At 4:30 a.m., with headlamps and backpacks strapped on, Amelia Heymach, Eden Fisher, and Addie Kelsey stepped out of Currier House and began walking — southwest through Watertown and Newton, bound for the Connecticut border. With just two weeks until Commencement, the three seniors had one last goal to cross off their College bucket list: a 47-mile walk to commemorate their undergraduate journey.

For Heymach, Fisher, and Kelsey, who became friends on the first day of freshman year, long walks have become a tradition to mark the end of each academic year: As sophomores, they walked to New Hampshire; as juniors to Rhode Island. These ultra-walks might seem extreme, but this trio says they are a way to spend time together while testing their endurance, trust, and commitment.

“People do big walks at transition points in their lives, and it’s not by accident,” Heymach said. “It’s a great opportunity to reflect and center yourself and to think about your goals for the future and reflect on the past. There’s something about those walks that’s so conducive to that sort of thinking, to put away your devices, to be outside, to connect with the lands around you.”

None of them are strangers to trekking. Heymach, a statistics concentrator with a secondary in global health and health policy, hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain with her mom during a gap year. Fisher, a joint concentrator in integrative biology and math with a secondary in studies of women, gender, and sexuality, is a lifelong runner with four marathons and an ultramarathon under her belt. Kelsey, a psychology concentrator with secondary in integrative biology, took many walks with her family growing up.

The plans for their 25-mile walk to New Hampshire formed spontaneously after a late-night study session during final exam week of their sophomore fall. They had heard of some students who had walked to the state line, and wanted to see if they could do it, too.

“We went home to sleep, and then the next morning woke up super early and started,” Kelsey said. “There was no preparation.”

Their route, suggested by Google Maps, took them through Lexington, Burlington, and Billerica, sometimes through residential neighborhoods, other times through industrial areas, often with no sidewalks. The December sun was setting as they walked through Lowell, and then crossed the border into Pelham, New Hampshire, with a time of just under 10 hours.

“We got there, and it was dark. We had headlamps.” Heymach recalled. “Cars were going fast. We were on the side of the curb just running to the finish.”

For the return trip they called an Uber.

“It’s so funny Ubering back in like 40 minutes after you spent the entire day from before the sun has risen to sunset, walking,” Kelsey said. “You’re just seeing everything you passed flash by.”

Junior year they walked 32 miles to Rhode Island, heading south through Massachusetts towns including Dedham, Norwood, Walpole, and Wrentham. They crossed the border into Cumberland, Rhode Island, after 12 hours.

To pass the time while walking, the three sing songs and read aloud to each other from books they find in Little Free Libraries. They pack snacks and usually stop to buy pastries and sandwiches along the way.

All three agreed that at the end of a semester of rigorous academics and extracurriculars, something as simple as a long walk is a welcome change.

“I love the speed of a walk,” Heymach said. “Things can feel super fast-paced for many months at a time here. It’s saying, ‘No, we’re going to go our 2.5 miles-per-hour pace for as long as we want to.’”

Fisher agreed. “It allows you to slow down and enjoy things in a different way. I’ve been learning to appreciate a different pace.”

Last month, with Commencement on the horizon, the friends decided it was time to attempt Connecticut. On May 16 they headed southwest through Wellesley, Holliston, Milford, Mendon, and Douglas. To keep momentum, they developed mind games to stay mentally fresh. One rule? They weren’t allowed to ask how much farther they had to go.

“With walking there’s the physical aspect to it — you feel like your legs may be falling off toward the end — but a lot of it is mental,” Heymach said. “You have to tell yourself you’re not walking with a destination, you’re walking indefinitely.”

The final miles took them along the Southern New England Trunkline Trail through Douglas State Forest after dark, where they heard peeping frogs and spotted a beaver. They crossed the border into Thompson, Connecticut, around 10 p.m.

Next year they will be in three different countries, with Heymach doing community health work in Ecuador, Kelsey studying psychology at the University of Cambridge in England, and Fisher at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“I have faith in the friendships that I have, and trust that we’ll be there to support each other regardless of where we are,” Heymach said. “I’m excited to do hikes with them in the future.”

They already have a few in mind: Kelsey has her eye on the Camino de Santiago, Heymach on the Lone Star Hiking Trail in Texas, and Fisher on the North-South Trail in Rhode Island. Heymach and Fisher are also interested in the Long Trail in Vermont.

Plus, there are a few more nearby states they haven’t reached by foot.

“We haven’t gone to New York yet. Or Maine,” Kelsey added. “But New York is far, so we’ll have to split it into a couple of days next time.”

As Stephanie Burt sees it, queer lyric poetry mirrors the patterns of queer life. She offers many examples in “Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall,” a new anthology of 51 works by queer and trans poets from the last 55 years.

“I chose only poems I admire and wanted to write an essay about,” said Burt, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, who paired each work with an original essay providing analysis and historical context. “I looked for stylistic range, from concise to effusive, rhymed-formal to free and chaotic, weird-and-challenging to apparently pellucid. I also looked for emotional range, from joyous to erotically engaged to white-hot angry, quietly curious, resolved, mournful, inviting, shy, and extroverted.”

Burt’s chosen poets span generations, from Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) to Logan February (born in 1999), and address major moments in modern queer history — from Paul Monette’s “The Worrying” (1988) responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis, to Jackie Kay’s “Mummy and donor and Deirdre” (1991), which explores the increasing visibility of queer families.

The anthology also reflects a wide geographic range, from Puerto Rican writer Roque Salas Rivera to Singaporean writer Stephanie Chan. Some names, like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, will be familiar to many readers, while others may offer new discoveries.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Burt discusses shifts in the poetry landscape, the thrill of discovering new voices, and the power of poetry to capture historic moments.

Could you talk more about the notion of time in LGBTQIA+ poetry?

Many of us grew up with a very clear, normative set of expectations about how life works: You’re a child, then a teen, and then an adult, and then you’re old. You hang out in same-sex friend groups, and then you date, and then you “get serious,” and then you get married and have kids and raise kids, ideally 2.6 of them.

Often queer time, as encapsulated and addressed in queer poems, works differently. You don’t “grow up” if growing up means abandoning your intimate same-sex attachments in favor of straight-passing dating. Or you, as an adult, derive your energy from the kinds of exciting parties adults are supposed to abandon. Or maybe you go through puberty twice and feel (or act) like a baffled, excitable teen when you’re an adult. Even if you do end up monogamously connected to one stable partner for decades, as several of my poets did, the poetry about that connection works differently: It can feel more hard-won or feel like a former secret.

What changes do we see in LGBTQIA+ poetry after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising?

Post-Stonewall, we see more people come out. More people celebrate, openly, long-term relationships. People raise kids and attend to a next generation. During the 1970s, lesbian poets celebrate lesbian-only or women-only spaces; later on, not so much. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a whole generation — especially, but not only, gay men — lose half or more of their friends to HIV/AIDS, which is still a killer in much of the world but shows up less often in poems.

During the 2010s, people come out as trans or nonbinary. Also during the 2000s and 2010s, more people in the Global South come out and write poems about how their multiple identities and forms of belonging intersect. Sometimes they feel welcome where they grew up, and sometimes — as is the case with Logan February, whose poem “Prayer of the Slut” (2020) is included in the book — they do not and cannot.

Did you make any new discoveries while compiling this book?

Yes, I had never encountered Cherry Smyth, whose poem “In the South That Winter” (2001) is included, or Logan February. I hadn’t paid enough close attention to Melvin Dixon (“The Falling Sky,” written 1992, published 1995), nor to Judy Grahn (“Carol, in the park, chewing on straws,” 1970) until this book gave me the chance to re-examine their work.

Do you see poetry as a tool for documenting LGBTQIA+ history?

All art forms document history because all works of art come from historic moments. I picked the poems here because I loved them all, but some parts of global queer history in English don’t show up because I didn’t or couldn’t find awesome poems about them: queer liberation in the Republic of Ireland, for example, or the relationship between the Filipino diaspora and Filipino/a/x bakla identities. For that latter I recommend Rob Macaisa Colgate’s amazeballs book, published after “Super Gay Poems” went to press.

I did happily — but also sadly — include poems tied to big-deal historic moments such as Paul Monette’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power verse [“The Worrying”] which really needs another look these days. That said, some of my favorite poems have nothing to do with big chapters in public history — they construct aesthetic refuges from it, or alternatives to it. May Swenson’s “Found in Diary Dated May 29, 1973” (first book publication 2003), for example, an allegory of lesbian love via plant roots. You can connect it to history if you like, but that’s not what the poem invites us to do first or last.

What do you hope readers will take away from this anthology?

New favorite poets! New favorite poems! And a sense of the queer and trans and ace and intersex and pan and so on possibilities out there today, even at this troubled time for so many of us — possibilities that include fears and catastrophes but also resilience, community, solidarity, and joy.

Ukraine stunned Russia — and the world — when it launched Operation Spider’s Web, an audacious drone attack on June 1 that damaged or destroyed dozens of Russian warplanes. In the days since, Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded by escalating aerial assaults, launching record drone and missile attacks on Ukraine. 

Beyond its secrecy and complexity, military analysts say Ukraine’s remarkable success using inexpensive homemade drones against a larger, more formidable adversary ushers modern warfare into a new and potentially troubling era.

In this edited conversation, the Gazette spoke with Eric Rosenbach, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and past executive co-director at the Belfer Center, about how drones are rapidly reshaping global conflicts. Rosenbach, a former Army intelligence officer, was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter from 2015-2017, a job in which he advised on Russia policy and led efforts to improve innovation at the Defense Department.

Beyond its success, what was significant about Operation Spider’s Web?

I think the most significant thing is that it showed Ukraine’s ability to reach deep into Russia and to hit targets that have a very high level of strategic significance. The use of drone technology itself was important, but it was more about the fact that they were able to project power in a way that I’m sure deeply impacted Putin.

So not only the targets they hit, but also that Ukraine was met with no resistance from the Russians?

Exactly. The targets that they hit, they’re called strategic aircraft. Those are aircraft that are used to deliver nuclear weapons. They were also the type of aircraft that were used by the Russians to launch many of the high-end missile attacks against Ukraine for some of their hypersonic and long-range cruise missiles. So symbolically, that was super important but also had an important operational effect.

And if you look at some of the details about how the Ukrainians must have done this, it’s amazing. It will be an amazing spy thriller movie to watch the Ukrainians smuggling in drones over borders, probably loading them into trucks, driving the trucks probably within, I bet, five to 10 kilometers of these military bases, launching the drones through the roofs of these cargo trucks and then piloting them in to hit the right targets. They must have done an enormous amount of advanced intelligence work to pull this off.

Many observers say this was a watershed event that suggests we’ve entered a new era of modern warfare. Do you agree?

Yes. I think it’s important to look at the sophistication of the Ukrainian drone program and how it has evolved. In the very beginning of the war, they were using a lot of off-the-shelf drone technology, wiring some munitions to them, using those then to attack Russian tanks or infantry formations.

Now, it’s quite different: They’re designing their own drones, using a global supply chain to get the parts, including from China, and then doing things like 3D printing the drones themselves. The production line produces numbers that, quite frankly, are much higher than what the U.S. is producing right now or probably could produce.

Also, they’re really pushing forward the capabilities of these weapons in terms of what they can do, and how they’re utilized. And part of that is based on the artificial intelligence that they have been able to develop, and the data. Some of it is also just learning on the battlefield.

What is — or should be — most worrisome for the U.S., for NATO countries, and others whose drone programs lag behind Ukraine and Russia?

Three points here, I would say. One is that the Taiwanese are very closely studying what the Ukrainians have done and will do in the future in terms of using pretty inexpensive autonomous weapons for both defense and offense. In particular, the way they hit deep inside Russia.

Xi Jinping has said that Taiwan will become part of China sometime — some people say by 2027. I doubt that, but there’s a really important reason that the Taiwanese would want the ability to strike deep with China, if the [People’s Liberation Army] launched a military action against the island. I just wrote a report on that a few months ago that talks about how the Taiwanese could learn from the Ukrainians to develop their own type of autonomous weapons.

I would say the second is the Europeans are very nervous about how advanced the Russians have become with these autonomous weapons. They ask, for example, “What if the Russians wanted to try to mount some type of limited, small incursion into one of the Baltic states to test Article 5 of NATO and the way that they were doing it was, in large part, through the use of autonomous weapons?” The European defense technology sector is not very well developed, less so than the United States, and far behind Ukraine. I think the Europeans recognize that.

For the U.S., there’s a pretty jarring homeland security takeaway from this, which is: Imagine there are some bad actors — it wouldn’t even have to be a nation state, but it could be a terrorist group — that decides they’re going to 3D print these within the United States, or go across the border, and mimic the Ukrainians with a high-profile attack. I know a lot of people recognize that, but this should really drive home that the U.S. is vulnerable to attacks like this.

How vulnerable?

It’s getting better. If you look at high-profile public events, they’re called national security events. There’s quite good technology in place to protect the president, for example, when he’s out and about, the Super Bowl, things that would be logical opportunities to attack.

It’s the lower-profile things that are a much softer target that still could have a big impact both on the American psyche and, probably, the economy.

What does the U.S. need to do to prevent an attack like this? 

The United States will always be vulnerable to some degree from these attacks that are based on newer technology, whether it’s a cyberattack, there could be a space-based attack, and attack from autonomous weapons. The risk will never be zero.

So that’s also important to recognize when you read, for example, about a “golden dome” that will protect everything in the country. It’s just not realistic to think that we’ll ever be zero risk, fully protected from some magical defense technology.

So that means that we probably do need to invest more in counter-UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) homeland defense. And you see in the headlines of the last couple days that the U.S. is pulling more of the support we’ve given to Ukraine back to protect Americans, whether in the Middle East or even in the homeland, to try to do that.

How close are we to having something effective?

To a limited degree, there are pretty effective counter-UAV systems that have been developed, but they’re in very limited numbers to get up to the level that we would rest easier. I think it’s a years-not-months type of scenario.

What’s the potential global fallout from this demonstration by the Ukrainians?

From a geopolitical perspective, I think it makes clear that a peace agreement is nowhere near in the future. I’m sure the Russian response will be very heavy. The way Putin and the Russians have always reacted to something like this is with an overwhelming response of force. So that will be unfortunate. It probably will be one of the worst attacks we’ve seen against Ukraine from a technology perspective.

One thing to recognize about this is, although the operation was sophisticated, the drones were not fully autonomous. They were not completely reliant on AI, and they didn’t travel 5,000 miles. It was still a local-based operation with a pilot operating them to do the targeting. What would really start to worry you is if there were drones that were very long-range and had full autonomy — they were doing the identification, selection, and targeting of targets on their own, without a human in the loop.

Why would that be more worrisome?

The range is a significant limiting factor right now, both in defense and offense, when you’re using autonomous weapons. Think about the U.S., for example: If someone drove a boat just off the coast of the United States, and didn’t even have to go through the border. They had produced and put everything together there, and they could get even a couple hundred miles range, you could see how a lot of people in Washington, D.C., or other major metropolitan areas would be very vulnerable.

As I mentioned, true fully autonomous weapons would mean that a terrorist or nation-state could simply program targets, launch the killer drones, and then escape. Because that technology is still several years from being fully mature, the likelihood of this right now is low. The technology isn’t fully developed, hasn’t even really been tested extensively.

There is one thing to worry about: Throughout history, technologies that are lethal but have not been subject to a lot of testing end up having unintended consequences that sometimes are worse because of the catalytic effects in generating new classes of weapons.

There was a time when corporate America was not very online. Most companies used social media for promoting products and services or engaging with consumers in a friendly fashion. Political posts on a company Twitter account were rare.

That all changed between 2012 and 2022, when the volume of partisan speech on Twitter (now called X) from large corporations surged, more than doubling beginning in 2017, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

Researchers said the spike was driven disproportionately by companies using language associated with Democratic politicians. The moves frequently had negative effects on company stock prices.

In this edited conversation, the paper’s co-author Elisabeth Kempf, Jaime and Raquel Gilinski Associate Professor of Business Administration, explains corporate Twitter’s abrupt shift.

It seems ubiquitous now, but corporations putting out partisan-sounding tweets is only a recent development. What did you find?

Partisan speech was very rare for companies. Less than 1 percent of all the tweets they sent between 2012 and 2017 would constitute what was, according to our measures, very partisan speech.

Wading into partisan, polarized issues can be tricky for companies. We saw the first big change in 2017 where both Democratic and Republican partisan speech picks up, and then this big asymmetry starting in 2019.

That was the part that I found the most surprising. I was expecting to see some companies also start to use more Republican-sounding speech — to see, essentially, evidence of polarization. It was quite surprising to see that everybody seemed to adopt more Democratic speech after 2019 and that it was happening across the board, companies in blue states, red states, companies that are in consumer-facing businesses, also B2B [business to business].

How did you define partisan corporate speech?

We built on previous work by Jesse Shapiro, my colleague at Harvard, and his co-authors. They developed this methodology to look at partisan speech in Congress that identifies phrases that allow you to correctly guess a speaker’s political party.

We used their methodology and applied it to tweets sent by Democratic and Republican politicians. That allowed us to identify highly partisan phrases and then apply it to corporate speech. Essentially, phrases that sound like they could be coming from a Democratic or Republican politician is what we consider partisan speech.

What did you learn about how partisan corporate speech has changed over time?

The first fact is that partisan corporate speech has become more common over this time period, 2012 to 2022. The second fact is that this growth was really asymmetric. Starting in 2019, we see rapid growth in Democratic-sounding speech, while Republican-sounding speech stayed constant or, if anything, decreased toward the end. And third, when we look at stock returns around these partisan corporate statements, we see that they tend to be followed by negative abnormal stock returns.

That said, we also see a lot of heterogeneity depending on the investor composition. For example, if there are more funds with ESG [environmental, social, and governance] objectives, then we see that the stock return after a Democratic-sounding statement tends to be less negative.

Corporate partisan tweets over time

Is it clear why these partisan Twitter statements suddenly escalated during this time?

In 2017, we see both Democratic- and Republican-sounding speech go up for the first time. We don’t have so much to say on that.

What we do have more to say on is when we start to see this divergence between Democratic- and Republican-sounding speech, which is in January 2019. That was when BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink put out a pretty influential letter, his “Dear CEOs” annual letter. He explicitly called on CEOs to be more vocal, take more stances on polarizing issues.

This would be another potential piece of evidence to suggest that large institutional investors may have also played a role in this. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager so there was a lot of news reporting that this had kicked off a lot of discussion in the business world.

Also in 2019, the Business Roundtable [a CEO lobbying association] came out saying shareholder value maximization should not be the sole purpose. So, I do think it was quite influential.

We also see that 2019 was a massive growth in terms of the assets under management with a sustainability mandate. This is when a big shift happened in the investment industry.

Recently, we’ve seen protest campaigns against Tesla and Bud Light spurred by perceived partisan corporate statements. Could robust consumer boycotts that threaten profits have contributed to declines in shares as opposed to just public or investor reaction to statements?

This was the finding we struggled the most to make sense of. One possibility is, as you say, that maybe there could be facts of this partisan speech that affect what we would call the cash flows in finance or the profits that the companies make. For example, it might be losing employees or losing customers. We argue that partisan speech can affect a third potential stakeholder group — investors — and how much they are willing to hold the stock.

We were looking at the 500 largest companies by market capitalization, so these are very big companies that need to raise capital from a pretty heterogeneous investor base. It’s hard for these large companies to raise capital only from Democrats or only from Republicans. And so, once you make a partisan statement that aligns with one group but not with the other, you might see precisely this negative stock price effect.

It is also difficult to explain the growth in Democratic-sounding speech with consumer or employee preferences alone. To be clear: We wouldn’t want to conclude that investor or consumer preferences did not play a role at all. But we thought it was worth pointing out that it was hard to explain everything just with consumers or just with employees.

Why is that? Because we see this rapid growth both for companies that are in consumer and non-consumer-facing industries. Boycotts could explain why maybe certain retail companies might adopt a certain speech, but we see it even in materials, which is a sector with companies that make metals, chemicals, coatings and things like this. It’s hard to think that there the consumer preferences for partisan speech would be super strong.

I thought employees could be quite relevant, but we saw the same trend in companies with employees located in very Democratic areas versus Republican areas. We also didn’t see that labor market tightness played a role. You might imagine that if you’re really in desperate need of talent, maybe you would engage more in this partisan speech if you thought it would help in hiring.

There were a couple of results that just made it hard to explain this with consumers or employees alone. Whereas, if you think about this investment channel, it could explain why we see it in companies that are based in blue areas, red areas. It could explain why this is such a broad-based phenomenon.

Are there other aspects of corporate speech ripe for further research?

Yes. I don’t think we have fully answered the question of why this big shift was happening then. We have suggestive evidence that investors could have played a role. But I don’t think there’s a full, causal relationship yet. So that is one big open question: How influential were investors versus consumers versus employees?

The second question is what were the more long-term effects? We’re looking at stock prices over a relatively short window. What does this do in the longer run to companies, and potentially also to their relationship to politicians or how partisan speech by companies influences politics, I think, are exciting areas for future research.

Thousands of alumni from around the world gathered on campus Friday for Harvard Alumni Day — an annual event celebrating alumni of all Harvard Schools and class years and the collective strength of their communities. The day’s events, which coincided with Harvard and Radcliffe College reunions and other alumni programs across the University, drew a record 9,600-plus attendees this year. The festivities included musical performances, the presentation of the Harvard Medals, and a keynote address by renowned surgeon, best-selling author, and public health leader Atul Gawande, M.D. ’95, M.P.H. ’99.

The main program began with the traditional alumni parade from the Old Yard to Tercentenary Theatre, led by the chief marshal of alumni Dara Olmsted Silverstein ’00 and the two oldest alumni in attendance, Linda Cabot Black ’51 and Stanley Karson ’48, A.M. ’50.

After Peter J. Koutoujian, M.P.A. ’03, the sheriff of Middlesex County, called the 155th annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association to order, HAA board president Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93 took to the podium, referencing an appeal she made to the College Class of 2024 last spring: to consider the plural of the University’s motto, Veritas, and embrace Veritates— the ability to hold many truths simultaneously to connect across differences.

