Nikolai Vasenin, a Russian soldier who fought with the French Resistance, was born in December 1919 and died in December 2014. His story — courage, sacrifice, and love — is well worth remembering but has not been well publicized until recently. Two Russian filmmakers, Andrey Grigoriev and Pavel Sablin, discovered the story. Inspired, they filmed…

Food production and emergency phone calls may look very different in the near future thanks to the student grand prize winners announced at the 2015 Harvard Business School New Venture Competition (NVC) Finale, which took place April 22 before an enthusiastic audience in Burden Auditorium on the HBS campus. RAPIDSOS plans to use technology to…

Perma.cc, a project that takes on the problem of “link rot” or broken or defunct links in scholarship, has won the prestigious Webby Award for best law site of 2015. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc is a Web archiving service that helps authors and publishers create permanent links to their online sources,…

A portrait of Treasurer of the United States Rosie Rios ’87 was unveiled during a special ceremony in Winthrop House, where Rios lived as an undergraduate. It is the first portrait of a Latina to hang on a wall in Harvard College, according to S. Allen Counter, director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and…

On April 11, Harvard College hosted the inaugural Diversity, (In)Equity, and Social Justice Undergraduate Research Conference to 100+ attendees. The purpose of the conference was to bridge both academic and cocurricular learning by giving students a space to have critical conversations about research with their peers at Harvard and beyond. The conference  recognized research on…

Bruce Spiegelman, director of the Center for Energy Metabolism and Chronic Disease at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, has received Belgium’s most important international scientific prize for his contributions to understanding the mechanisms of metabolic disorders. Queen Mathilde of Belgium presented Spiegelman with the 2015 Health…

Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was named recipient of an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor Award on April 2, 2015. It is one of the most prestigious awards offered by the organization. The Clinical Research Professor Award is for mid-career investigators who have made seminal contributions to cancer…

Doctors across the country are taking action against ‘gag laws’ that would prevent then from asking patients if they have guns in their homes. One such law, passed in Florida in 2011, is currently being fought in the courts by a coalition of physicians. Similar laws are pending in 12 other states. In a March…

Laurence Ralph, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard College, is one of 32 inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows, the  Carnegie Corporation of New York announced on April 22. Recipients of the new annual fellowship supporting scholars in the social sciences and humanities will receive up to $200,000…

The 2015 Bertarelli Symposium on Translational Neuroscience and Neuroengineering was held on April 17 at Campus Biotech in Geneva. The symposium brought together scientists from Harvard Medical School and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to discuss the work that they undertake collaboratively as part of the transatlantic research program of the same name.…

David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is one of 32 inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced on April 22, 2015. Recipients of the new annual fellowship supporting scholars in the social sciences and humanities will receive up to…

Long-term, regular aspirin use is associated with a reduced risk of some cancers, according to new research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, held April 18-22, 2015. The research was led by Yin Cao, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Study…

Who decides who can carry concealed firearms legally? Should local police chiefs have a say? Massachusetts police chiefs think so. A new survey finds that a large majority of Massachusetts police chiefs favor continuing to give local police discretion in whether or not to grant concealed carry hand gun permits in their jurisdiction. Massachusetts is…

HILT hosted a reception last week for faculty, student, and staff grant recipients. Attendees represented projects from all four rounds of Spark Grants since 2013, as well as the inaugural round of Cultivation Grants, awarded in 2014. The group of nearly two dozen attendees took turns sharing a sentence or two about the status of their innovative…

Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Xiaoliang Sunney Xie is the co-recipient of the Albany Med Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research. The $500,000 prize is awarded to a physician, scientist, or group whose work has led to significant advances in health care and scientific research with demonstrated translational benefits for improved patient care. Xie…

Ahead of his book talk on April 20, Center for the Study of World Religions director and Harvard Divinity School professor Francis X. Clooney opens up about the importance of comparing religious traditions, the difficulties of academic writing, and if loving God is harder today than it was centuries ago. HDS: Your work and writings…

Theresa Betancourt, Sc.D. ’03, associate professor of child health and human rights, directs the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity, based at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population. She has spent more than a decade working in Sierra Leone studying the mental health and well-being of former…

Eighty-four boys rescued by the Cameroonian army in March 2015 from Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group based in Nigeria, were initially silent. But that silence might be what helped them survive at the Koranic school from which they were rescued, according to a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researcher. “Being demure, not speaking…

Teaching more nutrition education and self-care skills like mindfulness and behavioral change to medical students and other health professionals will better prepare them to teach patients to lead healthier lives and help stem the public health “tsunami” of lifestyle-related diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, according to David Eisenberg, adjunct associate professor of…

The U.S. Senate’s likely approval this week of bipartisan legislation to repeal a long-standing feature of Medicare physician payment policy called the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) does not mean a new era of bipartisan Congressional cooperation on health policy has dawned, according to John McDonough of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Writing in…

Men who take muscle-building supplements may be at increased risk of testicular cancer, according to a new study, which included researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Those who used the supplements, such as pills and powders with creatine or androstenedione, were more likely to develop testicular cancer than those who did not,…

The Office for the Arts at Harvard and the Council on the Arts at Harvard, a standing committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have announced the recipients of the annual undergraduate arts prizes for 2015. The prizes were awarded to 10 students for excellence in the arts. Read about the winners.  

The Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA) and the Office of the Dean for the Arts and Humanities have announced the 2015 recipients of the Artist Development Fellowship. This program supports the artistic development of students demonstrating unusual accomplishment and/or evidence of significant artistic promise. The program is administered by the OFA and the Office…

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), writes The New York Times, is “one of the most accomplished and adventurous groups in new music.” On Friday April 17 and Saturday April 18 at 8 p.m. in Paine Hall, ICE will present “Voces de America Latina,” conducted by Steven Schick and presented by the Fromm Players at Harvard.…

Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) today announced a gift by the family of Hüsnü Özyeğin, a leading Turkish entrepreneur, highly esteemed philanthropist, and HBS graduate (M.B.A. 1969), to establish the Özyeğin Forum on Modern Turkey. The Özyeğin Forum will provide CES new opportunities to incorporate the study of Turkey and…

This is a critical year for turning the world’s economic development toward a more sustainable course — maybe “the” critical year, economist and United Nations adviser Jeffrey Sachs told a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health audience on April 1. World leaders will be meeting at three high-level summits this summer and fall to hash…

So much more than a walk in the park, the annual celebration of Lilac Sunday at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University stands among the most time-honored traditions in New England. Since the early 1900s, the peak blooming time of one of the world’s most significant collections of lilacs has attracted flower and garden lovers…

The Chicago Tribune has won the Nieman Foundation’s 2014 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism with “Red Light Cameras,” a comprehensive series that exposed the corruption and mismanagement of a traffic-monitoring program that has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting motorists in Chicago over the course of ten years. Two other…

Adding a 50 percent excise tax onto tobacco products in China – which has the highest number of tobacco users in the world – could significantly reduce smoking-related deaths while generating substantial financial risk protection and poverty alleviation benefits to households, according to a study led by a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health…

Teaching more nutrition education and self-care skills like mindfulness and behavioral change to medical students and other health professionals will better prepare them to teach patients to lead healthier lives and help stem the public health “tsunami” of lifestyle-related diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, according to David Eisenberg, adjunct associate professor of nutrition…