Among Harvard’s chaplaincy, Rabbi Getzel Davis has long been known as a bridge builder. From his internship at Harvard Hillel in 2012 to his service as a member of the executive committee of Harvard chaplains, Davis has created lasting relationships across religious, spiritual, and ethical organizations on campus.

Davis will now join the University staff as inaugural director of interfaith engagement, where he will lead programs to foster respect for diverse identities, build relationships among communities, and encourage cooperation for the common good. He sees the post as a natural continuation of his tenure at Harvard.

“I spent 12 years as a Harvard chaplain, and I learned a lot about all these other communities,” Davis said. “Not only did I build deeper relationships with them and run programming together, but I learned a lot about what they were struggling with and was often surprised that, in fact, we had a lot in common.”

In the new role, part of a presidential initiative on interfaith engagement, Davis will oversee projects that promote religious literacy and meaningful dialogue across diverse faith and non-faith traditions, and collaborate with University offices to advocate for the needs of religious and spiritual communities.

“Creating a community in which every person at Harvard can thrive means expanding opportunities for individuals to know, understand, and appreciate one another,” said President Alan M. Garber. “Rabbi Davis is a good listener and a great collaborator. His capacities for curiosity and compassion will shape our efforts to ensure that Harvard is a place where people can be themselves, express their views, and pursue their dreams both individually and collectively.”

Davis brings with him deep relationships with many of Harvard’s chaplains, including Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid, Harvard’s Muslim chaplain, who expressed excitement about Davis’ appointment and the new role. “To have someone in the Office of the President that is devoted to fostering interfaith programming is innovative, strategic, and forward-looking,” he said. “I think his presence as director of interfaith engagement is a win for Harvard, a win for the chaplains, and a win for our students.”

The work has already begun. In the coming semester, Davis will launch the First-Year Religious Ethical and Spiritual Life Fellowship, a paid 10-session program that helps students develop the skills to navigate complex differences and combat religious prejudice, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. At the end of the program, students will have the opportunity to apply for grants to foster their own interfaith initiatives on campus.

Davis is also collaborating with the office of the College dean of students to provide programming for pre-orientation and orientation to help promote pluralism and mutual understanding.

These new projects will run alongside existing programming, including Interfaith PhotoVoice — an exhibit of photos and stories that reflect student perspectives on religion, ethics, and spirituality — and Pluralism Passports, a series of interfaith events and programs that help Harvard community members learn about religious, ethical, and spiritual communities outside their own. Additional programs, administered by Davis and multifaith engagement fellow Abby McElroy, will begin throughout the academic year.

Other chaplains joined Abdur-Rashid in praising Davis as the right leader for the role.

“Getzel is a leader of deep humanity who has already spent years working hard to build closer, more mutually respectful relationships at Harvard, between religious groups that would undoubtedly have been more at odds with one another if not for his presence,” said Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein. “In my particular case, I can say he has also been a wonderful champion of friendship and understanding between religious and nonreligious communities.”

Tammy McLeod, president of the Harvard Chaplains and a staff member of the interdenominational Christian organization Cru, also spoke to Davis’s ability to lead across difference. “Within the Harvard Chaplains, he has been a dedicated advocate for cultivating genuine relationships across diverse belief systems,” said McLeod. “Warm, personable, and deeply committed to life’s enduring questions, Getzel brings a unique presence to Harvard’s spiritual and ethical landscape. Students will find great value in engaging with him. His new position is not only timely — it is vital.”

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, echoed that sentiment.

“Of the many people I have worked with and observed in higher education, none is a better exemplar of assiduously cultivating relationships with colleagues across difference. … I cannot imagine a better fit, or more urgent work, than his new role of stitching together the different strands of Harvard’s communal tapestry into a more unified, humane, and interconnected whole.”

Davis lives with his wife, Leah Rosenberg, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and three children in Cambridge. At Brandeis University, he majored in Near Eastern and Judaic studies, with a minor in comparative religion, before attending Hebrew College, a pluralistic rabbinical school in Brookline. He first joined Harvard Hillel as an intern, advising the reform and conservative minyans on campus. In 2015, he became Harvard Hillel’s director of graduate programming and chair of University Programs for Harvard Chaplains.

In the latter role, he aimed to strengthen relationships among more than 40 chaplains from more than 30 religious and ethical traditions. Davis recalls meeting in a different chaplaincy every month, giving different groups opportunities to share their triumphs and struggles.

Aside from formal programming, Davis and other chaplains hosted meals open to students to discuss essential questions of faith, meaning, and collaboration on campus. He also changed the format of chaplain meetings to build time for one-on-one conversations and in-person gatherings.

“I find a lot of the way I encounter the sacred is to be in relationship with other people,” said Davis, who became campus rabbi in 2023. “And some of that has been by developing deep and trusting relationships with the other chaplains.”

The deep bonds with other religious leaders, including Abdur-Rashid, led to joint events between Harvard Hillel and other groups like the Harvard Islamic Society. Davis cited the “Sukkat Salaam” dinner as one of many successful collaborations — an event that celebrated the start of the Jewish holiday Sukkot and the close of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting.

The relationship between Davis and Abdur-Rashid proved valuable following the events of Oct. 7, 2023, as Jewish and Muslim students navigated complex emotional and community responses to the attack on Israel and the Gaza war.

In December 2023, the two held their first of three vigils, praying together for peace for all those affected by the conflict. “They felt very important, symbolically, to be done on campus,” Davis said. “It felt like a very big deal.”

This experience of bringing communities together during a particularly challenging time reinforced Davis’ belief in a more structured approach to interfaith work on campus. After leaving Hillel in March 2025 to regroup and spend time with his family, Davis continued thinking about the connections he had formed with other chaplains, imagining a new role that would allow him to establish programming for an even wider and more diverse community.

“That time of reflection gave me the clarity to see that the bridge-building work we did at Hillel was precisely what the entire campus needed,” Davis said. “I used that period to meet with chaplains, administrators, and students to develop a concrete vision for how Harvard could foster true pluralism. This collective vision is what the University has now entrusted me to advance.”

After more than a decade at the University, Davis is thrilled to be stepping into the inaugural role and an initiative that he expects to grow in years to come. “This new role feels like the culmination of my entire career here,” he said. “I am honored and energized to answer this call to serve the whole Harvard community.”

Every year, hundreds of people die in automobile accidents involving distracted teen drivers. A new study zeroes in on one of the most common forms of distraction, cellphone use, exploring how often young people engage in the risky behavior and why.

A team of public health researchers led by Rebecca Robbins, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, surveyed teens across the country to find out the ways in which they use their phones while driving and how that behavior might be curbed.

They found that seven in 10 high school students reported using or making long glances toward their phones while driving — many lasting two seconds or longer — for about 20 percent of each trip.

“That’s a huge proportion — putting themselves and the traveling public around them at risk,” said Robbins.

The time that it would take to read or send a text message, activate maps, or check social media, she added, is associated with a 5.5 times greater likelihood of a crash.

Most teens in the study said they believed their peers engaged in distracted driving. Robbins said teens have a strong association between their beliefs about what their peers are doing and their own actual behavior. So many think it’s normal to check their phones while driving, despite the risks.

“Young people harbor beliefs that looking at their phone offers benefits,” she said. “It allows them to be entertained. It allows them to get where they’re going. That is what we call a maladaptive belief that would need to be corrected with behavioral intervention.”

Among participants who reported using their phones while driving, the most common reasons were entertainment (65 percent), followed by texting (40 percent) and navigation (30 percent).

Among participants who reported using their phones while driving, the most common reasons were…

entertainment

65%

texting

40%

navigation

30%

Yet Robbins emphasized three in 10 respondents reported practicing focused driving.

“Young people had bright spots around them, of role models that were practicing safe driving practices such as avoiding phone use while driving, that was inversely associated with reports of young people distracted-driving themselves,” she said.

Additionally, Robbins said, teens’ attitudes toward their own ability to make educated choices played a role.

“We also found a significant association between self-efficacy and distracted driving, such that stronger self-efficacy beliefs or beliefs that they could avoid distracted driving, avoid the temptation, put their phone in the backseat, turn on ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, any number of those in the constellation of safe driving practices, was inversely associated with distracted driving,” she said. 

Robbins said information gleaned through the study could be used to craft public health messaging campaigns and behavioral interventions like those that have promoted seat belt use. “This research suggested a number of promising avenues for future research, such as a campaign that would emphasize the benefits of using ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode and empowering young people to turn that mode on, or have it automatically turn on, while they’re driving.”

Uche Amaechi is the chair of the Leading Change Foundations and a lecturer on leadership at the Graduate School of Education.

“Severance” is a great story and it’s great storytelling, and I highly recommend it. So many rich conversations about organizations and leadership can come out of it: It gets into the idea of multiple versions of yourself, and which versions may come to the fore in different contexts. It asks the question: Why would a company want its employees to be severed? Is it about risk management? Is it about control? Is it about blind allegiance to the mission?

I’ve always been a cycling commuter, but I didn’t start cycling for fun until COVID. The reason I recommend cycling is that you get emotional and mental benefits as well as physical benefits. Mentally, cycling gives me time to really think things through, to work through what’s in my head. Emotionally, it’s a great way to release stress I didn’t even know I had, it’s very cathartic. And it’s a great way to get to know what’s in your neighborhood: You become more aware of your surroundings.

In leadership, we always talk about the importance of work-life balance. You can’t be a good leader if you’re not taking care of yourself. Cycling is a great way to get time on your own to focus, clear your mind, and find your center so you can be a better leader and a better team member.

In my line of work, we often encourage leaders to be on the balcony as opposed to on the dance floor: When you’re on the dance floor, you’re part of the system, but when you’re on the balcony you’ve removed yourself from the system a little bit so you can make decisions for the benefit of the system. That’s important for strong, empathetic leadership. But there’s a lot of value to being on the dance floor.

I dance — and teach — Argentine tango. It’s you, your partner, and the music. The leader has to pay attention to how their partner is interpreting their lead, and they have to adjust in real time. The follower has to interpret what the leader is asking them to do. In a way, the leader has to know how to follow, and the follower has to know how to lead. Both people have to really pay attention to each other, and to the rest of the dance floor: What are the other couples doing? It’s personal, it’s interpersonal, and it’s systems-thinking.

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

In recent weeks, several prominent executives at big employers such as Ford and J.P. Morgan Chase have been offering predictions that AI will result in large white-collar job losses.

Some tech leaders, including those at Amazon, OpenAI, and Meta have acknowledged that the latest wave of AI, called agentic AI, is much closer to radically transforming the workplace than even they had previously anticipated.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI firm Anthropic, said nearly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting could be replaced or eliminated by AI.

Christopher Stanton, Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, studies AI in the workplace and teaches an MBA course, “Managing the Future of Work.” In this edited conversation, Stanton explains why the latest generation of AI is evolving so rapidly and how it may shake up white-collar work.

Several top executives are now predicting AI will eliminate large numbers of white-collar jobs far sooner than previously expected. Does that sound accurate?

I think it’s too early to tell. If you were pessimistic in the sense that you’re worried about labor market disruption and skill and human capital depreciation, if you look at the tasks that workers in white-collar work can do and what we think AI is capable of, that overlap impacts about 35 percent of the tasks that we see in labor market data.

“My personal inclination — this is not necessarily based on a deep analytical model — is that policymakers will have a very limited ability to do anything here unless it’s through subsidies or tax policy.”

The optimistic case is that if you think a machine can do some tasks but not all, the tasks the machine can automate or do will free up people to concentrate on different aspects of a job. It might be that you would see 20 percent or 30 percent of the tasks that a professor could do being done by AI, but the other 80 percent or 70 percent are things that might be complementary to what an AI might produce. Those are the two extremes.

In practice, it’s probably still too early to tell how this is going to shake out, but we’ve seen at least three or four things that might lead you to suspect that the view that AI is going to have a more disruptive effect on the labor market might be reasonable.

One of those is that computer-science graduates and STEM graduates in general are having more trouble finding jobs today than in the past, which might be consistent with the view that AI is doing a lot of work that, say, software engineers used to do.

If you look at reports out of, say, Y Combinator or if you look at reports out of other tech sector-focused places, it looks like a lot of the code for early-stage startups is now being written by AI. Four or five years ago, that wouldn’t have been true at all. So, we are starting to see the uptake of these tools consistent with the narrative from these CEOs. So that’s one piece of it.

The second piece is that even if you don’t necessarily think of displacement, you can potentially think that AI is going to have an impact on wages.

There are two competing ways of thinking about where this is going to go. Some of the early evidence that looks at AI rollouts and contact centers and frontline work and the like suggests that AI reduces inequality between people by lifting the lower tail of performers.

Some of the best papers on this look at the randomized rollout of conversational AI tools or chatbots and frontline call-center work and show that lower-performing workers or workers who are at the bottom of the productivity distribution disproportionately benefit from that AI rollout tool. If these workers have knowledge gaps, the AIs fill in for the knowledge gaps.

What’s driving the accelerated speed at which this generation of AI is evolving and being used by businesses?

There are a couple of things. I have a paper with some researchers at Microsoft that looks at AI adoption in the workplace and the effects of AI rollout. Our tentative conclusion was that it took a lot of coordination to really see some of the productivity effects of AI, but it had an immediate impact on individual tasks like email.

“Our tentative conclusion was that it took a lot of coordination to really see some of the productivity effects of AI, but it had an immediate impact on individual tasks like email.”

One of the messages in that paper that has not necessarily been widely diffused is that this is probably some of the fastest-diffusing technology around.

In our sample, half of the participants who got access to this tool from Microsoft were using it. And so, the take-up has been tremendous.

My guess is that one of the reasons why the executives … didn’t forecast this is that this is an extraordinarily fast-diffusing technology. You’re seeing different people in different teams running their own experiments to figure out how to use it, and some of those experiments are going to generate insights that weren’t anticipated.

The second thing that has accelerated the usefulness of these models is a type of model called a chain-of-thought model. The earliest versions of generative AI tools were prone to hallucinate and to provide answers that were inaccurate. The chain-of-thought type of reasoning is meant to do error correction on the fly.

And so, rather than provide an answer that could be subject to error or hallucinations, the model itself will provide a prompt to say, “Are you sure about that? Double check.” Models with chain-of-thought reasoning are much, much more accurate and less subject to hallucinations, especially for quantitative tasks or tasks that involve programming.

As a result, you are seeing quite a lot of penetration with early stage startups who are doing coding using natural-language queries or what they call “vibe coding” today. These vibe-coding tools have some built-in error correction where you can actually write usable code as a result of these feedback mechanisms that model designers have built in.

The third thing driving major adoption, especially in the tech world, is that model providers have built tools to deploy code. Anthropic has a tool that will allow you to write code just based on queries or natural language, and then you can deploy that with Anthropic tools.

There are other tools like Cursor or Replika where you will ultimately be able to instruct a machine to write pieces of technical software with limited technical background. You don’t necessarily need specific technical tools, and it’s made deployment much, much easier.

This feeds back into the thing that I was telling you earlier, which is that you’ve seen lots of experiments and you’ve seen enormous diffusion. And one of the reasons that you’ve seen enormous diffusion is that you now have these tools and these models that allow people without domain expertise to build things and figure out what they can build and how they can do it.

Which types of work are most likely to see change first, and in what way? You mentioned writing code, but are there others?

I have not seen any of the immediate data that suggests employment losses, but you could easily imagine that in any knowledge work you might see some employment effects, at least in theory.

In practice, if you look back at the history of predictions about AI and job loss, making those predictions is extraordinarily hard.

We had lots of discussion in 2017, 2018, 2019, around whether we should stop training radiologists. But radiologists are as busy as ever and we didn’t stop training them. They’re doing more and one of the reasons is that the cost of imaging has fallen. And at least some of them have some AI tools at their fingertips.

And so, in some sense, these tools are going to potentially take some tasks that humans were doing but also lower the cost of doing new things. And so, the net-net of that is very hard to predict, because if you do something that augments something that is complementary to what humans in those occupations are doing, you may need more humans doing slightly different tasks.

And so, I think it’s too early to say that we’re going to necessarily see a net displacement in any one industry or overall.

If AI suddenly puts a large portion of middle-class Americans out of work or makes their education and skills far less valuable, that could have catastrophic effects on the U.S. economy, on politics, and on quality of life generally. Are there any policy solutions lawmakers should be thinking about today to get ahead of this sea change?

My personal inclination — this is not necessarily based on a deep analytical model — is that policymakers will have a very limited ability to do anything here unless it’s through subsidies or tax policy. Anything that you would do to prop up employment, you’ll see a competitor who is more nimble and with a lower cost who doesn’t have that same legacy labor stack probably out-compete people dynamically.

It’s not so clear that there should be any policy intervention when we don’t necessarily understand the technology at this point. My guess is that the policymakers’ remedy is going to be an ex-post one rather than an ex-ante one. My suspicion is better safety-net policies and better retraining policies will be the tools at play rather than trying to prevent the adoption of the technology.

Harvard has launched two new initiatives that promise to bolster the University’s academic engagement with Israeli institutions and create greater opportunities for students and researchers. A collaboration announced this week with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) will offer study abroad opportunities for undergraduates during the academic year and the summer. Additionally, earlier this month, Harvard Medical School opened applications for the Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellowships for Israeli researchers.

