News Archive

May 2012

Computer scientist Ryan Adams wins DARPA Young Faculty Award

$300,000 grant will support work on building new computational tools that exploit statistical inference

Sharing design, in all its forms

Massive fair highlights hundreds of great ideas that emerged in courses at SEAS this year

Crime probe

SEAS students help police assess anti-gang tool (Harvard Gazette)

David C. Parkes awarded Harvard College Professorship

Parkes one of five rewarded for excellence in teaching

New undergraduate S.B. degrees in EE and ME approved

Harvard College students now have the option of pursuing Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering S.B. degrees

Using Green Beret tactics to win peace back home

ES 96 course tackles real-world engineering challenges in Springfield, Mass. (New York Times)

April 2012

Loncar and Vase win 2012 Levenson Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Electrical engineer and head TF praised for devotion to instruction in the College

"Warming hole" delayed climate change over eastern United States

50-year model suggests regional pollution obscured a global trend

Slicing mitotic spindle with lasers, nanosurgeons unravel old pole-to-pole theory

Quantitative research shows key organelle of cell division to be more complex than previously thought

Grad student Gairik Sachdeva wins Link Fellowship

Will use the award to support his work on synthetic metabolic control for biofuel production

Sujata Bhatia wins Marquand Award

Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies lauded for her exceptional advising and counseling of Harvard students

James R. Rice awarded the Harry Fielding Reid Medal

Award is the highest honor granted by the Seismological Society of America

How to become an expert tightrope walker

Applied mathematicians take on the science of balance, determine the ideal amount of slack for a slackline (ScienceNOW)

Radhika Nagpal approved for promotion to tenured full professor

Computer scientist applies inspirations from biological multi-agent systems to computer and robotic systems

SEAS receives grants from the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching

From assessing hands-on learning to computer vision analysis to water policy, the awards highlight innovative pedagogy

Elegant entanglement

Research a key step towards quantum computers (Harvard Gazette)

Zhiming Kuang approved for promotion to tenured full professor

Climate scientist aims to understand the convective forces driving El Niño and the South Asian monsoons

Tumor study reveals size limitations for new drugs

Normalizing tumor blood vessels improves delivery of only the smallest nanomedicines

Bubble, bubble, without toil or trouble

In the 1850s, a professor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School invented baking powder, a replacement for yeast (Harvard Gazette)

A data-driven war on crime

Students in ES 96 use scientific tools to inform a unique combination of military tactics and police work (Nature)

James R. Rice wins Louis Néel Medal

Mechanics and geosciences expert honored for seminal contributions to strain localization, poromechanics, and friction

Green Carpet Awards honor Abernathy and other SEAS members

Harvard's Office for Sustainability to honor Abernathy's lifelong commitment to energy-efficient practices and celebrate staff and students for their green efforts

Robotic design and production as easy as 1-2-3

NSF grant funds team of researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Penn to create design and print-your-own robot technology

Socially-minded projects abound at I3 start-up competition

Fifth annual Harvard College Innovation Challenge recognizes top student entrepreneurs with six awards

Robert J. Wood approved for promotion to tenured full professor

Leader in the design, fabrication, control, and analysis of biologically inspired microrobots and soft robots collaborates across campus

March 2012

Nurturing the seeds of innovation

From Cambridge to Silicon Valley and back again, Harvard’s resources and networks help students turn ideas into social change

"Buckliball," an engineered buckling structure, advances folding materials

Inspired by a toy, the collapsible buckliball represents a new class of 3D, origami-like structures

Exporting America's future

An op-ed by Venkatesh Narayanamurti on the future of American manufacturing and innovation (Los Angeles Times)

How to teach the teachers

A Q&A on innovative pedagogy with Eric Mazur (Harvard Crimson)

I3 competition heats up

A look at the 19 teams competing for $50K & 12 months of free office space in Harvard’s I3 Challenge (BostInno)

Marko Loncar approved for promotion to tenured full professor

Expert on nano-optics will further strengthen SEAS' teaching and research in electrical engineering

Engineer Robert J. Wood to receive NSF’s Alan T. Waterman Award

NSF’s most prestigious award recognizes outstanding early-career research

Metamaterials may advance with new femtosecond laser technique

"Lucky" combination of chemicals and laser pulses enables high-resolution, 3D patterning for futuristic optical materials

David C. Bell appointed Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Electron Microscopy

Physicist also manages the imaging and analysis facility at Harvard's Center for Nanoscale Systems

Joanna Aizenberg talks "extreme biomimetics" at TEDxBigApple

Lively video from the February event describes biologically inspired engineering of new materials (TEDxBigApple)

February 2012

Reduction in U.S. carbon emissions attributed to cheaper natural gas

Lower emission from power plants in 2009 was driven by competitive pricing of natural gas versus coal

Metal nanoparticles shine with customizable color

A new way to create and control color has implications for display screens and security tags

Donhee Ham named an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer

Solid-State Circuits Society honors electrical engineer known for his work in plasmonic circuits and solid-state and biological systems interfaces

In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life

Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices

Katia Bertoldi wins Faculty Early Career Development Award

NSF CAREER Award to support mechanical engineer's aim to create a new class of responsive origami-like materials

"Flipped classroom" teaching model gains an online community

The Peer Instruction Network, a new global social site for interactive teaching, launches at Harvard

Street smarts

Students develop hurricane response plans on Cambridge roads, gaining practical experience in computational science

SEAS graduate student awarded Facebook Fellowship

Gregory Malecha aims to use the fellowship to radically improve both the efficiency and the trustworthiness of modern software

Harvard researchers to receive high-performance computing grants

Projects will advance both basic science and applications, and accelerate development of exascale computing systems

For cutting-edge biomedical materials, try corn

Winter mini-course explores plant-derived materials for wound closures, drug delivery, and tissue engineering

January 2012

Designing in the human context

IDEO workshop at SEAS pushes the limits of engineering design into psychology, marketing, and freewheeling creativity

Physics at 2,500 feet

Sharing his lifelong passion for flight, CNS manager T. Fettah Kosar teaches aerodynamics from the cockpit

Early-stage venture fund launches in Cambridge, Mass.

New resource will serve local students and alumni worldwide

Mighty mesh

Extracellular matrix identified as source of spreading in biofilms

Femtosecond laser research wins SPIE Green Photonics Award

Members of Eric Mazur's applied physics laboratory honored for innovative, energy-efficient research in photonics

Stephen Chong wins Air Force Young Investigator Award

Computer scientist honored for his work on integrating programming language and operating system information security mechanisms

Hosang Yoon and Kitty Yeung win 2012 Analog Devices design award

Ph.D. candidates from Donhee Ham's lab lauded for "academic excellence and research promise"

Robert Howe named IEEE Fellow

Biorobotics expert honored for contributions to the electrical and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession

Harvard Tweets from Silicon Valley

Real-time updates and commentary on the week-long Harvard trip to Palo Alto, California

What would pristine air mean for the climate?

Loretta Mickley, senior research fellow in atmospheric chemistry, asks what would happen if pollution and other aerosols were eliminated (NASA Blogs)

Reading life’s building blocks

Harvard researchers develop tools to speed DNA sequencing (Harvard Gazette)