“Israel vs. No. 2 Pencils” by Lena Awwad ’13 and Shatha I. Hussein ’14 argued that the move had had a devastating effect on Palestinian students hoping to attend colleges such as Harvard. When “not a single U.S. news source picked up the story of the SAT hold-up in Palestine,” the Harvard Crimson published it, according to Gina Helfrich, director of the Harvard College Women’s Center.

In a clear nod to the op-ed, the White House soon released a daily briefing that said the issue had been resolved and that Palestinian students would be able to take the SATs —  “so they should sharpen their No. 2 pencils.”

Because of Awwad and Hussein’s efforts, Helfrich said, “at least one of those students who was able to take the SATs will attend Harvard next year” — and the Center took note, honoring Awwad with the 2013 Harvard College Women’s Leadership Award.

Faculty, staff, and students recently flocked to the Charles Hotel to recognize Awwad and two other outstanding Harvard University women. Nadia Farjood ’13 accepted an honorable mention, and Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education and president-elect of Smith College, was presented with the 2013 Women’s Professional Achievement Award.

Coordinated by the Women’s Center, the annual awards, now in their 16th year, are made possible by support from Terrie Fried Bloom ’75 and have a legacy of distinguished past recipients, including astronaut Stephanie Wilson ’88 and Tina Tchen ’78, chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama.

Accepting her award, Awwad emphasized her belief that leadership is “the ability to fight not only for one’s own rights, but for the rights of others, especially when they’re not able to do it themselves.”

In addition to thanking her family, she thanked the “difficult circumstances” she had witnessed and encountered in her native country of Palestine — “the poverty, the hardship, the checkpoints … they made me the person who I am today” — but she dedicated her award to Harvard itself.

“This institution has given me so much,” Awwad said. “It has allowed me to develop as a person and as a woman, and I can only hope that a privilege like this will be extended to students from Palestine and around the world.”

“We have many great traditions here at Harvard, and this is one of my favorites,” said Diana Sorensen, dean of Arts and Humanities and the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature. “It is one of the more recent traditions, but it is absolutely central.”

In introducing McCartney, Sorensen honored her for “her history of supporting women in leadership roles, for encouraging diversity, and for her brilliant academic achievements in early childhood development education.” She added that McCartney would be missed “as a friend, and as a role model.”

McCartney, a “first-generation college student” and a native of Medford, Mass., said that the world had changed “since I was the age of the young women being honored here tonight.” She recalled that during her undergraduate years at Tufts University, male students would rate female students on their physical attractiveness, “literally holding up signs” as the women passed by.

Despite such challenges, McCartney said, a series of sponsors and “intellectual mothers” helped her find her way, people who used their influence to advocate on her behalf. “They saw something in me that I just didn’t see in myself,” McCartney said, adding that she felt “so honored to lead the Graduate School of Education for the past eight years … it really has felt like an eight-year honeymoon.”

Graduate student Shauna Shames ’01, who nominated Farjood, called the honorable mention recipient “a force of nature” who had just received funding from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program to pursue a summer internship at the White House.

Shames said that when Farjood discovered that Harvard had no course on women in politics, she decided to create one. Putting together a team of student researchers, Farjood collected student signatures to demonstrate interest and demand, conducted peer-institution research showing that Yale and Princeton offered such courses, and wrote and delivered a report of their findings to Harvard administrators. The result, Shames said, is the lecture course “Women and U.S. Politics,” which will debut at Harvard next year.

Commending Farjood’s determination and vision, Shames thanked her “for all you do, for all that you have done already, and all that you will do, for us.”

Richard Holmes, whose critically acclaimed “The Age of Wonder” explored the intersection of science and the arts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, discussed the role of biography in shaping popular understanding of scientists and their work Tuesday at Radcliffe Gymnasium.

“Can biography and science speak to each other?” he asked to launch his 75-minute talk, “The Scientist Within.” Holmes said they can, even though “biography is literary, subjective, historical, and backward-looking,” while “science is forward-looking” and objective.

The image of the scientist in the popular imagination was largely created around the Romantic notion of a singular genius experiencing a “eureka” moment of discovery, said Holmes, stressing the point by holding a print of the astronomer John Herschel next to a picture of Albert Einstein. With their strikingly similar unkempt hair and intense gazes, there is “something extraordinary about how close these images are,” he said.

Biography can help challenge and deepen such notions by illuminating not just the formation of an individual scientist but also the painstaking scientific process, he said, citing Walter Isaacson’s “Einstein” and “Steve Jobs” and Dava Sobel’s “Longitude,” as successes.

Holmes traced the roots of scientific biography to the 17th century. Samuel Johnson, the subject of one of the most famous biographies in history, himself wrote a pioneering work: “The Life of Herman Boerhaave” (1739). The book focused on formative events in its subject’s childhood, as did William Stukeley’s 1752 biography of Isaac Newton. Holmes quoted Stukeley: “Every reader burns with a desire to know the primordia,” the beginnings of Newton’s epic engagement with science. It was Stukeley’s biography, Holmes said, that first popularized the story of how a falling apple served as Newton’s epiphany about the workings of gravity.

As he did in “The Age of Wonder,” which was named the best nonfiction book of 2009 by Time, Holmes stressed the close interaction between scientific discovery and artistic endeavor in the Romantic age.

Pioneering astronomical work by Sir William Herschel (father of John) helped inspire the music and poetry of his age — the work of Keats, for one. For Romantic poets such as Keats, science was about “eureka” moments, when nature’s wonders were revealed. Of course, as Holmes pointed out, Herschel had no such moment, but confirmed his observations through careful research and the generous help of others, such as his brilliant sister, the astronomer Caroline Herschel.

Equally taken with astronomy, said Holmes, was composer Joseph Haydn, who looked through Herschel’s famous telescopes shortly before beginning the composition of his oratorio “The Creation,” in 1796, and drew inspiration from a conversation with Caroline Herschel.

Holmes finished with an emphasis on three emerging challenges in scientific biography: first, a much deeper look at the contributions of women (he cited Rosalind Franklin, who worked on discovering DNA, as a prime example of neglect); second, the need to better convey the collaborative nature of scientific discovery; and finally, educating and inspiring young people to consider careers in science.

“Biography is a miraculous, inspiring teaching tool,” said Holmes.

The Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, after consulting with students concerned about socially responsible investing and the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, chose the Parnassus Equity Income Fund as the investment vehicle. Managers at the Parnassus fund give special consideration to social responsibility issues when making investments.

The decision was based in large part on the advice of the Harvard Management Company (HMC), which hired two Harvard College students as interns to research investment options for the social choice fund. The students analyzed several investment options across a series of investment and social criteria to inform HMC’s recommendations.

There will be no minimum gift amount for the fund, and each year 20 percent of the fund’s beginning market value will be made available to support financial aid across the University. The University plans to review and assess the fund’s performance within five years.

The University announced in December that the fund would be in place by the start of the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. In December, President Drew Faust said: “I have heard from many students and alumni who have asked for additional avenues to support both the University and broader social interests. This fund will offer donors another way to support Harvard’s financial aid program and the transformational opportunities it offers our students.”

CONTACT:
Kevin Galvin
Harvard Public Affairs & Communications
617.495.1585

For busy bicyclist and blogger Alice Anne Brown, MUP ’13, the wheels are always turning. They turn in her mind at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where for two years she has studied urban planning — especially how bicycles can make cities more livable, lovable, and viable.

And the wheels turn for Brown on the road, where she logs five to 20 miles a day on her one-speed Westport cruiser. It has fat wheels, pedal brakes, a single gear, and a seat that makes her sit up straight, all the better to just look around. (For weekend distance rides, she keeps a Specialized Dolce.) “I’m a three-city girl,” said Brown, whose home is in Somerville, school is in Cambridge, and work is in Boston (as a project manager at Boston Bikes, a citywide cycling initiative).

She was born in Detroit, the Motor City, but her core passion revolves around how pedal power could be at the heart of a safe, practical, and low-impact urban life. Brown has ridden the bike lanes in many of the 22 countries she’s visited, though two years ago she was obliged to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on foot.

“There is no better way to really see a place,” she said of biking. Her childhood seemed to be on wheels too, and rolled through Michigan to Maryland and back to Ohio for her father’s engineering career. Mostly, she grew up in the village of Baltimore, Ohio, where home was on five acres with a pond. She swam, ice skated, played the flute, and dabbled in 4H. (“I was a disaster at cooking and sewing,” she said.) Her younger brother took to country life, but “I have searched for cities ever since,” said Brown.

At Ohio State University, Brown studied physics, then switched to mathematics. (She also rowed crew and played ice hockey.) As an undergraduate senator, Brown sat on a town-gown planning board that piqued her interest in how cities worked, including streetlight audits and regulations for commercial frontage. In 2003, armed with dual degrees in math and philosophy, Brown moved to the Bronx, where for five years she taught math to sixth- and eighth-graders.

Even when teaching, Brown felt intimations of the career she ultimately would embrace: planning that would make the world’s cities greener. She spent many hours in New York’s Central Park, a place that she said feels like her real home. In a life-changing experience, Brown led her class through a unit on sustainability, including a look at the “No Impact Man” lifestyle. For a week, she rode her bike everywhere.

When she moved to Ethiopia in 2008 for a three-year teaching job in Addis Ababa, her bike came with her, as did her interest in public spaces. Brown surveyed city parks in the capital. She also studied the ubiquitous and cheap 14-passenger minivans that provide informal public transport in much of East Africa. She realized that her interests had converged into a desire to study urban planning.

“I wanted to change things,” said Brown, who applied to the GSD, was admitted, and started in September 2011.

What’s next? “I could go anywhere,” said Brown. She has new skills at planning and assessment and a vision of cities where streets are designed for more than cars. Still, she added, “I don’t want to be just the bike girl.”

In a report released Tuesday by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Program on Human Security and Technology, researchers combined satellite images with thousands of publicly available reports, including soldier accounts posted on the Internet — YouTube videos in which they talked about their exploits — for more insight on fighting that took place in 2011 and 2012.

“You’re talking about basically an area closed off to the outside world,” said Brittany Card, the Signal Program’s coordinator of data analysis and a lead author of the report. “It’s a sad reality that conflicts like that are occurring all over the world.”

The report identified specific military units involved in certain engagements and indicated that the destruction of civilian homes — more than 2,000 — was greater than earlier believed. It also corroborated the destruction of the headquarters of four humanitarian organizations that had been operating in the area.

