Year: 2008

  • Health

    C. Ronald Kahn first to win Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research

    C. Ronald Kahn, M.D., Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and head of the Head Section on Obesity and Hormone Action at the Joslin Diabetes Center,…

  • Campus & Community

    Gleason memorial set for Nov. 14

    A memorial service is set for Andrew Gleason, professor emeritus of the Mathematics Department, who died Oct. 17. The service will be Nov. 14 at 2 p.m. in the Memorial Church, Harvard Yard. A reception will follow at Loeb House, 17 Quincy St., from 3 to 5 p.m.

  • Campus & Community

    HRES plans home-buying seminar

    Harvard Real Estate Services is holding a home-buying seminar on Dec. 4 from noon to 1:30 p.m.

  • Campus & Community

    HUHS to offer flu vaccination clinics through November

    Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) will conduct free vaccination clinics throughout November. The clinics will be open to the entire Harvard University community every Monday and Tuesday (noon-3 p.m.) at HUHS on the second floor of the Holyoke Center (Monks Library).

  • Campus & Community

    Gleason memorial set for Nov. 14

    A memorial service is set for Andrew Gleason, professor emeritus of the Mathematics Department, who died Oct. 17. The service will be Nov. 14 at 2 p.m. in the Memorial Church, Harvard Yard.

  • Campus & Community

    Worldly Weissman Scholars talk trips

    Neagheen Homaifar ’10 helped to create a financial literacy program for a microfinance bank in Mexico City, and Samantha Fang ’10 examined practices on trade and sustainable energy while writing articles for an international organization in Geneva.

  • Arts & Culture

    Puzzling through Yeats with Helen Vendler

    Helen Vendler knows a thing or two about William Butler Yeats. She has authored three books on the Irish poet’s work, including her most recent volume, “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form,” published in 2007.

  • Campus & Community

    Astronomy Department dedicates new telescope

    A small knot of a dozen people gathered on the Science Center roof on Friday (Oct. 31) to officially dedicate Harvard’s latest teaching telescope, a 16-inch cassegrain telescope built by DFM Engineering in Colorado.

  • Nation & World

    Teach For America’s Kopp describes what works, what will work

    The woman who created a national teaching movement out of her college thesis was on campus last week to advocate for broader support for public education. Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach For America (TFA) addressed a standing-room-only crowd at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Askwith Forum at Longfellow Hall on Nov.…

  • Campus & Community

    Sports briefs

    Crimson tie 1-1 at Dartmouth, within one game of title; Men’s soccer stunned by Big Green, falls into a tie with Penn; Donato inducted into the Massachusetts Hall of Fame

  • Arts & Culture

    Looking at race, racism through a philosophical lens

    Tommie Shelby’s airy office in the Barker Center is piled with papers. His desk is a blanket of white. Books and academic journals litter the floor. The look is, in a word, chaotic. The scholar is anything but.

  • Nation & World

    New president, new challenges

    In introducing the featured speaker at last week’s (Oct. 29) John F. Kennedy School Forum, Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said, “If there were a really serious national security problem and we could only consult one person, that person, in my view, is Brent Scowcroft.”

  • Campus & Community

    Gary Ruvkun took a roundabout route to science

    Gary Ruvkun has made a career out of imagining the unimaginable, and of surrounding himself with like-minded thinkers who let the wheels of thought spin until they catch on something hard, gain traction, and take off.

  • Nation & World

    Post-colonial wars parsed at Radcliffe

    Last week, a two-day interdisciplinary conference on post-colonial wars got under way at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Oct. 30-31 event was the capstone of two years of private meetings at Radcliffe by high-level experts on the wars that followed independence movements in Africa and Asia after World War II.

  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

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

  • Nation & World

    Obama joins list of seven presidents with Harvard degrees

    When sworn in on Jan. 20, Barack Obama will join current President George W. Bush (M.B.A. ’75) and Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy as Harvard graduates chosen to serve as the nation’s chief executive.

