Spaepen, the John C. and Helen F. Franklin Professor in Applied Physics, will return to direct Harvard’s Rowland Institute after helping to guide CNS through changes suggested in a recent report by an external review committee, launching CNS toward its next stage of development. In his role at CNS, Spaepen will work closely with both Jeremy Bloxham, dean of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and Cherry A. Murray, incoming dean of SEAS.

CNS, which for the past five years has been led by Charles Marcus, professor of physics and scientific director of the Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures, operates and maintains centralized scientific facilities for use by researchers at Harvard and beyond. CNS also provides training and assistance for the next generation of scientists. Development of new, advanced facilities for the imaging and fabrication of nanoscale structures is also a high priority for CNS.

For someone who deep-sixed his BlackBerry (instant e-mail was taking over his life) and traded the local newspaper for a good book (“What do I need to know about Celtics’ scores?”), John Briscoe ’76 is as worldly a person as you are ever likely to meet.

An expert on water and economic development who most recently served as the World Bank’s senior water adviser and the country director for Brazil, Briscoe has lived in his native South Africa as well as Bangladesh, Mozambique, India, and Brazil.

Briscoe’s cultural comfort has been his guide amid what he calls the “changing economic geography” of the world. However painful and disorienting the current financial crisis, he insists that the true mover and shaker of the planet has never been the markets. It is instead the ebb and flow of the oceans.

“Water touches everything,” Briscoe explains. “It is about religion, culture, history, biology, government. It is everything.”

To make that point, the August 2008 Scientific American cover featured an image of the world as a sponge being wrung dry. The article’s author, Peter Rogers, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), concluded that if unchecked, “by midcentury as much as three-quarters of the Earth’s population could face scarcities of freshwater.”

Rich or poor, powerful or weak, water’s fate is our fate.

From ‘the Bank’ to ‘the Big H’

Briscoe arrived in January as the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering, a joint appointment between SEAS and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Having loved his roles as the “water guy” and the “Brazil guy” at “the Bank,” he did not make the change lightly.

His decision to come to Cambridge was influenced by the tug of ties both old and new. Two former deans, Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti (of SEAS) and Barry Bloom (of HSPH), urged him to create a water program for the 21st century, highlighting how Harvard was embracing integrative, global-minded science and engineering.

Only half a term in, he has discovered the promised openness and enthusiasm of the research community. Colleagues have filled up his schedule, asking Briscoe to give talks on behalf of the South Asia and Middle East Initiatives, present a lecture during Latin American Week, and meet with a group of visiting Chinese executives.

“Harvard is one of the few places where you can do this — and I feel like an absolute fish in water,” Briscoe says. Moreover, he has not had to give up his international connections. “The big ‘H’ counts for a lot. Everyone wants to partner with Harvard.”

At the same time, Briscoe was pulled in by past history, remembering fondly the achievements of his faculty advisers. From the late 1950s to the early ’60s, Harold A. Thomas Jr. (1913-2002) guided what became the famed Harvard Water Program. In tandem, Roger Revelle (1909-91), the man who inspired Al Gore about an inconvenient truth, focused on the link between population and natural resources as he created the Center for Population Studies at Harvard.

Both thinkers answered a call by John F. Kennedy, who was intent on offering a nonmilitary incentive to then-Pakistani President Muhammad Ayub Khan. As Pakistan was facing an agricultural crisis due to waterlogging (saturation) and salinization, Kennedy offered academic expertise. Thomas and Revelle’s diagnosis — more, not less, irrigation by supplementing canal water with the extensive use of groundwater — changed the history of the country and the region.

“By doing good science, [offering] good policy, and engaging politicians, they left a mark that is still revered by Pakistanis today,” says Briscoe.

Likewise, his goal is to craft a program that brings together politicians with policies and science. “The science part standing alone, is interesting, important, and obviously necessary, but not sufficient,” he says. “At the same time, even the best technocratic policies can be a bit blue-eyed and pie in the sky. Proposals will only work when they make political sense, too.”

Already, with no influence from Washington, 10 of the governors of Brazil’s 27 states — Briscoe knows them all — have said they are ready to work with Harvard on issues like sustainable development in the Amazon. On campus, students have pitched thesis topics, and policymakers have offered collaborations.

To best direct such enthusiasm, Briscoe advises those interested in the water development business to first overcome a common “moral hazard.” As many have never lived without water, “they come up with a whole set of prescriptions about an imagined solution that has nothing to do with people’s actual situation,” he says.

Put another way, water is deeply personal. “If you want to understand it in your heart, live in Mozambique or India or turn the taps or electricity off for a week.”

At Harvard, Briscoe’s vision is to create an environment where students, faculty, and politicians can come “in and out of the fray” and gain “a sense of what the battles are really about and find enough distance to see the science and what’s essential in it.”