Written by Card and Ziad Al Achkar, a Signal Program analyst, with the help of interns Jody Heck, a Harvard junior, and Sam Plasmati from Tufts University, the report also shows what’s possible when modern satellite imagery is combined with new reservoirs of information available online, providing a “proof-of-concept” that could help future researchers get a fuller grasp on other conflicts in closed areas.

“This study provides previously unavailable information about the conflict in Sudan, while also demonstrating how humanitarian actors can see other, future disasters in new ways,” said HHI Director Michael VanRooyen, professor of medicine and of global health and population and an emergency physician at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The report, “Sudan: Anatomy of a Conflict,” looks at the volatile border region in the months after the January 2011 referendum that created South Sudan. Though the Sudanese government has officially accepted the referendum’s results, the actual location of the border remains disputed and fighting has continued among multiple armed groups. Roughly a million people have been displaced.

“It was really a critical moment in the history of South Sudan,” Card said.

The YouTube videos — shot by a Sudanese army public relations team — were particularly useful, the authors said, as were tweets and other posts from the soldiers themselves. Al Achkar, who viewed and translated the videos from Arabic, said it’s clear that the soldiers feel like they’re defending their country or tribe, rather than possibly breaking international law.

“They don’t see it as potentially criminal behavior, they see it as fighting for their nation or tribal group,” Al Achkar said.

By filling in blanks, the report’s methodology could change how conflicts in closed areas are monitored and provide humanitarian organizations with an important tool, Card said. The findings could also be useful should international criminal courts be convened over human rights violations in the region, as well as to policy makers from organizations negotiating with the governments or groups involved.

In their analysis of fighting around the border town of Abyei, researchers realized that many more homes had been burned down than originally estimated, because the images showed that the fighting affected not just Abyei, which was razed, but numerous outlying towns.

Researchers may also have shed light on extra-judicial killings in the Sudanese town of Kadugli in 2011. The report showed that cars similar to those used by the killers — white Toyota Land Cruisers — were seen at state police headquarters in Kadugli in June 2011.

“When you gather all this information here in Cambridge and add satellite imagery, we’re seeing how much we know about a non-permissive conflict zone,” said Benjamin Davies, deputy director of the Signal Program. “What we found out is that you can learn quite a lot.”

Today President Drew Faust named Team Nucleik the grand prize winner of the Harvard University President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship, hosted by the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab). Faust developed the challenge last year to support students from across the University who were interested in developing entrepreneurial solutions to some of the world’s most important social problems. This year’s competitors tackled five topic areas: learning, energy and the environment, health, disaster preparation and relief, and the arts.

Team Nucleik will receive $70,000 to support its emerging business based on the software management information system team members developed while at Harvard for law enforcement officers.

“I spoke with the members of Team Nucleik earlier this month at the President’s Challenge Demo Day and was struck by their commitment to pursuing an idea and applying what they had learned in the classroom to improve the lives of others,” said Faust. “They’ve built a tool that will help law enforcement professionals better serve and protect communities across the country, and their inspiring work is something I will follow with great interest in the months and years ahead.”

On a field trip to Springfield, Mass., as part of Professor Kevin Kit Parker’s spring 2012 ES 96 engineering design seminar, the Nucleik team — computer science concentrators Scott Crouch, Florian Mayr, and Matthew Polega — saw firsthand the impact of violent crime and the everyday struggles of law enforcement officers handicapped by decades-old information management systems.

“Almost one and a half million gang members from 33,000 active gangs are responsible for 48 percent of the violent crime in the United States. We have a real problem with violent crime in the U.S., and technology can help solve it,” said Crouch. “There are many creative entrepreneurs — so many unbelievably talented people — out there, and they were all completely missing this issue.”

The system Nucleik developed provides instantaneous access to accurate and organized data to help law enforcement officers tackle gang violence, murders, and violent crime. It has been employed by the Special Projects Team of the Massachusetts State Police in Springfield, helping slash the time spent on office paperwork by 90 percent. The fledgling company is also in talks to launch the platform in several other major metropolitan police departments.

Three other student-led teams — Flume, PlenOptika and TerraTek — were recognized in the President’s Challenge for winning solutions to pervasive societal problems. Named runners-up in the competition, the teams tackled the complexity and potential behind understanding the human genome, the lack of affordable eye care in developing countries, and the challenges of registering for property rights and gaining access to public benefits in developing markets.

For the second year, Faust called on students from across the University to envision novel solutions to global problems that lack comprehensive answers. One hundred and twenty-seven student-led teams entered the competition, leveraging classroom learning and resources from the i-lab and across the University, as well as skills across disciplines, to develop unique solutions to problems that, like the teams themselves, are interdisciplinary in nature.

The three runners-up will each receive $10,000 to support the development of their ventures.

Team Flume is building a comprehensive and up-to-date map of the human genome through a crowdsourced webtool. Members hope access to their map will give researchers and clinicians information that provides comprehensive understanding of human biology, helping experts better understand diseases and supporting their efforts to fight them.

Team PlenOptika aims to distribute a device that can quickly test a person’s vision and provide the best off-the-shelf prescription. The project promises to bring adequate vision care to areas where professionals are in low supply. More than 1 billion people have poor vision because they don’t have the eyeglasses they need.

Team TerraTek is developing a two-sided platform that allows individuals to more easily secure property rights so they can obtain credit and other social benefits, and that assists governments of developing countries to expand their property rights databases to expand their revenue and plan more effectively. The team is launching the TerraTek platform this summer in Medellín, Colombia.

“The caliber of ideas that the judging committee considered this year was astounding, and it was very difficult for my fellow judges and me to choose from among the finalist teams — a wonderful problem to have in just the second year of the competition,” said Provost Alan M. Garber, co-chair of the judging committee.

“The members of the teams that split this year’s prize brought fresh perspectives and diverse backgrounds to tackle challenges related to crisis management, the environment, health, and learning. The range of issues they are addressing through their projects is a testament to the creativity and skills of students across the University — and to the success that follows when they connect with one another to identify and pursue common goals.”

Student teams took part in workshops and gained resources and mentoring to help build their skills. The 10 finalists named in March further developed their ideas with the expertise of handpicked mentors, tailored workshops, and $5,000 in seed money.

“The student teams met this year’s President’s Challenge with true passion,” said Gordon Jones, managing director of the i-lab. “There is an extra spark around their ideas that comes from firsthand experience, whether it be from ride-alongs with the State Police or seeing the impact of inadequate access to vision care in communities around the world. It is this spark that has fueled these teams to pursue and grow their ventures.”

Student learning throughout the challenge matched the scope of the ideas.

“I love being involved in all aspects of a real product; the ability to create something and watch it unfold in front of you is just so unique to entrepreneurship and that’s why I love doing it,” said Crouch. “It’s not about the money or the product, it’s about putting something you built in the hands of other people and watching it affect their lives. I would never have been an entrepreneur without the i-lab, having a central place where we could meet people who were like-minded and find the things that we needed to get our startup up and running.”

The Wyss Institute seeks to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges in health care and the environment by drawing inspiration from nature’s design principles. In addition to uncovering new knowledge about how nature builds, controls, and manufactures, the institute measures success in the ability of its faculty and staff to translate their discoveries into products that can have near-term impact.

“Mr. Wyss is extraordinarily generous, and we are deeply grateful that he has expanded his support of multidisciplinary research at Harvard,” said Drew Faust, Harvard’s president and Lincoln Professor of History. “Through the Wyss Institute, we are realizing his vision — generating promising technologies and building partnerships that extend far beyond our campus. This additional gift will enable the institute’s continued success and create new opportunities to improve people’s lives and the world in which we live.”

The Wyss Institute has grown at a rapid pace since its founding in January 2009, and now includes over 350 full-time staff located in 100,000 square feet of research space distributed between Harvard’s Longwood Medical Campus and Cambridge sites. This burgeoning community of scientists, biologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and clinicians includes 27 core and associate faculty and their students and fellows, as well as 40 staff with extensive experience in product development and team management across multiple industries. The work at the institute ranges from early-stage exploration of new ideas to focused technology translation, with an emphasis on validating and de-risking technologies to enable their commercialization.

“We wanted to create a place where the innovation and imagination of the world’s best minds could work beyond disciplinary boundaries to deliver life-changing medicines and technologies that are inspired by nature,” said Wyss, who, after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1965, started a successful medical research and design company whose products have helped millions of patients recover from skeletal and soft tissue trauma and injuries. “I could not have dreamt of the institute’s remarkable discoveries thus far, and am proud and excited to help them continue to build, explore, and improve lives.”

A native of Switzerland who now lives in Wilson, Wyo., Wyss’ philanthropy fosters new ideas, new tools, and new collaborations in areas ranging from medicine, education, and the arts to economic opportunity, conflict resolution, and land conservation. The Wyss Foundation, which Wyss established in 1998, is known for helping protect some of the country’s most iconic landscapes — from Montana’s Crown of the Continent to the Wyoming Range — and ensuring they remain open and accessible to all. All together, the Wyss Foundation has invested more than $175 million to help local communities, land trusts, and nonprofit partners conserve nearly 14 million acres in the West for future generations to explore and enjoy.

Wyss is also a founder of the AO Foundation, a medically guided nonprofit led by an international group of surgeons who specialize in the treatment of trauma and disorders of the musculoskeletal system, and PeaceNexus, a nonprofit foundation that brings together and advises government institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses to expand peace-building capacity in conflict areas around the world. His significant contributions to the Beyeler Foundation have helped conserve and display some of the world’s most important pieces of modern art.

At Harvard, Wyss’ support for the institute’s model of interdisciplinary work has led to impressive productivity in intellectual property creation, numerous corporate collaborations, multiple licensing agreements, and technology translation at an accelerated pace, with two potential products currently entering human clinical trials: a cancer vaccine and a vibrating shoe insole that promises to restore balance in the elderly. At the same time, the institute’s faculty members have an unparalleled publication record, with an average of one breakthrough publication in Science or Nature every month since the institute’s founding 52 months ago.

“Four years ago, we were tasked with developing an entirely new model for innovation, collaboration, and technology translation that more effectively bridges academia and industry, and that is precisely what we did,” said Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber. (Video: Wyss Retreat 2012)

Part of what makes the institute so effective, Ingber said, is its ability to harness expertise of members from its nine partner institutions, and to leverage the intellectual and commercial power of the Greater Boston region and beyond. Other members of the institute consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts University Medical Center, Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, and Tufts University.

