News from Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School news citations for May 15, 2012

Samari left Togo as a young man, determined to pursue his education free of the threats and violence that plagued the college he had attended back home.

Jamie Oliver, the internationally acclaimed chef of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” will be honored by the Harvard School of Public Health for his substantial achievements in working to end the childhood obesity epidemic. Oliver has campaigned to provide schoolchildren in the U.S. and U.K. with whole, freshly cooked food and has inspired millions of people around the world to become passionate about preparing delicious meals from scratch.

Oliver will receive the School’s prestigious Healthy Cup Award at a sold-out May 22 lecture and reception at the Joseph P. Martin Conference Center, 77 Ave. Louis Pasteur, Boston, at 4:30 p.m.

Noted neuroscience professor S. Allen Counter was appointed Knight of the Order of the Polar Star First Class by Carl XVI Gustaf, king of Sweden. The appointment is made only by the king in recognition of personal services to Sweden. It is a Swedish order of chivalry that was created by King Frederick I of Sweden on Feb. 23, 1748. Counter has served as consul general of Sweden in Boston and New England since 2004.

“Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War,” a book by Megan Kate Nelson, has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press. Nelson is a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard. Her book is being lauded as the first to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change.

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) announced it will fund 23 students through experiential learning projects this summer. The students, selected as Summer Fellows in Innovation, HKS Indonesia Student Research Grantees, and Vietnam Program Interns, will collectively receive $106,000 in support to defray research, travel, and living costs.

“The Ash Center is committed to supporting students throughout their time at HKS and best equipping them with the tools to succeed in the world of practice upon graduation,” said Tony Saich, director of the center. “These summer immersive experiences are an important component of the HKS curriculum, and allow students to actively apply the theory, ideas, and scholarship they have learned in the classroom while gaining real-world career experience.”

For a list of the grantees.

The Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard announced the recipients of the 2012 Norman Podhoretz Prize in Jewish Studies and the 2012 Selma and Lewis Weinstein Prize in Jewish Studies.

Samuel Evan Milner ’13 won the Podhoretz Prize for his essay, “To Exercise Firm Leadership: Conservative Judaism’s Directives on Civil Rights,” and Daniel Joseph Frim ’14 won for his essay, “The ‘Folk,’ Folk Knowledge, and Folk Wisdom as Discursive Categories in the Babylonian Talmud.”

Leah Reis-Dennis ’13 and Yair Rosenberg ’12 both won this year’s Selma and Lewis Weinstein Prize in Jewish Studies. Reis-Dennis’ entry was “Halfway to Respectability: A Jewish Prostitute in the Progressive Era U.S.” and Rosenberg’s entry was “Einstein and the Rabbi – Conversations with Chaim Tchernowitz on the Talmud and Zionism.”

A new research paper suggests that public pension funds are “dangerously underfunded to the extent that their assets are unable to meet future liabilities without either outsize investment returns or huge cash infusions”.

Harvard Kennedy School news citations for May 14, 2012

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) announced the recipients of its annual Challenges to Democracy Grant program. In its inaugural year, this grant program devotes $350,000 in support of HKS faculty as well as doctoral and postdoctoral student research that explores both the ideals of democracy and its often-imperfect practice in the real world. This year, the Ash Center will fund five HKS faculty research projects; four HKS faculty-led seminars; two doctoral fellowships for HKS and other Harvard graduate students; and one postdoctoral fellowship.

For the full list of grantees, visit http://bit.ly/ashcenter.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) elected additional members at its annual meeting on April 30. Harvard professors Susan Athey, Department of Economics, and Xiaowei Zhuang, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Harvard’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, were among the 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,152 and the total number of foreign associates to 430. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

In January, the NAS honored 17 individuals, including four Harvard faculty members: Michael J. Hopkins, Andrew H. Knoll, Jonathan B. Losos, and Jason P. Mitchell.

View the complete list from the April election.

 

Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) say they have uncovered a way that animals detect pathogens in their bodies that allows their systems to respond before cellular damage occurs.

Scientists already know of two ways that the body detects disease-causing germs. In one, our innate immune system is pre-programmed to recognize certain pathogens before they do damage. In another, our bodies are on the lookout for free-floating molecules normally found inside cells, a sign that a cell has been damaged and spilled its contents.

