Year: 2012

  • Campus & Community

    Kuwait Foundation awards $8.1M gift

    The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) has given $8.1 million to Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to support the continuation of the Kuwait Program at HKS’s Middle East Initiative.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard’s IOP announces fall fellows

    The Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School has announced its resident and visiting fellowships for this fall.

  • Campus & Community

    House renewal, ready for launch

    The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard College announced plans to launch the systemwide effort to renew the University’s 12 undergraduate Houses. The announcement unveils Dunster as the first full House to be renewed, along with the location of “swing” housing, and the pacing for the project.

  • Campus & Community

    House renewal supports local economy

    Harvard University today announced plans to undertake a wide-ranging construction program that will result in the creation of nearly 3,600 local construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new local economic activity while ultimately funneling approximately $10 million into Cambridge city coffers in permitting fees alone.

  • Campus & Community

    Houses Today

    House Masters and former students discuss learning outside the classroom and how the housing system enriches life and community at Harvard.

  • Arts & Culture

    In 40 films, story of a screen great

    A summer-long festival at the Harvard Film Archive tells the story, in 40 movies, of Paramount Pictures — a legendary cinema enterprise that turned 100 this year.

  • Health

    In obesity battle, beige is the new brown

    Scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have isolated a new type of energy-burning fat cell in adult humans, which they say may have therapeutic potential for treating obesity.

  • Health

    Moving beyond health care’s fee-for-service

    Harvard researchers find that global budgets for health care, an alternative to the traditional fee-for-service model of reimbursement, can slow the growth of medical spending and improve the quality of care for patients.

  • Arts & Culture

    A new avenue for expression

    A new master’s concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Design invites artists and others out of the studio and into the world.

  • Campus & Community

    Getting a leg up, through Year Up

    Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of Year Up, a national program that trains urban young adults and places them in internships, visited Harvard to celebrate the achievements of seven Year Up participants who just completed the program.

  • Science & Tech

    Helping hunt for the Higgs

    For decades, it has been the holy grail of particle physics, an elusive subatomic particle that offered the tantalizing possibility of explaining how much of the universe works. Billions of dollars have been spent in the search for it. Thousands of researchers — including dozens from Harvard — have conducted trillions of experiments as part…

  • Campus & Community

    More than a residence: Houses of Harvard

    Silhouetted against the morning sun, a House crew hoists its boat high overhead at dockside, ready for a practice row on the Charles. Inside a master’s residence in Quincy House, amateur artists expand their creative horizons at a “paint bar,” working side-by-side with fellow students, offering encouragement and critique. High in the tower of Lowell…

  • Health

    Transforming cancer treatment

    Professor Martin Nowak is one of several co-authors of a paper, published in Nature on June 28,that outlines a new approach to cancer treatment that could make many cancers manageable, if not curable, by overcoming resistance to certain drug treatments.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard represented at Olympics

    Harvard will be well-represented at the upcoming 2012 Olympics in London, as nine athletes and one coach will compete at the games beginning July 27.

  • Health

    One million species, and counting

    Just weeks after adding its millionth Web page, the online biology clearinghouse called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has received a grant from the Sloan Foundation that will allow it to continue its mission of documenting every living plant and animal species on the globe.

  • Science & Tech

    Carbon counter

    Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China’s CO2 emissions.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard grad students named NAE fellows

    The National Academy of Education named four Harvard graduate students 2012 Spencer Dissertation Fellows.

  • Health

    The positives of playing favorites

    As described in a paper in Scientific Reports, a study led by Feng Fu, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, found that in-group favoritism — the tendency of people to help other members of the same group — is critical in establishing high-level cooperation that ultimately benefits the whole.

  • Health

    Clot-busting technology goes straight to work

    Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard have developed a novel biomimetic strategy that delivers life-saving nanotherapeutics directly to obstructed blood vessels, dissolving blood clots before they cause serious damage or even death.

  • Health

    When skin cancer cells resist drug treatment

    Harvard researchers have found that although tailored drugs can eradicate melanoma cells in the lab, they often produce only partial, temporary responses in patients. Researchers have now learned that normal cells that reside within the tumor, part of the tumor microenvironment, may supply factors that help cancer cells grow and survive despite the presence of…

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvard in the War of 1812

    The War of 1812 touched Harvard only lightly, a new exhibit shows, but the end of the conflict was much welcomed in Anglophile New England.

  • Science & Tech

    Quantum computing, no cooling required

    Using a pair of impurities in ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, researchers have created room-temperature quantum bits and have stored information in them for nearly two seconds — an increase of nearly six orders of magnitude over the life span of earlier systems. The work, described in the June 8 issue of Science, is a critical first…

  • Science & Tech

    Images from long ago or far away

    A new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology traces the development of photography and its use in anthropology from the beginnings of both fields in the 1800s to the present.

  • Nation & World

    Empowering a growing minority

    Now in its third year, the Latino Leadership Initiative brought 41 students from eight universities to Harvard for a week of leadership training, reflection, and strategizing on projects they will implement when they return to their largely Latino communities.

  • Science & Tech

    Fuel cell keeps going after hydrogen runs out

    Materials scientists at Harvard have demonstrated that a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC), which converts hydrogen into electricity, can also store electrochemical energy like a battery. This fuel cell can continue to produce power for a short time after its fuel has run out.

  • Campus & Community

    Suzanne Vogel, researcher of Japanese culture, 81

    Suzanne Hall Vogel, a psychotherapist at Harvard University Health Services for 27 years, died on June 19.

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Spider-Man,’ the scavenger hunt

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History has launched a summer-long program called Spider Sense! Scavenger Hunt, designed to entertain fans of the comics character and natural science alike.

  • Nation & World

    Balky states likely to join Medicaid expansion

    Experts speaking at The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health discussed the health care reform law Friday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of its core but struck down drastic penalties for states that don’t participate in a major expansion of Medicaid.

  • Campus & Community

    Obaid joins Belfer Center as visiting fellow

    Nawaf Obaid joins Belfer Center as visiting fellow

  • Health

    Worry over drug-resistant TB

    A symposium at the Broad Institute calls for mobilization to battle drug-resistant tuberculosis.