“The Wyss Institute has rapidly established itself as a hub for the new field of biologically inspired engineering,” said Alan M. Garber, provost of Harvard University. “Thanks to Mr. Wyss’ critical support, the institute has developed novel insights into living organisms with remarkable speed and productivity — and it has applied those insights to create an array of bioinspired devices and materials that promise to advance medicine and many other fields.”

The Wyss Institute organizes its research priorities around six synergistic technology platforms: Bioinspired Robotics, Programmable Nanomaterials, Biomimetic Microsystems, Adaptive Material Technologies, Anticipatory Medical and Cellular Devices, and Synthetic Biology. Examples of projects under way include:

An up-close view of the Lung-on-a-Chip, a microdevice lined by human cells that recapitulates complex functions of the living lung. Photo courtesy of the Wyss Institute

• The RoboBee — a tiny robot inspired by the biology of a fly that may be used in search and rescue missions or to carry out pollination and replace dying bee populations. (Video: Controlled flight of the robotic insect)
• Human Organs-on-Chips — microchips lined by human cells that are poised to revolutionize drug development and environmental testing by replacing animal studies. (Video: Lung-on-a-Chip — Wyss Institute)
• SLIPS — a novel surface coating that repels just about everything — from oil and water to blood — which is being applied to increase the energy efficiency of refrigeration systems, to prevent fouling of water and waste treatment plants, and to prevent blood coagulation in dialysis devices and tubing. (Video: SLIPS)
• An anticipatory medical device — a vibrating mattress that senses when an infant is about to stop breathing and then transmits signals that prevent apnea. (Video: What if we could prevent infant apnea?)
• MAGE — a genome re-engineering instrument that fast-forwards the evolutionary process to produce more efficient and cost-effective microbial manufacturing plants for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural industries.
• A biospleen for sepsis therapy — a dialysis-like therapeutic device that cleanses blood of a diverse array of pathogens and toxins by mimicking the body’s innate immune system.

The continued support will ensure that the institute maintains its fast pace, Ingber said. “Mr. Wyss’ additional gift — for which we are beyond grateful — ensures that our adventure in high-risk research and technology translation will continue,” he said.

Shinagel was first appointed director of the Division of Continuing Education (DCE) in 1975 before being named dean of the Extension School in 1977, a position he has held until his retirement this year. (Shinagel’s official title is dean of continuing education and University Extension.)

“The accomplishment is yours, but the benefit has certainly been ours,” said Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith, adding that Shinagel had “made a singular contribution to our institution” during his time at Harvard.

More than a hundred administrators, students, alumni, and staff gathered on May 14 to celebrate Shinagel’s legacy of work at Harvard University. In his almost 40 years of service, he shaped the frontier of continuing and distance education at Harvard.

Pronouncing him “one of the transformative leaders” of the University, former president of Harvard Derek Bok, who appointed Shinagel to his position as dean, said that it was Shinagel’s flair for entrepreneurship, combined with the good timing of the era of lifelong learning, that made his impact on continuing and distance education such a powerful one.

“The number of people who come to Harvard today as nontraditional students, not in the traditional degree-granting programs …  that number is three or four times the number of the rest of the traditional degree-granting programs put together. It’s a major transformation, and Mike was a key figure presiding over that,” said Bok, who is the 300th Anniversary University Research Professor.

Shinagel observed that his career in continuing education at Harvard had begun 38 years ago on the same floor of University Hall where his retirement party was taking place. Recalling the meeting that finalized his appointment, Shinagel remembers asking Henry Rosovsky, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, what his mission should be. Rosovsky responded: “Mike, don’t embarrass us.”

“With these words of encouragement,” Shinagel said wryly, eliciting cheers of laughter from the crowd, he began his career at Harvard.

“Thanks to a loving family, the best colleagues, faculty, and administrative staff that any dean could wish for, we have made a success of it,” he said. “That’s because we have followed our high-principled mission: to make sure that the books stand open, and the gates unbarred, to thousands of nontraditional students.”

When Shinagel began his tenure at DCE, the institution taught 75 courses to 4,000 students each year — numbers dwarfed by 2013 totals, when over 600 courses were offered to more than 13,000 students. Nearly 500,000 students have taken courses at Harvard through the Extension School and the Division of Continuing Education, with approximately 16,000 students completing their degrees and certificates.

Shinagel was also instrumental in making a Harvard education accessible and affordable to its employees. He proposed the idea of the tuition assistance plan (TAP) for Harvard staff members, an idea implemented in 1976, and a benefit that many take advantage of today.

In 1997, Shinagel also led the way in creating distance education at the Extension School, ultimately attracting students from 195 countries and offering more than 200 online classes. Many alumni of these courses, and of the Extension School, have expressed their gratitude to Shinagel online, on a tribute page created to celebrate his legacy and retirement.

In addition to his 38 years in continuing education, Shinagel’s career at Harvard has touched almost every aspect of University life. He was a House master for Quincy House from 1986 to 2001, was a nonresident tutor for Eliot House, and is a former president of the Faculty Club. “I didn’t even know we had presidents of the Faculty Club,” Smith quipped, prompting laughter from the crowd.

Acknowledging his colleague and friend, Rosovsky said that one of his favorite moments every year during Commencement occurs when Extension School students, “in ever-larger numbers, stand up and take their rightful place” among Harvard graduates.

“Thousands and thousands of students have done so over the years,” said Rosovsky, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, emeritus. “No future historian will ignore continuing education at Harvard, and that is due, in large part, to the efforts Dean Shinagel has made for the last 38 years.”

The totals — 3,300 U.S. deaths and 387,000 injuries in 2011 — show that laws in many states banning texting and hand-held cellphone use while driving aren’t getting the job done.

Jay Winsten, Frank Stanton Director of the School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication and associate dean for health communication, thinks it’s time to turn to a higher power: social norms.

Winsten and the center hope to reduce distracted driving by enlisting the Hollywood creative community in a campaign against it. Texting and cellphone use will be the main targets, but the campaign also will seek to raise awareness of how anything that takes a driver’s attention from the road — whether programming a GPS device or re-setting a child’s entertainment center — is potentially hazardous.

One recent study monitored truckers for over 3 million miles using sensors and cameras to see when they took their eyes off the road. Reading or writing a text message distracted the driver for an average of 4.6 seconds, increasing the odds of a crash 23-fold.

“That’s the equivalent of driving blindfolded the length of a football field at 55 miles an hour,” Winsten said. “Imagine a texting driver heading toward you in the opposing lane of traffic. The threat comes from a combination of visual and cognitive distraction.”

Dialing a handheld cellphone took an average of 3.8 seconds, and increased the crash risk 3.8 fold.

A 2012 survey by the AAA Foundation found that “despite the near-universal disapproval of texting and e-mailing behind the wheel, more than one in four licensed drivers, 26.6 percent, reported typing or sending a text or e-mail at least once in the past 30 days, and more than one in three, 34.6 percent, said they read a text or e-mail while driving during this time.”

With legislation outlawing distracted driving tough to enforce and awareness campaigns showing limited results, Winsten and colleagues are planning an initiative to change social norms by enlisting Hollywood as a partner. Such a strategy has worked before. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Winsten spearheaded a campaign that made “designated driver” a household term, helping to shape a new social norm that the driver doesn’t drink.

The campaign, which is credited with contributing to a 25 percent drop in drunk driving deaths and creating enduring social change, was accomplished with the help of many partners, including law enforcement, Madison Avenue advertising firms, advocacy groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Students Against Drunk Driving, and a big push from Hollywood and the television networks.

Winsten won the support of television producers and writers to incorporate a designated driver message into 160 episodes of some of the most popular television shows of the day, including “Cheers,” “L.A. Law,” and “The Cosby Show.” Winsten also recruited President George H.W. Bush and later President Bill Clinton as the campaign’s lead spokespersons. Surveys found that a majority of the American public supported the practice of choosing a designated driver. Winsten hopes to use a similar strategy against distracted driving.

There is already a lot being done to fight distracted driving. Many states have passed laws regulating texting and cellphone use while driving and, in the business world, companies such as AT&T have been very active with advertising efforts, Winsten said. In an announcement last week, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile agreed to become partners in AT&T’s “It Can Wait” anti-texting campaign. And the Department of Transportation, under outgoing Secretary Ray LaHood, has made reducing distracted driving deaths a top priority.

“We’ve gone through the initial phase of response to the problem with greatly increased awareness and it’s a good time to review gains and consolidate knowledge,” Winsten said.

To do so, Winsten’s team is planning a conference this fall that will bring interested groups to HSPH for working sessions to examine existing efforts on distracted driving, extract lessons from past social change campaigns, and plan strategy.

“It’s all about digging deeper to understand cultural change,” Winsten said. “What are the stages in the evolution of particular social norms and what are the levers for influencing change?”

While borrowing lessons from past campaigns is important, the new effort, operating in a dramatically different media environment, will have to forge a new path.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could be assured of reaching a significant portion of the public with messages placed in a handful of key shows. Today, cable and satellite channels give television viewers hundreds of options and television itself competes for viewers’ screen time with video gaming, social media, and news and entertainment websites.

“For sure the mission is harder now,” Winsten said. “There wasn’t even a fourth network then. Fox was only on two nights a week. [But] it’s not only the fragmented media marketplace, it’s the public’s very short attention span.”

But Hollywood will still provide part of the answer, he said.

“People connect to fictional characters, and become engaged in the story lines,” Winsten said. “A substantial body of research on social learning has demonstrated that the modeling of behavior through entertainment programming can strongly influence social norms and behavior.”

The traditional top-down model of a public health campaign is outdated, he said, because today knowledge is disseminated laterally among the public as much as vertically from traditional knowledge sources.

“Today, a large part of the conversation — for example, on the safety of vaccines —is going on without us,” Winsten said. “The challenge for public health is to re-insert ourselves into the conversation.”

Students filled plates and sat at tables covered in blue and white tablecloths to pay homage to the Greek flag. Outside, the warm weather and the greening of the Quad signaled spring’s return.

Pforzheimer House Master Nicholas Christakis explained in an email to students what lamb in the spring signifies to Greek culture: “The idea behind a lamb roast is to celebrate the annual greening of the countryside with a ritual sacrifice of a new lamb. For millennia, the Greek diet was (and still is) organized around religious festivals, many of which involve fasting and the complete absence of dairy and meat for weeks at a time. In fact, some have hypothesized that the unusually high life expectancy of the Greek people comes in part from these periodic fasts from animal products. So, the traditional lamb roast signifies the coming of spring and an expression of gratitude for nature’s abundance.”

