Newsmakers
Merage Fellows announced
Harvard students Svetlana Meyerzon ’05 and Onyi Offor ’05 recently joined 12 other college seniors nationwide to be named 2005 American Dream Fellows by the Merage Foundation. The $10,000 fellowship is given to American immigrants based on their academic record and leadership ability, and the clarity of their “American dream.”
A history major with a secondary focus on Slavic languages and literature, Meyerzon, who came to the United States from Moldova under refugee status with her mother and two siblings, will apply the Merage Foundation stipend to the cost of Columbia Law School.
Offor, who came to the United States from Nigeria with her family to better their economic opportunities, is a biochemical science major. She hopes to discover effective therapies for curing breast cancer, and will use the award to support a yearlong internship in Nigeria with the University of Chicago and University of Ibadan. She plans to apply the remainder of her stipend to medical school expenses.
Winter delivers Mellon Lectures
Irene Winter, the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, is delivering this year’s A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Winter, who has served on the Harvard faculty since 1988, participated in archaeological excavations at Godin Tepe and Hasanlu, Iran, in the 1960s and ’70s. She has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, and is the author of more than 75 articles, reviews, and edited volumes on topics in ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology. The series of six lectures, called “‘Great Work’: Terms of Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Mesopotamia” now in progress, will culminate on May 1, 8, and 15. All lectures take place at 2 p.m. in the East Building Auditorium.
HSPH names Poster Day winners
The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has announced that Department of Environmental Health student Aleksandar Marinkovic received the top prize ($500) in the student category of the School’s 19th annual Poster and Exhibit Day for his entree “In Vitro Test of a Critical Phenomenon Causing Airway Closure in Normals and Asthmatics.” Research fellow Ariel Rabinovic of the Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases, meanwhile, received the postdoctoral prize ($500) for his project titled “Analysis of Nitric Oxide-Induced mRNA Stabilization Using cDNA Arrays.”
– Compiled by Andrew Brooks