Year: 2009

  • Campus & Community

    Nieman Foundation chooses 24 for its 72nd class of Nieman Fellows

    The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has selected 24 journalists from the United States and abroad to join the 72nd class of Nieman Fellows. The group includes print and multimedia reporters and editors; radio and television journalists; photographers; book authors; a filmmaker; and a columnist.

    7 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Radcliffe recognizes its distinguished alumnae

    The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the 2009 Radcliffe Alumnae Award winners, who will be honored at the Radcliffe Awards Symposium on June 5 from 10:30 a.m. to noon at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center. The event will also feature a panel discussion by alumnae award winners, titled…

    6 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Radcliffe Institute 2009-10 fellows include artists, scientists

    The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the women and men selected to be Radcliffe Fellows in 2009-10. These creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists were chosen for their superior scholarship, research, or artistic endeavors, as well as the potential of their projects to yield long-term impact. While at Radcliffe,…

    13 minutes
  • Arts & Culture

    Peabody awards photography fellowship

    The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has recently announced Alessandra Sanguinetti as the recipient of the 2009 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    H1N1 influenza advice for Commencement week visitors

    While at Harvard, should you experience any symptoms consistent with H1N1 flu, you should contact Harvard University Health Services (HUHS).

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    Tips to help you enjoy Commencement, come rain or shine

    VISITOR TIPS AND SERVICES The following services will be in effect at the University on Commencement Day, June 4.

    3 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Special notice regarding Commencement Exercises

    MORNING EXERCISES To accommodate the increasing number of those wishing to attend Harvard’s Commencement Exercises, the following guidelines are proposed to facilitate admission into Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement Morning (June 4):

    2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Tradition rings out

    A peal of bells will ring throughout Cambridge next week, on June 4. For the 21st consecutive year a number of neighboring churches and institutions will ring their bells in celebration of the city of Cambridge and of Harvard’s 358th Commencement Exercises.

    1 minute
  • Campus & Community

    A glimpse into the future

    Five years from now, at high school graduation, the memory of their first visit to Harvard might not be as vivid, but it’s one that will last. The 40 young, inquisitive students who flocked to Cambridge on May 20 got a brief glimpse of a university with three and a half centuries of history —…

    4 minutes
  • Health

    Chemical leaches from plastic drinking bottles into people

    A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles, the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles, showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA).

    4 minutes
    Plastic bottles lined up.
  • Health

    Acid-suppressive medicines increase pneumonia risk for hospital patients

    Ever since a class of drugs called proton pump inhibitors was introduced to the market in the late 1980s, the use of these acid-suppressive medications for heartburn, acid reflux, and other gastrointestinal symptoms has grown tremendously. The widespread use has extended to the inpatient hospital setting, where patients are often routinely given the medications as…

    3 minutes
  • Health

    Brigham face transplant recipient goes home

    James Maki, a 59-year-old who became the nation’s second face transplant recipient in April to repair injuries from a horrific subway accident, left Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Thursday (May 21), thankful for what he called a “new chance to build my life.”

    5 minutes
  • Health

    Evolution explored from all angles

    From humanity’s close relationship to chimpanzees to the missing link between land and sea creatures, the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) has capped off a year celebrating Darwin and “On the Origin of Species” with a new exhibit that puts evolution front and center.

    4 minutes
  • Health

    Biology department evolves at FAS

    Earlier this month, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) made official what scientists worldwide have known for years: Harvard is a hotbed of research and teaching in the field of human evolutionary biology — the study of why we’re the way we are.

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    HAA announces Harvard Medal recipients

    The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has announced the recipients of the 2009 Harvard Medal: John “Jack” F. Cogan Jr. A.B. ’49, J.D. ’52; Harvey V. Fineberg A.B. ’67, M.D. ’71, M.P.P. ’72, Ph.D. ’80; and Patti B. Saris A.B. ’73, J.D. ’76.

    3 minutes
  • Arts & Culture

    Seceding from the secessionists

    Deep in Civil War Mississippi, where manicured plantations gave way to wild swampland and thick pine forests, a young white man named Newton Knight led a ragtag band of guerilla fighters against the Confederate Army. His story is one of personal bravery and unwillingness to adhere to the secessionist movement that all but surrounded him.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Talking terror

    The two men sit close, knees almost touching, in a mud-walled hut in the Congolese village of Katokota.

    15 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Scholar makes robots that detect land mines

    On Oct. 10, 2005 — he remembers the date exactly — Thrishantha Nanayakkara was driving down a country road, headed for a science workshop at Jaffna Central College, a high school in the far north of Sri Lanka. The event was designed to distract potential child soldiers from the allure of war.

    6 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Four faculty join FAS’s teaching elite

    Four professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have been named Harvard College Professors in recognition of their contributions to undergraduate teaching, advising, and mentoring.

    6 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Leadership Initiative Fellow Bolden nominated to lead NASA

    Retired Marine Maj. Gen. and former astronaut Charles Bolden was nominated to be the head of NASA on Saturday (May 23), interrupting his stay at Harvard as anAdvanced Leadership Fellow.

    2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Guiding Harvard’s endowment

    Call it fate. Just as the world’s financial markets started tumbling, a woman with unique understanding of the Harvard endowment took over the helm of the Harvard Management Company (HMC).

    13 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    New department reflects the evolution of human evolution

    Earlier this month, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) made official what scientists worldwide have known for years: Harvard is a hotbed of research and teaching in the field…

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    EVP Ed Forst to leave Harvard Aug. 1; return to financial sector

    Edward C. Forst has decided to step down as the University’s executive vice president as of Aug. 1, to return with his family to New York and to resume his career in the financial services industry.

    2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Hospice care under-used by many terminally ill patients, study finds

    A new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) found that only about half the patients diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer discuss hospice care with their physician within…

    2 minutes
  • Health

    ‘Super-recognizers’ never forget a face

    Some people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who’ve discovered a group they call “super-recognizers”: those who can easily recognize someone…

    3 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending May 18. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

    2 minutes
  • Arts & Culture

    Two views of disparate cultures

    Art historian Kellie Jones, the child of two writers, grew up in the 1960s and 1970s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was a place of cultural ferment, creation, and comparative racial freedom. Jones is exploring new visual and literary ways to convey her personal history. Legal scholar Stacy Leeds, an expert in tribal law,…

    6 minutes
  • Arts & Culture

    Sarah Messer’s surreal poetics

    With long, sun-streaked tresses, Sarah Messer doesn’t strike one as a poetess whose work conjures American histories in bewitching, surrealist twists. But Messer’s poems navigate farther and farther from the familiar mainland into a world wholly her own.

    4 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    May 21, 1940 — “The Harvard Crimson” publishes a statement endorsed by hundreds of students vowing “never under any circumstances to follow the footsteps of the students of 1917” who had gone off to fight in World War I. Thirty-four members of the Class of 1917 defend their actions in a statement published on May…

    2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    ‘Black Holes’ at the Museum of Science

    The exhibition “Black Holes: Space Warps & Time Twists,” produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will open at the Boston Museum of Science on June 21. The exhibit journeys to the edge of black holes to discover how recent scientific research is challenging notions of space and time, and, in the process, turning science…

    1 minute