He pictures a series of “horizontal partnerships” in which faculty and students pair with their peers in Brazil (to start) and then those within Australia and Pakistan. “The old model of ‘send your best and brightest to Harvard’ must,” says Briscoe, “be replaced by new types of partnerships that reflect the changed global economic geography.”

Part of his plan includes training a new generation of “integrators” — the kind of individuals a future world leader might call in a crunch. With a Harvard degree, he says, “you are equipped to be adventurous, and that’s a fantastic gift” — and essential, he has found, for tackling a moving target like the water problem.

Briscoe offers a sense of optimism rather than dire Malthusian predictions about a coming drought. That “water has no respite” inspires him. Even the pessimistic poet Philip Larkin saw beauty in the Earth’s most elusive element: “And I should raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled light/Would congregate endlessly.”

Researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a prototype “return on investment calculator” that can measure the value of prevention services. Using a Boston-based mobile health program called the “Family Van” to test the tool, the team found that for the services provided in 2008, this program, in the long run, will return $36 for every dollar invested.

See the Family Van in action.

“People talk about the value of preventive measures all the time, but no one has ever really captured the important contribution of the many nontraditional prevention-based programs like the Family Van,” says study first-author Nancy Oriol, HMS dean of students and an obstetric anesthesiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “This value is underscored by the unique role that mobile health plays in reducing disparities in health outcomes, increasing access to care, and its ability to reach out to particularly vulnerable, at-risk communities.”

The report is published online today in the open access journal BMC Medicine.

The Family Van, a program of HMS, is a mobile clinic providing preventive health care and education to disadvantaged areas throughout Boston. The van provides screening, testing, and education for nutrition, weight management, diabetes, heart disease, pregnancy, and STDs, and other health concerns. The goal is to train and educate people to take the steps necessary to prevent or better manage chronic disease.

When Oriol, co-founder of the Family Van, decided that there needed to be some way to quantify the benefits of this and similar programs, she and executive director Jennifer Bennet teamed up with the Mobile Health Clinics Network, a membership-based organization of hundreds of such clinics across the country; Paul Cote, former Massachusetts commissioner of public health; and Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library of Medicine at HMS, and a health information technology expert.

Using published data from the National Commission on Prevention Priorities (NCPP), which assigns values to a broad array of preventive practices, as well as published data on the cost-savings of preventing avoidable emergency room visits, the team developed an algorithm that “calculates” a return-on-investment ratio, thereby quantifying the value of mobile health care to the overall health care system.

“These data provide evidence for what we have long suspected; that is, preventative health services are perhaps the most cost-effective way to address both our ailing health care system and the needs of disadvantaged communities,” says Cote.

The researchers emphasize that the Family Van data presented are a proof-of-principle demonstrating the feasibility of this online calculation tool, which they intend to have publicly available in less than a year.

Ronald McDonald House Charities funded the initial phase of the project. Work is now continuing with support from the Harvard Provost Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration and the Boeing Co.

For its fifth reunion, the Class of 1984 added community service to the celebration — a novel feature that other reuniting classes have since copied.

Anne S. Holtzworth ’84 remembers the 1989 affair, when one June afternoon she reminisced with old classmates while painting a homeless shelter.

The same activist class, holding its 25th this year, has come up with another innovation: Harvard’s first deliberately “green” reunion.

Over four days, returning graduates from the Class of 1984 will attend lunches, dinners, parties, and outings planned with the environment in mind.

Bottled water will be banned in favor of bulk jugs and reusable containers. Cups, utensils, and plates will get turned into compost — or will be washable china and silverware. And buses for a class trip to the Museum of Fine Arts will be forbidden to idle and will run on biodiesel.

Reunion menus follow a sustainability ethic too. Most food served will come from less than 250 miles away, minimizing the carbon impact of meals.

Saturday (June 6) includes the Class’ traditional community service project. It’s what organizers call a “green-up” cleanup of Charles River shorelines, in cooperation with the Charles River Conservancy.

And after the reunion is over, organizers will add up all the air and road miles the graduates took to get here. They’ll divide it by 800 (the number of registrants), and give everyone a year to offset the carbon costs — by making changes in their private lives.

“We’ve always added our own innovations,” said Holtzworth, a Boston-area political consultant who also helped organize the fifth and 15th reunions.

When planning committees started meeting last fall, the idea of an Earth-friendly gathering “just kind of bubbled up,” she recalled. “So I said: ‘Let’s just do this.’”

Just doing it meant getting the tone of the message right, said Gary Pforzheimer ’84, co-chair of the green reunion subcommittee. That meant not being strident or judgmental. “Ellen and I are not the green police,” he said, referring to co-chair Ellen Schreiber ’84.

The right tone acknowledges “all the trade-offs in our lives,” said Pforzheimer, a fundraising consultant whose office is on the edge of the Harvard campus. “We agreed with the philosophy that not everyone could be green every minute of every day.”

But in sustainability terms, reunion planners went after “every single piece of low-hanging fruit,” he said.