SHANGHAI — Kate McFarlin got off the plane in Beijing not knowing a soul. It was 2003, the summer of SARS, and the recent Harvard graduate was there to spend a year at the Beijing Film Academy.

McFarlin, armed with little more than what she described as “mediocre classroom Chinese” and the email address of a contact gleaned from her boss at a summer job, survived the yearlong fellowship. But she recalls her initial experience as an example of why it’s important for Harvard to have strong alumni networks in China and elsewhere in the world.

“I remember how lost and confused I was when I arrived off the plane,” McFarlin said. “Just having a single person’s email so you can say, ‘Where should I go? What should I do?’ was invaluable.”

McFarlin arrived with her one-year fellowship and a five-year plan to improve her Chinese, get experience, and make contacts. Ten years later, she remains in China, comfortably fluent in Mandarin, and, as the president of the Harvard Club of Shanghai, is working to strengthen the alumni community.

She has spent time as an entrepreneur and as a teacher, and is currently a communications and recruiting specialist for a fast-growing global investment firm. Through the changes, two things have held steady for McFarlin: her enthusiasm for both China and Harvard.

“I’m a huge Harvard enthusiast,” McFarlin said. “Harvard opened the world to me. It said, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ I don’t think there’s any way in the world I’d be sitting in Shanghai … right now if I didn’t go to Harvard.”

Those who know McFarlin describe her as outgoing, friendly, and “charmingly relentless,” a driving force behind making the Harvard Club of Shanghai relevant to the University community there.

“She embodies both Harvard’s growing engagement with the world and the rapid emergence of Shanghai as a truly global city,” said William C. Kirby, the T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, and head of both the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Harvard China Fund. “She is so bright, organized, and charmingly relentless that our Harvard Club of Shanghai has thrived under her leadership.”

Shaw Chen, the club’s treasurer, got to know McFarlin through a mutual friend shortly after McFarlin arrived. He praised her efforts to raise the club’s profile and, on a personal note, said her annual Thanksgiving dinners are not to be missed.

“It’s an amazing spread of traditional home-cooked favorites,” Chen said. “It’s an event her friends look forward to every November, particularly for the homesick American expats among us, myself included.”

McFarlin entered Harvard in the fall of 1999 thinking that she would become a doctor. Freshman chemistry proved a problem, however, one that McFarlin admits could be at least partly traced to her “freshman social life.” Instead of goading her into further struggles, however, McFarlin’s advisers asked her to look at her whole Harvard experience, including the classes she was enjoying most.

“Their advice was: Why bother with Chem 10 when that’s kind of a Gen Ed course taken by every pre-med in the world? What’s the unique thing at Harvard you’re studying?”

She doesn’t recall exactly why she enrolled in beginning Chinese as a freshman or why she stayed with it, given that most of the other “beginners” in the class already had ample experience. But she found herself enjoying the language, and learning to write characters appealed to her artistic side.

“This Chinese class was really fun. I had never had a Chinese class in my life. I’m sure the teachers thought I was totally insane to even try because everyone else had parents who spoke Chinese, but [felt], ‘Oh, I don’t know how to write characters, so I should be in beginning Chinese,’” McFarlin said. “They walk into class and are chatting with the teacher the first day, when I had never even heard ni hao [hello].”

But “it was such a fun experience to be in this language class that I took my adviser’s advice, picked up a couple of other Asian history classes, and then declared East Asian studies as my concentration my sophomore year.”

McFarlin was prepared to go to China after graduation, but when SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), broke out in Hong Kong and began spreading, the global panic led to the cancellation of Chinese job postings, including, she thought, the fellowship she had applied for at the Beijing Film Academy. Instead of China, McFarlin headed home to Tampa, Fla.

“I went home to Florida and watched my parents’ chagrin that I had graduated from Harvard and now was home,” McFarlin said. “That’s before it was trendy.”

But SARS or not, a few weeks later, a letter from the Beijing Film Academy arrived, saying that she had been accepted and that classes started in two weeks.

“I just packed a couple of bags and came. That was it. I never left,” McFarlin said.

McFarlin eventually moved from Beijing to Shanghai for a job with an investment firm. When she left that job, she spent the next couple of years teaching high school, tutoring, and freelance writing.

A recurrent problem for McFarlin was finding clothes that fit. At 5 foot 10, she is taller than most Chinese women. She began making her own, and her designs were such a hit with her friends that they urged her to start a business. She took their advice and Suits U was born.

Working with Kevin Ching, a 2006 Harvard graduate and friend from Hasty Pudding, the two marketed custom-made suits and shirts to college students at Harvard, Yale, and other campuses.  McFarlin handled the China end of the operation, locating material and working with tailors. The business did well for a few years before Ching moved to Beijing, leaving McFarlin without a U.S. contact.

For a while, she contemplated moving back to the United States to take on that role herself, but she had begun dating the person she’d eventually marry, Nathaniel Barney. She closed Suits U and joined her current firm, GHF Group, for which she handles human resources, recruiting, and global communications.

“I’ve had more opportunities here in China, in my 20s, than I ever would have had anywhere else,” McFarlin said. “You have amazing access to people. … I’ve had amazing job offers and could hop across any industry I wanted, and I did.”

McFarlin got involved with the Harvard Club as a way to meet people. She started out by organizing events and took over as president seven years ago, succeeding David Orenstein.

McFarlin said the opening of a permanent office, the Harvard Center Shanghai, in 2010 has made a difference to the club, offering both a physical focus for the alumni community and a place in which to hold events. McFarlin has been active in College recruiting efforts, spreading the word to talented Chinese high schoolers that Harvard is an option.

McFarlin has another year to go in her term as club president, because she and other current officers have agreed to stay on during a transition period in which the club will adopt a more formal governance structure, ratified at the first general meeting in November.

“It’s really been fabulous,” McFarlin said. “The University’s done great things for me to further my education and my career. I’ve received travel grants and scholarships, so I’ll do anything I can as a volunteer to promote the Harvard spirit in China.”

Adam Cohen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics, and Hopi Hoekstra, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and molecular and cellular biology, were selected for their individual scientific excellence from more than 1,100 applicants from institutions throughout the United States. As part of the appointments, each will receive flexible support necessary to move their research in creative directions.

“HHMI has a very simple mission,” said its president, Robert Tjian. “We find the best original-thinking scientists and give them the resources to follow their instincts in discovering basic biological processes that may one day lead to better medical outcomes. This is a very talented group of scientists. And while we cannot predict where their research will take them, we’re eager to help them move science forward.”

Hoekstra, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and molecular and cellular biology, said she plans to use her role at HHMI to focus her lab’s efforts on investigating the link between genes and behavioral variation. Photo by Rick Friedman

HHMI will provide each investigator with his or her full salary, benefits, and a research budget over their initial five-year appointment. The institute will also cover other expenses, including research space and the purchase of critical equipment. The appointments may be renewed for additional five-year terms, each contingent on a successful scientific review.

Jeremy Bloxham, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of science, hailed the selection of Hoekstra and Cohen.

“Hopi’s and Adam’s appointments speak to the exceptional quality of the science performed in these labs,” Bloxham said. “As HHMI investigators, Hopi and Adam will have the freedom to undertake novel and creative lines of inquiry. I look forward to the exciting work that will undoubtedly emerge from their labs as a result of this freedom over the coming years.”

Going forward, Hoekstra said she plans to use the award to focus her lab’s efforts on investigating the link between genes and behavioral variation.

“In my mind, this is a next great frontier in biology,” she said. “This award will give us the freedom to follow our research where it leads us, to move quickly, and to take risks.”

Given the current atmosphere for research funding, she added, being named an HHMI investigator is particularly important, as it will free her up to focus on research.

“Federal funding is more and more difficult to secure, so many researchers are spending more and more time writing grant proposals and less and less time doing research,” she said. “Also complicating things is the fact that our work is highly interdisciplinary, which means our research proposals often fall between different funding agencies.

“This award will allow us to pursue our most novel and innovative work while maintaining our strength in integrating approaches from across traditional disciplinary boundaries,” she added. “The support of the HHMI will mean I can focus more on the part of my job I love best: thinking creatively about science.”

Cohen’s proposal to the HHMI outlined a project whose goal is to take an instantaneous snapshot of the activity state — firing or not firing — of every neuron in the brain of a mouse. The challenge, he said, is that a mouse’s brain consists of about 100 million neurons.

“This project has some technical challenges, but I think we can succeed,” Cohen said. “The financial security provided by HHMI is great.  Not only does it largely free me from the tedium and terror of applying for federal funds, but it also allows me to adopt a more long-term view of my research. With HHMI support, it becomes possible to tackle really big challenges that might take a few years to yield results.”

Of equal importance, Cohen said, is the fact that being an HHMI investigator gives researchers access to a nationwide community of exceptional colleagues, all of whom are working at the cutting edge of their respective fields.

“Funding and support are great, but many people have told me that HHMI also provides a unique community,” Cohen said. “They sponsor annual meetings where people at the very forefront of all areas of biological and biomedical research describe their ongoing projects and future dreams.  I think it will be incredibly inspiring to participate in these discussions.”

In addition to Cohen and Hoekstra, four Harvard Medical School (HMS) faculty members were named HHMI investigators. To learn more about HMS faculty, visit the Harvard Medical School site.

“Operating in D.C. is so much harder than it needs to be,” Lubchenco said. “It’s exhausting, it’s frustrating, and at times depressing. That said, it is possible to get things done.”

Lubchenco recently left NOAA to return to the faculty at Oregon State University. She was among a handful of high-profile scientists brought into President Obama’s first administration as part of an effort to emphasize scientific integrity and raise the profile of scientific knowledge in policy decisions.

Her talk, at the Mallinckrodt Building’s Pfizer Auditorium, was sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE).

NOAA, part of the U.S. Commerce Department, runs the National Weather Service —including the National Hurricane Center — and the National Marine Fisheries Service, among other programs.

Lubchenco talked about the challenges of her time in government, including the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the highly politicized atmosphere around climate science, and extreme weather events — searing drought, major floods, record snowstorms, more than 700 major tornadoes, and 70 Atlantic hurricanes, including Isaac, Irene, and Sandy — all against a backdrop of economic struggle and legislative gridlock.

