The Harvard Gazette

Global Harvard: Asia

Travel anywhere through a world increasingly interwoven by the Internet, commerce, and fellowship, and chances are that Harvard is there, whether through established programs and offices, or in the guise of field researchers, alumni leaders, and touring students. Here is a sampling of those myriad connections.

Drew Faust descends the stairs of the Great Hall of the People with Harvard delegation members.

World

Harvard in Beijing

President Drew Faust delivered "Universities and the Challenge of Climate Change" as part of the Tsinghua Global Vision Lecture series. Her speech marked the culmination of a series of events in Beijing at which climate change was a central topic.

Science

Colleges have ‘special’ role in fighting climate change

They are pushing hard toward breakthrough remedies, Faust says in speech at Beijing university

Harvard President Drew Faust joined more than 430 alumni, faculty, and friends on Sunday to celebrate the University’s long and growing ties to the Middle Kingdom.

News

A celebration in Beijing

Faust, University researchers address Your Harvard gathering of alumni, faculty, friends

“Harvard opened the world to me. It said, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ I don’t think there’s any way in the world I’d be sitting in Shanghai … right now if I didn’t go to Harvard,” said Harvard Club of Shanghai President Kate McFarlin.

World

Cultivating community in Shanghai

Harvard Club’s McFarlin works to bring alumni closer together

World

Holistically Crimson

Alumnus works in finance, helps Harvard to thrive in Shanghai

China's Houtan Park is the brainchild of Kongjian Yu, a Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) alumnus, dean of architecture and landscape architecture at Peking University, and design critic in landscape architecture and urban design at the GSD. His environmental approach to landscape architecture has won him international acclaim.

World

With nature in mind

Landscape architect specializes in finding environmental solutions to China’s urbanization problems

Harvard Professor Michael Herzfeld taught a six-week intensive course at Shandong University as a way to bolster the fledgling Anthropology Department there.

World

The seeds of anthropology

Harvard alumnus helps to create academic discipline at Chinese university

“We have people say: ‘We want to know what happened to our family,’ ” said Phuong Pham, a research scientist at Harvard (pictured in Cambodia in 2008). Pham and fellow Harvard researcher Patrick Vinck have been conducting surveys of Cambodians’ attitudes toward trials of former Khmer Rouge officials. The trials — Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia — are currently under way.

World

A thirst for justice delayed

Researchers explore Cambodian attitudes toward Khmer Rouge trials

The Maha Kumbh Mela, an eight-week Hindu festival held every 12 years in India and the largest human gathering on the planet, ended three weeks ago. In January and February, nearly 50 Harvard professors, students, doctors, and researchers made a pilgrimage to India's Kumbh Mela, which housed roughly 3 million people for its 55-day duration and drew as many as 20 million visitors on peak river-bathing days.

World

Lessons of a temporary city

Researchers from across Harvard share findings from India’s Kumbh Mela festival

Sakura Christmas, a doctoral student from Harvard’s History Department, is wrapping up work in the archives and libraries of Tokyo and headed for 10 months of study in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China that spans much of China’s northern border.

World

Invading Inner Mongolia’s painful past

Tumultuous times draw history student Sakura Christmas

Harvard Center Shanghai provides programming support, local expertise, and meeting space for Harvard researchers, students, and alumni in one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

World

A taste of Harvard in Shanghai

Center hosts executive education, other programs, while doubling as locus for alumni

“For a lot of Japanese people, Harvard is very unstructured, very diverse, a place where people are not shy about expressing their opinions,” said Carl Kay, a businessman in Tokyo and president of the Harvard Club of Japan. “The Harvard Club is a place where they can reconnect with that. It touches a place where they’ve stretched and grown.”