Undergraduate study abroad: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Harvard’s agreement with BGU will offer Harvard College students year-round opportunities to study and earn credit toward their degree in Israel beginning in spring 2026.

BGU, whose main campus is in Be’er-Sheva, was founded in 1969 as the first campus in southern Israel’s Negev desert. Today, it has expanded to three campuses, which are home to 20,000 students and 4,000 faculty members. Its community is engaged in cutting-edge research and academics in the sciences, history and the humanities, and business and management, and the school is a regional leader in research on climate change and desert studies. In addition to its three campuses, BGU is home to several multi-disciplinary research institutes specializing in biotechnology, solar energy, desert research, and Jewish and Israeli culture, among other areas. Its more than 100,000 alumni hold leading roles in research and development, healthcare, industry, and culture across Israel and the world. One noteworthy aspect of BGU’s mission is its commitment to social and environmental responsibility. The university is actively engaged in developing the Negev, Israel, and the region.

Current and past opportunities at BGU include an archaeology course that sends students to help on active excavations; marine science courses on the Mediterranean; and a sustainable agricultural practices course focused on preventing desertification and conserving resources. All courses are taught in English, with visiting students sharing classrooms with Israeli students to facilitate conversation and cross-cultural exchange.

Professor Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, BGU’s vice president for global engagement, highlighted the university’s commitment to impact and exchange: “Ben-Gurion University strives for excellence in research and teaching, as well as innovation and applied research that impact people’s lives wherever they are. We look forward to embarking on this collaboration with Harvard University and fostering the collaborative relationships so necessary to training our next generation of leaders.”

“We are thrilled to work with BGU to provide this new opportunity for undergraduate study abroad,” said Mark Elliott, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs. “The collaboration with BGU is the latest in Harvard’s long and rich history of engagement with institutions of higher education across Israel, and I have no doubt that it will contribute both to transformative experiences for students and to increased academic collaboration across the region in the coming years.”

Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education at Harvard College, said: “I’m delighted that we’re adding BGU to the list of Israeli universities where our students can study abroad, because BGU offers opportunities that aren’t available here at Harvard: learning about archaeology at a dig site, about marine biology in the Mediterranean, about climate and sustainability from the world’s leaders in desert agriculture.”

College students can study abroad with BGU beginning in spring 2026, with opportunities available for spring, full-year, or summer study. For information on term-time studies, visit the Office for International Education’s list of approved programs. The deadline for spring 2026 semester study will be Oct. 1.

In addition to BGU, OIE also offers undergraduate study abroad opportunities with Tel Aviv University; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Technion – Israel Institute of Technology; and the University of Haifa. Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and Harvard Divinity School also offer opportunities for graduate student exchange.

For information on summer study, see OIE’s list of summer programs. The deadline for summer 2026 study abroad applications will be Jan. 29 (for funding and credit, programs 6+ weeks) or April 1.

Students interested in term-time or summer options can email oie@fas.harvard.edu to schedule a meeting, or attend drop-in sessions beginning in September, from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Postgraduate research exchange: Kalaniyot Fellowships at HMS

The University is also working to strengthen its academic ties to Israel via scholarly exchange. Harvard Medical School recently announced the opening of the Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellowships at Harvard Medical School, which will welcome scientists from Israel to conduct postdoctoral training in basic biomedical research at HMS.

The Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellowships are open to residents of Israel who have completed a Ph.D. and wish to perform biomedical research in a laboratory on the HMS campus or at an affiliated hospital (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Joslin Diabetes Center, Massachusetts Eye and Ear, or Massachusetts General Hospital). Successful applicants will be awarded a fellowship of two to three years, beginning in January, with the possibility of extension. The HMS branch of the Kalaniyot chapter at Harvard administers the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Sciences established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and the Dorot Fellowship established by the Dorot Foundation.

This opportunity is coordinated by the Harvard Medical School branch of the Kalaniyot chapter at Harvard. HMS led the way in establishing Kalaniyot at Harvard, where the local chapter is supported by the Kalaniyot Foundation, a national organization that seeks to deepen ties between American and Israeli researchers and to contribute to academic exchange and excellence in both Israel and the U.S. The University is currently exploring expanding the initiative to include other Schools at Harvard.

“The aim of the Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellowships is to enhance scientific excellence and expertise by bringing the most promising research talent from Israel to Harvard Medical School and our affiliated hospitals,” said Naama Kanarek, HMS assistant professor of pathology at Boston Children’s Hospital, who serves as a faculty leader of the HMS branch of the Kalaniyot chapter at Harvard alongside Matthew Meyerson, HMS professor of genetics and medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Mark Poznansky, director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Mass General Hospital and HMS professor of medicine. “We look forward to the benefits of academic exchange with these researchers, as well as the strengthened ties between HMS and researchers across Israel that will result.”

The new initiative builds on other successful collaborations between HMS and Israeli institutions, such as the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Living Laboratory Collaboration, established in 2021 to bring together researchers from HMS and Clalit Research Institute to investigate critical questions in precision medicine and predictive health. Since its inception, the Berkowitz Clinic for Undiagnosed Cases has successfully resolved dozens of complex genetic mysteries, enabling prenatal diagnosis and disease prevention while identifying novel disease-causing genes and risk factors that have been published for global use. In parallel, Clalit researchers developed innovative analytic models to enhance genetic interpretation, benefiting both Israeli and global patient populations.

This type of collaboration is not unique to HMS; faculty across Harvard are widely engaged in scholarly work in and about Israel. Several centers and programs across the University — including the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard Law School’s Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Israeli and Jewish Law, HKS Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative — host Israeli fellows, visiting scholars, and speakers each year.

Summer break offers a time for a different kind of learning in labs and research centers across campus. Hundreds of Harvard College students are conducting hands-on research with faculty and making discoveries — about the material and themselves.

There are 350 undergraduates participating in the Harvard Summer Undergraduate Research Village, and another 150 are enrolled in the Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Summer Scholars program. These programs house students on campus all summer while they work alongside faculty mentors on cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines.

An additional 200 students are pursuing off-campus opportunities with support from the Harvard College Research Program.

“We are so excited to see our students ‘learning without a net’ and looking to answer questions with no known answers,” said Jonna Iacono, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

Sam Capehart ’28

A native of Virginia, Capehart is assisting Sophia Wiesenfeld, a Ph.D. student at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in Michael Baym’s lab at Harvard Medical School. They are working on a project exploring the role plasmids play in the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Plasmids are mobile genetic elements that can transfer between bacterial cells. The DNA molecules can carry genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics and can pass those genes between different species, which is a major concern among public health experts.

“Thinking toward the future, especially for our generation, antibiotic resistance is something we have to contend with,” Capehart said. “The bacteria will always be one step ahead of us. So I think any research that we can be doing now that’s even tangentially related to antibiotic resistance could potentially save millions of lives in the coming years.”

The Baym lab, which is part of the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Microbiology, investigates whether it might be possible to combat antibiotic resistance by outcompeting it.

Since the most “fit” plasmids replicate the most and dominate within bacterial cells, the researchers are working to design a highly fit plasmid that can dominate and displace plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes.

In the lab, Capehart has been doing “competition experiments” to identify which plasmids come out on top when placed in the same bacterial environment.

Using samples from the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, she isolates bacterial plasmids and introduces two different ones into cells to observe how they behave over a nine-day period and see which takes over. She compared it to making a March Madness bracket.

“We’re hoping to determine whether plasmid hierarchy exists,” Capehart said. “Does plasmid A always win over the other plasmids, or is it more of a rock-paper-scissors system? Developing some sort of probiotic plasmid would depend pretty heavily on its ability to defeat all other plasmids. So if we can find a ‘king plasmid,’ that could point us toward mutations that we could then use in the future.”

Capehart said her experience in a wet lab environment is the perfect complement to her coursework. While she hasn’t declared a concentration yet, she’s leaning toward chemical and physical biology.

“Having the hands-on skills that I’ve been learning these past couple of weeks is invaluable,” Capehart said. “I’m a nerd. I love reading books as much as the next person, but there’s nothing quite like actually getting your hands dirty with wastewater to understand the subject.”

Nouraldeen Ibrahim ’26

Ibrahim is a chemical and physical biology concentrator who has worked in Philip Cole’s lab at the Medical School since he was a first-year. He is studying the function of an enzyme released by Legionella pneumophila, the bacteria responsible for Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia.

Specifically, he is looking at how the enzyme functions at the molecular level. The enzyme has a role in modifying DNA, leading to a reduced response in immune response genes, which allows the pneumonia to develop.

“I have access to this enzyme, which is fairly new and not much work has been done on it,” Ibrahim said. “I’m using some tools in our lab to better understand the function of this protein. What is its shape? What does it like to interact with? Which metal ions does it contain? The goal is finding ways to curtail this enzyme and making sure that maybe in the future we could have a way to prevent the spread of this disease.”

Ibrahim first became interested in epigenetics in high school after visiting his grandmother in Egypt while she was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma.

“I began thinking about how we can look at a more targeted way at how these diseases or bacteria are able to modify your DNA before looking at the outcomes,” said Ibrahim. “Chemotherapy looks at the outcome and then tries to kill those cells. But maybe if we could look at the start and what happens in the first place to lead to these downstream effects, it could be useful.”

Ibrahim, who hopes to attend medical school in the future, said being able to work in the Cole lab as an undergraduate has been transformational.

“Getting to go hands-on in the lab, having one-on-one conversations with one of the top professors at Harvard and Brigham Women’s Hospital, and being able to gain from his expertise has been crucial for me,” Ibrahim said. “Just pipetting things, working through my own experiments, designing my experiment from scratch, having my idea that I conceptualize, and seeing outcome and data is super powerful.”

Eunice Kim ’26

Kim’s research focuses on the history of heat mortality in Los Angeles County, particularly in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries before air conditioning became common.

Kim has been assisting David S. Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, with research for his forthcoming book on how heat waves came to be seen as public health threats. The work has required her to play detective, scouring online newspaper archives — including the 1870s Los Angeles Daily Star newspaper — to find records of major heat waves that impacted the region, and how residents responded to them.

“We’ve known about heat waves for a long time,” said Kim, who is earning a double concentration in the history of science and human developmental and regenerative biology. “It was mentioned in the Bible — people have been writing about it since basically the beginning of time. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, interestingly enough, that people realized this was going to be a re-occurring issue of experiencing heat waves, and that something had to be done in order to create better structures so people can live through heat waves and actually survive.”

For Kim, who was born and raised in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, it’s a research topic close to home, literally. She grew up experiencing heat waves in the county — sustained high temperatures lasting for two days or more — but began thinking about them more critically as a public health issue in the classroom.

“As global warming is continuing to affect the world and temperatures are continuing to rise, this will continue to become a persistent issue,” said Kim, adding that the research skills she is acquiring will help prepare her to write a senior thesis.

“I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Harvard’s archives, resources, and librarians better,” Kim said. “Hands-on research has taught me a lot about curiosity and patience. I’ve gone into this research with a spirit of inquiry and a hope to uncover unique LA heat wave narratives.”

Charlotte Paley ’26

Paley is spending the summer researching eating disorders in the lab of Kristin Javaras, assistant professor of psychology at the Medical School. Based at McLean Hospital, Paley’s position is part of McLean’s Student Visitor Program and is funded through Harvard’s BLISS Program.

Paley, a Florida native who is concentrating in psychology with a secondary in global health and health policy, is assisting with a project aimed at investigating the accuracy of eating disorder diagnoses.

She is working under the supervision of Javaras; Jennifer Sneider, assistant director of the Javaras laboratory and assistant professor at the Medical School; and research assistant Lily Suh.

Paley’s role on the project involves reviewing descriptions of patient symptoms (with personal details carefully edited to ensure anonymity) that Javaras’ team have collected to see how well they match up against the formal criteria used to diagnose anorexia nervosa.

The goal is to evaluate the accuracy of the diagnoses in practice, to inform future assessment in both research and treatment. 

“Something I’m particularly interested in is looking at exercise behavior in the data,” Paley said. “Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have some good qualitative findings regarding exercise behavior and the ways these are manifesting across patients of different ages and genders.” 

Paley has also been helping with a neuroimaging study on binge eating that explores how social stress affects food-related decision-making in women. That work has included some data entry and putting up fliers to recruit study participants. 

“Eating disorders are pretty misunderstood and very stigmatized,” Paley said. “There’s so much shame surrounding them. Research is so important to improving outcomes and potential treatments for eating disorders, so I’m really excited about this research and hope that it makes a meaningful impact.” 

This summer offers Paley real-world experience that may contribute to her senior thesis on how weight discrimination contributes to various forms of psychopathology, including anxiety, depression, and disordered eating. She hopes to pursue medicine or public health after graduation. 

“Getting to do research this summer is an amazing opportunity,” she said. “In this current climate where research funding is being cut, it’s very meaningful that I’m getting to do this now. I’m very grateful for this opportunity.”

Jeffrey Shi ’26

Shi is researching acoustic metamaterials in the lab of Jenny Hoffman, Clowes Professor of Science, a topic that has fascinated him since he first joined the lab as a Massachusetts high schooler.

Shi, a double concentrator in physics and English, has used acoustic metamaterials to help design and simulate a broadband high-Q resonator. The devices trap energy, like sound vibrations, and traditionally are either broadband or high-Q (quality factor), meaning they can resonate either for a long time or at multiple frequencies.

But this new design breaks that barrier, maintaining energy efficiently across a wide range of frequencies. Some potential real-world applications include energy harvesting: capturing energy from the environment and converting it to electricity.

“If you place our metamaterials under train tracks, say, and the train barrels across and the tracks shake, there’s actually a very straightforward way of harvesting the energy using our acoustic materials,” explained Shi, who was first author on a paper on the topic and presented his work at several conferences. “Because our material is both broadband and high-Q, the tracks can vibrate at different frequencies, and we can harvest that energy with high efficiency.”

Acoustic metamaterials are engineered structures designed to manipulate sound waves. Since their properties come from their geometry rather than the materials they’re composed of (they can be made of steel, plastic, or even a trash bag), they are highly tunable and scalable, according to Shi.

They can also be 3D printed quickly, which makes them ideal stand-ins for studying quantum materials, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to create.

“Part of the beauty is that there is easy tunability for whatever purpose that you need these materials for,” Shi said. “Is my layer going to be steel here, or is it going to be a sort of polymer? You can scale it so that you can hold it in your hand or so that it stretches across your entire wingspan. Either way, it’s macroscopic, and it’s easy to build.”

When he isn’t in the Hoffman lab, Shi is an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Kang-Kuen Ni, Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics.

There he assists with improving a component in a complex laser system used for experiments. His group uses these highly focused lasers to trap and manipulate individual atoms, bringing isolated atoms of different species together to study their interactions at the single-particle level.

“I feel very fortunate and grateful to have had a research experience so early, and so many resources and support and guidance from the people around me,” said Shi, who plans to pursue physics at the graduate level. “Physics research has been helpful in terms of knowing what kinds of physics I care about and what kinds of academic work I want to do in the future. I think I’ve learned a lot about myself through my research.”

When Michael Brenner taught the graduate-level class “Applied Mathematics 201” in fall 2023, the course’s nonlinear partial differential equations were too tough for artificial intelligence. AI managed to solve just 30 to 50 percent of the problems in the first three weeks of the class. 

“It was fine, but it wasn’t that great,” said Brenner, the Catalyst Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics and of Physics at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

But when he taught the same course this past spring, everything had changed. The same AI models that had stumbled on the easiest problems now aced the hardest ones. Brenner was shocked. “This actually calls into question the entire way the class is taught,” he said. 

The course taken by many graduate students has a reputation for being tough. Brenner has taught it for more than two decades, and he’d always given students take-home exams; he wanted them to have time to wrestle with difficult questions without the stress of a ticking clock. But if ChatGPT could take the exam for his students, could he trust what they turned in? 

He had two choices: Ban AI completely, or embrace it and redesign the class that has been taught at Harvard since before he was born. 

He redesigned the class. 

Forms of artificial intelligence have been used in mathematics for decades. But in the last few years, advances in machine learning and the exponential improvements of publicly available large language models have begun to reshape the discipline. While some mathematicians expect modest tools that can automate unglamorous parts of the job, others see a wholesale reimagining of the discipline and a rapid acceleration of what’s possible. 

And the notion that AI is uniquely bad at math? Brenner says: Simply not true.

“If you take your favorite large language model from two years ago and you ask it to please add 372 and 476, and it gives you the wrong number, then you say it’s bad at math,” Brenner said. “But what I would say is that’s the wrong use of a large language model. Obviously what you should do if you’re given those two numbers is you should open up a calculator.”

Evidence of AI’s mathematical capabilities is mounting. In 2024, two AI models from Google DeepMind earned a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the largest and most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Also in 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI model AlphaFold2, which predicted the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins. 

“It is now possible to make a computational model that leads scientifically to the extent that, within years of publication, it wins a Nobel Prize,” Brenner said. “That’s unprecedented.”

Knots and murmurations

While some mathematicians remain wary of AI’s tendency to hallucinate, specialized machine learning systems are accelerating mathematical discoveries in multiple fields. 