Though she could have spent her four years in reaction mode, Lubchenco pushed ahead with several initiatives, including reducing political interference and stressing integrity in the science done at NOAA, restructuring a dysfunctional weather satellite program (which provides 90 percent of the data that goes into weather forecasts), creating a national oceans policy, and strengthening fishery management plans that have recovered 32 fisheries since 2000 and reduced the number of overfished stocks.

Among her failures was an effort to create a National Climate Service, a longer-term parallel to the National Weather Service. The change needed congressional approval and, with climate science becoming a third-rail issue, couldn’t get it.

“Some suggested that if we called it the ‘Longterm Weather Service’ we would have had a different outcome,” Lubchenco said.

Shifting from personal experience to the role of science in policy, Lubchenco called for more scientists to take up positions in government. This requires a change in how faculty training the next generation of scientists view a policy-focused career, she said. Currently, she said, academic scientists regard it as a failure if a student doesn’t wind up as an academic scientist. Instead, she said, students with an interest in policy should be encouraged, because their voices are essential.

“I think the country desperately needs more scientists in government,” Lubchenco said.

But just showing up doesn’t mean success, she said. To be effective, scientists have to understand that the culture in Washington is not what they’re used to. Stories and anecdotes that relate facts to real people are often more persuasive than the bare facts themselves. Relationships, with both supporters and opponents of your positions, are crucial to accomplish anything. Equally vital is a skin thick enough to take the inevitable criticism.

“I would say that good science is critical, but not sufficient,” Lubchenco said. “You need good science. You need good strategy. You need good diplomacy. Progress really hinges on finding the right incentives and the right partners. Finding common ground is key to navigating conflict, but so too is having a very, very thick skin.”

Giving science a stronger voice in Washington will require having more scientists in key positions throughout the establishment: in government agencies, in the White House, and on Capitol Hill, Lubchenco said. It will also require greater engagement and a bigger effort by the academic community to communicate scientific findings.

“Science can be a powerful force, but it has to be at the table, it has to be understood, it has to be relevant, and it has to be credible,” she said. “Unfortunately that combination is all too rare.”

Lubchenco was introduced by Professor of Biological Oceanography James McCarthy, who sat on her dissertation committee in the early 1970s. She received her doctorate from Harvard in 1975 and stayed on as an assistant professor before moving to Oregon State in 1977.

Not only was the long employment break a concern, but she had never used Microsoft’s Office programs. Her last employer had only used WordPerfect.

A year later, Connolly is so well-versed in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that she is helping others, and just completed a stint as a teaching assistant in a computer class. She’s also on the job hunt, armed with a new résumé, freshly honed interview skills, and state-of-the-art knowledge of how to conduct Internet job searches, fill out Web-based applications, and upload resumes.

“I can walk through the doors of the company and feel very confident,” said Connolly. “They [the course instructors] have given that to me.”

Connolly, who lives in Brighton, credited her development to classes offered by the Harvard Allston Workforce Development Collaborative. The collaborative is part of a rich suite of programs, grants, and neighborhood improvements that stem from an agreement struck between Harvard University and the city of Boston five years ago.

The Education Portal is an example of where Harvard has gone over and above the terms of the agreement. It takes the strengths of the University and brings them to the community, to kids, to parents, and to teachers.” — Linda Kowalcky, deputy director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority

The agreement grew out of discussions between the University and the city over the construction of Harvard’s Science Complex in Allston. Although the University paused construction in 2009, implementation of the non-construction-related aspects of the agreement has continued.

What that has meant to the neighbors is the opening and expansion of the Harvard Allston Education Portal, a community-centered education facility that serves as Harvard’s front door to the neighborhood; access to certain University programs and facilities; more green space, in the form of the 1.74-acre Ray V. Mellone Park; and new resources, in the form of grants to community organizations and nonprofits that have totaled $500,000 in five years. (Information about the agreement’s benefits to the community, as well as about Harvard’s deep ties with Cambridge and Boston, are available on the new community-oriented Public Affairs website, which launched earlier this month.)

“Harvard is an engaged community partner and is committed to projects, educational and outreach programs, and other initiatives that benefit Allston,” said Kevin Casey, associate vice president of Harvard Public Affairs & Communications.  “The programs implemented over the past five years have created a solid foundation of meaningful community engagement to build upon as we enter into this next phase of community benefits associated with our new institutional master plan.”

Gavin Healy (left) and Brendan Shea go over a play at an A.R.T. workshop at the Ed Portal. File photo by Katherine Taylor

An Ed Portal “over and above”

The Harvard Allston Education Portal is perhaps the centerpiece of the University’s burgeoning relationship with the Allston-Brighton neighborhood. It opened in 2008 with mentoring and after-school enrichment programs aimed at local schoolchildren, including those at nearby Gardner Pilot Academy, the closest public school to Harvard’s Allston campus.

Over the last five years, 80 Harvard undergraduates have provided mentoring for 300 neighborhood students, and programming has grown to include the Workforce Development Collaborative’s computer and job-readiness classes, a lecture series that brings the Harvard faculty’s cutting-edge research to a community audience, and an outdoor farmers market that runs from June through October.

The free Ed Portal membership is open to any neighborhood resident. Membership has grown rapidly from 455 in 2009 to 1,700 this year. The facility has grown as well, with an annex opening last year that tripled its size.

“What began as a thoughtful but modest program of mentoring has blossomed into a full array of programs for kids, adults, seniors, and residents who speak other languages,” said Linda Kowalcky, deputy director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Kowalcky, who helped to negotiate the cooperation agreement for the city, said that while there are aspects of the agreement tied to the science center construction process that have yet to be implemented, Harvard has carried out its non-construction-related obligations, and in some cases exceeded them.

“The Education Portal is an example of where Harvard has gone over and above” the terms of the agreement, Kowalcky said. “It takes the strengths of the University and brings them to the community, to kids, to parents, and to teachers.”

The key to the Education Portal’s success has been the University’s commitment to treat the relationship with the community as a core priority, said portal faculty director Robert Lue, professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology.

Lue said he views the facility as something of a “sandbox” where innovative ideas about how to strengthen the relationship between the University and the community — while enhancing the understanding of learning — can be suggested and tried out.

“People who have great ideas and great energy need a place to do it,” Lue said. “It’s not something built separately. Sharing and outreach truly must come from the heart, and be an extension of the core priorities of the University.”

A longstanding community resource in Allston that predates the cooperation agreement is Harvard’s Ceramics Program, managed by the Office for the Arts. The program was founded in Cambridge in 1969 and has been located since 1987 at its studio at 219 Western Ave. In addition to events for all ages, presented in collaboration with the Ed Portal, the program provides adult ceramics classes, workshops, and seminars led by highly skilled artists and scholars from around the world, drawing about half of its student body from the University and half from the community. It also sponsors a semi-annual show and sale, which this month drew a record number of attendees. In the fall, the program will increase its visibility and commitment to the Allston community by moving to 224 Western Ave., where a large studio will feature enhanced amenities, including a dedicated exhibition space at street level.

Allston resident Stephanie Henry looks over the finished pieces at the ceramics studio. Managed by the Office for the Arts, the Ceramics Program was founded in Cambridge in 1969 and has been located at its studio at 219 Western Ave. in Allston since 1987. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Funding partnerships

The cooperation agreement also provides for the Harvard Allston Partnership Fund, through which the University has distributed $100,000 a year for the past five years. The funds have gone to 20 organizations, including the Friends of the Honan-Allston Library, the Oak Square YMCA, the Charles River Watershed Association, and the Fishing Academy, a nonprofit that runs summer camps for urban youth. Because of its success and popularity, the fund was extended this year for five more years as part of the planned relocations associated with the Barry’s Corner mixed-use development.

Fishing Academy Executive Director John Hoffman said the funds have provided scholarships for youth from Allston-Brighton, most of whom had never cast a line, tied a knot, or baited a hook. The weeklong camp provides two days of freshwater fishing in nearby ponds and then three days of fishing on the Boston Harbor islands, cruising aboard a local charter fishing boat, and taking a turn on the academy’s own boat.  In 2012, the academy received more than $5,000, which provided scholarships for 45 youths.

“Without support from the Harvard Allston Partnership Fund, a lot of local kids wouldn’t be able to get into the outdoors and participate in such a fun and educational experience,” Hoffman said. “It really is a program that can actually change the course of some of the kids’ lives.”

Carin O’Connor, librarian at the Boston Public Library’s Honan-Allston Branch, applied for partnership funds to enhance the library’s offerings for adult education. The funds were used to buy seven sewing machines and hire an instructor so the library could offer sewing and quilting classes. O’Connor said the partnership funds, which went to Friends of the Honan-Allston Library, are essential, since city budget cuts have meant the library had no funds for programming.

“It absolutely would not have been possible,” O’Connor said. “Adults really like getting back into making things. Why should the kids have all the fun?”

Camps and programs and scholarships, oh my!

While the Education Portal provides a physical focus for the partnership between Harvard and the Allston-Brighton community and the Partnership Fund extends resources into the community, a variety of scholarships give community members access to programs at the University.

Since 2008, 556 academic and recreational scholarships have been given to Allston-Brighton youth and adults. Each year, 50 scholarships allow adults to attend the Harvard Extension School, and each summer 50 more allow neighborhood youth to participate in summer camps for tennis, baseball, and swimming.

Last year, Erica Herman, principal of the Gardner Pilot Academy, attended instructional rounds at the Graduate School of Education’s Principals’ Center, with three other Gardner faculty members. Herman called the four days of professional-development classes “an eye-opening, challenging, wonderful opportunity,” one that should be experienced by other teachers at the school.

Herman said the Ed Portal’s mentoring program provides Pilot Academy children, ranging from kindergarten through sixth grade, a chance to interact with Harvard students and to see that college is a possibility for them.

Herman, who sits on the Education Portal’s advisory board, said that while Harvard has long had a partnership with the community, the two-way communication is better now. She looks forward to seeing the relationship continue to expand.

“There is definitely a deeper presence of Harvard in our community, in our school,” Herman said. “It’s not that Harvard has never been a partner, but the partnership has deepened. There’s a much stronger presence and a two-way conversation.”

The two-day conference was a rare convergence of two communities that, if the direst predictions come true, may get to know each other much better in the coming decades.

“We’re going to rely on you to deal with the mess that’s coming,” Daniel Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, and professor of environmental science and engineering, told the humanitarian relief workers at the event. “You’re going to be critical and you’re going to have your hands full.”

During the panel, Daniel Schrag told humanitarian relief workers, “We’re going to rely on you to deal with the mess that’s coming.”

