Author: Harvard Gazette Online

When President Obama delivers his first State of the Union address tonight (Jan. 27), Harvard freshman Janell Holloway ’13 will be watching from the first lady’s box in the U.S. House chamber.

The White House bestowed the honor on Holloway in an effort to reach out to young people and as a reward for her White House service last summer as a D.C. Scholar, following her graduation from high school.

“The president and first lady have been opening up the White House in new ways, and they’ve made a special effort to make this a place for young people to learn about the world around them,” said White House spokeswoman Moira Mack.

Holloway, one of two students chosen for the honor, said she was thrilled to learn she’d be at the event, during which the president lays out his policy agenda for the year, up close.

“It was like something out of a movie,” Holloway told the Boston Globe. She said she had met first lady Michelle Obama during her internship. “She’s really cool in person, really down to earth,” Holloway said.

At Harvard, Holloway is a member of the campus chapter of the Red Cross, the CityStep dance troupe, and the Black Students Association. While in high school, she made documentaries on the Tuskegee Airmen’s role in World War II and the influence of black radio on the Civil Rights movement.

Television shows such as House promote the idea that, to be great, a doctor simply needs to be brilliant.

But surgeon Atul Gawande, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, says medicine today is so complex that even the sharpest doctors can no longer keep everything they need to know in their heads.

As a result, patients don’t always get the care they need…

Read more here (USA Today)

Actress Anne Hathaway will parade through Harvard Square as Hasty Pudding’s Woman of the Year this Thursday (Jan. 28). Last year’s honoree Renée Zellweger braved arctic temperatures while surrounded by a cluster of half-dressed Hasty jokesters before being feted inside the New College Theatre at 12 Holyoke St. Let’s hope this year’s weather is more forgiving as Hathaway, star of such films as “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Rachel Getting Married,” receives her Pudding Pot at 3:15 p.m. inside the theater, followed by a preview of the new Hasty Pudding spectacle, “Commie Dearest.”

Man of the Year Justin Timberlake will bring sexy back to Harvard on Feb. 5, where he will be roasted in good fashion at 8:10 p.m. inside the New College Theatre. Singer Timberlake, a New Mickey Mouse Club veteran, was catapulted to stardom as a member of boy-band ’N Sync, but has proved to be multitalented with his turns as a solo singer and as an actor in the films “Alpha Dog” and “Black Snake Moan.” He also proved his comedic chops in his infamous work with “Saturday Night Live.”

For more information on the events.

The Harvard Kennedy School hosted two iconoclastic mayors on Monday (Jan. 25), both of whom entered government in their countries as a second career and changed their cities by shaking up politics as usual.

The discussion involved the visionary urban landscapes of Edi Rama, a former artist and mayor of Tirana, Albania, and Antanas Mockus, once an academic and a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. Addressing an overflow audience, the former mayors outlined the offbeat methods by which they helped to transform their cities, in a discussion titled “Dialogue in Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Transformation.”

“We see ourselves as moral subjects, but others as legal subjects. We obey for positive reasons, but we think others obey for negative reasons,” Mockus said.

As mayor from 2001 to 2003, Mockus used humor, peer pressure, and visual reinforcements as tools of cultural persuasion in Bogotá, a period in which the homicide rate fell by 70 percent, traffic fatalities dropped by half, water conservation increased, and drinking water and sewer service reached nearly all homes for the first time in the city’s history. He prompted 60,000 people to pay an extra 10 percent in taxes — voluntarily.

How did he help to foster those changes? By handing out thousands of thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards to citizens who used them as a peaceful way to judge one another’s behaviors in the public sphere, by hiring mimes to make fun of traffic violators, and by placing yellow stars at all the locations in which there had been a pedestrian death in the previous five years, just to name a few. The approach worked, he said, because it combined three regulatory systems: law, morality, and culture.

Rama’s approach was quite different, but proved equally effective. As a former artist, he started with paint when he was elected in 2000 “with a landslide but no budget” to head the capital city of Albania, a country with a troubled history that came under communist rule in 1946. In 1992, communism fell and ushered in an era that shifted rapidly from collectivism to “total individualism.” Problems exponentially increased as Albanians from the countryside flocked to Tirana in search of jobs, increasing the city’s population nearly threefold in just two decades.

Using money from the World Bank, the European Union, and other international organizations, Rama razed many of Tirana’s often illegal, generally derelict buildings and transformed others by having bold colors and abstract patterns painted on their facades. He cleaned up the piazzas, introduced green space, improved infrastructure, and literally brought light to a city that, when he took over, had only 78 working streetlamps. “This basically permitted us to regain the spirit of citizenship,” Rama said. “So, from a no man’s land, we now have a city with problems.”

Both men admitted that their ideas have not solved all of their cities’ challenges and that they were initially greeted with skepticism. “People were [saying] that the mayor is a clown,” said Mockus. “I remember a lot of taxi drivers saying, ‘I voted for you; we will see.’ And I remember saying, ‘Help. Don’t be a spectator.’”

Rama, who, in addition to being mayor is also the leader of Albania’s opposition Socialist party, had a similar experience. “Of course they said I was crazy,” he said. But in the buildings that had been refreshed, the city suddenly attained a 100 percent tax-collection rate and saw crime plummet. “All from a simple gesture of painting a building,” Rama said.

