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Campus & Community
Harvard authors receive CASE research award
Professor of Higher Education Richard Chait and William Ryan, research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, have been named recipients of the Council for Advancement and Support of Educations (CASE) 2005 Research Writing Awards. These awards recognize outstanding research and writing in the educational advancement disciplines of alumni relations, communications,…
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Campus & Community
CAPS announces fellowship winners
Harvards Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) has announced the winners of its graduate and undergraduate student fellowships. These fellowships help to foster innovative research on American politics, spanning from the Civil War to the present. Deadlines for the fellowships are in early spring.
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Campus & Community
New route to cell death found
Damaged or unusable cells in our bodies will commit suicide to protect us from harm. That’s a well-known process with the awkward name of “apoptosis.” There’s also necrosis, meaning “to make dead,” when brain, heart, and other cells die from disease and trauma. These suicides and uncontrolled deaths have always been thought of as separate…
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Campus & Community
Risk of sudden cardiac death is highest in the early period following a heart attack
Even with modern medical treatment, patients who have experienced a heart attack remain at increased risk for sudden death after they are discharged from the hospital. In an effort to better understand who to treat and when, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), in collaboration with an international research team, studied sudden death in…
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Campus & Community
Study: Predatory dinosaurs had birdlike pulmonary system
What could the fierce dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex and a modern songbird such as the sparrow possibly have in common? Their pulmonary systems may have been more similar than scientists previously thought, according to new research from Harvard University and Ohio University. Though some scientists have proposed that predatory dinosaurs had lungs similar to crocodiles and…
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Health
Home from the hospital: almost half of patients are discharged with test results still pending
According to Christopher Roy, M.D., a hospitalist at BWH who studies patient safety, “We found that while approximately half of the patients in this study had test results that were unavailable at discharge, only a very small percentage of pending results impacted the patient’s care plan.” The researchers followed 2,644 consecutive, discharged patients from two…
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Health
Molecular middleman puts thyroid hormone in developmental signaling pathway
Tissues such as muscle and brain convert the inactive form of thyroid hormone, T4, into T3, the active form of thyroid hormone, when necessary. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that this conversion is accomplished by the deiodinase enzymes. Several years ago, Antonio Bianco, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,…
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Health
Bacterium proves essential to immune system development
In the July 15, 2005 Cell, a team led by Dennis Kasper, the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Sarkis Mazmanian, HMS instructor in microbiology and molecular genetics, both at the Channing laboratory, reports that Bacteriodes fragilis…
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Health
Study shows new compound may reduce risk of vision loss in patients with diabetes
The PKC-Diabetic Retinopathy Study (DRS) was designed to evaluate the safety and effect of an oral treatment, RBX, on retinopathy progression or visual loss in patients with moderately severe to very severe nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy. In the study, patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes received either RBX or a placebo over three to…
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Health
Subtle changes in normal genes implicated in breast cancer
Scientists found that benign cells surrounding breast cancers undergo epigenetic modifications. The altered gene function causes the microenvironment cells to signal proliferation and increased aggression in the breast tumor cells. Kornelia Polyak, M.D., Ph.D., is senior author of the paper, which was posted as an advance online publication on the Nature Genetics Web site. Min…
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Health
Blood vessel drugs halt cancer growth
After decades of surviving peer rejection of his theory of cancer treatment by blocking tiny blood vessels, Judah Folkman has gone on to develop drugs that did what he predicted they would do. Folkman’s endostatin, the drug Fortune magazine called a failure, was used to treat 486 patients with lung cancer in China. At Dana-Farber…
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Health
Size of brain structure could signal vulnerability to anxiety disorders
Individuals respond with physical and emotional distress to situations that recall traumatic memories. Such responses usually diminish gradually, as those situations are repeated without unpleasant occurrences; this is called “extinction memory.” But some people continue to respond fearfully and develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Studies in animals have suggested that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)…
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Health
Scientists identify normal gene driving the growth and survival of melanoma cells
Dana-Farber’s Levi Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., and William Sellers, M.D., the paper’s first and senior authors, and their colleagues reported their findings in the July 7, 2005 issue of the journal Nature. The researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology, which focuses on the building blocks of individual genes, to identify regions of chromosomes where…
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Health
