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Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research
Mortality rates between Black, white Americans narrow — except in case of infants

70-year study finds widening gap despite longer life expectancy for both racial groups


Newborns in a hospital nursery.

Diane Macdonald/Getty Images

Health

Mortality rates between Black, white Americans narrow — except in case of infants

70-year study finds widening gap despite longer life expectancy for both racial groups

5 min read

Americans are living longer than ever. And the disparity in overall mortality rates between Black and white Americans has narrowed since the 1950s. Among infants, however, the gap has widened, with Black infants dying at twice the rate of white infants, a new study reports.

A team of researchers, including Associate Professor Soroush Saghafian, founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard, collected and analyzed data across the U.S. from 1950 to 2019 to determine how mortality rates and disparities have changed over time.

In general, life expectancy has improved for both Black Americans (from 60.5 years in the 1950s to 76 years in the 2010s, a 20.4 percent increase) and white Americans (from 69 years in the 1950s to 79.3 years in the 2010s, a 13 percent rise), according to the new research. The racial gap has also improved, though Black adults still have an 18 percent higher mortality rate.

The picture for Black infants is far bleaker. While mortality rates for both Black and white infants have improved, the disparity between races has worsened. The mortality rate for Black infants was 92 percent higher than for white infants in the 1950s. Today the difference is 115 percent. Medical conditions during pregnancy were the leading cause of excess death in the 2010s.

In this edited conversation, Saghafian explains where these disparities have persisted and what needs to happen to address them.

Soroush Saghafian.

Soroush Saghafian.

Photo by Grace DuVal


Life expectancy has been improving for 70 years, and yet the difference between mortality in Black and white infants has actually gotten worse. What’s happened since the 1950s?

There is a public understanding that healthcare has improved over time in the U.S., and that life expectancy and other healthcare metrics are improving. This study is showing that, while all that is true, there have been gaps between different races, specifically between Black and white Americans.

When focusing on adults, we see that, fortunately, things have improved. But in the case of Black infants, they are now dying twice as often as white infants. That’s just a huge number. And the fact that it has worsened since the 1950s is of great concern. Public policy and public health authorities should have put their utmost priority on at least improving such gaps. I mean, the ideal is to make measures like this equal between different races. But at least you can improve things.

What accounts for the disparity in infant rates?

We did look at the causes of death, and it turns out that, for infants, the main reasons for excess mortalities are medical. There is, unfortunately, a large amount of healthcare inequality, and it’s multidimensional. There’s access to care, but also quality of care. There’s a large set of factors that cause these disparities.

However, the goal of this particular study was not to study the reasons, but to point out the important differences. The hope is that it can inform other studies to get to the reasons, and to inform policymakers about what they should do. Our work raises the critical question of why, over seven decades post-World War II, we still haven’t figured out a solution for this enormous problem.

“This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have.”

Several shorter-span studies have also found mortality rate disparities between races. What does this study tell us that the others didn’t?

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the whole data over seven decades — the entire postwar era — has been collected and analyzed. When you look at shorter periods, you might not get the full picture.

Looking at a more extended period, we can think more carefully about all the claims that say, “Look, healthcare is improving” — which, to be clear, is mostly true. We are still seeing that, by and large, healthcare is improving for both Black and white Americans in most dimensions.

The problem is the comparisons. For instance, are things getting better for Black people compared to white people? When we look at measures like excess infant and childhood mortality among Black Americans during this whole seven-decade period, it becomes clear that not only have things not improved, but they have gotten worse. However, if you looked at, say, only three decades, instead of seven, you might not be able to see this full picture.

Your results showed that 5 million excess deaths of Black Americans could’ve been avoided over the past 70 years. Now that the disparities have been laid out, what needs to happen next?

As I mentioned, we didn’t go into the details of the causes, and I think that needs a lot more attention from both researchers and public policy and public health authorities. At the same time, our findings raise important questions for both researchers and authorities.

This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have. This, in turn, raises an important question: What should the priorities for public policy and public health officials be now and in the next few decades?


Healthy Minds Survey asks students about mental health

University will use results to tailor resources and support to students’ needs


Giang Nguyen (left) and  Robin Glover.

Giang Nguyen (left) and Robin Glover.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Healthy Minds Survey asks students about mental health

University will use results to tailor resources and support to students’ needs

6 min read

On Wednesday the University will launch the Healthy Minds Survey, which asks all degree-seeking undergraduate and graduate students about their current mental health, as well as their awareness and utilization of Harvard’s mental health resources and support. Sponsored by the Provost Office of Student Affairs and University Health Services, the confidential survey will be open until April 23.