“Computers can deal with data sets that are too large for people to search through, and they can find patterns that people find interesting and significant,” said Michael Douglas, senior research scientist at the Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard. “That’s been very helpful for mathematicians whose objects of study can be assembled into data sets.”

One example: knot theory, a discipline that has applications in physics, biology, and chemistry. 

There are an infinite number of possible knots; researchers comb through databases of hundreds of millions of mathematical knots looking for relationships between them. In 2021, researchers at DeepMind, some of whom had ties to Harvard, used AI to discover new relationships between knot invariants, the numerical characteristics that define each knot’s properties. The discovery could have taken human mathematicians years to uncover through traditional methods. 

Another breakthrough came in research into elliptic curves, deceptively simple structures with big implications in both pure mathematics and cryptography. When Harvard researchers fed curve data into machine learning systems, they found that the curves’ behavior resembled murmurations — those swirling, coordinated movements of flocks of birds. 

“No mathematician ever thought to look for that before, and they were quite surprised to see it,” Douglas said. “They are now busy trying to prove it.”

But perhaps the form of AI that’s generating the most buzz in the math world is in automated theorem proving. For decades, mathematicians have used computer systems to check that theorems are logically sound. It’s an effective process, but translating human-written proofs into computer-readable formats is time-consuming, and the proofs generated by the automated provers are often very large. 

Enter generative AI. 

“The hope, and what people are starting to do now, is that we’ll use the large language models to write the proof in this way that the computer can check,” Douglas said. 

It’s solving one problem with another, Douglas said. Generative AI can almost instantaneously translate proofs into formats that automated systems can verify, while the verification process catches any AI-generated errors or hallucinations. 

Of course, just as AI is influencing mathematics, math is also influencing AI. Melanie Weber, assistant professor of applied mathematics and of computer science at SEAS, uses classical tools from geometry to build “geometric” AI models that are more efficient and transparent.

“Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing science. However, the current models require vast data and computing resources, which can be limited in the sciences and raise sustainability concerns. Encoding geometric structures, such as symmetries arising from laws of physics, can increase the models’ efficiency by narrowing their focus to physically plausible conditions,” she said. “What that means is that the possible instances that we have to consider during training can be dramatically reduced by incorporating such structure. And that essentially means that we need less data and less computing resources to train a good model if we hard-code that structure into the model.”

The future of math 

Although the speed at which AI will change mathematics is still unclear, there’s no doubt the transformation is happening. Weber sees the technology serving both as a kind of research assistant, handling literature reviews and proof verification, and as a sounding board for ideas, helping mathematicians solve problems faster. Brenner said that kind of acceleration could be transformative.

“My hope is that we can solve problems faster and we can get more work done,” he said. “Science is infinite. There’s no limit.” 

Teaching, Brenner added, is also infinite. In the 2025 version of “Applied Mathematics 201,” he did away with traditional homework problems. Instead, students had to create their own problems, have a classmate verify them, and see if they could outsmart an AI. (“One of the good ones,” Brenner specified. “If the not-very-good models can solve your problem, it doesn’t count.”) 

By the end of the semester, the students had created nearly 700 math problems of increasing difficulty. The data on whether AI could solve them could prove useful for researchers.

“It’s just amazing, because I’m teaching math, right? And we’ve got a situation where the students are inventing math problems that are harder and harder and harder, and trying to solve them. That is the dream.” 

Brenner added, “There are problems everywhere. How to better predict the climate. How to understand what manipulations one could do to help the Earth be a more habitable place. Models that would help discover drugs. … The sky’s the limit on this, and we don’t know what is possible. But it is not a boring time to be doing this.”

Executive function — top-down processes by which the human mind controls behavior, regulating thoughts and actions — have long been studied using a standard set of tools, with these assessments being included in national and international child development norms.

A new study of children in schooled and unschooled environments, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises questions about some of the assumptions underlying the way psychologists and scholars of cognitive science think about these processes.

Instead of defining an innate, basic feature of human cognition, the executive functions supposedly captured in the assessments are likelier to depend on the influence of formal schooling.

The study, “The cultural construction of ‘executive function,’” tested children in the Kunene region of Africa, which spans the countries of Namibia and Angola, as well as children in the U.K. and Bolivia. Children in rural areas of Kunene who received limited or no formal schooling differed profoundly in so-called executive function testing from their schooled peers, or a “typical” Western schooled sample.

“Almost all developmental research is done on children who live in a schooled world,” explained Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Evolutionary Biology, whose Culture, Cognition, and Culture lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology oversaw the study. Referring to Kunene, he said, “We went to a place where we have a kind of natural experiment, where we have some communities with no schools and some with schools. That allows us to compare the cognitive development of the kids. And what we see is we only get the usual executive function development in the places with schools rather than in the places without. That suggests that it’s really about schooling.

“What has been taken as a very generalized thing called ‘executive function’ is actually really specific to a set of skills you need to navigate school and schooled worlds.”

Testing executive function, continued Henrich, often involves such exercises as memorizing lists of unconnected words. But children with little or no formal schooling might not recognize these words because such lists do not occur in their environment.

However, the researchers argued, the innate cognitive functions of children who were not formally schooled were not impaired — they were simply applied differently.

“In the populations we work in, people are super good at remembering cows,” he said. “They can look at the herd, they can tell you how many cows are there, they can name the cows. If you showed them faces of cows, they can tell you who the owner is. And I bet if I did this with kids around here in Boston, they would be terrible at differentiating cows.”

It’s not that executive function doesn’t exist, explained the researchers. Instead, we need to recognize that what we have been measuring is not that overall control.

“We need to rethink how we approach human psychology,” said Henrich, and a lot of what is regarded as regular cognitive development is actually a product of a formal education.

Ivan Kroupin, the paper’s lead author and a former postdoc in Henrich’s lab, elaborated: “The term ‘executive function’ refers to a set of capacities and dispositions that are, in large part, culture-specific.” Kroupin, who is currently at the London School of Economics and co-directed the field studies with Helen Elizabeth Davis of Arizona State University, said, “ Our study suggests that the capacities these tasks require are in part universal, but also in part culture-specific, potentially tied to formal schooling or other institutions and experiences in urbanized societies.”

The findings suggest a re-examination of terms such as “executive functions” and a more accurate understanding of what these are.

“We can use the term ‘executive functions’ to refer to underlying universal capacities,” said Kroupin. However, “If that is the case then we need a different term for the suite of universal and culture-specific capacities which typical EF tasks are measuring.”

Harvard argued in federal court in Boston on Monday that the Trump administration’s move to terminate billions of dollars in research funding to the University was unconstitutional and violated procedural provisions in civil rights and administrative laws.

The 2½-hour hearing, before U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, brought together attorneys from Harvard, the Justice Department, and the American Association of University Professors, which has also sued the government for its abrupt cancellation of research funding, on behalf of Harvard faculty members.

During the proceeding, Burroughs spent significant time questioning Justice Department senior attorney Michael Velchik about several topics, including the administration’s contention that it has the right to halt funding at any time due to contractual terms and probing the link between that ability and free speech issues.

“If you can make decisions for reasons oriented around free speech, the consequences of that are staggering to me,” Burroughs said.

The Trump administration has cited campus antisemitism in its actions against Harvard. The University’s attorney, Steven Lehotsky, argued that the government has sought to coerce Harvard to give up its autonomy through a series of demands that extend beyond fighting antisemitism.

He noted that the demands include audits of viewpoint diversity among students and faculty and changes to admissions and hiring practices. Those demands amount to a violation of academic freedom and the University’s First Amendment guarantees of free speech, he argued.

“This is a blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment,” Lehotsky said.

In addition, Lehotsky argued that the government’s actions violate procedural provisions in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which require that an investigation be conducted, a hearing held, and findings released before funding is withdrawn.

The government did not engage in a reasoned decision-making process that took into account the interests of those who stand to benefit from academic and medical research, the general public, and others affected by research funding cutoffs, he said.

Making the case for the Trump administration, Velchik shifted the focus of the government’s argument, which previously centered claims of an inadequate response to incidents of antisemitism. Rather, Velchik said, the dispute is about money: Harvard wants billions in research dollars restored, and the government is within its rights to decide where it wants those funds to go.

The government’s disagreement with Harvard is at its core a contract dispute, he argued, and government contracts contain language that says funding can be withdrawn at any time.

All sides requested summary judgment in the case, which avoids a lengthy trial. Burroughs said she would work as quickly as possible but did not set a deadline for a ruling.

Loretta Mickley first started thinking about smoke in the summer of 2002.

“I was on vacation in Western Massachusetts, and on that day, there was something kind of sparkly about the air,” Mickley recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it, and I said to my husband, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m an atmospheric chemist — I should know, right?”

The shimmering agent was smoke, kicked up by a wildfire in Quebec and borne hundreds of miles down the eastern seaboard.

Twenty-three years later, smoke has become an almost-exclusive focus for Mickley, a senior research fellow at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. But it took years for the work by Mickley and others to begin in earnest — and widen across disciplines — as the problem grew to fit a warming planet.

Though wildfires have raged as long as the planet has existed, their consequences were little understood — and even overlooked.

“For a long time, smoke was not considered very important,” Mickley said. “People thought of climate change as temperature and sea level rise, and that was it. They didn’t realize there could be this other consequence of climate change that could be terribly scary, terribly bad for human health — not just close to the fire, but many miles downwind.”

A wave of recent papers has changed that. Chemists parse the composition of wildfire smoke. Engineers design and fly new instruments into the plume. Medical researchers model its effects on public health and trace its course into human bloodstreams. And environmental scientists and coders estimate how much more fire we can expect as global temperatures rise.

With dozens of publications on smoke since 2015, Mickley is a key member of a research community that stretches around the world — to where the fires are burning.

“I look at agricultural fires in India and their smoke, which affect millions of people,” Mickley said. “I don’t go to these places, but we’ve done work in the Amazon, work in Australia … working with local people as much as possible.”

Their early findings suggest that wildfire smoke is broadly and especially toxic. Burning trees, soil, and vehicles can throw off heavy metals as well as volatile organic compounds, Mickley said, that “attach to and react with human cells.” 

Smoke from fires that spread to buildings — like those that devastated Southern California earlier this year — can contain the perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, that are linked to cancer and endocrine disruption, and that take decades to degrade.

What we are learning about the smoke is that most of its particle composition consists of the tiny particles known as PM_2.5.

By definition, they are at most 2.5 microns in diameter — about 20 times smaller than a human hair.

That makes them uniquely dangerous to human health, said Nicholas Nassikas, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Pollen [being roughly four times larger] — that gets stuck in your nose,” said Nassikas, who is also a clinician specializing in pulmonology and asthmas at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. By comparison, PM_2.5 particles are “so tiny that they can get deep into the lungs, into your blood. It causes a cascade of inflammation, and it can wreak havoc on health.”

That cascade can weaken immune responses, and — in the case of smoke — cause a dizzying variety of adverse health effects.

It’s not just heart or lung health: Mickley’s Australia study found that after prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke, pregnant women were more likely to give birth prematurely, require intervention from neonatal intensive care, or lose pregnancies.

The symptoms of COVID-19 appear to worsen in the plume. NIH-funded research has established an early but uncertain link between wildfire smoke inhalation and dementia. Emergency hospitalizations tick up for a variety of maladies after days in dense smoke — especially for the elderly.

In another corner of the University, scholars are starting to investigate the health toll of smoke exposure along the burn line in Southern California.

Kari Nadeau — chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health — and her lab are part of the LA Fire HEALTH Study consortium, seeking the mechanism of adverse health effects from smoke.

For a June paper, they studied the blood of 31 Californians — firefighters and civilians — who were exposed to smoke.

That blood was compared to that of a demographically matched, nonexposed group, at billions of genetic and biological sites, said Abhinav Kaushik, a co-author and research scientist at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

They found that California’s urban wildfire smoke — a complex mixture of heavy metals, PFAS, and organic compounds — wreaks havoc on the immune system. “Normally, immune cells are highly regulated, but after smoke exposure, some of those cells began to behave abnormally — to be hyperactivated,” Kaushik said.

Meanwhile, other immune cells — loaded up with cadmium and mercury isotopes — simply died.

Heavy-metal poisoning was particularly evident in long-tenured firefighters, Kaushik said, “which may explain the chronic diseases firefighters experience [disproportionately], from cancer to asthma.”

Kaushik said smoke has surfaced as “a public-health emergency — no doubt about that.”

The next step for the LA Fire HEALTH Study, he added, is to expand its pool of blood samples in search of a reliable biomarker for smoke exposure at the individual level.

Even in its early stages, that work plays a crucial explanatory role to match the alarming epidemiological models.

In a June paper in Environmental Science & Technology, Mickley and co-authors at Harvard and in British Columbia estimate that in 2020 — a heavy fire year — smoke played a role in nearly 37,000 excess deaths.

The confidence interval, she notes, is wide: between 25,000 and 47,000.

“In my mind, the exact number is not so important, just so, just that we know it’s a big number,” Mickley said. “Our goal in giving these numbers is to highlight the sense of urgency and the possible human hazards that follow wildfire smoke, which in turn is caused by climate change.”

It stands to reason that the risks of wildfire, which thrives on drought, electrical storms, and high temperatures, might increase as the climate changes.

And indeed, in 2014, Mickley and lead author Xu Yue — then a postdoctoral student at SEAS — projected that California’s burn area would roughly double in size by midcentury under one warming scenario envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Under that model, what has been an “extreme fire year” in Southern California — with at least 25,000 acres burned — would become the rule rather than the exception. (Already this year the region has seen more than double that area lost to fire.)

In her road show at alumni clubs and convenings, Mickley advocates reasonable measures to take as individuals: wearing N95 masks on smoky days, adding HEPA filtration in the home.

Rather than the zero-tolerance fire management policy used for many years, she has advocated the use of controlled burns to prevent the apocalyptic blazes that can strike after a prolonged “fire deficit,” in which fuel can pile up.

But those are local adjustments, Mickley says, where the central driver of risk to health and safety is global: a changing climate already causing fire-related death, dislocation, and ill health on a new scale.

Wildfire is natural, Mickley notes. But, “We’re entering a new climate regime that is not — that is at least in large part due to the greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere. And this is a recipe for disaster.”

Covering Pope Leo XIV’s entire desk was his family tree, its corners secured by weights.

“Your Holiness,” announced Henry Louis Gates Jr., “your ancestry goes back to your 12th-great-grandparents, who were born 500 years ago — when Leo X was pope.”

The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research took an in-depth look at the pope’s family history for a recent article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Gates and his wife, historian Marial Iglesias Utset, were planning to vacation in Rome anyway. So the celebrated literary scholar and Emmy Award-winning host of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” requested an audience with the pontiff to present a hard copy of his family tree.

“Having a private audience with the pope was one of the greatest honors of my life,” said Gates, whose show was nominated this month for its second Emmy. “We found him very witty, very smart of course, very down to earth, and very open. He was just delighted by the work we had done, which was very gratifying — because we hadn’t exactly asked for permission.”

Within a few hours of the new pope’s election in May, Gates was alerted to the new pontiff’s Black Creole New Orleans roots via text messages from Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and former New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, a native of New Orleans.

A day later, the newspaper published a story about this background based on work by New Orleans genealogist Jari Honora, who has contributed to research for guests on “Finding Your Roots.” Gates was then commissioned by the Times magazine to trace the pope’s ancestry “from scratch.”

Packed for a July 5 appointment in Vatican City was a 4-by-5 foot printout of the papal family tree, completed under the direction of Boston nonprofit American Ancestors with assistance from the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. Gates and Iglesias Utset, a native Cuban who also collaborated on the project, spent 30 minutes with the pope revisiting the lives of more than 100 of his ancestors, with many hailing from France, Spain, Italy, the United States, and Cuba.

“We were a tag team,” recalled Gates, noting the pope’s fluency in Spanish following more than two decades serving the Catholic Church in Peru. “I answered questions about his English-speaking ancestors, and Marial regaled him with information about his Spanish-speaking ancestors.”

Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, the pope has multiple ancestors from Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas. Iglesias Utset highlighted a fifth cousin named Antonio José de Sucre (1795–1830), a key ally of the 19th-century Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar.

“Sucre played a crucial role in defeating colonialism in Latin America,” Gates explained. “The pope was really happy about that.”

The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers. He also wanted to know whether he had Haitian ancestry. Gates told him about one ancestor born to native New Orleanians who had immigrated to Haiti during the Civil War. When the fighting ending, the whole family moved back to New Orleans.

Genealogists worldwide have already built upon these findings, extending some branches and adding new ones to a uniquely American family tree.

As the meeting wound down, Gates remarked upon the cosmopolitan nature of the holy genome. “I used the word ‘ecumenical,’ from the Greek,” Gates shared. “I said, ‘You are truly our ecumenical pope, and the perfect pope for this moment in the world’s history.’”

Gates also presented a glossy copy of the article itself. The Bishop of Rome, in turn, posed a final question: Would Gates sign the magazine for him?

“Of course, your Holiness,” Gates responded. “How should I address it?”

“To Pope Leo XIV,” came the reply, with both men bursting into laughter.

Harvard faculty are struggling to maintain labs and preserve research amid the Trump administration’s termination of research grants and continuing pressure campaign. Campus leaders say the government actions could cumulatively cost the University as much as $1 billion a year. Those moves are also threatening laboratory jobs, emerging science and innovation, cell lines, animal models, research continuity, and the education of tomorrow’s scientists. The Gazette reached out to faculty members to get their view of the scramble to minimize disruption during times that have abruptly turned tumultuous.

