Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, announced today that they will officially launch the Born This Way Foundation (BTWF) on Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Lady Gaga will be joined by some very special guests as she personally unveils BTWF before a crowd of policymakers, nonprofit organizations, foundation leaders, and…

The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, located at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is pleased to announce its 2012 Spring Fellows and Visiting Faculty. “This semester the Shorenstein Center will once again be bursting with brain power and talent,” said Alex Jones, the center’s director. “Pulitzer Prize–winner Ron…

The Harvard Kennedy School community is mourning the loss of Edith Stokey – economist, teacher, administrator, and “founding mother” of Harvard Kennedy School – who died during the evening of Jan. 16. She was 88. Stokey was a true believer in the Kennedy School’s mission. Since being recruited by Richard Zeckhauser in 1971, Stokey served…

Harvard University today launched Harvard Skate, part of the University’s yearlong 375th anniversary celebration. Scheduled to open on Jan. 17, Harvard Skate is a 40-foot-by-60-foot ice skating rink that will be temporarily located in the plaza adjacent to the Science Center.  It will be open and free to members of the Harvard community and the…

Playtime (Spielzeit), a film produced by Harvard Extension School graduate Ryan Slattery, A.L.B. ’09, has been selected to screen at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival International Shorts program in Park City, Utah, January 19 through 29. Slattery’s film is one of only 64 short films selected from a record 7,675 submissions for this year’s Sundance…

Medical historian Allan Brandt, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has authored the “Perspective” article in the 200th anniversary edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, published this January. Discussing the history of the Journal, Brandt tracks its seminal role in observing and investigating disease, reporting innovations in medicine, and educating the medical…

It’s one thing to understand the public health implications of scientific evidence. It’s quite another to use that information to successfully implement real public health improvements. The challenge of leaping from theory to practice has prompted the creation of new programming, offered through the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Public Health Leadership, that…

Michael VanRooyen and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) team he directs are working hard to develop new ways to offset the miseries of humanitarian disasters. In a January 2012 Boston Magazine article titled “The Saving Game,” VanRooyen talked about how relief workers — if their efforts aren’t properly coordinated—can sometimes do more harm than good.…

Nan Laird was appointed the new Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health. This honor recognizes her more than 35 years developing statistical methodology, teaching, and doing applied research. Laird succeeds the first holder of the professorship, Howard Koh, who is now Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.…

Addressing the growing need for fresh ideas and research in news reporting, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society announce the creation of the joint Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation. Candidates for the new yearlong fellowship will be asked to propose a specific course of study or…

It is a typical morning in rural Malawi. Women wearing colorful red, yellow, and blue patterned dresses carry large metal buckets, many balancing them on their heads, and often with young infants strapped to their backs. To get fresh water for their families, most travel an average of two miles on unpaved, meandering roads. At…

The Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Project recently co-hosted a groundbreaking conference with U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) on preventing and stopping genocide and other mass atrocities around the world. Harvard Kennedy School’s Sarah Sewall, lecturer in public policy, founded the MARO Project in 2007 with the goal of enabling the U.S. and…

When Bambo Sosina, a PhD student in the Statistics Department, came to the United States for the first time, he soon noticed that people had trouble understanding him. “Being originally from Nigeria, an English speaking country, this naturally felt devastating, and I sought to correct things quickly,” Sosina recalls. One opportunity in particular caught his…

Sarah Tudesco and Jindra Miller are the recipients of the 2011 Carol Ishimoto Award for Distinguished Service in the Harvard College Library. Created through a 1991 endowment established by former Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Cataloging and Processing Carol Ishimoto, the award annually recognizes a member or group of the professional staff who has…

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il brings up many questions about the future of the communist country and the Korean peninsula as a whole, where remnants of the cold war are still felt. “Internally, the North Korean regime will need to show consistently that they’re in command since the U.S. and South…

We all play an important role in reducing energy and conserving resources on campus and in our offices. Our actions make a big difference in helping Harvard meet its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2016. Astonishingly, the energy used by a building to support just one office worker for a day causes…

