On March 1, the Georgia House of Representatives passed H.B.531, a sweeping elections bill that critics and voting rights advocates were quick to note increases restrictions on absentee voting and curtails weekend early voting hours. Just two days later, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1, legislation containing a broad range of democratic reforms, from…

Each year, the international NOMIS Foundation selects two notable academics as recipients of the NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award, and this year Harvard professor Catherine Dulac is one of the honorees. “This is terrific news, and more well-deserved recognition for the exciting and groundbreaking work that Catherine and her lab have been doing,” said Sean Eddy,  Ellmore…

Harvard Business School (HBS) has announced the spring cohort of Executive Fellows for the 2020-21 academic year. The Executive Fellows Program leverages the expertise of outstanding practitioners, including alumni, each of whom partners with an HBS faculty member to bring their experience in business into the MBA program and the School. The fellows contribute to…

Researchers Piotr Bialowolski, Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska, and Eileen McNeely, of the Harvard Chan SHINE program, examine the roles that financial control and financial fragility play in well-being in a new paper published in the journal Social Indicators Research. Financial fragility is recognized as a substantial issue for individual well-being. Various estimates show that between 46 and…

Harvard Business School (HBS) and Odgers Berndtson, a world leader in recruiting and developing organizational leaders, today jointly announced a new collection for the school’s Baker Library, made up of interviews with the colleagues and family of former Genzyme Corporation Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President Henri A. Termeer, one of biotech’s early pioneers. The…

Harvard professor Pierre E. Jacob was awarded this year’s Guy Medal in Bronze by the Royal Statistical Society. The prize is presented by the Royal Statistical Society and is named after William Augustus Guy, the British medical statistician. The prize is awarded to honor excellent work presented to any conference or meeting run by the…

Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine is proving as effective in real-world settings as it did in clinical testing, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) co-authored by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers. The study looked at data on more than 500,000 people who received the vaccine in…

Mental health and well-being appear to be connected to biological processes and behaviors that contribute to cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to an American Heart Association statement published in Circulation on Jan. 25, 2021. The statement, co-authored by Laura Kubzansky, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public…

Newspapers this week are swamped with headlines like, “What Went Wrong with the Texas Power Grid?” To anyone not intimately concerned with the details of American electricity distribution, this may seem like an odd way of referring to the current electricity crisis in Texas. Isn’t there one national grid? Actually, there are three: the Eastern Interconnection, the…

Meena Venkataramanan ’21 is one of 24 U.S. citizens who make up the Gates Cambridge Scholars class of 2021. She will join the MPhil program in English Studies at the University of Cambridge in October, and plans to study contemporary refugee and asylum-seeker literature from the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Venkataramanan is a joint…

The clothing that firefighters wear to protect themselves from fire and other hazards may contain toxic compounds called perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In the study, led by Anna Young, a research fellow in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H.…

The Dan David Prize announced on Monday seven recipients of the award for 2021, including the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor Emerita of the History of Science Katharine “Katy” Park. This year’s recipients also feature director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and fellow distinguished health and medical scholars…

A newly developed machine learning algorithm has uncovered information about how eating walnuts can lead to significantly lower risk of chronic diseases. The algorithm was able to analyze data from 1,833 participants of a multi-year nutrition study and identify 19 biomarkers associated with walnut consumption, according to research led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of…

Harvard is being recognized as one of the top Universities for commuters in the country. Harvard’s CommuterChoice program recently received a 2021 Best Workplace for Commuters award based on the level of commuter-benefits provided to our community members. Those benefits include Harvard’s 50 percent subsidy on transit passes, discounted memberships for Bluebikes bike sharing, carpool…

Researchers in the laboratory of Frederick Alt of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) at Children’s Hospital Boston made a groundbreaking discovery at the nexus of chromatin biology and immunology.  Their work, recently published in Nature, showed that physiological deregulation of the WAPL chromatin-maintenance factor allows developing B…

The challenges that the field of education has faced this year have been well-documented, from the swift and surprising shift to online learning in spring 2020 to the transition into a more robust and sustainable model of remote teaching and learning this fall and winter. In the realm of higher education, as in other areas,…

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 106 new members and 23 international members, announced NAE President John L. Anderson this week. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,355 and the number of international members to 298. Three members of the Harvard community were included in the most recent election: Doyle, Francis J.,…

As she prepared to lead classmates, professors, teaching fellows (TFs), and visitors in a virtual Zumba session, Bri Braswell paused for a moment of gratitude. “It has been a gift, a breath of air, for me to be here,” said Braswell, a master’s student in the Higher Education Program, looking out across a sea of…

The fifth annual Sophomore Convocation offered new concentrators of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) a sense of unity in the midst of a virtual world. Held via Zoom, the program featured words of advice and encouragement for sophomores from a group of diverse and distinguished alumni, and concluded…

The Harvard Innovation Labs recently announced that more than 420 ventures are joining the 2021 Spring Venture Program. “Last spring, soon after welcoming hundreds of students to the Harvard Innovation Labs at our in-person Venture Program orientation, we transitioned to entirely virtual programming,” said Matt Segneri, Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director of the Harvard…

A startup company founded by applied physicists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) intends to transform consumer electronics by introducing a powerful technology for imaging and illumination that could replace conventional lenses with an ultrathin, flat optical microchip. Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD), which cultivates the University’s…

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has announced its initial awards to scholars as part of the Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) K99/R00 program. Elias Picazo, a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology with the Mallinckrodt Chemistry Lab, has received an award for his project titled “Strategic Molecular…

Two faculty members from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — Sara Bleich and Benjamin Sommers — and one former faculty member, Gina McCarthy, have been chosen for roles in the new Biden-Harris administration. The appointments for Bleich and Sommers were announced Jan. 20, shortly after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. McCarthy’s appointment…

Sheperd (Shep) Doeleman, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has been named the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences’ 2021 Henry Draper Medal. As founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), Doeleman is widely known for his pivotal role in capturing the first image of a supermassive black…

President Joe Biden has nominated several Harvard alumni and faculty members to fill senior government positions. Ron Klein ’87 — Chief of staff A Washington, D.C., veteran, Klain has served as a Biden adviser many times over, most recently during the 2020 campaign and previously as his chief of staff when Biden was vice president in…

Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) announced today that it will continue to provide a wide range of research opportunities and programming through its Tunisia Office for a further six years, supported by a $2 million gift from Harvard alumnus Hazem Ben-Gacem ’92. The office, which opened its doors in Tunis in January 2017…

President Joe Biden has chosen two Harvard faculty members with deep diplomatic experience to fill senior government positions, signaling his intention to emphasize diplomacy and soft power in rebuilding U.S. influence on the world stage. Wendy R. Sherman, professor of the practice of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the School’s Center for…