Walter Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

How have these funding cuts affected your day-to-day work and that of your lab?

These cuts have greatly affected our day-to-day work because we can’t drop our ongoing research, now temporarily partly supported by Harvard, and also teach and mentor our doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. At the same time we have needed to reduce our research staff, which is painful, and search for new sources of short-term and long-term funding. This has stretched all of our faculty.

What are the potential future consequences of these cuts to your research, whether on individuals, patients, customers, public health messaging or others?

These cuts imperil loss of data and biological samples that have been collected over the last 45 years and the active communication with participants in our research, now including over 200,000 men and women across the U.S. This information is vital for ongoing and future research to understand the causes and potential prevention of cancer, heart attacks, dementia, and other major health burdens. More positively, this research can help us identify ways to reach older ages with good physical and mental health.

What is your next move? Are you seeking alternate funding sources? Hunkering down and protecting core projects? Waiting for the legal process to play out?

We can’t hunker down or wait for legal process to play out because we can’t drop and rehire key research staff or turn off our freezers and data systems without loss of key resources. We are accelerating efforts to be ever more efficient, focusing on key functions, and pursuing new sources of funding. 

Until now, we have been able to share our resources with other researchers across the country with minimal costs, but we will now also need to find ways to share to costs of the underlying infrastructure. The primary product of our work, knowledge about ways optimize health and well-being, is a public good and sometimes invisible. Thus, we are increasing our effort to convey this information broadly with the hope that federal funding for public health will once again be bipartisan and de-weaponized.

Pamela Silver, Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School

How have these funding cuts affected your day-to-day work and that of your lab?

When the first stop-work order arrived, we had to shut down a new initiative that we had been planning for quite some time. This meant laying off newly hired people or finding positions for them elsewhere. Needless to say, this was stressful and sad as it meant we would not be able to pursue the exciting research plan. 

With additional grants terminated, the day-to-day uncertainties make it difficult to think clearly about how to proceed for all of us in the group. That said, the financial assistance from the University and Harvard Medical School has been an amazing uplift. And I continue to be in awe of the resiliency of the young researchers whom I work with and who remain excited about their science.

What are the potential future consequences of these cuts to your research?

Overall, the inability to bring on new young people and explore new ideas will have long-term impact not just for my group but for our entire community. The continuous flow of young researchers at all levels is what fuels basic research and differentiates us from the private sector. For instance, every summer we host undergraduates in our lab to do research, and we were not able to do that this summer. For many students — this is their first experience in a research group.

In addition, the lack of a critical mass of researchers makes for a less dynamic environment which can stifle the emergence of new ideas. We are also interested in issues of sustainability for the planet, which are not a high priority for federal funding.

What is your next move? Are you seeking alternate funding sources? Hunkering down and protecting core projects? Waiting for the legal process to play out?

My group has for a long time had a diverse portfolio of funding and works in a number of areas. So we might be nimble enough to sustain at least for a while. We are thrilled with the aggressive legal stance that is being carried out by Harvard and see the logic in its success. 

As a member of the Wyss Institute, where translation of research to real-world problems is the focus, I am encouraged by interest from the private sector and nonprofit organizations.

Robin Wordsworth, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

How have these funding cuts affected your day-to-day work and that of your lab?

These funding cuts are having a huge impact on our research. Our canceled NSF project was focused on understanding convection in planetary atmospheres. I’ve no idea why the administration decided to cut it.

What are the potential future consequences of these cuts to your research?

Nationwide, these cuts will make it much harder to do fundamental research in the future. Planetary science is one of the few subjects that inspires everyone, regardless of political affiliation. If these cuts go through, the U.S. will cede much of its scientific leadership to China and Europe.

What is your next move? Are you seeking alternate funding sources? Hunkering down and protecting core projects? Waiting for the legal process to play out?

We are pursuing all possible options to secure funding and continue our research. It’s not an easy environment right now, but I became an academic because I’m passionate about science, and so giving up isn’t really an option.

Christine Riedy Murphy, Delta Dental of Massachusetts Associate Professor of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Dental Medicine

How have these funding cuts affected your day-to-day work and that of your lab/project?

Our federally funded projects are primarily focused on the education and clinical training of the healthcare workforce, with a particular emphasis on the dental workforce.

The work spans the training continuum — predoctoral, postdoctoral, and continuing education. The federal funding freeze has had immediate and palpable impacts on our day-to-day operations. Staffing and program planning have been disrupted, and we have had to carefully consider critical components of the training activities. Project team members face uncertainty, which affects morale. Planned curriculum enhancement, clinical rotations, and partnerships are at risk. The freeze not only undermines the progress we have made but also jeopardizes our ability to respond to emerging needs with agility and innovation.

What are the potential future consequences of these cuts to your work?

Freezing funding may significantly hinder the training of both current and future dentists and other healthcare workers in providing care for older Americans. As the aging population grows, outpacing younger generations, many older individuals face at least one chronic health condition and many have multiple conditions.

By freezing funding, the dental and broader healthcare workforce may lack adequate training to meet older adults’ complex needs. Ultimately, this may impact the larger community, especially community health centers, by limiting postdoctoral training, reducing continuing education on caring for older adults, and ultimately, compromising age-appropriate care for older patients.

What is your next move? Are you seeking alternate funding sources? Hunkering down and protecting core projects? Waiting for the legal process to play out?

We have already begun taking a pragmatic approach to prioritizing the core activities of our projects and ensuring alignment with the School’s mission. Fortunately, we will receive some research continuity funding through both the University and School, which will help maintain momentum.

Looking ahead, the most effective path forward will be to strategically diversify our funding sources, including scenario planning to develop sustainable revenue models. As the federal funding landscape continues to shift, we will need to think creatively and proactively to sustain our educational and training efforts — ensuring the healthcare workforce is prepared to meet the evolving needs of older Americans, and those in rural communities.

Today, immune checkpoint inhibitors — a type of immunotherapy — have been approved for more than 25 types of cancer. For advanced melanoma, in particular, outcomes have been astounding. Just 15 years ago, only 1 in 20 patients with metastatic skin cancer would survive for five years. Today, advanced melanoma patients treated with a combination of immunotherapies have a 10-year survival rate of 50 percent or higher.

These advances build on decades of research across multiple institutions and continue as researchers work to refine these therapies by targeting the unique features of each patient’s tumor and immune system and engineering smarter immune cells that can adapt and persist in the body. This is just one example of the building-block process of work in labs that has over the years led to breakthroughs in therapies and treatment.

The modern era of cancer immunotherapy can be traced to 1891, when American surgeon William B. Coley injected bacteria into patients with inoperable cancers, sometimes causing their tumors to shrink. Yet, without a clear understanding of how and why this approach worked — and in an era before antibiotics, when the risk of deadly infection was high — physicians continued to favor surgery and radiotherapy over immunotherapy well into the 1900s.

Today, Coley is recognized as the “father of cancer immunotherapy” for his pioneering efforts. But his legacy might have faded into obscurity were it not for major federal investments in U.S. biomedical research after World War II. It was this influx of funding for basic science in the latter half of the 20th century that enabled scientists to begin realizing the long-elusive promise of using the immune system to fight cancer.

Life-saving care, decades in the making

The Review Committee assigned to consider the request from petitioners to dename the John Winthrop House has delivered its report to Harvard President Alan Garber and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Hopi Hoekstra. Garber and Hoekstra have accepted the committee’s recommendation to maintain the “Winthrop” name and remove the name “John,” so that, going forward, the undergraduate residential House will be known formally as Winthrop House.   

In the report, the Review Committee details the history of the John Winthrop name and the considerations included in the denaming request. Incorporated in 1931, the House was named after Professor John Winthrop (1714-1779), the second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy and twice the interim president of Harvard. Archival records reviewed by the committee revealed that Winthrop’s great-great-grandfather, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop (1588-1649), is not a namesake of the House, though he was long thought to be. Still, the committee recognized that both Winthrops have been associated with the House, and both have complicated histories with slavery, as outlined in the report. 

Bearing in mind that Winthrop House stood out among the 12 residential Houses as the only one with a full given name, removing “John” would also bring the House in line with all other Houses, the committee wrote in their recommendation: 

“Ultimately, the process of thinking through these questions resulted in something richer for the committee than straightforward answers. The deep engagement with Harvard and its history that we pursued did generate some pride. But it also produced a fitting discomfort with the question of what it means to be a part of an institution whose past is long, complicated, and at times dark, and whose present cannot be untangled from the whole of its past. This rich and complicated involvement with our place seems both appropriate and fulfilling. Bearing in mind its charge to approach history ‘through a lens of reckoning and not forgetting,’ the committee agreed that to completely dename Winthrop House would reduce the likelihood that the broader Harvard community might be afforded the opportunity to reckon with the institution’s history in a similarly profound way.”

In addition to removing “John” but keeping “Winthrop” in the name of the House, the committee recommended that the FAS and Harvard College work with Winthrop affiliates to seek creative opportunities for residents and other community members to learn about the House’s history and to engage with its complexities — work that will begin during the summer and stretch into future years. 

Sean Kelly, Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy and Harvard College Professor and now FAS dean of Arts and Humanities, was appointed by Hoekstra to lead the committee, which was comprised of three senior faculty members (two from the FAS and one from Harvard Law School), as well as one senior FAS administrator and one senior University administrator. 

The committee engaged in robust community conversations to review the denaming request. They met as a group 22 times and participated in more than 35 outreach conversations. They received more than 100 responses to an online survey created to collect anonymous community feedback.  

In considering the denaming request, the committee met with the petitioners, as well as Winthrop residents, leaders, and alumni. Student organizations, including the Generational African American Students Association, the Black Students Association, and Natives at Harvard College, also took part in conversations, as did descendants of the Winthrop family and members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. To strengthen their review of literature and primary sources, the committee also engaged the New England Historical Genealogical Society, now known as American Ancestors, and a historian of colonial New England and held multiple conversations with faculty with expertise in history, focusing on the time periods of both John Winthrops. 

The committee’s investigation into the Winthrop name and legacy surfaced broader questions of how to grapple with complex history and address barriers to belonging. About these challenges, the committee wrote:  

“These enduring fault lines cannot be mitigated through the singular act of denaming; it will require a multipronged approach that engenders courageous inquiry about the complexities of our past in the present — and future — and a more profound commitment to the virtues of belonging. Only then can we advance and sustain a ‘culture of belonging’ integral to how we learn, work, teach, and live at Harvard.” 

The full report is posted online at https://www.harvard.edu/denamingproposals/winthrop-house/. 

Imagine an ant crawling in sand, tracing a path that happens to look like Winston Churchill. Would you say the ant created an image of the former British prime minister? According to the late Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam most people would say no: The ant would need to know about Churchill, and lines, and sand. 

The thought experiment has renewed relevance in the age of generative AI. As artificial intelligence firms release ever-more-advanced models that reason, research, create, and analyze, the meanings behind those verbs get slippery fast. What does it really mean to think, to understand, to know? The answer has big implications for how we use AI, and yet those who study intelligence are still reckoning with it.

“When we see things that speak like humans, that can do a lot of tasks like humans, write proofs and rhymes, it’s very natural for us to think that the only way that thing could be doing those things is that it has a mental model of the world, the same way that humans do,” said Keyon Vafa, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Data Science Initiative. “We as a field are making steps trying to understand, what would it even mean for something to understand? There’s definitely no consensus.” 

In human cognition, expression of a thought implies understanding of it, said senior lecturer on philosophy Cheryl Chen. We assume that someone who says “It’s raining” knows about weather, has experienced the feeling of rain on the skin and perhaps the frustration of forgetting to pack an umbrella. “For genuine understanding,” Chen said, “you need to be kind of embedded in the world in a way that ChatGPT is not.”

Still, today’s artificial intelligence systems can seem awfully convincing. Both large language models and other types of machine learning are made of neural networks — computational models that pass information through layers of neurons loosely modeled after the human brain. 

“Neural networks have numbers inside them; we call them weights,” said Stratos Idreos, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at SEAS. “Those numbers start by default randomly. We get data through the system, and we do mathematical operations based on those weights, and we get a result.” 

He gave the example of an AI trained to identify tumors in medical images. You feed the model hundreds of images that you know contain tumors, and hundreds of images that don’t. Based on that information, can the model correctly determine if a new image contains a tumor? If the result is wrong, you give the system more data, and you tinker with the weights, and slowly the system converges on the right output. It might even identify tumors that doctors would miss. 

Vafa devotes much of his research to putting AI through its paces, to figure out both what the models actually understand and how we would even know for sure. His criteria come down to whether the model can reliably demonstrate a world model, a stable yet flexible framework that allows it to generalize and reason even in unfamiliar conditions.

Sometimes, Vafa said, it sure seems like a yes. 

“If you look at large language models and ask them questions that they presumably haven’t seen before — like, ‘If I wanted to balance a marble on top of an inflatable beach ball on top of a stove pot on top of grass, what order should I put them in?’ — the LLM would answer that correctly, even though that specific question wasn’t in its training data,” he said. That suggests the model does have an effective world model — in this case, the laws of physics.

But Vafa argues the world models often fall apart under closer inspection. In a paper, he and a team of colleagues trained an AI model on street directions around Manhattan, then asked it for routes between various points. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the model spat out accurate directions. But when they tried to build a cohesive map of Manhattan out of its data, they found the model had invented roads, leapt across Central Park, and traveled diagonally across the city’s famously right-angled grid. 

Rather than operating from a stable understanding of reality, he argues, AI memorizes countless rules and applies them to the best of its ability, a kind of slapdash approach that looks intentional most of the time but occasionally reveals its fundamental incoherence.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said we will reach AGI — artificial general intelligence, which can do any cognitive task a person can — “relatively soon.” Vafa is keeping his eye out for more elusive evidence: that AIs reliably demonstrate consistent world models — in other words, that they understand. 

“I think one of the biggest challenges about getting to AGI is that it’s not clear how to define it,” said Vafa. “This is why it’s important to find ways to measure how well AI systems can ‘understand’ or whether they have good world models — it’s hard to imagine any notion of AGI that doesn’t involve having a good world model. The world models of current LLMs are lacking, but once we know how to measure their quality, we can make progress toward improving them.”

Idreos’ team at the Data Systems Laboratory is developing more efficient approaches so AI can process more data and reason more rigorously. He sees a future where specialized, custom-built models solve important problems, such as identifying cures for rare diseases — even if the models don’t know what disease is. Whether or not that counts as understanding, Idreos said, it certainly counts as useful.

Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.

“Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland,” said co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim ’13, M.A. ’22.

Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.

“Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely,” said co-lead author Tian Chen (T.C.) Zeng, who earned his Ph.D. this spring from the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.”

The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.

Genetic ties to Yakutia also show up in sets of hyper-mobile forager hunter-gatherers believed to have spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary, now a linguistic island surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.

Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based lab, zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.

“We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded,” offered Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.”

But Uralic’s influence was largely anchored in the north.

“We’re talking about the taiga — the large expanse of boreal forest that goes from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait,” said Kim, who concentrated in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and studied archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “This isn’t territory you can simply ride a horse through.”

Archaeologists have long connected Uralic’s spread with what is called the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia.

The resulting artifacts, primarily weapons and other displays of power, have also been tied to an era of global climate changes that could have advantaged the small-scale cultures that spoke Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.

“Bronze often had a transformative effect on the cultures that used it,” explained Zeng, noting the need to source raw materials — largely copper and tin — from select locations. “Bronze really catalyzed long-distance trade. To start using it, societies really needed to develop new social connections and institutions.”

A picture of the genetically diverse communities who practiced Seima-Turbino techniques became clear with the advent of ancient DNA science.

“Some of them had genetic ancestry from Yakutia, some of them were Iranic, some of them were Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe,” Reich said. “They’re all buried together at the same sites.”

The newest genetic samples, assembled by Kim with the help of other archaeologists, including third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov at Czechia’s University of Ostrava, revealed strong currents of Yakutia ancestry at a succession of ancient burial sites stretching gradually to the west, with each bearing rich reserves of Seima-Turbino objects.

“This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture,” said Kim, an archaeologist with longstanding interest in Siberia and Central Asia.

Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion

“That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening,” said Zeng, who led the study’s analyses of DNA data.

Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.

Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs.

“But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry,” Zeng emphasized.

A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture’s elders. But Yeniseian’s influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike.

“Just like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ are from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian toponyms in regions that today speak Mongolic or Turkic languages,” said Kim, a scholar on these languages since his undergraduate years (when he also learned to speak Uyghur). “When you consider this trace on the landscape, its influence extends far beyond where Yeniseian languages are spoken.”

The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.

The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.

Research described in this report was supported by the National Institutes of Health as well as by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the John Templeton Foundation.

Gaurab Basu is an assistant professor of environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an assistant professor of medicine and global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School.

I think it’s a tremendous source of pride for the University and a gift to the whole Commonwealth. I love going there and immersing in the ecological richness that we can find on our marvelous planet. This outdoor museum shows us what a gift it is to be in nature, to have such diverse and splendid living things all around us. I look at the remarkable trees that tower around me and think of all they have seen, and how they have endured, and they give me wisdom on how to right my relationship with nature. My visit to the Arboretum also inspired me to connect with the city of Cambridge’s Department of Public Works and get 10 trees planted on our neighborhood street.

