Courtesy : Bachelor of Science Biology (CBZ) – Chemistry, Botany, Zoology

Research highlights

Early 20th century

• 1919 – George Washington Pierce (PhD, 1900), Rumford Professor of Physics and director of Harvard’s Cruft High-Tension Electrical Laboratory invented an oscillator that enabled a given radio station to stay “fixed” at a proper frequency and allowed multiple telephone calls to occur over a single line.
• 1938 – A cyclotron was constructed at the Graduate School of Engineering’s Gordon McKay Engineering Laboratory to support research in biology and medicine as well as physics. It was projected to be the world’s largest such facility. In 1942, it was sent to Los Alamos for work on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
• 1944 – Howard Aiken ’37 (PhD) developed the Mark I series of computers, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the U.S. Around the same time, a new generation of technically trained students began to share their knowledge well beyond Harvard’s campus. Alumnus and donor Allen E. Puckett SB ’39, SM ’41 created an endowed professorship at SEAS, went on to define modern aerodynamics, served as CEO of Hughes Aircraft Company, and won the National Medal of Honor in Technology.
• 1952 – Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), the scientific foundation for MRI (used in modern medical imaging systems), was pioneered by Nicolaas Bloembergen, Edward Purcell, and Robert Pound. Purcell won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. # ISO certification in India

1995 to 2006

• Stopping light – Lene Hau and her colleagues created a new form of matter, a Bose-Einstein Condensate, to slow light to 17 meters per second and later to bring a light beam to a complete stop, then restart it again.
• Unbreakable hyper-encryption – Michael O. Rabin embedded messages in rapidly moving streams of random digital bits in ways that cannot be decoded, even with unlimited computing power.
• Black silicon – Eric Mazur’s group created a new material that efficiently traps light and has potential use in solar cells, global warming sensors and ultra-thin television screens.
• The mathematics of nature – L. Mahadevan and colleagues discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey in a mere tenth of a second by actively shifting the curved shape of its mouth-like leaves.
• Atmospheric modeling – Loretta J. Mickley, Dan Jacob and colleagues found that the frequency of cold fronts bringing cool, clear air out of Canada during the summer months declined by about 20 percent. These cold fronts are responsible for breaking up the hot, stagnant air that builds up regularly in summer, generating high levels of ground level ozone pollution.
• High speed nanowire circuits – Donhee Ham and Charles Lieber made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon.
• Double emulsions – A new microfluidics-based device made by David A. Weitz and colleagues at Harvard University and Unilever makes precisely controlled double emulsions in a single step. Double emulsions, or droplets inside droplets, could be useful for encapsulating products such as drugs, cosmetics, or food additives. # ISO certification in India

2007 and beyond

• Applied physicist Lene Hau caused a light pulse disappeared from one cold cloud then was retrieved from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light.
• A research team led by Mike Aziz and Earth and Planetary Sciences’ Kurt House invented an engineered weathering process that might mitigate climate change.
• Bioengineers including David Edwards collaborated with public health researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to develop a novel spray-drying method for delivering a tuberculosis vaccine that could help prevent the related spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world.
• Working with a team of Dutch researchers and software developers, SEAS computer scientists used a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a model for e-commerce that uses bandwidth as a global currency.
• Rob Wood’s team launched a robotic fly that could be used in everything from surveillance to chemical sensing.
• MIT’s Technology Review named the creation of light-focusing optical antennas (that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies) as one of their Top 10 emerging technologies for 2007.
• Kit Parker’s lab found that an elastic film coated with a single layer of cardiac muscle cells can semi-autonomously engage in lifelike gripping, pumping, walking and swimming.
• Nan Sun and Donhee Ham built what may be the smallest complete nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) system to date in a 0.1-kilogram (0.22 lb) package.
• Engineers and applied physicists demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically pumped semiconductor laser source of terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays.
• A team composed of Harvard students and alumni was among the winners of the World Bank’s Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition, held in Accra, Ghana. The innovation, microbial fuel cell-based lighting systems suitable for Sub-Saharan Africa, netted the group a $200,000 prize.
• In collaboration with SiEnergy Systems, materials scientists at SEAS have demonstrated the first macro-scale thin-film solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC).
• An interdisciplinary research effort investigated digitized text corpuses containing about 4% of all books ever printed in English, between 1800 and 2000. It was co-founded and co-directed by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, whose prototype was instrumental in creating Google Ngram Viewer. # ISO certification in India