Topics at the event, “2013 Humanitarian Action Summit: Climate and Crisis,” included an overview of climate change as well as talks on climate change and food security, conflict and migration, humanitarian aid, climate predictions, and related initiatives in humanitarian organizations. It was co-sponsored by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.

Attendees included representatives from a variety of academic and nonprofit organizations, including Oxford University, the University of Liberal Arts in Bangladesh, Oxfam, the World Food Program, AmeriCares, MIT, Stanford, the Brookings Institution, the World Bank, and the Conrad Hilton Foundation.

A major hurdle remains the translation of long-term climate trends into predictions about regional weather events. Although there seemed to be little doubt of the growing relationship between human-induced climate change and extreme weather, pinpointing trends precisely enough to be useful to relief organizations will be difficult, speakers said.

If long-term trends are clear, the natural variability in the weather on any given day makes it difficult to predict very far into the future. That’s not to say predictions can’t help.

Speakers pointed out that weather forecasting has improved significantly in recent decades, so that a 10-day forecast — nonexistent not so many years ago — is reasonably accurate today. Accuracy degrades rapidly beyond that, however, and predictability from a few months up to a decade away is very poor, after which longer-term trends can be discerned. Improved computing power should continue to improve forecasts, but there will remain a certain amount of unpredictability, said Mark Cane, a professor of Earth and climate sciences at Columbia University.

Climate scientists do understand some specific drivers of regional weather, and there are useful steps that can be taken even based on long-term outlooks. For example, the relationship between weather patterns and the El Nino and La Nina events in the equatorial Pacific are better understood. Though predicting the magnitude of an El Nino/La Nina remains difficult, scientists know that an El Nino is linked to heavy rains in western South America, drought in southern Africa, cool and wet weather in the southern U.S., and dry weather in Australia, which might shed light on the likelihood of crop failures, water shortages, and flooding. Also, knowing that record-setting heat waves will become more frequent will allow officials to take preparedness steps in cities with vulnerable elderly populations even if a heat wave cannot specifically be predicted far in advance.

El Nino and La Nina are such powerful drivers of local conditions in the regions they affect that a study of 93 tropical nations found that the annual risk of conflict decreases significantly from El Nino years to La Nina years, comparable to increasing annual per capita income in a nation from $1,000 to $10,000, Cane said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has already begun to use data in its Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which uses weather and other information to give advance warning to places at risk of food shortages and famine.

“Any increase in predictability will be useful,” said Michael Delaney of Oxfam. “I don’t think we have to wait until it’s perfect to use it.”

HHI co-founders Jennifer Leaning, Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, and Michael VanRooyen, HHI director, professor of medicine, and professor of global health and population, said that follow-up between climate scientists and disaster relief specialists will be key. VanRooyen said it’s likely a small working group will be organized to continue the conversation and develop real-world applications.

Also on the “2013 Humanitarian Action Summit: Climate and Crisis” panel was Noah Diffenbaugh, assistant professor in the  School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University.

]]> 138623 Alvin Powell Harvard Staff Writer category http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/051413_Climate_243_605.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/051413_Climate_243_605-223x149.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/051413_Climate_243_605-280x187.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/urgent-prep-work/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HarvardGazetteOnline/~3/jKNM3lZciBA/ Fri, 17 May 2013 18:25:06 +0000 http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/?p=138809 At an event at Harvard Business School (HBS) that was three parts analysis and one part rally, participants tried to chart a new path forward for the sluggish U.S. economy — a move that may require a new definition of “competitiveness.”

Highlighting the panel discussions Wednesday on “U.S. Competitiveness: Paths Forward,” an HBS initiative, was an appearance by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who was brought in by wheelchair but rose to his feet to speak about how the city could be a model for the nation.

“I believe that for America to be more competitive, it must be more collaborative,” Menino said. “This approach delivered results for our city. It will also deliver results to our country.”

The mayor cited development of the South Boston waterfront and the creation of summer jobs for youth. “Just look at what happened after the Marathon attack,” he said. “City, state, and federal official worked together to collect evidence, keep our city safe, and bring the bombers to justice. Everyone put their egos aside.

“Sometimes I wonder if Washington is capable of doing the same,” Menino added. “We have to put away this Democrat-Republican nonsense.  They get elected to help people, but it’s criminal those people in Washington don’t work together, don’t speak together.”

Likewise, Michael E. Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, and Jan W. Rivkin, Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration, each led spirited discussions on how HBS alumni could play an active role in the national debate, countering the “circus” in D.C.

“We are trying to understand what we can do to actually move the needle on both the quality of the debate and the facts underlying the debate and the political choices and compromises that we can make,” said Porter.

While many people say the country needs to be more competitive, “we don’t have a robust and common understanding of competitiveness,” he said. “What this means is that people who should be allies are at cross-purposes with each other.”

The U.S. Competitiveness Project put forth this definition: “The United States is a competitive nation to the extent that firms operating in the U.S. can compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for the average American.”

Republicans may focus on the global economy angle, Democrats on the living standards, but “competitiveness occurs when we do both together,” Porter said.

Rivkin put the issue in historical context: “We worried at the beginning of the Industrial Age that the advent of mass production would mean there would be no jobs for the vast majority of the population, but we reinvested and gained productivity and expanded the economy.”

Innovation has driven the country’s strength in world markets and quality of life, said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, a panel moderator. “But that strength has to be nurtured.”

She added, “We count on start-ups for job growth in America. Start-ups turn out to be more successful when they are also linked to a rich ecosystem of partnerships and collaborations.”

Gerald C. Chertavian (from left), Mary L. Fifield, Gregory Bialecki, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter discussed “U.S. Competitiveness: Paths Forward,” an HBS initiative, which included an appearance by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who was brought in by wheelchair but rose to his feet to speak about how the city could be a model for the nation.

Three panelists outlined some of those collaborations. Mary L. Fifield, president of Bunker Hill Community College, described that school’s partnership with a consortium of local businesses to create the Learn and Earn program, in which students work a day or two a week at a major corporations, receive mentorship, and are matched with a “work buddy.” The model should be scaled up to include the state’s other 14 community colleges, she said.

Gregory Bialecki, secretary for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, acknowledged that government is used to making rules, not partnerships, and that state officials must now learn to “be more collaborators and not order givers.”

Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of Year Up, focused on how education must respond to workforce needs. Today 6.7 million 16-to 24-year-olds with a high school education are out of school and out of work, he said. Yet, “Thirty percent of jobs in this country are middle-skilled jobs, which means you need a high school degree but not necessarily a four-year degree.”

Any discussion of the U.S. economy must include an analysis of the debt, and Robert Kaplan, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development Emeritus, cheerfully admitted he would provide “the gloomy panel” with David Walker, founder and CEO of Comeback America Initiative. The picture they painted was gloomy, indeed.

“The bottom line is that the government has grown too big, promised too much,  waited too long to restructure, and it needs to restructure sooner rather than later,” Walker said. He said the government lacks three things taught in every management 101 class: a plan, a budget, and metrics for performance. “We’re zero for three — that’s called a strike out.”

Since its launch in 2009, Kepler has found 130 planets orbiting other stars and 2,500 planet candidates requiring further investigation. The space telescope has pulled back the veil on the true nature of the Milky Way, showing it to be a galaxy rich with planets, and potential homes for life outside of Earth.

Gazette staff writer Alvin Powell discussed the problem with one of Kepler’s co-investigators, Astronomy Professor Dimitar Sasselov, asking what the glitch means for Kepler, for the quest for extra-solar planets, and for the search for life outside the solar system.

GAZETTE: Can you tell us what is going on with Kepler?

SASSELOV: The telescope needs to point very precisely in the direction in which it takes images. That pointing has been compromised by the breakdown of one of the reaction wheels — or gyroscopes — which keep it aligned.

The wheels come in packages of four, with three needed and one a spare. We lost one last July, so we have been without the spare since then. Losing a second one means that the telescope cannot point, and hence the images are not precise enough for us to continue the scientific mission of the telescope.

GAZETTE: Are there potential fixes or workarounds being considered?

SASSELOV: What is happening now is an immediate assessment, and within a few days we’ll know the results. It’s very likely the engineers will test and implement some new workarounds in the coming weeks, trying to recover the wheel functionality. So they’re not going to write it off.

However, there is no obvious workaround. We were forewarned that this may happen when the spare stopped working last July. So I don’t think there was a clear path to solve this if the second wheel really got stuck.

GAZETTE: What are the implications for Kepler’s scientific mission?

SASSELOV: We have collected data for a little bit more than 17 quarters. Only about two-thirds of that has been analyzed or downloaded to the ground. Inevitably, there is always a delay between what the telescope has obtained — in the can, so to say — and that data having been fully reduced and analyzed.

In the next year and probably more, there will be analysis of data that is currently on the spacecraft. When that is done, you can say the scientific mission has been completed. You will continue hearing about Kepler discoveries at least for the next two or three years. It is not over yet.

GAZETTE: Will the problem interfere with transmission of data already collected to the ground?

SASSELOV: The satellite has two functional wheels and thrusters powered by hydrazine fuel. Those thrusters allow the telescope to point in different directions. It doesn’t allow the telescope to point precisely enough to allow for data collection, but under normal conditions it would be enough [to relay data to Earth].

GAZETTE: Just about a year ago, NASA extended Kepler’s mission through 2016. What had scientists hoped to learn during the additional time?

SASSELOV: The telescope would gather additional data that would improve dramatically our statistical confidence of our final results. It was also kind of a no-brainer. The telescope was working fine and taking great data. At a minimal expense, you continue to use it.

GAZETTE: Can we say Kepler has been successful, whatever the outcome of attempted workarounds for the balky wheel?

SASSELOV: It’s been a resounding success. Not only because you hear about it in the news all the time, but because when you look at what we knew [before it launched] and what we know about exoplanets from all our other efforts combined, Kepler stands way above all of them.

So just by sheer volume, it provided us new insights and data to understand how planets form, what they are, and where they are. [Kepler] has provided us with a mother lode of planetary systems that we will be exploring for decades in the future, not just a few years, but decades. Kepler has already delivered beyond expectations. So it was worth every penny.

Artist’s composite of Kepler viewing a small planet. Since it launched in 2009, Kepler has found 130 planets orbiting other stars. Credit: Ames Wendy Stenzel/NASA

GAZETTE: What’s the feeling of the scientific team now?

SASSELOV: Obviously, we were very excited about the extension, and we did expect to find exciting new things in the additional four years. You shouldn’t be surprised that the team would feel that we have the best telescope working, and it’s a shame if it cannot deliver more.

