J. Gregory Morrisett, Allen B. Cutting Professor of Computer Science at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been elected a 2013 fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He was recognized “for contributions to mathematically-based methods for ensuring the efficient implementation and verification of practical programming languages.” The 50 ACM Fellows…

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) today announced an ambitious new fellowship in honor of developer and philanthropist Walter Shorenstein and a name change for the research center endowed by the late Shorenstein in 1986. A gift of $5 million from Doug and Lydia Shorenstein to Harvard University will be used to fund the new Walter Shorenstein Fellowship in Media and…

A dozen experts discussed health care challenges ranging from delivering humanitarian aid to making surgery safer at a wide-ranging Global Health Summit that drew about 500 to Harvard Medical School’s Joseph B. Martin Conference Center on Monday, November 25, 2013. The summit—a joint effort of Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Brigham and Women’s Hospital…

Equal access to quality education is a fundamental human right and yet it is beyond the reach of thousands of Roma children living in Europe today. Over 90% of European youths enroll in secondary education and over 60% enroll in tertiary education. By contrast, under 20% of Roma youths (pejoratively called “Gypsies”) enroll in secondary…

On November 6, the basement of Northwest Labs was bustling with a crowd of student performers eager to participate in the second annual Chinese Poetry Recitation Competition. The contest, organized by the Chinese Language Program within Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, brought together students from basic, intermediate, and advanced courses to engage…

Women in India who are forced into prostitution or sex trafficking are almost three times more likely to be HIV-infected than those who joined the industry voluntarily, according to Kathleen Wirth, ScD ’11, research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Botswana Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership in Gaborone, Botswana. “Involuntary sex work is not…

Obesity is associated with a worse prostate cancer prognosis among men whose tumors contain a specific genetic mutation, suggest results from a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers. Among prostate cancer patients whose tumors contain the mutation, they had a more than 50% increased risk…

Abstaining from art, theater, dance, and most other forms of entertainment, the Puritans took solace “in the word.” Sermons and elegies by local ministers became a kind of glue that held towns together, especially during the hardscrabble days of an emerging nation. On November 14, in far more comfortable conditions at the Harvard Allston Education Portal,…

The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has failed to boost the nutritional value of food purchased and consumed by recipients or to improve food security (ensuring participants have food to meet household needs), according to a new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. New policies, programs, and nutrition education initiatives are needed to…

A new partnership between the city of Boston and most of the city’s large supermarkets aims to help consumers choose healthier and less sugary beverages with a color-coded “Rethink Your Drink” campaign in stores and weekly circulars. Harvard School of Public Health’s Prevention Research Center (HPRC), directed by Steven Gortmaker, professor of the practice of health sociology at HSPH, and…

In the weeks before Evan Osnos delivered the 2013 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation, the problems facing journalists in China were prominent in the news: Veteran correspondent Paul Mooney, who has written hard-hitting stories about human rights abuses, had his resident journalist visa renewal request denied, and a recent New…

Across the globe, there are signs that human activity is causing changes to Earth’s natural systems that may result in risks to health—from Indonesia, where fires used to clear land have been linked to cardiopulmonary disease downwind in Singapore, to the U.S., where the rise in Lyme disease has followed a reduction in mammalian diversity…

Controlling blood pressure, serum cholesterol, and blood glucose may substantially reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke associated with being overweight or obese, according to a study from a worldwide research consortium led by a team from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Imperial College London, and the University of Sydney. Among the three…

Harvard faculty members, instructors, and the teaching and learning community are invited to attend the next HarvardX Town Hall meeting on course development and research that will take place in the Harvard Medical School/Longwood Medical area. To be held on Wednesday, December 11, at TMEC Walter Amphitheater, the main session will run from 3 to 4 p.m.…

Women with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) gain weight more rapidly and are more likely to be overweight or obese than women without the disorder, find researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It is the first study to look at the relationship between PTSD and obesity over time.…

Reflecting on the 2013 elections and what they might mean for 2014 and 2016, Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, shared with the Shorenstein Center three key outcomes that might shed light on future political developments. The three elections she pointed to were Bill de Blasio in the New York mayoral race, and the gubernatorial races of…

More than 300 Harvard School of Public Health alumni, students, faculty, and guests, from a dozen countries and 29 U.S. states, came back to campus to celebrate Alumni Weekend on November 2-4. More alumni than ever returned to the festivities in the School’s Centennial year, as the weekend also coincided with the American Public Health…

Vahid Tarokh, the electrical engineer who introduced space-time codes into wireless communications and who has been one of the world’s most cited researchers in computer science, has been chosen to receive an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal. Tarokh, the Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard…

The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) announced they have extended the Cultivation Grant application submission deadline to Friday, December 13. Cultivation Grants are awards of $100 – 200K designed to extend promising educational innovations into new intellectual and institutional contexts, and to rigorously investigate the potential of their wide-scale adoption across the University.…

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union invited musician/artist Kanye West to the School Sunday, November 17. West met with students and then toured the School. While visiting, West addressed the students who had gathered. After his remarks, West distributed tickets to his concert in Boston that evening. The following statement…

Immigrant women who live in regions of Spain with high unemployment rates are three times more likely to have stillborn infants than Spanish-born women living in more thriving areas of the country, according to a study by an international team of scientists led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Many poor women with low…

The number of homeless families in Massachusetts seeking shelter in hotels and motels is at an all-time high, while one in seven in Massachusetts relies on food stamps. Yet the Massachusetts legislature is considering a wallop directed at people in poverty—a welfare reform act aimed at fostering economic independence but which make access to cash…

Jennifer Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Committee on Degrees in American Studies, will give the Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts on Jan. 20. Roberts’ lecture will focus on the matrix – be it a plate, block,…

A new phase of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP)—which over the past five years identified the millions of microorganisms living on, and in, the human body—will focus on the roles played by these microbes both in health and disease. The new three-year “multi-omic” study at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT is being co-led…

The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) awarded seven Spark Grants for fall 2013 (about 10% of applicants): Repository of section plans. Kris-Stella Trump (FAS) will develop and pilot an open database of section plans for Teaching Fellows in the government department; Teaching genomics across Harvard schools. Winston Hide (SPH), William Gelbart (FAS), and…

The Woodberry Poetry Room’s rich collection contains rare and one-of-a-kind recordings of some of the 20th century’s most important poets. But because many of these rare recordings exist on fragile cassettes or on transcription discs made of lacquered metal or glass prone to separation and decay, these voices have essentially been silenced – until now.…

Traditional social science research tends to skew toward “WEIRD” subjects—that is, toward the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—according to four Harvard researchers who are trying to expand the reach of modern data collection and analysis. Pioneers in the field of crowdsourced, Web-based research, they offered a vision of large-scale citizen science experiments in a…

Epidemiologists at Harvard have a long legacy of groundbreaking findings, from a 19th-century study on the effectiveness of bloodletting as a treatment for pneumonia to recent work on the role various dietary factors play in chronic disease risk. Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) faculty, alumni, and students gathered to reflect on the past and future of…

New research led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) demonstrates a disease mechanism in type 1 diabetes (T1D) that can be targeted using simple, naturally occurring molecules to help prevent the disease. The work highlights a previously unrecognized molecular pathway that contributes to the malfunction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in T1D in human…

Ana Navarro, Institute of Politics fellow and political contributor at CNN and CNN en Español, describes herself as a “Republican without labels,” which she explained meant that she is “inclusive, not obstructionist.” Navarro, who served as the National Hispanic Co-Chair for Gov. Jon Huntsman’s 2012 Campaign, spoke to the Shorenstein Center about how punditry has changed political debate, and how politicians might…