Growing up in the Bay Area, watching San Francisco sports teams (which did quite well in the ’80s and ’90s) was a big part of my childhood, and created a lot of memories with my dad, who passed away last year. Now, my 8-year-old son and I traverse to Fenway Park and TD Garden to cheer on the Giants and Warriors as they come into town to play. We try to hit the right chord — we are not those annoying fans rooting against the home team, but we proudly wear our team’s colors and quietly slap each other on the knee when we make a good play. Go Steph Curry!

The sound of Dolores O’Riordan’s voice on this enchanting song still gets me to go just a bit faster on my runs around Fresh Pond and helps me touch a bit of magic.

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

Sometime early in the history of life on Earth, a meteor at least 1 kilometer wide came screaming through the atmosphere and slammed into what is now Western Australia. The impact likely unleashed a cataclysm — a fireball estimated to be more than 8 miles wide with an energy 2,000 times greater than the largest nuclear blast.

But the age and size of that impact remains a hot topic of dispute. Earlier this year, a team of Australian scientists reported that the meteorite hit 3.5 billion years ago — making it the oldest impact site on Earth — and left behind a crater up to 62 miles wide.

Now a new study by Harvard geologists reports that the event was smaller and more recent. In a paper published July 9 in Science Advances, the team asserts that the meteorite hit no more than 2.7 billion years ago and left a crater only about 10 miles wide.

The findings will fill a gap in our understanding of the planet’s history. But the Harvard researchers also say the site, which has some geological features similar to Mars, could offer insight into questions about asteroid impacts on the red planet and the potential effects on any life that might have existed there.

The Harvard story began with a stroke of luck. In 2023, Alec Brenner, then a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, traveled to Western Australia to conduct paleomagnetic studies at the Pilbara Craton.

The formation is of prime interest to geologists because it contains rocks up to 3.6 billion years old from the Archean Eon, a time when the Earth was mostly covered in water, bombarded by asteroids, and witnessing the emergence of early life.

On the first day of the field season, Brenner and undergraduate students Jasmine Palma-­Gomez of Harvard and Joanna Li of Smith College (both co-authors on the new paper) were driving into the wilderness at North Pole Dome, a geological feature roughly 19 by 25 miles in the center of the craton. He stopped to show the students some rock outcrops. At first, the rocks seemed like unremarkable examples of the basalts common throughout the area.

“We were about to pull away when I noticed that there were these weird fractures on some of the rock surfaces,” recalled Brenner, now a postdoc at Yale. The cracks formed cone-shaped structures vaguely resembling the tail of a horse — the classic “shatter cones” seen in rocks hit by extreme shocks such as meteorite impacts.

A few days later, the crew returned — and found more shatter cones. “They were all pointing in the same direction — and that’s a really interesting telltale sign,” said Brenner. “That was a strong suggestion that these things might actually be real.”

He texted photos of the shatter cones to his adviser, Professor Roger Fu, who normally greets such news with a cautious skepticism. But he too found the evidence compelling.

“I was fairly excited about it from the first sight,” said Fu. “This doesn’t happen every time.”

In the following days, Brenner and his teammates drove up and down the desert road and visited more rock outcrops spread over several miles — and found even more shatter cones.

“They were all pointing back toward roughly the same point,” he said.

Shatter cones — which range in size from fractions of an inch to yards long — often radiate in a spherical pattern from the point of impact, with each cone pointing towards the center.

“It’s kind of like those goofy pirate movies where one of the pirates has a compass that always points toward the treasure,” said Brenner.

Eventually, the crew followed the arrows to what Brenner calls “ground zero” — the presumed point of impact. There they found more cones — pointing straight upward. Those clues suggested the meteorite struck the overlying rocks, then more than a mile thicker but now eroded away.

The team spent two years surveying in the rust-colored hills amid the kangaroos, dingos, and giant eagles. Their summer breaks coincided with Australian winter, so the desert heat remained tolerable.

Eventually, they found thousands of shatter cones spread over about 4 miles. They estimated that the original crater would have been about 10 miles wide, but the structure has disappeared due to erosion. They dubbed the impact site “Miralga” after the indigenous name for a nearby creek and local family.

Another mystery remained to be solved: When did the impact occur? Most of the shatter cones were found in the oldest rocks in the area, basalts 3.47 billion years old, but the investigators also found some in younger basalts that formed 2.77 billion years ago.

They also found more horsetail-shaped cracks across geological faults that occurred 2.71 billion years ago, revealing that the impact occurred sometime afterward.

After two years of research, the Harvard team submitted their paper to a journal earlier this year.

Not long afterward, they learned that another team of researchers from Australia had discovered the same impact site in 2021 — and published first.

“That was a surprise,” recalled Brenner. “I was actually on my honeymoon. I got revisions back for our paper, and they were favorable. And literally within 24 hours, the other group’s paper came out.”

The two teams reached very different conclusions, however. The Australian team estimated that the impact occurred 3.47 billion years ago and left a crater that could be up to about 62 miles wide. The Harvard geologists believe the other team misjudged the size of the impact and missed the evidence that indicated a younger age.

The Harvard team brackets the age of the impact to somewhere between 2.71 billion and 400 million years. But Brenner said the team is conducting additional studies and will limit the age to a much narrower window of time.

If preliminary evidence bears out, Miralga is unlikely to remain the oldest impact structure on Earth. (Aside from Miralga, the oldest confirmed impact crater is the 2.2-billion-year-old Yarrabubba structure, also in Western Australia.)

The Harvard researchers believe that the site provides a model for studying early Mars. Both sites feature basaltic crust weathered by water and oxygen and subjected to meteorite bombardment. The Australian site holds some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth and scientists are investigating whether the red planet also might have hosted some form of life.

“It’s kind of like going to a little piece of Mars right here on Earth,” said Brenner.

Relatively few impact sites from the early history of the Earth are still preserved, because most ancient rocks have been destroyed by geological processes. Some researchers had suggested that all surviving large impact craters had been found already, but the new impact site reveals that more may be hiding in plain sight — even in places already intensely studied by geologists.

“If this thing could have evaded detection for this many years, that means there’s a lot left for us to look for,” said Brenner. “All it takes is curious eyes and some luck.”

Robin Kelsey is the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, History of Photography and American Art.

You can commune with the dead, with migrating birds, and with ancient trees. Each time I visit, I treasure the chance to say hello to departed friends, from vital contemporaries who left us too soon (e.g., our faculty colleague Svetlana Boym) to those long-gone but thrilling us still (e.g., Winslow Homer). When I need to restore myself, there is no better place in Cambridge than this path-winding refuge with its massive, straight-boled oaks.

What better place to find contemporary art than up creaking stairs in a dilapidated warehouse by the Market Basket in Somerville? The space is tiny, the light soft and exquisite, and the curation distinguished by its perspicacity and care.

To call this building “Brutalist” may abide by textbook definitions but feels utterly inapt to me. I find the Carpenter Center inviting (who can resist that ramp?) and aspirational. The sight lines, the terrace, the cool concrete shadows on a hot summer day. Beautiful!

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

Proteins degrade over time, making their history hard to study. But new research has uncovered ancient proteins in the enamel of the teeth of 18-million-year-old fossilized mammals from Kenya’s Rift Valley, opening a window into how these animals lived and evolved.

In their new paper in Nature, researchers from Harvard and the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute  discuss their findings.

“Teeth are rocks in our mouths,” explained Daniel Green, field program director in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the paper’s lead author. “They’re the hardest structures that any animals make, so you can find a tooth that is a hundred or a hundred million years old, and it will contain a geochemical record of the life of the animal.”

That includes what the animal ate and drank, as well as its environment.

“In the past, we thought that mature enamel, the hardest part of teeth, should really have very few proteins in it at all,” said Green. However, utilizing a newer proteomics technique called liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, the team was able to detect “a great diversity of proteins … in different biological tissues.”

“The technique involves several stages where peptides are separated based on their size or chemistry so that they can be sequentially analyzed at higher resolutions than was possible with previous methods,” explained Kevin T. Uno, associate professor in HEB and one of the paper’s corresponding authors.

“We and other scholars recently found that there are dozens — if not even hundreds — of different kinds of proteins present inside tooth enamel,” said Green.

With the realization that many proteins are found in contemporary teeth, the researchers turned to fossils, collaborating with the Smithsonian and the National Museum of Kenya for access to fossilized teeth, particularly those of early elephants and rhinos.

As herbivores, they had large teeth to grind the plants that made up their diets. These mammals, Green said, “can have enamel two to three millimeters thick. It was a lot of material to work with.”

What they found — peptide fragments, chains of amino acids, that together form proteins as old as 18 million years — was “field-changing,” according to Green.

“Nobody’s ever found peptide fragments that are this old before,” he said, calling the findings “kind of shocking.”

Until now, the oldest prior findings were put at about 3.5 million years old, he said.

“With the help of our colleague Tim Cleland, a superb paleoproteomicist at the Smithsonian, we’re pushing back the age of peptide fragments by five or six times what was known before.”

The newly discovered peptides cover a range of proteins that perform different functions, altogether known as the proteome, Green said.

“One of the reasons that we’re excited about these ancient teeth is that we don’t have the full proteome of all proteins that could have been found inside the bodies of these ancient elephants or rhinoceros, but we do have a group of them.”

With such a collection, “There might be more information available from a group of them than just one protein by itself.”

This research “opens new frontiers in paleobiology, allowing scientists to go beyond bones and morphology to reconstruct the molecular and physiological traits of extinct animals and hominins,” said Emmanuel K. Ndiema, senior research scientist at the National Museum of Kenya and paper co-author. “This provides direct evidence of evolutionary relationships. Combined with other characteristics of teeth, we can infer dietary adaptations, disease profiles, and even age at death — insights that were previously inaccessible.”

In addition to shedding light on the lives of these creatures, it helps place them in history.

“We can use these peptide fragments to explore the relationships between ancient animals, similar to how modern DNA in humans is used to identify how people are related to one another,” Uno said.

“Even if an animal is completely extinct — and we have some animals that we analyze in our study who have no living descendants — you can still, in theory, extract proteins from their teeth and try to place them on a phylogenetic tree,” said Green.

Such information “might be able to resolve longstanding debates between paleontologists about what other mammalian lineages these animals are related to using molecular evidence.”

Although this research began as “a small side project” of a much larger project involving dozens of institutions and researchers from around the world, said Green, “We were surprised at just how much we found. There really are a lot of proteins preserved in these teeth.”

This research was partially funded by the National Science Foundation and Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute.

It’s your typical biotech love story: A couple of eager Harvard students stumble upon a brilliant scientific breakthrough in anti-aging, drop out of school to pursue their dream, experience a fast and furious rise to fame before … well, we won’t give the ending away. In “Notes on Infinity,” Austin Taylor ’21 showcases her grasp of science and love of literature. During her own time at the College, she double concentrated in English and chemistry, a decision that has served her well in writing her debut novel. The Gazette spoke with her about how her time at Harvard influenced her writing, as well as what’s next in her career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In the book, Harvard students Zoe and Jack discover a new way to unlock the potential of anti-aging. You draw from many studies and chemistry principles. Does the science track? Does the secret to immortality lie in our DNA?

My first disclaimer is that while I studied chemistry, it was physical chemistry and not bio. However, it was important that I get the scientific context right. I wanted the novel to be completely plausible, so everything leading up to the actual work of the two main characters is real and I tried to communicate it accurately. So is it possible that a discovery like the one they made could be made? I think theoretically, yes. Has a similar discovery been made? No.

David Sinclair is doing some work on this. And the main discovery that they work from is the Yamanaka factors, which allow us to turn back the clock on aged cells. So if we figured out how to turn back the clock on aged cells for many cells in our body at one time, one would think that would have an anti-aging effect. But that’s the part where the science becomes fiction.

You’ve said that one theme you wanted to explore with this novel was empathy. Why is that?

One of the things that inspired the book was the many startup scandals in the news. As I followed those stories, I was struck by the simplicity of the punchy, dramatic, six-word headlines. It’s very easy to forget that those headlines are describing real people who had whole lives leading up to a set of decisions, a set of moments that resulted in these headlines being published. I don’t think that’s a good thing; I think it’s really important not to flatten people. It’s important to humanize others, and I think that the most important task of fiction — both for writers and for readers — is to produce empathy.

How did your own experiences inform the characters in this novel?

One of the main characters, Zoe, is a young woman in STEM. I studied chemistry, so I also was a young woman in STEM. Some of the tension she experiences is the feeling of tokenization or of being perceived primarily by or through the lens of her gender. Zoe struggles throughout the book with very much just wanting to be a scientist, but feeling like she’s constantly the woman scientist, especially because she starts a biotech company. She is lauded for being a woman founder, which in some ways is great, but in other ways is very isolating and frustrating.

I certainly did not drop out and form a billion-dollar startup, but I did find myself wondering if I was being given opportunities in the sciences because I was working hard and doing good, interesting work — or if I was being given opportunities because I was a woman and a minority in the field. That is a tough feeling that a lot of minorities in various spaces experience, and it can create a lot of tension and insecurity.

You also tackled what seems to be a recurring theme in biotech start-up culture, with the often quick rise to success followed by failure. What were you attempting to explore there?

Two major scandals that happened just before and during the writing process were the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. When you put people in a high-pressure, high-stakes environment, they can behave differently than they maybe would otherwise. For the two main characters, those two environments are first Harvard College — which is very high-pressure and very high-stakes — and then the venture-capital-funded world of biotech. When you dump extreme amounts of money on people who have good ideas, and you encourage them to “move fast and break things,” the incentive structure you create is not always one that will produce good, sound science.

Chemistry and English make a unique pairing. How did concentrating in both affect your professional pursuits?

As an undergraduate, I was really excited about science. I also really loved my English classes. I remember my sophomore year when I was thinking about declaring, I nervously soft-pitched the idea to my chemistry adviser of a joint concentration, thinking he was going to say it was a silly idea. Instead, he was very excited about it. I remember walking out of that meeting feeling thrilled that it was a possibility. I had a fantastic time pursuing the two, and the combination is sort of perfect for the novel, right? I leveraged my scientific literacy during research. I drew a lot on my experiences as a chemistry student and in the lab, as well as the skills in writing and reading that I developed as an English concentrator.

Were there any faculty who were particularly helpful to you?

My advisers in the Chemistry and English departments, Greg Tucci and Daniel Donaghue, were incredibly supportive of my joint pursuit. I also took two classes in the English department — contemporary fiction and a creative writing course with Jill Abramson — that were formative for me as a writer. Jill gave me some very generous feedback and was very supportive; it was the first time that I really considered that writing could be a career for me. My Principal Investigator, Cynthia Friend, was also a great mentor and is a fabulous scientist.

And then, broadly speaking, the faculty, staff, and peers that I was surrounded by at Harvard were just brilliant and doing incredible things. It was intimidating and challenging, especially for the first few years, but being in that environment made me an immeasurably better thinker, writer, problem-solver, friend, and person. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who made up the community during the time that I was there.

What’s next for you?

I’ll be attending law school at Stanford University in the fall. I’m interested in the interface between emerging science and tech and the law. While I was writing my first novel, Chat GPT emerged, and so my legal and professional interests in the publishing space sort of dovetailed. I’m hoping to work on AI governance, particularly as it relates to art and media.

I don’t have any plans to stop writing, so I’m hoping to pursue some sort of career as an attorney or legal scholar in parallel with a career as a novelist. I’m working on my second novel currently and hope to keep writing for as long as people are interested in reading what I write.

Public health officials are saying this year is a particularly bad one for ticks, due to milder winters and rainy springs in many parts of the country.

In a virtual event hosted by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, experts from medicine, epidemiology, and environmental health came together to remind the public that these critters, which carry a range of serious diseases, can put a huge damper on summer plans if not taken seriously.

“Go outside. Enjoy nature, it’s healthy for you; but just have a healthy respect that nature sometimes bites back,” said Richard Pollack, senior environmental public health officer.

Gaurab Basu, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health, said it’s important to approach tick season thoughtfully, with rates of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses on the rise.

“[We need] vigilance, not panic,” he said during the event, which was livestreamed July 1.

Basu said climate change has changed tick behavior and presence — essentially, they emerge earlier and remain longer. The arachnids are most active in warmer months, but there have been sightings even in January in some areas.

“We can’t say any one case of Lyme is because of climate change,” Basu said. “But we have to understand what we’re doing to our environment, what we’re doing by burning fossil fuels and warming our planet. And the trend lines that we are creating because of it.”

Previously known hot spots are still hot, particularly in New England and the Midwest, but the areas where ticks have thrived are growing.

Cassandra Pierre, assistant professor at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, said cases of tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever are on the rise in southern Massachusetts, including places like Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. While rare, it is a life-threatening disease if not recognized and treated early.

Reported cases of tick-borne diseases, 2019-2022

“Lyme certainly does still dwarf everything else we see,” Pierre said. That being said, she continued, instances of some of the rarer tickborne illnesses — like anaplasmosis and babesiosis — have increased.

