FY08 Grant Recipients

With support from the provost’s office, the Fund last April put out a call for faculty proposals for interdisciplinary research and teaching that would address challenges facing China and improve collaboration with Chinese scholars and institutions. 28 proposals arrived from throughout Harvard and were reviewed by the Fund’s steering committee (with members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the schools of design, law, government, medicine, and public health). The eight strongest were then vetted externally, resulting in these commitments:

• • Disabilities. Stimson Professor of Law William P. Alford, Director of East Asian legal studies, and colleagues, working with experts in China, will use $160,000 over three years to develop disability law, civic organizations, and various remedies for that nation’s disabled population (who may number as many as 130 million)—until recently, as the proposal puts it, a “much-neglected area” of law and services.
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• • Crisis management. Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, who holds professorial appointments in the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Harvard Business School, and KSG colleagues will develop, with Tsinghua University, executive-education programs for emergency preparedness and response to crises, a $150,000 venture during its initial 18 months. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/taubmancenter/emergencyprep/
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• • Growth and air-pollution control. Butler professor of environmental studies Michael B. McElroy and Chris Nielsen, executive director of the Harvard China Project (www.chinaproject.harvard.edu), both of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will direct a two-year, $121,000 project in collaboration with Tsinghua to build scholarly capacity—from basic science to economic modeling and public-health studies—to assess China’s policies for controlling air pollution. (Nielsen co-edited Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China, an integrated Harvard-Tsinghua analysis of the health and economic damages of air pollution in China, and the costs and benefits of policies to control it.)
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• • Kidney disease. A smaller grant of $50,000 was awarded to the Harvard Medical School-Brigham and Women’s Hospital team of Dr. Dirk Hentschel and Dr. Joseph Bonventre for joint medical training to address China’s emerging problems of kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension.
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