First to go was bottled water. Celebrants (a record-breaking 2,000, if you include families) will get personal water bottles to refill from bulk containers. (Making plastic water bottles — about 40 billion a year in the U.S. market alone — wastes oil and jams landfills.)

At meals, Class of 1984 partiers will sweeten their coffee with sugar from sugar bowls (not single-serving packets) and use real spoons to do it. Flowers on the tables will be potted or — in the case of one meal — rented from a florist shop, then returned for sale.

To save paper and ink, more than 90 percent of reunion publicity and registration was done online. Not incidentally, said Pforzheimer, “it saved us a lot of money.” (Speaking of which: This 25th reunion is twice green. Class members have pledged $30 million for Harvard scholarships.)

To save more resources, programs for the traditional memorial service will be half the size of previous programs. Poetry, prose, and musical lyrics — once printed — will be made available through the reunion Web site, www.hr84.org.

On the same site, class members are invited to take the sustainability pledge offered to Harvard students, faculty, and staff by the Office for Sustainability (www.green.harvard.edu/pledge). The pledge was slightly modified to add “alumnus” to the mix of identifiers.

The 25th reunion at Harvard is traditionally a landmark event for mid-life graduates, who with their families move into Harvard Yard dormitories for the week (and enjoy the services of a 200-student day-care staff).

“We basically turn Harvard Yard into a hotel,” said Michele Blanc, senior associate director of the Harvard Alumni Association, who has worked closely with organizers of the greened-up 25th reunion.

The Class of 1984 drew praise for reducing the environmental impact of reunion activities.

“They’re a model for future reunion classes,” said Jaclyn Olsen, assistant director of Harvard’s Office for Sustainability, which provided sustainability guidance and expertise. “And they’re inspiring their classmates to carry environmentally friendly practices into their daily lives.”

Pforzheimer hopes the sustainability idea will live on as a legacy for 25th reunions to come. It’s a way of “adding a dimension,” he said, “to an exciting traditional event.”

That green dimension appears elsewhere in Commencement 2009. The 40th anniversary reunion of Al Gore’s Class of 1969 included events last weekend (May 29-31) designed to minimize trash and maximize recycling and composting.

And the Senior Class Day dinner this week (June 2) — with 5,000 guests expected — will generate “very close to zero waste,” said Robert Gogan, recycling and waste services manager for Harvard’s Facilities Maintenance Operations.

Trash containers (few) will be joined by receptacles for recycling and compostable items (many). A single small truck will bear it all away.

Large events modeled on sustainability practices — reduce, reuse, recycle — are part of Harvard’s recent past.

The Yard Fest in April had an 80 percent recapture rate for recycling. And last October, Harvard held a festival to kick off its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016. It drew a crowd of 15,000 participants, but generated less than one bag of trash.

As for Harvard reunions, the idea of a green template is exciting, said Gogan.

“It’s so visible,” he said, and such a good opportunity to educate organizers, participants, and vendors about events that save energy and waste. “It’s not just a fad. It’s something that people deeply value.”

The heart of sustainable events is humble, said Gogan: composting.

Food waste, paper napkins, and “bioplastic” utensils are shipped to a farm in Hamilton, Mass. They turn into rich soil used throughout southern New England.

“It’s not going to go on a truck to North Carolina,” said Gogan of composted waste. “It greens the locality.”

Normally, as much as 25 percent of edible food ends up in landfills, said Crista Martin, director of marketing and communications at Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS).

She put together a sustainable foods primer for the 1984 reunion organizers — lessons on low-waste ways to provide linens, dishware, water, and food.

Martin drew on events and meals practices already widely used at Harvard. “Virtually all of this is what we execute on a daily basis here,” she said.

Annenberg Hall, the University’s largest dining facility (3,400 meals a day) composts 100 percent of its food waste. Students are encouraged to bring reusable mugs, and to take only what they plan to eat.

For 25th reunion meals, menus are largely local and sustainable, said Martin, including chicken, cheese, fruits, field greens, tomatoes, and bread from regional providers.

Food is a path to community, to celebration — and to education, said Martin.

“It’s a visible link in the sustainability chain,” she said. “We all know that food has to come from somewhere to get on our plates — and then has to go somewhere.”

This year’s 25th reunion will encourage others to plan and deliver sustainable events, said Martin, bringing lessons already embraced at Harvard “into these big forums.”

Sustainability was part of Commencement for the first time in 1993, with the advent of recycling, said Gogan – but the Class of 1984 has organized the first green reunion, and that changes the dynamic.

“This is kind of a breakthrough year,” he said. “This is going down in history as the year we bumped it up a peg.”

“You are what you eat.” Can these pithy words explain the evolution of the human species?

Yes, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, who argues in a new book that the invention of cooking — even more than agriculture, the eating of meat, or the advent of tools — is what led to the rise of humanity.

