Members of the community recently flocked to the Weissman Preservation Center and the Collections Conservation Lab for their Open House tours, held in celebration of the American Library Association’s Preservation Week 2013. The informal tours gave visitors a glimpse into the dedication, precision, and level of care provided to Harvard’s millions of books, photographs, artifacts and…

In the digital age, some professors might grumble that students today don’t even know how to read a newspaper. Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of the History and Literature Program, knows that they’re right. Lepore recently shared her story during “Reality Matters,” organized by Harvard…

When it comes to using new technology in education, “the trick is not to adopt, but to adapt,” Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk told the audience at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, held at Harvard’s Science Center on May 8, 2013. The conference focused on the essentials of good teaching…

Anniversaries offer an opportunity to reflect on the past and contemplate the future. One year ago, we announced the launch of both edX, the not-for-profit open-source online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT, and HarvardX, the partner organization which supports online pedagogy and its application to on-campus education as well as educational research. Harvard’s activities in…

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, the nonprofit online enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT, has been named to the Boston Globe’s 100 Innovators of 2013, “a list of trailblazers working in fields from medicine to robotics to social services.”

Cycling around campus has never been easier or cheaper.  CommuterChoice and Hubway, Metro-Boston’s regional bike share, are happy to announce a new, discounted annual membership rate of just $50 for students, faculty and staff.  That’s 40% less than the previous cost of membership. Harvard now supports 12 stations, plus there are dozens of locations throughout…

Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, is pleased to announce that Gia Wolff, an architect based in Brooklyn, New York, is the winner of the inaugural Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 traveling fellowship dedicated to fostering new forms of architectural research informed by cross-cultural engagement. The Wheelwright Prize jury—Mostafavi, Yung Ho Chang,…

Patient safety expert Lucian Leape has called for the creation of a federal agency to compel safer hospital practices. He thinks regulation is the only way to effectively reduce the avoidable harm that takes place in the nation’s hospitals. “I’ll put my chips on brute force, and that is regulation,” said Leape, adjunct professor of health policy…

It’s Wednesday night in Cambridge and Thursday morning in Beijing, and their seminar rooms are some 6,700 miles apart, but for 30 students from Harvard Law School and the Renmin University of China School of Law, common interests and videoconferencing equipment easily bridge these distances. During this spring semester, students in a reading group taught…

In March, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick ’82 nominated Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute clinical instructor Gloria Tan to a seat on the Massachusetts Juvenile Court. Tan came to CJI, which supervises third-year law students representing indigent criminal defendants in local district and juvenile courts, after serving as a public defender for the Committee for…

The biennial Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law attracted scores of IP lawyers, business people, academicians, and judges to the school April 12 to discuss recent developments in IP law. According to William W. Fisher, the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at HLS and co-chair of the event since its inception 10…

Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 received the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award from the Harvard Federalist Society in April. The award is bestowed upon a faculty member who has furthered the cause of intellectual diversity and free and open debate at Harvard Law School, both inside and outside of the classroom, regardless of…

Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a professor of practice. The professorships of practice at Harvard Law School are given to outstanding individuals whose teaching is informed by extensive expertise from the worlds of law practice, the judiciary,…

Environmental lawlessness was the topic of discussion on April 10, as Richard Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law, gave a lecture marking his appointment to the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professorship of Law. Speaking before a crowd of family, students, colleagues, and friends—including Supreme Court Chief Justice John…

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has selected 24 journalists as members of the 76th class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard University. The group includes reporters, editors, columnists, digital media leaders and producers in print, broadcast and online who work around the globe and across media platforms. Announcing the class, Nieman Curator Ann Marie Lipinski said,…

Ninety-three students spent April 26-28, 2013 learning how to rapidly respond to a refugee crisis while being faced with a host of stressful distractions from confrontational child-soldiers to rogue journalists. It was all part of the annual disaster simulation organized by The Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative, the flagship training and professional development program of…

Researchers from several Harvard Schools and initiatives were instrumental in developing the city of Boston’s first Cyclist Safety Report released on May 15, 2013 by Mayor Tom Menino. The report examined four years of bicycle crash incident data supplied by Boston Police and Boston EMS that will now inform city officials in their continued efforts…

A grandmother’s gift was the inspiration for this year’s winner of the Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting. Catherine Katz ’13 was the first place winner for her entry “My Grandmother’s Childhood Library: Collecting Early 20th Century Stratemeyer Syndicate Children’s Series.” Katz said her grandmother’s gift of a half dozen original editions of favorite…

Spring flowers and new leaves at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University signal the return of schoolchildren for outdoor field study experiences. For three decades, the Arboretum has reached out to students from Boston schools to participate in structured explorations of the collections, life science instruction, and engaging interactions with the natural world. This season…

Quan Lu, Mark and Catherine Winkler Assistant Professor of Lung Biology in the Departments of Environmental Health and Genetics and Complex Diseases, is the 2013 recipient of the Armen H. Tashjian, Jr. Excellence in Endocrine Research Award. He presented the talk, “Message in a Nano-Vesicle: A New Way of Receptor Signaling and Cell Communication” at…

John W. Hutchinson, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics Emeritus, has been elected to foreign membership in the Royal Society. He was among eight foreign members and 44 new fellows welcomed on May 3 by the United Kingdom’s elite national academy. Hutchinson is a seminal scholar in…

The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) was honored to host an essay contest on Europe with the students in Professor Muriel Rouyer’s class at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Global Europe: Democracy, Policy and Governance” (DPI 431). Students were tasked with an unusual assignment: they were asked to pretend that, in a quest…

The Music Department awarded $236,735 in 2013 awards and fellowships to support the scholarly and artistic work of its current graduate and undergraduate students. Research awards were given for projects ranging from the study of gospel music in Houston to Ugandan language study, and fieldwork in Israel, Finland, China, and Benin. The funds will also…

Yaendy Matos, a student at Fenway High School in Boston, says she is interested in a medical career but the field of public health has not been on her radar. “We don’t know what public health is. We’re just checking it out,” Matos said, as she sat with her friends in the Kresge cafeteria at…

The European Physical Society (EPS) will award its most prestigious prize in quantum electronics and optics to Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The prizes are awarded only once every two years, and recognize…

A new study has shed light on why a monkey malaria parasite that typically caused only mild infection in humans is now beginning to cause severe disease and death—and how it has the potential to become a dangerous human-to-human pathogen. In a multidisciplinary study using experimental and modeling approaches, researchers at Harvard School of Public…

Two affiliated projects proposed by a Harvard/MIT team and a Metropolitan New York Library Council/Brooklyn Historical Society team each received a 2013 Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian Program Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The awards will support the projects “Testing the National Digital Stewardship Residency Model in Boston, MA” and “National…

Three years ago, Oregon native Ali Chisti, MPH ’13, was on course to become a private practice neurosurgeon, studying medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. During the summers he worked as a caddie at a golf course in Bandon, along Oregon’s rural southern coast, to help pay for school. But in the…

The Awesome Box allows library patrons to return materials to a box set aside for items they deem to be awesome. “If you interact with an amazing or useful item from the library and return it to the Awesome Box, that item gets recorded as awesome so the community can see what others have found…

StackLife combines the familiarity of ordinary shelves with the dexterity of the virtual to let users explore the 12.3 million items in Harvard’s 73 libraries, with the Harvard community as a guide. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, StackLife is an open-source project that displays works on a virtual shelf that combines shelves from…