Author: Harvard Gazette Online

Erich Segal, the author of the Harvard-based novel “Love Story” and who once taught classics at the University, died of a heart attack on Jan. 17. He was 72.

Segal taught at Harvard in the early 1960s after earning three degrees from the University. Once a Dunster House resident, he received an A.B. in 1958, graduated as the class poet and Latin salutatorian, and participated in that year’s Hasty Pudding show. He received an A.M. in classics in 1959, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1965. He also taught at institutions such as Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Munich, and Wolfson College in Oxford, England.

Segal was most renowned for his novel “Love Story,” which was based on a screenplay he had penned. The book was an overnight success, selling more than 21 million copies in 33 languages. It later became a film starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, and was the highest-grossing movie of 1971. “Love Story” remains a staple for incoming Harvard freshmen, who watch it each fall.

His other novels include “The Class,” “Doctors,” “Acts of Faith,” and “Prizes.” Alongside the Beatles and other writers, Segal helped to pen the screenplay for 1968’s film “Yellow Submarine.”

Segal also was a long-distance runner, completing more than 40 marathons. At the time of his death, Segal had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for nearly 25 years.

A private funeral was held in London. He is survived by his wife, Karen James, and daughters Francesca, 29, and Miranda, 20.

A week after an earthquake devastated Haiti, Harvard University affiliates have ramped up a combined medical and surgical aid effort in the battered island nation that is larger than that of any nongovernmental organization.

The logistics required to coordinate medical assistance that broadly and quickly is likely to provide a helpful template in the future for harnessing the power of academic medicine to meet the demands of major disasters, officials believe.

Fifty medical and surgical personnel have been deployed in Haiti in the last week from Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Harvard teaching hospitals have sent planeloads of medical supplies, including surgical and anesthesia equipment. More surgical teams are lined up to depart for Haiti Wednesday (Jan. 20).

Partners In Health (PIH), a not-for-profit Harvard affiliate, has taken the lead in University-related medical aid. The group, co-founded by Paul Farmer, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, operates nine medical sites in Haiti and has had a presence there since 1985.

PIH has seven operating rooms at the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where 1,000 patients await surgery. The agency has been shuttling patients to other medical facilities in the rugged Central Plateau, two hours away, and has just opened a treatment center outside Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, with three more operating rooms.

The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) are providing leadership for the United Nations “health cluster” and a U.N. field hospital. Such U.N. health clusters coordinate government, nongovernment, academic, and private organizations during medical emergencies.

For the next week or two, “surgical needs will dominate,” said HHI’s co-director Michael J. VanRooyen, who is helping to coordinate Harvard’s medical resources bound for Haiti.

Amputations and wound debridements are common, and crush injuries and infections are a major cause of mortality.

Among the Harvard affiliates helping to send medical and surgical teams are Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

After the initial response, VanRooyen said, the challenge will be to create temporary housing for the displaced, nurse the injured, and provide post-operative care.

Large numbers of those who were displaced in Port-au-Prince, he said, “are living in the rubble.”

The Haitian carnage is different from most earthquake disasters, said VanRooyen. It happened in a large city, where crushing injuries are a huge factor, but where surgical facilities are close by.

Harvard’s medical authorities on the ground have begun to get word out on the conditions they have found in Haiti, despite spotty cell phone service and limited access to e-mail. Some physicians already have rotated through the country.

Stephanie Rosborough, an emergency physician and disaster relief expert at Brigham and Women’s, was in Miami today (Jan. 19) after five days at a U.N. compound medical clinic in Port-au-Prince. Later today, she will be on a plane to the Dominican Republic, and will travel overland to Jimaní, a town on Haiti’s eastern border. There, Rosborough will help set up a post-operative medical camp.

She had arrived in Port-au-Prince last Thursday (Jan. 14) from Santo Domingo by helicopter, a vantage that revealed the enormity of the destruction in the capital, where structures collapsed “like stacks of pancakes.” In the city, water was scarce even for doctors and other medical staff, said Rosborough. Everyone slept in or outside the same two vast plastic tents housing 150 patients at the U.N. compound.

One day, she said, doctors performed 14 amputations using ketamine, a common drug for field surgeries, to anesthetize the patients. Crushing injuries, broken bones, and infections — even gangrene — were common, said Rosborough, a Cambridge resident who is director of the International Emergency Medicine Fellowship at the Brigham.

Many Haitians “have lost everything they have,” she said, and now many face life without limbs, or without family. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Evan Lyon, a resident in internal medicine at the Brigham, spent his first 12 hours in the capital city last weekend assessing the need for emergency medical care.

“Beyond the horror,” he wrote of his drive through Port-au-Prince Sunday, “one striking reality is that things are totally peaceful. We circulated …  in the middle of everything until just now. Everywhere. No U.N. No police. No U.S. Marines and no violence or chaos or anything. Just people helping each other.”

Lyon, once a teacher in Port-au-Prince, split his time for the last year between Boston and Haiti’s Central Plateau, where PIH has eight community-run clinics collectively called Zanmi Lasante.

Jonathan Crocker, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, another Harvard affiliate, arrived at Zanmi Lasante’s flagship clinic in Cange on Sunday, and posted his impressions the next day.
“Patients are dazed,” he wrote of the growing flood of wounded arriving from the capital. “The disruption to their families and lives is beyond description. Many of our injured patients are not mobile, have few resources, have no home to return to, and many have lost their entire families. We care for their wounds. We listen. We grieve with them.”

“All Harvard hospitals continue to communicate closely with each other around
issues relating to supplies and material support for PIH and other efforts,” according to the HHI Web site. “The level of coordination is a strong testimony to the solidarity of the Harvard system in support of Haiti and our partnering organizations providing relief.”

PIH surgical teams are working in Cange as well as at the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince. PIH has become one of the largest medical and surgical nongovernmental organizations and one of the lead agencies for civilian humanitarian assistance in Haiti.

Security and safety remain key concerns, but so far Harvard-affiliated medical personnel in the field report that Port-au-Prince has been generally peaceful, that logistics are improving, and that health workers are safe and well.

As Lyon drove through Port-au-Prince in search of urgent emergency cases, he passed the city’s main central park, where almost 50,000 people were sleeping at night.

“It was almost silent,” he wrote. “People cooking, talking, some singing and crying.”

Despite hundreds of injured people lying on the ground, with “open fractures, massive injuries of all kinds,” he wrote, “people are kind, calm, generous to us and others.”