Wrangham’s book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” is published today (June 1) by Basic Books. In it, he makes the case that the ability to harness fire and cook food allowed the brain to grow and the digestive tract to shrink, giving rise to our ancestor Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago.

“Cooking is the signature feature of the human diet, and indeed, of human life — but we have no idea why,” says Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s the development that underpins many other changes that have made humans so distinct from other species.”

Drawing on a wide body of research, Wrangham makes the case that cooking makes eating faster and easier, and wrings more caloric benefit from food. Moreover, he writes, cooking is vitally important to supporting the outsize human brain, which consumes a quarter of the body’s energy.

By freeing humans from having to spend half the day chewing tough raw food — as most of our primate relatives do — cooking allowed early humans to devote themselves to more productive activities, ultimately allowing the development of tools, agriculture, and social networks. Cooked food is also softer, meaning the body uses less energy digesting what it takes in.

Since physical remnants of fire tend to degrade rapidly, archaeological evidence of fire and cooking dates back only about 800,000 years. Wrangham looked to biological evidence, which shows that around 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus arose with larger brains and bodies and smaller guts, jaws, and teeth — changes consistent with the switch to a more tender and energetically rich diet of cooked food.

“Cooking is what makes the human diet ‘human,’ and the most logical explanation for the advances in brain and body size over our ape ancestors,” Wrangham says. “It’s hard to imagine the leap to Homo erectus without cooking’s nutritional benefits.”

While others have posited that meat-eating enabled the rise of Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago, Wrangham says those theories don’t mesh with that species’ smaller jaws and teeth. Instead, he claims meat enabled the shift from australopithecines to Homo habilis — a species about the size of a chimp, but with a bigger brain — more than half a million years earlier.

Wrangham says the adoption of cooking had profound impacts on human families and relationships, making hearth and home central to humanity and driving humans into paired mating and perhaps even traditional male-female household roles.

He writes that the advent of cooking permitted a new distribution of labor between men and women: Men entered into relationships to have someone to cook for them, freeing them up for socializing and other pursuits and bolstering their social standing. Women benefited from men’s protection, safeguarding their food from thieves. Homo sapiens remains the only species in which theft of food is uncommon even when it would be easy.

“To this day, cooking continues in every known human society,” Wrangham says. “We are biologically adapted to cook food. It’s part of who we are and affects us in every way you can imagine: biologically, anatomically, socially.”

Lin “William” Cong remembers his early childhood as a time of playing in the street, reading comic books, and coasting through the early grades. College was a dream.

But Cong graduates from Harvard today (June 4) with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a dual bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics, a secondary field degree in economics, a language citation in French, and — whew! — a master’s degree in physics.

At age 12, high test scores earned him the chance to board and study at Northeast Yucai School, a middle school just across town in Shenyang, his native city of 5 million in northeast China.

“It was my first time away from home,” said Cong (pronounced tsung), and he was ill-prepared academically. “I learned to work hard ... and to have empathy for others not doing well.”

At age 14, Cong won a competitive scholarship that took him even farther from home — to Hwa Chong Junior College in Singapore. He fought off loneliness, cultural isolation, and a crisis of confidence to burrow deep into physics, chemistry, higher math, and Chinese calligraphy.

In his gap year — Hwa Chong graduates its students in November — Cong worked in Singapore. Every month, he earned what his parents earned in a year.

In the time since, mostly from part-time work at Harvard, Cong has sent his parents enough money to buy a house and keep up with the payments. “My money is my parents’ money,” he said. “It’s not a separate account.”

His hometown, a thriving industrial hub, is famous for its airplane factory, for the pianist Lang Lang, and for being the founding capital of the Qing dynasty. But Shenyang may one day be famous for Cong himself.

Since high school, the John Harvard Scholar has authored five academic articles in mathematics and science; won many fellowships and prizes, including the Jack T. Sanderson Memorial Prize (for physics) and the Allston Burr Resident Dean’s Award (from Lowell House). Cong has also had six rigorous research jobs at Harvard, at the University of Cambridge, and in Singapore.

In the fall he will start a Ph.D. program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business to study finance and economics. China’s rapid growth is driven by Western economic models, said Cong, but few of its economists are trained in the United States.

His mother, Li Naiyan, is a nurse at a kindergarten, and his father, Cong Zhiliang, is a city policeman. For both his parents, education stopped at the ninth grade.

His father was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, but he managed to save his texts in physics, a favorite subject. The same books first inspired his son to study the science of matter and motion.

“They went through hardships,” Cong said of his parents, “but they aren’t bitter about it.” Both will be at the Harvard graduation ceremony. Cong’s mother had visited Cambridge once before; his father had never been on an airplane.

“I have great parents,” he said. “They love me deeply.”

Cong himself has visited home once or twice a year since coming to Harvard, but never for more than a month. “If I stayed longer,” he said, “I’d put on weight.”