“But the deeper [effect] was to give to people a sense of belonging and also pride in the city where they were living.” Well into the project, a survey of Tirana’s citizens found that although only 63 percent said they liked the painted buildings, 85 percent said they wanted the painting to continue. “So half of the people who didn’t like it wanted it to continue,” Rama said. “This told a lot about the energy that this was creating.”

The discussion was sponsored by the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, and co-sponsored by the Cultural Agents Initiative and the Public Diplomacy Collaborative.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has announced a new initiative to help build the next generation of men and women who will bring professional history to bear on strategic studies and major issues of international affairs. For the 2010-11 academic year, the Belfer Center will select two Ernest May Fellows.

The Ernest May Fellowships honor Ernest May, the former Charles Warren Professor of American History, member of the Belfer Center’s board of directors, and faculty affiliate of the center’s International Security Program, who died June 1, 2009.

The Ernest May Fellows will be housed at the Belfer Center and participate in the activities of the center as part of the International Security Fellows group. They will have full access to all Harvard research resources. Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, and member of the Belfer Center board of directors, will serve as point of contact and mentor for the fellows.

Fellows are expected to devote some portion of their time to collaborative endeavors, as arranged by the project director. They are also expected to complete a book, monograph, or other significant publication during their period of residence.

The fellowships will include 10-month stipends of either $34,000 (for postdoctoral or advanced research fellows) or $20,000 (for pre-doctoral fellows). In addition, health insurance will be provided. Fellowship applications for the 2010-11 academic year are due on Feb. 15, and decisions are expected to be made by March 15.

Application procedures are available at the Belfer Center Web site.

The Hasty Pudding Theatricals of Harvard University has chosen Justin Timberlake as its 2010 Man of the Year.

Timberlake is a pop-R&B singer, songwriter, actor, and producer who is widely considered one of pop culture’s most influential entertainers. He came to fame as a member of the pop group ’N Sync, and followed that with a successful solo career. He has gone on to win six Grammy Awards and two Emmy Awards.

The award festivities will take place on Feb. 5. The producers of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Kelly Conley ’11 and Steve Rola ’11, will roast the honoree and present him with a Pudding Pot at 8 p.m. in the New College Theatre, prior to the opening night performance of the Hasty Pudding’s 162nd production, “Commie Dearest.” A press conference will be held immediately after the roast at 8:30 p.m.

Actress Anne Hathaway already was announced as recipient of the 2010 Woman of the Year award.

The Man and Woman of the Year awards are presented annually to performers who have made an impressive contribution to entertainment. The Man of the Year award was established in 1963. Past recipients include Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Anthony Hopkins, Bruce Willis, and, last year, James Franco. Established in 1951, the Woman of the Year award has been granted to many notable and talented entertainers, including Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Elizabeth Taylor, and, most recently, Renée Zellweger.

After going solo, Timberlake in 2002 released his debut album, “Justified,” which has sold more than 8 million copies. His second solo album, “FutureSex/LoveSounds,” was released in 2006 and produced four number one singles, including “SexyBack,” “My Love,” “What Goes Around …/… Comes Around,” and “Summer Love.” He is the first artist in Nielsen Top 40 history to chart four No. 1 hits from one album. He was the chief songwriter and producer on both albums, which have sold more than 17 million copies. He also has written and produced songs for such artists as Madonna, Reba McEntire, the Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna, and 50 Cent.

Timberlake also embarked on a successful career in film and television as an actor and producer. In 2007, he received rave reviews for his performance in Universal’s crime drama “Alpha Dog.” He has also starred in “Black Snake Moan,” “Southland Tales,” “The Love Guru,” and “The Open Road,” and has lent his voice to DreamWorks’ “Shrek the Third.” A two-time host of “Saturday Night Live,” he won the Emmy Award for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy Series in 2009, while his sketches have become viral video sensations, including the Emmy Award-winning “D*ck in a Box.” Upcoming work includes the David Fincher-directed and Aaron Sorkin-penned “The Social Network,” set at Harvard University, “Shrek Forever After,” and “Yogi Bear.”

To purchase tickets to “Commie Dearest,” contact the New College Theatre box office at 617.495.5205. The show opens on Feb. 5 and continues in Cambridge until March 15. The show runs Wednesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. The company then travels to New York to perform at Hunter College’s Kaye Playhouse on March 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. The tour continues to the Hamilton City Hall in Bermuda for performances on March 18–20 at 8 p.m.

For more information about the events, please contact the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ press manager, D.J. Smolinsky ’11. He can be reached at 516.729.7858 or by e-mail at [email protected].

Haitian-born Vanessa Alix ’10 was visiting Dallas when the massive earthquake rumbled through her native land on Jan. 12. She saw a CNN news flash, but the vast scale of the disaster wasn’t immediately evident.

Once it was, Alix — a Mather House psychology concentrator — spent the night trying to get through, by cell phone and Skype, to Jacmel, a coastal town in southern Haiti where her parents run three linked school orphanages, for boys, girls, and toddlers.

Marlaine and Daniel Alix, Vanessa’s parents, made the same worried calls from their home in Port St. Lucie, Fla. (The family moved in 2001 after a kidnapping attempt, though the parents travel back and forth often.) The family, which has long been involved in Haitian assistance, opened its first school there in 1989, created the Faith & Love in Action Foundation in 1996, and founded Aid International in 2000.