World

A Harvard bridge to Japan

Leader of University club works to foster community, understanding, sharing

“How we define success in the education of women, whether in the United States or South Korea or worldwide, remains an open and pressing question,” Harvard President Drew Faust said during her address at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

World

More opportunities for women

Concluding her Asian trip in South Korea, Faust urges improved educational prospects

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, one of the Toyoko's tallest, is unconventional in more than just design. It is a school skyscraper that contains 10,000 students in three institutions of higher education. The striking building was designed by Paul Tange, who graduated from Harvard College in 1981 and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1985. Photo by Ned Brown/Harvard Staff

World

Creator of skyscrapers

Harvard-trained architect builds across Asia, including high-rise schools

Professor Robert Lue (pictured), the HarvardX faculty director, presented the latest thinking on HarvardX and its global presence during a meeting in Hong Kong on Monday. This was the first event in a weeklong visit to Asia with President Drew Faust.

World

Harvard’s hand in shaping education

Faust, Lue outline online learning initiatives at Hong Kong meeting

Daniel Koss, a doctoral student in Harvard’s Government Department, has spent nearly a year in China, studying how such a large, diverse nation could remain intact through decades of warfare, revolution, and unrest, and emerge to wield growing influence on the global stage. Photo courtesy of Daniel Koss

World

Stability amid revolution

Doctoral student plumbs China’s strength throughout war, turmoil

“Transparency is perhaps the most potent tool in the fight against corruption,” said Associate Professor Karthik Ramanna, launching into a presentation about a fearless publisher of exposés in Russia and an Indian website that crowdsources examples of government officials seeking bribes. His talk was part of a series of live Web chats, hosted by the South Asia Institute and funded by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission.

World

Bridging the gap, digitally

Video conferences connect Harvard experts, South Asian entrepreneurs

In the wake of the nuclear disasters at Fukushima two years ago today, many Japanese are worried about radiation in the food they serve to their families. Photo by Ned Brown/Harvard Staff

World

With radiation, worries about food

Harvard student probes Japanese concerns over safety two years after nuclear meltdown

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In addition to the work conducted at Harvard, the program supports Indonesian researchers in their own studies. “It’s a completely special program geared toward the needs of local leaders in Indonesia,” said Jay Rosengard, faculty chair of the Harvard Kennedy School Indonesia Program.

World

Indonesia, front and center

HKS program provides data to help vast, fledgling democracy prosper

Harvard President Drew Faust visited the Keio Girls Senior High School during a 2010 trip to Tokyo and later China. “Universities exchange faculty and students as never before, and engage in an increasingly porous world of international problem solving and collaboration,” Faust said at the opening of the Harvard Center Shanghai.

World

Harvard-Asia: Ties deep and broad

Faust's upcoming visit is framed against University's longstanding involvement with continent

Over 25 days, using not much more than a team of Indian medical student volunteers and 10 iPads, the FXB team cataloged 40,000 patient records. Here, pilgrims gather for drug distribution at one of the pharmacies.

World

Tracking disease in a tent city

Public health researchers follow outbreaks in real time at India's Kumbh Mela

“The Kumbh’s organizers let everything else be handled by non-government entities like the akharas,” or religious orders, said John Macomber, a senior lecturer in finance at HBS, who came to Kumbh with his own mission: to turn its organized chaos into a Business School case study.

World

Among millions, a blank slate

Pondering the price of potatoes, and other mysteries of commerce, at India’s Kumbh Mela

“For anyone interested in the vibrancy of Hindu culture, this is a kind of epicenter of religious life,” said Harvard Professor Diana Eck (not pictured). Eck was joined by Harvard Divinity School students at Kumbh Mela, a six-week-long, millions-strong celebration of Mother Ganga.

World

Saving the mother river

Divinity, College students explore ‘sacred geography’ at India’s Kumbh Mela

The largest public gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela is expected to draw as many as 70 million people, a crowd greater than New York, London, and Paris combined, for ritual bathing in the rivers.

World

Mapping a megacity’s metabolism

Design School team finds lessons for urban planners at India’s Kumbh Mela gathering

A sadhu, or holy man, arrives in style, his face covered by light ash.