Now, Justine Melo, a research fellow, and Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), have reported in the journal Cell that animals can also detect disruptions in important cellular processes that occur before the cell itself dies, which allows an earlier immune response that can potentially rescue the cell.

Melo said that the research further fleshes out how the innate immune system recognizes pathogens, a key research question. Innate immunity is the older and less well-known of the body’s two immune systems. The other, the adaptive immune system, allows us to “learn” to attack pathogens after being vaccinated or infected with ailments like chicken pox.

“It provides a new mechanism of pathogen detection by organisms,” Melo said. The mechanism “allows us to defend ourselves against the myriad molecular approaches that pathogens take.”

Melo’s research concerns how animals make choices about which foods to eat and which to avoid. Because such decision-making is critical to the survival of all animals, she is able to explore its roots in a simple animal model, the roundworm C. elegans.

“It’s so fundamental to life, we believe the mechanism that worms use to decide if food is pathogenic or not is the same mechanism humans use,” Melo said. “When you put the animals down on a plate of pseudomonas [a pathogen of worms and humans], how do they know to run away?”

C. elegans are normally voracious feeders, Melo said, and will rarely leave a food source. Melo and Ruvkun took advantage of this fact for their work, in which they used genetic techniques to disrupt cellular processes and then looked for behavioral cues from the worms to see if there was an effect.

Specifically, they used interfering RNA (RNAi), which when ingested by the worms turns off genes for specific cellular processes. They planted the RNAi inside the worms’ normal food, the bacteria E. coli. Then they waited and observed. Over time, they used RNAi that disrupted more than 4,000 worm genes. For 379 of them, the worms eventually developed an aversion to E. coli and turned and swam away from their food.

When the researchers examined which genes were altered in those 379 cases, they invariably were those that affected important cellular processes that would also be targeted by pathogens. Disruption of cellular ribosomes, the protein-making machinery that is a common target of pathogen attack, prompted a particularly strong reaction.

“We fed worms RNAi against these core processes and saw that they developed strong aversion to that food source,” Melo said. “These are the processes that are often targeted by pathogens in the course of pathogenic assault. We found that ribosome was a robust activator of this assault. The animals really run away.”

In another sign that the worms thought they were fighting germs, the worms mounted an immune response to fight the nonexistent pathogen, detoxify the nonexistent poison, and repair the damage.

Melo said the worms’ avoidance behavior may provide insight as to why nausea and diarrhea — symptoms of food poisoning — result during chemotherapy. Since food poisoning has been a common way that humans ingest pathogens over the long reach of history, it may be that the body interprets the cellular disruption brought on by chemotherapy as a result of something we ate.

Media moguls viewed the iPad not as a revolutionary gadget, but a time machine with a square, tabloid shape and apps that would allow them to recapture lost subscribers.

Instead, newspapers and magazines now grapple with clunky pay walls and their circulation remains in freefall, as the mainstream media struggle with the dizzying pace of change in the Internet age. The iPad disrupted the news business. People used the apps on it to get their news from Facebook or Google+.

“It’s important we focus on the future, not the past,” warned Richard Gingras, head of news products for Google. “We can’t reverse time.”

Gingras came to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard Friday not as doomsayer from Silicon Valley to predict the demise of the news business, but rather to foresee a bright future.

“I do feel these are extraordinary times,” Gingras said. “We are in the beginnings of a renaissance in journalism.”

But to get there, the business needs to change. Gingras spelled out a prescription in “Innovation in an Age of Disruption,” hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Ann Marie Lipinski, the Nieman Foundation’s curator, was the moderator.

Focusing on newspapers, Gingras said that they need to toss out the concept of editions. A newspaper website needs to look more like a Wikipedia page — continuously updated by a single reporter and editor with a single URL.

“A story with its own URL goes into the archive and we used to call that the morgue,” Gingras said.

As readers click from social media to straight stories, websites should focus on the design of the story page, not the home page, Gingras said.

Story design must change. Radio broadcasters, Gingras noted, started out reading newspaper stories before adopting their own clipped, precise prose. Similarly, newspapers operating on the Web may incorporate footnotes, links, and document clouds to build trust with readers.