“There was a lot of panic, a lot of fear,” said Alix of those first fearful hours, when they didn’t know how bad conditions were.

Finally the callers got through. All 72 orphans in Jacmel were safe. Still, the family runs another orphanage compound in Carrefour, the epicenter of the quake. There is no word from there yet. “We tried all the numbers we have,” said Alix.

The Faith & Love compound, three miles from Jacmel’s center, was nearly untouched by the 7.0-magnitude quake. But the small city itself is another story.

Once gracious, safe, and historic, Jacmel was 90 percent destroyed, said Alix, who is in touch with an aunt there. Jacmel had been a sunny enclave redolent of colonial France, with stacked balconies, tile roofs, and turreted homes in pastel tones.

“You went there, and you could actually see what Haiti used to be like,” said Alix, who lived in Haiti for 12 years, and still summers at Jacmel, her mother’s hometown. Alix’s aunt said almost all is now in ruins.

“She said there is no Jacmel anymore.”

The orphans in Jacmel are mostly 7 to 9 years old, with the youngest 11 months and the oldest 25.

“The kids are there as long as they need to be,” said Alix, repeating a family rule. “We provide all their education, and all their needs, and they leave whenever they are ready to leave.”

Now, the number of orphans has grown since the earthquake, said Alix, and local residents — hungry and sleeping out under the stars —are showing up for food, water, and medical care.

Marlaine Alix is headed to Jacmel today (Jan. 22), hitching a ride on a Dominican navy gunboat on an aid trip arranged by Sebastian Velez, a Harvard doctoral student in biology who runs a nongovernmental organization in Pedernales, in the Dominican Republic just across Haiti’s eastern border.

With assistance from four Harvard undergraduates and using funds donated by the American Humanist Association, Velez earlier this week delivered the first outside aid to Jacmel, including food, water, medicine, and tools. Supplies for the Faith & Love compound were included.

Alix’s mother does not plan to remain in Jacmel, but will return when transportation is normalized. Meanwhile, her father is working in Florida to collect donations from area churches.

The orphanage’s immediate needs are basic, said Alix, involving food and tents. “The kids have been catching cold,” she said. Water is available, since every Faith & Love compound has its own well.

“The kids are fine,” said Alix, who has stayed in touch by cell phone and Skype. “They’re singing, and they’re praying.”

In other developments touching on Harvard and Haitian relief efforts:

■ Partners In Health (PIH) reported today (Jan. 22) that Wednesday’s strong aftershock temporarily shut down PIH operations at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince, the capital, as well as at several PIH medical sites outside it. But the 12 operating rooms are back up and running 24 hours a day. Across Haiti, the Harvard-affiliated PIH has 20 operating rooms. Its medical facilities are supported by 144 volunteers, who arrived by plane. They supplement the 4,500 PIH health care providers already in Haiti. Additional medical supplies are needed to save patients threatened by infections in wounds now nearly two weeks old. For the next six to eight weeks, PIH said, full medical teams will be needed to manage dressings, skin grafts, and other postoperative care.

■ S. Allen Counter, Harvard clinical professor of neurology and director of the Harvard Foundation, flew to Haiti by helicopter on Jan. 18 from Santo Domingo, accompanied by four doctors and two medical assistants. On the team were Harvard Medical School’s Bruce Price, Timothy Benson, and Michael Jenike. The group brought medical supplies and helped to deliver tents and water. The visitors flew back to Boston from Santo Domingo Jan. 20. “I will continue to travel to Haiti with more tents for the homeless,” said Counter.

Harvard University has established an emergency relief fund to assist employees who have been directly affected by the tragedy unfolding in Haiti.

The Harvard Haiti Emergency Relief Fund for employees, announced today (Jan. 22) by President Drew Faust, was created to help members of the staff and faculty who have lost loved ones or otherwise suffered personally as a result of the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti. Vendor employees working on campus also are eligible for assistance.

“We have learned that at least 75 people who work at our University have direct ties to Haiti, and many of them are coping with the loss of loved ones or struggling to assist friends and relatives who have been left homeless,” Faust said. “The establishment of this fund helps us to come together as a community at a time of great need and assist some of the men and women whose work supports Harvard’s mission every day.”

Employees at Harvard facing significant personal or family hardships and unanticipated expenses are eligible to apply for funds to help pay for housing, food, travel, medical, or other personal expenses for themselves or dependent family members in Haiti.

Established with contributions from the University and the Harvard University Employees Credit Union, the fund will be administered by the Credit Union. Faculty, students, and staff are encouraged to consider contributing to the fund. Visit the Credit Union Web site for details on how to donate online, in person, or by mail.

The Credit Union also will offer a zero-interest loan program to supplement the relief fund. “It is our hope that these loans will provide an additional measure of support to families who are coping with tremendous hardships,” said Gene Foley, president of the Credit Union.

Details about the relief fund program, on who is eligible, and about how to apply will be posted on Harvie on Monday (Jan. 25).

Males compete for females’ attention. It’s a pattern seen throughout the animal kingdom. But new research shows that kind of male-male competition persists even after animals have mated.