Aside from his academic accomplishments, Cong is an ardent practitioner of the physical arts.

He was on Harvard’s badminton team in its championship 2005-06 season. He participated in intramural squash, crew, and swimming, and found time to study tae kwon do and aikido.

These days, the slight, muscular Cong practices CrossFit, a hell-bent combination of aerobic training and weight lifting that burns calories like a bonfire. “The movements,” he said of dead lifts, running, shoulder presses, and rowing, “you actually use in real life.”

Real life for Cong has also included volunteering at the Harvard College Fund, serving as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students, and taking up French, from scratch, in his sophomore year.

Cong is studying Japanese now too, in part because of a Kawamura Fellowship this summer. “It’s like a cultural immersion,” he said: five weeks in Japan, and a week each in Korea and Thailand.

Cultural immersion was the idea behind the nonprofit foundation Cong co-founded in 2007: Initiating Mutual Understanding through Student Exchange (IMUSE).

The idea is to get future U.S. and Chinese leaders to experience each other’s culture — “to get them to talk,” he said, “even on sensitive issues.”

Harvard has taught Cong the value of exploring more than one academic pursuit, and of searching out your passion in learning. If students don’t feel it, he said, “they take a year off and find it.”

Harvard also taught him the true value of his parents, of fine teachers, and of lasting friends, said Cong. “I really want to thank them.”

Complete strangers recognize Dan Jones on campus all the time. It’s the same for his brother, Bill.

“I just play along,” said Dan. “I don’t know their names, I’ve never seen them before. I just assume Bill knows them and I try to be friendly so they don’t start hating him.”

There’s a connection between the graduating identical twins that runs much deeper than their looks: a sense of parallel lives and a profound love for, and dedication to, each other that has motivated them for 20 years. The pair falls into that category of twins who share an intense, almost indescribable relationship, one that transcends sibling attachment. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’ve pretty much done everything together, all the time,” said Dan. “It’s very nice,” added Bill. “I think it’s an advantage. You are never alone. Whenever there is a new situation, your best friend is there.”

For the athletic duo, the water has had a lot to do with their bond.

Growing up in western Michigan in a small town surrounded by lakes — and with a mother who was uncomfortable in the water — swimming classes were a must.

“It just so happens we were good at it,” said Dan.

And they were good, indeed, very good. They began swimming competitively at the age of 6. But their team’s practice pool was too far away to get to, so they spent countless hours in a pool closer to home, honing their skills against each other. “It made us better,” said Dan. “We didn’t have a coach; there was nobody there to motivate us except for each other, and that was pretty much essential to us getting as far as we did.”

Both eventually chose to swim the strenuous butterfly stroke in competitions. As time passed, their rivalry became so fierce — their finishes often separated only by hundredths of a second — friends would wager on who would win.

The University of Michigan and its legendary sports program looms large in the eyes of many an athletic high school senior from the state, and initially the pair were intent on swimming for the Wolverines. But a trip east changed all that. The combination of Harvard’s rigorous academic curriculum and strong swimming program was a perfect fit for the Midwest pair who had excelled in high school as both scholars and athletes.

“We liked it; we felt like we fit in here with the team; we liked the coach, and there have been no regrets. We made the right choice,” said Bill.

Attending different schools was never even a consideration.

“That’s what we thrive on,” offered Dan as a simple explanation, “each other’s support.”

As freshmen, they were separated, residing in different dorms, but sophomore year they were together again, living as roommates through their senior year at Winthrop House.

Though they are intense rivals in the water, they also love seeing each other succeed. In 2008, Bill qualified for the Olympic Swimming Trials and for the past two years has qualified for the NCAA championships. Dan was thrilled his brother was able to compete on such a grand stage. When Dan, who had been sidelined for much of his final swimming season with an illness, made it back to the pool and shone at this year’s Ivy championships, the loudest cheers came from Bill.

“He didn’t just get best times,” said Bill, “he got best times by a significant margin, which is incredible.”

The Jones brothers are both organismic and evolutionary biology concentrators, and, as in the pool, have relied on each other for academic support. Both did their senior theses on different aspects of the Charles River. In their spare time, when not studying or swimming, their aquatic interest extends to their hobby of wooden fish carving, a skill they largely picked up on their own. What began as a childhood effort to carve fishing lures out of backyard willow tree branches has grown into a successful business. Today both are accomplished artists able to create intricately hand-carved and painted works of art.

But after graduation, their close connection will be severed by distance for the first time. Bill is headed to San Diego to pursue a Ph.D. in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Dan will remain on the East Coast to study for medical school entrance exams.

“Hopefully, without each other we will still accomplish something,” laughed Dan, who intends to go into cardiology or possibly heart surgery.

And though their competitive swimming careers are over, some day the two hope to complete an Ironman Triathlon. Together.