But the stench of death was everywhere, wrote Lyon. “The city is changed forever.”

Lyon oversaw the evacuation of four patients to U.S. hospitals, who may be the first Haitian nationals to leave for care in the United States, he said.

Crocker wrote that the Cange operation is “incredibly busy,” especially as the wounded have begun to develop complications, especially sepsis and venous blood clots from immobility and trauma.

“The Haitian medical staff of Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante and survivors of the quake are working with unimaginable valor and dedication, as many of them have lost several or most members of their family,” he wrote. “And yet they remain here, working tirelessly to provide care for others. They are the true heroes.”

The good deeds of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) are being handsomely rewarded, and the nonprofit group may be in line for more aid shortly.

The Chase Community Giving Facebook competition, which recognizes small and local charities, last month awarded the student-run, community-based public service organization $25,000. The much-appreciated award also advances PBHA to the final round of the competition and gives the organization a shot at $1 million.

Voting for the final round, which calls for nonprofit finalists to publish one “big idea” that would greatly expand their services to the community, runs through Jan. 22.

PBHA’s proposal is titled “200 Kids to College: Getting In, Getting Through.” It aims to send 200 low-income Boston and Cambridge high school students to college over the next four years, and also to ensure that each student graduates.

“We have a pipeline that goes from cradle to college, and this million dollars would allow us to fill in this missing link of college access, really focusing on high school,” said Emily Parrott ’09, PBHA nonprofit management fellow.

Currently, PBHA has mentoring programs for low-income youths in Boston and Cambridge, both after school and in the summer. But the group’s goal of helping young students get into college, and stay there, will be aided by the recent grant from Chase, and even more so if PBHA is chosen by the Facebook community, which votes on the award.

Inspired by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s “Getting Ready, Getting In, and Getting Through” initiative to increase college graduation rates of local youth by 50 percent, PBHA hopes that if the “200 Kids to College” program can make a difference in the lives of that many young people, the effect will be exponential.

“Part of PBHA’s mission is developing student leaders, so we want to work with communities. We also want to be a community-based organization,” said Parrott. “We want to work with young people and see them come back to their community and create change on a larger scale.”

Parrott added, “The leadership development programs we have so far [are] a good example of giving high school students the activism skills that they can use to engage in college activities, and college gives people the skills to go back home and really holistically change communities.”

To vote in the contest, visit the Chase Community Giving page on Facebook. In addition to the $1 million prize, Chase will donate $100,000 to five runners-up.

Even if PBHA’s “big idea” doesn’t go all the way, the publicity is a boon. “Another great part of this is it will get PBHA’s name out there … and our vision for social justice.”

Babette (Babbie) Samelson Whipple, former psychology researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), died on Dec. 18, 2009, after a short illness. The 60-year resident of Belmont, Mass., born July 22, 1918, in Memphis, Tenn., died at the age of 91.

At 17 she entered Wellesley College. She continued her studies at Radcliffe, earning an M.A. in philosophy before switching to psychology because she was attracted to the broader potential impact that her work in this relatively new discipline could have. She was awarded her doctorate, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1945 and began working as a therapist at the innovative Habit Clinic (now Thom Clinic) in Boston.

She married Fred L. Whipple, a Harvard professor of astronomy, in 1946. As she raised their two daughters and continued part time with her psychology research career at the Child Psychiatry Department at MGH, her duties expanded to include social support for the families of the faculty and graduate students at the newly formed Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, of which Fred had been named director.

In her basement you can still find a large box with the 50 teacups and saucers she used for the wives’ afternoon teas that she regularly held at her home in Belmont. During the heady years of Sputnik and the race to space, Babbie accompanied Fred on travels all over the globe to visit the satellite observing stations he had been instrumental in setting up and to join international scientific meetings.

A memorial service is planned for April 10. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Babette and Fred Whipple Fund for Graduate Student Travel, c/o Amanda Preston, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., MS-45, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Harvard University will create a relief fund for faculty and staff who have been directly affected by the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

The University’s executive vice president, Katherine N. Lapp, announced the fund Friday (Jan. 15), broadening Harvard’s on-campus response to the crisis in the beleaguered Caribbean nation. Members of the Harvard community will be encouraged to contribute to the fund, and any employee struggling with a personal loss from the disaster can apply for financial assistance.

“We want to be sure that we are responding to this catastrophe on a personal level as well as at an institutional level,” Lapp said. “Many members of the Harvard community are coping with this tragedy, and we want to make sure that we are supportive of them.”

Details about eligibility and administration of the fund were being worked out by a Central Administration team.

Additionally, Harvard Human Resources was reviewing paid leave policies to provide affected staff members with more scheduling flexibility and financial support. An early census of Harvard employees revealed there are at least four dozen with direct ties to Haiti.

In addition, Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds posted a letter to students on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Web site, expressing sadness for the people of Haiti, while acknowledging that undergraduates are eager to help.

But for the time being, she wrote, students are better off helping at home rather than heading for the Caribbean.

“The most effective thing that Harvard students can do in the immediate term is to support relief efforts through fundraising and other activities,” said Hammonds, who is also the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies.

In the letter, she mentioned three ways that students can help: Harvard’s Office for the Arts, which is exploring the idea of a benefit event or concert; the Phillips Brooks House Association, which will help to coordinate public service aid for Boston-area Haitian communities; and Harvard’s dedicated Web site for Haitian financial help.

The situation in Haiti remains dire, said Arrietta Chakos, director of the Acting in Time Advance Recovery Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In an e-mail Friday, she outlined the first priorities for a ravaged Haiti: water, communications, fuel, and power. All are lifelines that must be in place for relief operations to work in the crucial next several days.

“The humanitarian response now has to be swift, decisive, and coordinated,” wrote Chakos. “The incoming responders must be self-sufficient, collaborative, and focused on immediate need because the Haitian authorities are not yet able to manage the situation.”

She called the aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake a “landscape-scale” disaster that only magnified Haiti’s “pre-event systemic vulnerabilities.”

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world. Even before the quake, few homes had reliable power, sewage disposal, or safe drinking water.

After water, fuel, and other basics, other needs “must follow close on,” said Chakos, including medical services, emergency housing, and a continuity of Haitian governance.

In the long term, “strengthening the social connections among people is crucial to rebuilding hope and purpose,” said Chakos.  “The disaster literature shows that typically 10 years is the period for a region to recover from catastrophe. Haiti will likely follow this trajectory.”

