Watching television is the most common daily activity apart from work and sleep in many parts of the world, but it is time for people to change their viewing habits. According to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers, prolonged TV viewing was associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes,…

A group of physicians and patient safety experts, including HSPH’s Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management, have written a report that calls for shorter shifts and increased supervision for resident physicians. Starting July 1, new rules will limit first-year residents to shifts of no longer than…

Kamiar Alaei, who received a master of science degree from HSPH in 2007, thanked David Bloom, chair, Department of Global Health and Population at HSPH, and the Physicians for Human Rights organization for working for his freedom from an Iranian prison, a Boston Globe June 17, 2011, article reports. Alaei’s first public remarks since gaining…

By applying a coating to individual silicon nanowires, researchers at Harvard and Berkeley have significantly improved the materials’ efficiency and sensitivity. The findings, published in the May 20, 2011, issue of Nano Letters, suggest that the coated wires hold promise for photodetectors and energy harvesting technologies like solar cells. Due to a large surface-to-volume ratio,…

A new professional development grant named in honor of Jan Merrill-Oldham has recently been approved by the Association of Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the American Library Association (ALA) and will be awarded in 2012. For more than 30 years, Merrill-Oldham has been a recognized leader in the…

Harvard University Hospitality & Dining Services’ (HUHDS) chefs took first place and prestigious American Culinary Federation (ACF) gold medals at the 17th Annual Chef Culinary Conference in Amherst, Mass., on June 17. The Team Mystery Basket competition is the only ACF-sanctioned event of its kind in the United States. HUHDS’ four-person team of Martin Breslin,…

Social media might prove critical in the electoral success of women political candidates, but is a “mixed blessing,” according to a new discussion paper, Digital Divas: Women, Politics and the Social Network, by Alexis Gelber, a longtime journalist formerly based at Newsweek. Gelber conducted her research during her time as a Goldsmith Fellow at the…

Beginning in fall 2011, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) will offer a secondary field in computational science and engineering (CSE) to graduate students across the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). An exciting and rapidly evolving field, CSE exploits the power of computation as an approach to major challenges…

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has named Harvard Professors Joanna Aizenberg, Leah Price, and Robert Sampson as faculty program directors of Academic Ventures. Together, these distinguished faculty members will lead new, multidisciplinary collaborations with faculty throughout the University and develop innovative programming across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences that…

Inspired by one of the most talked-about Harvard College courses in recent history, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” the Science & Cooking public lecture series will return on Sept. 6. Members of the general public are once again invited to attend talks by world-class chefs and eminent food…

Vivek Kundra, the U.S. chief information officer at the White House for the past two and a half years, will serve a joint fellowship this fall at Harvard University. Kundra will split his time between the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and the Berkman Center for…

Though it explores the myriad techniques – from cartouches to vignettes, figural borders, and frontispieces – that cartographers have employed for centuries to encode messages into maps, “Going for Baroque: The Iconography of the Ornamental Map,” the current exhibition at the Harvard Map Collection also employs new technology. It is the first Harvard College Library…

A.C. Thompson, a staff reporter for ProPublica whose work frequently exposes social injustice and the abuse of power, is winner of the 2011 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard will present the award at Boston University on October 4, 2011, during a ceremony co-hosted by BU’s College of…

Michael J. Sandel has been named the “most influential” foreign figure of the year in China.  The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government was given the award by China Newsweek, a weekly magazine published by the China News Agency.  Sandel’s online lectures on Justice have attracted millions of viewers in East Asia,…

Over the past decade, an increasing number of families in India appear to be aborting their second child if prenatal tests indicate the child is female, presumably to ensure that at least one child in the family will be a boy, according to a May 24, 2011, study published online in The Lancet. The authors,…

“There are two important things in my life,” said Isabelle Valadian, M.P.H. ’53, “my parents and my life at the Harvard School of Public Health [HSPH].” To honor both, Isa (as she prefers to be called) established a series of gift annuities in support of financial aid at HSPH as part of the Gohar and…

Thirty years after the first official reports about HIV/AIDS, we look back on the human devastation and forward to a changed social landscape. The infection has killed more people so far than has any other discrete epidemic, except for the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 and the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It has…

As of today, Harvard’s new Borrow Direct service enables the University’s faculty, staff, and students to borrow books and other circulating library materials that are not available at Harvard from the libraries of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Harvard’s participation in Borrow Direct is the result of an agreement…

Elif Yamangil, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the 2011 Google Fellowship in Natural Language Processing. Yamangil, who is advised by Stuart Shieber, James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at SEAS and director of the Office…

Jim Waldo, currently Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been named as the University’s Chief Technology Officer, effective June 6. In his role as chief technology officer, Waldo will be responsible for the architecture and implementation of the Harvard University technology…

Martha Heitzmann, Ph.D. ’97, is the senior executive vice president of research and innovation at Areva Group, a French energy company that specializes in nuclear power. She describes herself as a “hybrid” of cultures and disciplines, “a dedicated environmentalist who is pursuing a career in heavy industry.” Heitzmann earned a B.S. in ecology and evolutionary…

Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, “Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting,” authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland’s The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe…

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the appointment of Professor Jonathan Zittrain as the agency’s Distinguished Scholar. He will be based in the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis and will work on a range of issues related to 21st-century communications networks. He succeeds Stuart Benjamin, the commission’s first Distinguished Scholar in Residence.…

When she retires from her post as the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College next month, efforts to sum up the career of Nancy Cline will invariably point to the massive, multi-year renovation of Widener Library as one of her greatest accomplishments. Such efforts, however, only scratch the surface of a career that has…

Thanks to a generous donation from Bruce McEver, M.T.S. ’11, Harvard Divinity School (HDS) announces a new initiative, the Religious Literacy Project (RLP), which will enable HDS to continue our nearly four decades of leadership in religious studies and education in the United States. As a successor to the Program in Religious Studies and Education,…

Highlights from a year of innovative teaching, breakthrough research, inventive student projects, and global impact Summer 2010 President Obama appointed SEAS Dean Cherry A. Murray to serve on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Applied physicist Lene Hau, known for stopping light, was named World Dane 2010. September…

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has selected 24 journalists from the United States and abroad to become the 74th class of Nieman Fellows. The group includes journalists who work for newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online news organizations. Announcing the news, Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles said “The class of 2012 includes journalists…

It’s been a banner year for the Department of Mathematics and its faculty and graduate students. The department shared some impressive year-end highlights with us. Professor Joseph Harris, Ph.D. ’78, was among 100 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences on May 3. An honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and…

The remarkable uprising in Egypt earlier this year created an extraordinary opportunity to radically change the trajectory of the country. Jennifer Bremer, M.P.P. ’75, Ph.D. ’82 in public policy, is training a new generation of Egyptian leaders to make good on that opportunity. Bremer is leading a well-timed new master’s program in public policy — the…

The archive of Sir Georg Solti, a body of work of significance to musical scholars and musicians worldwide, has come to Harvard’s Loeb Music Library, the University announced today.  The collection includes hundreds of scores heavily marked for performance and annotated by Solti, one of the 20th century’s most renowned conductors of opera and symphony…