Harvard Medical School will break ground in the Longwood Medical Area in October for construction of a new, 430,000-square-foot research building consisting of laboratories and related facilities. Adjacent to the Harvard Institutes of Medicine building (top left) on Avenue Louis Pasteur, the new facility will house two medical-school departments--genetics and pathology--alongside researchers from the affiliated teaching hospitals. The project is estimated to cost $313 million.
Nieman in the News
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism, which brings reporters to campus for a year of study, will be run by one of its own again. Robert H. Giles, Nf '66, was appointed curator on July 25, succeeding Bill Kovach, Nf '89. Giles has been senior vice president of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to freedom of speech and of the press, and editor in chief of its Media Studies Journal. He had previously been editor and publisher of the Detroit News and, earlier, editor of newspapers in Rochester, New York, and Akron, Ohio. The appointment attracted widespread news coverage, because Giles oversaw the Detroit newspaper during a bitter strike, still not fully resolved after five years. Journalists involved in the strike wrote to Harvard to criticize the paper's coverage then as biased. Other editors, and officers of the American Society of Newspaper Editors--where Giles had served as president--in turn rallied to his defense.
Ocean Analyst
This year's MacArthur Fellows include professor of geophysics Daniel P. Schrag, of the department of earth and planetary sciences. Schrag, who is the director of the laboratory for geochemical oceanography, studies climate and the oceans over time--for example, by examining sediments and coral for evidence of past temperatures, circulation patterns, and the oceans' chemical composition. The foundation cited him for research linking science to policy bearing on climate change.
Tackling Tuberculosis
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $45 million to Harvard Medical School to perfect strategies to combat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). The principal investigator for the project is Jim Yong Kim, M.D. '86, director of the school's program in infectious disease and social change, and executive director of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization that serves the poor in Haiti and has pioneered treatment of virulent, airborne MDR-TB in Peru and the Russian prison system. The new program--a joint venture involving the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, Partners in Health, and others--will attempt to extend treatments now being used in Lima to all of Peru. The foundation, established by Microsoft's William H. Gates '77 and his wife, also supports efforts to develop vaccines for malaria and HIV.
Nota Bene
Administrator-in-chief. The Kennedy School's new executive dean is J. Bonnie Newman, who served in the White House personnel office and as assistant to the president for management and administration during the Reagan and Bush administrations. She succeeds Sheila Burke, who recently returned to Washington, D.C., to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Labor Leader. The University's new lead negotiator with its unions is David A. Jones, who became director of labor and employee relations in July, succeeding Kim Roberts, who moved to New York City. Jones will also manage employment policies overall. He came to Harvard in January 1999 and has been working on workforce diversity issues and a survey of administrative employees' attitudes toward the University.
Premier poet. The nation's new poet laureate, based at the Library of Congress, is Stanley Kunitz '26, A.M. '27. The honorand found the appointment that "gratifying and astonishing." His first published poem appeared in 1930.
Also emeritus. In listing members who were moving to emeritus or research professor status at the end of the last academic year (see "University People," July-August, page 80), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences inadvertently omitted one scholar: Owen J. Gingerich, professor of astronomy and the history of science, an expert on the work of Copernicus.
