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Lightning Strikes Twice
Last Monday, a Harvard faculty member and an alumnus shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with a third scholar. Today, another Harvard faculty member and another alumnus did the same: Gates professor of developing societies Michael Kremer …
Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell is professor of English and an award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic. Although born in Zambia, her economist mother’s home country, her earliest memory, at age two, is of seeing horses for the first time on a misty day in her …
Issue: July-August 2021
Catching Some Rays: Good for Your Heart?
CBS News has the story on a new study, led by Harvard School of Public Health professor Edward Giovannucci, that found that men with low Vitamin D levels had more than double the risk of heart attack, compared to other subjects in the study. Vitamin D is …
News Briefs
A Coach Cashiered On July 9 , The Harvard Crimson and The Boston Globe reported that Peter Brand, head fencing coach since 1999, had been dismissed. A statement released by director of athletics Robert L. Scalise said: “In April, Harvard was made aware of …
Issue: September-October 2019
Harvard’s Honorary-Degree Recipients 2019
DURING THE MORNING EXERCISES of the 368th Commencement, on May 30, Harvard planned to confer honorary degrees on five men and four women—the first cohort of honorands to receive their degrees from the University’s new, twenty-ninth president, Lawrence …
Faculty, Family, Diversity
In her first annual report, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) senior advisor to the dean on diversity issues has highlighted recent results in recruiting female faculty members, and some of the real obstacles to effecting change in the composition …
Issue: January-February 2007
International Investments
Harvard’s global ambitions to study and know more about the world, and to send more students out into it, were triply boosted at the end of the spring term with the creation of a new post—vice provost for international affairs—and the …
Issue: July-August 2006
Dunster Deconstruction
Having practiced the art and craft of House renewal on parts of Quincy and Leverett houses, the College is now renovating an entire undergraduate residence . As soon as students decamped, the scaffolding went up, construction workers began stripping the …
Issue: September-October 2014
Bishop Redux
Some writers have an uncanny way of becoming more prolific after their deaths than they ever were while living. Elizabeth Bishop, who was born 100 years ago and taught poetry at Harvard from 1970 to 1977, published only four slim collections of poems …
Issue: March-April 2011
Humanities Center Endowed by $10-Million Gift
The Humanities Center at Harvard , an interdisciplinary hub for lectures, readings, conferences, and seminars within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), has received a $10-million gift from Anand Mahindra '77, M.B.A. '81, in honor of his late mother, …
Melissa Dell
Economics professor Melissa Dell has studied everything from colonialism’s impact on development in Indonesia to global trade and worker displacement in Mexico. A development economist, she studies countries her discipline once ignored: “In the 1960s, …
Issue: July-August 2020
Convocation 2016: “I Urge You to Be Idealists”
Each new Harvard class will gather together on just two occasions before they graduate—once during Commencement week, at President Drew Faust’s baccalaureate address; and at Freshman Convocation, for which the Class of 2020 gathered on a mercifully cool …
Brevia
Heads of Houses Lakshminarayanan “Maha” Mahadevan and Amala Mahadevan Photograph courtesy of Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and Amala Mahadevan Martignetti professor of philosophy Sean D. Kelly and senior lecturer on philosophy Cheryl Chen have been appointed …
Issue: July-August 2017
Raj Chetty and Benjamin Warf Win MacArthur Grants
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded its $500,000, no-strings-attached fellowships, known as “genius grants,” on October 1. The 23 recipients include professor of economics Raj Chetty ’00, Ph.D. ’03 ( his controversial study on good …
How to Reform Healthcare
Imagine facing an infection that no medicine can cure. Or finally being diagnosed with a disease that explains all your symptoms—but at a stage too late to treat. How can the practice of medicine change to address challenges like these? More than 100 …