Dean Jeremy Bloxham
Academic Year 2010–2011

Teaching

Concentrations

The recent trend of increasing numbers of undergraduates opting to concentrate in the sciences continued this year, with a 10 percent increase over last year. Particularly notable gains were seen in Statistics, which has grown tenfold in the last five years, and in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, which has grown to 95 concentrators in just its first two years.

Curriculum Review and Pedagogy

The Division of Science continued to build upon the curriculum and pedagogy efforts highlighted in our spring 2010 faculty retreat.

The division hosted two dinner discussions on reorganizing freshman science offerings. The planning has begun to coalesce around three new streams for freshmen interested in science but not yet committed to a particular concentration. The three streams connect the life and physical sciences: one stream emphasizes the life sciences, one emphasizes the physical sciences, and the third provides an intensive foundation in both areas.

In May 2010, the division hosted the second annual retreat focused on undergraduate education. Following last year’s focus on what we teach, this year’s retreat explored how we teach.

Planning for New Courses

The Division of Science has been working closely with Mathematics and Statistics, and with Applied Mathematics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), toward reorganizing lower-level undergraduate mathematics, applied mathematics, and statistics service courses into a new Mathematical Sciences structure.

Research and Core Facilities

Collaborative Efforts

The Division of Science had another successful year in attracting support from a wide range of external sponsors. Our newest investigators were awarded over 20 prestigious early career and scholar awards, including five Sloan Research Fellowships. As more scientific questions require interdisciplinary solutions, faculty are pushing the boundaries of science and creating new scientific communities and disciplines. Some faculty collaborations have culminated in large-scale National Science Foundation center proposals: a proposed Center for Neurophysics and a Center for the Study of Extrasolar Earths. To support these types of collaborations, the division is investing resources in research development to enhance the efforts of faculty to identify funding opportunities and develop proposals in an increasingly complex and competitive funding climate.

Core shared research instrumentation facilities remain a high priority for the Division of Science. Consistent with prior years, the division engaged in many programs in 2010 to create, strengthen, and expand on our existing offerings for the Harvard science community, with a particular focus this year on imaging, high-performance computing, and nanoscale science.

Harvard Center for Biological Imaging

The Harvard Center for Biological Imaging (HCBI) opened in the Biological Laboratories Building in July 2010. The center, led by molecular and chemical biology professor Jeff Lichtman, was created to foster collaborative research in the most state-of-the-art facility available. To date, the center houses 15 microscopes ranging from a fluorescence stereo microscope to more advanced specialty microscopes including confocal, 2-photon, TIRF, and array tomography technologies. A new addition for the coming year is a super-resolution microscope system, which is supported by a National Institutes of Health NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant. The center is staffed by an on-site Zeiss engineer and a microscope support specialist who assist with everything from microscope training to experiment design. The HCBI is open to the Harvard community as well as other academic and nonacademic researchers. In its first year, the center supported the research of 130 scientists, including 9 undergraduate students, 38 graduate students, and 95 postdoctoral fellows.

High-Performance Computing in Holyoke

In October 2010, Governor Deval Patrick joined representatives from Harvard and other university and industry partners for a ceremonial groundbreaking at the future site of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, to be located in the Innovation District of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The center is the result of a collaboration between five Massachusetts universities (Harvard, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, Northeastern University, and MIT) and will offer a state-of-the-art computational infrastructure, indispensible in the increasingly data-rich research environment of the post-genomic revolution. Holyoke’s proximity to the Connecticut River and the river’s associated hydroelectric system provide a sustainable and cost-effective source of power for the facility.

The Division of Science has led Harvard’s involvement in the project, which, when completed in late 2012, will provide much-needed computational capacity to the University’s researchers. It will also liberate approximately 6,500 square feet of space on the Cambridge campus, reduce our campus carbon footprint by 3 to 4 percent, and increase Harvard’s ability to enable complex computational science.

Center for Nanoscale Systems

The Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) continues to provide world-class service and facilities to its users. To better serve the needs of the CNS community, a Faculty User Group was convened to review equipment utilization reports; counsel the CNS Executive Committee about future acquisitions, training, and safety; and make recommendations regarding future scientific collaborations and directions. Roy Gordon, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry, has provided sterling service as director.

Other Developments and Projects

Museum of Comparative Zoology Collections Move

A shell space of approximately 13,000 square feet on Level B2 of the Northwest Science Building was built out as collections storage and associated specimen processing and curatorial workspaces for the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). In the first phase of construction, this new space will allow for the relocation of the Mammalogy Collection from the fifth floor of the museum complex. Construction will begin this fall on phase two, which will build out an additional 35,000 square feet on Level B3 of the Northwest Building to accommodate the relocation of the Ornithology, Invertebrate Zoology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Malacology collections from the fifth and fourth floors of the museum.

This project will not only provide clean, environmentally controlled storage and collections management spaces more appropriate for the long-term stewardship of these world-renowned MCZ collections, but also will make available space in the museum that will be renovated to provide desperately needed office and computational space for Division of Science academic programs.

Office for Postdoctoral Affairs

In February 2011, the Division of Science created the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs (OPA) in the FAS. The office was created to assist postdoctoral scholars with career and professional development needs, to serve as a resource to the larger campus community, and to build a sense of community among Harvard postdoctoral scholars.

In its first year, the office has been a resource for individual career counseling appointments and has sponsored programmatic events aimed at career aspirations. OPA is using programming to build a community of support for the postdocs within the FAS, SEAS, and other Harvard professional schools.

Director of the Arnold Arboretum

In September 2010, William (“Ned”) Friedman was appointed the director of the Arnold Arboretum, the eighth in its 138-year history. Friedman, whose tenure began on January 1, is also the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in the FAS.

Professor Friedman’s appointment creates an exciting opportunity to connect the unique resources of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston to the plant science research and education occurring on our Cambridge campus. His teaching and leadership will facilitate closer linkages between the educational and research possibilities the arboretum presents and the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students.