Biologist Heidi Fisher of Harvard University sees that competition in deer mice. As it turns out, female deer mice are promiscuous. They will frequently have multiple mates when they go into heat…

Read more here (National Public Radio)

Birth weights in the United States are on the decline, a study has found. The report, released Thursday, found a small but significant decrease in average birth weights from 1990 to 2005, for reasons that scientists say are unclear…

“We were startled by the findings,” said senior author Dr. Emily Oken, assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We tried really hard to explain it away, but we were unable to…”

Read more here (Los Angeles Times)

The court case originally focused on a narrow question of campaign finance. But the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC sent reverberations throughout the political world. By removing restrictions on election spending by corporations, the ruling promised to change the way that campaigns are waged. The Gazette asked members of the Harvard faculty to discuss the significance of the case:

Gazette: How do you think that this decision will reshape elections?

Alex Keyssar, the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School: It may reshape elections quite dramatically. I think that what we’re going to see is a very, very significant infusion of corporate funding into advertisements supporting an opposing candidate. What the ruling focuses on is not contributions directly to campaigns, but using funds to support candidates. But what I think we’re going to see is something that we haven’t seen in this country in decades, which is a huge infusion of corporate money, which is going to change the fundraising landscape.

Elaine Kamarck, lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs: It is as significant, if not more significant in the long run, than Scott Brown winning in Massachusetts. This is a real earthquake. What it basically does is it allows elections to become a financial free-for-all. … In a generic sense, you would think it’s a help to the Republican Party, which it probably is, but I think it will play out more issue by issue. So, for instance, look at health care, look at climate change. This really has big consequences for political campaigns.

Gazette: What are the implications here for labor unions and nonprofit institutions? Can they also start to play a more direct role in campaign politics?

Jed Shugerman, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School: From a reading of this decision, labor unions and other nonprofits are free to spend more. There’s nothing in the opinion that forecloses it or makes this distinction. So it seems like there will be more money coming from labor unions. Labor unions are opposed to this decision because they know, in the balance of power, the corporations will be able to spend more money than the unions can. But at least it seems evenhanded in allowing both. And there’s no reason to think that they would distinguish between the First Amendment rights of corporations but not extend those rights to labor unions.

Gazette: What will be the impact on individual voters?

Keyssar: It’s quite tricky to predict the impact on voters. We live in a political culture where, for about a half century, large numbers of eligible voters have not participated, and according to lots of polling data and other data that we have, one reason is that they don’t think that their individual voice matters very much — that the country is basically run by large, powerful interests. If this does unleash the wave of advertising that I suspect that it will, this will intensify that sentiment. … The rationale for restricting corporate contributions, which goes back to the turn of the 20th century, is in effect that the political arena, the arena of democracy, should be one where individuals’ voices are equalized as much as possible, and this runs directly counter to that.

Gazette: What do you see as the ramifications of giving corporate speech the same weight in society as individual speech?

Kamarck: It just strikes me that it is serious imbalance in power. Corporate speech already has a big voice at the table. And some of that is for legitimate reasons, right? I mean corporations provide jobs; congressmen and congresswomen are inclined to listen to corporations because they don’t want to do things that end up costing jobs. … There’s plenty of attention paid in the American political system already to the health of corporations for obvious reasons. They provide jobs. But this seems to be taking this one step further, and really giving them a power that they, frankly, don’t need.

Gazette: Is there anything to be read into the fact that this began as a fairly narrow case but wound up having such broad implications?

Shugerman: The Supreme Court had in front of it a potentially narrower and more minimalist way to resolve this case without overturning precedent. This is the big deal about this case. This sends a larger signal about the Roberts court. When Chief Justice [John] Roberts was confirmed in the confirmation hearings, he talked about deference and a cautious approach and seeking more consensus. And we have seen that that is not his approach in practice. So today what we’re looking at is an irony. To pass a law in Congress takes a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. But to strike down a law today takes a one-vote majority in the Supreme Court — and a decision that overturned precedent. … The larger context of the Roberts court’s aggressiveness and lack of concern about consensus is something that we should be paying more attention to.

Gazette: Any final thoughts on the decision?

Kamarck: Will both customers and shareholders object to corporate spending in political campaigns? This will be different depending on the kind of corporation. Corporations like Starbucks or Target or corporations that are really dependent on customers liking their brand will probably be pretty careful about playing in political campaigns. By getting involved in divisive issues or divisive campaigns, you could have people saying, “Well the heck with this, from now on I’m going to Peet’s, and I’m forever boycotting Starbucks.” So some companies will probably be very, very careful about this. There will be other companies, particularly highly regulated companies, who might see this as a way to enhance what is their already substantial lobbying capacities in Washington.

Keyssar: I think you can start imagining how campaigns will change. For example, given all of the recent discussion of an issue like health care, you can now imagine what the pharmaceutical companies or the health insurance companies are going to do now that they can involve themselves very directly in campaigns.

Shugerman: The next question is whether the Supreme Court will move beyond outside political advertising, issue advocacy, or independent spending, and move from striking down regulations on outside spending to striking down regulations on direct donations. That’s a big deal. So if a corporation can go today and now spend money on its issues, that’s one thing. But there are longstanding precedents that set limits on what individuals and groups can donate to candidates. If there’s now an ability to make direct donations to candidates without limits, that will be a major change.

Sebastian Velez, an assistant resident dean at Harvard’s Kirkland House, is a graduate student in biology who studies arachnids. But after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, he put spiders aside, and plunged in to help with relief efforts.