“Today I am even more convinced that we must strengthen this muscle to hold multiple truths and to coalesce around our many shared values, particularly freedom of thought and expression, and respect and kindness,” said Savard, who will be succeeded by incoming HAA President William Makris, Ed.M. ’00, on July 1.

Noting the unprecedented challenges the University has faced over the past year, she urged fellow alumni to continue “to be informed, principled ambassadors” of Harvard and higher education more broadly.

Sarah Karmon, executive director of the HAA and associate vice president of alumni affairs and development, spoke next, expressing her gratitude for the steadfast support and contributions of Harvard’s alumni volunteers. She also gave special thanks to those who led reunion planning and fundraising efforts for their classes this year, noting the Class of 2005’s record-setting attendance for a 20th reunion.

Karmon closed by paying tribute to Jack Reardon ’60, associate vice president of University relations, who will retire at the end of the month after more than 60 years of service to Harvard. “Every person in this theater today has benefited from his leadership, his wisdom, and his deep commitment to his alma mater,” she said.

President Alan M. Garber ’76, Ph.D. ’82, who was met with a standing ovation, spoke to the challenges of a difficult year, laying out how the University is working to address legitimate criticisms while defending itself against misrepresentations and retaliatory actions from the federal government.

“Only one thing about Harvard has persisted over 388 years, and actually it’s not our name; it’s our embrace of scrutiny, advancement, and renewal,” said Garber, noting that the University is built on the idea of continual improvement to create a better institution and world for successive generations. “The pursuit of truth — of Veritas — is perpetual,” Garber said. “We are unceasing in our efforts to champion our motto.”

He also remarked on the expressions of support the University has received from alumni, as well as from people with no affiliation to Harvard who have championed the University in its fight to preserve academic freedom.

Garber ended his speech with a short valediction: “May Veritas lift us up and light our way, especially in dark times, enabling Harvard and our fellow universities to persevere and succeed in building a better future — not perfect, but more perfect than the present.”

Following Garber’s speech, brothers Danilo “Dacha” Thurber ’25 and Sava Thurber ’27 performed two songs — a traditional Polish folksong called “Tesknota Za Ojczyzna Marsz” and “Etudes-Caprices Op. 18, No. 4” by Polish composer Henryk Wieniawski — which they noted “highlight the importance of an international voice in a place which we are so fortunate to call home.”

Garber then presented this year’s Harvard Medals to Kathy Delaney-Smith, Paul J. Finnegan ’75, M.B.A. ’82, Carolyn Hughes ’54, and David Johnston ’63, who were recognized for their extraordinary service to the University.

In his keynote address, Gawande, who served as assistant administrator for global health at USAID from 2022 to early 2025, called out recent federal actions for undermining public health and harming Harvard and the country.

The University is facing existential questions, said Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He learned just in the previous week that funding had been cut for his own research center’s efforts to reduce surgical patient mortality.

“The discussions have been hard, but the answer was ultimately easy,” he said, expressing his gratitude to Garber and the Corporation for standing strong against demands that threaten the foundation of teaching, scholarship, and discovery. Navigating an uncertain future, he said, “is far easier when we know who we are and what we stand for.”

The main program ended with a performance of “Fair Harvard” by alumni members of the Harvard Din & Tonics, Harvard Glee Club, Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, Harvard University Choir, Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, Radcliffe Choral Society, and Radcliffe Pitches. Savard told those in attendance to save the date for next year’s Harvard Alumni Day — June 5, 2026 — before the crowd dispersed to celebrate in the Yard with lawn games, photo opportunities, and food and beverage trucks.

Sixteen Harvard Clubs around the world also hosted local celebrations of Harvard Alumni Day for those who could not attend in person. Later in the afternoon, many Shared Interest Groups hosted meetup events on campus and in Cambridge, including a get-together at Charlie’s Kitchen hosted by Harvardwood. Alumni also had the opportunity to attend several Harvard Alumni Day symposia sessions, which included faculty panels on Harvard’s global impact, the ongoing work of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative’s efforts to ensure AI serves society in meaningful and ethical ways.

It was a simple question asked over lunch in 1950. Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped usher in the atomic age, was dining with colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the conversation turned to extraterrestrial life. Given the vastness of the universe and the statistical likelihood of other intelligent civilizations, Fermi wondered, “Where is everybody?”

Seventy-five years later, David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, says we’re closer to an answer. 

When Fermi posed his famous paradox, Charbonneau said, we hadn’t identified a single planet beyond our solar system. The 1995 discovery of the first exoplanet allowed scientists to break the paradox into smaller, more solvable questions: How many stars are there? How many of those stars have planets? What fraction of those planets are Earth-like? What fraction of Earth-like planets support life? And finally, what fraction of that life is intelligent? 

“We have made tremendous progress on those questions,” said Charbonneau, who co-chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2018 Committee on Exoplanet Science Strategy. “We now know that one in every four stars, at least, has a planet that is the same size as the Earth and is rocky, and is the same temperature as the Earth, so it’s what we would call a habitable-zone planet. Those are very secure conclusions.”

Recognizing that challenge, the National Academies’ Committee for a Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, on which Charbonneau served as a panel member, recommended the development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a space telescope designed to hunt for chemical signs of life on other planets. The HWO, if it were built and launched, would image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. The project remains tentative. 

There’s still the question of just how common life, let alone intelligent life, really is. It’s possible, Charbonneau said, that if you take any habitable-zone planet, add water, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, and give it about a billion years, life will develop. Or you could have those very same conditions, and it would all remain stubbornly lifeless. You only have to look at the first habitable planet to have a much better idea how common life is.

“If you look at the first one and there isn’t life, you’ve already learned, from a statistical perspective, that it’s not a guarantee that life forms. And then you have to think logarithmically. You have to think, maybe it’s one in 1,000 or maybe it’s one in a billion, or maybe it’s one in a trillion. And all those possibilities basically would mean there’s no life that we can interact with.” 

Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, says the search for extraterrestrial life should expand beyond traditional approaches. Loeb is the founder of the Galileo Project, which studies both unidentified aerial phenomena spotted here on Earth and physical objects that may have come from other solar systems. 

The project is named for the Italian astronomer who was persecuted in the 17th century for arguing the Copernican theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Proof of billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone is a reminder that we’re not as unique as we think we are, Loeb says. “The message from nature is, don’t be presumptuous, you are not privileged.” 

Loeb made headlines in 2018 when he suggested that ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, could be an alien lightsail or debris from an extraterrestrial ship. Despite pushback against the idea, Loeb says we shouldn’t brush anomalies under the carpet: We should at least get the data to find out for certain. He thinks that Fermi was doing himself a disservice by wondering idly about whether there were aliens, like someone who complains of being lonely but won’t try to meet new people.

 “It’s the most romantic question on Earth,” Loeb said. “Do we have a partner out there?”

For Charbonneau, the chances of finding that partner are slim. Even under ideal circumstances — if our nearest interstellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, hosted intelligent life with radio technology — sending a single message back and forth once would take the better part of a decade. 

There’s also the chance that the aliens are less interested in us than we are in them.

“If you look around on the Earth, there are a lot of organisms, some would say intelligent organisms, that are not interested in developing technology, and they’re also maybe not interested in communicating,” Charbonneau said. “We humans love to communicate, and we love to connect, and maybe that’s just not a property of life: Maybe that’s really a property of humans.”

A “scorecard” designed to assess a person’s risk of developing brain-related conditions works similarly for heart disease and the three most common types of cancer, according to a new Mass General Brigham study published in Family Practice.

The McCance Brain Care Score, developed at Mass General Brigham, is a list designed to assess modifiable risk factors that influence brain health. The scorecard also serves as a practical framework to help individuals identify meaningful, achievable lifestyle changes that support brain — and possibly systemic — health. Previous studies showed that a higher score, indicating better brain care, associates with a lower risk of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression.

“While the McCance Brain Care Score was originally developed to address modifiable risk factors for brain diseases, we have also found it’s associated with the incidence of cardiovascular disease and common cancers,” said senior author Sanjula Singh of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “These findings reinforce the idea that brain disease, heart disease, and cancer share common risk factors and that by taking better care of your brain, you may also be supporting the health of your heart and body as a whole simultaneously.”

Neurological diseases such as stroke, dementia, and late-life depression are often driven by a combination of modifiable risk factors. Similarly, cardiovascular diseases — including ischemic heart disease, stroke, and heart failure — and the three most common cancers worldwide (lung, colorectal, and breast cancer) share many of these risk factors. At least 80 percent of cardiovascular disease cases and 50 percent of cancer cases are attributable to modifiable behaviors such as poor nutrition, physical inactivity, smoking, excessive alcohol use, elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, as well as psychosocial factors like stress and social isolation.

Given this overlap, researchers used data from the UK Biobank to analyze health outcomes in 416,370 individuals aged 40 to 69 years. They found that a 5-point higher Brain Care Score at baseline was associated with a 43 percent lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a median follow-up of 12½ years. For cancer, a 5-point increase in Brain Care Score was associated with a 31 percent lower incidence of lung, colorectal, and breast cancer.

The authors acknowledged several limitations. First, while the findings reveal strong associations, the study does not establish causality — although prior evidence suggests that some individual components of the Brain Care Score, such as smoking, physical activity, and blood pressure control, have causal links to specific outcomes. Second, because the UK Biobank includes only participants aged 40 to 69 at enrollment, the findings may not generalize to younger or older populations. Lastly, while the score provides a broad, accessible measure of brain health, it is not designed as a disease-specific predictive model.

“The goal of the McCance Brain Care Score is to empower individuals to take small, meaningful steps toward better brain health,” said lead author Jasper Senff, who conducted this work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Singh Lab within the Brain Care Labs at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Taking better care of your brain by making progress on your Brain Care Score may also be linked to broader health benefits, including a lower likelihood of heart disease and cancer.”

“Primary care providers around the world are under growing pressure to manage complex health needs within limited time,” said Singh. “A simple, easy-to-use tool like the McCance Brain Care Score holds enormous promise — not only for supporting brain health, but also for helping to address modifiable risk factors for a broader range of chronic diseases in a practical, time-efficient way.”

Funding for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association.

Over the last decade, Dustin Tingley has reconsidered his beliefs about expertise.

As a public policy expert, Tingley has devised quantitative ways to understand the messy problems and sometimes messier datasets that abound in political economy, international trade, and political science. In recent years, he has turned his attention to the transition to renewable energy amid the quickening pace of climate change.

As he has done so, Tingley has found himself shifting focus from datasets that tell a story in numbers to stories told by people experiencing changing economic circumstances and climate-stressed times.

“I came to the realization that there was so much expertise about this topic that was not in academia,” said Tingley, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “You go where the knowledge is, and the knowledge is in the field. The knowledge is in the lived experience of communities and people.”

Tingley hasn’t abandoned data and its power to illuminate in ways beyond the reach of anecdote and personal experience. But he’s also come to recognize that data alone doesn’t tell the full story. Missing in high-level, numbers-driven discussions of things like jobs to be lost in the fossil fuel industry are the community-level impacts of shifts in industries that underpin not just household finances, but also local and regional economies. This includes everything from concerns around infrastructure to downtown retail zones to the ability of local governments to fund things like public safety and schools.

“It’s easy to think about this in terms of fossil-fuel jobs, which are important to focus on, but what that misses is that the local economic tax base depends on it,” said Tingley. “That was not on my radar at all, but it was one of the first things that people would raise. Local economic development officials or county commissioners would show, for example, a picture of their local football stadium. I didn’t have an appreciation of how embedded and suffused all this was.”

The work culminated in 2023’s “Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse.” The volume, co-authored with Alexander Gazmararian, relies on interviews, community meetings, and other forums to present an on-the-ground view of climate change and the coming energy transition. Focusing on individuals, business owners, and community leaders, it seeks lessons from those likely to feel the transition most deeply.

“I definitely brought my quantitative knowledge and expertise to bear,” Tingley said. “But the more qualitative interview, the listening and learning, was necessary because my slice of academia did not have the bigger picture.”

Tingley’s shift in perspective was perhaps preordained. Though his work in international relations has largely followed the numbers, a shift to communities in transition echoes the changes that rocked the places where he grew up.

His family’s financial situation improved over time, but they struggled when he was young. They lived in a rural part of North Carolina where furniture-making and tobacco-growing were important industries, both of which would encounter significant challenges. The region’s furniture industry declined due to foreign competition and outsourcing, while tobacco has long been under assault because of health concerns.

He also recalls visits to his father’s family in West Virginia, driving through coal country, with blasted mountaintops and mile-long coal trains. The economic impact of the industry’s decadeslong decline was apparent even to his young eyes, as he watched weathered shacks and cars on blocks in front yards pass by his window.

Tingley has always had an interest in the environment, which he says was piqued by his family’s move to New Jersey in middle school, with the Garden State’s juxtaposition of oil refineries and urban sprawl, fertile farmland and natural Pine Barrens.

But his first academic passion was international affairs. That interest developed in the years around the Cold War’s end, when his North Carolina elementary school had him crouching under his desk during nuclear drills, the Soviet Union collapsed, and later, in high school in the mid-1990s, when protests on the streets highlighted globalization’s inequities.

“I started to become more aware of the world, learning more systematically about war and conflict and the Cold War and international trade — you read stories about protests — I realized there’s a big world out there,” Tingley said.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tingley studied at the University of Rochester, earning a political science degree and a minor in math. After teaching at a private school in New York for two years, he headed to graduate school at Princeton, where he became more deeply involved in research. The work blended statistics and political science, and he began developing new statistical tools when existing ones weren’t up to handling the complex and often unruly data sets.

“He’s full of energy and interested in a lot of different things,” said Kosuke Imai, one of Tingley’s professors at Princeton who today is professor of government and of statistics at Harvard. “We worked on these statistical methods, but he went on to other research about international trade and how that affects domestic actors. Now he’s on to climate change. He’s quite versatile in terms of being able to understand today’s need.”

Imai said Tingley’s energy is infectious and part of what makes him a good leader. At Princeton, Tingley was captain of the department’s softball team — Imai recalls being pulled from the whiteboard to the diamond on occasion.

At Harvard, Tingley has taken on a more formal leadership role as deputy vice provost for advances in learning, where he has worked to create educational tools and resources for students and co-chaired a study on climate education.

“He has an energy that is contagious to his colleagues, friends, and collaborators, plus he works extremely hard,” Imai said. “He’s also down-to-earth, doesn’t assume anything, and is a very straightforward person.”

After graduating in 2010, Tingley came to Harvard as an assistant professor of government where, over the next few years, he became increasingly interested in climate change. After gaining tenure in 2015, he began to look for climate-related problems to explore.

His research eventually touched on the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides financial support to those who have lost their jobs due to international competition. He began to wonder whether workers displaced by the clean-energy transition might benefit from something similar.

“I thought, all these fossil-fuel people are going to lose their jobs, what are we going to do about them?” Tingley said. “I ran polling on an idea that I called ‘climate adjustment assistance,’ basically asking, ‘Would you support helping fossil-fuel workers transition?’ and bipartisan majorities supported it.”

Since “Uncertain Futures,” Tingley has continued his work. He is part of a cluster of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability that carries on themes in his book. The work uses community surveys, public hearings, and in-person interviews to gather experiences and opinions on the best way forward.

In August 2024, Tingley and pre-doctoral fellow Ana Martinez authored a report, “Federal Land, Leasing, Energy, and Local Public Finances,” examining how differently the nation handles proceeds from fossil fuel versus wind- and solar-generating facilities.

Proceeds from fossil-fuel extraction on federal land are shared with nearby towns and states and provide important revenue for them. But the report noted that when it comes to renewable energy, the federal government keeps all the money.

The pair conducted a nationwide poll, finding that significant majorities of voters in both parties support sending renewable revenue to local communities, a step that might help build acceptance in the most affected places.

“Just convincing someone that there’s a problem is a totally different thing from putting in place a solution that they can afford,” Tingley said. “People vote with their pocketbooks.”

Doug Melton’s life irrevocably changed the day his child was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. But unlike most other parents in that situation, he was a molecular biologist uniquely positioned to do something about it.

Now, more than 30 years later, Melton and his colleagues are within sight of a new treatment for Type 1 diabetes that uses stem cells to make healthy insulin-producing cells that can be transplanted into patients. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biomedical company headquartered in Boston, is running clinical trials on methods pioneered by Melton and his colleagues at Harvard and a startup company that he founded.

“There are few things better than having an interesting science puzzle,” Melton said. “Especially one which involves educating people and that, if you’re successful, does some good for people in the world.”

Melton recently was named Harvard’s first Catalyst Professor, a senior faculty role that aims to foster collaboration with the private sector. The professorship allows distinguished faculty to engage in external opportunities while maintaining their teaching commitments and contributions to the University’s academic mission. 

Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, hailed Melton’s work as a prime example of scientific discovery generating an advance in medicine.

“At a time when investment in science is under attack, it is hard to imagine a better example of how basic scientific discovery paves the way for breakthroughs in medicine, and how the research done at Harvard can improve the health of everyday people,” she said.

Hatching a biologist

As a child, Melton became captivated by biology. One question especially puzzled him: How did single-celled eggs grow into complex animals with billions of specialized cells? “I remember as a boy in Chicago wondering how the eggs in the pond knew whether to make a salamander or a frog,” he recalled. “That really started me on a career in science.”

That question continued to propel his career. Melton graduated with a biology degree from the University of Illinois and won a Marshall Scholarship to study at University of Cambridge, where he earned another bachelor’s degree in the history and philosophy of science and a Ph.D. in molecular biology. In 1981, he landed at Harvard and spent a decade studying early development in frogs and mice. He planned to spend his career investigating how bodies formed in vertebrates.

His life took a sudden turn in 1991 when his infant son, Sam, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a disease in which the immune system attacks and destroys beta cells, the parts of the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone that regulates our blood sugar. Such patients are forced to rely on external sources of insulin. “I didn’t really even know what that meant,” Melton recalled. “But we quickly found out. My wife was spending all her time really being Sam’s pancreas, injecting him with insulin.”

With two young children, Melton and his wife were overwhelmed. Half in jest, she turned to her husband and suggested he make himself productive. “She looked at me and said, ‘You know, you’re kind of useless,’” he recalled. “‘You’re supposed to be able to do something. Why don’t you work on this?’”

So he did. Melton switched his research to diabetes. His jump was not as radical as it might seem: The development of tissues and organs involved the same mystery that had captivated him from the beginning — how did genes encode the signals that guided the division and differentiation of cells? He began researching how beta cells form in frogs and mice and eventually came to an emerging realm of biology — stem cells. These developmental cells are the precursors that differentiate into all cell types in the body. An idea hatched in his imagination: taking embryonic stem cells and manipulating them to become the cells that produce insulin.

“It never occurred to me that it couldn’t be done,” said Melton. “I just didn’t know how to do it.”

Rising global burden

Diabetes is a disorder in which the body cannot properly metabolize glucose, the blood sugar that is our main source of energy. Normally, glucose is regulated by insulin, produced by beta cells in clusters of endocrine cells called islets of Langerhans scattered throughout the pancreas.

In Type 1 — which can appear any time but often during childhood — the body’s own immune system attacks and destroys the beta cells. In Type 2 diabetes — which often appears later in life and frequently is linked to obesity — beta cells become dysfunctional and fail to supply sufficient insulin.

38 million Americans had diabetes in 2021, according to the CDC

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, more than 38 million Americans, roughly 11 percent of the population, had diabetes in 2021. It is the eighth leading cause of death in the country.

The burden of diabetes also is rising around the globe, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the disease afflicts some 589 million adults around the world, or about 11 percent of the global adult population.

For Melton, this global mission became even more personal. About 10 years after his son was diagnosed with Type 1, his daughter, Emma (then 14), developed the same disease.

Supported through Bush-era cuts

A breakthrough occurred more than 100 years ago with the development of exogenous insulin treatment, originally delivered by injections and now commonly by insulin pumps. But these advances still require external sources of insulin and are treatments — not cures.

Melton has sought a cure by deciphering the developmental biology of the beta cells. What were the developmental steps that turned a stem cell into a beta cell that produced insulin? Could scientists reproduce those events to engineer beta cells that could be transplanted into patients?

His research was bold, and Harvard was the rare place where he could do it. He recalled the University’s support when, in 2001, then-President George W. Bush suspended federal funding for research on human stem cells and later limited federal funding to existing lines of stem cells. The University constructed a new lab for Melton to ensure that his research remained separated from federally funded work. In 2004 Melton and his colleague David Scadden founded the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, a collaboration that now involves more than 350 research faculty.

“I’m proud to say Harvard supported me and we created about 300 stem cell lines and sent them to researchers throughout the world for free,” said Melton. “That really helped the whole field grow.”

Copying nature

Over the decades, Melton and his colleagues made a series of discoveries that laid the groundwork for a new treatment to restore insulin production in patients with Type 1 diabetes.

Melton compares this stem cell-derived islet therapy to “educating” a stem cell and its descendants — introducing the protein signals that trigger or inhibit developmental processes. All told, the method delivers 15 signaling proteins at specific times and places in six stages over 30 days to turn a stem cell into an insulin-producing beta cell. These cells are then transplanted into patients with Type 1 diabetes.

After demonstrating a method to create beta cells in 2014, Melton founded the company Semma Therapeutics (the name is a combination of the names of his two children) to develop a commercial application. In 2019, the company was acquired by Vertex, and it now conducts clinical trials for people with Type 1. Melton said more than a dozen patients have completed the trial and “more than a handful” who have taken this new treatment are “insulin independent” — meaning they have not required additional exogenous insulin thus far.

Continuous glucose monitors measure blood sugar every 15 minutes, but a beta cell does so 1,000 times per second. “I’m not inventing anything,” says Melton. “I’m trying to copy nature.”

A place for science

The new stem-cell-derived therapy represents the first time a fully differentiated human cell has been cultured in the lab from stem cells and then introduced into human clinical trials. Melton says the technique might eventually be adapted to treat Type 2 diabetes. The method also provides insights into how stem cells might be used for other therapies, such as making dopamine-producing brain cells to treat Parkinson’s disease.