On the other hand, if this had happened two years ago, it would have been really a disaster for our efforts. We would have essentially failed if it were two years ago.

Now we can forge ahead and plan our next steps. Kepler was able to accomplish two things. One was the research and new discovery. The other was helping prepare so the next step in our exploration is successful. That has been done, and, for posterity, that’s probably the most important thing. Now we have TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] already approved.

GAZETTE: Is TESS the next step or is the James Webb Space Telescope?

SASSELOV: Both. They go hand in hand. Kepler was supposed to deliver the numbers, the frequency of planets the size of the Earth around solar-type stars in the habitable zone.

Now, we want not simply to improve the number, we want to find those planets we can study directly with high precision. Now we want to find the nearest ones. There, we need TESS to discover them, and then we need James Webb to analyze them.

GAZETTE: Any possibility of a Hubble-like rescue for Kepler?

SASSELOV: The answer is very clearly no. Kepler is in an orbit around the sun, very far from the Earth and the moon. It’s trailing behind the Earth, and no human has gone that far from the Earth before. You’re talking about capability similar to going to nearby asteroids, which we’re talking about developing, but we’re not there.

GAZETTE: How does this change the work of researchers at Harvard?

SASSELOV: A lot of this does relate to our efforts here at Harvard. Last summer, we installed a new spectrograph on the Canary Islands, together with our colleagues from Geneva. It is currently the highest-precision spectrograph in the world, and it has the specific goal to observe the planets that Kepler has discovered.

The demise of the Kepler telescope would have very little effect on our plans for the work with the spectrograph because we already have the data. Once you identify the planets with Kepler, then you pick the best candidates and spend one to four years observing them with the spectrograph to determine the planet’s precise parameters.

So in a certain sense, that second step has been happening for the past year. The original plan was that Kepler would gather data for four years, and then we’d continue with HARPS North, our spectrograph, for another four years. So from that point of view, our work here at Harvard is going on as scheduled.

But Hansun Hsiung, a Ph.D. student in East Asian languages and civilizations, isn’t convinced.

As part of the Harvard Horizons symposium, May 6 at a packed Sanders Theatre, Hsiung argued that distance learning began significantly earlier, with the printing of the first international textbooks in the 18th century.

“The textbook as we know it was a fairly recent invention,” developing only in the second half of the 18th century and rising in use over the course of the 19th, Hsiung told the audience.

For readers, he said, the access such books provided was considered in the same light as online learning is today. Access to the textbook “promised that every man could be his own teacher,” Hsiung said. “No matter who or where you were in the world, as long as you had the right textbook,” you — as a reader — could share in long-distance learning.

Created this year by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), the Harvard Horizons initiative highlights top research by doctoral students. One of the goals is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community across Harvard’s graduate schools. Another: to help students develop crucial presentation skills. The culmination of the initiative was an afternoon symposium in which eight Ph.D. students each offered five-minute presentations, styled on the popular TED talks, about a specific aspect of their current research.

Along with Hsiung, other presenters included:

• Edgar Barroso, music, “Enhancing Music, Social, and Entrepreneurial Innovation through Trans-Disciplinary Collaboration”
• Stephanie Dick, history of science, “Aftermath: Following Mathematics into the Digital”
• Alex Fattal, anthropology, “Guerrilla Marketing: Information War and the Demobilization of FARC Rebels”
• Fenna Krienen, psychology, “Big Brain Science: Strategies for Mapping the Human Brain”
• Aaron Kuan, applied physics, “Graphene Nanopores for Single-Molecule DNA Sequencing”
• Liz Maynes-Aminzade, English, “Macrorealism: How Fiction Can Help Us Understand a Networked World”
• Jeff Teigler, medical sciences, “Building Better Vaccines by Learning the Language of the Immune System”

GSAS Dean Xiao-Li Meng, Ph.D. ’90, hosted the event, which was attended by Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, Ph.D. ’82, and FAS Dean Michael Smith. In a video address, President Drew Faust emphasized the importance of the symposium.

“Communicating about one’s work outside of one’s discipline is an essential skill for scholars and researchers in the 21st century, and the women and men you are about to see are persuasive and powerful presenters,” she said. “Their presentations exemplify one of the finest gifts universities give to humanity: individuals capable of making new and significant contributions to the world of knowledge.”

While the presentations may have looked simple, they were the result of weeks of work.

After being selected from 55 applications, the eight members of the inaugural class of the Society of Horizon Scholars underwent a five-week training course that included mentoring sessions by Harvard faculty members and experts from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. The sessions, which focused on voice and on visual presentation skills, among other topics, were led by Laura Frahm, an assistant professor of visual and environmental studies, and Pamela Pollock, an assistant director of the Bok Center.

Harvard Horizons was the brainchild of Shigehisa Kuriyama, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

GSAS Dean Xiao-Li Meng: “In addition to possessing deep expertise in their field of study, our students need to be able to deliver an elevator speech, and that’s a skill that has not traditionally been emphasized. They need to be able to talk with a variety of audiences, across a variety of disciplines, about what they do and why it’s important.”

“One of the big challenges at Harvard is this: the wealth of talks and presentations constantly occurring on campus makes it hard to reach audiences beyond one’s division, or sometimes even beyond one’s department,” Kuriyama said. “Because the competition for attention is so intense, the ability to communicate one’s ideas lucidly and crisply is becoming an even more fundamental skill.”

Equally important, Kuriyama said, have been the social aspects of the program. Given the focus and time research demands of students, it’s unlikely any of the Horizon Scholars would otherwise have met each other.

“I think that’s one of the things that they found most invigorating, the social bonding and the intellectual exchange,” he said. “All of our students are curious, and eager to learn about other fields. But they have relatively few opportunities to speak with students in other divisions, especially students who have the ability to explain their research in terms that are clear and compelling to the nonspecialist. This program is designed to give them those opportunities.”

Meng said he sees the initiative as filling an important role in helping provide much-needed training in the communication skills students require — as teachers, as scholars applying for grants and fellowships, and in their professional careers, whether in academia or in policy, corporate leadership, or industrial research. Going forward, Meng said, he hopes to explore how to expand the program to ensure more graduate students receive the benefit of such training.

“We now have about 10 departments that include various courses on how to communicate,” he said. “Regardless of what your career may be — some of these students may become professors, and others may go into business or government — communication is a skill that is absolutely critical.

“If you look at how society is evolving, we’re all multitasking, every one’s attention span is getting shorter,” Meng continued. “In addition to possessing deep expertise in their field of study, our students need to be able to deliver an elevator speech, and that’s a skill that has not traditionally been emphasized. They need to be able to talk with a variety of audiences, across a variety of disciplines, about what they do and why it’s important.”

]]> 138304 Peter Reuell and Jennifer Doody FAS Communications category http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/050613_Horizons_139_605.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/050613_Horizons_139_605-223x149.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/050613_Horizons_139_605-280x187.jpg http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/sharp-work-in-substance-and-delivery/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HarvardGazetteOnline/~3/XyrlJIW6zsE/ Thu, 16 May 2013 17:55:30 +0000 http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/?p=138302 Having spent their careers focused on teaching and learning, and community building, Anne Harrington and her husband, John Durant, say they are excited about the opportunities that lie before them as the new master and co-master of Pforzheimer House.

Today, Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds announced the appointment of Harrington ’82 and Durant.

“I am very pleased that Anne and John have agreed to take on these important roles. Anne and John are tremendous scholars, passionate not only about science, but also deeply committed to teaching and learning,” said Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies. “But in addition to their scholarship, they are wonderful people committed to mentoring students and fostering community in Pforzheimer. The Houses are such an enriching part of the Harvard College experience, and having a family like Anne and John’s join the Pfoho family will help strengthen that tradition.”

Harrington is a professor of the history of science, as well as director of undergraduate studies for the department, while Durant is the MIT Museum director and an adjunct professor in MIT’s Science, Technology & Society Program.

“I am very excited,” Harrington said. “We spoke to a lot of masters as a part of this process, and through those discussions we got a sense of the real joy that this kind of position can bring and also what a wonderful opportunity for service this can be.”

They will take over as House masters in the fall, bringing with them their 8-year-old son, Jamie.

Harrington said having their young child living in the House atmosphere is part of what drew them to the masters’ roles.

“Jamie will be 9 when we take over as masters, so we decided as a family that if we were going to do it, this is the time to do it,” Harrington said. “We like the idea of him growing up in an aspirational community, one that is full of creativity, and talent and diversity.”

Durant added, “I see this as enormously enriching for the family. To be surrounded by smart, energized, talented young people, why would that not just be the greatest opportunity for a young child?”

Harrington received her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard and Ph.D. in the history of science from Oxford University. After completing postdoctoral work at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Harrington returned to teach at Harvard in 1988. The author of three books, Harrington specializes in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences.

“My career has also been marked by a sustained commitment to teaching, especially undergraduate teaching,” Harrington said.

In 2004, she was appointed to a five-year term as a Harvard College Professor, winning the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota Prize for excellence in teaching.

Durant earned his B.A. in natural sciences and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Queens’ College, Cambridge. In addition to his current day job as a museum director, Durant has worked to introduce science to a broader spectrum of people through the creation of the Cambridge Science Festival, and his efforts to launch similar festivals around the world.

“A lot of my career has been about community. I have spent a large part of my career in trying to engage the research community with the wider community outside of the university walls,” Durant said. “So there is something about community that I am drawn to, and now with Anne, I find myself drawn to a community within the university. I am hoping this will be exhilarating, I expect to learn a lot, I expect to be challenged and to also be stimulated immensely.”

The husband-and-wife team have also been teaching study abroad programs in England for the past five years. They will continue to do so this summer at the University of Cambridge with an eight-week program, titled “Science, Medicine, and Religion in an Age of Skepticism,” encompassing classroom study, extensive travel, and independent projects.

Durant and Harrington will be taking over for Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who have been House masters at Pforzheimer since 2009.

“I wish to extend to Nicholas and Erika Christakis my thanks for their service to our students during their time at Pforzheimer,” said Hammonds. “They have worked to foster a tight-knit House community and brought creativity and vibrancy to Pforzheimer. The College was fortunate to have them in these roles.”

Both Harrington and Durant said they look forward to fostering the tight-knit house community and traditions that currently exist at Pfoho, while introducing some new programs and events.

