Provost Albert Carnesale has announced that Jerome Kagan, Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology, has been named director of the Mind/Brain/Behavior (MBB) Interfaculty Initiative. Anne Harrington, professor of the history of science, has been named associate director. MBB's previous director, Steven E. Hyman, associate professor of medicine, left Harvard in April 1996 to become director of the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health.

MBB is one of five University-wide Interfaculty Initiatives. (The others are Environmental Studies; Ethics and the Professions; Health Policy; and Schooling and Children.) The goal of the MBB initiative is to develop new approaches to understanding human behavior through collaborations between the brain sciences and the social sciences and humanities. Since its founding in 1992, MBB has attracted growing national attention as a model of an interdisciplinary program in this field that begins with the brain sciences but has reached far beyond them.

"MBB has been one of the most challenging and enriching activities I've been involved in at Harvard, and I'm both humbled and energized to take on this leadership responsibility in collaboration with Professor Harrington," said Kagan.

Thirty-seven faculty members, representing nine Faculties, are involved in MBB as "Faculty Fellows." These Fellows are organized into interdisciplinary working groups examining particular topics such as "Intergroup Violence," "The Experience of Illness," and "Memory Distortion." This year, the particular focus of MBB is on "mapping the irrational." MBB has also instituted "MBB tracks" in four undergraduate concentrations.

"We are committed to finding ways to translate our enthusiasm for what we are learning into concrete products that can benefit the University and broader intellectual community," said Harrington. "And for all of us this means especially the successful launching of new interdisciplinary forms of research that challenge and change how we think about human behavior."

Provost Carnesale, who oversees the Interfaculty Initiatives, commented, "We are very much aware of the challenges facing such an ambitious interdisciplinary program. Nonetheless, Harvard has the strength of faculty to succeed, and an outstanding leadership team in Kagan and Harrington."

Kagan and Harrington will work closely with MBB's Steering Committee, led by Gerald D. Fischbach, Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology, and including Albert Galaburda, Emily Fisher Landau Professor of Neurology; Michael Jensen, Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration; Stephen Kosslyn, Professor of Psychology; Mark Moore, Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, Policy Management; Lawrence Sullivan, Professor of History of Religions; and MBB's administrative director, Shawn Bohen.

For further information, contact MBB, Harvard University, 220 Longwood Ave., Goldenson 526, Boston, MA 02115.