“Harvard is the kind of place where you can take a problem that you might not solve in a year, or even five years or maybe 10 years,” said Melton. “I think that’s one of the great things our institutions can do.”

Harvard also has been a great place to nurture young talent — and learn from them, Melton said. The scientist has employed about 50 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs in his lab. He also has enjoyed teaching classes such as developmental biology and “Frontiers in Therapeutics: Science of Health,” which explores how basic science can be applied to unsolved medical problems.

“I like teaching undergraduates because, on the whole, they come with fewer prejudices or preconceived notions about what’s worth doing and how to do it,” said Melton. “That challenges my own thinking about what we’re doing. There is an additional motivation — to entice some of the bright young undergraduates for a career in science.”

Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87, former president of American University and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has been elected president of the Harvard University Board of Overseers for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Monica Bharel, M.P.H. ’12, a physician, public health leader at Google Health, and former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, will serve as vice chair of the board’s executive committee for the same term.

Burwell and Bharel assume the board’s top leadership roles succeeding Vivian Hunt ’89, M.B.A. ’95, chief innovation officer of UnitedHealth Group, and Tyler Jacks ’83, a cancer genetics research expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served in the roles over the past academic year.

“Sylvia Burwell and Monica Bharel are accomplished alumni leaders whose experience overcoming complex challenges under extraordinary circumstances will serve Harvard well,” said President Alan Garber. “At the helm of a university, at the highest levels of government, and in two of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations, Sylvia has demonstrated a keen understanding of large multifaceted organizations and what it takes to advance them. As a physician, a public health expert, and a government leader, Monica has combined compassion with evidence-based solutions to keep people healthy throughout the region and across the country. I am grateful to them both for their leadership and for their commitment to the University.”

The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards and its members are made up of and elected by Harvard alumni. Formally established in 1642, the board plays an integral role in the governance of the University. As a central part of its work, the board directs the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning.

More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. The board also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of members of the Corporation, Harvard’s other governing board.  

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

Sylvia Mathews Burwell is a widely experienced leader who has served at the highest levels of government, philanthropy, and academia. Burwell was the 15th president of American University, after having served as Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2014 to 2017 and director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2013 to 2014. As HHS Secretary, she managed a trillion-dollar department with 12 operating divisions — including the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Medicaid and Medicare programs.

 “It’s an honor to serve as president of the Board of Overseers in the year ahead,” said Burwell.

“I came to Harvard as a freshman, having grown up in Hinton, West Virginia, where everyone knows one another, and where the idea of community is fundamental,” she continued. “My grandparents immigrated to this country with hopes and dreams for their children and their families. My background, together with my time at Harvard, has shaped my understanding of the importance of contributing to this nation and the role community plays in the health of our institutions and country.

“This is a time of serious consequence for higher education, our nation’s students, and for Harvard. I look forward to working closely with President Garber, with my colleagues on the Board of Overseers, with members of the Harvard campus and alumni community to listen and to advance the University’s core teaching, learning, and research mission so that other students can benefit and the University can continue its work improving the lives, livelihoods, and communities of people across the country and around the world.”

As AU president, Burwell steered the university through the COVID-19 pandemic and led the development and implementation of the Changemakers for a Changing World strategic plan, as well as the $500 million Change Can’t Wait campaign, the most successful such campaign in the university’s history. The campaign resulted in the creation of four new and expanded research centers, eight endowed faculty positions, and more than 170 scholarships. Under her leadership, AU opened the Sine Institute for Policy and Politics, the Khan Cyber and Economic Security Institute, and the LEED-Gold Hall of Science.

Burwell also held executive positions at two of the largest foundations in the world — she served as chief operating officer and president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, and as president of the Walmart Foundation based in Bentonville, Arkansas.

She has served on numerous higher education boards and is on the board of Kimberly Clark, Guidewell Florida Blue, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a past board member of the University of Washington Medical Center.

Born and raised in Hinton, a small West Virginia town with a population of around 3,000, Burwell’s family was committed to service in their community. Her mother was a teacher who also served as mayor for nearly a decade. Her father was an optometrist by trade but occasionally filled in as minister at the local Episcopal church when needed. Both sets of maternal and paternal grandparents emigrated from Greece.

Burwell concentrated in political science and government at Harvard. She received an A.B. in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar in 1990.

Monica Bharel

Monica Bharel is a physician, public health leader, medical educator, and public servant. As the global clinical lead in public sector and public health at Google, Bharel works to harness technology to solve public health challenges, using the power of data and analytics to drive innovations in advancing health outcomes for all.

 “It’s an immense honor to serve in this role alongside my fellow Overseers and with President Garber and leaders across the University,” said Bharel. “My time as a student at Harvard was transformative. In addition to the courses and analytical frameworks I was exposed to, the fellowship and camaraderie of people working together to solve complex problems expanded my own capacity and ability to imagine new ways of approaching solutions that work for everyone.”

Bharel was appointed by Gov. Charlie Baker in 2015 as Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, serving as the Commonwealth’s chief physician from 2015 to 2021. During that time, she oversaw the Massachusetts public health response to the COVID pandemic as well as several other public health crises, including the opioid epidemic.

As commissioner, Bharel oversaw a public health workforce of nearly 3,000 and an expansive department covering a wide portfolio of health-related issues, including lead poisoning, health equity, and injury prevention. Bharel was a leader in the creation of the Public Health Data Warehouse in 2017, as part of the newly created Office of Population Health. Under her leadership, Massachusetts ranked nationally among the healthiest states in the nation.

Bharel also served as a senior adviser to the mayor of Boston in 2021-22 and was appointed by Mayor Michelle Wu to lead the city’s response to the humanitarian crisis in the area known as Mass and Cass.

Bharel is a board-certified internist who has practiced general internal medicine for more than 20 years, including at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Medical Center, neighborhood health centers, the Veterans Administration, and nonprofit organizations. She has served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to becoming commissioner, she was chief medical officer of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

She holds a Master of Public Health degree through the Commonwealth Fund/Harvard University Fellowship in Minority Health Policy. She holds a medical degree from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, and completed a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital/Boston Medical Center.

Being exposed to lingering fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from wildfire smoke can have health effects up to three months afterwards, well beyond the couple of days that previous studies have identified, and the exposure can occur even after the fires have ended.

These findings were reported in a new study in Epidemiology published on May 28 by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

This medium-term exposure to PM2.5 from wildfire smoke was associated with increased risks for various cardiorespiratory conditions, including ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, arrhythmia, hypertension, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma. 

PM2.5 is a mixture of tiny particles and a major component of wildfire smoke. Compared to non-smoke PM2.5, smoke PM2.5 is smaller in size and is considered more dangerous because it is richer in carbonaceous compounds, which are more likely to induce oxidative stress and inflammation and thus pose a greater threat to public health.

The study also showed larger effects in neighborhoods with more vegetation or more disadvantages (e.g., lower education, more unemployment, lower housing quality, and higher poverty), as well as among people who have smoked at any point in their life.

This is the first study to examine the medium-term health effects of wildfire smoke. It is also the first to comprehensively assess its impact on all major types of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

“Wildfire activity in the United States has increased substantially over the past few decades, resulting in an increase in emissions that have begun to reverse decades of air quality improvements,” said corresponding and first author Yaguang Wei, assistant professor of environmental medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine and department associate in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard Chan School. “Even brief exposures from smaller fires that last only a few days can lead to long-lasting health effects. There is an urgent need for research to fully understand the health impacts of wildfire smoke to raise awareness among public and health professionals, as well as to support the development of effective regulations to mitigate the impacts.”

In total, 13,755,951 hospitalizations for cardiovascular diseases and 7,990,910 for respiratory diseases were recorded among residents of all ages across the 15 U.S. states (Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin). They were linked across time and location, using residential addresses, to smoke PM2.5 exposures between 2006 and 2016. Among the conditions studied, hypertension showed the greatest increase in hospitalization risk associated with smoke PM2.5 exposure. 

The team developed and employed a novel self-controlled design within a cohort framework to mimic a quasi-experimental study. Under a cohort framework, researchers did not randomly assign participants to different smoke exposure levels; rather, they tracked a participant’s health and smoke exposure over the defined time period, which can introduce bias due to unmeasured confounders. This self-controlled design automatically addresses factors that don’t change or change slowly over time — like genetics — even if they aren’t measured, because each person is compared to themselves. This self-matching format improves the reliability of study findings. 

“Wildfires can burn for weeks to a month, and smoke PM2.5 may linger in the air for extended periods, which may keep the air toxic even after a wildfire has ended,” said Wei. “Current wildfire strategies are outdated and ineffective. For example, prescribed fires can reduce wildfire risk but are mainly used to protect property rather than public health. Greater effort should be placed on wildfire management rather than relying solely on traditional air quality control strategies in response to the increasing wildfire activity.”

“As wildfires become more frequent and intense, and their burden on human health becomes clearer, addressing the health impacts is a critical public health priority,” said Rosalind Wright, dean for public health and chair of the Department of Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine. “The public and clinicians should take preventive measures during and after wildfires, such as wearing masks and using high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, which are becoming more affordable. 

“Findings from this study underscore the need to continue such preventive measure for a prolonged period after the fires have ended. Collaborative efforts across federal, state, and local levels are essential to safeguard the health of communities nationwide,” said Wright, who is also the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor in Life Course Health Research in the Departments of Public Health and Environmental Medicine; co-director of the Institute for Exposomic Research; and director of ConduITS, the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program at Mount Sinai.

Other Harvard Chan co-authors included Edgar Castro, Alexandra Shtein, Bryan Vu, Yuxi Liu, Adjani Peralta, and Joel Schwartz.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

When Kelly Rich was at Ohio State, her research into ALS and other neuromuscular diseases was promising enough to win her a career training award from the National Institute for Aging.

Unlike federal grants that are tied to specific institutions, the training award is intended to support young researchers as they complete doctoral studies and transition from student to independent scientist, so Rich could have taken the grant anywhere. She chose the Harvard Medical School lab of David Sinclair because of his reputation for work that flips on its head conventional thinking around aging and disease.

Many of the health threats we fear the most, including heart disease, cancer, and dementia, occur more frequently with age. Medical research has answered or is striving to answer the most pressing questions about these conditions: What goes wrong in the body, how that malfunction translates into disease, and how we can fight back.

Sinclair looks at the situation more broadly: If the risk of a given condition rises with age, what is it about aging that increases the risk? His reasoning is that if we can find the answer to that question, we might be able to lower the risk of several diseases at once.

Researchers in his and other labs have made progress toward that goal in recent years. In 2020, Sinclair and colleagues — supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and NASA — made the cover of the journal Nature after they turned back the cellular clock in the optic nerves of lab mice. The team restored the neurons’ ability to generate new axons — the connection between the eye and the brain — and repaired vision in mice with glaucoma and in older mice whose vision was fading with age.

Since the eye’s nerve cells are the same type as neurons in the brain, the work attracted Rich to Harvard. She believes the approach used to reinvigorate the mouse optic nerve holds promise as a way to fight currently incurable conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and spinal muscular atrophy. 

In recent weeks, however, her work has hit a roadblock. Rich, Sinclair, and other researchers across campus received grant termination notices linked to the government’s campaign to force Harvard to comply with proposed changes to governance and hiring, as well as audits of faculty and student viewpoints.

“We’re all just looking at each other going, ‘What the hell just happened?’ and it’s slowly sinking in,” Sinclair said. “We’re really trying to be supportive to our lab members, the students who’ve staked their lives on this, and the postdocs, who are the ones most likely to be let go. It’s extremely terrifying for them.”

Sinclair’s lab lost two major grants — a five-year, $1.5 million grant that provides its financial foundation and Rich’s career award of $438,000 over six years, which funds her salary plus a technician to support her research.

“I’m still letting the dust settle a bit,” Rich said. “This is an especially tough moment for early career scientists and postdocs and students. The effect of these cuts is to take early career scientists who want to be the next generation of academic leaders and erode their confidence, their trust in the infrastructure that has driven science and science careers. Academia looks very different today.”

The termination of Sinclair’s R01 grant — the NIH funding that supports his lab — casts his entire research program into doubt. He thinks that he has enough resources to avoid layoffs for a few months, but he has been scrambling to find private grants to replace federal funds.

“I’m traveling around the country and the world to see if I can raise money to keep going and it’s just a race against time,” he said. “I can keep going for a while, maybe a few months, but ultimately, we relied on government money. So I’m looking for support from companies and the public to replace what was lost.”

Despite the unsettled environment, Rich said she’s intent on not making “snap decisions” about her next steps. Her preference is to continue to work with Sinclair and move on to an academic career, but she’s also not averse to transitioning toward an industry role, especially with the longstanding research partnership between the federal government and higher ed now in jeopardy.

“I’m going to stick with where I am for as long as I can right now,” she said. “But I don’t think you can ignore the fact that it seems tougher now than ever to start a lab in academia, given that the infrastructure of federal funding so many early career professors rely on is largely gone. I haven’t made any decisions, but these are things that you can’t ignore. You have to be practical when you’re making decisions about that next step.”

More than 9,000 graduates from the Class of 2025, representing all of Harvard University’s Schools, streamed into Harvard Yard on May 29 for Harvard’s 374th Commencement Exercises.

The graduates, most wearing black gowns and bits of crimson, processed into Tercentenary Theatre. Families, friends, and well-wishers filled the steps of Widener Library, spreading out across the Yard.

Some graduates wore colorful stoles and turned their mortarboards into canvases for words of wisdom and inspiration — “I Believe in Myself”; “Look at Me Go”; “She Made It Happen.” Harvard Kennedy School students tossed beach ball globes in the air. The Law School waved gavels.

Sunshine found its way through gray skies as the graduates listened to author and physician Abraham Verghese deliver the principal Commencement address from in front of Memorial Church.

“Graduates, the decisions you make in the future when under pressure will say something about your character, while they will also shape and transform you in unexpected ways,” Verghese said. “Make your decisions worthy of those who supported, nurtured, and sacrificed for you: your parents, your partners, your family, your ancestors.”

Algorithm-driven digital feeds have deepened the split between red and blue America. But a new online tool may help bring the country back together.

The virtual quiz game Tango, developed at Harvard, pairs Democrats and Republicans on common teams, where bipartisanship quickly emerges as a competitive advantage. “It’s really the opposite of the nasty, divisive posting you find on social media,” offered Tango co-creator Joshua D. Greene ’97, a professor of psychology and co-author of new study measuring the game’s impact.

The results, published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, showed decreased negative partisanship, increased warmth, and even financial generosity between U.S. players from opposing parties. The effect was comparable, the authors wrote, to rolling back approximately 15 years of rising polarization in American political life.

What’s more, the changes persisted long after just one hour of play.

“We see over and over again that the effects last at least a month and often up to four months from playing just once,” reported Greene, whose research partners include current and former Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students.

Greene’s interest in intergroup conflict began with the publication of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them” (2013).

“I was happy with the book,” he recalled. “But it was very philosophical and offered little practical guidance for real-world problem-solving. For me, that provoked a kind of reckoning about how to spend my time.”

The experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher soon found himself returning to core principles in both the life and social sciences.

“They were pointing in the same direction,” he said. “That is, everything is really about mutually beneficial cooperation. Molecules come together to form cells; cells form more complicated cells and colonies and creatures with organs that cooperate. Individuals form societies and tribes and chiefdoms and nations and occasionally United Nations.

“At every single level,” Greene continued, “the reason the world isn’t just primordial soup is because parts can come together to form wholes that can accomplish more together than they can separately.”

But how to move Americans toward this evolutionary sweet spot?

Former graduate student Evan DeFilippis, M.A ’19, M.B.A. ’22, was enlisted to help dream up solutions that were more scalable and a lot more fun than the standard dialogue circle. Later joining the project team were Shankar Ravi, M.Ed. ’22, a data/software specialist in Greene’s lab, and Lucas Woodley ’23, a Ph.D. candidate studying psychology and the new paper’s lead author.

As an undergraduate economics and psychology concentrator, Woodley got interested in conflict resolution after taking a Gen Ed course taught by Harvard Medical School’s Daniel Shapiro. Woodley and a few classmates went on to author a book on negotiation, featuring a free, hands-on curriculum for faculty and students.

“People reached out to say, ‘Hey, I tried out this exercise in my class, and it worked really well — the students had a lot of fun.’ But it was always on such a small scale,” Woodley said. “As I was thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have an intervention that was much more scalable while still keeping that element of enjoyment?’ I was applying to graduate schools and ran into Josh.”

With the help of the Washington, D.C.-based Global Development Incubator, the Tango project team engineered a platform that presents players across the U.S. with three rounds of trivia. Field-testing has yielded a set of questions that reliably reveal partisan knowledge gaps. Some cover cultural terrain, advantaging either Democrats (“Who are the main characters from ‘Stranger Things’ on Netflix?”) or Republicans (“Name the family from ‘Duck Dynasty.’”).

Other questions are crafted to affirm or challenge partisan beliefs. For example, Americans on the left are more likely to know that immigrants in the U.S. commit relatively few crimes. Right-leaning players know relatively few gun deaths involve assault-style weapons.

“We build in uncomfortable truths for both sides,” Woodley said. “People still left us comments saying they want to play again.”

Throughout, two-person teams rely on Tango’s chat function to coordinate answers. As Woodley pointed out, this invites debate as well as mini-celebrations of a partner’s contributions. “That seems to be what makes the game so effective,” he said.

The academic paper represents five randomized controlled trials based on nearly 5,000 U.S. players who were recruited online. In one of the experiments, Democrats and Republicans were given $100 to allot as they like. Those who had teamed up with a political rival proved far more generous with members of the opposing party.

Eventually, the Tango team hopes for regularly scheduled sessions where Americans at large can join in for game night at letstango.org. Woodley also envisions bar-goers encountering Tango at the local watering hole. But for now, they’ve cooked up other creative ways of distributing a game that requires simultaneity.

With support from the President’s Building Bridges Fund, Woodley partnered this spring with undergraduate Houses and a GSAS student group to stage a two-hour Tango event. The project team has already reached thousands of undergraduates via rollouts on other U.S. campuses and recently wrapped up its first trial with employees at a Fortune 500 company.

“A lot of business leaders feel like they’re being forced to pick sides — and they just want to sell a product,” said Greene, who envisions for-profit entities incentivizing Tango one day via coupons and other customer perks.

As polarization surges globally, the team is also at work customizing Tango for a variety of national contexts. Pilot testing is underway in Israel, with questions for India and Northern Ireland in the works.

Constructive dialogue is still a critical intervention in these divided societies, Greene said. “But what makes dialogue even possible is that basic sense of mutual respect and openness — of thinking ‘this person is on my team.’

“So, what we’re trying to do with this game is expand the definition of ‘us,’” he added. “It’s less like two smart humans having a debate about immigration and more like two chimps picking bugs out of each other’s fur.”

Every week, Sophia Scott ’25 travels from Cambridge to the Suffolk County Jail in Boston to teach a high school equivalency class to inmates hoping to get their diplomas. It’s a trip she has made since her sophomore year.

The work, which also includes conducting workshops and teaching public health, enabled the human evolutionary biology concentrator to be one of 67 College seniors to graduate on May 29 with a Civic Engagement certificate. Students in the program must complete three classes — including an engaged scholarship course — that provide rigorous perspectives on social issues, a 300-hour practicum, and a capstone retreat.

“This program is very intentionally designed to help students think about their path through Harvard and how to make the most of the College experience,” said Travis Lovett, assistant dean of civic engagement and service. “If you’re civically minded, it helps to reinforce that mission. The academic experience is all rooted in social issues. It has a very strong connection between theory and practice, and that’s incredibly valuable.”

Scott, a Kirkland House resident, said the certificate helped her connect with other peers interested in public service.

“For me, civic engagement means caring deeply about the communities that are not just around you, but the communities that are most in need and thinking about what you can do as an individual and as a collective to improve the experiences of those people,” she said.

Jana Amin ’25, who was also in the first College cohort to graduate with the certificate, worked in the Emerging Leaders Program at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as a mentor to high school students. Each year, Amin has been paired with two students to help develop their leadership skills and support a social change project they can implement in their communities.

“The cool part about the program is that it allows me to grow into being a leader, but it also helps me explore what it means to be a mentor,” the Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator said. “It’s a very specific kind of role that requires you to listen, to learn, and to be a resource for the students you’re paired with.”

Amin opted to take “Oral Histories with History & Literature” with lecturer Lilly Havstad as one of the three courses required for the certificate. The Mather House resident was able to connect the class, which explored the ethics of conducting oral histories, to her senior thesis on Palestinian women in Cairo.

Gavin Lindsey ’25 took his final required course in the spring, choosing Elizabeth City’s GenEd offering “U.S. K-12 Schools: Assumptions, Binaries, and Controversies.” The double concentrator in environmental science and public policy and economics plans to use what he learned in the classroom when he begins working with Teach for America.

“The course has been stellar in teaching us what kind of disparities are present in teaching,” noted Lindsey, who ultimately envisions himself going into public service in the housing or economic development sector.

Anthony Miguel ’25 believes that civic engagement means working directly with his community in Santa María Tataltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. “Oftentimes public service is overlooked or even undervalued in higher education,” Miguel said. “I feel like this is a next step to highlighting the importance of engaging with your community and bridging that gap between academia and that community.”

The double concentrator in computer science and molecular and cellular biology hopes to return to Mexico to address health concerns such as diabetes, which is the second leading cause of death among Mexican adults.

Recent federal funding cuts are hitting climate research hard. The losses will hamper progress, Harvard environmental scientists say, but they won’t stop it.

The Trump administration has cancelled millions in research grants, shuttered key climate monitoring programs, and made deep cuts to federal agencies that support environmental science. Researchers warn that the cuts could undermine America’s ability to respond to accelerating climate change. 

“We’re caught in the crosshairs,” said Peter Huybers, chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS). But, he said, “We’re still standing. We still have fantastic people who are here. We have all these things to do, and we can still do important work.”