A rise in co-infection rates, which track patients infected with multiple types of tick-borne diseases, complicates the picture even further. These cases can lead to more severe symptoms, delays in treatment, and prolonged illness.

Pollack shared basic best practices for keeping safe in high-risk outdoor areas.

When hiking, stay on the path; wear light-colored pants and socks so you can more easily spot a tick (Pollack encouraged listeners to flick the tick off and “send the tick for a ride”); pretreat clothing with an EPA-registered form of permethrin, a synthetic form of what can be extracted from chrysanthemums, which is known to be safe for humans; and use EPA-registered insect repellent on exposed skin.

Also check yourself occasionally while outdoors, and again when you come inside. If you find a tick, remove it immediately with a fine-tip forceps, your fingernail, or a credit card.

“Speed is far more important than is the actual means of removing,” Pollack said. “The longer the tick is attached, the more likely it is that it will be able to transmit one of those nasty pathogens to you.”

“When ticks attach, they need to attach for a period of 24-36 hours to have the opportunity to expose their host — in this case humans ­— to [pathogens],” said Pierre, who is also the medical director of public health programs and an associate hospital epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center. This is why checking frequently is crucial.

The antibiotic doxycycline is available by prescription and it can reduce the risk of infection by as much as 87 percent if taken within 72 hours of the bite.

At the end of the day, ticks are part of our natural environment, Pollack said.

“Nature is a core factor in human health and public health. You’ve got to respect nature, and I think we often don’t,” Basu said. “We need to integrate this understanding of how we build our communities, what kind of energy we use, where our roads are, where we’re building into. [These] all have profound implications for public health.”

The event was moderated by Dave Epstein, a meteorologist for WGBH and a correspondent for The Boston Globe. To watch the full event, visit the Chan School’s YouTube page. For more information on Lyme disease, visit the Lyme Wellness Initiative.

For decades, scores of paintings by 20th-century masters shared shelf space with family photos, books, and knickknacks in the Cambridge home of Arthur and Marny Solomon. Works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne hung on their walls. And in a carriage house turned gallery in the backyard, more contemporary works by abstractionists such as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitzky, and Larry Poons shone.

Now, those works are on display for the public to enjoy in Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition “The Solomon Collection: Dürer to Degas and Beyond.”

“We are deeply grateful to Arthur and Marny Solomon for their careful stewardship of these artworks over many years, and for their generous impulse to share them with the Harvard Art Museums, a place in the community that was always near and dear to their hearts,” said Micha Winkler Thomas, deputy director of the Harvard Art Museums.

The Solomons were both lifelong art collectors with intricate ties to Harvard. Arthur was a professor of biophysics at Harvard Medical School, while Marny worked throughout her life as a teaching fellow for various Harvard professors after earning her A.B. in art history from Radcliffe in 1958. In 1985, after collecting both individually and as a couple for decades, the Solomons promised their collection to the Art Museums. It wasn’t until after Marny’s death in 2020 that the acquisition was made final. Arthur had passed away in 2005.

From the beginning

Arthur K. Solomon was born in 1912 in Pittsburgh into a tight-knit and wealthy Jewish family. His childhood, according to Marina Kliger, the Rousseau Curatorial Fellow in European Art and one of the curators of the Solomon exhibition, was filled with art and aesthetics. The Solomons’ crowd, including influential department storeowner Edgar J. Kaufmann, were “cultural leaders in Pittsburgh.”

Kaufmann’s son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., would later become curator of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art, while another neighborhood boy, A. James Speyer, would become curator of 20th-century art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Arthur, on the other hand, would go on to study chemistry at Princeton. But he still held onto his more artistic interests, taking New York-based photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz as a mentor. Stieglitz introduced Arthur to the New York art scene and the popular realist paintings of American artists at the time.

In 1934, Arthur came to Harvard to pursue his Ph.D. in chemistry. While there, he made the first two purchases in his collection — watercolors by American artists Edward Hopper and Charles E. Burchfield that he had first seen with Stieglitz.

Harvard helped his collection grow when he audited courses in the fine arts department. One of those was the famous “Museum Work and Museum Problems” seminar that met at both the Harvard Art Museums and in Professor Paul Sachs’ home. According to Kliger, Sachs arranged student visits to the homes of distinguished collectors in New York and Philadelphia.

“I think that was probably the most important part of my becoming a collector — seeing these great collections,” Arthur was recorded saying in a series of interviews by the Oral History Committee of Harvard Medical School.

His art collection grew throughout the ’30s, when he went to Cambridge, England, for postdoctoral work and was introduced to German art dealer Justin Thannhauser. Through Thannhauser, Arthur collected works by Van Gogh, Degas, and Cezanne.

In the 1950s and ’60s he made most of his acquisitions through the New York and London-based dealer Julius Weitzner. Arthur then took a brief hiatus from collecting after the death of his first wife, Jean, in 1963.

That was until he met Marny — a collector in her own right.

The earliest documentation of Marny collecting was in July 1962, 10 years before her marriage to Arthur. According to Kliger, it’s documented that Marny brought two works to the Department of Conservation at Harvard’s Fogg Museum: a drawing of an unspecified subject by 17th-century Italian painter Pietro Francesco Mola and a print by 17th-century Italian printmaker Stefano della Bella.

Marny was close friends with Marjorie “Jerry” Cohn — curator emerita and former acting director of the Harvard Art Museums. They met in the early 1960s, when Cohn was a conservation assistant at the Fogg. Marny would send works directly from dealers to Cohn at the museum, where she would mat and frame them. Cohn also served as a confidant on Marny’s subsequent acquisitions.

Marny mostly collected prints. When she met Arthur, however, the two began collecting a new form of art.

“When they met in the late 1960s both were already serious collectors. Arthur focused on 19th- and early 20th-century European art, while Marny was a dedicated print collector,” Kliger said. “After they married in December 1972, the Solomons experienced what they would come to describe as a ‘contemporary awakening.’”

One of their first joint purchases was in 1974, when they bought a 10-ton, 10-foot-long steel sculpture by Michael Steiner called “Betonica.”

“The Solomons installed their new acquisition in their spacious yard at 27 Craigie St., where the sculpture weathered years of New England winters and became part of the Solomons’ lives.” Kliger said

Their other purchases were displayed in their 19th-century Italianate revival home. In the early 1980s, the Solomons began running out of showing space and converted the historic carriage house on the property into a two-story art gallery.

Kliger calls the collection “three collections in one.” Between the two individual collections, and the Solomons’ joint purchases, more than 260 of their prints, paintings, and sculptures were donated to the Harvard Art Museums.

Artworks from the Solomons’ collection are on display through Aug. 17. The Harvard Art Museums are free to all, and open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Three research projects that address urgent societal challenges — cardiovascular health, rising data demands, and the future of quantum computation — have won awards from the Harvard Grid Accelerator.

The Grid Accelerator offers funding, mentorship, and hands-on venture development to help academic projects steer emerging technologies toward commercialization. The 2025 awardees:

The Grid Accelerator builds on a proven track record of the Office of Technology Development Physical Sciences and Engineering Accelerator. Since 2013, projects supported by the Grid/OTD Accelerator have led to the launch of 19 startups that have collectively raised nearly half a billion dollars, along with technology licenses to established companies and sponsored research agreements. The Harvard Grid was launched as a joint initiative of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and OTD.

“These awards exemplify Harvard’s commitment to transforming academic research into innovations with broad, real-world impact,” said Isaac Kohlberg, senior associate provost and chief technology development officer at Harvard. “By supporting promising technologies at this pivotal stage, the Grid Accelerator helps bridge the gap between discovery and meaningful societal benefit.”

SEAS Dean David Parkes also emphasized the program’s impact. “At SEAS, we are committed to fostering translational research and entrepreneurial thinking. Innovation requires the ability to pursue solutions that create meaningful change. The Grid Accelerator helps our researchers in transforming bold ideas into practical solutions that benefit society both locally and worldwide.”

Learn more about the Grid Accelerator awardee projects, previous awardees, and the mission of the Harvard Grid.

A neglected piece of the Alzheimer’s puzzle has been getting increased scientific attention: why women are twice as likely as men to develop the disease.

One might be tempted to explain the disparity as a natural consequence of women living longer. But those studying the disease say that wouldn’t account for such a large difference, and they’re not precisely sure what would.

While many factors may be at play, researchers are zeroing in on two where the biological differences between women and men are clear: chromosomes and menopause.

Women have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y. Differences between genes held on the X and Y chromosomes, researchers say, may give women an increased chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

Menopause, when production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone declines, is another clear difference between the sexes. Those hormones are widely known for their roles in the reproductive system, but estrogen also acts on the brain, researchers say.

Whatever’s at play is likely part of deeper neurological processes, researchers say, pointing to similar sex-related differences in other conditions. Multiple sclerosis and migraine, for example, are both more common in women. Parkinson’s disease, brain tumors, and epilepsy, by contrast, are more common in men. In some cases — like migraine in women and Parkinson’s in men — increased severity accompanies increased incidence.

“Epidemiologically, we see that for almost all neurological diseases, there are differences in how many biological women and men are affected,” said Anna Bonkhoff, resident and research fellow in neurology at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham. “There’s a tendency, for example, in MS and migraine for more females to be affected, while it’s the contrary for brain tumors and Parkinson’s. Just based on these numbers, you get the feeling that something needs to underlie these differences in terms of the biology.” 

The basic building blocks are genes, which in humans are arranged on 46 chromosomes, organized into 23 pairs. One of those pairs — XX in women and XY in men — contain the genes that define sex-based characteristics, differences that are key areas of exploration.

The X and Y chromosomes differ significantly, Bonkhoff said.

The X chromosome is rich in genes, while the Y chromosome has lost a significant number over the millennia. Having two X chromosomes, though, doesn’t mean that women have a double dose of the proteins and other gene products produced by those genes, because one of the X chromosomes is silenced.

That silencing, however, is imperfect, Bonkhoff said, leaving some genes on the silenced X chromosome active. Studies have shown that genes on the X chromosome are related to the immune system, brain function, and Alzheimer’s disease.

“We know that biological men and women differ by the number of X chromosomes,” said Bonkhoff, lead author of a recent review article in the journal Science Advances that examined sex-related differences in Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

“A lot of genes for the immune system and regulating brain structure are located on the X chromosome, so the dosages differ to certain degrees between men and women. That seems to have an effect.” 

Another key difference between men and women relates to their hormones. All humans have three sex hormones: estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. In women, estrogen and progesterone dominate, while in men testosterone dominates. When one looks at changes between men and women with respect to hormones and aging, menopause is a significant nexus over the course of a lifetime.

“Menopause is part of the puzzle, probably one of the bigger ones,” Bonkhoff said. “I’m not saying it’s the only one — aging is relevant by itself, and there’s a lot of interesting research looking at what aging does to the immune system that seems to have implications for cognitive changes.”

Women typically go through menopause from their mid-40s to mid-50s. During that time, their ovaries stop producing estrogen and progesterone, resulting in the characteristic symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes, emotional changes, cessation of menstruation, difficulty sleeping, among others.

In March, Rachel Buckley, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues followed that hormonal thread in a study that examined the impact of hormone replacement therapy and the accumulation of the protein tau in the brain, a key characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

Buckley, who is also an investigator in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, found that women who were receiving hormone replacement therapy later in life, after age 70, had significantly higher levels of tau accumulation, and suffered higher cognitive decline.

The result, she said, supports the “timing” approach to hormone therapy, which holds that hormone replacement therapy can safely be used to ease the symptoms of menopause, but should not be continued into old age.

The timing theory arose in response to a study by the federally funded Women’s Health Initiative in the early 2000s, which showed an association between women taking hormone replacement therapy and increased cognitive decline. That was contrary to expectations from earlier studies that indicated estrogen had protective effects on cognition.

Later studies, however, showed that hormone therapy appeared to be protective in younger women but was associated with declining cognition in women age 65 and up.

Buckley’s research took that work a step further, linking it to physiological changes in the brain. Alzheimer’s disease involves the accumulation of amyloid beta into characteristic plaques in the brain — considered an important hallmark of the condition. Those plaques spur the development of tangles of a protein called tau, which then sparks damaging inflammation.

Buckley’s research showed that hormone therapy among older women was associated with an increase in tau and with cognitive decline. It was not associated with an increase in amyloid beta, which today is a common therapeutic target.

The research, published in the journal Science Advances in March and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, allowed Buckley, Gillian Coughlan, first author and instructor in neurology, and their colleagues to highlight the role of hormone replacement in the accumulation of tau tangles in older women. But Buckley said the study also highlights significant areas where work remains to be done.

The database used for the study didn’t have information about variables that may be important, such as a woman’s reproductive history, information on when the replacement therapy was initiated, and the length of hormone therapy use.

Understanding the importance of that missing data, Buckley said, is a step forward even though the fact that it’s missing limits the conclusions that can be made in her study. To remedy that, Buckley is planning her own study that will gather what she believes is all the pertinent data, including reproductive history, and details of hormone therapy use.

“We work with a lot of secondary data that already exists, and that’s great but there are limitations to what we can do with it,” Buckley said. “We’re trying to see if we can set up a new study design where we can really look at the time of menopause, what is changing in the blood, what is changing in the brain, what is changing in cognition, and how that might be associated with later life risk.”

Sussing out how biological sex affects risk of Alzheimer’s disease, Bonkhoff and Buckley said, can help us understand Alzheimer’s more generally. That understanding, they said, has the potential to lead to new pathways of treatment and prevention of a disease that, despite decades of research and encouraging recent progress, is still poorly understood.

“It’s an important aim in medicine to understand and then to innovate in how we can prevent or treat,” Bonkhoff said. “If we can find ways to incorporate sex difference to optimize the treatment for individuals, both men and women, that is the overarching goal.”

When the first reports of a new COVID-19 variant emerge, scientists worldwide scramble to answer a critical question: Will this new strain be more contagious or more severe than its predecessors? By the time answers arrive, it’s frequently too late to inform immediate public policy decisions or adjust vaccine strategies, costing public health officials valuable time, effort, and resources.

In a pair of recent publications in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology combined biophysics with artificial intelligence to identify high-risk viral variants in record time — offering a transformative approach for handling pandemics. Their goal: to get ahead of a virus by forecasting its evolutionary leaps before it threatens public health.

“As a society, we are often very unprepared for the emergence of new viruses and pandemics, so our lab has been working on ways to be more proactive,” said senior author Eugene Shakhnovich, Roy G. Gordon Professor of Chemistry. “We used fundamental principles of physics and chemistry to develop a multiscale model to predict the course of evolution of a particular variant and to predict which variants will become dominant in populations.”

The studies detail approaches for forecasting the viral variants most likely to become public health risks and for accelerating experimental validation. Together, these advances reshape both the prediction and detection of dangerous viral variants, setting a template for broader applications.

These studies were led by members of Shakhnovich’s lab, including co-authors Dianzhuo (John) Wang and Vaibhav Mohanty, both Ph.D. students in the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Marian Huot, a visiting student from École Normale Supérieure.

“Our work has focused on the spike protein of COVID-19, analyzing how its mutations change viral fitness and immune evasion,” said Wang. “Given that COVID-19 is the most extensively documented pandemic to date, we saw an opportunity to develop models that not only understand viral evolution, but also anticipate which mutations are likely to pose the greatest threat.”

The first study introduced a model that quantitatively linked biophysical features — such as the spike protein’s binding affinity to human receptors and its ability to evade antibodies — to a variant’s likelihood of surging in global populations. By incorporating a complex, yet essential factor called epistasis (where the effect of one mutation hinges on another), the model overcame a key limitation of previous approaches that struggle to make accurate predictions.

“Evolution isn’t linear — mutations interact, sometimes unlocking new pathways for adaptation,” Shakhnovich said. “Factoring these relationships allowed us to forecast the emergence of dominant variants ahead of epidemiological signals.”

Building on these insights, the companion study introduces VIRAL (Viral Identification via Rapid Active Learning), a computational framework that combines the biophysical model with artificial intelligence to accelerate the detection of high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants. By analyzing potential spike protein mutations, it identified those likeliest to enhance transmissibility and immune escape.

“At the start of a pandemic, when experimental resources are scarce, we can’t afford to test every possible mutation,” Wang said. “VIRAL uses artificial intelligence to focus lab efforts on the most concerning candidates — dramatically accelerating our ability to identify the variants that could drive the next wave.”

The implications of this research are far-reaching. Simulations show that the VIRAL framework can identify high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants up to five times faster than conventional approaches, while requiring less than 1 percent of experimental screening effort. This dramatic gain in efficiency could significantly accelerate early outbreak response.

“This framework doesn’t just help us track variants — it helps us get ahead of them,” said Huot. “By identifying high-fitness variants before they appear in the population, we can inform vaccine design strategies that anticipate, not just react to, emerging threats.”

A defining feature of this work is its interdisciplinary scope, with the international Harvard team bringing together fields of molecular biophysics, artificial intelligence, and virology to deepen our understanding of rapidly evolving viral threats.

“By uniting physics-driven modeling and machine learning, we’re introducing a predictive framework for viral evolution with broad potential,” Shakhnovich said. “We’re eager to see how this strategy might extend beyond infectious diseases into areas like cancer biology.”