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is pleased to announce the release of Collection Researcher version 1.0, an innovative web application that provides unique access to the Arboretum’s living plant collections through its geographic information system (GIS). Available on the Arboretum website, Collection Researcher integrates a searchable inventory of the Arboretum’s nearly 15,000 curated trees,…

When a group of NATO and European Union (EU) ambassadors met recently in Brussels, there were a lot of familiar faces in the room. At least a dozen of the diplomats at the meetings can trace their roots back to Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where they spent time as participants in the Black Sea Security Program.…

The Dudley House Jazz Band and Harvard GSAS are proud to present the music of Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The concert will take place on Saturday, December 10 at 8 p.m. in Dudley House on the Harvard campus and is free and open to the public. Born in 1934, pianist and…

GSAS is ready to help students tackle their top new year’s resolution, and has prepared a robust month of professional development offerings, courtesy of the Office of Career Services and January@GSAS. Graduate Students can anticipate programs aimed at job-seekers in various stages and disciplines, from improving networking approaches, to transitioning from academic to nonacademic fields:…

A new study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has found that a group of volunteers who consumed a serving of canned soup each day for five days had a more than 1,000% increase in urinary bisphenol A (BPA) concentrations compared with when the same individuals consumed fresh soup daily for…

“Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t make a difference in public service,” former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis told an audience of HSPH students. Dukakis came to HSPH on November 17, 2011, as part of the ongoing “Decision-Making: Voices From the Field” speaker series, which provides students with the opportunity to engage with leaders…

Three GSAS students — Nataly Moran Cabili (PhD candidate in systems biology), Mehmet Fisek (PhD candidate in neuroscience), and Le Cong (PhD candidate in biological and biomedical sciences) — are among the 48 total winners in a new fellowship competition from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that awards full-time funding to exceptional international students in the third, fourth,…

New city leaders with Harvard ties Michael Brennan (Portland, Maine), Peter Buttigieg (South Bend, Ind.), Angel Taveras (Providence, R.I.), and Karen Freeman-Wilson (Gary, Ind.) are joining more than 20 other incoming mayors from large cities across the country at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP) Nov. 30-Dec. 2 for a three-day seminar on leadership and…

When the former prime minister of Greece, George Papandreou, asked Richard Parker to serve as special economic adviser in 2009, Parker couldn’t refuse. A friend of the Papandreou family since the early 1970s, the Harvard Kennedy School economist didn’t hesitate when asked to help. What he didn’t know was that his acceptance would give him a…

Harvard Kennedy School is well represented on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers 2011. Professors Edward Glaeser, Lant Pritchett, and Joseph Nye are included, along with alumni Andrew Sullivan, M.C./M.P.A. 1986, and Robert Zoellick, M.P.P. 1981. Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and serves as faculty director of both the Taubman…

From targeted cancer chemotherapy to the guarantee of successful organ transplants, the 21st century may prove to be the age of big ideas in medicine. The drugs themselves, though, will be miniscule. Experts in chemistry, applied physics, materials science, and pharmaceutical science are gathering this week for the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard University’s…

The President’s Office announced today the 2012 grant recipients for the President’s January Innovation Fund for Faculty. The fund was created in 2010 to support Harvard faculty in the development and implementation of creative academic and co-curricular experiences taking place during the January term. The program generated significant interest in its second year, with a…

Friends of Henry Hubschman, HLS 1972 M.P.P. 1973, have set up a fellowship in his memory at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and Harvard Law School (HLS). Established shortly after Hubschman’s death in February 2011, the fellowship has received more than $550,000 in contributions and is now permanently endowed. It will provide financial assistance to students…

Over the weekend, Harvard students, guided by Eric Chivian ’64, M.D. ’68, moved three heirloom apple saplings from the Harvard Community Garden to a permanent spot on campus, just behind Lowell House. The three heirloom varieties– a Baldwin, an Esopus Spitzenburg and a Roxbury Russet– were planted by the Center for Health and the Global…