Environmental research was largely spared from the first round of federal funding cuts, which struck Harvard in early April and led to the University filing suit, arguing the government’s actions violate federal law and the University’s First Amendment rights.

Then a number of EPS researchers learned on May 15 that their grants, many of them through the National Science Foundation, had been targeted under a new round of cuts.

Elsie Sunderland, the Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, lost a grant worth $578,882 to study permafrost melt in Arctic ecosystems and its impact on the global mercury budget. Amid the waves of funding halts, she said it was hard to know what would happen next.

“We don’t know what the landscape is and what future funding pipelines look like. A lot of the world right now is just pausing to see where we end up, and how long we have to brace ourselves,” she said. 

David Johnston, whose lab studies the relationship between microorganisms and Earth surface evolution, had a grant from the NSF formally terminated, funds withheld from NASA, and one of his students lost an NSF Graduate Fellowship.

“The work of our entire team, including research staff, students, etc., will come to a near standstill. The future of our capacity to do science and make fundamental discoveries is highly uncertain,” said Johnston, who is also a professor of Earth and planetary sciences and co-director of graduate students.

Mary Rice is director of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE), which studies potential solutions to the health consequences of climate change and fossil fuel pollution.

She lost a major National Institutes of Health-funded Center grant that she co-leads to address heat threats in vulnerable communities around the world, including a project to provide cooling units to older adults in Boston who are at risk of heat stress.

She also lost $500,000 in NIH funding for the final year of a randomized controlled trial testing the impact of clean air filters in the homes of people who have serious lung disease. Rice is determined to find a way to continue the work.

Stopping the trial early would be “a disservice, not only to the people who dedicated their time and their tissue, and went through all of this inconvenience to be part of the study, but it’s also a disservice to the American public and to the taxpayers who paid for the research, to the many people with COPD who could have benefited from the findings of the study,” she said. 

But it’s not just the loss of grant funding. Researchers in climate science say they are also concerned about the loss of federal data and federally run analytical tools climate researchers rely on. 

“The central missions and much of the important work of these agencies are being dismantled,” said Sunderland, listing the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This affects all of those collaborators, the data infrastructure, all of the work that they do. It’s a mess.”

Rice was alarmed by the Trump administration’s ending of EJScreen, an EPA-based mapping tool that helped researchers monitor parts of the country where vulnerable people were exposed to high levels of pollution. 

Graduate student Alex Berry was developing novel methods to monitor food security via satellite imagery in southern Madagascar, where drought has left about 1.6 million people dependent on food aid. Her research involved comparing satellite images of farmland with live reports from the ground. But the on-the-ground data collection was run by Catholic Relief Services, which was funded by the now largely dismantled USAID.

“We’re no longer getting that live data,” Berry said. “The Madagascar project has been completely shut down.” Plans to expand the project to Ethiopia and Madagascar have been scaled back and may not proceed at all. 

Global surface temperatures in 2024 were 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century baseline, topping the previous record set in 2023. It’s an unprecedented heat streak; in some parts of the world, it’s regularly stretching the upper limit of what the human body can tolerate.

EPS head Huybers, who researches how climate change affects agricultural output around the world, said his department is pivoting to preserve critical work. He got as much data on global food insecurity as he could from USAID and is carrying forward some of their work. 

“We are putting together a global database of agricultural yields at the subnational level and plan to release a publicly available version soon,” he said. 

Despite the many setbacks, EPS researchers say they remain committed to the work.

“I think it is our responsibility right now to document the harm that is being imposed, both on the environment locally and globally, and then on public health,” Sunderland said. “I don’t actually feel depressed about this. I feel like we have an obligation to speak out and talk about it, and then really keep doing our work.”

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, wrote a chapter on swearing for his book “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” (2007).

The content of swear words varies from culture to culture, from language to language, and across time periods, as we see in the fact that damn and hell used to be highly fraught taboo words in English. Part of that has to do with the decline of religious sensibilities. In an era in which people literally thought that God was monitoring every word and were worried about spending eternity in hell, a curse that damned you to hell would have had more of an impact than it does today. Likewise with sexuality. Before the sexual revolution, words like f*ck and pr*ck were far more offensive than they are today, though they still retain the taboo status. Cultural norms and taboos give rise historically to swear words.

The common denominator of swear words is that they evoke a negative emotion, whether it be dread of the supernatural, as in religious taboo words; disgust at bodily secretions; revulsion at depraved sexual acts; or a hatred of certain disfavored or marginalized people.

The act of swearing indicates that someone is prepared to inflict discomfort, but it can also be used to express informality; a setting where we don’t have to watch what we say. A sweeping cultural change that began around the turn of the 20th century eroded formality, inhibition, and decorum in all spheres of life in favor of authenticity, self-expression, and spontaneity. This informalization extended to a relaxing of the inhibition against swearing.

Among the types of swearing, there is dysphemistic swearing. Dysphemism is the opposite of euphemism, a word chosen to avoid arousing emotion in your listener. Dysphemism is a word selected precisely because it arouses emotion, as when you say, “Will you please pick up your dog sh*t?” because you want to convey your anger and revulsion. Abusive swearing is when you use negative emotion to humiliate or intimidate someone by likening them to an unpleasant or at least emotionally fraught object, as when you call someone a d*ck or accuse them of engaging in undignified sexual activities. There is cathartic swearing, as when you hit your head on a cupboard door, and there is idiomatic swearing, as in, “get your sh*t together,” “pissed off,” “a pain in the ass.”

There are also truncated profanities, where sometimes people will stifle the urge to utter a taboo word by using a word that rhymes with or alliterates with the taboo word. Like geez, gee-whiz for Jesus Christ, or gosh, golly for God. One other feature of taboo words is the use of hyphens and asterisks. The use of asterisks raises the question: Who’s being fooled by writing f*ck, or when something is bleeped out on TV? It’s not so much the concept behind the word, but it is the very act of using the word that both speaker and hearer understand to be an intentional attempt at shocking or transgressing. What the truncated profanity does is withdraw that intention but keep all else constant. It signals “I am conspicuously and deliberately not trying to offend you,” something that ordinarily is the whole point of swearing.

I think swearing ought to be used judiciously. The potent use of taboo language depends on it not being used in every sentence, but if it’s something that you can hold and reserve for when you want to shock an audience or call attention to the dangerous or evocative aspect of something. You might want to keep the powder dry, as they say. I find it rather tedious when people gratuitously use f*ck as if it were the only means at their disposal to emphasize a point. With the English language having some half a million words, it’s just more pleasing if people dip into the lexicon and find the best word, instead of just falling back on the easy taboo word.

— As told to Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer

David Liu has been having a good run.

On May 15, the New England Journal of Medicine published what has become a high-profile case of a 5-month-old boy called KJ with a deadly genetic disorder, who became the first to receive a personalized CRISPR gene-editing treatment. The therapy was built on base editing, a technology developed in Liu’s lab nearly a decade ago.

The therapy was created to correct the single-letter genetic mutation that was shutting down KJ’s ability to eliminate ammonia from his liver, a condition known as CPS1 deficiency. Half of the babies with this disorder die in the first week of life. KJ not only survived but began recovering.

This was the first of two recent landmark events involving science developed by Liu, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, and his team. Liu, who is also an HHMI investigator, won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize for his work on base editing and prime editing, technologies that enable the correction or replacement of virtually any genetic mutation. 

“There’s a lot of confidence in base editing technology based on the 17 previous base editing clinical trials and thousands of research publications, but it doesn’t change the fact that you still realize the stakes are very high for this patient and their family,” said Liu of KJ’s case. “This story is a powerful testament to the fact that the editing technology, the delivery technology, the manufacturing, the animal models, and the regulatory approval are all robust enough to make this huge team effort happen fast enough to save Baby KJ.”

A chemical biologist by training, Liu has long believed that scientific discovery gives humans the opportunity to have more say over their own lives.

Just a week after KJ’s story made headlines, Prime Medicine, a biotech company Liu co-founded, announced the first clinical results of its therapy for chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), a rare and severe immune disorder.

For the first time, an adult human had been treated with a prime-edited medicine. Prime editing enables even more versatile and precise rewriting of DNA.

The patient was missing two base pairs in a particular gene that encodes an enzyme essential for immune system function. The adult patient responded positively: Early data showed restoration of the missing enzyme activity and no serious adverse effects.

“This is the Alyssa Tapley moment for prime editing,” Liu said, referring to the first patient successfully treated with base editing in the U.K. “The scientists at Prime Medicine succeeded in taking out the patient’s bone marrow, editing it with prime editing, and then transplanted the patient’s edited bone marrow back into his body.

“Until now, the only curative treatment for CGD is transplantation of another person’s bone marrow into the patient, which puts patients at significant risk of rejection or of graft-versus-host disease in which the donor’s immune system attacks the patient’s own tissue,” he added. “So prime editing provides an especially elegant and effective solution, by prime editing the patient’s own bone marrow to fix the disease-causing deletion and then returning it to the patient.”

In KJ’s case, the treatment was developed on an emergency timeline by a coalition of academic researchers and companies across the U.S., led by University of Pennsylvania physician scientists Kiran Musunuru and Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas.

Liu’s lab played a vital role in developing base editing almost exactly eight years ago and advising the team on which base editor would be likeliest to correct KJ’s mutation effectively while minimizing the risk of unwanted side effects.

“It normally takes many years to go from a genetic diagnosis of a new mutation to a clinical treatment,” Liu said. “This time, it happened in less than seven months.”

While base editing and prime editing technologies each offer their own strengths, their shared promise is a future in which previously untreatable genetic diseases can be reversed with a bespoke treatment.

Prime editing, introduced by Liu’s group in 2019, acts like a molecular word processor, capable of search-and-replace corrections to DNA. It opens the door to treating thousands of genetic mutations behind conditions like sickle cell disease, progeria, and Tay-Sachs.

Both KJ’s case and the CGD breakthrough illustrate what Liu has long championed: the translation of fundamental science into tools that can change lives — safely, swiftly, and equitably.

“Genetic diseases are a consequence of the chemical structure of our DNA, so they will always be a part of humanity. Our mission is to make possible a future in which these types of gene editing treatments are routine, so that people are no longer so beholden to the misspellings in our DNA,” Liu said. “We can finally have some say in our genetic features.”

Liu credited early grants from the National Institutes of Health and other public agencies for enabling high-risk, high-reward ideas like gene editing. Basic science and future breakthroughs are in grave danger due to Washington’s cuts to scientific research, Liu warned.

“It’s easy to forget that every translation of science into a societal benefit began as a basic science project where initially there may not have been any obvious pathway to benefit society,” Liu said. “A basic science investigation into repetitive sequences of DNA found in bacteria turned into the discovery of CRISPR and now into dozens of uses of gene editing to benefit patients with terrible diseases, demonstrating the critical importance of basic science to humanity. Basic science must be supported if we want our children to have the opportunity to live better lives.”

On Thursday the University awarded a total of 9,434 degrees. A breakdown of degrees and programs is listed below.

Harvard College granted a total of 2,014 degrees. Degrees from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were awarded by Harvard College, the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Design.

All Ph.D. degrees are conferred by the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

All figures include degrees awarded in November 2024 and March and May 2025.

Harvard College
2,014 degrees

• 1,947 Bachelor of Arts
• 67 Bachelor of Science

Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
1,357 degrees

• 395 Master of Arts
• 275 Master of Science
• 7 Master of Engineering
• 680 Doctor of Philosophy

Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
881 degrees

• 446 Bachelor of Arts (conferred by Harvard College)
• 67 Bachelor of Science (conferred by Harvard College)
• 7 Master of Engineering (conferred by GSAS)
• 26 Master in Design Engineering (conferred jointly with GSD)
• 79 Doctor of Philosophy (conferred by GSAS)
• 256 Master of Science (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Business School
944 degrees

• 802 Master in Business Administration
• 78 Master in Business Administration with Distinction
• 49 Master in Business Administration with High Distinction
• 15 Doctor of Philosophy (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Divinity School
140 degrees

• 50 Master of Divinity
• 79 Master of Theological Studies
• 10 Master of Religion and Public Life
• 1 Doctor of Theology

Harvard Law School
784 degrees

• 177 Master of Laws
• 602 Doctor of Law
• 5 Doctor of Juridical Science

Harvard Kennedy School
618 degrees

• 78 Master in Public Administration
• 249 Master in Public Administration (Mid-Career)
• 73 Master in Public Administration in International Development
• 206 Master in Public Policy
• 1 Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government (conferred by GSAS)
• 11 Ph.D. in Public Policy (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Graduate School of Design
393 degrees

• 126 Master of Architecture
• 24 Master of Architecture in Urban Design
• 65 Master in Design Studies
• 55 Master in Landscape Architecture
• 3 Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design
• 45 Master in Urban Planning
• 14 Doctor of Design
• 26 Master in Design Engineering (conferred jointly with SEAS)
• 35 Master in Real Estate

Harvard Graduate School of Education
766 degrees

• 720 Master of Education
• 25 Doctor of Education Leadership
• 21 Doctor of Education/Philosophy

Harvard Medical School
484 degrees

• 82 Master in Medical Science
• 166 Doctor of Medicine
• 236 Master of Science

Harvard School of Dental Medicine
66 degrees

• 17 Master of Medical Sciences
• 12 Doctor of Medical Sciences
• 37 Doctor of Dental Medicine

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
561 degrees

• 374 Master of Public Health
• 155 Master of Science
• 18 Master in Health Care Management
• 14 Doctor of Public Health

Harvard Extension School
1,360 degrees

• 133 Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies
• 1,227 Masters of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

All he got out was “Welcome,” before the crowd sprang to its feet to give a visibly moved President Alan Garber a standing ovation as he stood at the podium in the opening moments of Commencement. Across the Charles, University lawyers were presenting their case against a Trump administration move to block Harvard from enrolling international students. It was a graduation unlike others in its legal and political context but one that at its core remained deeply and distinctly personal. The blend of hope for the future, gratitude for family, friends, and teachers, and the poignancy of moving on were in evidence throughout the Yard. Here are some snapshots of the day.  

Always remember: You might be wrong

In remarks to students, President Garber delivered a warning about the danger of getting too comfortable.

“The world as it is tempts us with the lure of what one might generously call comfortable thinking,” said Garber, “a habit of mind that readily convinces us of the merits of our own assumptions, the veracity of our own arguments, and the soundness of our own opinions, positions, and perspectives — so committed to our beliefs that we seek information that confirms them as we discredit evidence that refutes them.

“Though many would be loath to admit it, absolute certainty and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin, a coin with no value but costs beyond measure. False conviction saps true potential. Focused on satisfying a deep desire to be right, we can willingly lose that which is so often gained from being wrong — humility, empathy, generosity, insight — squandering opportunities to expand our thinking and to change our minds in the process.”

Nearing the close of his address, he celebrated graduates as “the hope of this institution embodied — living proof that our mission changes not only the lives of individuals but also the trajectories of communities that you will join, serve, and lead.”

‘Semper Veritas’

Early Thursday morning, tucked in a quiet, grassy nook in front of Holden Chapel, seniors gathered one last time to hear from Rakesh Khurana, the Danoff Dean of Harvard College.

In his final address to students before stepping down as dean, Khurana urged soon-to-be graduates to savor having reached such an important academic and personal milestone in their young lives.

“Enjoy this moment. Think of where you were four years ago, where you are today, and all that came in between, and embrace every second of this special day,” Khurana said.  

He also urged students to use their time and talents to make positive contributions to the world. “Whatever your calling is in life, I encourage you to do good,” he said, later adding: “My fondest hope for all of you — that your education has helped prepare you to be good citizens and citizen leaders for our society. Go forth and make us proud.”

Khurana, who was named dean of the College in 2014, plans to return to the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Harvard Business School.  

“I will miss you dearly, and it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to spend these last four years with you and to serve as dean of Harvard College,” he said. “Semper Veritas!”

Opportunities and inspiration

More than three decades after her own Harvard graduation, Jean-Marie Alves-Bradford, M.D. ’92, beamed as her oldest son Malik Aaron Bradford III ’25 received his degree in biomedical engineering.

“I’m just so proud of him and it’s wonderful to see him accomplish this,” the former Kirkland House resident said. “This place has so many opportunities that he’s been a part of, and he’ll continue to grow from.”

She continued: “He’s really matured quite a bit. It’s been nice to see that evolution. He’s really settled and comfortable in his own skin.”

Alves-Bradford and her husband, Malik Bradford II, said they were excited for their son’s next steps. The new Harvard alumnus already has a job lined up after Commencement, the couple proudly shared. Bradford II shared his hope that Malik’s pursuits can be “applied in a way that’s going to help him feel fulfilled.”

A few feet away, fellow Eliot House parent Linda Erickson shared her excitement at seeing her daughter, Sarah Erickson ’25, accomplish her childhood dream.

“When she was 8 years old, she told me, ‘I want to go to Harvard someday.’ So, to see that dream realized over all these years has been absolutely amazing,” Linda said. “She has pushed herself so hard to achieve that goal and to get to this day has just been inspirational.”

Sarah, who was homeschooled in Cincinnati by her mother before starting high school, received her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering. At Harvard, she danced and performed in musical theater with the Harvard-Radcliffe Modern Dance Company and became a staff photographer for the Harvard Crimson.

“She’s not the same girl I dropped off four years ago,” Linda said. “She’s built great memories here with all the people she’s interacted with. It’s been amazing.”

Despite threats, hope for future of higher ed

“Honestly, it still doesn’t feel real,” said Jesse Hernandez, about moving on from life at Harvard. “I’m first-generation too, so there’s a part of me that has trouble imagining what comes next after something like this.”

The College graduate who studied economics, resided in Lowell House, and plans to hunt for a job in finance this summer, was especially grateful his parents and younger brother could make the rare trip from Florida to offer their support. “It feels good to be celebrating with all the people that helped me get here.”

With many close friends who are international students, Hernandez said he’s worried about their future after the Trump administration’s effort to block Harvard from enrolling them.

“Everybody’s nervous. Just when you start to think things can’t get worse,” they do, he said. Despite the circumstances, Hernandez said he’s trying to stay positive.

“I’ve got confidence that we’ll see this through, and that higher education won’t die today.”

3 years after knee tear, starting a new career

Danielle Ray’s journey to Harvard began with a knee injury. The professional squash player born in Calgary, Canada, had competed professionally since graduating from Cornell, but during the 2022 Canadian National Championships, she took an awkward step and tore her ACL, MCL, and meniscus all at once.

“It just got stuck on the floor as I was turning and just collapsed in,” she said. 

Facing the prospect of multiple surgeries and many months out of the sport, Ray looked for something she could do in the meantime that could prepare her for the future. Her now-husband, who had graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree, suggested the Harvard Extension School. 

A month later, Ray was enrolled in a master’s degree in information management systems. “I blew my knee out in June,” she said, “and I started the program in July.” 

The program, Ray found, was a good mix of technical and policy-based courses. Her favorite course, “Fundamentals of the Law and Cybersecurity,” examined the legal, economic, and policy challenges that arise from cybersecurity threats. She found herself especially drawn to the policy components of the program and her work in agile project management — figuring out ways to solve dynamic, complex problems. 

Because she could complete the degree online while taking one or two courses at a time, Ray could also move her life forward in other directions. She recovered from her surgeries, worked through physical therapy, and returned to the professional squash circuit — representing Canada at the international level. She competed in tournaments while pregnant and in January, gave birth to a baby girl. 

Ray says she’s in a place right now “that’s a bit transitional.” She hopes to work herself into a policy-related position in the near future, building off interests she developed at Harvard. She still competes professionally. 

But at Commencement Thursday with her family, she celebrated her accomplishment. “It’s almost three years to the day since I tore my knee,” she said. It would have been hard then to imagine all that would quickly follow.

Giving disadvantaged Detroit youth a boost

“I didn’t see this for myself,” said Courtney Ebonique Smith, a newly minted graduate of the Harvard Extension School with a master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology.

Smith grew up in foster care before being adopted and when she graduated from high school, she was living in a homeless shelter. Her experiences led her to start the Detroit Phoenix Center, a nonprofit in Detroit that provides housing, academic, and workforce support to young people who are experiencing housing insecurity and other barriers to opportunities.

“We provide them with support so they can thrive,” she said, “and maybe even come to Harvard.”

A few years after starting the nonprofit at the age of 25, Smith looked for ways to gain skills that she could immediately use as its CEO. She found the Extension School, which allowed her to take courses both on campus and from home. 

In 2020, she started the Extension School’s Nonprofit Management Graduate Certificate. When she finished, she enrolled in a master’s degree. The flexibility of the program allowed her to work whenever she had time to spare. “I was able to do it at night, on the plane, in the morning, during the day,” she said, laughing. “It’s very convenient.”

Smith said that her skills in fundraising and project management improved after taking classes in both subjects. Overall, she said, the program taught her “how to be adaptable and to juggle a lot of things at once.”

Looking back, Smith is proud of the journey that led to her graduating from Harvard. “I want every person to know that it doesn’t matter where you come from,” she said. “There are opportunities for you to be able to live out the dreams that you have for your life and to thrive.”

A real team guy

Scott Woods II is a person of loyalties.

First on the list of the economics graduate is his House, Cabot.

“I’m a big quad guy — very loyal to the quad,” he said, while toting the Cabot House sign used in the Commencement Exercises across the Yard. “I boast about how great it is, even though it catches a lot of flak.”

Woods said Cabot, which is on the “quad,” is seen by some as less desirable than the other Houses, which are closer to the main campus along the Charles River. And he gets it because he started out that way.

“I remember it vividly,” he said of the moment he got his housing assignment as a first-year. “You could hear a pin drop — no one was excited about it at first. But then as soon as we got out there, we just realized it was all a myth, and we had to make it what it was, which was a good time.”

Besides being a Cabot House booster, Woods is also a Crimson football loyalist, having been a wide receiver on the team.

“Harvard came in with a last-minute offer that changed my life. And since I committed to play here, my life has been on the upward trend,” he said.

Woods said he’s off to the University of Maine next year, where he’ll pursue an M.B.A. Originally from Virginia, he said in all seriousness that Cabot helped make Harvard home.