The survey, developed at the University of Michigan and administered at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, will provide Harvard with national benchmarking data to gauge progress and evaluate challenges related to student mental health. It is one of a series of steps Harvard has taken in response to the University’s Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health released in 2020.

To learn more about the survey and how the University will use its results, the Gazette sat down with Robin Glover, associate provost for student affairs, and Giang Nguyen, associate provost for campus health and well-being and executive director of Harvard University Health Services.


What is the Healthy Minds Survey?

Glover: The Healthy Minds Survey is a national survey based at the University of Michigan that has provided data for more than 15 years on the mental health of students in colleges and universities across the U.S. It includes a lot of the questions that we wanted to ask our students about their mental health and whether the resources and support we’re currently offering meet students’ needs. Without asking, we don’t really know how we’re doing. All of this information will inform decisions about any changes to the services and support we provide to our students.

Nguyen: The Healthy Minds Survey will also help us evaluate where we stand within the context of the broader mental health needs of college and university students all over the country. While the University has recently administered other surveys, such as the HESMA and Pulse surveys, Healthy Minds is the only University-wide survey specifically focused on student mental health and benchmarked against other universities.

How will the survey’s results be used?

Nguyen: In response to previous assessments of the student mental health experience, we improved student access to mental health support by implementing the 24/7 CAMHS Cares phone support line, providing access to TimelyCare for virtual mental health visits, and implementing a new clinical access coordinator team staffed by CAMHS licensed clinicians. We’ve also implemented campus-wide educational programs for members of our community to address mental health needs. Through the Healthy Minds Survey, we want to know whether our students know that these resources exist, what their experience has been with them, and which resources should be added or strengthened.

Periodically surveying students about their experiences and needs regarding health, and specifically mental health, is good public health practice. So, we will likely be conducting additional surveys every three years in the future.

Why is this survey important, and why should students take it?

Glover: We are really encouraging every student who is invited — every undergraduate and graduate student — to complete the survey. We want to hear as many different voices from as many different perspectives as possible. This will give us a complete picture of the mental health status of our students, as well as feedback about the programs that we offer here. A broad response across the University is important because an undergraduate student is different from a graduate student, and a professional student at the Medical School is different from one at the Business School.

What type of questions will be included and how long will it take?

Nguyen: In addition to asking about awareness and utilization of mental health services on campus, we do ask students to anonymously share with us their own experiences with mental health, which may include questions about depression, anxiety, body image issues, or other mental health diagnoses. We also ask questions about how connected they are with the community around them, as well as any exposures to trauma or substance abuse in the past. All of this feedback helps us to understand, in a more direct way, the experience of our students.

Glover: In total, the survey will take about 25 minutes, and we recognize that’s a significant commitment. As a thank-you for their time, students will receive a $15 gift card after completing the survey. Students may also exit the survey at any time, or they can pause taking it and pick it up again later using their personal survey link. 

Mental health can be a difficult topic. How will the responses be kept confidential?

Nguyen: The folks at the national Healthy Minds Study have been doing this since 2007. Because they know how sensitive this subject matter is for participants, they have worked out very thoughtful and careful approaches to protecting students’ privacy.

Glover: That’s correct. They are contractually committed to anonymizing all responses and will not generate or maintain any internal connection logs with IP addresses. No information linking a student’s identity to their survey response, including an incomplete survey response, will be available to Harvard, any of the other participating universities, or any other party that may have access to the anonymized data.

Why is it important for Harvard to continue to invest in student mental health awareness services and resources?

Nguyen: We know that throughout academic life, our students face challenges. These are sometimes related to campus life and sometimes related to things going on in the broader world. We want to support our students throughout their academic journey at Harvard by helping them address their well-being and developing the capacity to strengthen their well-being in all its facets. And we recognize that one of the most critical facets of well-being is emotional well-being.

Glover: Our undergraduate and graduate students are here one year, two years, five years, seven years. Harvard is their home, their community during that time. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re offering them all the services and support that ensures their well-being, and that they feel comfortable about getting those services, support, and resources, where they need it, in a timely manner, and without judgment.

It’s very important for all of us to know that mental health is just as important as physical health. If someone says they’re getting a physical examination, people don’t think twice. And we want taking care of mental health to be the same way.


You, too, can never, ever relax

In ‘Make Your Own Job,’ Erik Baker explores how entrepreneurialism has altered Americans’ relationship with work


Work & Economy

You, too, can never, ever relax

Illustration of a business person running on a treadmill. (Ben Sanders/Ikon Images)

Illustration by Ben Sanders/Ikon Images

5 min read

In ‘Make Your Own Job,’ Erik Baker explores how entrepreneurialism has altered Americans’ relationship with work

There are lots of entrepreneurs these days. Founders of businesses, of course, are entrepreneurs, and so are the managers below them. Ride-share drivers, influencers, life coaches: entrepreneurs. There are self-styled intrapreneurs, solopreneurs, and sidepreneurs, all of whom embody the ideals of entrepreneurialism in their own unique ways.