Longer-term recovery “will emerge with support from responding nations,” she said, “in the form of governance guidelines, social institution building, and development of safe building practices.”

Meanwhile, a common Haitian phrase tells the story:  ”kenbe fem,” which means “hold on” – as in, “Keep the faith, don’t despair, help is on the way.”

Help has raced toward earthquake-shaken Haiti from many nations this week, as well as from groups of experts and medical personnel affiliated with Harvard University, which has several institutional ties to the country. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the island nation Tuesday (Jan. 12), radiating shock waves from an epicenter 10 miles southwest of Haiti’s crowded capital of Port-au-Prince.

Harvard President Drew Faust announced today (Jan. 14) a dedicated Web page to make it easier for members of the Harvard community to respond to the crisis.

“Scenes of such suffering remind us of our own humanity, and our natural reflex is to reach out to help,” she said. “The destruction in Haiti has shocked and saddened us all. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Haitian people, the men and women who are working to help them recover from the earthquake that has devastated their nation, and the members of the Harvard community who are anxious for word from friends and loved ones living on the island.”

Assistance was en route in other ways as well.

Massachusetts General Hospital has deployed the International Medical Surgical Response Team (IMSuRT). It will go to Haiti within days.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) is coordinating a roster of medical, surgical, and public health personnel within the Partners HealthCare System who are available for deployment to Haiti.  (Interested volunteers can contact Brian Daly at [email protected].)

Harvard’s Joia Mukherjee left for Haiti Wednesday (Jan. 13). She is chief medical officer of the Harvard-affiliated Partners In Health (PIH), a not-for-profit aid group with community-based clinics in Haiti and eight other countries.

Going to Haiti also is David Walton, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who is associated with PIH and is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2008, he helped to set up a 54-bed hospital in La Colline in Haiti’s rugged Central Plateau.

Mukherjee and Walton are the vanguard of Harvard-affiliated assistance. Their reports will help focus future relief efforts in the form of supplies and personnel.

Already laboring in a temporary Port-au-Prince field hospital is physician Louise Ivers, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She sent a pleading e-mail Wednesday. “Port-au-Prince is devastated,” it said, “lots of deaths. SOS, SOS. … Temporary field hospital … needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Ivers is clinical director in Haiti for PIH, which opened its first clinic in rural Haiti in 1985 and has since opened eight more that are run by PIH’s sister organization Zanmi Lasante, which means “Partners In Health” in Haitian Creole.

PIH also has community-based medical operations in Peru, Russia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. The clinics are staffed by local medical personnel as well as by Harvard faculty and students.

The group’s main hospital is L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur in Cange, about 20 rugged miles outside Port-au-Prince. It “experienced a strong shock” from the quake, according to the PIH Web site, “but no major damage or injuries.”

Zanmi Lasante and its satellite clinics already can call on more than 120 doctors and nearly 500 nurses, impressive numbers that are being used to leverage efficient and rapid medical relief for what already was the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

PIH issued a call yesterday for more experienced medical personnel to help in Haiti, especially surgeons who specialize in trauma and orthopedics. Also needed are emergency room doctors and nurses, and full surgical teams, including anesthesiologists, scrub and post-op nurses, and nurse anesthetists.

PIH is employing a two-part strategy to speed medical care to devastated Port-au-Prince, where thousands are believed dead and thousands more hurt. Field hospital sites in the capital city, linked to a supply chain from the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with Haiti, are being used for triage and immediate care. PIH sites in the Central Plateau — two hours from the wrecked capital of 2 million people — are being readied to serve a flow of patients from the capital.

A church in Cange has been converted into a large triage site. There and in Hinche, another PIH medical location, a “steady flow” of injured people from the capital are receiving medical care.

In the capital alone, “tens of thousands” will need medical care, according to the PIH Web site, a situation that makes financial assistance a high priority as well.

“Haiti is facing a crisis worse than it has seen in years, and it is a country that has faced years of crisis, both natural disaster and otherwise,” according to a post earlier this week by PIH executive director Ophelia Dahl. “The country is in need of millions of dollars right now to meet the needs of the communities hardest hit by the earthquake.”

Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at HMS, said that all faculty and students involved with PIH in Haiti are reported safe. But the situation on the ground in Haiti is an “overwhelming tragedy,” he said. “We all share in the shock and grief over yesterday’s devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Our hearts go out to the millions who have been affected, both in Haiti and closer to home.”

Flier also expressed concern that some members of the Harvard community “may be experiencing personal losses, and we want to offer them our compassion and to provide them with the support they may need.” Members of the Harvard community who would like counseling services or referrals are asked to call Harvard’s Employee Assistance Program at 877.327.4278 or to contact their Human Resources representatives.

Other Harvard-related relief efforts are also rolling out. The HHI, a University group of disaster-relief specialists, is working with nongovernmental organizations to assess immediate medical needs and other required assistance, according to spokesman Vincenzo Bollettino. HHI will offer regular updates on its Web site and on Twitter concerning Harvard’s relief partners and affiliated programs and hospitals, he said.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital has dispatched an emergency response team, including HHI’s director of education, Hilarie Cranmer, who is a physician and clinical instructor. The team will work with United Nations and Dominican officials to address the immediate needs of displaced people.

HHI fellow and physician Miriam Aschkenasy, a public health specialist at Oxfam America, is also working on Haitian relief. HHI is in touch with Alejandro Baez, a physician and former faculty member at Brigham and Women’s who now runs disaster services in the nearby Dominican Republic. They will assess the needs for further disaster response.

Zanmi Lasante is one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti and the only provider of comprehensive primary care.

It has a 104-bed hospital with two operating rooms, adult and pediatric inpatient wards, an infectious-disease center, an outpatient clinic, a women’s health clinic, ophthalmology and general medicine clinics, a laboratory, a pharmaceutical warehouse, a Red Cross blood bank, radiographic services, and a dozen schools.

Zanmi Lasante employs about 90 community Haitian health workers and serves an estimated 500,000 people in the Central Plateau.

Why do societies and their governments fail so often to act in time to avert crises that appear in plain sight? What can be done to alter that pattern?

Those questions served as impetus for a new intensive January session course, “Acting in Time,” at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).  The course is one component of the Acting in Time initiative, launched in 2006 involving scholars, and now students, of various disciplines from across the University.  The course and initiative seek to leverage scenario planning and research to anticipate crises and prevent failures of public policy.