“The people in Cabot made me feel seen and made me feel comfortable. It made me feel like I had a family,” he said, grinning. “Being all the way out here you don’t really have too many people to interact with.”

Woods was joined on Commencement Day by his mom, dad, brother, and two grandmothers. He said they were proud of their Cabot House mascot.

“They thought I was the man. They wanted to get a picture with me,” he said.

‘It’s surreal’

Jean Filo hustled to meet his parents after the Commencement ceremony, part of a departing wave of other Medical School graduates identifiable by the stethoscopes they wore along with their caps and gowns.

He paused for a moment to reflect on what his graduation meant not only to himself as an immigrant from Syria but also to his parents waiting eagerly to hug their son.

“It’s surreal,” he said. “Today is mostly about my parents and them enjoying this.”

During his time at Harvard Medical School, Filo worked in cerebrovascular research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Brain Aneurysm Institute. He said he’s now heading off to Philadelphia to do a residency in neurosurgery.

But first, he said, rushing off, he had dinner plans with the parents.

Family pride — and impact

Caroline Maynes and Sierra Dorweiler have been watching their son and brother, respectively, for years, and, though they know him well, they’re still impressed. Nicholas Maynes, who graduated with a master’s degree in public administration on Thursday, has been on a yearslong journey that has taken him to war and back.

As the pair watched the Commencement unfold in Tercentenary Theatre, they said that Maynes has been entirely self-driven, starting with his education at West Point.

His Army service as a field artillery officer included deployment to Iraq during the liberation of Mosul. After that, he earned a master’s degree in business administration at the University of California at Berkeley before enrolling at Harvard to study at the Kennedy School.

“Academics has just been his passion,” said Caroline.

Watching her brother couldn’t help but have an impact on her, Dorweiler said. Maynes has always encouraged her to focus on what can be done, not what can’t, she added.

“I’m so proud because he’s been the one who’s pushed me to achieve academically,” she said. “He just makes it seem like pretty much anything is possible.”

Her goal: To help as many people learn as she can

Growing up in India, Devina Neema — who graduated Thursday from the Harvard Graduate School of Education — observed a major disparity between private and public schools. Her school had good classrooms and teachers and 40 hours of class every week. In public schools, students could get four or five hours of instruction, with few books and limited interaction between teachers and parents.

After graduating from college, Neema began teaching in public schools through a nonprofit program. The conditions weren’t ideal. At times, she led classrooms filled with 90 students. “It was a new world for me,” she said. “I realized this is where education needs to happen and get better.”

For different nonprofits, Neema worked across rural and urban areas to understand how students learned at different types of schools. How did they learn their first language? What were the math disparities? Were there any technological solutions?

To explore those questions more thoroughly, and to get a more formal education in teaching and how to change education at a systemic level, Neema looked to the HGSE’s master’s program in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology.   

At Harvard, Neema explored how people of different ages learn and how technology can augment it. She also studied how learners can develop transferable skills, such as social skills, and apply them to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Having never formally studied education in a university setting, she was struck — and inspired — by the sheer amount of research her professors performed in their areas of expertise. “If you have to truly understand something at heart,” she said, “then you have to broaden your perspective but also narrow down your niche and go deep.”

With her program now complete, Neema plans to stay in the area so she can continue to learn and “build something here,” she said. After studying the education systems in many countries and the workings of international and humanitarian aid, she wants to help as many people learn as she can — with any tools she has.

What’s to come

Like many, College seniors Kylie Hunts-in-Winter and Taylor Larson weren’t quite sure what to expect from Morning Exercises on what is typically a joyful day.  

Given the tensions sparked by Harvard’s legal battles with the Trump administration, they weren’t certain how graduating students would respond to University officials or the celebration.

“Some people were saying on [the social media app] Sidechat that they want to cheer for [President Alan] Garber, and other people. And so, I’m interested to see how this plays out,” said Hunts-in-Winter, a champion martial artist who studied sociology and Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.

The duo stood with Larson’s Adams House colleagues as undergraduates prepared to process into Tercentenary Theatre. Not long after, Garber and other University officials received robust cheers from the assembled crowd as they made their way toward the stage.

For Larson, a history and literature concentrator from Minnesota, the morning was one of conflicting emotions. While it was “exciting,” she confessed to also feeling “overwhelmed by everything that’s to come after this.”

Both identify as first-generation, low-income students. Larson plans to pursue a master’s degree in history in London, while Hunts-in-Winter, whose family is Lakota from the Standing Rock Reservation, intends to remain in the Boston area to pursue public service work with Native American communities.

“I am glad and I’m very grateful for my time,” said Larson. “I met all my best friends here and had a lot of opportunities because of Harvard funding.”

Dunster House ceremony: Lasting friendships

Residents of Dunster House returned to their home of the last three years to gather with parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends, receive degrees, enjoy lunch — and let it all sink in.

Graduate Minsoo Kwon, a Mather House resident, was at Dunster to celebrate her friend Hannah Ahn, whom she met five years ago during a gap year in Korea.

Kwon said the two, who have remained friends throughout college, will both be heading off to law school in the fall — with plans already in the works for frequent visits.

“I’ll be at Yale, and Hannah will be at Columbia,” she said. “Still along the Amtrak line.”

Ahn earned a degree in government while Kwon got hers in neuroscience. She’s interested in drug and healthcare policies that overlap law and science.

Two other friends sharing in the afternoon festivities were Sara Silarszka and Quincy Brunner Donley — first-year roommates who got along so well they stayed together for the next three years at Dunster.

“We were in a double for three years together, and so this is the first year we had our own rooms,” Donley said.

Asked whether they missed sharing the close quarters, Donley said, “I think I did,” followed by a quick “definitely” by Silarszka.

Both roommates made their mark in Harvard athletics — Silarszka, as a field hockey player, now with a degree in integrated biology, and Donley, a Nordic skier with a degree in economics.

Donley said after graduation, she’s moving back to her home state of Alaska to pursue professional skiing.

“At least for the foreseeable future,” she said.

Silarszka, who grew up in Virginia, said she is hoping to visit her old roomie. And she’s taking a gap year before applying to medical school.

“I just love living with my best friends,” she said. “You’ll just never be this close to so many people you love, so that’ll be hard to leave behind.”

Back to the beginning

Chidimma Adinna, a graduating senior from Adams House, left Nigeria at age 6 when her parents immigrated to California. Now she’s set to return, thanks to a fellowship to teach at a high school some of her family members still attend.

While her desire to return to Nigeria stems from her family history, the how and why owe largely to her studies at Harvard. A psychology concentrator, Adinna became interested in climate change during her time as an undergrad. As a fellow in Nigeria, she plans to promote sustainability and help the school take steps to fight the climate crisis. She’ll also act as a tutor and mentor students who want to go to college.

“Since I was younger, I was always trying to be connected to my community in Nigeria,” she said. “This has involved me donating clothes through organizations that I founded with my family, and it’s a mission that I’m trying to continue, even postgrad. It’s been evolving over the years I’ve been trying to give back to my community.”

Connecting flights?

Justin Biassou spent a lot of time in an airplane cabin on the way to his master’s degree.

Starting in 2022, he would occasionally commute from Seattle to Cambridge for in-person classes from Harvard Extension School, where he earned an A.L.M. in international relations.

But Biassou is comfortable in the air. He started flight training at 12 and got his private pilot’s license at 17. Even as he studied, he was working full time leading an air safety team for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Biassou took up his coursework in January 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic still loomed over campuses, classrooms, and airports.

“I took one class per semester, and each one had this incredible group of students with all these different backgrounds — often they were working, too.”

Many of Biassou’s courses did take place online. But person-to-person time in Cambridge was well worth the flight, as were a few intensive January courses crammed into his time off from work.

At a time when “a lot of us just felt isolated, and very uneasy,” Biassou recalled, class “just really brought a lot of us together … These have become lifelong friends.”

The Extension School allowed Biassou a chance to expand his skill set in aviation safety. With new expertise in international relations, he hopes to “harmonize” safety efforts beyond U.S. borders, with authorities like the United Nations and the International Civil Aviation Organization.

His three-year, transcontinental balancing act may have earned Biassou “a lot of gray hairs.”

“But I had a really incredible support system: my significant other Michelle, my parents, my sisters,” Biassou said, as his family stood by. “They allowed me to focus on the things that needed to get done: Yes, 40 hours a week keeping aviation safe, then also working on my classes.”

A child of immigrants gives back

Many faculty and graduates at Commencement ceremonies wore stickers, flowers, and other symbols in support of Harvard’s international students — now facing threats from the Trump administration.

For Daniel Roque-Coplín, J.D. ’25, the cause of safeguarding the rights of newcomers in America is personal — and the focus of his professional goals.

“Both of my parents are immigrants: My mom is from the Dominican Republic; my dad is from Cuba,” Roque-Coplín said, as he and his mother huddled before lunch. “They never in their lives dreamed that their son could go to a school like this one.”

His law school journey was not always easy — particularly at the beginning.

“First year, second year, you spend a lot of time in the library,” he said. “A lot of times, the studying can consume you, because you’re competing with everyone else, in a sense.”

Roque-Coplín said he was driven by a desire to help families like his own, with immigrant pasts and big ambitions in the United States.

Even before the latest tightening of immigration law and enforcement, the law did not always serve those families well, Roque-Coplín said.

He hopes to change that.

“Immigration law is intersectional, right? There are public-health needs, criminal needs, straightforward needs” related to legal status and asylum.

He had already begun that work in Cambridge as a student attorney in family practice with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, which offers free representation to low-income clients in Greater Boston.

Roque-Coplín acknowledged that he enters the legal professional at an acutely difficult moment for the families he hopes to serve. But he and other Law School graduates said they see that field as a chance to do urgent work.

“Through the grace of God, I’ve overcome — I’m here,” Roque-Coplín said. About the fights to come, “I’m nervous, I’m excited, and I feel, honestly, like nothing can stop me.”

A star’s turn

As the official ceremonies of Commencement Day wound down, families gathered on the steps of Widener Library for photographs with their graduates.

Elio Kennedy-Yoon showed particular patience with the many iterations of family pictures on offer: his three siblings, separately and together; his father, then grandfather; his girlfriend; then the whole clan together.

You might credit Kennedy-Yoon’s recent experience with celebrity, as an actor and singer in Din & Tonics, the College a capella group. Just last year, he made a splash online with a viral solo version of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.” Fan art, mashups, and the group’s world tour ensued.

After Commencement, Kennedy-Yoon wore two sashes: one honoring his Asian American heritage and another for LGBT pride.

Even before that viral moment, the last five years have been transformative for Kennedy-Yoon.

First, a gender transition during the pandemic, and a jarring move from Utah to Cambridge.

“I love Utah, but the people can be very conservative. I really found a community here that’s very accepting, very diverse.” (Among that community was Kennedy-Yoon’s girlfriend, a few years older — and “the love of my life,” he said with a smile.)

Still, as a queer Asian American with some online visibility, it hasn’t been possible to dodge hostility or derision. When Donald Trump was elected president the first time, Kennedy-Yoon was 13. In this tumultuous spring, he said it feels like a long time to have lived in conflict with the country’s political leadership.

That has made the University’s resistance to Trump administration mean all the more.

“In a weird way. I’ve never been prouder to be a Harvard student than right now,” Kennedy-Yoon said. “That we’re standing up for academia, for knowledge, for truth … and against tyranny.”

Ready to start

When Annabeth Tao was an undergraduate at UCLA, she worked as a research assistant for a professor focused on computer game animation. In her year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, she added to that experience a better understanding of how students learn, which she plans to blend into a startup focused on devising interactive games to help students become more creative in STEM studies.

When she arrived on campus in the fall, enrolled in the Ed School’s Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology master’s degree program, Tao had a vague plan to use the arts to enhance education. Over the course of her studies, she refined that ambition, in part through conversations with fellow students. In fact, some of her best memories of her time at Harvard are the brainstorming sessions with classmates.

She’ll have to find a job while getting the startup off the ground, but said that she’s excited about the chance to help unleash creativity among students and teachers, shaping “a dynamic learning experience for kids.”

A federal judge on Thursday extended a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from terminating Harvard’s right to host international students and scholars. The restraining order was issued last week after the University sued in response to an attempt by the government to revoke Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification.

More than 5,000 international students and scholars at Harvard are at risk of losing legal status due to the revocation order, which was first conveyed in a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and has sown fear and confusion among international students and scholars at Harvard and other universities. In its lawsuit, Harvard argues that the government’s actions violate the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. President Alan Garber has described the Trump administration’s efforts as retaliatory.

Responding Thursday to Judge Allison Burroughs’ decision to extend the temporary restraining order, the University noted the contributions of international students and scholars and pledged to continue to fight for its ability to welcome them to campus.

“Harvard will continue to take steps to protect the rights of our international students and scholars, members of our community who are vital to the University’s academic mission and community — and whose presence here benefits our country immeasurably,” a University spokesperson said.

The extension of the restraining order came as students, staff, and faculty celebrated Commencement in Harvard Yard. Garber received a standing ovation when he began welcoming remarks that included a nod to the University’s global community.

“Welcome members of the Class of 2025 — members of the Class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and around the world,” he said, adding: “Around the world just as it should be.”

Elsewhere in the Yard and around campus, students, alums, and others welcomed Harvard’s success in court.

International students are “part of what makes Harvard one of the best universities in the world,” said Kevin Pacheco, an instructor at the Medical School. Caleb Thompson ’27, co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Association, agreed.

“I’m obviously very happy about the news,” Thompson said. “International students are a part of all our lives. I’m not the first person to say this, but Harvard isn’t Harvard without international students … these are some of the most talented, intellectually capable students on our campus.”

He added: “For me it’s personal even though I’m a domestic student: I have eight international suitemates. They’re the most important people in my life.”

Sy Boles of the Harvard Staff contributed to this report.

Abraham Verghese underscored the vital role of immigrants in the life of the nation at Harvard’s 374th Commencement Thursday at Tercentenary Theatre. He was speaking from experience.

Born in Ethiopia to expatriate teachers from India, Verghese, a doctor and writer, began his medical studies in Addis Ababa but had to interrupt them as the country descended into civil war in 1974. After completing his medical studies at Madras Medical College in India, he arrived in Johnson City, Tennessee, as an infectious disease specialist in the mid-1980s, the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Verghese, who teaches at Stanford, was the principal speaker at Commencement, which unfolded as a federal judge in Boston extended a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to host international students and scholars. That action and others by the government were on Verghese’s mind as he delivered a passionate defense of immigrants and international students living, studying, and working in the U.S.

“When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me,” he said.

He also spoke directly to the contributions of foreign-born doctors at hospitals across the country.

“We were recruited here because American medical schools simply don’t graduate sufficient numbers of physicians to fill the country’s need,” said Verghese, who spent two years early in his career at what is now Boston Medical Center. “More than a quarter of the physicians in the country are foreign medical graduates, many of them ultimately settling in places that others might not find as desirable.

“A part of what makes America great, if I may use the phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.”

Pointing to his experience as a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — his books include “Cutting for Stone,” “My Own Country,” and “The Covenant of Water” — Verghese credited America for enriching his life as an author. He quoted the novelist E.L. Doctorow: “It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year. Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?”

He also praised Harvard President Alan Garber for resisting Trump administration demands for viewpoint audits and other measures, even as dramatic funding cuts imperil the University’s ability to carry out its research mission. Harvard deserves support and praise, he said, for “affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation.”

Closing his remarks, Verghese offered a few pieces of advice to the Class of 2025. First, he urged students to read fiction, because novels offer “powerful lessons about life” and can open a reader’s mind to unfamiliar lives and experiences. He was inspired to become a doctor in part by reading W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” he recalled.

“If you don’t read fiction,” Verghese said, “my considered medical opinion is that a part of your brain responsible for active imagination atrophies.”

Verghese also stressed the importance of character and courage: “Graduates, the decisions you will make in the future under pressure will say something about your character, while they also shape and transform you in unexpected ways. Make your decisions worthy of those who supported, nurtured, and sacrificed for you: your parents, your partners, your family, and your ancestors. Make your decisions worthy of this great university and the hardship it must endure going forward as it works to preserve the value of what you accomplished here.”

Lastly, drawing on the lessons he learned from AIDS patients he tended to Tennessee in the mid-1980s, Verghese asked students to take great care with the gift of time. Seeing men in their 30s and 40s face death was heartbreaking, he said, but he found comfort in the fact that many of them, at the end of their lives, cherished the company of family.

“They found that meaning at the end of a shortened life did not reside in fame, power, reputation, money, or good looks,” he said. “Instead, they found that meaning in their lives ultimately resided in the successful relationships they had forged in a lifetime, particularly with family.”

Verghese read to the crowd a letter he had shared many times before. In it, a young man dying of AIDS assures his mother that, having fulfilled many of his dreams, he has no regrets, and is grateful that his illness has allowed him to slow down to spend time with his family.

“I’ve enjoyed a life full of adventure and travel, and I loved every moment of it. But I probably never would have slowed down enough to really appreciate all of you if it hadn’t been for my illness. That’s the silver lining in this very dark cloud …

“If anyone ever asks you if I went to heaven, tell them this: I just came from there. No place could conceivably be as wonderful as where I’ve spent these last 30 years. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss you, mother. I’m so glad we made good use of this time to get to know each other again.”

After reading the last lines, Verghese exhorted students, “Cherish this special day. And above all, make good use of your time.”

Kannon K. Shanmugam ’93, J.D. ’98, a prominent and prolific appellate attorney and alumnus of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, will join the Harvard Corporation as its newest member, the University announced on Thursday. Shanmugam will succeed Theodore V. Wells Jr., J.D. ’76, M.B.A. ’76, who departs the board after 12 years of service.

Citing his “deep devotion to Harvard and to the importance of academic values and academic freedom,” President Alan Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker announced Shanmugam’s election in a message to the Harvard community on Thursday afternoon.

“Kannon Shanmugam is one of the nation’s most accomplished and admired appellate attorneys, who has also served an array of educational institutions,” said Garber and Pritzker. “Beyond his extensive experience counseling and representing major organizations in complex matters, he is known for his intellectual acuity and curiosity, his remarkable work ethic, his warm and collegial manner, his adroitness in engaging people with varied points of view, and his commitment to academic excellence.” 

Shanmugam has argued 39 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and more than 150 other appeals in courts across the country, including all 13 federal courts of appeals and numerous state courts. Formerly a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly and a member of the Office of the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice, Shanmugam is now a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he is also the founding chair of the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Practice, chair of its office in Washington, D.C., and co-chair of the Litigation Department.   

Shanmugam has also served a number of educational institutions in advisory and governance roles, including as past chair of the board of trustees of Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school in Washington, D.C.; current trustee of both the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the University of Kansas Endowment; and past trustee of the Association of Marshall Scholars. 

“It’s an honor to have been asked to serve on the Harvard Corporation, and I look forward to contributing my perspective to the Corporation’s deliberations in the coming years,” said Shanmugam. “My reason for agreeing to serve is simple: I owe everything to Harvard. Harvard gave me opportunities I never would have had, and it exposed me to different people and new ideas.

“Harvard has gone through difficult times and faces substantial challenges, but it does so much good for the world,” he continued. “Harvard is one of our nation’s most important institutions, and when an institution has problems, I believe the solution is to work constructively to fix the problems, while holding true to its foundational commitment to academic excellence. I look forward to doing my part to help Harvard meet those challenges and to make the University a better, stronger place for the future.”

A native of Kansas, Shanmugam’s father was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Kansas after his parents emigrated from India. In 1993, Shanmugam graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, where he concentrated in classics and served as editor in chief of the Harvard Independent. He studied as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, where he received a Master of Letters degree in classical languages and literature. Shanmugam was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1998. 

After law school, Shanmugam clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court. He entered private practice as an associate at Kirkland & Ellis and later served as assistant to the solicitor general in the Department of Justice from 2004 to 2008.

Shanmugam practiced as a partner at Williams & Connolly for more than a decade after leaving the solicitor general’s office, rising to become one of the country’s most sought-after appellate lawyers. He served as co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Appellate Practice Committee and as the president of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court — an organization dedicated to advancing the rule of law through example, education, and mentoring. Shanmugam is the only practicing American lawyer who is an honorary bencher of the Inner Temple, one of the four English Inns of Court. He has also taught Supreme Court advocacy at Georgetown University Law Center and is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Federalist Society contributor.

One of six appellate lawyers ranked as a Star Individual by Chambers USA, Shanmugam was a finalist for The American Lawyer’s Litigator of the Year in 2022 and 2024, and he was named Appellate Litigator of the Year by Benchmark Litigation in 2021.

In accordance with the University’s charter, Shanmugam was elected by the members of the Corporation with the consent of the University’s Board of Overseers. He will begin his service on July 1 as Wells departs the board. Garber and Pritzker thanked Wells and noted his service in their message to the community.

“We owe profound gratitude to our colleague Ted Wells, who since 2013 has served the Corporation and the University superbly with his powerful mind, his formidable legal expertise, his strong commitment to academic ideals and principled decision-making, and his humane concern for others,” said Garber and Pritzker. “In Kannon Shanmugam, we are fortunate to have someone well positioned to carry forward and build on Ted’s remarkable legacy, while bringing fresh perspectives and valuable insights to the hard and important work ahead.”

The Harvard Corporation, formally the President and Fellows of Harvard College, was chartered in 1650 and exercises fiduciary responsibility with regard to the University’s academic, financial, and physical resources and overall well-being. Chaired by the president, the 13-member Corporation is one of Harvard’s two governing boards. Members of Harvard’s other governing board, the Board of Overseers, are elected by holders of Harvard degrees.

Growing up in Afghanistan, Muqtader Omari ’25 loved astrophysics, but the political climate of his country led him on a couple of detours — working as a writer and studying government — before he ultimately returned to his scientific roots to focus on artificial intelligence.

After he graduated from high school in Kabul, Omari launched a nonprofit called Talk Science, which aimed to educate young people on social media platforms. But he soon found education had political dimensions he hadn’t anticipated.