  • Campus & Community

    Stephen R. Prothero to deliver Noble Lectures

    New York Times best-selling author and Boston University professor of religion Stephen R. Prothero will deliver this year’s William Belden Noble Lectures, “The Work of Doing Nothing: Wandering as Practice and Play,” Nov. 18-20 at the Memorial Church.

  • Science & Tech

    Global warming predicted to hasten carbon release from peat bogs

    Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.

  • Campus & Community

    Fresh faces in the crowd

    It may come as a surprise to some, but after Harvard men’s hockey’s 4-1 win against Dartmouth on Friday (Oct. 31) and 3-1 win against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) on Tuesday (Nov. 4), the Crimson are 2-0 for just the second time in 15 seasons. With 17 underclassmen and 10 upperclassmen on the roster, so…

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Nov. 14, 1899 — In Sanders Theatre, students, faculty, and administrators celebrate Maj. Henry Lee Higginson’s recent $150,000 gift for building the Harvard Union (now part of Barker Center for the Humanities).

  • Nation & World

    Voter turnout approaches some records, breaks others

    Voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election was not record-breaking, but it appears that it will approach the roughly 67 percent of the eligible citizenry who voted in 1960.

  • Nation & World

    Spirited discussion brings some clarity to Obama’s strategy on Middle East

    In the final days before the U.S. presidential election, the two leading candidates were too busy dashing from one rally to the next in a few battleground states to make it to the reliably blue Bay State in person.

  • Arts & Culture

    How the ‘talking machine’ allowed music and dance to cross oceans

    In the late 1920s, with the advent of new technology, gramophone and “talking machine” companies were able to capture the sounds and rhythms of life in cities across the globe. From New York to Havana, Paris to Honolulu, labels like Victor, Gramophone Company, and Okeh competed to record vernacular music.

  • Campus & Community

    And into the night

    It was well after midnight, and America was more than an hour into the Obama era when 02138 erupted in a series of spontaneous, ravelike street parties. In Harvard Yard, revelers dressed up the sedate, seated bronze John Harvard in a cloud of red, white, and blue balloons, and propped on his still chest an…

  • Science & Tech

    Wildlife Conservation Society chief outlines scenarios

    From the complex social structure of elephant herds to the understanding that gorillas are susceptible to deadly “human” diseases to the impacts of climate change, conservationists are struggling to balance a suite of challenges unknown in past generations.

  • Campus & Community

    Home for the homeless: Community Gifts kicks off the season of giving

    It’s November again, signaling the cold autumn preamble to another lengthy Massachusetts winter. And here at Harvard, “giving month” has arrived — kicking off the annual Community Gifts Through Harvard campaign, a campuswide charitable initiative that draws much-needed dollars from generous faculty, staff, and retirees for various Massachusetts Bay charities during the month of November.…

  • Campus & Community

    At the Harvard Kennedy School

    The interest in this contest on the Harvard campus was apparent early at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Their election night gathering, featuring returns showing on the forum’s large screen, was ticketed for the first time. Forum officials said that 1,500 applied for the 1,000 tickets available.

  • Campus & Community

    A special night at the Queen’s Head pub

    At 7 p.m., with election results still the stuff of dreams, Matthew Clair pitched in to inflate balloons at the Cambridge Queen’s Head at Loker Commons. The Dunster House senior, whose Brentwood, Tenn., family, he said, was the only one in town with an Obama sign on the front lawn, is president of the Harvard…

  • Campus & Community

    At Harvard Law School, and beyond

    One hundred and twenty seven years later, the Harvard Law School can claim it has another alumnus in the White House. On Nov. 4, Barack Obama became the second Law School grad to ascend to the nation’s highest office.

  • Campus & Community

    Clarke, inventive materials scientist, to join Harvard’s SEAS faculty

    David R. Clarke, an inventive materials scientist recognized worldwide for his outstanding contributions to the study of ceramic materials, has been named Gordon McKay Professor of Materials in Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), effective Jan. 1, 2009.