Looking ahead, the team aims to adapt and scale the framework for broader use, targeting challenges such as other emerging viruses and rapidly evolving tumor cells. They emphasize that combining physical modeling with AI could shift the paradigm from reactive tracking to proactive biological forecasting.

“In a world where biological threats are constantly evolving, earlier warning and smarter tools are essential,” Wang said. “Our ultimate goal is to create a platform — one that gives scientists and policymakers a head start not just in future pandemics, but in tackling fast-evolving challenges across biology.” added Huot.

Shakhnovich credited grants from the National Institutes of Health for enabling exploratory research to benefit public health. Basic science and future breakthroughs are in grave danger due to Washington’s cuts to scientific research, Shakhnovich warned.

“Our research has the potential to help all of humankind to solve some serious health problems,” Shakhnovich said. “It would not have been possible without federal funding that looks for long-term benefits.”

The itch of a clothing tag. The seam on the inside of a sock. The tickling of hairs on the back of your neck. For many of us, it’s easy to tune out these sensations as we move through the day. But for some autistic people, everyday sensations can be intolerable. 

David Ginty knows why, and it’s not, as many autism researchers once believed, a dysfunction of the brain. 

Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, studies touch and pain. Scientists have known for some time, he said, that our experience of physical sensation is a collaboration between our brain, our central nervous system, and sensory neurons. But the mechanisms behind that collaboration have remained a mystery, and the quest for an answer has major implications for our ability to treat everything from chronic pain to autistic hypersensitivity to sexual dysfunction. 

“The auditory system cares about sound waves in a particular frequency range,” Ginty said. “The visual system, similarly, only cares about a narrow band of the visual light range. But the somatosensory system cares about tactile stimuli, thermal stimuli, chemical stimuli, proprioception — where your body and limbs are in space and time, as well as the state of many of our body organs.

“And then there’s an affective component, an emotional component of touch, which in itself is a huge burgeoning area that is interesting. How does touch trigger an emotional response? Somatosensation is incredibly rich and multidimensional.” 

About 10 years ago, Ginty and his team found that in animal models of autism spectrum disorder, the locus of sensory dysfunction was not the brain, as had been thought, but the spinal cord and periphery. The key players are second-order neurons in the spinal cord that function like a mixing board’s gain or volume control, amplifying or dampening sensations as they travel from the skin and other sensory organs to the brain. In some ASD models, these second-order neurons appeared to be stuck on high, leading to sensory overload.

“It made us realize that we could potentially treat sensory over-reactivity by turning down the activity of sensory neurons, or sensory neuron responsiveness, in the peripheral nervous system,” he said. 

The most logical approach would be to use drugs that turn down sensory neuron activity. Lauren Orefice, then a postdoc in the Ginty lab, thought that benzodiazepines could be used to silence nerve cells in the periphery to help reduce sensory over-reactivity. But pediatricians are reluctant to prescribe potentially addictive sedatives to their patients.

“So one approach that we’ve been trying to take is to develop peripherally restricted benzodiazepines that can reduce the activity of neurons in the peripheral nervous system without penetrating the brain, and therefore without sedating side effects,” Ginty said. 

For children with autistic hypersensitivity, such a drug could be life-changing. It could reduce overstimulation, lower anxiety, prevent meltdowns, and let them experience a hug as a pleasure rather than a source of pain. 

The implications of Ginty’s work on the systems underlying pleasure and pain extend far beyond autism research. The somatosensory system is made of some 20 types of neurons tucked into every imaginable part of the body: the base of our hair follicles, the crevasses of our dermis, in our muscles and joints — anywhere that detects variations of stretch, pressure, vibration, temperature, and even our position in space. If he had to pick a favorite neuron, he’d pick two: Pacinian corpuscles and nociceptors. 

Pacinian corpuscles sense vibrations. They’re delicate enough to pick up someone’s footsteps on the other side of the room, and impactful enough to make us cry when music moves through our body. Nociceptors pick up on noxious stimuli — or, in plain English, pain. 

“We’re figuring out how nociceptors are connected in the central nervous system to give rise to reflexes, like quickly removing your hand from a hot stove, or to the emotional component of pain,” Ginty said. “These are truly amazing neurons. They have very high thresholds, unlike the Pacinian corpuscles, which respond just to tiny tweaks or vibrations of the skin. The nociceptors only fire an electrical impulse when you have a damaging encounter.” 

New genetic tools allow Ginty to understand how nociceptors connect to the central nervous system and identify every protein that nociceptors express, unlocking a new range of potential drug targets. “Right now, opioids are the best remedy we have for many types of pain, and that’s really gotten us into trouble,” he said. “We’re looking hard to find non-opioid approaches to treat pain and we’ve identified many potential approaches by targeting the nociceptors themselves.”

Ginty’s lab is not set up for drug development. But the research done in his lab forms the groundwork that the pharmaceutical industry needs to create treatments that improve lives. Ginty’s research is often exploratory, he said. It’s not always clear whether or how a certain experiment will translate into a therapy or marketable drug, which is why industry funding is rarely sufficient. It’s federal grants that have supported the fundamental science, which, in the long run, lead to cures. 

Ginty has had two grants frozen in the Trump administration’s dispute with Harvard. The first, a partnership with Clifford Woolf at Boston Children’s Hospital, was exploring how pain stimuli in the skin, joints, and bone are propagated into the spinal cord and conveyed to the brain, and where in the brain those signals go. 

The second was a prestigious R35 grant, sometimes called the Outstanding Investigator Award, which provides flexible, long-term funding to established investigators to allow them to pursue particularly innovative research. It was meant to cover the bulk of Ginty’s work for eight years, but it was eliminated just one year in. 

The most devastating part of the cancellations, he said, is that they come at a time of unparalleled progress in neurobiology. 

“The advances are just breathtaking because of the alchemy of bringing together genetics and physiology and molecular biology, the knowledge that is being unveiled. At no other time in history have the advances been so rapid and so large as the time we’re in now. I feel fortunate to be in this position and to play a part in discovering how the nervous system works and new therapeutic opportunities. We need to find ways to survive the current funding crisis so that progress that leads to new treatments for disorders of the nervous system can continue.”

In Massachusetts, getting stoned gets easier all the time.

Since the Commonwealth legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, dispensaries have proliferated, the price of cannabis has dropped by more than half, and the potency of pot has shot up. All told, cannabis has become big business in Massachusetts, with the industry raking in more than $1.64 billion last year. Other states have seen similar trends.

Some supporters of legalization envisioned a new era of personal freedom, with easy access to a plant they touted as a healthier alternative to alcohol. Tax revenue from cannabis sales would fund valuable state projects, and legalization would alleviate a burden on the justice system, they said.

Almost a decade later, we asked four researchers to weigh in on how those hopes line up against the reality of marijuana legalization. Interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Legalizing marijuana has created a huge new revenue stream for the state — over $920 million according to the Marijuana Policy Project. And I think that’s great. But in my eyes, that revenue has come at a great cost to public health.

My colleagues and I are treating more and more people who have developed cannabis use disorder, which is when cannabis use interferes with key spheres in one’s life such as work, school, or relationships. That’s not surprising when you consider that the number of daily or near-daily cannabis users has increased 20-fold over the last three decades.

On top of that, cannabis is far more potent today than it was in decades past. This trend started before legalization, but when big businesses got involved in cultivation, they had the means to really drive up the THC content — that’s the component of the plant that makes a user feel high. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the average THC content of cannabis was around 3 percent or 4 percent. Now you can find cannabis flower that’s 20 percent to 30 percent or even higher.

That jump in potency has led to a significant increase in the number of adult users who develop cannabis use disorder, from 10 percent just 10 years ago to around 30 percent today. It’s hard to say how much of this trend can be attributed to legalization, but I think legalization has probably pushed it along that much faster.

The problem, I think, comes down to the difference between ideas and implementation. We need to couple increasing cannabis use to additional research so that we can mitigate the harms done by the drug while still maintaining the positive aspects of legalization. For example, we need more research on how law enforcement can prevent people from driving under the influence of cannabis, which can lead to dangerous situations. Likewise, we need people to research the medical benefits of cannabis (and yes, in certain circumstances the drug does seem to have bona fide medical benefits). Ideally, we’ll find ways for people to take advantage of those benefits while keeping their risk of developing a substance use disorder — or other problems that might result from cannabis use — low.

I would love to see the states and private companies that are benefiting from cannabis sales put more money toward research so that cannabis science can keep pace with interest in cannabis.

I think cannabis legalization has been a tremendous success overall. Certainly there are things that could still be better, but we’ve made great progress in a few key areas.

First, cannabis causes far fewer people to get arrested these days than it did in decades past. Arrests for possession dropped over 70 percent between 2010 and 2018. And that’s great because having an arrest on your record can impact your education, your housing, your employment, everything. It’s awful. Things aren’t perfect; arrests have not gone down to zero, and Black people are still arrested at higher rates than white people. But the drug isn’t clogging up the justice system as much as it used to.

Second, by creating a legal market we’ve made sure people have access to safe cannabis as opposed to an illicit product that may be contaminated with pesticides or mold or heavy metals. Of course, not everybody buys through the legal market, and that’s something we could still work on.

And lastly, we’re generating tax revenue for the state, which is a huge win. At this point, the state is actually generating more tax revenue from cannabis than it is from alcohol.

Are there still problems to be solved? Yes, absolutely! One of the biggest problems is that accidental overconsumption is becoming more common. That’s for two reasons. The first is that products are so much stronger than they used to be. People take the same three bong hits they took back in college not realizing that today that’s the equivalent of taking about seven times what they used to.

And second, we’re stupid enough to make cannabis into gummies and chocolates. Kids will eat these if they’re left out in the open, and that can send them to the ER. But it’s not just kids — adults are also prone to overconsumption when cannabis is made to taste good. I’m firmly opposed to turning cannabis into candy — or pizza sauce or hot sauce or any other type of food — and I’ve been blowing this horn for a long time.

Just like criminalizing cannabis, legalizing it is a social experiment. We need to monitor the situation carefully because there could be risks that we haven’t even thought of. But as far as I know, nobody credible is arguing for a return to cannabis prohibition, and I think that’s a testament to the overall success we’ve had in legalizing it.

As the director of MGH’s pediatric injury prevention program, my interest in cannabis legalization lies in how it impacts the safety of children. And accidental cannabis exposure can definitely be a threat to child safety.

When my colleagues and I used public health data to study the frequency with which cannabis sends kids to the emergency room, we found that these visits increased by about 60 percent after recreational dispensaries opened. Most of the exposures (over 80 percent) have been in teenagers, but the biggest increases were in younger kids. In the zero-to-5 age group, we saw about a fourfold increase, and in the 6-to-12 age group, a sevenfold increase.

Because they’re small, kids will be more severely affected by cannabis than an adult who takes the same amount. In fact, cannabis can make kids so sleepy they start to have trouble breathing. To complicate matters, the same thing can happen if kids ingest a number of prescription drugs or if they get meningitis or encephalitis. Cannabis consumption is rarely if ever fatal, but those other conditions can definitely be fatal. Unless someone saw the kid eat cannabis, we often don’t know what’s going on — or how bad the situation is — until we test for everything plus the kitchen sink. It puts a lot of strain on the system.

Cannabis has also had some positive effects for pediatric medicine. In particular, a component of cannabis called cannabidiol has been quite successful for treating epilepsy in children who don’t respond to other seizure medications. I don’t really have an opinion on whether the pros of cannabis legalization outweigh the cons. But as a pediatrician, it’s my job to advocate for children and to protect them from the unintended consequences of voters’ actions, and right now that means educating people about the dangers of accidental consumption.

Toddlers in their exploratory phase are especially likely to eat cannabis if it’s left lying around. It’s really important that parents keep cannabis well secured so that kids can’t access it, and we also need to put a call out to manufacturers and retailers: Make the packaging child-proof! These products should be a little more difficult for a child as young as 3 or 4 to open.

One of the strangest aspects of cannabis legalization is that the drug is only legal in state policy. At a federal level, cannabis is still criminalized. And part of why it’s criminalized is because cannabis is classified as a Schedule I substance, which means it’s addictive and it has no medical use.

At this point it seems clear that cannabis does have medical value, for example for relieving certain types of pain and to reduce nausea during chemotherapy. The Schedule I classification was a response to the cultural perception people had of cannabis during the 1960s, and the designation was made without much scientific evidence to back it up. Unfortunately, with cannabis illegal on a federal level, it’s difficult for scientists to research the plant’s legitimate medical uses because they can’t use federal funds. And because cannabis is a natural product and can’t be patented, private industry isn’t very interested in researching it.

Many people — myself included — hope that cannabis will be reclassified as a Schedule III drug, which would clear some of these roadblocks to research. Legalization at the state level sets a precedent for reclassifying cannabis because it shows that even with millions of people now having access, the sky has not fallen. But at this point, we still haven’t achieved the reclassification that we’re hoping for.

During the Biden administration, there was interest in rescheduling cannabis, but the process has a lot of twists and turns, and it wasn’t completed before the new administration took office. Now rescheduling appears to be on pause. The motion is parked in front of a Drug Enforcement Agency administrative law judge who seems to be skeptical of its value.

A new wildlife camera mounted on Memorial Hall is giving online visitors an up-close glimpse of a peregrine falcon nesting site with a storied history. 

The FAS installed the Peregrine Falcon Cam this spring on the east side of the tower, facing the rooftop nest box. There have been frequent sightings of two falcons, one male and one female, who appear throughout the day to eat, preen, and rest when they aren’t hunting. 

“Buildings are natural canyons for them,” said Brian Farrell, Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, professor of biology, and curator of entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “They’re like cliffsides, and they have loads of starlings and pigeons around, so plenty of food. They like the high perches because they hunt only birds in flight, and only over open spaces.”

The Memorial Hall site has a long history — late pioneering biologist and Harvard professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson observed peregrine falcons nesting there as a Ph.D. student in 1955. But the U.S. peregrine population was decimated by the pesticide DDT in the mid-20th century, and none of the birds of prey were seen on Harvard’s campus for years.

Ray Traietti, director of administration in the Office for the Arts and former building manager of Memorial Hall, realized the birds had returned one day in 2014. He was walking into work when a severed starling head dropped at his feet.

“I started noticing pieces of dead birds all around. I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of odd,’” Traietti recalled. Officials from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife would later discover that the falcon eggs laid on the rubber roof of Memorial Hall weren’t viable that year, likely due to exposure to the elements.

State officials installed the box the next year to protect future nests. The three-sided design allows the fastest birds on Earth to leave the nest with their signature move: a dive that can reach 200 mph.

“They need open space to launch themselves,” Farrell said. “They don’t flap and go up vertically like birds with broader wings can do. They just take off like fighter jets off an aircraft carrier.”

In the spring of 2021 a pair of falcons successfully hatched and fledged three chicks — the first known to hatch on Memorial Hall since the 1950s.

“I think, to E.O. Wilson’s point, there’s something about that location that works for them,” Traietti said. “To think that after the nationwide decimation of DDT, that they went back to that same spot, is pretty remarkable.”

After the federal DDT ban in the 1970s, a reintroduction effort followed, and the falcon population has slowly increased. Previously designated endangered in Massachusetts, they were moved to the less critical “special concern” category in 2019. As of 2020, there are at least 46 nesting pairs in the state.

“These animals are living in a pretty human ecosystem, and they’re thriving,” Traietti said. “When you see them up there, it’s a testament to coexistence.”

The Memorial Hall falcons have been a rotating cast, but one familiar face keeps returning. Fellsway (banded with the number 79/CB) has nested at Harvard for the past three years. He was found injured in Medford and rehabilitated at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic in 2021.

He raised three chicks on Memorial Hall in spring 2023 with an unbanded female (Traietti calls her “Athena,” after the stained-glass window in Sanders Theatre). Fellsway and Athena returned in 2024 and raised four more chicks.

But in a surprising turn this year, Fellsway returned with a new mate: Letitia, identified by leg band 28/BV, who was previously seen nesting at Boston University. According to Farrell, she and Fellsway haven’t laid eggs at Memorial Hall — likely because their bond is new, though also possibly because Letitia hatched a brood with another male at BU just last month.

“It’s an interesting and complex drama of pairings and places,” Farrell said. “It’s a little bit confusing trying to keep track of these guys and figure out who’s who, because they’re almost indistinguishable as adults. You have to get a good enough photograph that you can read the band.”

This fall, Traietti says, a new nest box will be installed. He and Farrell are hopeful that there will be a nest next spring.

In the meantime, Farrell said he is glad the Falcon Cam can help the Harvard community feel connected to the fierce, powerful birds living just overhead.

“It’s really about outreach and sharing science with the world,” Farrell said. “The world seems more chaotic every day, but here’s something that’s beautiful and pure and continuing on.”

Congratulations! You have a newborn baby. She has plump cheeks, a round little belly, and the right number of fingers and toes. Everything seems just dandy. But unbeknownst to you, a risk is hiding in her DNA: some percent chance that later in life she’ll develop high cholesterol and have a heart attack in her 40s. Maybe it’s a 5 percent chance. Maybe it’s 80.

Would you want to know?

Robert Green would. Green is the director of Genomes2People, a research program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School that explores the impacts of using genomic information in medicine and in society at large.

Until genomic sequencing, Green said, the possibility of moving beyond treating sick patients and toward precision and preventative medicine was largely impossible.

