’s $15 billion AIDS relief initiative, which focuses primarily on Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, endorses the ABC model.

AST names Fishman president-elect

The American Society of Transplantation (AST) has announced that Associate Professor of Medicine Jay A. Fishman has been named the society’s president-elect for 2003-04. Fishman, director of the Transplant ID and Immunocompromised Host Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, will be the first infectious disease specialist to lead the society.

Lerner wins prize for paper

Josh Lerner, the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, and co-author Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, have won the NASDAQ Best Paper Prize for “Private Equity in the Developing World: The Determinants of Transaction Structures.” The award was presented at this summer’s Western Finance Association meeting.

Leape honored for patient safety

Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy in the Faculty of Public Health, was awarded the 2003 Alfred I. duPont Award for Excellence in Children’s Health Care by Nemours, one of the nation’s largest pediatric health-care providers. Leape received the $50,000 award, which recognizes his leadership on medical error prevention, at a ceremony this past month at the Wilmington Country Club in Delaware.

– Compiled by Andrew Brooks