Featured series 
Tag: Profiles
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Nation & World
Young scholar aims at physics, finance, and the physical
Lin “William” Cong remembers his early childhood as a time of playing in the street, reading comic books, and coasting through the early grades. College was a dream.
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Nation & World
HDS grad hopes to alter military culture
Lukas Filler likes a challenge. One of the 6-foot-5-inch former competitive swimmer’s favorite pastimes is surfing … in the New England winter … before dawn.
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Nation & World
Modeling the forest … and the trees
When building computer models of the ecosystems that cover the earth’s surface, it is tempting to incorporate sweeping generalizations in your calculations.
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Nation & World
Class, war, and discrimination in 1812 Korea
Sun Joo Kim’s laugh is as easy as it is infectious. Her cheery nature no doubt comes in handy when she’s conducting her intensive research in three complex languages.
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Nation & World
Moral dimensions of ‘the scientific life’
Scientific knowledge is reliable and it is authoritative. It is also often understood to be impersonal: The personal characteristics of a researcher are not thought to influence his or her findings. In recent work, historian Steven Shapin assumes the reliability and authority of scientific knowledge but illustrates how scientists’ personal characteristics and traits figure prominently…
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Nation & World
Falling in love with South Asian music
As a young boy, Richard Wolf, professor of music, liked to sit at the piano in his grandparents’ home and invent short musical ditties. “My grandfather would listen and shout, ‘Oh! It’s Bach! Oh, just like Mozart!’” Wolf recalled recently, with a laugh. “He was wonderfully encouraging.”
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Nation & World
Gary Ruvkun took a roundabout route to science
Gary Ruvkun has made a career out of imagining the unimaginable, and of surrounding himself with like-minded thinkers who let the wheels of thought spin until they catch on something hard, gain traction, and take off.
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Nation & World
Driven to succeed
When the baby vomited again, Gail Melton knew something was seriously wrong with her second child, a son she and her husband, Doug Melton, had named Sam. She phoned Doug and took Sam to Harvard Health Services in Holyoke Center. Doug hurried to the clinic from his Fairchild Biochemistry Building lab on Divinity Avenue. Together…
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Nation & World
The beauty of computer science
As a sophomore at Harvard College in 1992, Salil Vadhan skeptically and rather grudgingly enrolled in an introductory departmental course that a friend had cajoled him into taking. The course was “Computer Science 121: Introduction to Formal Systems and Computation,” a class that he would revisit a little more than a decade later — as…
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Nation & World
Exploring tangled legacy of slavery
Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide…
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Nation & World
‘The diverse ways history can be written’
Relocating to a foreign city for a new job can be stressful in the most congenial circumstances. Trying to depart your home country in the middle of a Communist coup? As Serhii Plokhii, Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, can tell you — that’s downright complicated.
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Nation & World
Telling the arthropod tale of life
They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty hands to show for it.
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Nation & World
Upon meeting a scholar of literature, one is likely to ask, “What period do you study?” with the likely answer being a fairly narrow slice of the literary pie — the 19th century novel, say, or nondramatic poetry of the Renaissance. With Panagiotis Roilos, however, the answer is not so straightforward.
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Nation & World
Government holds seeds to its own reform
The seeds of a new, more efficient government able to nimbly handle the challenges of a new century are sprouting in the corridors of today’s slow-moving bureaucracy, according to Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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Nation & World
Serhii Plokhii is new Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History
Serhii Plokhii, a prolific scholar whose studies have opened up a new pathway of studying Ukraine’s relationship with Eastern and Central Europe, has been appointed Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective July 1.
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Nation & World
Tian loves poetry – from Plath to Yuanming
Xiaofei Tian, a youthful looking Harvard scholar of Chinese poetry, could easily be mistaken for an undergraduate in the halls of 2 Divinity Ave., where she works in a book-lined office. Last September, at age 34, Tian got word of her tenure in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. To celebrate, she and…
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Nation & World
Chinese diarist opens door to history
Liu Dapeng (1857-1942), the subject of Henrietta Harrison’s book “The Man Awakened from Dreams” (Stanford University Press, 2005), seems an odd choice for a biography. A Confucian scholar and teacher in the village of Chiqiao in Shanxi province, northern China, Liu was poor and unknown, and, although a prolific writer, never published a word.
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Nation & World
The philosophy of evolution
For many college students, deciding what subject to major in can be a struggle. But for Peter Godfrey-Smith the decision seemed obvious almost from his first days as an undergraduate at Sydney University in Australia. “I knew when I was a first-year student that I was going to do philosophy,” he said. “There was such…
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Nation & World
Founder of Harvard’s Statistics Department, Frederick Mosteller, dies
Pioneering statistician Frederick Mosteller, a retired Harvard professor whose broad-ranging work influenced public health, medicine, education, and even American history, died Sunday (July 23) at age 89.