In “Make Your Own Job,” history of science lecturer Erik Baker explores the American embrace of entrepreneurialism and why, for all the popularity of the approach, it can feel so exhausting.

Baker got interested in the topic as his friends graduated from college, landed well-paying corporate jobs, and quickly became miserable. One told him that she felt like Natalie Portman’s character in the sci-fi movie “Annihilation,” who descends into a black pit and discovers a sinister doppelganger. There was something interesting, Baker thought, about how work changes our relationships with ourselves.

Book cover: "Make Your Own Job."

In “Make Your Own Job,” Baker traces America’s enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism to the end of the 19th century. It was the conclusion of the first era of American industrialization, and the rapid electrification of manufacturing plants, among other developments, depressed demand for factory labor. After high levels of job growth throughout the 1800s, Baker writes, “The rate of employment growth in manufacturing began to taper off in 1890 and became negative around 1920.”

Social scientists called this job loss “structural” or “technological” unemployment: “Unemployment that was not the product of transient, cyclical crises,” Baker writes, “but was rather a side effect of irreversible changes to the technical structure of American industry.”

In response, Americans shifted from an industrious work ethic to an entrepreneurial one infused with ideas of personal transcendence in New Thought. Instead of focusing on the inherent value of hard work, the new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition. A cohort of success writers, across racial and gender demographics, began preaching a similar ideology: “Make your own job.”

Baker chronicles how entrepreneurialism, and its very definition, expanded over time. In the early 1900s, orthodox management styles that focused primarily on production processes gave way to “entrepreneurial management,” which focused not on merely managing employees, but inspiring them. At Harvard Business School, among other institutions, management intellectuals preached the importance of leaders who made workers “not truly feel like subordinates,” in Baker’s words, “but like members of a team or a family, or even a revolutionary cadre.”

The new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition. 

In Baker’s narrative, entrepreneurial fervor tends to increase during times of economic stress. During the Great Depression, “odd jobs” became a glorified pursuit. Doing freelance work was not just a way to make a few dollars, but, as the authors of the 1933 book “Make Your Own Job: Opportunities in Unusual Vocations” put it, a way for someone to build “a small one-man business of his own.” Women over 40, who often faced hiring discrimination, could embrace this individualistic ethic. “We Are Forty and We Did Get Jobs,” boasted the title of one self-help book aimed at women.

Baker uses these references to self-help literature to illustrate shifts in national sentiment. Authors such as Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich” remains popular to this day, encouraged readers to turn work into a calling that relied on specialized knowledge, creativity, and self-promotion. “With the changed conditions ushered in by the world economic collapse,” Hill wrote, “came also the need for newer and better ways of marketing personal services.”

By the mid-20th century, Baker writes, interest in entrepreneurialism had surged into non-economic fields, with Abraham Maslow and other psychologists becoming cheerleaders. “The most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society,” Maslow wrote, “would be not 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.”

It also became a catch-all explanation for a lack of economic development. As the fate of American cities sharply diverged with the relocation and shuttering of factories during the 1960s, certain experts blamed increasing unemployment in places like Detroit on a lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

With these mid-century changes, Baker argues, almost everyone could think of themselves as entrepreneurs: leaders of companies, managers who could inspire their co-workers, employees who could take more initiative, and even unemployed people looking for work. “It was far from obvious that high-tech corporate executives … were doing exactly the same sort of thing as a laid-off Black worker taking adult education classes, or a shopkeeper in India contemplating a change in management methods,” Baker writes. “But midcentury thinking about entrepreneurship and development depended upon precisely this equivalence.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t so much a scarcity of work that drew people toward entrepreneurialism, Baker argues, but a scarcity of jobs people found meaningful. This yearning was filled in part by leaders who encouraged employees to see their work as a source of enlightenment. Apple’s Steve Jobs would state that competing with IBM was not an economic imperative but a moral one — lest IBM win and stifle innovation. Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law was supported by young, ambitious employees. When asked how many hours he expected them to work, Nader deadpanned: “The ideal is 100.”

The popularity of entrepreneurialism continues to this day, Baker says, in part because it glorifies a perpetual state of risk. With fears of technological job displacement rising along with the number of people in freelance or temporary roles, more people can consider themselves the center of an entrepreneurial operation — even if the operation is just themselves.

Reading “Make Your Own Job,” one can see why Baker’s friend found herself experiencing science-fiction levels of misery. When failure always feels tangible, it’s hard to relax. For Baker, entrepreneurialism requires that everyone keep a solitary eye on the future — and remain anxious in the present.


