Year: 2012

  • Health

    The ants come marching

    Aaron Ellison, a senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard Forest, has co-authored a new book, “A Field Guide to the Ants of New England.” During a discussion, he explained their pivotal importance to nature.

  • Campus & Community

    Governance reform, two years in

    In an interview with the Gazette, Harvard President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow Robert Reischauer reflect on the University’s governance changes two years after implementation.

  • Campus & Community

    Ronald F. Thiemann dies at 66

    Ronald F. Thiemann, Bussey Professor of Theology and former dean of Harvard Divinity School (HDS), died on Nov. 29 at the age of 66.

  • Arts & Culture

    Lincoln’s dimensions

    Screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner sat down with President Drew Faust to dissect Abraham Lincoln’s legacy and talk history, politics, and writing after a Harvard-sponsored screening of his new biopic, “Lincoln.”

  • Nation & World

    A fall snapshot of Arab Spring

    Short on certainties, a Harvard panel convenes nearly two years after the start of the Arab Spring to offer perspectives on the past, present, and future.

  • Nation & World

    Chile-Harvard partnership strong

    Harvard marked its 10-year relationship with Chile with a two-day seminar examining the nation’s future.

  • Health

    ‘Stem cell tourism’ growing trend

    A Harvard panel examined the problem of clinics around the world that provide stem cell treatments for intractable conditions. Although there is no medical evidence of the treatments’ effectiveness, such clinics have drawn thousands of patients from many countries.

  • Arts & Culture

    Apocalypse now? Hardly

    During a sometimes tongue-in-cheek lecture on Wednesday, Professor David Carrasco discussed the historical origins of humankind’s periodic preoccupations with the apocalypse.

  • Campus & Community

    Help for Cambridge youths

    Harvard Medical School faculty members at the Cambridge Health Alliance lend a hand, in partnership with the Cambridge Police Department, the schools, and youth services agencies, to identify potentially troubled youths and divert them into structured activities and mental health programs.

  • Campus & Community

    Margaret Nast Lewis, 101, dies

    Margaret Nast Lewis, a former faculty member of the Harvard College Observatory, died in Cambridge on Nov. 23 at the age of 101.

  • Science & Tech

    Two Harvard teams win energy grants

    Two Harvard-led teams are among the 66 selected by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) that will receive a total of $130 million in funding through its OPEN 2012 program, which is designed to support innovative energy technologies.

  • Campus & Community

    Professor joins Arctic commission

    President Barack Obama has appointed James J. McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission (USARC).

  • Campus & Community

    AAAS names 7 fellows from Harvard

    Seven faculty from Harvard University are named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  • Science & Tech

    Building with DNA bricks

    Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created more than 100 3-D nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego bricks — a major advance from the two-dimensional structures the same team built a few months ago.

  • Campus & Community

    Faculty Council meeting held Nov. 28

    The Faculty Council held its monthly meeting on Nov. 28.

  • Campus & Community

    Early Action applications rise to 4,856

    A total of 4,856 students have applied for admission to Harvard’s Class of 2017 under the Early Action program, an increase of 14.9 percent over last year. The Class of 2016 had 4,228 students in the early pool.

  • Campus & Community

    Deans announce new challenge

    Thirteen deans from Schools across Harvard today announced $150,000 in new entrepreneurship challenges, expanding Harvard support for student innovation and cross-School collaborations with broad social and cultural impact.

  • Arts & Culture

    Shadow and substance

    Harvard alumnus T.S. Eliot published 10 poems in the student-run literary magazine The Harvard Advocate between 1907 and 1910, including the one below.

  • Campus & Community

    Help with kids. And pets. And …

    The WATCH Portal, an online network launched last year to connect Harvard parents with University-affiliated baby sitters, is expanding its marketplace to include tutoring, pet care, and a host of other services for busy employees in a pinch.

  • Campus & Community

    In the Yard, a changing of the guard

    The trees of Harvard Yard are in the midst of managed change as the once-ubiquitous elms continue their decades-long decline. Mixed species, dominated by American trees, replace them.

  • Nation & World

    Digital society from the bottom up

    Kicking off the first in a three-part lecture series sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, “Exclusions and Inequality in Digital Societies: Theories, Evidence, and Strategy,” Ernest J. Wilson III, examined what the transition to a digital society means for “those at the bottom.”

  • Arts & Culture

    Disruptive music

    Harvard Professor Ingrid Monson during a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is exploring the music of Malian Neba Solo.

  • Campus & Community

    Transplant pioneer dies at 93

    Joseph E. Murray, emeritus professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, whose many breakthroughs included the first successful kidney transplant, died Nov. 26, after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke at his Wellesley, Mass., home on Thanksgiving. He was 93.

  • Science & Tech

    New device hides from infrared cameras

    A new device invented at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can absorb 99.75 percent of infrared light that shines on it. When activated, it appears black to infrared cameras.

  • Campus & Community

    VP for strategy, programs named

    Leah Rosovsky, executive administrative dean at Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences, will become Harvard University’s vice president for strategy and programs, President Drew Faust announced today.

  • Campus & Community

    Sen named Chevalier

    Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has been decorated with the title of Chevalier in France’s Legion of Honor.

  • Science & Tech

    Ancient Iraq revealed

    Jason Ur, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, earlier this year launched a five-year archaeological project — the first such Harvard-led endeavor in the war-torn nation since the early 1930s — to scour a 3,200-square-kilometer region around Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, for the signs of…

  • Arts & Culture

    To understand, make a map

    “Cartographic Grounds,” an exhibit of new and old mapmaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, intends to inspire a new generation of designers to draw, with precision, what they see, and to present, with art, what they imagine.

  • Arts & Culture

    Note taking in a clickable age

    A recent Radcliffe symposium explored the history and future of note taking.

  • Health

    Sophisticated worms

    In a new study of worm locomotion, researchers show that a single type of motor neuron drives an entire sensorimotor loop.