First female president in Harvard's history.
Article here in today's NY Times.
My only complaint - she's not a scientist (she's a civil war historian). Here's something I hadn't heard:
Dr. Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among the candidates being considered by the university's search committee, particularly after Thomas R. Cech, a biochemist who is the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Prize winner, took the unusual step of announcing publicly that he had withdrawn from the competition.
(Karl you went to lunch with the guy ... you didn't know this?)
More like this
Births
1730 - Jan Ingenhousz, Dutch-born British physiologist and botanist
"There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it."
-Thomas R. Cech
My husband brought this fantastic book home from the ASHG* that I think many of you will find interesting.
In the days before the House vote to fund embryonic stem cell research, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran page one stories heralding a Nature Biotech study that indicated stem cells extracted from amniotic fluid might have "near pluripotent" like properties.
Considering how chronically underfunded the humanities are, everywhere including the Ivies, I'm all for a humanities scholar at the (nominal, at least) end of the purse strings. :)
Gilpin seems like she has a good head on her shoulders, and a good heart. We need more like her in academe.
EGAD. How about someone unafraid to question marxist orthodoxy, for starters?