Velez had been on his way to the Dominican Republic to assist on a water purification project near Pedernales in the southwest corner of the country, on the Haitian border. The project was sponsored by Children of the Border, a nongovernmental organization that Velez founded five years ago to help Haitian refugees who live in uneasy alliance with their Dominican neighbors.

He arrived in the Dominican Republic two days after the quake, and quickly teamed up with five Cambridge-area undergraduates, four of them from Harvard, who were already working on the water project.

Harvard officials strongly discourage students from heading to Haiti in an effort to help. Trained medical personnel are the first priority there. But these students were already near the massive disaster. So they asked themselves: How can we help?

They set their sights on Jacmel, a small Haitian coastal city nine hours from Pedernales by sea.

For one thing, Jacmel had not yet received aid, even though it was half-destroyed by the same temblor that leveled Port-au-Prince, the capital. Velez received his first accounts of damage there from Haitian fishermen docking their small boats near Pedernales.

For another thing, Jacmel is home to the Faith & Love in Action orphanages, owned by Marlaine and Daniel Alix, the parents of Harvard undergraduate Ruth Vanessa Alix ’10, who has been in touch with Velez and the others.

A native of Haiti, she lived there for her first 12 years. She visits Jacmel every summer and on spring break. Her parents founded the Faith & Love in Action Foundation in 1996 and Aid International there in 2000. The groups run orphanages, schools, and churches throughout Haiti, and coordinate medical aid.

By Monday (Jan. 18), the ad-hoc Harvard relief team and volunteer Dominican civil defense workers had loaded $23,000 worth of food, water, medicine, and tools aboard a Dominican navy gunboat, which Velez had convinced the government to dispatch. The relief team had bought, inventoried, packed, labeled, and loaded the relief supplies.

Jacmel needed those supplies fast, said Velez, a man in a hurry who gave his last cell phone interview from a motorcycle. “That’s the point of all this,” he said.

The funds were wired to Velez from the American Humanist Association, a Washington, D.C., aid group dedicated to the idea of being, as they advertise, “good without God.”

A second sum of $20,000 arrived earlier this week, and Velez spent it on truckloads of medical supplies for another trip to Jacmel scheduled for Friday (Jan. 22). Reports from the town said amputations were being conducted without anesthesia, and medical supplies were critically needed.

“We went to the pharmacy and raided the medicines,” said the jovial Velez, who paid for the goods out of a knapsack stuffed with Dominican pesos. He said he was careful to leave one of everything on the store shelves for local use.

For the initial trip, it took 12 hours of hard work — until 3 a.m. Sunday (Jan. 17) — to inventory and load all of the supplies, including pallets of bottled water, thousands of pounds of rice and sugar, containers of powdered milk, boxes of sardines, bags of dried pasta, jugs of cooking oil, wheelbarrows, and cooking utensils. The cargo also included hand tools for breaking through collapsed structures, including sledgehammers, pry bars, pickaxes, hammers, and crowbars.

Local farmers donated bananas and plantains. A hardware store provided a truckload of bottled water. Other donors provided hundreds of tents. A few Dominican doctors signed on for the trip.

Mindful of potential dangers, Velez was the only student to accompany the Dominican gunboat and its crew on the journey.

Velez e-mailed photos of the relief operation. One showed him atop a stack of large white sacks that were stenciled in blue with the word “Humanists.” Another showed Matthew C. Mulroy ’12, tall and smiling, hefting a 100-pound sack of flour.

“I feel lucky we’ve gotten to be part of this,” said Tracy T. Han ’11, a Currier House resident with a special concentration in global health. “I’m so glad we’ve been able to help in the little way we can.” The other undergraduates helping in the Dominican Republic were Fabian A. Poliak ’11, Annemarie E. Ryu ’13, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior Yvette M. Beben.

All were safe and well, Velez said, staying in a Pedernales hotel, and would not enter Haiti. The students are scheduled to fly back to Boston Saturday.

When the gunboat arrived in Jacmel, Velez said, it was greeted by 300 Haitians eager to help unload the supplies. Since it was the town’s first glimpse of outside aid, the work went by “in a flash.” The Haitians set up a bucket brigade to unload the vessel. They then used wheelbarrows to transport the goods to waiting trucks.

Velez ventured into the small city. Though not as hard-hit as Port-au-Prince, he still saw some now-familiar sights: streets blocked by fallen rubble, buildings collapsed into pancaked stacks, crushed cars, and crowds of dazed pedestrians. The residents, worried by frequent aftershocks, were sleeping outside at night.

Velez checked that the food was stored safely and then headed for the Faith & Love orphanage in a little white truck – a Haitian “tap-tap” – that was jammed with food and water.

Alix, the Harvard undergraduate whose parents own the Faith & Love orphanages, said by e-mail that all 85 children in the Jacmel facility survived the quake and were in good health. But her parents run two other orphanages in Carrefour, where the epicenter of the earthquake was. There was no word yet on the fate of the children there, she said.

While in Jacmel, Velez talked with Haitian doctors, who gave him a five-page list of needed medical supplies. There was adequate food on hand, but distribution was not yet running smoothly.

Returning to Pedernales, he bought the requested medical supplies – 4 tons worth – and on Thursday (Jan. 21) was loading the gunboat a second time with the aid of the undergraduates.

He said that some of the Dominican volunteers have been working for 24 hours without food and that he himself had just gotten his first four hours of sleep in days.