“On subjects as diverse as climate change, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, and genocide, the same pattern recurs,” said HKS Dean David T. Ellwood, who co-taught the course with Christopher Stone, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice, and director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

“Governments can see a crisis coming and the appropriate responses are often relatively well understood,” added Ellwood, who is also the Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy. “The costs of acting now appear substantially less than the costs of acting later, when the crisis has already hit. Yet governments and people don’t always act at the right moment.”

“You have here different stories that are related, and the need to think more strategically about how to address highly complex and connected problems,” said course participant Victor Moscoso M.P.A./ID ’11. “We still don’t know how to address these interconnected problems.”

The goals of the course, which ran Jan. 8-15, and the larger Acting in Time initiative are to understand the nature of these large-scale problems; to analyze the obstacles that prevent societies and their governments from acting; and to devise solutions that allow governments and citizens to act more effectively in specific instances. Even more important, it helps them to know how to organize themselves to act in time across the whole class of these problems.

By their nature, the problems and potential solutions are interdisciplinary.  The new January intersession provided a unique opportunity for collaboration among faculty from across the Harvard community to implement this course and to delve deeply into the issues, along with students from Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Guest faculty included Julio Frenk, Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health; Luis Moreno Ocampo, visiting lecturer, Harvard Law School; and Dan Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering.

So why is it that despite advance knowledge of pending crises that people don’t act?  What are the biggest impediments to addressing issues such as genocide, climate change, and pandemics?  Course discussions suggested a variety of reasons, including a lack of political will, uncertainty about the issues, and in particular a lack of urgency around issues like climate change that will have longer-term impacts; the “noise problem” that comes when there are so many issues that it becomes difficult to decide what is important; and “collective action problems,” whereby no one wants to share the cost when everyone shares the benefit.

For example, in one session with guest speaker Kenneth Hill, professor of the practice of global health, Harvard School of Public Health, and adjunct professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School, students examined the issue of demography.  They discussed how the decrease, increase, or leveling off of fertility rates in countries may affect the overall population, and the inherent challenges to society that ensue. Demographic shifts may appear to be slower to affect societies, with changes seen over generations, and they may not appear to have the same obvious negative ramifications as issues such as genocide and pandemics.

However, as demographics shift and populations increase or decrease as a result of fertility rates, there is likely to be a rapid shift in the nature of the workforce, with corresponding effects on who will receive pensions, Social Security, and other services needed by an aging population.  As Ellwood said, “It’s a very interesting and provocative future.”

Beginning next fall, Harvard College will resume enrolling a small number of undergraduate transfer students from other colleges and universities.  The College’s transfer program was temporarily suspended in 2008.

In a statement posted on the Admissions Office Web site, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith and Dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds announced that a recent review has determined that adequate residential space is now available to accommodate a small number of students in the coming academic year.

“Over the years, the transfer program has been a source of superb students who have gone on to make important contributions to the nation and the world,” Smith and Hammonds wrote.  “The College looks forward to welcoming a new class of transfer students this coming fall.”

“Residential space is essential to our ability to support a successful transfer program,” they noted.  “Harvard does not admit transfer students to nonresidential status because, in important respects, undergraduate education at Harvard College is residential in character. Students learn a great deal from the House experience, which complements activities in our classrooms and laboratories.”

In general, students who have completed at least one year, but not more than two years, of full-time study at another college or university are eligible to apply for transfer admission.  Harvard’s generous financial aid policies will apply to transfer students.

“Harvard seeks students with clearly developing academic interests that can be well served by Harvard,” said Marlene Vergara Rotner, director of transfer admissions.  “Students who apply should be enrolled in a challenging liberal arts curriculum that includes mathematics, science, and a foreign language.”

“Transfer admission closely mirrors that of freshman admissions, insofar as it looks beyond good grades and test scores and considers the qualities of creativity, intellectual curiosity, and independent thinking,” Rotner said.  “Other factors weighed in the evaluation of transfer candidates include significant nonacademic talents and personal qualities such as a capacity for leadership, energy, character, motivation, and a sense of responsibility.”

Additional information about the program is available online.

The Hasty Pudding Theatricals of Harvard University has chosen actress Anne Hathaway as the 2010 Woman of the Year.

Award festivities will be held Jan. 28 at 2:30 p.m. when Hathaway will lead a parade through the streets of Cambridge. Afterward, the president of the theatricals, Clifford Murray ’10, and the vice president of the cast, Derek Mueller ’10, will roast the actress and present her with her Pudding Pot at 3:15 p.m. at the New College Theatre, the Hasty Pudding’s historic home in the heart of Harvard Square since 1889. After the roast, several numbers from the Hasty Pudding Theatrical’s 162nd production, “Commie Dearest,” will be previewed at about 3:40 p.m., followed by a press conference at about 4:10 p.m.

The Man of the Year event will take place on Feb. 5.  The recipient of this year’s award will be announced next week.

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].

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

Continuing to emerge as one of Hollywood’s most engaging talents, Hathaway shot to stardom in films such as “The Devil Wears Prada.” She went on to receive nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her performance in Jonathan Demme’s recently acclaimed “Rachel Getting Married,” for which she was named best actress by the National Board of Review.

Hathaway has impressed audiences with her range as an actress, from her lauded dramatic performances in “Becoming Jane,” “Passengers,” and “Brokeback Mountain,” to her comedic turns in such films as “Get Smart,” “The Princess Diaries,” and “Ella Enchanted.” Hathaway also took to the New York stage last summer in Shakespeare in the Park’s production of  “Twelfth Night,” playing Viola.

Hathaway will next star in the ensemble romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day,” to be released in February, and as the White Queen alongside Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” hitting theaters in March.

Director Garry Marshall has said of her, “The multi-talented Hathaway is a combination of Julia Roberts, Audrey Hepburn, and Judy Garland.”

To purchase tickets to “Commie Dearest,” contact the New College box office at 617.495.5205. The show opens Feb. 5 at the Man of the Year ceremony and continues in Cambridge until March 7. Performances are each Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m.  The company then will travel 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 to 20 at 8 p.m.

Members of the Harvard community are invited to offer nominations and advice regarding the search for a new member of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s executive governing board. The search arises in light of the December announcement by James R. Houghton that he plans to step down from the Corporation at the end of the academic year, following 15 years of service. The search will be led by a joint committee of the governing boards including the following members:

• Drew Faust, president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History
• Leila Fawaz ’73 (overseer), Ph.D. ’79, Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and professor of history and of diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
• Paul Finnegan ’75 (overseer), M.B.A. ’82, co-CEO, Madison Dearborn Partners and former president of the Harvard Alumni Association
• Patricia King (Corporation member), J.D. ’69, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics, and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center
• Richard Meserve (overseer), J.D. ’75, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science and former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Robert Reischauer ’63 (Corporation member), president of the Urban Institute and former director of the Congressional Budget Office;
• James Rothenberg ’68 (Corporation member and ex-officio overseer), M.B.A. ’70, chairman, principal executive officer, and director of Capital Research and Management Company, and treasurer of Harvard University.