“I started noticing all these limitations that exist and was interested in learning more about where these came from,” said Omari, pointing to the barriers faced by Afghan girls seeking an education under Taliban rule. His curiosity led him to write for a newspaper in Kabul, and eventually to pursue higher education in the U.S.

At Harvard, where he is one of nearly 6,800 international students across the University, Omari opted to concentrate in government and in computer science. Throughout his undergraduate years, he sought to learn more about his birth country as the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan’s government. In 2023, the Adams House resident met lecturer in the Modern Middle East Mohammad Sagha through a course dedicated to regional order, U.S. wars, and the politics of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What makes Muqtader unique is that while he has a compelling personal story, he never relied on that to solely inform his worldview,” said Sagha. “He’s intellectually rigorous and tries to objectively study and understand Afghanistan, its neighboring environment, U.S. foreign policy, and other factors through a balanced scholarly lens — that is rare to find.”

Sagha added: “He is very passionate about what is happening in his country and is eager to make a difference.”

Omari’s early intellectual leanings may have been with Afghanistan, but he was determined to push himself to meet students from all walks of life. About filling out his first-year roommate survey, Omari said, “I didn’t want to be with other international or Middle Eastern students. I wanted it to be as opposing to who I am as possible, because that’s what I thought Harvard was all about.”

He joined the Institute of Politics as a study group leader and the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Committee, where he assisted in the production of nonpartisan dialogues on politics, public service, and other affairs. But halfway through his four years, Omari realized that politics wasn’t for him. Missing the rigidity that science offered, he became fascinated with artificial intelligence.

“It’s mind-boggling to me,” he said. “It feels like we’re reaching a new period of human history.”

Omari’s plans after Harvard are unclear. “I preplanned a lot of my life in high school, and none of it worked out,” he said. “I’ll let myself decide in the moment. I just hope I’m happy and I’m learning.”

Eventually, he hopes to return to Afghanistan, although the political situation is too unstable now, he said. His family, including younger sisters, moved to the U.K. after the Taliban takeover. “I could never feel like I’m at home anywhere else but Kabul,” he said.

Sagha is confident Omari will be successful wherever he lands. “He, alongside other gifted Afghan diaspora, can play a positive role in representing their country and enriching our own society and knowledge here in the United States.” 

When Sophia Hunt found out she had been elected president of the Harvard Law Review in February 2024, she texted her family group chat: “What do Barack Obama and I have in common?”

That commonality of course, was being selected by their peers to lead the nearly 140-year-old student publication that has been influential in shaping American law throughout its history.

“The works that we publish can be read by justices, lawyers, professors, and students and can not only shape the law itself but also shape our orientation about what the law can and should be,” she said.

After she graduates with her Juris Doctorate, Hunt plans to enter the world of criminal defense. Once she passes the bar, that is. Her interest, Hunt said, stems from working for the Office of the Federal Public Defender after her first year of Law School.

“That was a really formative experience,” she said. “It was really nice to be able to put legal research and writing to practice.”

Hunt joined Harvard Defenders, a student practice that provides pro bono representation to low-income defendants in criminal show-cause hearings and assists clients looking to seal their records, among other legal issues.

Hunt also took part in the Tenant Advocacy Project at HLS helping represent clients facing issues such as revocation of Section 8 housing vouchers. She also provided representation and legal research assistance to incarcerated people through the Prison Legal Assistance Project.

In her last year at the Law School, she worked with Harvard’s Criminal Justice Institute.

“That was like being a baby public defender, where I visited clients in jail and stood up in court and wrote motions,” she said. “Sometimes it was just talking and listening to someone’s story and being the first person to hear them. That has been incredibly fulfilling.”

Hunt graduated from Harvard College in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature. From there she headed off to Stanford to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology.

But after three years of research and writing at the intersection of law and society and receiving her master’s, she felt a call to law school and took a leave of absence from her Ph.D. program.

“In the back of my head, I’ve thought — is being a lawyer the best way to help the individuals and communities that I care about? Should I be doing more policy-related work, or should I be thinking about academia and putting new ideas out there and trying to change the law from that standpoint?” she said.

“I just find so much meaning in working and advocating on behalf of individual clients,” she added. “It’s the best feeling, getting to tell their stories, and helping a prosecutor, a judge, see someone’s humanity.”

In addition to her course load and participation in groups that brought her into the courtroom, Hunt said she joined Harvard Law Review in her second year at HLS to “further invest” herself in the Law School community and flex her academic muscles.

Hunt went on to be elected by that community to lead the Law Review as its second-ever Black woman president, after ImeIme Umana, who was elected in 2017.

“Just being in the same sentence as her is a complete privilege,” Hunt said. “It was an honor to be in consideration of all these amazing former presidents, including ones who were Black. But for me, I hope that we’re past the hump of having first and seconds. I hope it’s become more normalized at this point — someone being elected because they’re perceived as being the best person for the job.”

Reflecting on her time in the top spot, Hunt said it was challenging and rewarding but overall not as much an exercise in shaping the voice of the Review as an exercise in management.

“When it comes to editorial decisions, what’s really helpful is that our entire body is involved in the articles that we publish,” she said. “I tried to reflect the body’s will and interest in carrying out those decisions. And getting to work so closely on so many brilliant pieces was just phenomenal.”

Maureen Brady, Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, said Hunt’s leadership skills should serve her well during challenging times.

“It’s an incredibly important moment in our world,” said Brady, who teaches property law and related subjects. “There’s so much conflict, and there’s incredible polarization. I think law school is about learning a common language that we can use to argue about things and to deeply disagree, but also to, hopefully, reach justice. Sophia is someone who really embodies that, who has led a wide range of people, and who has pursued a really interesting path here, toward justice.”

After she passes the bar, Hunt plans to clerk for a judge in Mississippi.

“Through law school, you read a bunch of judicial opinions and now to switch over and help in the crafting of judicial opinions … it’s going to be interesting to see things on the other side.”

She added: “I’m excited to eat well and meet a bunch of new people, and I think I have to get into college football.”

The University conferred six honorary degrees during Thursday’s Commencement ceremony.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is known world-wide over as one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game as well as a committed social activist and award-winning writer. As a player, he was the NBA’s all-time leading scorer for 39 years, with 38,387, until his record was broken in 2023 by fellow Laker great Lebron James. Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time NBA champion, and the league’s only six-time MVP. Time magazine dubbed him “History’s Greatest Player” and ESPN and The Pac 12 named him the No. 1 Collegiate Athlete of the 21st Century.

Abdul-Jabbar has a national platform as a regular contributing columnist for newspapers and magazines around the world. He currently publishes on kareem.substack.com, where he shares his thoughts on some of the most socially relevant and politically controversial topics facing our nation. He is a nationally recognized speaker and regularly appears on the lecture circuit.

President Barack Obama awarded Abdul-Jabbar the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honor for civilians. He has also received The Ford Medal of Freedom, The Rosa Parks Award, The Double Helix Medal, and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal of Courage. Abdul-Jabbar holds eight honorary doctorate degrees and is a U.S. Cultural Ambassador, a title created specifically for him by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Abdul-Jabbar is a New York Times bestselling author of 17 books, most of which explore the often-overlooked history of African Americans, from the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to forgotten Black inventors who changed daily life. He currently has several book and film projects in development.

He is an award-winning documentary producer and was twice nominated for an Emmy. He was featured in HBO’s most watched sports documentary of all time, “Kareem: Minority of One,” and he a writer/producer on Season 5 of “Veronica Mars.”

In 2015, the Basketball Hall of Fame created the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar College Center of the Year Award, and in 2021, the NBA created the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award.

Abdul-Jabbar is the California STEM Ambassador because of his commitment to youth education, and also serves on the Advisory Board for UCLA Health. Now 76 years old, he likes to say, “Only my jersey is retired.”

Geologist Richard Alley, widely known as one of the best professors at Pennsylvania State University, is an expert who studies the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to predict coming changes in climate and sea level. A 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner (with Al Gore), he has been honored for research, teaching, and service, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society, and has advised top government officials from both major political parties. 

Educated at Ohio State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1987, Alley has authored or co-authored than 400 articles for scholarly publications about the relationships between Earth’s cryosphere and global climate change. His research was the first to show  that the last Ice Age ended abruptly and violently rather than as a result of gradual change, suggesting a warning to look to the past before making environmental decisions for the future.

Alley’s “The Two-Mile Time Machine,” a Phi Beta Kappa science book of the year, focuses not on the long-term changes that may have caused the ice ages, but on newly discovered “flickering” climate changes revealed by drilling through Greenland’s ice. The ice core showed sudden, immense climate shifts that have changed the Earth from livable to inhospitably frozen to unbearably hot.

Alley has warned that the U.N.’s “best estimate” of 3 feet of sea-level rise by the end of this century is misleading: “It could be 2, it could be 15 or 20,” he has said. 

“People who study the history of climate desperately need a record,” he told Knowable Magazine in 2022. “I really do think that this understanding of the ice ages, the role of carbon dioxide, has been a key step in the full understanding of the role of carbon dioxide in our climate.”

Alley participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and presented the PBS TV miniseries “Earth: The Operators’ Manual,” based on his book of the same name. In it, he wrote, “Science is not the result of dispassionate machines spitting out Truth; it involves passionate humans pursuing truth and fame and next week’s paycheck, while satisfying curiosity at the same time.”

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Chaire, Pauvreté et politiques publiques at the Collège de France. Her research seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim of helping design and evaluate social policies.

Duflo has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance, believing that “Evidence-based policies are the key to solving complex social issues.”

Known for the “Randomista Movement,” which uses randomized control trials to study poverty interventions, Duflo says that without these trials poverty reduction efforts do no more than simply hope for the best. From 2000 to 2012 the number of published economic studies relying on randomized controlled studies nearly quadrupled.

Duflo has written, “If you want to understand the root causes of poverty, you have to lookbeyond the symptoms,” which she defines as a lack of cash. “If we want to fight poverty effectively, we must first understand the lives of the poor.”

Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. She earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999.

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes, including 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (with co-laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer), the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2015, the A.SK Social Science Award (2015), Infosys Prize in 2014, the David N. Kershaw Award in 2011, a John Bates Clark Medal in 2010, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2009. 

With Banerjee, she wrote “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty,” which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages. She also wrote “Good Economics for Hard Times.”

Duflo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Elaine H. Kim is professor emerita of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, associate dean of the Graduate Division, faculty assistant for the Status of Women, and assistant dean in the College of Letters and Science.

Questions of who is represented and how are central to Kim’s work. At UC Berkeley, believing that, “If something you want does not exist, you can try to create it,” she helped establish the Ethnic Studies Department.

Kim has written, edited, and co-edited 10 books and directed or produced and co-produced three video documentaries, including  “Labor Women” in 2002 and “Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded” in 2011. She received the Asian Pacific American Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, the State of California Award for Excellence in Education, and the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award.

Drawn to questions of representation by Hollywood stereotyping (“Very early on, everybody was interested in representation and felt the importance of films and television in our fate. And so all the students could relate to the fact that, for men, there was only Charlie Chan. Bruce Lee wasn’t even a possibility because they wouldn’t let him play in the roles. And then for women, it was just as bad — Madame Butterfly and Dragon Lady,” she told the Cal Alumni Association in 2021), she has worked hard to correct misimpressions of the Korean community in the U.S. and Asians more broadly, though she pointedly dislikes hearing one person speak for an entire group. She has served as president of the Association for Asian American Studies and on the National Council of the American Studies Association. She also co-founded Asian Women United of California, the Korean Community Center of the East Bay in Oakland, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.

Kim earlier received an honorary doctorate of laws from Notre Dame University, honorary doctorates in human letters from the University of Massachusetts Boston, Amherst College, the Global Korea Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship.

Rita Moreno is a triple-threat performer whose legendary performances include roles as Anita in “West Side Story,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role; Louise in “Carnal Knowledge”; Miller in “The Electric Company” (a role in which she popularized the shout “Hey, you guys!”); Sister Peter Marie Reimondo in “Oz”; and recently, Abuelita Toretto in “Fast X.” She is one of only six women to have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.

She began her career at 9 years old, dancing in New York City nightclubs, and broke into movies two years later by dubbing Spanish-language films. Her first appearance on stage, opposite Eli Wallach, came in 1945, when she was still 13. She broke into movies in 1950 with “So Young, So Bad” and worked steadily in movies and television throughout that era. Her 43 wins and 51 nominations include honors from the American Latino Media Arts, Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, Daytime and Primetime Emmys, Grammy, and NAACP Image awards.

Moreno broke barriers for Latines and others. A social activist, she worked with the Civil Rights Movement and was part of the March on Washington in 1963. She has championed racial, gender, immigration, education (she herself attended Public School 132 in Brooklyn but dropped out of high school at age16), and LGBTQ+ rights, and advocated for relief for Puerto Rico, her homeland.

Acknowledging that she was typecast early in her career, even having her skin darkened for her role in “West Side Story,” she believes she owes her professional longevity to her ability “to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward.” Moreno has said, “No one’s going to tell me how to make my own choices. For too many years, everybody told me what to say and what to do and how to be.”

She has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Peabody Award, and the Medal for the National Endowment for the Arts. The 2021 Netflix documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” tells the story of her amazing 85-year Hollywood career.

Abraham Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine, Stanford University. He also leads PRESENCE, a multidisciplinary center that studies the human experience of patients, physicians, and caregivers.

He began his medical training in Ethiopia in 1974, but when a military government deposed Emperor Haile Selassie he immigrated to America and worked as a hospital orderly for a year. He has written that that experience made him determined to finish his medical training. He earned his bachelor’s in medicine in India, completed a residency in Johnson City, Tennessee, and a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine.

Verghese returned to Johnson City in 1985 and was quickly overwhelmed by the rural AIDS epidemic. To tell that story, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, writing in 2009, “I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.”

Since 1991 Verghese has published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His first book, “My Own Country,” was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair; and his novel, “Cutting for Stone,” spent 107 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. “The Covenant of Water,” his latest, was a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah pick, and is currently being made into a series by Netflix and Harpo Productions.

Verghese is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, “For reminding us that the patient is the center of the medical enterprise. His range of proficiency embodies the diversity of the humanities; from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.” In 2023, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. This is his seventh honorary doctorate.

Commencement season is a time to celebrate the achievements of graduates, but behind every individual success is a network of parents, family members, and friends whose unwavering support made each diploma possible — or at least easier. Four families shared their stories — and their pride — on the eve of graduation.

Full circle for family 

Gunjan and Gurmeet Batra journeyed from Denver to celebrate their son, Arjun, who is graduating with a concentration in electrical engineering. 

“It’s a very proud moment for our entire family,” said mom Gunjan in a bustling Harvard Yard on Wednesday. “It’s been lovely having him go through the process and through such a prestigious institution. It’s been wonderful. We’re very proud of him.”

Arjun picked electrical engineering because a professor inspired him, but the decision has a special meaning for his family: His grandfather was also an electrical engineer. 

Arjun said his parents supported him every step of the way. “I’d call them every night and complain about a p-set or complain about a class, and they’d help me get through it. I would call them multiple times a day. Having their support in the background, being there always, has been incredible.” 

Gurmeet said it was a bittersweet moment for his son.

“On one hand, he’s graduating and moving on, exploring new ventures,” he said. “On the other hand, he’s going to miss this. College is the place you build memories. He’s going to miss all this.” 

More than a game

Owen Fanning always knew what he wanted: to play volleyball at a top college.

For mom Carolyn, that meant years of driving him to practice and matches during his high school years in Needham, Massachusetts. 

“Without great support, people don’t typically get here,” said Owen, a physics concentrator and outside hitter for the men’s volleyball team, as he thanked his mom for schlepping him to “all those tournaments.”  

But Carolyn deflected the praise. “He got himself here for sure. We were just there to be the car driver.” 

The Fannings enjoyed coming into Cambridge to watch Owen’s matches. Carolyn said the family will miss those outings but are gratified to see how far Owen has come. 

“This was the dream,” she said. “For us, it was worth every effort we put into it.” 

Alongside the Fannings at Class Day, the Diaks were celebrating their own volleyball success story.

Parents Nikki and Bradley were volleyball players themselves, and soon-to-be-graduate Callum grew up playing the game with them on Lake Ontario near their hometown of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. 

“Without them, I definitely wouldn’t be as passionate as I am about this sport,” Callum said. 

Nikki said she was proud of her son for taking the initiative to apply to Harvard as a foreign student, and that playing on a college team taught him about determination and resilience.

“He’s grown so much personally and education-wise,” she said. “We’re so proud of all he’s learned.” 

‘She could have gone to any university, and she decided to come here’

Sandra Villarreal posed for a photo with daughter Ayleen in front of one of the most recognizable landmarks on campus: the statue of John Harvard.

For Villarreal and husband Sergio, who immigrated from Mexico before Ayleen was born, watching their daughter earn a Harvard degree was a milestone decades in the making. The couple and 15-year-old son Dylan made the trip from El Paso, Texas, to attend Commencement.

“I feel fortunate to have been able to bring my family here and to have been able to give her the opportunity to go to whatever university she wanted and follow her dreams,” Sandra said in Spanish. 

Ayleen spent four and a half years in the U.S. Air Force before coming to Harvard and is graduating with a concentration in government and a secondary in global health and health policy. She plans on working in politics for a few years before going to law school. 

“At Harvard, I found my love for the law,” she said. “I believe that laws, regulations, and policies affect a human being’s everyday life all the way to their biological cells. … I’m very, very thankful for Harvard academics, because I’ve learned a lot in the government department, and I’m very grateful to the professors. I will take everything they gave me and go and keep serving the United States.” 

Ayleen said her path was different than most of her classmates, as a Mexican American, a first-generation student, and a female veteran at the College — at one point, there were only five others. But she hopes her experience will show others that difference is not an insurmountable barrier.

“I want females in my hometown, in El Paso, Texas, or in Texas in general, to know that it is possible to achieve your dreams despite being a minority in the United States,” she said. 

“I feel very, very proud of her for everything she’s done. It’s a very great pride,” her father Sergio said in Spanish. “She took every opportunity. She had a lot of options for university; it wasn’t just one or two. She could have gone to any university, and she decided to come here. We’re very happy with her choice.”

In early 1956, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood next to his bombed-out house in Montgomery, Alabama, and urged angry supporters to recommit to nonviolence, reassuring them that “if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.”

On Wednesday, basketball hall of famer, writer, and social justice champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said that he counts Harvard University and President Alan Garber among “the others willing to take Dr. King’s place.” Then he asked the Class of 2025 whether he can count on them.

“When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures the way Rosa Parks defied the entire weight of systemic racism in 1955,” said Abdul-Jabbar, addressing grads during Class Day ceremonies at Tercentenary Theatre. “As I look out over the crowd of eager faces today who are ready to launch their lives of successful careers, I wonder how many of you will also be among the others willing to take Dr. King’s place.”

Abdul-Jabbar’s 20-minute speech was the centerpiece of the two-hour Class Day ceremony, which is hosted by graduating seniors. The event also featured a farewell address from Danoff Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana, who is departing his post after 11 years of service.

Reflecting on his own journey as an undergrad, which took him first to the State University of New York at Binghamton and then to Cornell University, Khurana recalled his time at Cornell as a major turning point — the moment when he stopped trying to be the person others wanted him to be and instead explored who he was, reading deeply and beginning to understand his own values. It was then, he said, that he realized education was more than just memorizing facts and getting good grades, but an experience that helps you appreciate life’s long journey.

In the next chapter of your life, he told students, you will be faced with choices about new jobs and challenges, choices between opportunities that are transformational and those that are merely transactional.

“Wherever you go next, the important question isn’t where you go now, but who you’re going to be,” he said. “May your road be a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.”  

Abdul-Jabbar, who followed up his record-breaking 20-year NBA career by becoming a successful writer, received standing ovations at the beginning and end of his speech. He said that his passion for social justice and civil rights stems from the Cleveland Summit, a meeting organized by a group of Black athletes and activists to interview boxer Muhammad Ali after Ali refused to participate in the Vietnam War draft. The group’s aim was to determine whether Ali’s claim to be a conscientious objector was sincere.

Ali convinced them that he was, but not everyone agreed: He was soon convicted of evading the draft and sentenced to five years in prison, a fine, and a three-year boxing ban. (The Supreme Court would overturn the conviction in 1971.) The episode, combined with King’s assassination, left Abdul-Jabbar shaken, prompting him to turn down an invitation to the 1968 Olympics. Civil rights, he said, felt like “a fading dream.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to become a smiling symbol of the promise of the United States to be a multiracial democracy when it was doing everything it could to not fulfill that promise,” Abdul-Jabbar said.

Choosing justice, Abdul-Jabbar said, usually comes with risk. Sometimes the risk is financial, he said; sometimes it’s physical. In any case, the stakes are always high.

“You have to decide whether you’re part of the old-timey fire brigades passing buckets of water down a long line of people trying to put out a fire or if you’re content to stand by and let it burn,” Abdul-Jabbar said.

And one victory is not enough, he said, urging grads to commit themselves to a lifelong fight.

“It is a never-ending battle that must be fought over and over,” Abdul Jabbar said. “After seeing so many cowering billionaires, media moguls, law firms, politicians, and other universities bend their knees to an administration that is systematically strip-mining the U.S. Constitution, it is inspiring to me to see Harvard University take a stand for freedom.”

In addition to remarks by Abdul-Jabbar, Khurana, and incoming HAA president Will Makris, Class Day included a moment of silence to remember two classmates: Luke Balstad, who died in November 2022, and Ryan Murdock, who died after a brief illness in October. Byron Gonzalez and Talia Levitt received the Richard Glover Ames and Henry Russell Ames Awards, which recognize graduating seniors for unsung service to the community.

Even in the face of near-constant opposition, have the confidence of your convictions and stand up for the truth, Harvard President Alan Garber urged 19 soon-to-be graduates on Wednesday during the annual joint Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) commissioning ceremony.

Gathered with loved ones watching in Sanders Theatre, the Army, Air Force, and Navy cadets swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution and were pinned with two gold bars marking their elevation to military officer ranks. Each received their first salute as a newly minted officer from a family member, friend, or mentor chosen for the honor.