Computational journalism will become a larger part of storytelling. Gingras suggested municipal and other databases created for one story could automatically be maintained and serve to spawn future series. Data-driven stories will be more prevalent as an increasing number of students graduate with journalism and computer science degrees, Gingras said.

In the Internet age, reporters will face increased demands and need more than just a pen and spiral notebook in the field, Gingras reckoned. “We should rethink not only about the site but the reporter’s tools,” Gingras added.

As papers and reporters change, organizational roles must be reconsidered, too.

But the biggest change has to be sweeping, as news businesses reconsider their entire mission — what works and what doesn’t — in a race for survival.

Gingras said newspapers are burdened by always doing things a certain way while competing against companies without baggage.

“These were models that barely changed in 100 years — what, they added color? So people didn’t have a reason to evolve,” Gingras said. “You now have people on the outside looking at the problem with a clean slate.”

Gingras was a pioneer in online media, helping create an interactive broadcast teletext news magazine in 1979. He worked at Apple Computer, Google, and until July 2011 was CEO of Salon Media Group before returning to Google. As a member of Google’s board, Gingras also has been active in the development of new products, technologies, and companies.

A “technologist” rather than a reporter, Gingras said news companies must embrace a culture of change. They can’t, like the some media titans did with the iPad, expect to recapture the past.

“First it was about search, then about blogs, then about social [media] — what will it be three years from now?” Gingras said. “The pace of change continues.”

Harvard Kennedy School's 75th Anniversary Conference is held at the Charles Hotel on May 11, 2012

Several years ago, Cambridge city officials worried that the American Repertory Theater’s (A.R.T.) second stage, Oberon, “didn’t look like a theater.” Diane Paulus, the newly appointed artistic director of the A.R.T., quickly assured them that the hall — more disco than proscenium — had much in common with William Shakespeare’s famous London theatrical home, in particular its “groundlings,” the audience members who stood close to the stage to watch the show.

“The mosh pit,” she told them, “is the modern Globe Theatre.”

From Shakespeare to vaudeville to artists on the streets of New York City, the history of performance informs Paulus’ dynamic, 21st-century vision for the stage.

During a recent lecture, Paulus explained that even the experimental early endings to her reimagined production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” were rooted in the history of the story and its evolution from novel to play to opera. Her musical moved from the A.R.T. to Broadway late last year and recently garnered 10 Tony Award nominations.

“The show has many different endings, if you look back to the novel and the play,” said Paulus, adding that even the opera libretto leaves Bess’ final physical action on stage largely open for interpretation. “There is a big area to explore there.”

Growing up in Manhattan, Paulus trained as a classical pianist but quickly realized she craved a more collective approach to creativity, she told a crowd at the Cambridge Public Library during Tuesday’s discussion, which was part of the University’s John Harvard Book celebration. The lecture series brings distinguished Harvard speakers and other programs to each public library in Cambridge and Boston as part of the University’s 375th anniversary festivities.

“I remember thinking as a young person I could be on a piano practicing five hours a day by myself, or I could be in a room with a lot of people making theater. And there was no question in my mind where I wanted to be.”

When she was hired as artistic director in 2008, Paulus ’88 committed herself to “expanding the boundaries of theater,” in large part by asking the same questions she had always asked: “What does theater look like historically?” and “Can it look a little different?” Her inaugural season offered theatergoers a definitive answer, with works that both acknowledged the past, and brought the audience onto the stage.

“The Donkey Show” transformed the Athenian gardens of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a 1970s nightclub, with the crowd grooving around performers in their midst. “Sleep No More” was staged as a type of immersive haunted house, where the audience roamed 40 rooms of an eerie, deserted high school, encountering actors performing scenes from the Bard’s “Macbeth.”

“It was the living, breathing world of Macbeth,” said Paulus, who was “trying to make the audience feel like they were part of the show.”

The productions in her second season further reimagined the theatrical experience and her notion of the theater beyond the stage. “The Blue Flower,” a musical that unfolds against the backdrop of World War I and the cultural movement known as Dadaism, inspired the creation of a mini modern museum in the Loeb Drama Center’s lobby. Harvard undergraduates and members of the cast crafted the works of Dada-inspired art for what she called the theater “that happens after the show.”

