The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) was honored to host an essay contest on Europe with the students in Professor Muriel Rouyer’s class at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Global Europe: Democracy, Policy and Governance” (DPI 431). Students were tasked with an unusual assignment: they were asked to pretend that, in a quest…

The Music Department awarded $236,735 in 2013 awards and fellowships to support the scholarly and artistic work of its current graduate and undergraduate students. Research awards were given for projects ranging from the study of gospel music in Houston to Ugandan language study, and fieldwork in Israel, Finland, China, and Benin. The funds will also…

Yaendy Matos, a student at Fenway High School in Boston, says she is interested in a medical career but the field of public health has not been on her radar. “We don’t know what public health is. We’re just checking it out,” Matos said, as she sat with her friends in the Kresge cafeteria at…

The European Physical Society (EPS) will award its most prestigious prize in quantum electronics and optics to Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The prizes are awarded only once every two years, and recognize…

A new study has shed light on why a monkey malaria parasite that typically caused only mild infection in humans is now beginning to cause severe disease and death—and how it has the potential to become a dangerous human-to-human pathogen. In a multidisciplinary study using experimental and modeling approaches, researchers at Harvard School of Public…

Two affiliated projects proposed by a Harvard/MIT team and a Metropolitan New York Library Council/Brooklyn Historical Society team each received a 2013 Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian Program Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The awards will support the projects “Testing the National Digital Stewardship Residency Model in Boston, MA” and “National…

Three years ago, Oregon native Ali Chisti, MPH ’13, was on course to become a private practice neurosurgeon, studying medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. During the summers he worked as a caddie at a golf course in Bandon, along Oregon’s rural southern coast, to help pay for school. But in the…

The Awesome Box allows library patrons to return materials to a box set aside for items they deem to be awesome. “If you interact with an amazing or useful item from the library and return it to the Awesome Box, that item gets recorded as awesome so the community can see what others have found…

StackLife combines the familiarity of ordinary shelves with the dexterity of the virtual to let users explore the 12.3 million items in Harvard’s 73 libraries, with the Harvard community as a guide. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, StackLife is an open-source project that displays works on a virtual shelf that combines shelves from…

A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed…

Last May on Lilac Sunday, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University introduced visitors and online audiences to two mobile applications for mapping and sharing information on the Arboretum’s living plant collections—Mobile Interactive Map (MIM) and Arboretum Navigator. Following a year of rigorous testing and evaluation, the Arboretum has combined the best attributes of both in…

Robert Darnton, Harvard University Librarian and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, was awarded the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France. The Prix Mondial is awarded each year to an author whose work “conveys a message of modern humanism.” The Institut de France noted it wanted to recognize Darnton for “his research…

New findings from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment show that Medicaid coverage had no detectable effect on the prevalence of diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure, but substantially reduced depression, nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures, and increased the diagnosis of diabetes and the use of diabetes medication among low-income adults. The Oregon Health Insurance…

The influence of a minister of finance in shaping broad public policy, building sustainable health financing, and increasing efficiency in implementation and delivery of health and social services while securing fiscal and economic stability and growth were the key topics of the recently convened inaugural Ministerial Forum for Ministers of Finance, held at Harvard on April…

Harvard’s recently acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection centers on art, literature, and popular culture artifacts related to the chief avenues to altered states of mind: sex and drugs.  It is the largest collection of its kind in the world, and since its arrival at Harvard, this collection has sparked great interest. A new page…

The April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing killed three people and injured 264—20 critically—but every patient who was transported to a hospital survived the tragedy. One reason is that Boston is a “medical mecca,” with an unusually high number of teaching hospitals and trauma centers. But another crucial reason is that the Boston medical community…

Like others in Harvard Law School’s LL.M. class of 2013, Maryna Kavaleuskaya practiced law abroad before coming to America for additional legal training. And, like many of her 187 classmates—most of them from overseas—she had to overcome obstacles along the way. But unlike most others, Kavaleuskaya will be unable to return to a normal life…

Last month, as an historic trial continued in Guatemala against a former dictator charged with the genocide of indigenous Mayans, Lauren Herman ’13—a student in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC) —stood in court in Boston as a judge announced he was granting asylum to her Mayan client, who, with his family, had suffered…

John F. Manning ’85, the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at Harvard and an expert in administrative law, statutory interpretation, separation of powers law and the federal courts, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “John’s vital and meticulous scholarship, superb expertise in practice and theory of public law,…

The 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, marked by tragedy, are also known for being the first to incorporate a brand across all aspects of the games. “The Munich games were really the first games to create a visual identity. And it was a visual and graphic identity that spoke to the new identity of West…

Google’s head of news and social products Richard Gingras spoke to the Shorenstein Center about the evolution of the news ecosystem, and how media institutions can stay relevant in a changing technological landscape. Gingras, who describes himself not as a journalist, but as a “technologist,” reflected on why the news industry has experienced such changes in the…

  The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s 2012 renovation of Gutman Library’s first and second floor was recently recognized by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), receiving LEED Platinum certification. “The LEED Platinum certification of the Gutman Library is a great honor and further signifies HGSE’s commitment toward sustainability,” says Director of Operations Jason…

A New York Times profile of HSPH alumnus Donald Hopkins, MPH ’70, describes his impressive efforts to battle guinea worm disease and his prior involvement with the eradication of smallpox. Former deputy director and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1984-87), former assistant professor of tropical public health at HSPH, and currently vice…

Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), discusses the problem of pesticide residue on fruits and vegetables in a new video on the website of Environmental Working Group (EWG), a leading environmental health research and advocacy organization. The video appears in conjunction with the release of…

The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) will host its second annual conference on May 8. The theme for this year’s event is “Essentials,” drawing on the framing question, “In this time of disruption and innovation for universities, what are the essentials of good teaching and learning?” Ticket applications for this University-wide event are…

Though spring seemed to get a bit of a late start in Boston this year, spring planting is already well under way at the Arnold Arboretum. Staff horticulturists are adding many trees, shrubs, and vines from our nurseries to their new locations in the landscape. This season’s additions to the living collection—including about 75 individual…

The New York City Post of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) has awarded Harvard College senior Riju Agrawal ’13 the 2013 Colonel and Mrs. S. S. Dennis, III Scholarship in recognition of his hard work and dedication to research. In a ceremony on April 26, Cherry A. Murray, dean of the Harvard School…

A new environmental toxicity study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Copenhagen has found that exposure limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies for perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) found in drinking water appear to be 100 to 1,000 times too high. PFCs are chemicals widely used…

Four Harvard graduate students have been named recipients of Julius B. Richmond Fellowships from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. The doctoral students will each receive a dissertation grant totaling $10,000 from the center to fund independent research during the 2013-14 academic year. In awarding the one-year fellowships, the center selects candidates…

Caroline Buckee’s research on mining cellphone data to track how people’s movements correlate with the spread of disease has been named one of the top 10 “breakthrough technologies” for 2013 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Research published in October 2012 in the journal Science by Buckee, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, revealed—on the largest…