HMS/HSDM Class Day
2005
The Doctor’s Advice: Talk to Strangers
Faculty Symposium
Profs Tell Tales of Molecular Medicine
HSPH Class Day
UN Official Sees Women’s Health Crisis in Africa
Alumni Day
How Doctors Speak to the Public
Class Symposium
For Class of ’80, Risk and Reward Mark a Productive 25 Years
DMS Symposium
Integration Key to Student Success in Life Sciences
Student Speakers
Students Recount Lessons Learned
Scenes From Alumni Week
Pictures from Commencement and Alumni Week activities
Student and Faculty Awards
Honors Given to Faculty and Students During Commencement
Growth Factor May Aid in Crohn’s Disease Treatment
Bench Science Advances Against Cancer
Dental School Dedicates New Building on Longwood
Faculty Health Survey Being Conducted
Awards Recognize Advancement of Women
BLAST Resource Available to HMS Faculty
The July Effect: How Hospitals Cope with Intern Turnover
HSPH CLASS DAY
UN Official Sees Women’s Health Crisis in Africa
 Photo by Richard Chase Stephen Lewis said the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa is especially devastating to women. |
Lewis focused on the tremendous toll the HIV/AIDS epidemic takes on women in sub-Saharan Africa due to gender inequality. Parts of the continent are being stripped of women and girls. “And because of the inequality,” he said, “they have no capacity to say no to predatory sexual overtures. They have no capacity to negotiate safe sex. They have no capacity to say, ‘Wear a condom,’ and indeed, what is emerging, which is absolutely hallucinatory, is that one of the most dangerous environments for a woman in Africa is to be married.”
Prevalence rates for HIV/AIDS are actually higher in sub-Saharan Africa among married women than among sexually active single women because the married women erroneously believe they are in a monogamous relationship and therefore at less risk.
 Photo by Richard Chase HSPH dean Barry Bloom |
Lewis, whose remarks are available online, sees the role of public health work in the modern world as indispensable. “It goes beyond all the boundaries of the particular professional discipline, and you bring so much more,” he said, addressing the graduating students. “And I see it in the context of HIV and AIDS, and I see it in the context of Africa, and I think to myself how wondrous it might be if even a small handful of you participated in what the School of Public Health and Harvard already know so well in so many countries.”
 Photo by Richard Chase In her student speech, Alyson Lee Burns said she had never met more passionate people than those she got to know at HSPH. |
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On the podium during the HSPH Class Day ceremony is James Ware, the School's dean for academic affairs. |
The commencement ceremony opened with a Native American honor song offered by Tobias Vanderhoop, tribal councilman for the Wampanoag tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah, Massachusetts. The song was shared to recognize Harvard’s historical relationship with Native American communities and to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Indian College at Harvard. Alyson Lee Burns, SM ’05, Health Policy and Management, delivered the student speech, saying that she had never met more passionate people than those she got to know at HSPH. She urged fellow graduates to retain their compassion for those in need. “We’ve learned how to run data, learned the P value, but we must remember the human dimension” to public health, she said. J. Jacques Carter provided greetings as president-elect of the HSPH Alumni Council.
HSPH awarded 477 graduate degrees in public health at the ceremony. More than half of the class were women, four were Native Americans, and nearly one third of the students came from countries outside the United States.