It was 1998 and Mohan Sundararaj was frustrated. A medical student at India’s Sri Ramachandra Medical College and the child of two physicians, Sundararaj was committed to his medical education but frustrated by the demands that kept him from his other passion: the piano.

“I was a concert-oriented pianist. I felt stuck in medical school because I was not able to indulge in my passion,” Sundararaj recalls.

He spoke about his feelings with his grandfather, who commented that maybe one day Sundararaj, who had been playing piano since age 4, would be able to use his music as therapy.

Sundararaj thought that was a great idea. He began to research music therapy, finding, to his surprise, the existence of an entire field that he knew little about. He picked up a book on the subject and hasn’t looked back since.

When he finished his medical studies, Sundararaj came to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music, which has a music therapy program. As a Berklee intern, he worked with terminally ill patients at a hospice in Florida. He graduated in 2004.

After graduation, he returned to India to do his medical residency. He went to Calcutta, where he worked with street kids and orphans for four years. As he worked, he began to look for fields in which he could integrate his medical and musical interests. He became interested in public health as an alternative, enrolled in the Harvard School of Public Health, and is graduating with a master’s degree in health policy and management.

At the Harvard School of Public Health, Sundararaj has worked with other musically minded students to put on benefit concerts to raise money for pediatric cancer patients. Called “Rhythm Therapy,” the group has put on two events, one in the fall and one in May, drawing audiences of more than 100 to each.

The field of music therapy got its start after the world wars, according to the American Music Therapy Association. Veterans Hospitals around the country would invite community musicians in to play. The patients’ responses, both emotional and physical, prompted the hospitals to hire the musicians and then to begin to train them. The first music therapy degree program in the world was founded at Michigan State University in 1944.

The therapy is useful in a wide variety of settings with a wide variety of patients. Children with special needs, the elderly, psychiatric patients, and others all can benefit from music therapy. The therapy is used as a complement to more typical medical or psychiatric interventions.

“Music reaches what the medicine does not,” Sundararaj said.

Though patients do participate in the therapy, the point is not to teach them to sing or play an instrument, Sundararaj said. They may write words to a song that Sundararaj puts to music, but the product — the song itself — isn’t the purpose. Rather, Sundararaj said, it is the writing of the song, the listening and engagement with the music, that provides the therapy.

“The outcome is always nonmusical,” Sundararaj said. “It’s not the product that matters, it’s the process.”

Being a music therapist doesn’t mean always listening to music he enjoys; rather, it means being adaptable, Sundararaj said. Selections depend on the individual tastes and needs of the patient, regardless of what Sundararaj likes — or how many times he’s heard the chosen piece.

After graduation from Harvard, Sundararaj plans to return to India to start a nonprofit that fosters music therapy outside the United States, where it remains little-known. He’d like to find and promote clinical and research opportunities for U.S. music therapists to travel to the developing world, benefiting patients but also exposing others to the field.

An anonymous donor honored the extraordinary service of three Harvard veterans with a $15 million gift to support innovative science. From left, Robert L. Scalise, M.B.A. ’89, Nichols Family Director of Athletics; William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.M. ’69, Ed.D. ’71, dean of admissions and financial aid; and John P. Reardon Jr. ’60, executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association and associate vice president for University relations. The new President’s Fund for Innovative Science will support a range of cutting-edge initiatives — among them, stem cell research.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has named Harvard math and physics concentrator Norman Yao ’09 the winner of its 2009 Captain Jonathan Fay Prize. Yao was selected for the quality and potential impact of his senior thesis, which describes a breakthrough scientific technique he developed to measure the properties of neurofilaments, a family of proteins found in the neurons that constitute mammalian nervous tissue. Already, Yao’s technique has enabled a discovery about how cross-linking occurs in neurofilament protein molecules — an important advance in understanding the mechanical properties of cellular networks.

Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, presented the Fay Prize at Radcliffe’s annual Strawberry Tea, held May 27. Harvard seniors John Sheffield and Matthew Spellberg received honorable mentions for their outstanding theses in social studies and literature, respectively.

“The Radcliffe Institute is delighted to honor Norman Yao for his advanced research and breakthrough technique that paves the way for new scientific discoveries,” said Grosz. “With great admiration for the work he has accomplished, we look forward to watching Norman’s future scientific contributions.”

The Radcliffe Institute annually awards the Fay Prize to a graduating Harvard College senior who has produced the most outstanding imaginative work or original research in any field. Submissions can take the form of a thesis, course work, or a creative arts project. Candidates for the Fay Prize are chosen from the winners of Harvard College’s Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, awarded each year for outstanding work or research.

