Alexandra Topic News Today

Epidemiology assistant professor Michael Mina discussed the threats that some variants of the coronavirus may pose — despite the fact that tens of millions of people in the U.S. are now fully-vaccinated — during a Harvard School of Public Health Event on Tuesday. In the forum jointly held by the School of Public Health and The World, a media organization, Mina said that though “not all variants are worrying” — and many are a “normal part of virus biology” â€...

Former Harvard Astronomy professor and Adams House Master William Liller ’48 couldn’t take his eyes off the stars. In the early 1970s, Liller could be found early in the morning at Harvard College Observatory measuring the sizes of stars, putting in “more than his share of the work” each day to aid his graduate students, according to William R. Forman, one of Liller’s Ph.D. advisees. “You would get there at 10 … and there would be this long list of plates that...

Bernard Lown, whose life’s work spanned from pivotal breakthroughs in medicine to humanitarian efforts against nuclear war that won him the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, died at age 99. Lown died Feb. 16 of complications from congestive heart failure, according to his son Fredric Lown, after a decades-long academic career serving as a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lown is survived by his three children, Fredri...

When Nina C. de W. Ingrao taught Spanish, she stood in a Boylston Hall classroom “almost like the director of a symphony with this absolute grace, moving her hands in very precise motions to orchestrate grammatical exercises in the classroom,” according to Romance Languages and Literature professor Luis M. Girón-Negrón ’88. Girón-Negrón described moments like this — Ingrao “day in and day out in the classroom, doing what she did best without force, without d...

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of terrified New Yorkers fled the city, which had fast become an epicenter for the virus. Alexander Goldfarb had the opposite response. The doctor immediately drove to Queens, New York, to treat patients at Elmhurst Hospital, which had been decimated by the virus and suffered a shortage of healthcare providers. He worked at the hospital for a week straight, intubating around six patients every night. “All of this was a great risk to himself,...

During a section discussion in the famed Harvard course “Justice” this fall, Suuba M. Demby ’22 remembers her teaching fellow — Thomas B. “Tommy” Raskin — asking, “Shouldn’t we all be doing as much as we can to help those less fortunate than us?” What set Raskin apart, though, was that he did not just talk about creating a more just world, he lived his life in pursuit of that goal, Demby said. For that reason, when she learned a few weeks later ...

With a dedication to scholarship and an innate ability to connect with others, Harvard professor emeritus Ezra F. Vogel will be remembered for not just “how many books he wrote, but how many people he touched,” his son, Steven K. Vogel, said. Vogel, who served as Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, and was described by his colleagues as a visionary in East Asian studies, died on Dec. 20 at age 90 of complications from cancer surgery. His work, centered around Eas...