Year: 2013

  • Nation & World

    Shinagel’s legacy honored

    Michael Shinagel was honored on May 14 for his accomplishments as dean of the Extension School, a position he has held since 1977. He will be retiring at the end of this academic year.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Attention, undivided

    Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health hopes to recruit entertainers for a campaign to reduce distracted driving.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Inside Pforzheimer House: GreekFest

    For the fourth consecutive year, the Pforzheimer House dining services staff helped students and staff celebrate GreekFest by creating a delicious feast.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cultivating community in Shanghai

    Kate McFarlin, president of the Harvard Club of Shanghai, wears her dual enthusiasms for Harvard and China on her sleeve.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    New investigators named

    Adam Cohen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics, and Hopi Hoekstra, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and molecular and cellular biology, are among the 27 scientists nationwide to be appointed as investigators by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Speaking up for science

    Former National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco described her four years in Washington, D.C., as difficult and frustrating, but said it’s imperative that other scientists follow suit to give science a voice in national policies.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Five-year partnership strengthens ties

    Five years after Harvard and Boston struck a community benefits cooperation agreement, the University’s neighbors in Allston-Brighton point to an enhanced partnership that has resulted in a vibrant Harvard Allston Education Portal, workforce preparation classes for adults, mentoring for students, and a wide variety of other programs.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Urgent prep work

    Humanitarian relief workers and climate scientists gathered in Cambridge this week to discuss the connection between climate change and humanitarian disasters and what relief workers can learn from science.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Toward a more competitive U.S.

    At an event at Harvard Business School (HBS) that was three parts analysis and one part rally, participants tried to chart a new path forward for the sluggish U.S. economy — a move that may require a new definition of “competitiveness.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The trouble with Kepler

    A malfunction aboard NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has jeopardized what has been one of the agency’s highest-profile missions, one that has revealed a galaxy rich with planets. The Gazette talked to Astronomy Professor Dimitar Sasselov, one of the mission’s principal investigators, about the implications.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Style and substance

    The culmination of the Harvard Horizons initiative was a symposium in which eight Ph.D. students each offered five-minute presentations, styled on the popular TED talks, about a specific aspect of their current research.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    New masters for Pforzheimer House

    Professor Anne Harrington and her husband, MIT Museum Director John Durant, have been appointed master and co-master of Pforzheimer House.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Catching flux

    Stephen Dupont, an award-winning photographer who traveled repeatedly to Papua New Guinea as a Robert Gardner Fellow, is displaying his works showing the intersection of traditional Papuan life and the industrialized world in a new exhibit at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Three honored as HAA medalists

    The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has announced that James V. Baker ’68, M.B.A. ’71, William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., J.D. ’43, LL.D. ’96, and Georgene Botyos Herschbach, A.M. ’63, Ph.D. ’69, are the recipients of the 2013 Harvard Medal.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Using clay to grow bone

    Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Brainbow,’ version 2.0

    Led by Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, a group of Harvard researchers has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Building on Einstein

    A team at Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Refusing a ‘diminished self’

    Former Ethiopian judge and political prisoner Birtukan Midekssa, at Harvard as a Scholar at Risk, argues that her native land — with its heritage of religious tolerance and its innate appetite for liberty — is ripe for democracy.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    With inclusion as the goal

    Harvard staff attended a workforce management conference to learn skills to communicate, solve problems, and innovate effectively across cultures.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Mourning that vexes the future

    In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Innovation in the arts

    Judges on Thursday gave an innovative Harvard group $30,000 and the grand prize in the inaugural Deans’ Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Putting local youth to work

    Harvard’s Summer Youth Employment Program puts local high school students from Boston and Cambridge to work on campus during the summer months. For many young people, it’s their first job.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Gangnam Style’ by the Yard

    The singer Psy spoke at Memorial Church about his life, his time in the United States, and the runaway success of “Gangnam Style.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Students win BSC’s Barrett Award

    Ruth Goins ’13 and Kabungo “Yanick” Mulumba ’15 were presented with the Joseph L. Barrett Award at a special ceremony on Wednesday.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Boldly going to Houghton

    A newly acquired writer’s guide for the science fiction fantasy TV show “Star Trek” at Harvard’s Houghton Library offers aspiring scriptwriters everything they would need to know before crafting a script for the ’60s cult classic.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Education without limits

    Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, explained his vision for online learning during a GSE Askwith Forum.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Top problem solvers

    This week at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) 10 teams of students from across Harvard demonstrated their projects as finalists in the President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Focus on teaching, learning

    The essentials of good teaching and learning took the stage at the second annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching conference.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pages out of time

    “Time & Time Again,” a new exhibit centered on Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, uses artifacts to illustrate shifting conceptions of making and marking time, from the cyclic sun and stars to linear springs and gears.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Making old hearts younger

    Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans, a study says.

    7 minutes