“There is a tremendous amount of enrichment and learning that happens just by virtue of living in a vibrant community with people with distinct talents,” Harrington said. “How can we leverage that into something greater than the sum of its parts? This is an opportunity and a challenge we take very seriously and one we are very much looking forward to.”

Dupont began working in Papua New Guinea in 2004, spending time with the gangs of Port Moresby, the nation’s capital and one of the world’s most crime-ridden cities.

More recently, in 2011, Dupont traveled around the country, documenting a culture in transition as a Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The fellowship, which supports a documentary photographer in an in-depth endeavor examining “the human condition anywhere in the world,” was created by documentarian and author Gardner in 2007.

Dupont’s project examines the impact of globalism and the creep of Western lifestyles into a nation where traditional ways have long held sway.

Dupont has long been interested in the clash of cultures. Living in Australia, he was first drawn to Papua New Guinea after two friends, a filmmaker and a photojournalist, traveled there. During his fellowship year, he focused on three areas: Port Moresby, a melting pot of the nation’s many tribes, rife with modern urban problems including crime, slums, unemployment, and AIDS; the fishing communities along the Sepik River, the country’s longest; and the tribes of the remote highlands, whose rugged terrain and isolated valleys still provide some insulation from the outside world. He took thousands of images using five different photographic formats, including Polaroid film and large-format, 4-by-5 cameras.

Dupont’s work is on display through September at the Peabody Museum. The exhibition features diaries and large images that take the viewer to a country in flux, and also chronicle daily life — mothers sitting with their children, people dashing for shelter from a sudden downpour, a rugby team praying together before a match.

The images hold echoes of Australia’s influence on the lowlands and the highlands’ eroding traditions. Dupont, who will participate in an online “webinar” on his work on June 27, found fertile ground at Sing-Sings, cultural events created by colonial authorities as a way to get highland tribes to interact peacefully. The events, which Dupont described as “tribal Woodstocks,” draw thousands to observe and participate in tribal dance, singing, and other competitions.

To document the Sing-Sings, Dupont set up a portable portrait booth, using black or white sheets as backgrounds to isolate the subjects. But instead of using physical supports to hold the backdrop, Dupont had bystanders hold up the sheet. He then pulled back the frame to include the helpers around the edges. Where a portrait against a neutral background might be taken anywhere in the world, this technique allowed him to incorporate the flavor of the setting within the images.

The Sing-Sing pictures show the subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — intrusion of Western influence into what is intended to be a traditional tribal display: one woman wears a white brassiere with otherwise traditional garb, while a man wears a drum made from a large plastic container on a sling around his neck.

Dupont said the Sing-Sings have visibly changed since his first visit to the country in 2004. In addition to the Western items working their way into people’s dress, advertising is everywhere, with Digicel, the country’s leading mobile phone carrier, surpassing even Coca-Cola.

“I was there in 2004 and there was far less advertising there,” Dupont said. “How will this look in 10 years’ time?”

To get a sense of how people dress while away from the competitions, Dupont visited a traditional tribal area in the southern highlands. But a nearby liquid propane plant had brought in roads and infrastructure and moved people off their land. While some older people maintained traditional dress, most of the younger people wore Western clothes, adorned with a lone piece of traditional jewelry.

“It’s the death of their culture. How long will it be before it’s completely gone?” Dupont asked.

He may be around to find out. Though he has already done a lot of work there, the intersection of globalization and traditional culture is a rich subject area, and the diversity in Papua New Guinea means there’s still plenty to do.

“New Guinea has really gotten into my blood,” Dupont said. “I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface.”

First awarded in 1981, the Harvard Medal recognizes extraordinary service to Harvard University. The service can relate to many aspects of University life — from teaching, leadership, and innovation to fundraising, administration, and volunteerism. President Drew Faust will present the medals at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association on May 30, during Commencement’s Afternoon Program.

2013 Harvard Medalists

James V. Baker has been an active citizen of Harvard, serving both his local community in England as president of the Harvard Club of the United Kingdom, as well as the global alumni community as the HAA’s first international president. He has always maintained an eye toward strengthening Harvard’s relationship with international alumni.

Baker’s commitment to the University has been consistent since his graduation from Harvard Business School (HBS). A recipient of the HAA Alumni Award in 2000, he has served in a number of different capacities, including as an alumni interviewer for both Harvard College and HBS, an HAA elected director, a vice chair of his class gift committee, chair of the Class of 1968 John Harvard Society Leadership Committee, and first marshal of his class.

His work at the local level in the U.K. saw a revitalization of the Harvard Club’s programs and a significant increase in the club’s membership. His talents were then recruited by the HAA to serve as a regional director for Europe. As such, he organized a European Leadership Conference in London, bringing together 16 European clubs from 13 different countries. The success of the conference led to it becoming a regular event, with a different European club acting each year as host. The format has subsequently been used by clubs in South America and Asia.

Following graduation from HBS, Baker worked for Goldman Sachs in London and Zurich, retiring as executive director of the equities division in 1996.

He and his wife, Maggie, are the parents of Chris ’96 and Tanya.

William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. has devoted his life to public service. He was the first African-American to serve as a clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court judge, Justice Felix Frankfurter. Coleman was a contributing author to the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, working with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and later becoming president of the fund. He was the second African-American to serve in a presidential cabinet, as the nation’s fourth secretary of transportation during the Ford administration. In 1995, he was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Most recently, he has served as a judge of the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review.

Coleman was first in his class at Harvard Law School (HLS) and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and his call to service has extended to the University as well. He has served as an Overseer and has been a member of five Overseer visiting committees — Law School, Business School, Center for International Affairs, Institutional Policy, and Social Studies. He is a recipient of the HBS Distinguished Service Award, the Harvard Law School Association (HLSA) Award, and the Harvard Club of Washington, D.C., Public Service Award, and he has been an HLS Traphagen Speaker. He has also been a member of the HLS Dean’s Advisory Board since 1997.

Coleman and his wife, Lovida, have three children, Lovida, William, and Hardin.

Georgene Botyos Herschbach has made enduring contributions to the University and is among its most valued and selfless citizens. After serving as co-master of Currier House with her husband, Dudley, she embarked on a wide-ranging career at Harvard College, including: assistant dean and director of special programs, registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, associate dean of academic programs, and dean of administration. Exemplifying all that Harvard holds dear, she worked tirelessly in support of many initiatives to enhance the experience of undergraduates.

Having earned her Ph.D. in chemistry, Herschbach brought astute analysis to shaping policy as well as advising students, mentoring fledgling administrators, and counseling senior colleagues. She collaborated with faculty in developing innovative interdisciplinary courses in the life and physical sciences, and was a co-founder of PRISE (Program for Research in Science and Engineering), a summer program in which undergraduates work with faculty on projects at the frontiers of science.

Herschbach’s family life has also been deeply involved with Harvard. While a Harvard graduate student, she married Dudley Herschbach, Ph.D. ’58, and became the mother of two daughters, Lisa, Ph.D. ’97, and Brenda, ’88, A.M. ’88, J.D. ’98.  For this family, the sum of their years as Harvard students plus Georgene’s three decades in administration and Dudley’s four on the faculty, totals a full century.

The research was published online Monday in Advanced Materials.

“With an aging population in the U.S., injuries and degenerative conditions are subsequently on the rise,” said Harvard Medical School Associate Professor of Medicine Ali Khademhosseini of the BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, the senior author of the study. “As a result, there is an increased demand for therapies that can repair damaged tissues. In particular, there is a great need for new materials that can direct stem cell differentiation and facilitate functional tissue formation. Silicate nanoplatelets have the potential to address this need in medicine and biotechnology.”

“Based on the strong preliminary studies, we believe that these highly bioactive nanoplatelets may be utilized to develop devices such as injectable tissue repair matrixes, bioactive fillers, or therapeutic agents for stimulating specific cellular responses in bone-related tissue engineering,” said Akhilesh Gaharwar of the BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, the study’s first author and a visiting fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. “Future mechanistic studies will be performed to better understand underlying pathways that govern favorable responses, leading to a better understanding of how materials strategies can be leveraged to further improve construct performance and ultimately shorten patient recovery time.”

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the National Science Foundation.

Click here to view the full manuscript.

A group of Harvard researchers, led by Joshua Sanes, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Paul J. Finnegan Family Director, Center for Brain Science, and Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Santíago Ramón y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences, has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique. Their work is described in a May 5 paper in Nature Methods.

First described in 2007, the system combines three fluorescent proteins — one red, one blue, and one green — to label different cells with as many as 90 colors. By studying the resulting images, researchers were able to begin to understand how the millions of neurons in the brain are connected.

“‘Brainbow’ generated beautiful images of a kind we had never been able to obtain before, but it was difficult in some ways,” said Sanes, who also serves as director of the Center for Brain Science.

“These modifications aim to overcome some of the more problematic features of the original genetic constructs,” Lichtman said. “Lead author Dawen Cai, a research associate in our labs, worked hard and creatively to find ways to make the ‘Brainbow’ colors brighter, more variable, and useable in situations where the original gene constructs were hard to implement. Our first look at these animals suggests that these improvements are fantastic.”

The cells in the cerebellum of a mouse show up in an array of colors, including red, pink, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and brown.

Among the challenges faced by researchers using the original method, Sanes said, was the chance that certain colored proteins would bleach out faster than others.

“If one color bleaches faster than the others, you start with a ‘Brainbow,’ but by the time you’re done imaging, you might just have a ‘blue-bow,’ because the red and yellow bleach too fast,” he said.

Sanes said that some colors also were too dim, causing problems in the imaging process, while in other cases the protein didn’t fill the whole neuron evenly enough, or there was an overabundance of a certain color in an image.

“What we decided to do was to make the next generation of ‘Brainbow,’” Sanes said. “We systematically set out to look at these problems. We looked at a whole range of fluorescent proteins to find the ones that were brightest and wouldn’t bleach as much, and we developed new transgenic methods to avoid the predominance of a particular color.”

The researchers also explored new ways to create “Brainbow” images, including using viruses to introduce fluorescent proteins into cells.

The advantage of the new technique, Sanes said, is it offers researchers the chance to target certain parts of the brain and better understand how neurons radiate out to connect with other brain regions. Ultimately, he said, he hopes that other researchers are able to apply the techniques outlined in the paper in the same way that they expanded on the first “Brainbow” method.

“People adapted the method to study a number of interesting questions in other tissues to examine cellular relationships and cell lineages in kidney and skin cells,” he said. “It was also used to examine the nervous system in animals like zebrafish and C. elegans. With these new tools, I think we’ve taken the next step.”