Year: 2008

  • Arts & Culture

    Celebrating thirty years at helm of choruses at Harvard

    “It’s one of those great moments in Western music. It’s the highest level of the compositional technique of Bach, one of the most difficult [pieces] to sing,” said Jameson Marvin, director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music at Harvard University. Marvin will conduct the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, an undergraduate chorus, along with musicians…

    2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    March 23, 1639 — In recognition of John Harvard’s recent bequest, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony orders “that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge.”

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending March 3. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online athttp://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Gallery seeks submissions

    The Harvard Neighbors Gallery is now accepting portfolio submissions from eligible Harvard-affiliated artists (including current or retired full- or part-time faculty and staff and their spouses/partners).

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Not too late to get flu shot

    With the flu season often lasting through April, there is still plenty of time and good reason to get immunized if you have not already. Following immunization, it takes approximately 10 days to develop antibodies and be protected.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Faculty climate survey online

    The Harvard University Faculty Climate Survey is available online on the Faculty Affairs Web site (http://www.faculty.harvard.edu). The survey was conducted in academic year 2006-07 by the Office of Institutional Research and the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity. Highlights of the survey results were published in last year’s End of Year Report, which is also…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Can corporations police themselves effectively?

    On the surface, one might argue, it looks like the business world is headed in a decidedly socially conscious direction. Coffee giant Starbucks supports fair prices for its coffee growers. Wal-Mart, the department store dynasty, has instituted a number of measures to lighten its environmental footprint. Companies everywhere tout their eco-friendly products and packaging, and…

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Senior awarded prestigious Churchill Scholarship

    The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States has named Harvard senior Alison Miller among its 2008-09 scholars.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Flavell receives Weintraub Award

    Neuroscience Ph.D. candidate Steven Flavell has been selected, along with a dozen other graduate students from North America, to receive the 2008 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award sponsored by the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC).

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Faculty Council

    At its ninth meeting of the year on March 5, the Faculty Council discussed the Rules of Faculty Procedure. The council next meets on March 19. The preliminary deadline for the April 8 Faculty meeting is Monday (March 17) at 9:30 a.m.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Pool school to open April 5

    Each spring, Harvard Swim School provides swimming and diving lessons for children and adults. Held at Blodgett Pool, the Saturday morning lessons will commence April 5 and run through May 10.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Malkin Athletic Center to upgrade exercise equipment

    Seeking to improve health and recreation on campus, Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and Bob Scalise, director of athletics and interim executive dean of FAS, announced Tuesday (March 11) that funds have been made available to purchase new fitness equipment for the Malkin Athletic Center (MAC).

    2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Icers edge Saints in OT to secure ECAC title

    The Harvard women’s hockey team improved to 26-0-0 in Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) action with a 3-2 overtime victory against visiting St. Lawrence this past weekend (March 9) to advance to the NCAA tournament. Senior defender Caitlin Cahow netted the game-clinching goal 3:33 into overtime to hand No. 1 Harvard its fifth ECAC tournament…

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Weekend split skews Ivy pursuit

    That wild rivalry between the Harvard and Yale football teams seemed to briefly spill over to women’s hoops this past Saturday (March 9) in New Haven, Conn. Unfortunately, up against the passionate play of the host Bulldogs, the Harvard Crimson were the ones to get soaked.

    2 minutes
  • Arts & Culture

    Redman ’91 to be awarded 2008 Harvard Arts Medal

    In conjunction with Harvard’s Arts First festival (May 1-4), Grammy-nominated saxophonist, recording artist, and jazz bandleader Joshua Redman ’91 will receive the 2008 Harvard Arts Medal. President Drew Faust will present the award to Redman, who is the 14th distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alum or faculty member to receive this accolade for excellence in the…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Provost’s Fund for technology seeks proposals

    The Office of the Provost makes funds available to faculty for University projects that promise to alter and improve teaching and learning through the use of technology. The Provost’s Instructional Technology Fund is made up of two funds: the Innovation Fund and the Content Fund. The Innovation Fund is for large-scale projects that propose to…

