Congratulations to OEB graduate students, postdocs and associates awarded the Fall 2019 Derek Bok Certificates of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching!
Certificates of Distinction for TFs, TAs and CAs:Abagail Burrus (OEB 10), Alyssa Hernandez (OEB 10), Austin Garner, Brock Wooldridge and Tianzhu Xiong (OEB 50), Richard Childers (OEB 54), Sarah Losso (OEB 56), Min Ya (OEB...
Congratulations to Peter Girguis, recipient of the 2020 Petra Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award!
Established by the Harvard Extension School in memory of Petra T. Shattuck, a distinguished and dedicated Harvard Extension teacher who died in 1988, these prizes are presented annually to honor outstanding teaching.
Rewan Abdelwahab, Integrative Biology (IB) concentrator in OEB, says the four trips to five countries during her years at Harvard helped define and shape who she is.
As a first-year student, Rewan visited Santiago, Chile where she was immersed in the Spanish language and learned about health care and education in the country, often working with students from local schools. During her sophomore year, she traveled to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia to learn about Islamic history and culture. The summer before her junior year, she was in Istanbul and Alexandria,...
Prof. Pardis Sabeti partnered with Christian Happi, Professor and Director of the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemer's University in Nigeria, to develop, Sentinel, an early warning system that detects and tracks viral threats in real time.
Sabeti and Happi plan to combine rapid CRISPR-based test results in different regions and countries with data-sharing technology to track outbreaks and share information to preempt a pandemic. The...
When Harvard classes moved online, PhD candidate and teaching fellow, Phil Fahn-Lai (Biewener and S. Pierce Lab), used their background in graphic and web design to tackle the online challenges for students in OEB 126: Vertebrate Evolution. The course's labs involve hands-on observation of the MCZ's Vertebrate Paleontology collection. Determined to make the classroom experience meaningful for the remote students, Phil approached the Derek Bok Center's Learning Lab to design a custom web app for the course. In collaboration with members of the Pierce lab, Phil used photogrammetry to...
Stephanie Pierce and George Lauder teamed with University of Detroit paleontologist, Nizar Ibrahim, to decipher how Spinosaurus aegyptiacus would have used newly found tail vertebrae fossils.
Ibrahim's team discovered Spinosaurus fossils in Morocco in 2014 that included tail vertebrae with meter-long spines that appeared to form a paddle. Ibrahim reached out to Pierce who worked with fish bio-mechanist, Lauder, to create a robotic model of the tail, complete with the top fin that would cover the meter-long bone spines....