In his remarks, Garber recounted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s historic visit to Harvard on Sept. 6, 1943, to accept an honorary degree at a critical juncture of World War II. Churchill had long warned about the danger Adolf Hitler and Germany posed to the world but was met with skepticism and even ridicule “by those who chose to blind themselves to the truth that was unfolding before their eyes,” Garber said.

“Despite being dismissed as paranoid and pushed to the margins, Churchill had the courage to persist, to keep his eyes open and unblinking. His confidence even in the face of near-constant opposition offers a powerful and enduring lesson for anyone who seeks to stand up for the truth,” he said. “I hope that you will carry this lesson with you as you support and defend the Constitution.”

Garber presented a biography of Churchill by William Manchester (“The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940”) to each student and a coin featuring Memorial Hall on one side and on the other, a Veritas shield and 1916 — the year Harvard first welcomed ROTC to campus.

The students will embark on a wide range of duties next. Some will undergo basic officer leader courses at military bases around the country, while others will begin training to become intelligence officers, members of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, pilots, and a missile and nuclear operations officer.

Lt. Gen. Joseph P. McGee of the Army, the keynote speaker and an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the world is undergoing “significant geopolitical shifts” in Europe, across the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, and that the U.S. military is rapidly evolving to meet the changing landscape.

Many of the graduating students have a STEM education, McGee noted, a critical tool that will become even more essential as AI, drone warfare, nanotechnology, robotics, and cyber are “redefining the future of warfare and what it looks like.”

What hasn’t changed, McGee said, is the diversity of people who make up the military.

“You’re going to join a military community that represents every single element of American society,” he said. “It is still the true melting pot of the United States. Your success is going to depend on hard work, leadership, peer leadership, and your ability to relate to your fellow Americans and have them prevail in the face of daunting challenges.”

As future military leaders, McGee said, “It’ll be your job to bring this unique group of individuals to realize their potential, build cohesive, high-functioning, and lethal teams, and lead them into the future.” United by a sense of common purpose and love of country, “You will all be amazed by what you can accomplish in the years ahead.”

Army grads were Matthew Fitch, Eytan Goldstein, Chloe Hansen, Conner Huey, Morgan Kim, Carly Lehman, Andrew Lim, Matthew Sau, Jack Schwab, and Isaac Tang. Sworn in for the Navy was Jasmine Zhang. Air Force graduates were Sarah (Sally) Barksdale, Caitlin Beirne, Blake Chen, Emily McCallum, Jenny Peters, Elizabeth Sasse, Faith Schmidt, and Charles Whitehead.

Alexandra Petri ’10, formerly a Washington Post columnist, is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. She won the 2025 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her book “Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History: Important American Documents I Made Up.” 

OK, Harvard graduates. Listen. Many of you want to be doctors and lawyers and researchers and benefit the world in some large way. I’m not talking to you. But the odds are non-zero that somebody currently graduating will be the one guy who makes a ludicrous, cartoonish amount of money and the world worse (that’s zeugma! I was an English concentrator). This is addressed to him, just on the off chance that he is reading the Harvard Gazette. I want to answer the question I am sure is already plaguing him: After the cataclysmic Event happens that unravels society and sends me scurrying to my luxury bunker, how do I keep my guards loyal?

Great question! Let’s dive in.

Okay, you have your luxury bunker with its hydroponic garden, its decontamination chamber, and its secure boundary patrolled by guards. How, once money ceases to be a concept with any relevance to human interactions, do you keep those guards in their place? Remember, before, they were your employees. But now you are alone in your bunker, after the Event! Money no longer matters to them, and they are much stronger than you! Much stronger than anyone! That is why you hired them as guards.

Oh, you weren’t thinking about that, were you? The special technology you invented to give billionaires a second, bonus set of teeth that descends in front of their original teeth, like a curtain, at the press of a button (I don’t know what billionaires want) may have lined your pockets back in the day, but now you’re alone in that bunker, and you have to justify why you should still be in charge. No algorithms here! No stock exchanges! It’s just you and that strong man you hired, that man whose name is almost certainly Greg (but what if you’re wrong? Can you afford to be wrong? Remember, your money is no good any longer!).

Now it is just you and Greg. You and Greg, and, I hope, his family. You did remember to pick up his family, didn’t you? When you all piled into the helicopter and came rushing here? That’s the first thing I would have recommended.

Society is over. Bang! You created a lot of value for your shareholders, enough value that you were able to commission a yacht too big for even God to lift, have yourself surgically enhanced to look more like the vampire Lestat, and purchase this glorious bunker on a small island. Now large swaths of the planet aren’t livable, for reasons that people would probably say are your fault, if they had survived the Event. You are going to be stuck in this bunker for a while. And unfortunately, your money is no good any longer. Which is a shame because you had such a lot of it! Some of it was even bitcoin. Not that that matters. You can try telling Greg (Is it Greg? Maybe it’s Jeff!) that you have some bitcoin for him and see what he does. Maybe it will make him laugh. Maybe that can be the start of something.

Think hard about your guards! What do they love more than anything in the world? Maybe you can stash some of it in the bunker! But what if it runs out? There’s no way to get more, because society (as previously stated) is over. After you have disposed of the last box of Jeff (Greg?)’s favorite cereal, what will you do? The factory where it used to be made is under the ocean, or possibly being overrun by some sort of Mad Max situation. What it is not doing is making cereal.

Think! Think! What do people love? The warmth of sunshine on their skin? Fresh fruit? The smell of the top of a baby’s head? Doritos? Laughter? Joy? The feeling of being seen? No, no! These answers are all wrong. It needs to be something that you can access after the Event! Something that you can stockpile in advance and store in a vault, to be released at intervals to your guards only if you enter a code that indicates you are still unharmed.

Or, wait. What is it that people do for other people? Make them laugh? Bake them pies? Remember what interests them and ask them about it? Tell stories? Give good foot rubs? Yes! Better! Maybe you can invent a machine that does that and sell access to it in the bunker, using a special coin of your own devising?  

No, never mind, we are back to money again. Remember, money doesn’t exist anymore!

What is the thing that you have to offer others? What about you is worth preserving? Don’t tell me it’s absurd that you should have to justify your worth in this transactional way. Don’t tell me you are valuable simply because you are a human being who exists. I know that. But does Greg (Jeff?)?

Maybe you should have thought about that before you made all that value for shareholders and triggered the Event. You should have thought about that before you let the cereal factory sink under the sea. I am begging you to think about it. 

Failing that, try getting really, really buff.

Melissa Shang had planned to become a disability rights attorney and had set her sights on studying sociology on a prelaw track. Once at Harvard, she quickly found a new possibility.

“My whole reason for wanting to go into disability rights law was to be able to support people with disabilities,” said Shang, who has a degenerative nerve disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. “I realized I could do that within the field of psychology.”

Switching her concentration allowed the Waltham, Massachusetts, native to take a deep look at the barriers faced by more than 70 million Americans who report one or more disability. Her senior thesis, which draws upon a deep well of original survey data, tested the hypothesis that experiencing what social scientists call “minority stressors” is associated with increased risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts for people with disabilities.

Shang argued that the link between minority stressors and suicidal behavior was brought on by “greater perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness.” She also set out to prove that greater “positive disability identity and community engagement” had the power to weaken the effect.

According to thesis adviser Mina Cikara, the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, Shang identified a “major gap” in the field’s research and literature. “It’s incredibly important work,” Cikara said.

Upon landing at Harvard, Shang immediately set about forging her own campus community. First up was co-launching the Harvard University Disability Justice Club. The officially recognized student group, initiated during Shang’s first semester, has since grown to 140 active members.

“I always thought advocacy work to be a bit of a lonely experience, but being able to have this community has been really powerful,” said Shang.

The Leverett House resident subsequently fell in love with the Harvard Noteables, a student-run, non-audition Broadway show choir, after attending a single rehearsal her first year.

“Then I went to more rehearsals, and I realized that it was an accepting space and so different from the environment that I was exposed to back at my high school,” Shang said. “The sense of inclusion, accessibility, and community that this club brought — that allowed me to rekindle my passion for singing — has been really incredible.”

In the classroom, Shang’s early years were spent seeking answers to important questions within the field of disability studies. “I started learning more about what the mental health system was for people with disabilities and how inaccessible it could be,” Shang explained. “It can be extraordinarily difficult to find providers who are disability-informed, and many people are denied mental health services because of their disability needs.”

She also learned how little attention the problem has received from academics. “When I looked into the research that’s been done about systemic barriers for people with disabilities, I found very little to no research about it,” she recalled.

As a sophomore, Shang enrolled in Cikara’s research methods course. It proved to be a pivotal decision. The course introduced Shang to Cikara’s work, which later helped Shang identify a set of minority stressors to investigate in her thesis, including discrimination, internalized stigma, and identity concealment.

Cikara initially counseled Shang against her “incredibly grand plan” of reaching out to various disability organizations for help distributing surveys to those they serve. But Shang could not be dissuaded. In the end, the strategy enabled her to survey hundreds of Americans with disabilities about their mental health experiences.

“This is a testament to her character,” Cikara observed. “She just did it. She pounded the pavement over and over again. She collected over 200 responses from people all over the country, many of whom have a wide variety of disabilities. That was no small feat.”

Ultimately, Shang’s findings only somewhat supported her theory that stigma experienced by people with disabilities relates to suicidal behavior. Shang noted that “internalized stigma” was one factor that was found to be associated with suicidal behavior. But the project still marks an essential contribution, Cikara said.

“What she’s done is seed the field with this incredible pilot dataset which she could spend years building,” she said.

Shang’s next chapter brings her to a clinical psychology doctorate program at Oregon State University. She plans to continue researching people with disabilities, their encounters within the mental health system, and the many barriers they face.

“Because people with disabilities are so valuable in society,” Shang said, “it’s important to keep conducting research that gauges their experiences and mental health — and to make an active effort to better support them and improve the way they’re treated.”

When Lilian Smith left Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to attend Harvard, she was eager for new experiences and a fresh start in a bigger city. She didn’t expect to ever look back. But during her junior year, a religion course on nationalism prompted her to re-examine her hometown from a new perspective.

“I didn’t learn much about it growing up,” Smith said, “but I feel it’s a history that could really benefit people in the town — so as to not repeat history. It’s important to talk about things that make people uncomfortable sometimes.”

Smith, a history concentrator with a secondary in chemistry, wrote her senior thesis on the establishment of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, a grassroots organization that has been instrumental in the fight against white supremacy in Idaho. It started as a group of concerned citizens who came together in opposition to the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist hate group that was headquartered just outside her hometown from 1978 to 2000.

Smith’s interest in the topic began in “Religion and Nationalism in the United States,” a course with Catherine Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America.

“From the very beginning, when Lilian first considered doing a project about Coeur d’Alene, she has been absolutely fearless,” said Carleigh Beriont, assistant director of undergraduate studies for the Committee on the Study of Religion, who advised Smith’s thesis. “Willing to dig into the darker recesses of the past to better understand why and how ideologies like that promoted by the Aryan Nations continue to resonate in her home community, happy to sit down with anybody and everybody who might have a story to tell, regardless of their political ideology or party affiliation. She has been resolute in her desire to portray Coeur d’Alene and its residents with nuance and care, challenging national media portrayals of her community and underscoring how shallow portrayals of the region have served as a draw for white supremacists.”

Smith did research in the archives of North Idaho College and Gonzaga University, and conducted formal interviews with locals, including the town’s former mayor, former and current members of the Task Force on Human Relations, leaders at the Human Rights Education Institute, a former member of the Aryan Nations, a police officer, an FBI agent, and a Republican Party leader in Kootenai County.

Her thesis describes how the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations grew from a few concerned citizens into a unified front of businesses, schools, churches, law enforcement, and politicians, working together to stop the spread of hate in the community. They offered victim support to residents who experienced religious or race-based harassment or violence from the Aryan Nations, advocated for state laws against malicious harassment, and raised $35,000 for human rights organizations during an Aryan Nations parade.

“Silence gives consent” became one of their biggest slogans, Smith said.

“These people really care about this work,” Smith said. “Many of these leaders saw the best in people in a way that I might not have, and that really shifted my perspective on my town.”

Even after Aryan Nations was bankrupted by a lawsuit in 2000 and vacated their property near Coeur d’Alene, the Task Force and its sister organization, the Human Rights Education Institute, continued to promote human rights more broadly, through education and diversity programming, awareness events, an annual human rights banquet, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.

Even so, Smith’s research showed how national media narratives have continued to portray her hometown as a haven for intolerance. She believes this had a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, attracting an influx of residents who are now pushing back against the work of the Task Force.

“One of the themes of my thesis is the powerful role media narratives play in shaping the evolution of towns,” Smith said. “The town that exists today is not the town that existed in the ’70s, and it’s made the work of the Task Force and the Human Rights Education Institute increasingly difficult.”

On campus, Smith also worked in Roy G. Gordon Professor of Chemistry Eugene Shakhnovich’s biophysics lab, led tours for the Admissions Office, and served on the business board of The Crimson. She also founded Harvard Undergraduate SWAN, a nonprofit for students pursuing careers in public service.

After commencement, Smith will move to Washington, D.C., to pursue her longtime dream of becoming a teacher with the Teach for America corps.

Her feelings about not returning to Coeur d’Alene after commencement are complicated. Through her thesis research, Smith grew increasingly concerned about America’s deepening political polarization — fueled, she believes, by a trend of people moving to areas that better align with their political values, reinforcing ideological echo chambers.

“This is a national trend that young people are leaving their hometowns when they feel their values don’t align,” Smith said. “Many don’t return to reinvest in their communities. It’s really concerning.”

Nearly every Coeur d’Alene resident Smith interviewed for her thesis asked if she planned to return home after graduation. While she is excited for her next chapter in Washington, D.C., Smith said she couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt each time she told them no. “That pushed me to think more critically about the fact that I was leaving and consider the possibility of returning someday,” Smith said. “It’s disheartening that so many people tend to leave rather than stay and work to address the issues impacting their community. Realizing the strength of those who’ve remained in the community for so long gave me a deep respect for them.”

In celebration of the city of Cambridge and of the country’s oldest university, neighboring churches and institutions will ring their bells in recognition of Harvard’s 374th Commencement.

For the 38th year the bells will begin to ring at 12:15 p.m. Thursday, just after the sheriff of Middlesex County declares the Commencement Exercises adjourned. They will ring for approximately 15 minutes.

Bells of varying tones hold a place in history, as they summoned students from sleep to prayer, work, or study. The deep-toned bell in the Memorial Church tower, for years the only bell to acknowledge the festival rites of Commencement, will be joined by the set of bells cast to replace the original 17-bell Russian zvon of Lowell House that was returned in 2008 to the Danilov Monastery near Moscow. The Harvard Business School bell will be heard across the river. The historic 13-bell “Harvard Chime” of Christ Church Cambridge, the Harvard Divinity School bell in Swartz Hall, and the bells of the Church of the New Jerusalem, First Church Congregational, First Parish Unitarian Universalist, First Baptist Church, St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, University Lutheran Church, Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church, and St. Anthony’s Church will ring for the graduates.

Bells were already in use at Harvard in 1643 when “New England’s First Fruits,” published in London that year, set forth some College rules: “Every Schollar shall be present in his tutor’s chambers at the 7th houre in the morning, immediately after the sound of the bell … opening the Scripture and prayer.”

Three of the 15 bells known to have been in use in Massachusetts before 1680 were hung within the precincts of the present College Yard, including the original College bell and the bell of the First Parish Church.

Of the churches participating in the joyful ringing on Commencement Day one, the First Parish, has links with Harvard that date from its founding. The College had use of the church’s bell, Harvard’s first Commencement was held in the church’s meetinghouse, and one of the chief reasons for selecting Cambridge as the site of the College was the proximity of this church and its minister, the Rev. Thomas Shepard, a clergyman of “marked ability and piety,” according to the late Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

Another church ringing its bells in celebration is Christ Church Cambridge. The oldest church in the area, it houses the “Harvard Chime,” the name given to the bells cast for the church in anticipation of its 1861 centennial. Two fellow alumni and Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” arranged for the chime’s creation. The 13 bells were first rung on Easter Sunday, 1860: each bell of the Harvard Chime bears in Latin a portion of the “Gloria in Excelsis.”

Referring in 1893 to the Harvard Chime, Samuel Batchelder wrote, “From the outset the bells were considered as a common object of interest and enjoyment for the whole city, and their intimate connection with the University made it an expressed part of their purpose that they should be rung, not alone on church days but also on all festivals and special occasions of the College, a custom which has continued to the present time.”

The old Russian bells of Lowell House, in place for 76 years, rang on an Eastern scale; the more newly cast bells give out a charming sound, as do the bells of the Cambridge churches joining in concert. A thoughtful student of bells wrote in 1939, “… church bells, whether they sound in a tinkling fashion the end of the first watch in the dead of night, announce the matins a few hours later, or intone the vespers or angelus, have a peculiar fascination. Chimes affect the heartstrings …”

Reaching the tiny settlement, located deep within the Amazon rainforest, required several hours of travel by river boat.

“When we finally got there, we were immediately greeted by the mayor,” recalled Eduardo Vasconcelos ’25, who reached the far-flung municipality as a volunteer delivering medical supplies during the pandemic. “He took us to see the public school and the public health facility, all of which was managed locally. I was just mesmerized. I thought, ‘Wow! This is the most fascinating experiment in self-governance I’ve ever seen.’”

The encounter stuck with the double concentrator in economics and government, stirring old passions and eventually shaping his senior thesis. Vasconcelos set out to investigate what prevents elected officials like the one he met from falling in with illegal gold miners. Brazil’s federal government has banned these black-market operators, who rely on a process that pumps the environment with toxins. But the miners have proven effective at enlisting cooperation from some of the rainforest’s secluded local powers.

“People tend to look at policy in the Amazon as something that is determined by national administrations,” said Frances Hagopian, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government and one of three faculty advising the thesis. “There are those who are more protective of the environment and there are those who lean more toward developing the Amazon’s resources. What Eduardo did that was different was look below the level of national government.”

Vasconcelos, who grew up amid a family of civil servants in Brazil’s federal capital of Brasília, was interested in government from a young age. He was just 14 years old when he started working with teen trauma survivors. A wave of violent threats against the country’s public schools later inspired him to co-found Jovens Líderes pela Paz (Young Peacebuilders), a nonprofit that trains Brazilian students in de-escalation and advancing mental health supports.

Vasconcelos also worked on education issues as a government volunteer while still in high school. During his senior year, a federal scholarship enabled his first visit to Cambridge for the Harvard Model United Nations program. “I immediately fell in love with the institution,” he recalled.

At the time, then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was actively freezing public funding for universities while taking shots at certain humanities and social science disciplines. “That really motivated me to try to come,” said Vasconcelos, whose application was supported by the Jorge Paulo Lemann Fund. “It would allow me to study what I love.”

As a College first-year, he made his first trip to the rainforest with the nonprofit G10 Favelas, which transported medical supplies to Brazil’s small communities during the pandemic. Inspired by the responsive democracy he saw practiced in a remote Amazon outpost, Vasconcelos subsequently landed spots on two immersions in the region organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).

“I feel like the Amazon is what bonds every Brazilian together,” Vasconcelos said, noting that Brazilian Chief Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, helped him home in on the rainforest as a research focus. “I see an opportunity to rediscover our sense of identity in the Amazon’s conservation and its future.”

Vasconcelos learned that illegal gold mining, on the rise since the early 2000s, contributes not only to deforestation and CO₂ rise. The extractors’ reliance on mercury and cyanide, used to isolate gold from river sentiment, contaminates water and air alike. Widespread mercury poisoning, with its devastating harms to the human nervous system, has been found in corners of the rainforest where unlawful mining is prevalent.

“He became very interested in why some local governments seem to allow this and others don’t,” said Hagopian. “And it turned out that the answer was not as simple as, some municipalities have the gold and others don’t.”

Vasconcelos kicked off his research project by indexing the influence of criminal mining interests over local governments. He focused on 50 municipalities in the Brazilian state of Pará, home to more than half of all illegal gold mining in the Amazon, finding some level of capture in 13. Advising the thesis with Hagopian were Government Professor Steven Levitsky, a Latin America expert, and Rio de Janeiro native Marcia Castro, a demography professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In search of deeper understanding, Vasconcelos next turned to assessing a host of political variables in each municipality. “Most political scientists and economists who study illicit economic activity assume that it flourishes where states are weak,” Hagopian explained. “What’s interesting about what Eduardo found is that it’s not the weakest local governments that play host to a lot of this activity. It’s actually local governments with some capacity.

“They have enough trained bureaucrats to give legal license to mine on land reserved for environmental protection or Indigenous nations,” she continued. “They have enough resources to build new infrastructure.”

Instead, one-party rule emerged as the most predictive factor. “The specific result shows us that when there is more diversity of parties, we see a lower likelihood of gold miners running for election or funding campaigns,” Vasconcelos explained, pointing to Brazil’s diverse political landscape with more than 30 parties.

In a separate chapter, the Kirkland House resident and former World Bank intern went deep on the social impacts of this brand of corruption. He found that rates of deforestation doubled in the Amazon’s captured municipalities, while these communities saw decreased investment in education and public health.

“We also see war-level homicide rates — the highest in the country,” Vasconcelos added. “Our data show that this is not a sustainable economic activity. It doesn’t bring better quality of life for the local population.”

The bottom line, he concluded, is that local government is the first line of defense against a profoundly damaging industry. DRCLAS awarded Vasconcelos its 2025 Kenneth Maxwell Thesis Prize on Brazilian Studies this week.

“When we talk about protecting the rainforest, we don’t always think about how we can better support local governments,” said Vasconcelos, a Schwartzman Scholar who will move to Beijing this summer for a one-year, fully funded master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University. “I’d like to see more research looking at this intersection.”

Dozens of graduating scholars elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society gathered in Sanders Theatre Tuesday morning.

They were called to order by Karen Thornber, president of the University’s chapter of the venerated honor society, the Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature, and professor of East Asian languages and civilizations.

