China Fund issues first round of funding

Three research proposals were recently selected to receive primary funding from the Harvard China Fund. Launched in July 2006, the fund supports China-related activities University-wide and University activities in China.

The following Harvard faculty members and affiliates, including their proposal and the amount of the award, have been selected to receive funding.

William Alford, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, for “The Harvard Project on Disability.” The proposal will receive $160,000 over three years.

The project plans to work closely with Renmin University in Beijing and the Chinese University of Hong Kong to pursue a series of initiatives concerning disability, including legislative development; the social construction of disability; the rise of civic organizations concerned with these issues; and the various paths for addressing the challenges that confront disabled Chinese citizens.

Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, the George F. Baker Jr. Professor of Public Management in the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and the Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Arnold Howitt, adjunct lecturer in public policy at KSG; and Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at KSG, for “Crisis Management: Research and Executive Training in Collaboration with Tsinghua University.” The project will receive $150,000 over 18 months.

The project will focus on China’s capacity to confront sudden and urgent challenges to public well-being, whether generated by natural disasters, technology failures, or emergent infectious diseases such as SARS. Program objectives would be fulfilled through faculty and student research, case-study writing, conferences of scholars, executive education for senior Chinese officials, and faculty exchanges.

Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and Chris Nielsen, executive director, China Project, Department of Environmental Science, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, for “Reconciling Economic Growth and Air Pollution Control in China: An Integrated Approach.” The project will receive $121,000 over two years.

This project seeks to undertake a long-term collaborative study with Tsinghua University aimed at building fundamental scholarly capacities in the assessment of China’s emission-control policies. It will broaden consideration of policy options from the government’s announced command-and-control approaches, such as “green” taxes. This assessment would be done in a framework that integrates a suite of complex research tools: emission inventories; atmospheric modeling and measurements; economic modeling; and epidemiology and risk assessment. Results of the study could help illustrate not only how to reconcile domestic environmental and economic priorities in China, but also how they could be aligned with global interests in greenhouse-gas control.

A fourth proposal titled “The Dragon’s Kidneys: Medical Training and National Standard Care in China ” will receive partial, one-time funding in the amount of $50,000. The project — submitted by Dirk Hentschel, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Joseph Bonventre, Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences and Technology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — aims to further the development of basic research relationships with Peking University.

The objective of this project is to support collaboration between Peking University, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital regarding research and teaching on chronic kidney disease as the prevalence of diabetes and hypertension in China grows.

The fund’s Steering Committee, together with outside external reviewers who are experts in various fields, conducted the first round of the grant-review process.