By charter, new members of the Corporation are elected by the President and Fellows with the counsel and consent of the Board of Overseers.

In addition to Faust, King, Reischauer, and Rothenberg, the current Corporation members include: James R. Houghton’58, M.B.A. ’62, chairman Emeritus of Corning Incorporated, who as noted above will step down in June; Nannerl O. Keohane, LL.D. (hon.) ’93, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and former president of Duke University and Wellesley College; and Robert E. Rubin ’60, co-chairman of the council and foreign relations and former secretary of the treasury.

Confidential advice and nominations may be directed by e-mail to [email protected] or by letter to the Corporation Search Committee, Loeb House, 17 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA, 02138.

For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students have applied for undergraduate admission.  Applications have doubled since 1994, and about half of the increase has come since the University implemented a series of financial aid initiatives over the past five years to ensure that a Harvard College education remains accessible and affordable to talented students from all economic backgrounds.

Two other factors also may have played a role in reaching this historic number.  Three years ago, Harvard eliminated its early admission program, leveling the playing field for financial aid applicants and providing more time each fall to recruit students.  At the same time, Harvard established the new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which, under the leadership of Dean Cherry Murray, is increasing the visibility of Harvard’s excellence in this area.  Applications from students interested in engineering have risen considerably more than applications as a whole.

“The continuing economic uncertainty, with its accompanying high unemployment and underemployment, has made affordability a crucial consideration for an unprecedented number of families,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid.  “The unwavering commitment of President Drew Faust, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith, and Dean of the College Evelynn Hammonds to ensure that Harvard remains open to talented students from across the economic spectrum sends a powerful message to those aspiring to higher education,” he said.

Harvard College’s financial aid program requires no contribution from families with annual incomes below $60,000, and about 10 percent of income from families with typical assets who make up to $180,000. The program eliminates loan requirements for all financial aid recipients.  Currently, 70 percent of students receive some form of financial aid.

Precise figures on the number of applicants are not yet available, since applications are still being processed.  The final total will likely be about 5 percent ahead of last year’s 29,114, or about 30,500.

This year’s results were achieved in the context of economic constraints that ultimately led to considerable change and innovation.  Like much of Harvard, the Admissions and Financial Aid Office was operating with fewer resources, after trimming its unrestricted operating budget by 15 percent.  “Faced with this challenge, our staff worked together to develop new ways of addressing our most important priorities,” said Fitzsimmons. “The changes we have made will make us more effective now and in the future at reaching out to the nation’s and the world’s best students.”

With a staff that is 10 percent  smaller, a travel budget reduced by half, and the replacement of several much larger publications with a single eight-page brochure, the office has made sweeping advances in its use of electronic communications.  The Web site, message boards, e-mail, and Internet conferencing outreach by staff have been greatly enhanced.  In addition, alumni and alumnae redoubled their efforts to contact students and schools in their local areas.  “We are extremely grateful to our alumni and alumnae for taking on a greater role in visiting schools, attending college nights, and talking with students and families,” said Marlyn E. McGrath, director of admissions.  “Of course they will also interview a record number of candidates this year, providing assistance in our decision-making process and building relationships with admitted candidates that can lead to their matriculation here,” she said.

The Admissions Office relied on its nearly 20-year-old joint-travel program with Duke University, Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University to visit with prospective students, their parents, and guidance counselors in 120 cities.  A similar program continued in 20 cities, teaming with Princeton University and the University of Virginia.  The Admissions Office maintained its full support of the Undergraduate Minority Recruiting Program and the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, student organizations that aid recruitment throughout the year.

The office also is using new technologies and operating procedures to handle the processing and evaluation of the record number of applicants.  Documents — such as applications and counselor and teacher reports — are scanned electronically with an imaging system, ensuring easy recovery and making them instantly available to application readers and to admissions committee selection meetings.  Improved Web site services for alumni and alumnae enable applicant-interview reports to be submitted electronically and made available immediately as well.

Similar administrative and technological advancements make it possible for financial aid officers to serve the larger number of students now receiving assistance at Harvard.  Only a few years ago, about 3,000 of Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates were on scholarship, compared with 4,000 now, including 63 percent of freshmen.  “Better technological resources allow our financial aid officers more time to counsel and advise students and their families with the personal attention and care they need,” said Sarah C. Donahue, director of financial aid.  “Each student on financial aid has a financial aid officer to contact with questions or concerns.”

Beyond the increase in numbers noted earlier, there are relatively few differences in the composition of this year’s applicant pool compared with last year’s. The gender breakdown remains about 50/50, and minority numbers are much the same (though still incomplete because some coding takes place during the reading process). Major academic preferences mirror last year’s, except for the larger increase in engineering, as well as associated increases in the physical sciences and computer science.  The geographical distribution is close to last year’s, with larger-than-average increases in the western United States and abroad.

Admissions officers are now reading applications in preparation for selection meetings, the careful, individualized process that begins on Jan. 30 and concludes March 20.  Notification letters to all applicants will be mailed on April 1, and e-mails will be sent later that day to those — usually about 95 percent — who request that additional notification.

“A visiting program for admitted students is scheduled for April 24 through 26,” said Valerie Beilenson, program director. Admitted students have until May 1 to make their final college selections.

Harvard University will open a free skating rink in Allston on Friday (Jan. 15). The 40-by-60-foot temporary indoor rink will be open to the public Fridays and weekends through March 28.

The Harvard Allston Skating Rink at 168 Western Ave. is a way to bring community-oriented uses to the University’s Allston properties while it looks for building tenants. The rink is part of the University’s commitment to strengthen the active stewardship of its properties and improve community vitality in Allston.

“As we seek a long-term use for this building, we wanted to open up this space to the community in a creative way,” said Christine Heenan, vice president of Harvard Public Affairs and Communications. “We share the neighborhood’s desire for places that can bring the community together.”

The indoor rink is housed in a former garage. An adjacent, glass-lined showroom has been transformed into the rink’s lounge.