In his thesis, “Nonlinear Mechanics of Biopolymer Networks,” Yao explains his study of the elasticity of neurofilaments, which serve as the neuron’s defense mechanism against external stresses, and are part of the reason for its rigidity. Although many cells in the human body are composed of nearly 90 percent water or other fluid, they remain elastic solids; for years, scientists have been trying to understand this phenomenon. In 2007, Yao and a group of collaborators began studying the neurons of cows to help answer this question. Yao’s principal advisers were David Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard and “Weitzlab” founder, and Frederick MacKintosh, professor of physics and astronomy at Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands). Using neurofilaments from bovine spinal cords, they constructed a gelatinous network that behaved like an intracellular network. The team embarked on a mission to uncover the origins of elasticity in these networks, whose curious feature is nonlinearity (the tendency to stiffen when stretched) — a very rare trait in synthetic materials.

To reveal the mysterious workings of these neuron proteins, Yao devised an innovative approach to taking measurements. His “inertio-elastic oscillations” method for measuring neurofilaments’ nonlinear elasticity at different levels of stress proved to be more accurate and effective than traditional methods, which are best suited to measurements of linear elasticity in materials that do not stiffen when stretched. The high-quality data that Yao’s method produced made it possible for MacKintosh to discover the origin of the cross-linking that causes stiffening under strain: ions with a positive charge and the ability to bond to two other chemical entities.

“This is a new approach likely to be helpful to many in the fields of biology, biophysics, and bioengineering,” said Rosalind A. Segal, director of the science program at the Radcliffe Institute, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Yao’s thesis is based on four manuscripts, of which he is the lead author on three and a lead co-author on one. In 2008, one manuscript, “Probing Nonlinear Rheology with Inertio-Elastic Oscillations,” was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Rheology as well as the Virtual Journal of Biological Physics Research, and another appeared in Conference Proceedings of the XVth International Congress in Rheology. The remaining two have also been submitted for publication.

“I am extremely delighted to have been awarded the Fay Prize and, at the same time, humbled to be in the company of so many remarkable former winners,” said Yao. “My work in the Weitzlab has been the cornerstone of my undergraduate experience and has taught me about the importance of interdisciplinary research. I’ve just had so much fun working on these projects.”

At the outset of his thesis, “Nonlinear Mechanics of Biopolymer Networks,” Yao quotes Edwin Powell Hubble: “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” Yao has gained admission to several graduate programs and has chosen to continue his scientific adventure at Harvard. He will work toward a doctorate in theoretical condensed matter physics, supported by prestigious fellowships, such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. Currently the president of the Harvard Table Tennis Club and highly ranked by the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association, Yao will set aside some time for his hobby as well.

Fay Prize honorable mentions

Social studies concentrator John Sheffield earned an honorable mention for his thesis, “The Anatomy of the Iron Fist: Police Violence in Democratic Latin America,” an examination of why police violence has increased in certain Latin American democracies, but decreased in others. Based primarily on his fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Medellín, Colombia, as well as sophisticated statistical analysis, Sheffield argues that growing spatial inequality and “degenerating organization coherence of police forces” are the main causes of increased violence.

“This thesis is a truly impressive piece of research. It uses both quantitative analysis and qualitative methods to help elucidate the causes of police violence — a significant social problem in many countries. The research has implications not only for policing in Latin America, the focus of the research, but for policing more generally,” said Brigitte Madrian, director of the Radcliffe Institute’s social sciences program and Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Matthew Spellberg, a joint concentrator in English and American literature and language and Romance languages and literatures, earned his honorable mention for a thesis titled “Art and Dream in Marcel Proust,” which proposes “Proust’s vision of the dreaming mind” as a central model for art and imagination in “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Describing Spellberg’s thesis as “a stunning reinterpretation of Proust’s massive opus,” Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, senior adviser to the Radcliffe Institute’s humanities program and professor of the history of art and architecture in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said, “In the course of his deeply original, at once daring and generous reading of one of the key works of modern literature, Spellberg ended up offering a fundamental insight into the nature of human creativity.”

Sheffield, a resident of Fayetteville, N.C., has accepted a Marshall Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in statistics next year. Spellberg will soon leave his hometown of Mill Valley, Calif., to study on a fellowship at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Daniel C. Tosteson, the Caroline Shields Walker Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology, who served an extraordinary two decades as dean of Harvard Medical School, from 1977 to 1997, died peacefully on May 27 after a long illness. He was 84 years old.

"He is a Harvard legend whose imprint on the university, and on medical education in particular, will be evident for many years to come," said President Drew Faust.

“Daniel Tosteson was a towering figure in the modern history of Harvard Medical School,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, the Medical School’s current dean. “His vision and leadership brought major and enduring changes in HMS education, research, and the School’s relationship to the world. Since I assumed leadership of the School, I met with him many times, and despite his increasing disability, his passion for education, research and the Medical School never waned. He will be sorely missed.”

By all accounts, Tosteson was an exceptional leader. His greatest legacy is the New Pathway, a radical restructuring of medical education launched in 1985 that combined several innovations being tested separately at other medical schools.