    1 minute
  • Health

    MGH receives Gates Foundation grant

    The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has received a five-year, $20.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand an international program investigating the biological factors underlying immune system control of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The grant provides support to the International HIV Controllers Study, which currently involves researchers from more…

    3 minutes
  • Health

    Late treatment with letrozole can reduce cancer recurrence risk

    Treatment with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole (Femara) can reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence even when initiated one to seven years after a course of tamoxifen therapy. The results of a study involving women originally in the placebo arm of an international trial of letrozole will appear in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and…

    3 minutes
  • Health

    Protein folding: Life’s vital origami

    The way proteins fold, and the good and bad effects of this molecular phenomenon, are what keeps biologist Susan L. Lindquist busy. Lindquist Ph.D. ’76, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is an award-winning professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former director of the Whitehead Institute. She shared her insights…

    6 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Interdisciplinary conference takes micro, macro look at origins of life

    How did we get here? That’s not the first line in a hangover joke. It’s a question that has been asked for centuries about the origins of life on Earth. At Harvard last week, an A-list of astronomers, physicists, Earth scientists, and chemists met in the Radcliffe Gymnasium to look at this and other fundamental…

    6 minutes
  • Health

    Harvard faculty members discuss state of research

    A panel of experts said Tuesday (March 11) that stem cell research’s biggest impact on patients’ health likely won’t come from therapies that inject stem cells or implant tissues made from them, but rather from the knowledge gained by examining diseased tissues grown from the cells.

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    HUSEC examines interdisciplinary and interSchool science efforts

    When the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC) gathered for its first meeting late last April, it was charged by not one, but two Harvard presidents. Then president-designate and now president Drew Faust told the 18 members of the new committee that theirs is both a unique and “historic” body, created to forge meaningful…

    4 minutes
  • Health

    Inhaled TB vaccine more effective than traditional shot

    A novel aerosol version of the most common tuberculosis (TB) vaccine, administered directly to the lungs as an oral mist, offers significantly better protection against the disease in experimental animals than a comparable dose of the traditional injected vaccine, researchers report this week (March 12) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).…

    3 minutes
  • Health

    Sobering look at ‘mind-body connection’

    Mind-body medicine goes by many names today — including holistic, complementary, or alternative medicine. Regardless of what it’s called, many people embrace the ideas behind the mind-body connection and its effect on health, sometimes despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence. In her recently published book, “The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine” (W.W.…

    5 minutes
  • Health

    President testifies for increase in NIH funding

    With the careers of a generation of young researchers threatened by five years of flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard President Drew Faust and leaders of six other major research institutions were in Washington Tuesday (March 11) calling on Congress to repair the “Broken Pipeline” through which breakthroughs in the biomedical sciences should…

    6 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Harvard students named Soros Fellows

    Four Harvard students are among the 30 recipients recently named Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellows. Now in its 11th year, the fellowship helps prepare new Americans, including naturalized citizens, resident aliens, or the children of naturalized citizens, for opportunities for leadership in various fields in the United States.

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Nieman Foundation announces I.F. Stone Award

    The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is establishing an award that recognizes journalistic independence and honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone. The I.F. Stone Medal will be presented annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of “independence, integrity, courage, and indefatigability” that characterized “I.F. Stone’s Weekly,” published from 1953…

    2 minutes
  • Health

    Ecologist Jeremy Jackson to receive Roger Tory Peterson Medal

    Jeremy Jackson, renowned marine ecologist of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been selected to receive the 11th annual Roger Tory Peterson Medal presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH). Jackson will deliver the Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture on April 6 at 3 p.m. in the Science Center, 1 Oxford St.

    2 minutes
  • Health

    Initial human trial of Type 1 diabetes treatment begun

    Scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have initiated a phase 1 clinical trial to reverse type 1 diabetes. The trial is exploring whether the promising results from the laboratory…

    3 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences hacking incident

    A Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Web server that contained summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information was hacked by an outsider and compromised in a way that the data…

    2 minutes