Tag: FAS

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard kicks off fundraising effort

    Harvard University kicked off the public phase of a $6.5 billion fundraising campaign today, designed to benefit key priorities during constrained financial times. If successful, it would be the largest ever in higher education.

  • Science & Tech

    ‘Chasing Ice,’ and searching for solutions

    A screening of the film “Chasing Ice” brought Harvard experts together to discuss innovations in monitoring the glaciers’ retreat and how America can tap its own energy sources.

  • 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.

  • Science & Tech

    Advancing science and technology

    The National Science Foundation is awarding grants to create three new science and technology centers this year, with two of them based in Cambridge. The two multi-institutional grants total $45 million over five years.

  • Campus & Community

    Six luminaries to receive Du Bois Medal

    Harvard University announced Sept. 18 that it will award the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal to six leaders across government, the arts, and athletics during a ceremony on Oct. 2. The ceremony will also mark the launch of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

  • Nation & World

    Unraveling Maya mysteries

    For decades, Harvard’s Bill Fash and his wife, Barbara, have worked in Copán, Honduras, to restore, preserve, and protect Maya culture and history for future generations.

  • Science & Tech

    Big problems, small solutions

    Author and activist Bill McKibben ’82 visited Harvard with a message: In the face of catastrophic climate change, it’s time for overt and energetic civil action.

  • Arts & Culture

    The modern opens the past

    In the inaugural lecture of a series organized by Harvard’s Digital Futures consortium, data-publishing entrepreneur Eric Kansa lays out a case for archaeology to “get on the map” of disciplines sharing data widely on the Web.

  • Campus & Community

    Dialogue with the deans

    Harvard College interim Dean Donald Pfister and Dean of Student Life Stephen Lassonde made themselves available to field questions from students in a “meet the deans” forum.

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvard’s Indian College poet

    With the discovery of a poem missing for 300 years, two Harvard graduate students have filled in some missing blanks on Benjamin Larnell, the last student of the colonial era associated with Harvard’s Indian College.

  • Campus & Community

    A boost for new ways to learn

    Harvard University Provost Alan Garber announced the appointment of historian and humanities scholar Peter K. Bol as vice provost for advances in learning.

  • Campus & Community

    Shopping around

    The start of a new semester signals many things, one of which is “shopping week,” where undergraduates sit in on classes and check out syllabi before committing to a course.

  • 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.

  • Science & Tech

    The building blocks of planets

    Harvard’s Matt Holman, a lecturer on astrophysics, and his collaborators at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado are piggybacking their research onto a NASA spaceship that is racing to the farthest edges of the solar system to study objects in the far-flung Kuiper Belt.

  • Arts & Culture

    On closer inspection, not such a plain Jane

    In her latest work, “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,” Jill Lepore, a professor of U.S. history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, brings Benjamin Franklin’s sister out of history’s fog and into the open.

  • Science & Tech

    Forks, knives, beakers

    New York Times columnist Harold McGee and chef Dave Arnold introduced this year’s “Science and Cooking” public lecture series, which runs through December.

  • 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.

  • Campus & Community

    Houghton’s heroes

    Houghton Library, Harvard’s home to literary and historical treasures, is more like a museum than your typical library.

  • Arts & Culture

    Six artists, teaching and creating

    Following tradition, Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies is hosting visiting faculty, six artists this year. Talks have been scheduled through November. The opening reception is Sept. 12.

  • Campus & Community

    New name for Old Quincy

    After 15 months of construction, the renewal of Old Quincy — the neo-Georgian portion of Quincy House — was completed Saturday when it was renamed Stone Hall in honor of Robert G. Stone Jr. ’45, the late senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

  • Campus & Community

    So near, so far, at Harvard

    Freshmen this year come from very close to Harvard Yard and from very far away.

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘All the Way’ to A.R.T.

    Award-winning director Bill Rauch ’84 has returned to Harvard to present the play “All the Way,” a powerful examination of President Lyndon B. Johnson, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and the critical events leading up to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. The show will open the American Repertory Theater’s…

  • Health

    The little old machine that could

    In the high-tech laboratory at the Arnold Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building, amid an array of expensive, shiny new equipment, sits a 1931 microtome, a machine whose well-oiled parts keep cranking out slices of tissue just 10 micrometers wide, thin enough for light to penetrate and perfect for making slides to see the internal cellular…

  • Campus & Community

    For big questions, a bigger forum

    Coordinated through the Freshman Dean’s Office, the “Reflecting on Your Life” initiative, which invites freshmen to think about meaning and purpose, has received a grant from the Teagle Foundation to broaden the scope of the program.

  • 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.

  • Campus & Community

    Legacies of leadership

    PBHA summer campers rise through the ranks to take leadership positions and start to give back to their communities.

  • Campus & Community

    Japan cultural agency honors Bestor

    Theodore C. Bestor, the Reischauer Institute Professor of Social Anthropology and director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, has received the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Award for the Promotion of Japanese Culture from the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan.

  • Arts & Culture

    Zines were the scene

    Two Harvard undergrad spent the summer at Widener Library working with a newly acquired collection of zines, the self-published, self-distributed counterculture voices of the 1980s and early ’90s.

  • Science & Tech

    Biases that can blind us

    Psychology Professor Mahzarin Banaji gave incoming members of Harvard’s Class of 2017 a tour of their own biases, helping to raise awareness that can help them avoid making decisions based on unconscious preferences.

  • Campus & Community

    Goodbye tourists, hello residents

    As the Class of 2017 settled in at Harvard and began Freshman Week, students from around the world were busy taking in the unfamiliar sights and sounds of their tightly packed, red-brick neighborhood, their home base for the next four years.