“It’s catching up to me,” he wrote in an e-mail Thursday afternoon – adding that sleep would come on the next boat ride to Jacmel. Velez plans to leave the Dominican Republic and be back in Cambridge in time to teach a class on Monday — back to his spiders.

But on Thursday, the second relief shipment still wasn’t ready. He revved up his motorcycle and shouted into the cell phone: “Gotta go!”

Thirteen-pound babies may make headlines, but they aren’t the norm. In fact, U.S. infants are getting smaller, according to researchers at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute’s Department of Population Medicine, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Their findings, published in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, suggest that birth weights in this country have declined during the past 15 years.

The study analyzed data on birth weight, maternal and neonatal characteristics, obstetric care, and other trends from the National Center for Health Statistics Natality Data Set, looking at 36,827,828 U.S. babies born at full-term between 1990 and 2005. Birth weight — a combination of fetal growth and length of gestation — was recorded in grams. The investigators teased out certain factors, including the mother’s age, race or ethnicity, education level, marital status, and tobacco use, as well as the amount of weight the women gained during pregnancy and how early in pregnancy they received prenatal care. They also considered the women’s risk of conditions such as hypertension and use of obstetric procedures such as induction of labor and Caesarean delivery.

Their findings came as a surprise. “Previous studies have shown that birth weights have increased steadily during the past half century,” said Emily Oken, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of population medicine. “We expected to see a continuation of those increases.” Higher birth weights have been attributed in part to women’s increasing age and weight and decreased smoking.

Instead, Oken and her colleagues found that birth weights had decreased by an average of 52 grams (1.83 ounces) between 1990 and 2005. Decreases were especially notable after 1995.

In contrast to previous research findings, birth weights fell even further in infants born to a subset of women considered to be at low risk for small babies. Mothers who were white, well-educated, married, didn’t smoke, received early prenatal care, and delivered vaginally with no complications had babies who weighed an average of 79 grams (2.78 ounces) less at birth during the study period.

The causes of this decline remain unclear. In addition to declines in birth weight, average gestation length among these full-term births also dropped by more than two days. “A logical conclusion might be that trends in obstetric management, such as greater use of Caesarean delivery and induction of labor, might account for these decreases in birth weight and gestation length,” said Oken. “However, our analysis showed that this was not the case.”

While the decline may simply represent a reversal of previous increases in birth weights, it may also be cause for concern. Babies born small not only face short-term complications such as increased likelihood of requiring intensive care after birth and even higher risk of death, but they may also be at higher risk for chronic diseases in adulthood.

Future research may identify factors not included in the current data that might contribute to lower birth weight, such as trends in mothers’ diets, physical activity, stress, and exposure to environmental toxins. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about the causes of low birth weight, said Oken. “More research needs to be done.”

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

On a recent bitter January morning, Marcus Stern encouraged a group of Harvard undergraduates to experiment with citrus.

“What would happen,” he asked them, “if you stuck an orange under each armpit?”

The whimsical suggestion had real implications for the 20 young women and men who have chosen to forgo a midwinter vacation and return to campus for a new kind of intense study.

Stern, associate director of the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University (the A.R.T. Institute), was teaching a drama class, one designed to help the budding actors create a new character, using changes in voice and body positions that would render them unrecognizable. The orange experiment, he said, could lead to “physical adjustments” that they could incorporate later, without the aid of the fruit, into their transformations.

“The goal is to get them comfortable with fully transforming their voices and bodies so they can get closer to creating characters that are completely different from themselves,” Stern said, so they can act more “freely, impulsively, spontaneously.”

Using a deep register for her voice and sharp hand gestures, one undergraduate took on the role of a pope. Another portrayed a woman confined to a wheelchair.

“Go a little higher, softer, more nasal,” Stern coached Emily Hecht ’11, urging her to change the pitch of her voice to help make her character, a vulnerable and emotionally troubled young woman, more believable.

The undergraduates are part of a new immersion program, a collaboration among the A.R.T. Institute, the Office for the Arts, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC). During the three-week intensive workshop, they are learning a wide range of dramatic techniques and various aspects of acting. The curriculum includes workshops on comedic scenes, intensive study with a dialect coach, improvisation classes, and even seminars on the business of being an actor.

Students work with participants and faculty at the A.R.T. Institute, as well as prominent guest lecturers. Jim True-Frost, famous for his role on the HBO series “The Wire,” led a seminar on acting for the camera, and well-known director and Harvard alumnus David Hammond recently conducted a Shakespeare workshop.

“It has been very exciting for us to be able to show the undergraduates that in the graduate school it’s a much more in-depth, intensive approach to acting,” said the institute’s director Scott Zigler, who designed the new program’s curriculum.

While A.R.T. Institute faculty currently teach undergraduate classes as part of the Harvard College curriculum, for those students considering a graduate degree in acting or pursuing the craft directly out of college, said Zigler, the intensive course really gives them a look at the “nuts and bolts of the profession.”

The American Repertory Theater’s artistic director, Diane Paulus ’88, is the driving force behind the new collaboration.

In step with her commitment to the organization’s mission of “expanding the boundaries of theater” is Paulus’ intense desire for a broader engagement with the University. As a Harvard undergraduate, her love of the dramatic arts was shaped by her own experience with the A.R.T. Since taking on the directorship in 2008, she has been working closely with students across campus.

