Olivera Receives Foundation Honor

Students, administrators, and professors gathered to honor the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations’ 2007 Scientist of the Year, Baldomero M. Olivera, at a reception in Pforzheimer House this past Friday.

The event kicked off the Foundation’s annual Albert Einstein Science Conference: Advancing Minorities and Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics, which took place on Saturday.

Past Scientists of the Year have included Mae C. Jemison, the first black female astronaut, and Jaime Escalante, a mathematics teacher famous for training and encouraging Latinos in Los Angeles to take and pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exams.

Olivera, a professor of biochemistry and neuroscience at the University of Utah, was born and raised in the Philippines, where he attended college. After completing doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and postdoctoral work at Stanford University, Olivera began doing research on the deadly cone snails that live in the Southeast Asian island.

His research, which now includes many more types of cone snails, has led to a better understanding of the nervous system and the development of new commercial drugs, such as potent painkillers that are administered to patients who do not respond to morphine.

Director of the Foundation Dr. S. Allen Counter, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, said Olivera’s work has the potential to “explain some behaviors...[and] help us treat and cure many diseases.”

Marlowe A. Rillera ’09, co-president of the Harvard Philippine Forum, called the award “a symbol that Filipinos are getting out there and making a difference in the world.”

SCIENTISTS OF TOMORROW

On Saturday, over 70 children from Cambridge and Boston schools arrived at the Science Center to learn about science from Harvard professors, undergraduates, and teaching fellows.

Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences J. Woodland Hastings, one of the lecturers, gave a talk called “Fireflies and Phosphorescent Seas: How and Why Animals Produce Light.”

The conference also featured experiments performed live, which taught the children about basic reactions through demonstrations such as “Baking Soda and Vinegar: A Chemical Reaction” and “Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream.”

One of the undergraduate volunteers running the ice cream experiment asked the young members in the audience, “Anyone know what liquid nitrogen is made of?” leading one of the students to eagerly reply, “nitrogen!”

Counter said he was happy to see the children learning about science and having fun.

“This was a dream for me. Having taught science at Harvard for more than 25 years, I wanted to introduce young people in public schools to science so that they would have an interest in the sciences as big as their interest for the humanities,” said Counter.

Counter said the Foundation’s science conference began more than 15 years ago with the aim of encouraging more women and minorities in the sciences. In 2006, Albert Einstein’s name was added to the conference to honor the physicist’s work lecturing at black colleges and speaking against racism and anti-Semitism.

Muriel Payan ’08, the conference’s co-director, said that the event was part of an important push to encourage women and minorities to pursue the sciences.

“Lots of women and minorities are not really taking that science, mathematics, engineering route,” she said, noting that these groups have nonetheless “made incredible contributions to science.”

This year’s conference was co-sponsored by the Harvard Philippine Forum, the Harvard Undergraduate Biological Sciences Society, the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers, and the Harvard Black Students Association.

—Staff writer Doris A. Hernandez can be reached at dahernan@fas.harvard.edu.