Featured series 
Tag: Research
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Campus & Community
Understanding the Anxious Mind
Jerome Kagan’s “Aha!” moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily…
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Campus & Community
Autism’s genetic roots examined in new government-funded study
Researchers at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston will sequence the genomes of at least 85 people diagnosed with autism in a bid to tease out the genetic basis for some cases of the neuropsychiatric disorder.
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Campus & Community
Earth’s ‘Boring Billion’ Years Blamed on Sulfur-Loving Microbes
“If we really want to understand what’s happed in the history of Earth, we really have to understand this cross talk between the physical and biological processes,” says study coauthor Andrew Knoll of Harvard University.
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Campus & Community
Wilson honored by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden
Edward O. Wilson has been named Commander, First Class of the Royal Order of the Polar Star by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
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Campus & Community
Belfer Center announces 2009-10 research fellows
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) announces 32 new fellows for the 2009-10 academic year.
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Health
Betley probes natural power plant
Harvard chemist Ted Betley is examining the process of photosynthesis to understand and manipulate nature’s engineering.
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Campus & Community
Quest for a Long Life Gains Scientific Respect
In mice, sirtuin activators are effective against lung and colon cancer, melanoma, lymphoma, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease, said David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School researcher and co-founder of Sirtris. The drugs reduce inflammation, and if they have the same effects in people, could help combat many diseases that have an inflammatory…
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Campus & Community
NIH funds risky, potentially transformative research by Harvard faculty members
Eighteen faculty members at Harvard and Harvard-affiliated institutions are among 115 scientists nationally whose promising and innovative work was recognized today with the announcement of three grant programs by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Campus & Community
If You Need to Work Better, Maybe Try Working Less
When members of 12 consulting teams at Boston Consulting Group were each required to take a block of “predictable time off” during every work week, “we had to practically force some professionals” to get away, says Leslie Perlow, the Harvard Business School leadership professor who headed the study.
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Campus & Community
Aspirin Can Prevent Colon Cancer in High-Risk Group, Study Says
The Harvard study suggested aspirin could prevent tumors from growing by inhibiting Cox-2, an enzyme that may play a role in the initial growth of a tumor.
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Campus & Community
Harvard Medical Study Links Lack of Insurance to 45,000 U.S. Deaths a Year
The Harvard study found that people without health insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private health insurance — as a result of being unable to obtain necessary medical care.
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Campus & Community
Diabetes Medication May Get New Life as Cancer Treatment
A national tax of 1 cent per ounce of soda and other sugary drinks could stem the United States’ obesity epidemic, while generating $14.9 billion the first year alone, health experts say.
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Health
Online encyclopedia makes life searchable
One hundred and fifty thousand species down, 1.65 million to go. That is the tally for the online Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org/), an ambitious two-year-old project with the goal of nothing less than documenting in one place all of the 1.8 million known living species on Earth and making the information available to everyone with…
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Campus & Community
Greyser honored by Institute for Public Relations
Steven A. Greyser, the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard Business School, has received a special award for his contributions to public relations education and research from the Institute for Public Relations.
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Campus & Community
Breakthrough on Open Access
On Monday, Harvard University was among five leading universities that announced a new “Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity” pledge to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions’ scholars.
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Campus & Community
Is Happiness Catching?
Nicholas Christakis began taking a new look at this question in 2000 after an experience visiting terminally ill patients in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago.
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Campus & Community
The first tailors? Researchers find ancient fiber
“Making strings and ropes is a sophisticated invention,” said Ofer Bar-Yosef, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at Harvard University. “They might have used this fiber to create parts of clothing, ropes, or baskets — for items that were mainly used for domestic activities.” The fibers were discovered in an analysis of clay deposits in Dzudzuana…
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Campus & Community
Does Infection Boost Prostate Cancer Risk?
In the new study, Jennifer Stark of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and colleagues analyzed blood samples from 673 men with prostate cancer who participated in the Physicians’ Health Study, a large, ongoing study examining a variety of health issues.
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Campus & Community
Harvard opens its research repository
Harvard University this week unveiled its open database of faculty research, with more than a third of its arts and sciences faculty members participating so far. Since the faculty of the main undergraduate college voted in February 2008 to support the system known as Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, in which professors’ scholarly works…
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Campus & Community
Medical grants a boon for Mass.
Massachusetts biomedical researchers are seeing a windfall from federal stimulus money, with the state receiving more in grants from the National Institutes of Health than all others but California.
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Campus & Community
Fine Arts Library reopens
The Fine Arts Library (FAL) is now open in its temporary space in the Littauer Building in the North Yard.
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Health
Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards fellowships to Harvard scientists
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting exceptional early career researchers and innovative cancer research, has selected four Harvard affiliates to receive Damon Runyon fellowships at its May 2009 Fellowship Award Committee review.
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Campus & Community
Harvard-Yenching Institute’s 22 visiting scholars, fellows
The Harvard-Yenching Institute has selected 22 visiting scholars and fellows from major universities in Asia. Established in 1928, the Harvard-Yenching Institute is an independent foundation dedicated to advancing higher education in Asia, with special attention to the study of Asian culture. The group of visiting scholars and fellows includes faculty members and advanced graduate students…
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Campus & Community
Committee on African Studies awards 51 summer travel grants
Through its Africa Initiative, the Harvard Committee on African Studies has awarded 51 grants to Harvard students for travel to sub-Saharan Africa during the summer of 2009. The grants fund internships, language study, senior thesis research, master’s thesis research, and doctoral dissertation research. Twenty-four undergraduates and 27 graduate students were awarded grants, the largest number…
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Science & Tech
Green reunions: Groundwork set
As of June 4, Harvard has celebrated 358 commencements. Add to that the simultaneous celebration of untold thousands of reunions.
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Science & Tech
Physics for musical masses
Harvard physicist Lisa Randall is taking Paris’ operagoing public to the fifth dimension this month, working with a composer and artist to present an opera that incorporates Randall’s theories about extra dimensions of space.
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Campus & Community
Frans Spaepen named interim director of Center for Nanoscale Systems
Frans Spaepen, director of the Rowland Institute, will serve as interim director of Harvard University’s Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) starting July 1, upon completion of his term as interim dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
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Science & Tech
‘Water guy’ John Briscoe stays in motion
For someone who deep-sixed his BlackBerry (instant e-mail was taking over his life) and traded the local newspaper for a good book (“What do I need to know about Celtics’ scores?”), John Briscoe ’76 is as worldly a person as you are ever likely to meet.
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Science & Tech
Trading energy for safety, bees extend legs to stay stable in wind
New research shows some bees brace themselves against wind and turbulence by extending their sturdy hind legs while flying. But this approach comes at a steep cost, increasing aerodynamic drag and the power required for flight by roughly 30 percent, and cutting into the bees’ flight performance.
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Campus & Community
Mohan Sundararaj of HSPH harnesses the power of music to heal
It was 1998 and Mohan Sundararaj was frustrated. A medical student at India’s Sri Ramachandra Medical College and the child of two physicians, Sundararaj was committed to his medical education but frustrated by the demands that kept him from his other passion: the piano.