World

Inside India’s pop-up city

Harvard team maps the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest gathering

President Drew Faust meets with Harvard students during the first leg of her trip to India.

World

Harvard’s ties to India

Visit by President Faust highlights region's growing importance

Tarun Khanna’s (above) new Gen Ed course on South Asia’s long-term problems and their possible entrepreneurial solutions attracted students from across the University last semester. Harvard’s understanding of the region’s importance will be highlighted by President Drew Faust’s visit to India this week.

World

India, front and center

Faust visit spotlights Harvard’s growing ties to South Asia

Annie Ryu (forefront) and Brandon Liu (far left) participated in a student project using text messaging to remind mothers in developing world countries about prenatal care. S.V. Subramanian (center) is their faculty adviser.

Health

Texting their way to better health

Student project on mother-child care moves toward India field test

Japanese rescuers search for survivors and victims in the debris of the tsunami devastation caused by the earthquake in Sendai, Japan. In response to the calamity there, members of the Harvard for Japan movement, together with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, are hosting “Harvard for Japan Week” through a slate of activities.

World

Harvard rushes to aid Japan

Web portals, discussions, benefits are being held in response to quake-created tragedy

The scientists say that the cholera bacterial strain introduced into Haiti probably came from an infected human or contaminated food or other item from outside of Latin America. It is highly unlikely, they say, that the outbreak was triggered by ocean currents or other climate-related events.

Health

Cholera strain tied to South Asia

HMS researchers aid effort to trace origin of outbreak

Associate Professor of Anthropological Archaeology Rowan Flad (right) conducts an auger survey during the 2009-10 season. Survey techniques commonly used by archaeologists aren’t useful in the Chengdu Plain because surface materials are obscured by the ongoing agricultural uses of the land. Team members must drill 2-meter-deep survey holes at regular intervals with hand augers.

Science

The search for China’s roots

Harvard archaeologist Rowan Flad sifts the past with international team

Harvard Business School has received a gift of $50 million from the Tata Trusts and Companies. This marks the School’s largest international donation in its 102-year history. Ratan Tata (from left), the chairman of Tata Sons Ltd., meets with Harvard President Drew Faust and Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria.

Campus

Business School announces Tata gift; two initiatives

$50 million to fund expanded executive education; innovation center also planned

Sunil Sinha, an executive in Tata Quality Management Services, told a Harvard audience Tuesday (Oct. 12) that the Tata Nano was the result of an unlikely — but public — promise that the company’s leader made in 2003, setting to work a team of engineers charged with rethinking how cars could be designed and made.

Science

Building the cheapest car

Indian executive describes design innovations of Tata Nano

Pakistanis carry boxes of food from an Afghan army helicopter after it landed on a road to deliver emergency food aid in a flooded area of Baluchistan Province, southern Pakistan. According to Harvard water engineer John Briscoe, Pakistan’s long-term water security requires institutional renewal and new infrastructure, including new dams, on the Indus River.

World

In Pakistan, controlling water is key

Modernized infrastructure may be best response to episodic floods

(Boston, MA - April 13, 2010) Audience members listen as Mickey Chopra, Chief of Health and Associate Director of Programmes at UNICEF speaks about "Nutrition and Achieving the Millennium Development Goals" at the HSPH, Kresge Building. Staff Photo Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office

World

Reducing malnutrition

International goals for 2015 seem out of reach for many developing nations

Harvard President Drew Faust delivers her speech during the Harvard Center Shanghai celebratory banquet and reception.

World

Harvard Center Shanghai opens its doors

Harvard University President Drew Faust visits the Keio Girls Senior High School in Tokyo. Drew Faust (left) speaks to a gathering of students. Staff Photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office

World

Harvard in Japan

Dispatches chronicle historic and cultural aspects of President Faust's trip

Exotic plant samples, obtained in China's rugged Hengduan Mountains, are mounted for study.

Health

Plant diversity, altitude leave collectors breathless in China

Harvard, Chinese researchers discover 30 new species during remote mountain explorations