“Central to my goals and my new leadership at the A.R.T. is to reinvigorate the A.R.T.’s connection with the University and in particular the undergraduates,” said Paulus, who met with members of the HRDC her first day on the job to discuss how to forge a stronger relationship with students. When Paulus realized the opportunity at hand with the new winter break, a plan for the immersion program took shape.

Paulus said the three-week intensive gives “undergraduates the opportunity to immerse and experience themselves in graduate-level training through our curriculum that we traditionally offer to the institute students. … When I was a Harvard undergraduate, I would have jumped at this opportunity.

“We are really saying we are here, we are an important pedagogical resource for Harvard University, and this is a particular way we can offer our faculty, training, and expertise to the broader student body.”

Jack Megan, director of the Office for the Arts, who helped coordinate the housing for students returning to campus for the program, said the new initiative is an example of Paulus’ effort to create a “deeper, more integrated community among undergraduates, institute students, professional staff at the A.R.T., and other University departments. The attitude and tone of things is very ‘can do.’ It’s very exciting.”

In a further collaboration, Megan also helped secure the undergraduate Agassiz Theatre for the Tennessee Williams play “Stairs to the Roof,” being produced by the A.R.T. Institute. Harvard alumnus Mike Donahue ’05 will direct the production (Feb. 4-6), which will also include three of the workshop’s undergraduate students in its cast.

Hecht, an English concentrator with a secondary focus in dramatic arts, got hooked at age 6 with the role of a witch in a half-hour version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” and is currently planning a career in acting or music.

“This is a taste of what real intense conservatory work might be like,” she said. It offers “the kind of intense technique work that is really helpful if you are thinking about going into the professional [entertainment] world.”

For Leverett House senior Carolyn Holding, who intends to pursue acting and is weighing graduate school with a move to New York City after graduation, the workshop has been an important part of her Harvard education.

She’s learned “how much there is [to acting],” she said, “and how little I know.”

This spring, alumni can vote for a new group of Harvard Overseers and Elected Directors for the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) board.

Ballots will be mailed no later than April 1 and must be received back in Cambridge by noon on May 21 to be counted. Results of the election will be announced at the HAA’s annual meeting on the afternoon of Commencement day (May 27). All holders of Harvard degrees, except Corporation members and officers of instruction and government, are entitled to vote for Overseer candidates. The election for HAA directors is open to all Harvard degree holders.

Candidates for Overseer may also be nominated by petition, that is, by obtaining a prescribed number of signatures from eligible degree holders. The deadline for all petitions is Feb. 1.

The HAA’s nominating committee has proposed the following candidates in 2010:

For Overseer

Cheryl Dorsey ’85, M.D. ’91, M.P.P. ’92, president, EchoingGreen, New York City

Joseph Fuller ’79, M.B.A. ’81, co-founder, vice-chairman, and CEO, Monitor Group, Cambridge, Mass.

David Heyman ’83, film producer, London

Walter Isaacson ’74, CEO, The Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C.

Nicholas Kristof ’82, columnist, The New York Times, New York City

Karen Nelson Moore ’70, J.D. ’73, United States Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Cleveland

Diana Nelson ’84, director, Carlson Companies Inc., San Francisco

David Tang ’75, managing partner for Asia, K&L Gates, Seattle

For Elected Director

Kenneth Bartels ’73, M.B.A. ’76, president and CEO, Paxton Properties Inc., New York City

Roger Fairfax Jr. ’94, J.D. ’98, law professor, George Washington University Law School, Washington, D.C.

Mark Fusco’83, M.B.A. ’90, CEO, Aspen Tech, Westwood, Mass.

Lindsay Hyde ’04, founder and president; Strong Women, Strong Girls; Boston

M. Margaret Kemeny ’68, professor of surgery, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine; chief of surgical oncology and director of Queens Cancer Center; New York City

George Newhouse Jr. ’76, Partner Brown, White & Newhouse LLP, Los Angeles

Reynaldo Valencia J.D. ’90, associate dean for administration and finance; professor of corporate and securities law, St. Mary’s University School of Law, San Antonio

Victoria Wells Wulsin ’75, M.P.H. ’82, D.P.H. ’85, physician, Mid-City Pediatrics, Cincinnati

Irene Wu ’91, director of international research, U.S. Federal Communications Commission; adjunct professor, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Some mouse sperm can discriminate between their brethren and the competing sperm from other males, clustering with the closest relatives to swim faster in the race to fertilize an egg. But this sort of cooperation appears to be present only in some promiscuous species, where it affords an individual’s sperm a competitive advantage over that of other males.

The work is described this week (released Jan. 20) in the journal Nature by biologists Heidi S. Fisher and Hopi E. Hoekstra of Harvard University.

“The race among sperm toward the egg is fierce, but never more so than when sperm of different males compete,” said Fisher, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “In some species where females mate with multiple males, groups of sperm join forces to outswim their uncooperative competitors. We’ve shown that, in deer mice, cooperation only occurs among close relatives — sperm from the same male.”

This ability of sperm to discriminate between related and unrelated sperm is not seen in monogamous species, in which sperm of different males are unlikely ever to interact. The results suggest that competition among males drives cooperative behavior among their sperm.

Fisher and Hoekstra studied sperm from two species of deer mice, Peromyscus polionotus and Peromyscus maniculatus. Although closely related, the species differ greatly in their sexual behavior: P. polionotus is monogamous, while P. maniculatus females are promiscuous, mating with successive males as little as one minute apart.

