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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 Seeking to progress beyond traditional means of tackling hard problems, the National Institutes of Health funded nine interdisciplinary research consortia; each will receive $21 million to $25 million during the next five years. Two are based within Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals: the systems-based consortium for organ design and engineering, directed by professor of medicine Richard L. Maas, which aims to grow heart valves and pancreas and tooth tissue; and the genomic-based drug discovery effort, directed by senior lecturer on genetics Edward M. Scolnick, director of the psychiatry initiative at the Broad Institute. Each consortium is intended to break down the departmental boundaries that persist even in multidisciplinary research projects. Economics EvolutionBaker professor of economics Martin S. Feldstein will step down from the presidency of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org), the pre-eminent nonprofit research organization in the field, next June. He became president in 1977 and has served continuously, except during his stint as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan. Beyond promoting research by hundreds of fellows throughout the profession, Feldstein made formal the bureau’s role in dating periods of economic growth and recession. Nota BeneArt acquisition. The Harvard University Art Museums’ center for the technical study of modern art received a gift of abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s studio materials—brushes, paints, sketches, models of sculpture, etc. The materials will be used for teaching and research, along with other museum holdings of pigments and related resources important to conservation and art-historical studies. 
Photograph by John Chase / Harvard News Office Catherine Dulac Neural network. Higgins professor of molecular and cellular biology Catherine Dulac, chair of the department, has been appointed to the new scientific advisory board of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle (www.alleninstitute.org); she has been a member of the advisory board for the institute’s “brain atlas,” which has been mapping the mouse brain genome. Johnstone Family professor of psychology Steven Pinker is an institute adviser. Bigger student bodies? With the constuction of new undergraduate residences, Princeton is expanding its student body. Yale president Richard Levin is approaching a decision on accommodating 200 additional students per entering class (currently 1,325 per year, versus Harvard College’s 1,640). And now Stanford president John Hennessy, writing in that university’s alumni magazine, suggests that “expanding the size of the undergraduate population would be both a practical and principled response to current realities”—namely, the tremendous growth in qualified applicants. Stanford’s undergraduate enrollment today slightly exceeds Harvard’s. Expos exit. Sosland director of expository writing Nancy Sommers—who both taught in the required freshman “Expos” course and oversaw it for more than a decade—abruptly left her position during the summer, apparently involuntarily. Expos is overseen by a faculty committee on writing and speaking, but is separate from any academic department and reports administratively to the Harvard College dean’s office. During revision of the College curriculum, the role of instruction in writing and public speaking was studied, but no proposal to modify the existing program was brought forward or legislated. Cadet Commander
Photograph courtesy of Captain David Gowel Danielle Williams '08 Danielle Williams ’08, shown here at a training exercise with a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, is the fall cadet commander for the seven-school ROTC program (Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Wellesley, Salem State, Gordon, Endicott) based at MIT. On September 19, as a recruiting event, the program arranged for Black Hawk and Huey helicopters to land at MIT’s Briggs Field. Fifteen Harvard students are training in the program. A colleague—MIT junior Stephen Petraeus, son of the U.S. commander in Iraq—may offer unusual insight into contemporary military service.
Photograph by Jim Harrison Black Hawk and Huey helicopters landing at MIT's Briggs Field Frequent fliers. The husband-and-wife academic couple of sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan—a linguistic anthropologist who studies hip-hop culture—are returning to Harvard with tenured positions in the department of African and African American studies. They departed for Stanford in 2005, when Morgan’s bid for tenure was denied. As before, Bobo (see Harvard Portrait, March-April 1998, page 65) will hold a joint appointment in sociology. 
Photograph courtesy of Constance Hale Constance Hale 
Photograph courtesy of Nancy Andrews Nancy Andrews Miscellany. As he was assuming the Harvard Medical School deanship, Jeffrey S. Flier and his wife and laboratory collaborator, Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, were on press with the article “What Fuels Fat,” in the September Scientific American , a special issue on diet, health, and the food supply. The c0authors, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, are identified as experts in the physiology of obesity and diabetes.…Minot professor of pediatrics Nancy C. Andrews, M.D. ’87, a pediatric oncologist and dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at Harvard Medical School, became dean of Duke University School of Medicine on October 1, making her the first woman to lead one of the top-10 medical schools in common public rankings.…The Nieman Foundation’s program on narrative journalism is now directed by Constance Hale, formerly a reporter and editor at Oakland and San Francisco newspapers and at Wired and Health magazines; she succeeds program founder Mark Kramer.… U.S. News & World Report ranked Princeton first and Harvard second in its annual beauty contest for national universities, reprising its 2006 listings.…The director of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen, resigned on September 14 to campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from that state; she was succeeded for the academic year by James A. Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa.…Princeton reported that its policy to limit A-range grades (to 35 percent of undergraduate marks and 55 percent of grades for junior and senior independent work), adopted in 2004, had brought such marks down to 40.6 percent of the total for undergraduate courses in the 2004-2007 academic years, from 47 percent in the prior three years; evaluation of grading for upper-level independent work is forthcoming.…Of the 41 National Institutes of Health “pioneer award” and “new innovator” grants announced in September (conferring $2.5 million and $1.5 million, respectively) for high-risk, high-reward research, nine went to members of Harvard faculties and affiliated hospitals; see www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2007/od-18a.htm.  
 
 
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