In only two months as an intern in a lab at Harvard School of Public Health, Erika Espinosa believes she learned more than she could have in a semester of undergraduate courses. The Summer Program in Biological Sciences in Public Health (BPH), Espinosa said, “taught me the real definition of hard work” as she performed molecular…

When she was running for a seat in Japan’s house of representatives, Mayuko Toyota, SM ’02, one day found herself standing in the rain on crutches, giving a speech at a common venue for politicking in that country: outside the train station. “I might have looked miserable,” she said, explaining that an injury had her hobbling around…

The U.S. spends more than $2.8 trillion on health care each year, and some estimate that 30% of that price tag may be waste. To promote more effective use of health care resources, a group of national organizations representing medical specialists are working to identify procedures and tests that may be overused. The Choosing Wisely initiative, sponsored by the American Board of…

For the past year, Harvard Law students in the Education Law Clinic have travelled back and forth to the Massachusetts State House to lobby state legislators to pass an Act Relative to Safe and Supportive Schools. On August 13, all that work paid off, when Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the Safe and Supportive Schools…

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Emily Balskus has been named an Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. Each year since 1999, editors of the review have selected exceptionally talented young innovators whose work they believe has the greatest potential to transform the world. Balskus uses a variety of approaches, including advanced DNA sequencing,…

Conventional wisdom holds that the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is a viscous fluid, with organelles and proteins suspended within it, jiggling against one another and drifting at random. However, a new biophysical study led by researchers at Harvard University challenges this model and reveals that those drifting objects are subject to a very different type…

Harvard’s popular Science & Cooking lecture series will return on Sept. 8, bringing world-class chefs and eminent food experts to campus for weekly talks and demonstrations that are open to the public. Most of the guests and topics this year will be entirely new, as the series welcomes for the first time the internationally renowned…

A follow-up study led by a joint team of Harvard and MIT researchers explores the promise and perils of de-identifying learner data from MOOCs (massive open online courses) and offers recommendations of how to balance privacy with open data. The dataset (made available in May) contains the original learning data from the 16 HarvardX and MITx courses…

Women who consume higher amounts of caffeine may have a lower risk of developing tinnitus — a steady ringing in the ear — than women who consume less, according to a new study by a Harvard School of Health (HSPH) researcher and colleagues. Most of the 65,000 women in the 18-year study got their caffeine from coffee; those…

Physics graduate students Erik Bauch and Georg Kucsko have developed an online tool, Open Rev., for collaborative annotation of scientific publications. Open Rev. enables open discussion about scholarly works, independent of publishers, on a free platform that is easily accessible. Users can upload a paper, highlight specific sections and generate related questions, which are then…

Graduate School of Design alumna Amale Andraos has been appointed dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). An associate professor at GSAPP and a principal at the New York-based firm WORKac, Andraos is a leading voice on urbanism and globalization, and related environmental and social concerns. She has worked on such…

The Harvard University Archives and Schlesinger Library opened their doors to a display of food-related items. While recipes abounded, a few items took the cake, including Julia Child’s Emmy award, a sketch of an epic 1818 Harvard dining hall food fight and china used at Harvard in the 19th century. The Archives’ display was but…

The Judaica Division’s latest publication — “Harvard Judaica in the 21st Century” by Charles Berlin — was recently published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Division. In 1962 the Division was established with the appointment of Charles Berlin, Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica and Head of the Division. Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost, noted in his…

Tozzer Library returned to an entirely rebuilt and redesigned space following two years in temporary quarters. The original Tozzer Library building  was almost completely demolished and rebuilt and enlarged to reunite Harvard’s anthropological community for the first time in over 50 years. Tozzer is connected to the Peabody Museum, where some Anthropology Department offices continue…

A film by pioneering director Robert J. Flaherty — which film historians believed to have been lost — was rediscovered at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The short film “Oidhche Sheanchais” (“A Night of Storytelling”) was created by Flaherty in 1935 during the production of his now-classic film “Man of Aran.” The nitrate print of “Oidhche Sheanchais” was…

Today, more people than ever have health insurance. In the U.S., millions have signed up for coverage since the 2008 passage of the Affordable Care Act. Globally, there’s a high level of interest in establishing universal health coverage in countries without it. It’s expected that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—a set of new worldwide goals for 2015 and beyond—will…

In St. Louis, Missouri, Delmar Boulevard marks a sharp dividing line between the poor, predominately African American neighborhood to the north and a more affluent, largely white neighborhood to the south. Education and health also follow the “Delmar Divide,” with residents to the north less likely to have a bachelor’s degree and more likely to…

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on supporting innovative early career researchers, awarded 16 new Damon Runyon Fellows at its May 2014 Fellowship Award Committee meeting, including Harvard’s Avinash Khanna and Sungwook. The recipients of this prestigious, four-year award are outstanding postdoctoral scientists conducting basic and translational cancer research in the…

The American Philosophical Society (APS) recently elected 28 new members, including three Harvard faculty members: Richard J. Tarrant, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Rem Koolhaas, professor in practice of architecture and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.   An…

Ana Langer, director of the Women and Health Initiative and Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) at Harvard School of Public Health, says that new findings from an international study on fetal growth and birth length debunk longstanding beliefs that variations among fetal and infant sizes have something to do with genetics, race, or ethnicity. The consortium that produced this study —…

In many cases, when you bring a room full of pre-teens together, in the summer, to talk about math and science – you don’t hear squeals of excitement. But then this was no ordinary class. This was the highly popular Science and Cooking for Kids, a week-long, free program that is developed and run by…

A team of engineers at theHarvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in Cambridge, Mass., and the University of Texas, Austin, have created a truly portable device for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy is a technique that perturbs protons within a molecule to glean important clues about its structure.…

James R. Rice, Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has been selected to receive the Theodore von Karman Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The Engineering Mechanics Institute, part of ASCE, presents the von…

Campus Services and Harvard University Housing recently announced the appointment of Professor Christopher Winship and his wife, Nancy K. Winship, as the newest faculty directors within the Graduate Commons Program. They will take up residence in 29 Garden Street next spring, and will begin hosting events for graduate students and other Harvard affiliates in the…

HarvardX is offering a host of new and returning open online courses this fall. Visualizing Japan (9/3) A first-time MITx/HarvardX collaboration, VJx opens windows on Japan’s transition into the modern world through the historical visual record. Poetry in America: Module 1: New England (9/10) This course, the first installment of the multi-part Poetry in America series, covers American poetry…

The Roma in Europe are increasingly subject to racism, social exclusion, trafficking, and violence, in spite of efforts by European Union institutions to uphold Roma human rights, according to a new article by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Europe’s Roma population “constitutes the poorest, most stigmatized, and excluded population within the…

Evelynn M. Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard, has been appointed by President Obama to the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans, it was announced Wednesday. Hammonds has served as a member of the President’s Board of Advisors…

A new paper by Jill Dougherty, Spring 2014 Fellow and former CNN Moscow bureau chief, traces the shift in Russia’s ideology and its effect on media coverage of the Ukraine conflict. In the piece, Dougherty says, all sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are using propaganda, including the United States and other Western countries. But, for Moscow, the conflict…

People who eat a lot of fried foods may have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, according to a large, long-term study. Led by Leah Cahill, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and An Pan of the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, the researchers examined data…

Selling the public on the insurance requirement in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — making sure people are aware of the opportunities and helping them find a plan — has proven to be a tremendous marketing challenge. So far, fewer than 10 percent of uninsured people in the U.S. have signed up for a plan through the federal…