During the week, staff from Harvard Real Estate Services, the Allston Development Group, and Harvard Public Affairs and Communications put the final touches on the space — hanging lights, decorating walls, and arranging furniture.

Starting Saturday (Jan. 16), visitors can go skating, watch skaters from the heated lounge, or get refreshments. Allston residents, along with Harvard and local officials, will celebrate the rink’s opening on Friday from 5 to 9 p.m.

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

In the future, 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 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 18), from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and during Boston’s school vacation week (Feb. 15-19), from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

A robust new technique for screening drugs’ effects on zebrafish behavior is pointing Harvard University scientists toward unexpected compounds and pathways that may govern sleep and wakefulness in humans.

Among the scientists’ more intriguing findings, described in the journal Science, are that various anti-inflammatory agents in the immune system, long known to induce sleep during infection, may also shape normal sleep/wake cycles.

The new research identifies several compounds with surprising effects on sleep and wakefulness in zebrafish. But it also suggests that despite the evolutionary gap between zebrafish and mammals, they may be strikingly similar in the neurochemistry underlying their rest/wake cycles, meaning that these same compounds may prove effective in people.

“Many current drug discovery efforts rely on screening conducted outside the body,” said Alexander F. Schier, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “Although such screens can be successful, they cannot recreate the complex neuroscience of entire organisms. These limitations are particularly acute for behavior-altering drugs, because brain activity cannot be modeled in a Petri dish or test tube.”

Together with postdoctoral fellows Jason Rihel and David Prober, Schier and other collaborators used their automated screening technique to monitor sleep and wakefulness in zebrafish for two days following administration of 5,600 compounds, creating more than 60,000 distinct behavioral profiles. By applying clustering algorithms to organize the molecules, the researchers identified 463 drug candidates that significantly altered rest and wakefulness, many of which had not previously been known to have such effects.

“For instance, we found that a diverse set of anti-inflammatory compounds increased wakefulness during the day, with much less effect at night,” Schier said. “Although these compounds have long been known to promote sleep during infection, this is an indication that the molecules that regulate the immune system may also play a role in setting normal daytime activity levels.”

Anti-inflammatory agents found to affect sleep/wake cycles included cytokines, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and the immunosuppressant cyclosporine. Schier and colleagues also found calcium channel inhibitors that increased rest with minimal effects on waking behavior and a class of potassium channel blockers found in a wide variety of drugs — including antimalarials, antipsychotics, and antihistamines — that selectively increased wakefulness at night without affecting total rest.

“Behavioral profiling reveals nuanced relationships between drugs and their targets,” Schier said. “It can characterize large classes of compounds and reveal differences in effectiveness, potential side effects, and combinatorial properties that might not otherwise be detected.”

Schier and his colleagues plan to expand their zebrafish screening to include many more uncharacterized compounds and to assay behaviors that, in humans, are associated with psychiatric disorders.

Schier’s co-authors on the Science paper are Jason Rihel, David A. Prober, Anthony Arvanites, Kelvin Lam, Steven Zimmerman, Sumin Jang, and Lee L. Rubin, all at Harvard; Stephen J. Haggerty of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); David Kokel of MGH; and Randall T. Peterson of the Broad Institute, MGH, and Harvard Medical School.

The work was funded by the Life Sciences Research Foundation, the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.

Mathematician Sophie Morel, who works at the intersection of algebraic geometry, representation theory, and number theory, has been named professor of mathematics in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She also has been appointed to the Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship at the University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Morel was previously affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where she continues as a research fellow. The new appointments took effect Dec. 15.

“Sophie Morel is among the world’s most promising young mathematicians working in number theory, algebraic geometry, and representation theory,” said Jeremy Bloxham, dean of science in FAS. “Her doctoral thesis was extremely demanding and stunningly original, solving a problem that had been intractable for more than 20 years.”

“Sophie Morel will enrich the Radcliffe Institute and FAS communities, and Harvard more broadly, with her groundbreaking research and discoveries in mathematics,” said Radcliffe Institute Dean Barbara J. Grosz. “We are grateful to Radcliffe alumnae for enabling the recruitment of a distinguished scholar who embodies Radcliffe’s longstanding traditions of excellence and achievement.”

Morel’s work focuses at the heart of the Langlands problem, an area of number theory and representation theory that has seen dramatic progress over the past few decades.

Morel holds degrees from Université Paris-Sud, which awarded her a Ph.D. in 2005. From 2005 to 2009 she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute, an affiliation she will maintain until 2011.

Professorships at the Radcliffe Institute are designed to bring a succession of eminent individuals to the institute and to attract outstanding faculty to tenured Harvard positions. The Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship, endowed by alumnae and friends of Radcliffe, was established so that new tenured FAS professors could spend four semesters at the institute during their first five years at the University. As the second Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Morel will work among the institute’s community of fellows.

Harvard chemistry professor Sunney Xie was one of six recipients of the 2009 E.O. Lawrence Award for his outstanding contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its missions.

Specifically, Xie will be honored for his innovations in nonlinear Raman microscopy and highly sensitive vibrational imaging, his scientific leadership in establishing the field of single-molecule biophysical chemistry, and his seminal work in enzyme dynamics and live cell gene expression. Xie is in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who announced the six winners on Dec. 16, said, “The contributions made by these researchers to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States are wide-ranging and meaningful. I congratulate the winners and look forward to their discoveries still to come.”

The award recipients will receive a gold medal, a citation, and $50,000.  They will be honored at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., early this year.

The Lawrence Award was established in 1959 to honor the memory of Ernest Orlando Lawrence who invented the cyclotron (a particle accelerator), and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore, Calif., are named.

For a full list of winners, visit the Department of Energy’s Web site.

People who are chronically sleep-deprived may think they’re caught up after a 10-hour night of sleep, but new research shows that although they’re near-normal when they awake, their ability to function deteriorates markedly as night falls…

Staying up for 24 hours straight is bad enough, but the study shows that if you do that on top of having gotten less than six hours of sleep a night for two to three weeks, your reaction times and abilities are 10 times worse than they would have been just pulling an all-nighter, says Daniel Cohen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study in Wednesday’s Science Translational Medicine…

Read more here

A catastrophic earthquake in Haiti Tuesday (Jan. 12) sent tremors all the way to Boston, prompting rapid, broad-based medical and humanitarian assistance from Harvard University and its affiliates.

Two faculty members from Harvard Medical School (HMS) are traveling today (Jan. 13) to Haiti, where they will join others already engaged in rescue operations, medical care, and relief efforts.