For Paulus, the “whole ritual of the theater” needs to be addressed.  “Why do we come out? What is the evening? Does it start before the play begins? What happens after the event?”

The A.R.T.’s current musical, “Woody Sez,” charts the impact the American singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie had as “a crusader for the oppressed,” and incorporates Paulus’ interactive, holistic approach. In connection with the show, Paulus and her team have organized a series of hootenannies informal jam sessions,.

The idea that “you can bring your instrument to the show, and then, when it’s over, you can take your own instrument out and a make a community with your fellow audience members, to me is as important as the show on the stage.”

In the future, she hopes to further tap Harvard’s human capital, inviting experts and scholars not just to discussions about a show after the curtain has gone down, as she has done with recent productions, but into the creative process before the lights even go on.

“We are trying to engage them in the creation of new work … [and] get professors at the table with artists talking about subjects — special areas of research that might spawn the creation of new work.”

A critical part of her expanding audience, acknowledged Paulus, is Harvard’s undergraduate community. In addition to encouraging students to take part in some A.R.T. productions, she has gone into the classroom, instructing and probing them for ideas and feedback on upcoming projects. As professor of practice in the English Department, she has taught courses on Shakespeare and “Porgy and Bess” with Marjorie Garber, Harvard’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Offering the crowd a glimpse of the upcoming season, Paulus said she plans to stage the musical “Pippin” in collaboration with a “cutting-edge circus troupe” from Montreal that will add “bold physical expression” to the show. Also on tap are a work about French Queen Marie Antoinette, whom Paulus called “the most famous 1 percenter,” and a five-hour Kabuki-inspired play about a flower trying to find its place in the world, a metaphor, she said, for marriage equality.

Asked about her directing style, Paulus said her operating ethos invites inclusion and possibility. If someone has a good idea to share, she wants to hear it. If she doesn’t have the answers at the start of a show, she doesn’t worry; instead she feeds off “the sense of potential.” She likened her role to that of a motivational coach. “You just have to have enough stamina to keep everybody climbing up the hill nobody wants to go up anymore … you just have to keep pointing to the top of the mountain and say ‘that’s where we’re going.’”

Her approach has made believers out of some who were uneasy at her appointment.

“I was a big skeptic of what she was going to be doing,” said Cambridge resident and longtime A.R.T. patron Nancy Hurlbut after the discussion. “And I have just been so impressed with piece after piece. … She really wants to pull in all kinds of impressions.”

The next John Harvard Book talk will be 6 p.m. May 15 at the Cambridge Public Library, Main Library, 449 Broadway. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Kathleen McCartney will present “Addressing the Challenges Facing Public Education.”

A “proof-of-concept” study applying financial portfolio theory to U.S. biomedical research funding shows that the nation’s health might gain the largest benefit by increasing funding on heart, lung, and blood diseases, and might gain the quickest benefit by increasing spending on mental illness research.

The work, published this month in the journal PLoS One, uses techniques long utilized by the investment industry, and for which the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded in 1990.

James Watkins, an instructor in surgery at Harvard Medical School and a trauma surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he got the idea for the study during the lulls that occur while waiting for patient test results. He began to think about where he would put his money if he had to invest it for the best health return, and realized the issue was a portfolio problem similar to that faced by investors, who have to figure out the right way to invest a finite pool of money to give the best return for a calculated amount of risk.

“I was wondering if I wanted to save an extra life by investing more of my tax dollars in medical care, what I would do,” Watkins said. “I realized that this is a portfolio problem, and this has been solved.”

Watkins turned to the Internet to see whether there was data readily available and found information on federal research spending and figures for premature death from specific diseases. He contacted Andrew Lo, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management. The two, along with Dimitrios Bisias, Lo’s doctoral student, worked on the study over the past four years.

The analysis used National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding data from 1965 to 2005, and measured return in “years of life lost” in seven broad disease groups from 1979 to 2007. The study said that changes to how NIH funding is allocated could reduce years of life lost by between 28 percent and 89 percent compared with current funding.

Watkins and Lo emphasized that the work is intended to provide proof that the analytical method works and not to give specific reallocation advice to the NIH, the nation’s largest funder of medical research. The study has several shortcomings, they said, but could serve as a starting point for an objective system to allocate research dollars.

