Featured series 
Tag: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Health
Chylack and Dowling named ARVO Fellows
The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) has named Harvard Professor of Ophthalmology Leo T. Chylack Jr., and Gordon and Llura Gund Professor of Neurosciences John E. Dowling as 2009 fellows. Chylack and Dowling will receive their fellowships in May at the annual ARVO meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Both have been named…
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Health
Microbes thrive in harsh, isolated water under Antarctic glacier
A reservoir of briny liquid buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier supports hardy microbes that have lived in isolation for millions of years, researchers report this week in the journal Science. The discovery of life in a place where cold, darkness, and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive…
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Campus & Community
FAS dean hosts town meeting
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Michael D. Smith will host a town meeting for faculty and staff to update the community on the financial challenges facing FAS; talk about the progress made toward solving these challenges; and present the next steps to address the budget shortfalls projected for FY10 and FY11. The meeting…
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Campus & Community
Catalog, handbooks, Q Guide go online only
In a plan designed to eliminate waste, provide more options for faculty, students, and staff, and to reduce costs, the “Courses of Instruction,” “Harvard College Handbook for Students,” “The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Handbook for Students,” and “Q Guide and Information for Faculty Offering Instruction in Arts and Sciences” will be available online…
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Science & Tech
Narayanamurti named director of Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Belfer Center
Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti will be the new director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Belfer Center director Graham Allison announced April 1. “Dean Venky,” as he is widely known, is the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied…
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Science & Tech
Five at Harvard named HHMI Early Career Scientists;
Five Harvard scientists are among 50 young scientists nationwide who will have their work supported for the next six years by a new initiative from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). HHMI today announced that the selected scientists are at 33 institutions across the United States and have led their own laboratories for two to…
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Health
Mechanism directing stem cells to their destination identified;
Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers have for the first time identified in mice a cellular mechanism that directs stem cells to their ultimate destination in the body. The finding in blood stem cells by HSCI co-director David Scadden and colleagues holds the promise of greatly increasing the efficiency of the bone marrow transplants used…
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Campus & Community
Concentration in human development, regenerative biology added
Inviting a new generation of scientists into the study of human development, disease, and aging, Harvard University will offer a new undergraduate concentration in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology (HDRB) starting this fall.
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Health
Faculty approves undergraduate concentration in human developmental, regenerative biology
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences late today voted to approve a new undergraduate concentration, or major, in Human Development and Regenerative Biology. One of the first of its kind in the nation, the new program will be available this fall to students starting with current freshman, the Class of 2012. The concentration will focus…
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Health
Taking a stride toward synthetic life
Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings. George Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and member of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative, reported the…
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Science & Tech
Charbonneau gets prestigious ‘young researcher’ award
David Charbonneau, the 34-year-old Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy, has been named the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s 2009 Alan T. Waterman Award, and will receive $500,000 over a three-year period for scientific research or advanced study in his field. The annual Waterman Award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field…
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Campus & Community
Nicolae Iliescu
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Nicolae Iliescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Iliescu’s scholarly work includes a study of the influence of Saint Augustine on the Canzoniere of Petrarch.
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Health
Alzheimer’s-associated plaques may have impact throughout the brain
The impact of the amyloid plaques that appear in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease may extend beyond the deposits’ effects on neurons — the cells that transmit electrochemical signals throughout the nervous system. In an article in the Feb. 27 issue of Science, Harvard researchers from the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MGH-MIND)…
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Health
The way of the digital dodo
The National Science Foundation-funded, three-year effort aims to create 3-D digital models of each species represented in Harvard’s collection of 12,000 bird skeletons.
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Science & Tech
Science, engineering programs advancing
Harvard President Drew Faust today renewed the University’s commitment to the vision of advancing interdisciplinary, collaborative science in general, and the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB), the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (WIBIE) in particular. “These important, forward-looking programs are vital to the future…
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Science & Tech
The evolution of Darwin
In a fitting celebration of a man whose ideas revolutionized science, Harvard marked Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in style.
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Science & Tech
Exploring hidden life’s abundance
Two miles below the surface of the Sargasso Sea lies a depression in the Earth’s crust filled with sediment and, scientists believe, teeming with life — exotic, microscopic, and very likely never before seen by human eyes. Called the North Pond Basin, the site — researchers at Harvard and beyond believe — can provide a…
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Health
Diverse ‘connectomes’ hint at genes’ limits in the nervous system
Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears.
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Health
The Improvising Brain
What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs? Aaron Berkowitz, a Harvard…
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Health
Stem Cell Research: The Quest Resumes
“After eight years of political ostracism, stem-cell scientists like Harvard’s Douglas Melton are coming back into the light — and making discoveries that may soon bring lifesaving breakthroughs. Scientific inspiration can come from anywhere — a person, an event, even an experiment gone awry. But perhaps nothing can drive innovation more powerfully than the passion…
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Science & Tech
The genes in your congeniality:
Can’t help being the life of the party? Maybe you were just born that way. Researchers at Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, have found that our place in a social network is influenced in part by our genes, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.…
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Science & Tech
Implants mimic infection to rally immune system against tumors
Harvard bioengineers have shown that small plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin can reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The research — which rid 90 percent of mice of an aggressive form of melanoma that would usually kill the rodents within 25 days — represents the most effective…
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Health
Topical treatment wipes out herpes with RNAi
Harvard Medical School researchers have succeeded in developing a topical treatment that, in mice, wipes out herpes virus, one of the most intractable sexually transmitted human diseases. Judy Lieberman, professor of pediatrics and a senior investigator at the Immune Disease Institute, has overseen the development of the treatment that uses RNA interference, or RNAi, to…
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Science & Tech
Hotter seasons coming earlier, research finds
An analysis of global temperatures between 1850 and 2007 has illuminated some climate change details, showing that winter temperatures have risen more rapidly than summer temperatures and that the seasons are coming nearly two days earlier than they were 50 years ago. Perhaps most worrisome, however, is that none of the dozens of computerized climate…
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Science & Tech
Transit search finds super-Neptune
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics havediscovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptuneorbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. While Neptune has a diameter3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the new world(named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earthmasses. HAT-P-11b was…
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Science & Tech
Researchers find new molecule to block ‘Hedgehog’ signaling in cancer, development
Researchers have achieved a feat drug developers had thought difficult, if not impossible, discovering a compound that blocks the functioning of a key developmental protein by binding to an “undruggable” target — an advance that may provide a new avenue to fight skin, pancreatic, prostate, and other cancers. A team led by Stuart Schreiber, the…