Women’s health study: Long-awaited findings of low-dose aspirin and vitamin E in preventing disease
The WHS trial was led by BWH researchers Nancy Cook, Sc.D., and Julie Buring, Sc.D. Its results are published in the July 6, 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association. It monitored 39,876 healthy females 45 years of age and older for cancer and cardiovascular events including heart attack, stroke, and death from cardiovascular causes.…
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Health
Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults
The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from 1972-1979. Enrollment was open to families in Brookline, Mass., and to some urban families in neighboring Boston. The program provided health, educational, and social services…
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Health
Urine test may help monitor disfiguring birthmarks
Vascular anomalies include both vascular malformations and vascular tumors (most commonly hemangiomas). Hemangiomas, found in about 10 percent of infants, occur when the cells lining blood vessels multiply abnormally. Hemangiomas grow rapidly in the first year of life, then usually shrink and disappear. But some grow large, causing obstruction, ulceration, and other problems. Vascular malformations…
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Health
DNA-scanning technology finds possible sites of cancer genes in chromosomes of lung cancer cell
In a study in the July 1, 2005 issue of the journal Cancer Research, the researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology to identify regions of chromosomes where genes were either left out or multiplied over and over – mistakes that are often associated with cancer. In this effort, SNP arrays have been used…
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Campus & Community
Auditions for Pops, chorus, orchestra
Wind, brass, and percussion instrumentalists interested in playing with the Harvard Summer Pops Band are invited to attend open rehearsals (no audition required) beginning June 29 through Aug. 7 from 7:15 to 9:30 p.m. Interested individuals should bring their instrument and, if possible, a folding music stand to Lowell Hall at the above-mentioned times. Directed…
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Campus & Community
Radcliffe Medalist reminisces
Denise Scott Brown said that when she was a young student, people would tell her she looked like a Radcliffe girl.
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Campus & Community
Asian studies centers, institutes name fellows
The Asia Center, the South Asia Initiative, the Fairbank Center, the Korea Institute, and the Reischauer Institute have announced their award recipients for this summer and the upcoming academic year.
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Campus & Community
Weatherhead’s grants, fellows named
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs has announced that it has awarded 59 student grants and fellowships amounting to more than $190,000 for the 2005-06 academic year. Twenty-four grants will support Harvard College undergraduates, and 35 will support graduate students. In recent years, the center has significantly expanded its support for Harvard students, both increasing…
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Campus & Community
DRCLAS awards certificates, prizes
The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) has announced that 31 Harvard students have received DRCLAS certificates in Latin American studies.
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Campus & Community
Commencement blends solemnity, jubilation
Not exactly in disguise, but nicely dressed and well-behaved, a couple of intrepid Gazette reporters mingled unobtrusively in the lively, vibrant 354th Commencement of Harvard University. They were on the lookout, as they are every year, for what is known in the trade as color. This year, under friendly skies and surrounded by movement, noise,…
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Campus & Community
HUAM seeks volunteer docents for training
Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) is currently seeking volunteers interested in public art education for its museum docent program. The program consists of approximately 35 volunteer guides who give tours of the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Approximately six to eight prospective docents will be chosen to enter…
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Campus & Community
Rappin’, talkin’, chalkin’ health
Rapping, stepping, and sidewalk-chalking are hardly customary modes of communication at Harvard Medical School (HMS). But such youth-focused expressions were the media of the day Monday (June 13) at HMSs second annual Reflection in Action: Building Healthy Communities event.
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Campus & Community
Chill family
Allison Gerrity (from left), 15, her father Steve and sister Erin, 13 – all in town to see brother Michael 05 graduate – cool off at Widener Library during Class Day.
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Campus & Community
Copland: ‘Cold War TV ambassador’
Emily Abrams was fact-checking Aaron Coplands tenure as Norton Professor at Harvard as part of her research on a forthcoming book on the composer edited by her professor, Carol Oja. The official lectures from his visit (there were six) were published in the volume Music and Imagination in 1952. Abrams, a second-year musicology graduate student,…
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Campus & Community
Buchloh named Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art
Art historian Benjamin Buchloh, recognized internationally as one of todays most important contributors to the study of post-1945 art, has been named Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art in Harvard Universitys Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective Sept. 1, 2005.
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Campus & Community
In brief
Harvard co-sponsored diversity forum approaching Members of the University community are invited to join the M.B.A. Diversity Forum at the Hult International Business School (One Education St., Cambridge, Mass.) on June 22 from 6:15 to 9:15 p.m. Presented by the Boston chapters of the National Society of Hispanic M.B.A.’s and the National Black M.B.A. Association,…