En route is Joia Mukherjee, medical director of Harvard-affiliated Partners In Health (PIH), a not-for-profit aid group with community-based clinics in Haiti and eight other countries.

Also on the way is David Walton, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who is associated with PIH and is an instructor in medicine at HMS. In 2008, he helped to set up a 54-bed hospital in La Colline in Haiti’s rugged Central Plateau.

Mukherjee and Walton will help medical and aid efforts in the shattered Caribbean island nation. Once they report back, PIH will send the appropriate supplies and personnel to provide relief.

Already laboring in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital near the quake’s epicenter, is physician Louise Ivers, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, who used e-mail earlier today to broadcast an urgent plea for help. “Port-au-Prince is devastated,” her e-mail said, “lots of deaths. SOS, SOS. … Temporary field hospital … needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Ivers is clinical director in Haiti for PIH, which opened its first clinic in rural Haiti in 1985 and has since opened eight others. PIH also has community-based medical operations in Peru, Russia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. The clinics are staffed by local medical personnel as well as by Harvard faculty and students.

All faculty and students involved with PIH in Haiti are reported safe, said Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at HMS.

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Haiti is an “overwhelming tragedy,” he said. “We all share in the shock and grief over [Tuesday’s] devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Our hearts go out to the millions who have been affected, both in Haiti and closer to home.”

Flier also expressed concern that some members of the Harvard community “may be experiencing personal losses, and we want to offer them our compassion and to provide them with the support they may need.” Members of the Harvard community who would like counseling services or referrals are asked to call Harvard’s Employee Assistance Program at 877.327.4278 or to contact their Human Resources representatives.

Other Havard-related relief efforts are also rolling out. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), a University group of disaster-relief specialists, is working with nongovernmental organizations to assess immediate medical needs and other required assistance, according to spokesman Vincenzo Bollettino. HHI will offer regular updates on its Web site and on Twitter concerning Harvard’s relief partners and affiliated programs and hospitals, he said.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital has dispatched an emergency response team, including HHI’s director of education, Hilarie Cranmer, who is a physician and clinical instructor. The team will work with United Nations and Dominican officials to address the immediate needs of displaced people.

HHI fellow and physician Miriam Aschkenasy, a public health specialist at Oxfam America, is also working on Haitian relief. HHI is in touch with Alejandro Baez, a physician and former faculty member at Brigham and Women’s who now runs disaster services in the nearby Dominican Republic. They will assess the needs for further disaster response.

PIH’s main hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, is in Cange, about 20 rugged miles outside Port-au-Prince. It experienced a strong shock from Tuesday’s powerful quake, but no major damage or injuries.

The hospital and its satellite clinics — already serving a flood of medical evacuees from the capital — are run by Zanmi Lasante, PIH’s sister organization, which means “Partners in Health” in Haitian Creole.

The earthquake, measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale, was centered 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince and has affected one in every three Haitians, about 3 million people. Many thousands of Haitians are believed dead.

“The earthquake has destroyed much of the already fragile and overburdened infrastructure in the most densely populated part of the country,” according to the PIH Web site. “A massive and immediate international response is needed to provide food, water, shelter, and medical supplies for tens of thousands of people.”

Communications throughout Haiti were disrupted. In theory, Zanmi Lasante has Internet access and cell phone communication via satellite.

HMS student Thierry Pauyo is working at Zanmi Lasante. But the Harvard School of Public Health does not have any students in Haiti on regular winter session travel courses, nor are there students registered who come from there. Harvard University does have a student from Haiti, said Sharon Ladd, director of the Harvard International Office. The student’s immediate family is reported safe.

Zanmi Lasante means “Partners In Health” in Haitian Kreyol (Creole). Its main site — now a vital center of stability in a devastated land — is one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti and the only provider of comprehensive primary care.

It has a 104-bed hospital with two operating rooms, adult and pediatric inpatient wards, an infectious-disease center, an outpatient clinic, a women’s health clinic, ophthalmology and general medicine clinics, a laboratory, a pharmaceutical warehouse, a Red Cross blood bank, radiographic services, and a dozen schools.

Zanmi Lasante employs about 90 community Haitian health workers and serves an estimated 500,000 people in the Central Plateau.

Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) has received a new shipment of H1N1 influenza vaccine and will distribute it at a clinic open to all members of the Harvard community under age 65.

The clinic will be held Jan. 19 from noon to 3 p.m. in Monks Library at HUHS in the Holyoke Center.

Flu season is not over, and HUHS would like to remind students, faculty, and staff to remain vigilant about monitoring and combating flulike illnesses. The best way to stay healthy is to practice good hygiene. Wash your hands often with soap and water or hand sanitizer, such as Purell. Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue or use the crook of your arm when you cough or sneeze, to protect others. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth to avoid spreading infection.

Public health officials have indicated that HUHS will receive additional shipments of vaccine at regular intervals, so additional clinics could be scheduled shortly.

More information about H1N1 and the vaccine can be found at www.harvard.edu/h1n1. For information about the clinics.

A group of visiting experts and Harvard scholars offered a grim prognosis for the success of the health care reform proposals before Congress during a symposium at Harvard Medical School (HMS) on Monday (Jan. 11).

Even as House and Senate lawmakers work toward reconciling the health care bills they passed late last year and submit a unified plan for President Obama’s approval, the panel, hosted by HMS and its Department of Health Care Policy, predicted a tough and eventually unsuccessful road ahead for the effort.

According to the participants, an ineffective governmental system, a flawed funding structure leading to massive debt, and a widening government involvement in personal health care decisions are just some of the problems that are likely to doom the reform proposals.

“I am very pessimistic about what you are going to be able to do,” said Allan Detsky, a professor at the University of Toronto.

The lone Canadian on the panel, Detsky, a Harvard-trained doctor, argued that the main problem facing health care reform in the United States involves the country’s governmental structure. He said it is far easier to approve legislation under a parliamentary system such as that in Canada, where the executive and legislative branches are “always together” when there is a majority government. Such alignment leads more readily to legislation, such as the comprehensive 1984 Canada Health Act that mandated universal coverage.

“We have party discipline. The caucus will debate the policy, the cabinet will decide what the policy is going to be, the prime minister puts the bill out there, and if you are a member of the ruling party and you don’t vote for it, you are kicked out. That’s the way it works,” said Detsky. “We have a government that can do things … your government system prevents you from doing things.”