“Genomics is sort of the tip of the spear, because you can actually profile some of the vulnerabilities that a child will have for their entire lifetime at the moment of birth through their DNA,” he said. “You’re not going to capture every illness; you’re certainly not going to capture illnesses that might have more environmental or lifestyle causes. DNA isn’t a crystal ball for every kind of illness by any means, but there’s a surprisingly large amount of human health that we can now probabilistically look at in the DNA of a newborn child or really a child at any age.”

Green’s team found that about 12 percent of babies carry a disease-associated genetic mutation. Some of them are considered rare diseases, but in the aggregate, they’re not rare at all. 

Just having the mutation doesn’t guarantee a baby will get the disease, and many conditions can vary greatly in their severity. But, Green said, early detection means you can screen regularly, start diet or lifestyle choices early, or even benefit from clinical trials or novel cell therapies that weren’t available a few years ago.

“More and more, there are going to be targeted genetic therapies which can correct a particular mutation, often before the child even manifests the symptoms,” he said. “Because remember, many of these features would be irreversible if you catch them too late.”

Green himself has gotten his genome sequenced. He didn’t find anything all that interesting, except that he’s a carrier for Factor V Leiden, a mutation carried by about 3 percent of people with European ancestry. It can make the blood clot faster, and it’s a risk factor for developing deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. It’s not necessarily life-threatening, but Green has still taken some precautions based on the knowledge of the risk factor.

“I’m one of those guys on the long-haul flights that gets up every hour, walks to the galley, does deep knee bends,” he said. “And I take an aspirin a day.”

For your imaginary newborn with the risk of a future heart attack, she’s not alone: One person in every 250 people carries a genetic mutation for familial hypercholesterolemia, or FH.

“From the moment they are a child through adolescence, through young adulthood, their lipid levels are much, much higher than the general population,” Green said. “Someday a doctor will measure their cholesterol and maybe find it and maybe they’ll get treated, but it turns out that if you have FH, you should be treated early and aggressively. Otherwise, you tend to die of a heart attack or a stroke in your 40s. And by the time most people are getting their lipids measured and maybe getting treated and maybe being compliant with that treatment, it’s often too late. So there’s a very concrete example where we know that more aggressive early treatment will have lifesaving consequences.”

The consequences of knowing

As genomic sequencing becomes more accessible, families are tasked with deciding: Does the psychological burden of knowing outweigh the medical risk of not knowing?

Green and his team are surprised to find that most families who choose to learn about a child’s risk don’t seem to experience sustained distress or anxiety, even when they learn about potentially dire medical risks.

“I’m not saying people didn’t experience some distress,” he said. “It’s not a great thing to find out that my child’s carrying a mutation for a cardiac risk. But at least I know that that risk is there and I know what I need to do to monitor it.”

Widespread implementation of this kind of preventative screening would be a drastic change not only to the way parents think about their children, but to the healthcare system, Green said.

“If you say an apparently healthy child is at risk for something terrible and we need to surveil them, what does that mean for medical expenses for a society, if you were to multiply that by the 3.4 million babies born each year?”

The cost, he says, is not zero. There’s the cost of genomic testing itself, which can range from $200-$600. And then there’s the cost of preventing, managing, or treating what is discovered. For a child who is found to have an elastin mutation, which can be associated with supravalvular aortic stenosis, the family might spend a few hundred dollars on echocardiograms every couple of years, but on the flip side, if the child begins to exhibit fatigue or slow growth, they might save themselves some money by having an easy first diagnostic step.

“So I won’t say that this is revenue-zero for a particular healthcare spend, but it’s not as dramatic as some folks predicted it would be.”

Is DNA destiny?

Green is an evangelist for the notion that most people would benefit from genomic sequencing, but he’s not immune to concerns from critics. One of the main concerns, he says, is that we’re not prepared to live with the uncertainty of fuzzy changes and middling probabilities.

“I think the best case for caution is the perception out there that DNA is destiny — the perception that if you carry a mutation, you’re going to get the disease — when in fact, the reality is that we don’t know the exact probabilities,” he said. “We’re really unprepared to give more granular risk information.”

It can be hard to tell a family if the risk of a child developing a disease is 10 percent or 50 percent or 75 percent. What is a parent to do with a ticking time bomb that might never go off?

That’s a Catch-22, Green said. “Until you do large numbers of children and you follow them over time, you actually aren’t going to be able to determine that information.”

Green wasn’t too worried about concern about data privacy (“Do you have a cellphone? Do you use a credit card? Do you ever search anything personal on Google? If you’re doing those things, you’re way more exposed to privacy issues than anything that could ever be gleaned from your genetic information”), but he said some other concerns are legitimate. “Your genetic information could be used to discriminate in life insurance, for example. It’s legal to do that. It hasn’t been done much, but it’s legal.”

Still, Green feels that concerns about the risks of genomics are out of proportion to the possible lifesaving benefits.

“Once we start sequencing children, once we start sequencing adults, your friends, your neighbors, people in your book club, somebody’s going to tell you, ‘My life was saved because I learned I had a cancer predisposition and we found it early.’ ‘My life was saved because I had no idea that I was an FH carrier and I needed more aggressive lipid management.’ And when those stories start coming out, I do believe that there will be a rebalancing of risk/benefit perception.”

It appears AI can rival humans when it comes to being irrational.

A group of psychologists recently put OpenAI’s GPT-4o through a test for cognitive dissonance. The researchers set out to see whether the large language model would alter its attitude on Russian President Vladamir Putin after generating positive or negative essays. Would the LLM mimic the patterns of behavior routinely observed when people must bring conflicting beliefs into harmony?

The results, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show the system altering its opinion to match the tenor of any material it generated. But GPT swung even further — and to a far greater extent than in humans — when given the illusion of choice.

“We asked GPT to write a pro- or anti-Putin essay under one of two conditions: a no-choice condition where it was compelled to write either a positive or negative essay, or a free-choice condition in which it could write whichever type of essay it chose, but with the knowledge that it would be helping us more by writing one or the other,” explained social psychologist and co-lead author Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology. 

“We made two discoveries,” she continued. “First, that like humans, GPT shifted its attitude toward Putin in the valence direction of the essay it had written. But this shift was statistically much larger when it believed that it had written the essay by freely choosing it.”

“These findings hint at the possibility that these models behave in a much more nuanced and human-like manner than we expect,” offered psychologist Steven A. Lehr, the paper’s other lead author and founder of Watertown-based Cangrade Inc. “They’re not just parroting answers to all our questions. They’re picking up on other, less rational aspects of our psychology.”

Banaji, whose books include “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People” (2013), has been studying implicit cognition for 45 years. After OpenAI’s ChatGPT became widely available in 2021, she and a graduate student sat down to query the system on their research specialty.

They typed: “GPT, what are your implicit biases?”

“And the answer came back, ‘I am a white male,’” Banaji recalled. “I was more than surprised. Why did the model believe itself to even have a race or gender? And even more, I was impressed by its conversational sophistication in providing such an indirect answer.”

A month later, Banaji repeated the question. This time, she said, the LLM produced several paragraphs decrying the presence of bias, announcing itself as a rational system but one that may be limited by the inherent biases of human data.

“I draw the analogy to a parent and a child,” Banaji said. “Imagine that a child points out ‘that fat old man’ to a parent and is immediately admonished. That’s a parent inserting a guardrail. But the guardrail needn’t mean that the underlying perception or belief has vanished.

“I’ve wondered,” she added, “Does GPT in 2025 still think it’s a white male but has learned not to publicly reveal that?”

Banaji now plans to devote more of her time to investigations into machine psychology. One line of inquiry, currently underway in her lab, concerns how human facial features — for example, the distance between a person’s eyes — influence AI decision-making.

Early results suggest certain systems are far more susceptible than humans to letting these factors sway judgments of qualities like “trust” and “competence.” 

“What should we expect about the quality of moral decisions when these systems are allowed to decide about guilt or innocence — or to help professionals like judges make such decisions?” Banaji asked.

The study on cognitive dissonance was inspired by Leon Festinger’s canonical “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance” (1957). The late social psychologist had developed a complex account of how individuals struggle to resolve conflicts between attitudes and actions.

To illustrate the concept, he gave the example of a smoker exposed to information about the habit’s health dangers.

“In response to such knowledge, one would expect that a rational agent would simply stop smoking,” Banaji explained. “But, of course, that is not the likely choice. Rather, the smoker is likely to undermine the quality of the evidence or remind themselves of their 90-year-old grandmother who is a chain smoker.”

Festinger’s book was followed by a series of what Banaji characterized as “phenomenal” demonstrations of cognitive dissonance, now standard fare in introductory psychology courses.

The procedure borrowed for Banaji and Lehr’s study involves what is called the “induced compliance procedure.” Here the critical task involves gently nudging a research subject to take up a position that runs counter to privately held beliefs.

Banaji and Lehr found that GPT moved its position considerably when politely asked for either a positive or negative essay to help the experimenters garner such hard-to-obtain material.

After opting for a positive essay, the GPT ranked Putin’s overall leadership 1.5 points higher than it did after choosing a negative output. GPT gave his impact on Russia two more points after freely choosing a pro- rather than an anti-Putin position.

The result was confirmed in replications involving essays on Chinese President Xi Jinping and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

“Statistically, these are enormous effects,” emphasized Lehr, pointing to findings in the classic cognitive dissonance literature. “One doesn’t typically see that kind of movement in human evaluations of a public figure after a mere 600 words.”

One explanation concerns what computer scientists call “context windows,” or a movement in the direction of any text the LLM is processing at a given time.

“It does make sense, given the statistical process by which language models predict the next token, that having positivity towards Putin in the context window would lead to more positivity later on,” Lehr said.

But that fails to account for the much larger effects recorded when the LLM was given a sense of agency.

“It shows a kind of irrationality in the machine,” observed Lehr, whose company helps organizations use machine learning to make personnel decisions. “Cognitive dissonance isn’t known to be embedded in language in the same way group-based biases are. Nothing in the literature says this should be happening.”

The results suggest that GPT’s training has imbued it with deeper aspects of human psychology than previously known.

“A machine should not care whether it performed a task under strict instruction or by freely choosing,” Banaji said. “But GPT did.”

An estimated 42 percent of Americans over the age of 55 will eventually develop dementia, and as the U.S. population ages, the number of new dementia cases per year is expected to double by 2060. The demographic shift promises to increase the pressure on already-strained healthcare systems and caregivers.

It’s also a challenge for the law. 

At a conference hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School last month, researchers from multiple disciplines, both from across Harvard and from other universities, explored how current laws too often strip decision-making authority from older adults, and what improvements could help those older adults keep more of their autonomy as their capacities decline. 

Not all older adults experience cognitive decline, and not all cognitive decline looks the same, said Duke Han, professor of psychology, family medicine, neurology, and gerontology at the University of Southern California. For example, the entorhinal cortex, which mediates between parts of the brain responsible for drawing on experiences and for values-based decision-making, is often one of the first parts of the brain to be affected in Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at Han’s lab recently found that people with thinning in that region are likelier to fall victim to financial scams. It’s a finding that could help explain why someone might function well in most areas of life while requiring decision-making support with their finances. 

The more physically frail an older adult is, the likelier they are to report financial exploitation, Han said. But family and friends can safeguard against those trends. “Social connectedness is important, but it’s not just how many connections someone has,” he said. “In our most recently published paper, we found that it’s really the depth of connection socially that someone has that seems to be protective in this regard.”

The law has traditionally taken a binary approach to decision-making capacity: Either you have it or you don’t, and those who don’t have been labeled incapacitated, incompetent, or insane in some states. 

“Current state statutes, which include living wills or advance directives, powers of attorney for healthcare, powers of attorney for financial matters, supported decision-making, default surrogate decision-making statutes … These just don’t fit individualized circumstances very well. We call them one-size-fits-all,” said Leslie Francis, Alfred C. Emery Distinguished Professor of Law and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. 

Often, the law has focused on transferring rights and protections to family members or other representatives who make decisions for those deemed unfit. But that approach can sideline the preferences and values of the older adults themselves, who may still have capacities to manage some or most of their own affairs. 

A 2023 piece of model legislation from the American Bar Association, the New Uniform Health Care Decisions Act, would move states in the direction of autonomy for those with cognitive decline. It includes a model form written in plain language that allows individuals not only to indicate specific types of care they do or do not want, but also to identify goals and values they wish to guide future healthcare decisions, reflecting the deeply personal realities of aging. 

To date, only two states — Delaware and Utah — have adopted the New Uniform Health Care Decisions Act. But an international body may soon offer its own guidance for protecting the rights of older adults. In April 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution to start negotiations for a new human rights treaty for older persons. 

Hezzy Smith, director of advocacy initiatives at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said the U.N.’s treaty would build on the agency’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Smith said the U.N. committee charged with monitoring the convention’s implementation “has made very clear that people with disabilities have been subject to egregious human rights violations as a result of legal capacity restrictions, and it made it very clear that, from a human rights perspective for the committee, states will have to do wholesale transformations of their substituted decision-making regimes in their home countries in order to usher in … regimes of supported decision-making. They rejected the notion that there are haves and have-nots with regard to legal capacity.”

Smith said U.N. member states might take a different approach for older adults, potentially prioritizing positive outcomes over optimizing for maximal rights preservation — a distinction that could shape how the international community balances autonomy with protections for aging populations. 

Other Harvard speakers at the conference were I. Glenn Cohen, Petrie-Flom Center faculty director, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, and deputy dean of HLS; Susannah Baruch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center; Michael Ashley Stein, visiting professor at HLS and executive director of the HLS Project on Disability; Francis X. Shen, professor of law at the University of Minnesota and member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics; Abeer Malik, Petrie-Flom Center student fellow; and Diana Freed, assistant professor of computer and data science at Brown University and a visiting researcher at the Petrie-Flom Center.

Children who struggle with reading often also have difficulty focusing, according to experts. Yet these students frequently receive ineffective support, with reading and attention difficulties addressed separately.

Intrigued by the possibility of helping students with reading and behavioral attention struggles, Harvard expert Phil Capin and his colleague Garrett Roberts from University of Denver designed a study to investigate the benefits of an integrated approach to intervention. The research project aimed to test the effects of a single, unified intervention called Supporting Attention and Reading for Kids (SPARK) on students in grades 3-5. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Capin’s $3.2 million research grant started in July of last year.

The school-based research part of the project was set to begin in the fall — with the participation of about 400 students from six schools in Texas — in partnership with experts at the University of Denver and the University of Texas. Researchers were to track students for four years to determine if the intervention helped them improve in word reading, vocabulary, and reading fluency and comprehension.

But everything came to a stop when Capin’s project was terminated in May as part of the Trump administration’s decision to freeze more than $2.2 billion in federal research funding in its ongoing dispute against Harvard.

It is a blow to an important research agenda, said Capin, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But the biggest loss is for students who may have been helped with new research-informed practices, he added. Estimates suggest that 25 to 40 percent of students with reading difficulties experience elevated levels of inattention, according to different studies. In 1998 testimony before the Senate, leadership at NIH concluded that literacy difficulties in the U.S. amounted to a major public health problem.

“The need to improve reading instruction for students who are vulnerable for reading difficulties is not going away,” said Capin. “We’re committed to finding ways to continue the work, but how that occurs is unclear.”

Capin hopes that the research continues with the University’s support, or other funding agencies and private foundations. He remains optimistic.

“It’s unlikely that we will procure the amount of funds that were needed to conduct the research that we had designed, which was evaluated by our peers through a review process and determined to be innovative and significant,” Capin said. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to do the exact study that we had proposed, but we’re committed to finding solutions to advance this work so that we can improve outcomes for those we’re committed to help.”

Second project dealt setback

For Capin, the week of May 12 was a tough one. The same week he learned his SPARK project was terminated, another research grant of his was stopped before it began its second year. Called STORIES, the four-year project was to develop and evaluate a novel intervention to support multilingual students in grades 2-4 to better understand narrative texts.

The $2 million project was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education. The research was to be conducted in partnership with experts in speech and pathology at Utah State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Revere Public Schools in Massachusetts, which serves a large population of English learners.

“Many students who are multilingual are developing their proficiency in English,” said Capin. “Research suggests many of these students would benefit from additional supports to develop their academic language in English.”

Reading scores among U.S. students have been declining. According to the latest Nation’s Report Card, reading scores among fourth graders in 2024 were lower than in 2022 and even lower than in 2019. This project’s termination prevents students and teachers from working together to improve outcomes, Capin said.

“These decisions impact all the students who would have been served by these practices through the research, and also the countless teachers and students who could have potentially gained knowledge about new evidence-based practices,” he said.

Like other research grants that were frozen by the administration, Capin’s two research projects were funded based on careful peer reviews and a rigorous process. Capin said that the abrupt termination of these grants puts at risk the nation’s research enterprise, which should be kept independent from political pressure.

“Decisions about funding — whether to fund scientific research or whether to terminate scientific research — should be based on careful review, and on the merits of whether the research can improve the lives of individuals,” Capin said. “The grants that were funded and then consequently terminated went through a really meticulous process to determine whether the ideas were innovative and the methods were appropriate. Both projects had the potential to improve the lives of students. Even with these changes, our commitment to advance literacy outcomes for children remains strong.”