Featured series 
Tag: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Campus & Community
The future is now for FAS
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith recently spoke about the priorities for the coming campaign and his vision for the FAS.
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Science & Tech
Seeing light in a new way
Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and post-doctoral fellow Ofer Firstenberg have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules — a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical.
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Health
Deconstructing motor skills
Harvard researchers have found that the brain uses two largely independent neural circuits to learn spatial and temporal aspects of complex motor skills.
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Campus & Community
A professorship and a MacArthur
Jazz musician and composer Vijay Iyer, who won a MacArthur Foundation grant, in January will become the first Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts in Harvard’s Department of Music.
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Campus & Community
Libraries coming together
Sarah Thomas, the new vice president of the Harvard Library, will now also oversee the libraries of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The appointment signals a move toward a more unified and coordinated library system.
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Health
A foundation for future research
Harvard researchers recently developed the most detailed “specificity profile” for Cas9 — a “machine” made of protein and RNA that can be programmed to target specific DNA sequences and to precisely cut, paste, and turn on or turn off genes. Future researchers will use the data when developing genetic tools and therapies.
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Nation & World
Move over, Gutenberg
After months of construction, a “video capture studio” is near completion at Widener Library as part of Harvard’s commitment to exploring, innovating, experimenting, and leading change in how faculty members teach and students learn.
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Campus & Community
A 21st-century campus
Supporting the development of a robust campus, one that enhances Harvard’s mission of innovative teaching and learning, while simultaneously fostering connections across the University and the broader community will be an important goal of The Harvard Campaign.
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Nation & World
Cooperating in educating
The Harvard Campaign will help support growing advancements in interdisciplinary collaboration and integrated knowledge across the University.
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Science & Tech
A higher plane
Research by scientists in Elizabeth Spelke’s lab suggests our innate understanding of abstract geometry has origins in the evolutionary past.
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Health
The good life, longer
By synthesizing the data collected in multiple government-sponsored health surveys conducted in recent decades, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University, and the University of Massachusetts were able to measure how the quality-adjusted life expectancy of Americans has changed over time.
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Health
Summer in the lab
Students from local high schools spent a chunk of the summer at work in a Harvard lab as part of program co-sponsored by the University’s Life Sciences Education program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Nation & World
Piecing together Egypt’s rupture
It was the Muslim Brotherhood’s success at the ballot box and the poor prospects for opposition candidates in future elections that were at the root of last summer’s military takeover in Egypt, a Harvard Kennedy School Middle East specialist said Sept. 5.
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Health
Lasering in on tumors
In the battle against brain cancer, doctors now have a new weapon: an imaging technology that will make brain surgery dramatically more accurate by allowing surgeons to distinguish between brain tissue and tumors, and at a microscopic level.
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Campus & Community
Welcoming the Class of ’17
At the annual Freshman Convocation Monday, Harvard President Drew Faust and other University officials told the Class of ’17 to embrace challenges, reach out to fellow students and others, and keep open minds about what the future should hold.
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Science & Tech
Pinched minds
The accumulation of money woes and day-to-day anxiety leaves many low-income individuals not only struggling financially, but cognitively, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. In a study featured in Science, he reports that the “cognitive deficit” caused by poverty translates into as many as 10 IQ points.
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Campus & Community
David S. Landes, 89, dies
David S. Landes, a renowned historian whose work focused on the complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance, died Aug. 17 at age 89.
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Science & Tech
Popsicle Earth
A recently published paper says that during the last glacial maximum, more ice than previously thought covered the globe.
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Science & Tech
The look of music
A new study by Chia-Jung Tsay, a musician and Harvard Ph.D., examines the power of visual information in evaluating classical music.
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Health
Good health lasts later in life
Working from data collected between 1991 and 2009 from almost 90,000 individuals who responded to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, Professor David Cutler has found that, even as life expectancy has increased over the past two decades, people have become increasingly healthier later in life.
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Health
Bacterial blockade
Harvard researchers have identified a pair of genes that appear to be responsible for allowing a specific strain of bacteria in the human gut to break down Lanoxin — a widely prescribed cardiac drug — into an inactive compound, as well as a possible way to turn the process off.
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Health
Clues to cholera resistance
Researchers have long understood that genetics can play a role in susceptibility to cholera, but a team of Harvard scientists is now uncovering evidence of genetic changes that might also help protect some people from contracting the deadly disease.
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Health
New plan of attack in cancer fight
Harvard Professor Martin Nowak and Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a “targeted therapy” — a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer’s ability to grow and spread — could effectively cure nearly all cancers.
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Campus & Community
Daniel M. Wegner famous for ‘thought suppression’
Daniel M. Wegner, a pioneering social psychologist who helped to reveal the mysteries of human experience through his work on thought suppression, conscious will, and mind perception, died July 5 at age 65.
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Science & Tech
Efficiency in the forest
Spurred by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, forests over the past two decades have become dramatically more efficient in how they use water, a Harvard study has found.
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Campus & Community
Pfister named interim dean
Donald Pfister, Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany and dean of the Harvard Summer School, has been appointed interim dean of Harvard College. Pfister’s career at Harvard spans nearly 40 years.
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Campus & Community
Collaborative museums
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the new public face of the FAS science museums, has enjoyed a successful first year with new programs and exhibits and a record number of visitors.
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Campus & Community
Watching Spanish grow
The Instituto Cervantes Observatory of the Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures in the United States at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University will be a center for tracking Spanish language growth.
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Science & Tech
Right down the middle, explained
The ability to throw an object with great speed and accuracy is a uniquely human adaptation, one that Harvard researchers say played a key role in our evolution.
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Science & Tech
Map to renewable energy?
Researchers hoping to make the next breakthrough in renewable energy now have plenty of new avenues to explore — Harvard researchers this week released a database of more than 2 million molecules that might be useful in the construction of organic solar cells for the production of renewable energy.