The scientists found that only sperm from the promiscuous species showed the ability to discriminate between closely related and more distantly related sperm. When sperm from different P. polionotus males was combined in a Petri dish, it showed no selective aggregation.

“This finding that sperm can discriminate suggests that sperm may be much more complex than we’ve appreciated,” said Hoekstra, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard. “Because more than 95 percent of mammals are promiscuous, it’s possible this ability to discriminate and cooperate may be fairly widespread.”

Fisher and Hoekstra say it’s not yet clear exactly how sperm identifies its relatives. Previous research by a different group at Harvard suggested that a single gene allows cooperative yeast to recognize related individuals. Fisher and Hoekstra found that one mouse’s sperm can even discriminate against that of its brother, suggesting that the recognition system must be very fine-tuned.

“Whatever the recognition factor is, it would have to be highly variable,” Fisher said. “It may involve a hypervariable protein expressed on the outside of the sperm head.”

The current work builds upon research published in 2002 by Harry Moore and colleagues at the University of Sheffield. Moore found that sperm from wood mice could clump together to increase swimming velocity during their migration toward the egg, but did not identify kinship as the factor determining which spermatozoa join forces.

“Since all but one sperm fail to fertilize after joining a group, this altruistic behavior has been assumed, but never demonstrated, to occur only between closely related sperm,” Hoekstra said. “Our results show that the temporary alliances among sperm are not passively formed. Rather, they represent a complex discriminatory behavior driven by sexual selection.”

Moore also investigated whether human sperm clusters in the same way, finding little evidence that it does.

“Most rodent sperm have hooked heads, enabling mouse sperm to cluster together,” Fisher said. “In humans, the sperm head is rounder, which does not facilitate clustering.”

Fisher and Hoekstra’s work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.

University researchers have built nanoparticles designed to cling to artery walls and slowly release medicine – a breakthrough that could help fight heart disease.

Scientists at MIT and Harvard Medical School yesterday announced that they teamed up to create what they’re calling “nanoburrs,” nanotechology that sticks to arteries the way that pesky burrs in the woods stick to your clothes. Researchers are hoping the nanoburrs can offer an alternative to surgically implanting arterial stents that, over time, release drugs to treat or prevent plaque build up on artery walls…

Read more here (Computerworld)

Visions of sugarplums may have faded with the end of the holiday season for many Allston youngsters, but an imaginative re-use of a garage on Western Avenue has given Allston families their own winter wonderland. That was the scene in Allston Friday night (Jan. 15) as more than 100 community residents flocked to the grand opening of the Harvard Allston Skating Rink.

The facility was so recently renovated that the smell of fresh paint lingered in the air. Harvard Executive Vice President Katherine Lapp said that the idea for the rink “surfaced before Christmas,” and that staffers from Harvard Real Estate Services, the Allston Development Group, and Harvard Public Affairs and Communications, all in close cooperation with the city of Boston, turned the project around in less than a month, from building the rink and securing permits, to painting and decorating the space.

“Coming here today and seeing people of all ages — and more and more people coming — is a validation of Harvard’s showing its support for Allston residents,” said Lapp, noting that the crowded, cheerful scene looked like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Savoring the night’s arctic thrill, parents watched their bouncing, skate-clad children from the periphery, including a Brighton resident named Caroline, who heard about the rink through her two children, who attend the Harvard Allston Education Portal. “It’s fantastic,” she said, as her kids skated by.

The temporary rink, located at 168 Western Ave., is a way to increase community-oriented uses of the University’s Allston properties while it looks for long-term building tenants. It will remain open until March 28.

“We are delighted to introduce an interim use that engages our neighbors and provides an inviting new space where families can spend time together this winter,” said Christine Heenan, vice president of Harvard Public Affairs and Communications. “We hope that, like the Harvard Allston Education Portal across the street, this will be both a gathering place and an enriching and lively anchor in the community.”

Brighton High School student David Yu, 17, took full advantage of the venue on opening night. It was the second time ever ice skating for Yu, who said he was no fan of the falls he was taking, which were plenty, as evidenced by his wet sweatshirt. “But I make an interesting wipeout,” he said, demonstrating his novel form for falling with grace. “This is too fun, even with the wipeouts.”

Allston Brighton Task Force member John Bruno was equally delighted by the festivities. “To utilize a space like this and to see young people smiling — and adults smiling, too — it’s a big thank you to the community,” he said.

“Look at all the families and neighborhood residents,” remarked City Councilor Mark Ciommo, a one-time Allston-Brighton youth hockey player and former hockey coach. “It’s wonderful.”

Visitors to the rink can bring their own skates or borrow free pairs. Skates are available on a first-come, first-served basis, with limited numbers.

The rink will be open on Fridays from 3 to 8 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There will be special hours during Boston’s school vacation week (Feb. 15-19), from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

As the night wound down, families drank hot chocolate and collected raffle prizes, which included Harvard sports tickets and sweatshirts. Emcee Kevin McCluskey, senior director of community relations, handed off a coveted envelope filled with Harvard vs. Cornell hockey tickets. “You can’t get these tickets anywhere but here,” he told the crowd.

Meanwhile, back on the ice, mother Sonia Simoun helped her daughter Alya, 10, lace up her skates. “My children can walk here,” Simoun said. “We’re very excited.”