The congressional health care plans are “not on the right track,” don’t acknowledge the need for trade-offs, and leave difficult decisions about how to contain costs to future generations, said Daniel Kessler, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“The current bill confuses access with insurance, which is going to lead us to a world of unsustainable deficits, very high implicit marginal tax rates, and increased government controls of people’s personal decisions in exchange for health benefits that are at best uncertain. It has the seeds of some successful cost-containment policies, which is good, but unfortunately it pushes the hard choices on that front off to the future.”

The president and CEO of the Game Show Network seemed an unlikely panelist. But a saddening experience with the U.S. health care system left David Goldhill with a personal perspective to add to the discussion. He began exploring the health care industry in depth after his elderly father died from an infection contracted in 2005 while receiving hospital care. Goldhill, who recently authored the article “How American Health Care Killed My Father” in The Atlantic magazine, argued for a return to having the patient act as consumer.

“What I got out of that experience was a realization that, in this most important service in my father’s life, he wasn’t really the customer of the hospital. Medicare was.”

Goldhill’s recommendations for reform included establishing a national catastrophic policy, requiring that people save for their health care and pay for part of it, and drawing consumers, who “need to be more empowered,” back into the system. He argued that the current congressional bills, which offer subsidies to expand insurance coverage and top-down systems of cost control, “haven’t worked before,” and “I am skeptical it’s going to work now.”

There was one optimistic voice in the debate. Harvard’s David Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, noted that the plans introduce helpful changes, including reforms that bundle payments for patients, once scattered across hospitals and among doctors, into one place. They also incorporate performance payments into Medicare by only rewarding providers who deliver solid service, and offer a holistic approach to health care, one that oversees the transition of patients from one form of care to another and helps to navigate them through “the most complicated system of any industry in the economy.”

Yet even Cutler, who was senior health care adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, framed his optimism with caution.

“This is a path, not a leap. What we have to do is reform the health care system over the next decade, not reform it overnight.”

Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of HMS and Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine, and Barbara J. McNeil, Ridley Watts Professor of Health Care Policy and head of the Department of Health Care Policy at HMS, moderated the symposium. Michael Chernew, professor of health care policy at HMS, William Sahlman, the Dimitri V. D’Arbeloff-MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Leonard Schaeffer, professor at the University of Southern California, also took part in the discussion.

Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest.

Harvard University today (Jan. 12) announced its presence on foursquare, a new location-based, mobile social networking application. The service, which is accessible from smartphones and other mobile devices, enables students and visitors to explore the campus and surrounding neighborhoods while sharing information about their favorite places.

In addition to creating an up-to-date online rating guide of stores, restaurants, businesses, and other venues throughout Harvard Square, foursquare users can also employ the application as a game, in which they earn points, and ultimately acquire coveted foursquare “badges.” Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest. Users who have visited a predetermined number of sites on the campus will be awarded the Harvard Yard badge on their foursquare profiles.

The application turns social networking into a running competition by creating incentives for users to explore neighborhoods, discover new venues, and make recommendations to the entire foursquare network. Individuals who download the free app can “check in” using their phones from different venues to earn badges and points. Updates and posted tips and suggestions can be shared across other social networking and microblogging sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

One popular element of foursquare is its competition to become “mayor” of various locations and venues. If you check in more frequently than anyone else, you claim bragging rights as the “mayor” of that venue. You can also earn extra points by being the first to post a visit to a new location, by making frequent visits, or by sharing new information about locations or activities.

“Harvard is more than classrooms and buildings. It is an interconnected community of people, ideas, and experiences, and we are actively pursuing ways to enhance those connections,” said Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications services for Harvard Public Affairs and Communications. “We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use.”

“Universities are places of such incredible talent and energy,” said Dennis Crowley, foursquare’s co-founder. “And that is why we’re excited about Harvard’s participation and the potential for foursquare to bring people together.”

See more information on foursquare or Harvard’s page on foursquare.

Kicking off Ivy League conference play, better known as the 14-game tournament, the Harvard Crimson men’s basketball team put together an emphatic 76-47 win over the Dartmouth Big Green on Saturday (Jan. 9).

The Big Green, who saw head coach Jerry Dunn tender his resignation the day before in a rare midseason departure, fought with the Crimson early on, and actually held a 12-11 lead through the first seven minutes.

But after Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker called a 30-second timeout to settle his team down, the Crimson put together a 13-3 run in a five-and-a-half-minute span to go up by nine points. The Big Green never challenged again.

“We came out with good pressure defensively from the beginning. We just turned the ball over and went for steals and didn’t get them,” said sophomore guard Oliver McNally, who had four assists and a steal in 15 minutes of play. “Once we took [a few] stupid mistakes out, we started to settle down and build our lead.”

Sophomore forward Keith Wright, who led all scorers with a career-high 22 points, went 11 for 16 from the floor. He also pulled down six rebounds and blocked three shots.

“The coaches really allow me to feel comfortable,” said Wright. “I worked a lot on my mid-range jumper this summer, and it’s all paying off.”

Harvard co-captain Jeremy Lin ’10, the Crimson’s leading scorer, was held to just 11 points on the day, but he made up for his low scoring output by dishing out five assists and recording six steals. At one point in the second half, Lin had four steals in a minute and a half, one of them capped by a thunderous dunk that brought the 1,500 fans at Lavietes Pavilion to their feet.

“It’s a nice opportunity to win a conference game when our best player [Lin] doesn’t have an absolutely tremendous offensive day,” said Amaker. “I think that says a lot for our bench and our balance.”

Freshman guard Christian Webster, who shot five for six from the field, added 12 points for the Crimson. As a team, Harvard shot a healthy 55 percent.

“We have a lot of weapons that offensively allow us to be a dangerous team,” said Amaker.

Providing a defensive spark off the bench was freshman forward Kyle Casey, who, after coming off career highs in scoring and rebounding with 27 and eight against Santa Clara, had an outstanding defensive effort, with four blocks.

“You can’t key in on one person with our team,” said Amaker. “It’s a nice feeling for us to have — that we have other options that can pick up the slack.”

The win was Harvard’s fifth in a row and gave the Crimson a record of 12-3 (1-0 Ivy League), as the team continues the best start in its 99-year history.

“A lot of us are really banged up, but we have that motivation, that drive to get a banner up,” said Wright. “We’re working really hard.”

The Crimson now take a two-week break before embarking on a three-game road trip against Dartmouth (Jan. 23), Columbia (Jan. 29), and Cornell (Jan. 30).