Part of Tosteson’s rationale for the New Pathway was his belief that medical students would learn better if they were responsible for their own learning. In lieu of learning primarily through lectures and texts, Harvard medical students began studying cases that guide them toward acquiring the core knowledge of medicine through their own efforts. In small groups, they analyze each case, seeking the information they need. They thereby cultivate skills and attitudes to decode unfamiliar medical situations and scientific understanding to deal with fields in which progress keeps accelerating.

Harvard was not the first medical school to institute problem-based learning, but its program was comprehensive and has since been emulated by medical schools all over the United States, as well as abroad.

“Dan’s clear objective was to prepare students to be lifelong learners as our knowledge of biomedical science expanded,” said S. James Adelstein, the Paul C. Cabot distinguished professor of medical biophysics at HMS, who served as executive dean for academic programs during most of Tosteson’s tenure. “He felt it was important to work not only on the knowledge base, but also on the attitudinal base, establishing attitudes toward learning and toward patients.”

Besides revolutionizing teaching, Tosteson kept the content of the curriculum more than current by anticipating future scientific developments. He was one of the first to foresee the revolution in molecular biology, and he positioned Harvard to move forward accordingly.

In 1980, he established the Department of Genetics, one of the first in the nation, “and reorganized the departmental structure on the School’s Boston Quadrangle, strengthening existing departments and creating the new Department of Cell Biology and that of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology,” said Philip Leder, the John Emory Andrus professor of genetics and former chair of the Genetics Department. In addition, while many others were debating the role of functional genomics, Tosteson implemented a plan to develop this nascent field, which investigates the function of genes in the living organism.

Tosteson also invested in graduate education. He expanded the size of the PhD program and established the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program, which enables students to pursue doctoral work with faculty members in one of five basic science departments at HMS or in its 17 affiliated hospitals and research institutes.

In addition, he expanded HMS’s scope beyond clinical and basic science, creating the Department of Health Care Policy and that of Social Medicine (now called Global Health and Social Medicine).

To help attract new faculty, Tosteson renovated most of the Medical School’s existing buildings, which had remained untouched since their construction in 1906. He also had several new ones constructed, including the Warren Alpert Building for basic research.

To finance these initiatives, Tosteson boosted HMS’s endowment from $128 million to $1.1 billion. At a time when other academic institutions eschewed collaborations with industry, Tosteson pursued support from corporations with strong programs in biomedical research and development, even while he protected the intellectual independence and discoveries of Harvard’s faculty. At the same time, Tosteson oversaw development of the School’s first conflict-of-interest policy that has served as a national model.

Tosteson opened the Medical School to a range of innovative initiatives. With Count Giovanni Auletta Armenise of Italy, he established the Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Foundation to support multidisciplinary, basic research by leading scientists at HMS and Italian institutions.

Under Tosteson’s leadership, HMS also established a publishing venture, now Harvard Health Publications, which helps faculty authors with the support and publishing expertise to produce and disseminate high-quality medical and health care information for a lay audience through books, newsletters, and electronic services.

“Dan Tosteson was a man of action,” said Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology at HMS. “He was inspired by a vision through which he reinvented medical education, completely renovated the aging physical structure of the Medical School, created new departments and then hired the very best scientists to lead them. Despite his outward formality, I will remember Dan as a passionate and loving person who created a unique community at Harvard, largely through his selfless commitment and fueled by his tireless personal efforts.”

Throughout his administrative career, Tosteson maintained his position as a laboratory researcher at the forefront of membrane phenomena. This work has led to a better understanding of degenerative diseases including atherosclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

A Milwaukee native, Tosteson attended Harvard College and was a 1949 graduate of Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital and held fellowships at Brookhaven National Laboratories, the National Institutes of Health, and Cambridge University in England. He served on the faculty at Duke University Medical School for 14 years, first as a professor and then as the chair of physiology and pharmacology. The two years prior to coming to HMS as dean, he was dean of the Division of Biological Science and vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Over his long career, Tosteson received numerous awards and honors, including the Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Harvard Medal for extraordinary service to Harvard University, and honorary degrees from New York University, Johns Hopkins University, the Université Catholique de Louvain, Duke University, Emory University, and Ludwig Maximilians University. Last year, Tosteson received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard University in recognition of his outstanding achievements.

Tosteson was a member of several scientific and scholarly societies, including the Institute of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he served as president from 1997 to 2000.

In addition to science, poetry was an important part of Tosteson’s life, and he kept a large portrait of Robert Frost in his office. “He believed strongly in the perfectibility of humans,” Adelstein said, “but science was only one tool; the humanistic side was equally important.”

Tosteson is survived by his wife, Magdalena Tosteson, a lecturer on biophysics in the HMS Department of Cell Biology, of Chestnut Hill, Mass.; sons Joshua of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Tor of Lyme, N.H.; and daughters Heather of Chattanooga, Tenn.; Ingrid of Chestnut Hill; and Zoe Tosteson Losada of Caracas, Venezuela.

A memorial service will be held on a date to be announced.