Among the problems they identified is the need for a better statistic to measure return than years of life lost. The national burden of disease includes suffering and productive time lost to illness before death. A modern statistic, disability-adjusted life years, would serve that purpose, the two said, but has not been kept long enough to account for the long lag time between investment in research and improvements in patient care. It is possible to reconstruct that statistic from other data, but it would require a significant effort, Lo said.

“From my perspective, the challenge is the data. The techniques have been around for years,” Lo said. The system would provide not just “better bang for the buck, but more transparent, systematic, and reproducible bang for the buck.”

The study shows that investment in disease research brings significant returns and that there is significant variation among diseases, with some harder to diagnose and treat, Watkins said. Investments in heart-lung-blood diseases take the longest to flower — 16 years from basic research funding to patient improvement — but also bring the best return for each dollar invested, gaining $9.80, measured in annual per capita GDP for each reduction in years of life lost. The study showed that the quickest return, for mental illness research, came in nine years.

Three Harvard Kennedy School alumni will be honored with awards during Reunion Weekend, May 11-13, 2012

Harvard Kennedy School news citations for May 11, 2012

Nearly 81 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2016 have chosen to matriculate at Harvard College. The last time the yield on admitted students reached 80 percent was in 1971 for the Class of 1975.  The yield for the Class of 2015 was 75.9 percent.

“Three factors combined to increase the yield so significantly: the return of Early Action, the importance of our generous financial aid program in uncertain financial times, and a series of changes enacted over the past decade that greatly enrich the undergraduate experience,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid.

Harvard reinstituted Early Action this year after a four-year interval, admitting 774 students to the Class of 2016 in December. Students who apply early have a strong interest in Harvard and often do not apply elsewhere. In addition, offering preliminary financial aid awards to students admitted in December gave reassuring news about Harvard’s affordability.

Harvard’s financial aid program has been significantly enhanced in recent years, providing additional aid to low- and middle-income students. “With the unwavering commitment of Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, and Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, Harvard has kept its doors open to talented students from all economic backgrounds,” said Sarah C. Donahue, director of financial aid.

The Financial Aid Office was open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays during April, and staff talked with students and parents in person and on the telephone.  Seventy percent of Harvard students receive some type of financial aid.  Sixty percent of Harvard students receive need-based grants, and the average annual cost to their families is $12,000.  Twenty percent of Harvard families have annual incomes under $65,000 and pay nothing.

Families with incomes from $65,000 to $150,000 and with typical assets pay from zero to 10 percent of their annual incomes, and families with higher incomes can still receive need-based aid depending on individual circumstances, including having multiple children in college or unusual medical expenses.  Students are not required to take out loans, and home equity is not used in determining financial aid.  As always, students are asked to contribute toward the cost of their own education by working 10 to 12 hours per week during the school year and obtaining a summer job.  This coming year, Harvard will spend $172 million on undergraduate financial aid.

Admitted students often noted that their decision to matriculate at Harvard was influenced by the many changes at Harvard in the past decade: a new core curriculum, the program in General Education; a fourfold increase in the number of small freshman seminars; the availability of more than 40 secondary fields of study (minors); the new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; an augmented advising system that doubles the number of freshmen advisers to more than 400 (and also includes 200 peer-advising fellows and 60 resident proctors); expanded opportunities for close collaboration with faculty through research and regional centers; an arts initiative and revitalized theater opportunities, including Farkas Hall; and many options for study abroad, supported by a $100 million gift from David Rockefeller.

Admitted students were invited to Visitas, which took place from April 21 to 23 with more than 1,300 students and their parents in attendance, a record. The program, directed by Valerie Beilenson and assistant director M. Amelia Muller, enabled students to experience Harvard firsthand, meet faculty and students, and explore Cambridge and Boston.  “We are extremely grateful to all the faculty, students, and staff who made Visitas such a great success,” said Marlyn E. McGrath, director of admissions. “We also want to thank our 15,000 alumni/ae who telephoned, emailed, and hosted gatherings for our admitted students in locations around the nation and the world.”

Personalized outreach to admitted students began in December at Early Action time.  Admissions staff sent individualized notes and (along with the Undergraduate Admissions Council, the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, and the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative) made telephone calls and sent emails informing students about opportunities in Cambridge.