Thornber noted that students are elected, not merely for their near-spotless GPAs, but for their “depth and breadth” as scholars.

And she set a tone for the two-hour ceremony: commending the more than 200 elected students for this “tremendous honor,” then charging them with a responsibility to “continue your love of learning [and] inspire others to do the same.”

In prayer and oration, poetry and song, the event also acknowledged the troubled moment — notably, the University’s ongoing conflict with the Trump administration.

As he blessed the event, the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, invoked “a spirit of bravery.” And in a hymn with lyrics drawn from Langston Hughes, the Harvard University Choir enjoined graduates “to sit and learn about the world / Outside our world of here and now / Our problem world.”

Seated on the theater’s floor, the graduating members formed a cosmopolitan group: Over their gowns, many sported saris and hijabs, regalia from racial and ethnic affinity groups, and sashes marking home countries from Thailand to Brazil.

On stage were the officers of Harvard’s chapter and the three members of faculty who’d been awarded the chapter’s annual teaching prizes: Remo Airaldi in Theater, Dance & Media, Samantha Matherne in philosophy, and Steven Levitsky in government.

In keeping with traditions that stretch back to John Quincy Adams and Alfred Kazin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Elizabeth Bishop, this year’s newly elected members heard from both a poet and an orator.

The poet was Arthur Sze — the son of Chinese immigrants who first dropped calculus for verse in a lecture hall at MIT over 50 years ago. Against his parents’ better judgment, Sze went on to Berkeley, a National Book Award for Poetry in 2019, and being honored as the first poet laureate of his adoptive hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In brief remarks, Sze called on the graduates to take risks and to attend to the interconnectedness — to neighbors and nature — at the heart of his own poetry. Of juxtaposition, Sze said, it “is more than mere artistic technique,” but “a vision of how to share our world.”

Reading his 2021 poem “Farolitos,” Sze sought to prepare his audience for the setbacks and wrong turns that are sure to mark their lives off-campus:

in this life, you may try, try
to light a match, fail,

fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike
a tip one more time

when it bursts into flame —

Meanwhile, this year’s oration was delivered by Rakesh Khurana in one of his last acts as the longest-serving dean of Harvard College.

After 11 years leading the college, Khurana — who has dual appointments in sociology and at the Business School — warned that Harvard and other elite universities have a role to play in overcoming a “legitimacy crisis” now facing them.

“[Even] if we teach values of equity, selective institutions are seen as gatekeepers of privilege — hoarding opportunities rather than extending them,” Khurana said. And too often, he added, graduates of exclusive schools fail to use their capacities “in the best interests of the broader society.”

As he wrapped up an address once delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Khurana contemplated the weightier meanings of the University’s motto: veritas.

In a time of deep division, where “confidence substitutes for understanding [and] complexity is flattened by outrage,” Khurana said that “truth — veritas — emerges slowly. It demands humility, skepticism, and the willingness to revise one’s views.”

Khurana cited his own work on efforts to foster “intellectual vitality” at the College as an effort to show veritas in action, as well as President Alan Garber’s resistance to federal demands. (Garber, who was seated onstage, drew a standing ovation at Khurana’s mention.)

As the event wound down, students and their families spilled into the transept of Memorial Hall to take photos and exchange greetings with classmates.

Nicolás Domínguez Carrero, one of the chapter’s four undergraduate marshals, found Khurana’s speech — and the ovation for Garber — “very moving.”

“I feel very proud to be a PBK scholar, and a Harvard student, at this moment,” he said, flanked by family from both Texas and Colombia. “I think Harvard’s doing an amazing job standing up for academic freedom and democracy, writ large. It is a time of crisis, but if there’s an institution that can weather this storm, it’s Harvard.”

Meanwhile, Levitsky, author of the bestsellers “How Democracies Die” and “Tyranny of the Minority,” was humbled by his teaching award.

But, he added, “The most wonderful thing about the ceremony was sitting on stage, watching the faces of the students. In this age of cynicism, I was blown away by how absorbed, how sincere they were… It really renewed my faith.”

In his second Baccalaureate address, Harvard President Alan Garber stressed to the Class of 2025 the importance of education, and those who impart it, for advancing knowledge.

“The best way to acknowledge Harvard — and what this time has meant to you — is to advocate for education,” Garber told students gathered at Tercentenary Theatre on Tuesday afternoon. “Everything we might achieve — morally, scientifically, technologically, and even economically — is grounded in knowledge. Where else are you more likely to find a path to knowledge and all that it unlocks for humanity than in education?”

Garber’s address capped this year’s interfaith ceremony celebrating undergraduates, a tradition dating back to Harvard’s first Commencement in 1642. The president’s plea to stand up for education comes amid funding cuts to the University by the federal government that will affect research across disciplines, including medicine and Garber’s area of expertise — economics.

In his speech, Garber — who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1976 — took a moment to thank the educators in his life who led him to his career path, and he urged the soon-to-be graduates to do the same. In particular, he made note of his resident tutor in Dunster House, Jerome Culp, who told him to switch his concentration from biochemistry to economics.

“That conversation with him changed my life. I still think about it all these years later. Who inspired you? Who gave you the attention and gentle nudging you needed exactly when you needed it? Who kindled your true ambition? Send that note that you have been meaning to send to a mentor who meant more to you than they might realize.”

Throughout the ceremony, faith leaders from across the University congratulated the Class of 2025, and blessed their future endeavors. And, like Garber, a few of the speakers chose to honor the past.

“If you are here today, it’s because you are descended from people from around this globe who have survived deprivations and immigrations and persecutions and liberations, just so you could sit here on this Yard today,” said the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.

He continued, “You are the answer to your ancestors’ hopes and prayers. You are their dreams come true. It’s not just the past that lives in you — the future does too, because you have your own hopes and dreams and wishes and visions of all that you might be and all that you will become from this point forward.”

The Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, a retired physician and the current Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School, also reflected on the influence of generations previous, noting marked differences from her own graduation from Harvard College in 1972.

“The relative diversity of your class compared to ours is a compelling indicator that we have been faithful to our callings,” she said. “And because the struggle continues, I want you to know that we are not here to pass our torches to you. Yes, we are old, but no, we are not dead. We are here to stoke the fire of your torch.”

Garber closed out by wishing one final good luck to students before Commencement on Thursday.

“May these final 44 hours, give or take some minutes, be filled with opportunities to celebrate how far you have traveled since your arrival. You have done so much. Rest on your laurels, but not for too long. The world, with its countless magnificent destinations, awaits you.”

On Thursday, three graduating students selected in a University-wide competition will deliver speeches at Tercentenary Theatre — one of the oldest of Harvard’s Commencement traditions.

The student orators are Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a graduating master’s student at the Harvard Kennedy School who will deliver the Graduate English Address; Aidan Scully, a graduating senior who will deliver the Latin Salutatory; and Thor Reimann, also a senior, who will deliver the Senior English.

Growing up in Qingdao, China, Jiang realized that education was a way to change the trajectory of her life. And it did.

High test scores earned her a full scholarship to a high school in Cardiff, Wales. She attended Duke University for her undergraduate education and will represent Harvard Kennedy School as the University’s Graduate Orator.

One of her friends had the same early understanding about education. But while Jiang had plenty of time to study, her friend — the daughter of fishmongers — had to help before and after school at her parents’ shop.

“It’s almost like you’re standing at a railway,” Jiang said, “and you know you have to hop off. Otherwise, your life will always be the same.” Jiang’s path shifted, and her friend’s didn’t.

The disparity got Jiang thinking about a question that would guide her educational journey: “What does it mean to have equality, fairness, and social justice?”

In Cardiff, where Jiang arrived not knowing English, she became interested in economics. “I trace it back to middle school,” she said. “When you see those hardships, why do they happen? What would the solution be?”

She continued studying economics at Duke and became increasingly interested in philosophy and politics, reading the work of thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and William L. Rowe. To Jiang, economics felt like learning to drive a car, and philosophy felt like learning where to take it.

She also hosted a boxing club, having learned the sport growing up. Despite standing at around 5 feet, 3 inches tall, Jiang often prepared for competitions by sparring with men.

“It strengthens your character,” she said. “You have to look at them eye-to-eye and not be scared — because if you close your eyes, you cannot block the punch you can’t see, and you cannot hit a target you cannot see.” 

Jiang worked in private-sector finance after Duke, thinking she might become an economist, but she felt the work was too far removed from the people she wanted to serve. The instinct brought her to the Kennedy School’s two-year M.P.A./I.D. program in international development.

She joined a class of 77 students from 34 countries. As she arrived, she writes in her address, “the countries I knew only as colorful shapes on a map turned into real people — with laughter, dreams, and the perseverance of surviving the long winter in Cambridge.”

She found her fellow students as idealistic as she was about supporting communities across the world — and one another on campus. When classmates lost loved ones or went through other tough experiences, friends from the program came to their aid, making sure they were eating and were not lonely.

“It makes us realize that this kind of empathy or human connection is beyond the countries,” she said.

She also continued studying philosophy, taking a class, and later a tutorial, with Arthur Isak Applbaum, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values. Reading philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s thoughts on recognizing the humanity of those very different from himself helped inspire her, more than 400 years later, to write her own reflection on the topic.

In her speech, Jiang encourages people to listen to one another without judgment, looking for shared beliefs rather than conflict.

“If we still believe in a shared future,” she writes, “let’s not forget: Those we label as enemies, they, too, are human. In seeing their humanity, we find our own.”

When your father is a high-school Latin teacher, “The Aeneid for Boys and Girls” is bedtime story material. At least, that was the case for Scully.

“The story was not in Latin,” he clarified, “but I had ancient history stories floating around from pretty early on.”

When it came time to choose a language at nearby Taunton High School, he remembers his father joking that he was allowed to study whichever one he wanted — as long as it was Latin.

Fortunately, Scully loved it.

“From day one,” he said, “I was hooked.” He took every Latin class the school offered, and when he was done, he continued independent study courses with his Latin teacher, Jessica Ouellette.

With her support, he worked toward publishing a translation of the first poem in Ovid’s “Amores,” from 16 B.C. Though others had translated the text before, he wanted to preserve its original metric playfulness.

“You can read Latin, and it can be an intellectual thing,” he said. “But I think trying to make poetry accessible to people in the way that it would have been 2,000 years ago bridges history in a way that is really exciting.”

Scully, a resident of Adams House, planned to concentrate in classics and government but realized his interests better aligned with a joint concentration in classics and religion. From sophomore year on, he split the bulk of his academic work studying the relationship between politics and religion in the ancient world and how they shape the modern U.S.

His former area of interest led to his thesis about how Romans in Late Antiquity balanced their Roman and Christian identities. While most people accept today that one can embrace both a religious and national identity, many Romans found this inconceivable.

“People at this time are trying to make sense of the fact of, ‘Well, if I am Roman and I am Christian, what does that mean? How are the two different? How do I make sense of the parts where it doesn’t seem like I can be both?’”

He found those fundamental questions relevant to the modern relationship between religion and government in the U.S. While mainstream U.S. history highlights religion’s impact on certain eras — The Great Awakening, the Civil Rights Movement — Scully studied its persistent presence over time.

Learning about evangelicalism and the landscape of Protestantism in the U.S. while studying ancient analogues fascinated Scully.

“This is the intersection I want to work at,” he said, “seeing what comparisons I can draw that maybe people haven’t thought to put in the conversation.”

His studies also affected how Scully approached his own faith and community service.

“Every work of religious scholarship begins with something like, ‘We don’t really know what religion is,’” Scully said, smiling. “It’s not easy to provide a definition that isn’t just a list of examples.” He finds that lack of certainty — and expansive approach — helpful in his volunteer work with queer interfaith communities.

“The lines we’re drawing are almost always arbitrary and usually based on at least one misconception,” he said. “Thinking critically about that leads to more inclusive activism.”

Besides introducing Scully to age-appropriate epics in childhood, Scully’s father, Christopher, also provided an example to Scully in a different way: He was Harvard’s Latin Orator in 1994. Family legend has it that his grandmother showed up not knowing that his father was about to deliver a Commencement address.

This time, though, Scully’s parents will know. He credits his mother, who graduated from Harvard as Elisa Leone in 1996 with a degree in social anthropology, for holding him accountable to reach the goals he set for education, and his life.

“I’ve been truly extremely fortunate to have a family that’s been so supportive of me doing a thing that’s kind of obscure and not, you know, employable,” he said. “The fact that things seem to be working out so far is a testament to them.”

Reimann was born and raised in Apple Valley, Minnesota, with parents who encouraged him and his two older siblings to pursue their own interests. It took each on a different path: His sister is a nurse; his brother is a nuclear submarine officer with the U.S. Navy; and Reimann hopes to attend law school and practice environmental law.

As a first-year, though, Reimann’s vision wasn’t quite so clear. In high school, he said, “I loved every subject.” He trusted that he’d find his way to a fulfilling academic experience and, as one of the only openly queer students from his high school, “the personal space to fully explore who I was,” he writes in his English Oration.

At first, Reimann, a resident of Mather House, thought he might concentrate in history and literature or social studies, which would allow him to take a broad range of classes. A general education course he took freshman year shifted his trajectory: “Life and Death in the Anthropocene.”

The course, taught by Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, encouraged Reimann to think about climate change and environmental problems from a range of academic and personal perspectives.

“They really touch every aspect of human life that’s out there,” he said. “I found myself constantly thinking about it when I would leave class.”

A lover of nature who would go on to join the steering committee for the First-Year Outdoors Program, Reimann decided to pursue a joint concentration in environmental science and public policy and comparative religion. Though he appreciated the technocratic element of environmental studies, the added focus on religion helped him balance policy with a big-picture idea of what he was trying to protect in the first place.

With guidance from Terry Tempest Williams, the Harvard Divinity School writer-in-residence, Reimann developed a deep interest in conservation. His joint major, and his conservation interest, sparked his senior thesis on Bears Ears National Monument, a federally protected area in southeastern Utah.

One of the most culturally dense landscapes in the U.S., the federal monument contains artifacts from different Native American tribes dating back thousands of years. Reimann was interested in how political organizing across different tribes that described the area as “sacred” helped earn it federal protection in 2016 — and how the same idea of “sacredness” was used by different groups to reduce its size the following year.

“The government just doesn’t have the right policy tools to be able to create space to talk about these claims,” he said.

Just as his thesis can be traced to first-year discoveries, so too can his speech. The title, “This World is Not Conclusion,” is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem that he read during a first-year seminar.

“I was having this big moment of, ‘Oh gosh, what am I going to do? How do I think about this opportunity?’” said Reimann. “And I think a lot of the poem is about how the circumstances of the day that you’re in right now are going to change. There’s going to be something that comes next.”

He felt especially struck by the final two lines of the poem: “Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul —”

“You can have a lot of money or you can have a lot of power,” Reimann said, “but still, the tooth is going to nibble — so you better listen.”

The poem helped him be comfortable letting his curiosities guide him as he started his undergraduate experience. It also helped him process its conclusion.

“In this time when there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear, I think it can be reassuring that there is something coming next, and we have the agency to go and be a part of creating that,” he said. “It’s not just an end. New things are beginning.”

First-year Ph.D. students at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying in Harvard Medical School’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program are facing an unprecedented challenge as they begin a process that will soon lead to one of the most consequential decisions in their careers: finding the right lab and mentor for their research.

“I’m supposed to be choosing labs, but all of the labs I’m talking to and rotating in, they have no idea what the funding situation is, if they can take students, if they have money for our salaries or the projects we want to do,” said Jason Biundo, a first-year doctoral student. “It feels disappointing.”

The University has been buffeted in recent weeks by a series of Trump administration moves to halt or cut federal research funds, beginning on April 15 when the administration announced it would freeze $2.2 billion in grants. In response, Harvard has filed suit, arguing the government’s actions and demands violate federal law and the University’s First Amendment rights.

Harvard is not the only institution of higher education in the nation losing federal research funds. The administration has targeted at least two dozen others and made at least $11 billion in cuts. Scientists say the losses threaten to upend the government-higher education partnership that has led to medical breakthroughs that saved millions of lives and launched numerous companies in the post-war period.

An integral part of that innovation ecosystem involves ensuring a steady pipeline of up-and-coming researchers.

Graduate students are “the engines in our labs that are generating all these new ideas and all this data,” said Beth Stevens, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Their salaries are covered by federal funds. It’s so fundamentally important: the ability to recruit amazing talent, keep amazing talent, and then support them in the next phases of their careers where they’re going to apply for grants. It’s the way we do it.”

Ph.D. students doing work in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program typically spend their first year rotating between labs, both “auditioning” for long-term research positions and doing their own assessments: Is it a good cultural fit? Would the principal investigator be a good mentor for their personality and career goals? Would they be able to do the kind of research they’re passionate about? By the third year of the program, students’ salaries should be covered by a combination of their own federal grants and work they do to assist their PIs on the PIs’ grants. 

Biundo plans to study spinal cord injuries, a topic that’s deeply personal to him: When he was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he suffered a serious spinal cord injury that left him partially paralyzed.

“Recently one of the best funders of spinal cord injury research, the Department of Defense’s [Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs], had its funding cut. It was about $40 million, a third of all spinal cord injury funding,” Biundo said. “I think it was already an underfunded condition to begin with, with such a large patient population, and to see that is really disheartening for the future of spinal cord research.”

Postdoc Cherish Taylor fears her funding will be terminated at the end of the current funding cycle because the program falls under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.

The funding uncertainty isn’t just impacting doctoral candidates. Cherish Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher studying environmental risk factors for the onset, progression, and severity of psychiatric disorders, has been funded by the NIH Blueprint Diversity Specialized Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Advancement in Neuroscience Award (D-SPAN). The program supported graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from diverse backgrounds, including groups that have been under-represented in neuroscience. 

“People of color, even to some extent women, but less so nowadays, and certainly people in the LGBTQ community, we are minorities within the STEM field. You may be the only person that looks like you in your program, in your department. Having this type of grant program is nice for remembering that you aren’t actually the only person who looks like you in the field.” 

Taylor fears her funding will be terminated at the end of the current funding cycle because the program falls under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, which has been a target of the current administration.

“My PI has repeatedly assured me that she will do whatever she can to provide funding for me,” Taylor said. “But it still doesn’t remove that emotional burden of knowing your peers are not in the same place, people you know and care about and want the best for.”

Harvard President Alan Garber announced on May 14 that the University is dedicating $250 million of central funding to support research affected by suspensions and cancellations. 

“We stand behind our thousands of outstanding faculty, postdoctoral, staff, and student researchers,” Garber said. “Together they continue to make revolutionary discoveries, cure illness, deepen our understanding of the world, and translate that understanding into impact and invaluable teaching and mentorship that will produce the next generation of leading scientists and innovators. It is crucial for this country, the economy, and humankind that this work continues.”

Some labs may be able to support junior researchers through philanthropic funding, industry partnerships, or operational adjustments. But uncertainty remains.

“At the beginning of the year, things felt like, you’re starting a new Ph.D. program, and you have a very bright future ahead,” said Biundo. “And then you’re hit with the uncertainty of this career path as a whole.” 

Had it not been for wildfires, Rupen Dajee may never have gone to graduate school.

They’re a seasonal occurrence in his home state of California, where he was a firefighter-paramedic before coming to Harvard Kennedy School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management to complete a dual M.P.A./M.B.A. degree program. He’ll graduate from the Kennedy School this week.

After college, Dajee became a licensed emergency medical technician working on an ambulance in Los Angeles in the area once known as South Central. What started out as a rewarding side job became a passion. So he went to paramedic school and trained as a firefighter, joining a small rural fire department in the mountains outside of the city.

There, Dajee experienced the technology inequities that rural emergency responders like firefighters have to overcome just to do what is already a difficult job.

“I would get sent out to wildfires during the summers and experience communications issues,” he said. “It’s a really tough technological environment to operate within and so, I thought, ‘What can I do to help with that?’”

Dajee started a technology venture called Twisted Kelp that develops tools to help solve some of the field challenges facing wildland firefighting, emergency services, and disaster management.

The infrastructure that enables emergency communications to work can fail under harsh conditions or may be insufficient for the vast expanses and difficult rural terrain, forcing firefighters to make some tough calls.

“You need to start thinking, ‘Do we send people down there, do we not because we’re not able to support adequate communications? Is that a vital area we still have to send people into even if we can’t cover it?’ There can be gaps in areas of opportunity where technology can help to solve those problems, to enable greater capabilities.”

The company produces satellite tracking and communications solutions with an online interface that overlays fire maps and infrared data so firefighters can see where personnel and equipment are positioned or needed. Another product enables emergency radio service using Internet Protocol packets. The company also developed a digitized version of a pocket-size booklet called the Incident Response Pocket Guide that firefighters often carry on them to reference instructions on the fly for an array of scenarios.

Because technology advances for the public sector are often longer-cycle and can affect a much broader scale than the private sector, Dajee said he realized it would take more than an M.B.A. to make his company truly effective. The focus on leadership and problem-solving on a grand scale at the Kennedy School and Sloan’s emphasis on principled business innovation were motivating, he said.

“Leadership and management shouldn’t just be about gross revenue maximization,” Dajee said. “It’s about the people, their context, and the environment,” as well as “trying to push the boundaries of what’s possible and what good that you can bring into the world with business.”

After Commencement, Dajee will return to L.A., where he spent three weeks in January fighting the devastating wildfire in the Pacific Palisades, an area he had lived near for many years.

“I knew almost every street where the fires were burning and had driven up and down those streets for a better part of 10 years,” said Dajee. “It was very surreal seeing these places that I knew, these homes that I had passed by many times and recognized, burned to the ground.”

Dajee said he’s immensely grateful to have had an opportunity to study at Harvard and MIT when so few of his colleagues in emergency services have chosen to attend graduate school. Most have a “deep passion” for what they do but struggle with systemic issues facing emergency healthcare and rural emergency services in the U.S., he said.

“It’s important that the work they do is recognized because they put their lives on the line on a daily basis in the harshest conditions to keep others safe, with long-term consequences that are often unsupported,” he said. “And while it is great that everyone thanks their first responders when they have a need for them, it is also important to remember that the work continues in the background even when they don’t.”