At this time, men make up 52.5 percent of the class. Prospective social science concentrators constitute 29.1 percent, with 24.3 percent interested in the biological sciences, 17.5 percent in the humanities, 13.6 in engineering and computer science, 8.5 percent in the physical sciences, 6.4 percent in mathematics, and 0.6 percent undecided.  African Americans make up 9.4 percent of the class, Asian Americans 22.6 percent, Latinos 9.3 percent, and Native Americans and Native Hawaiians 1.7 percent.  International students constitute 11.3 percent of the class.

This year’s high yield means that only a small number (about 25) will be admitted from the waiting list.  In recent years, this number has ranged from zero to 228.

Harvard’s yield is particularly notable because the College does not offer athletic or other non-need-based scholarships.  In addition, Harvard’s Early Action program, unlike binding Early Decision programs, allows admitted students to apply elsewhere and asks only that they reply by May 1 after comparing other offers of admission and financial aid.  Such freedom and flexibility allow a student more time to choose the college that provides the best match, a contributing factor to Harvard’s nearly 98 percent graduation rate.

“The Class of 2016 was chosen through the most selective admissions process in Harvard’s history,” said Fitzsimmons.  “They have enormous potential in every way that is measurable. But most of all, they demonstrate the intangible strength of character that Harvard has sought since its founding in 1636. We look forward to following their progress over the next four years and beyond.”

As a second-year student at Harvard Law School, Crystal Redd could be preparing to spend a summer in New York or Washington at a prestigious firm. Instead, she’ll be heading to Georgia and Alabama, fighting not for a plum associate position but for the lives of poor defendants facing the death penalty.

In choosing a public service path, Redd faces a host of career unknowns, starting with where she’ll find her first post-law school job. (Nonprofits, after all, aren’t known for launching massive recruiting efforts on campus.) But thanks to University support, Redd feels ready to take the plunge and pursue her passion for community work.

“I think we need to let people know it’s OK to not know exactly what you’ll be doing after graduation,” said Redd, who will work this summer at the Advancement Project and with the Southern Center for Human Rights.

With that in mind, Harvard President Drew Faust sat down with Redd, who was one of 10 students chosen as a 2012 Presidential Fellow for their commitment to public service initiatives. They engaged in a candid discussion of what the University can do to promote public service across Harvard’s Schools. The University honored the group, only the second to be awarded the grants from the Presidential Public Service Fellowship Program, during a luncheon at the Harvard Faculty Club on April 27.

This year’s fellows, drawn from six Schools and programs at the University, will work with legal aid groups, school districts, and community theater groups. Chike Aguh (left) and Paul Perry discussed the program during the luncheon.

“We want to continue to build a culture here that’s supportive of public service,” Faust said. “We want public service to have a high profile as a very important consideration for a life’s work.”

Begun last year, the program provides grants of up to $5,000 for undergraduates and $8,000 for graduate students to fund summer projects across a wide range of areas and interests, from nonprofits and government agencies to community initiatives and social ventures. An anonymous donor funds the program.

Through the fellowship program and other initiatives, Faust said, the University hopes to broaden students’ conception of what public service can be, repositioning it not as a side interest but as a central part of a fulfilling career.

This year’s fellows, drawn from six Schools and programs at the University, will work with legal aid groups, school districts, and community theater groups. One fellow will head to the White House to help improve performance management in the federal government, while another will run a community garden for at-risk youth in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

The fellowship program, managed by the Office of the President, aims to expand its horizon beyond the summer by offering fellows resources to continue their public service once they return to campus.

Fellows will be able to take online courses through the Center for Workplace Development and the Harvard Extension School and will have access to Rosetta Stone language software, helping them to build their skills in accounting, foreign languages, website design, or other topics that might help them to launch their own social initiatives.

The fellows will be able to turn to each other, as well as to last year’s inaugural cohort, who also attended the luncheon to share their experience.

“This is a wonderful opportunity,” said 2012 fellow Mackenzie Hild, a College sophomore, who will spend the summer on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico collaborating with a doctor and the local community to improve nutrition. “It’s great to feel supported by your peers in doing this kind of work.”

Biographies of past and current fellows can be found here.