Aramont Fellowships champion research at the forefront of innovation

Winning projects selected for potential to fuel scientific progress


Campus & Community

Aramont Fellowships champion research at forefront of innovation

Illustration that reflect a brain, AI and science in general.
6 min read

Winning projects selected for potential to fuel scientific progress

Offering a better understanding of the universe. Revealing a possible layer of gene regulation in human cells. Treating muscular diseases with implantable neurotechnologies. These are examples of the research supported by the Aramont Fellowship Fund for Emerging Science Research, which acknowledges the visionary work of exceptional early career scientists.

Established in 2017 through a gift from the Aramont Charitable Foundation, the award recognizes groundbreaking scientific innovation and exploration by providing crucial funding for high-risk, high-reward research that otherwise might not be conducted. This year’s cohort includes five scholars spearheading projects with the potential to significantly impact their respective fields and advance novel discoveries with wide-ranging implications.

“The Aramont Fund’s transformative impact on the awardees’ work and careers is inspiring,” said Vice Provost for Research John Shaw. “Investing in our early career scholars is vital to driving scientific innovation and nurturing the next generation of researchers. We all look forward to following the newest cohort’s achievements.”


Guanhao Huang

“Exploring Gravitational Physics Using Nano-mechanics on a Chip”

Guanhao Huang,
Postdoctoral fellow in applied physics, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The nature of gravity at the quantum level and the mysterious properties of dark matter are two of the biggest open questions in modern physics. While past breakthroughs have come from large-scale international collaborations using massive scientific instruments, an exciting new approach is emerging: using nanomechanical devices in university labs to probe these mysteries. Unlike traditional methods that rely on laser-controlled individual atoms, these tiny but relatively heavy devices — often made of materials like diamonds — act as ultra-sensitive quantum force sensors and sources of gravity. This makes them uniquely suited to explore new gravitational effects at microscopic scales. Most current research focuses on only a few vibrational states and leaves many unexplored, which limits the potential for studying gravity. To overcome this challenge, Huang aims to develop ultra-precise sensors by engineering and controlling these devices at the quantum level across a broad range of vibrational states. This could open new doors for detecting dark matter and gravitational phenomena, offering fresh insights into both the microscopic and cosmic scales — all using compact, tabletop experiments within a university setting. His work has the potential to reshape the understanding of the universe in ways previously thought possible only with massive, billion-dollar facilities.


Giacomo Maddaloni

“Discovering Brain Circuits That Change Seasonally and Offer Clues to the Seasonal Exacerbation of Diseases from Neuropsychiatric to Cardiovascular”

Giacomo Maddaloni,

Postdoctoral fellow in genetics, Harvard Medical School.

Credit: Ajja Photography

The ability to anticipate the light-dark cycle of the days and seasons — and to organize appropriate responses — are vital adaptive strategies that have been observed across the animal kingdom and in humans. When thrown off, the sleep-wake cycle and other biological rhythms can cause or exacerbate disease. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying such adaptations. Giacomo Maddaloni has undertaken studies that led to the discovery of a previously unappreciated mouse brain circuit and form of plasticity that proves critical for synchronizing activity and sleep-wake rhythms. As part of that work, he discovered that specialized neurons function as initial broadcasters of day length information in a region of the brain that controls many behaviors and physiological processes. Now Maddaloni is expanding on this work by characterizing the neurons’ molecular identity and deciphering how they decode and relay information to orchestrate whole-organism responses. He aims to identify a master brain hub vital for accurate circadian and seasonal adaptations, and molecular and circuit pathways, with far-reaching translational therapeutic potential.


Silvi Rouskin

“Unveiling Human Riboswitches Through High Throughput Detection and Analysis”

Silvi Rouskin

Assistant professor of microbiology, HMS.

Credit: Gretchen Ertl


Riboswitches are dynamic RNA structures that control various metabolic pathways in simple organisms. They have not been detected in humans, which is likely due to the technical limitations of research. The discovery of human riboswitches could enable new therapeutic targets for metabolic diseases and change our understanding of how gene expression is regulated. Silvi Rouskin has already identified promising riboswitch candidates, and her unique integration of experimental and computational approaches puts her team in a strong position to make this pivotal discovery — potentially revealing a previously unrecognized layer of gene regulation in human cells. This finding would fill a critical gap in the knowledge of cellular biology and open new avenues for medical research and drug development.


Shriya Srinivasan

 “Accessible Neurotechnology and Human-Machine Interfacing”

Shriya Srinivasan

Assistant professor of bioengineering, SEAS.

Eliza Grinnell/SEAS

Implantable neurotechnologies hold promise for treating muscular diseases and are expected to be available as a consumer technology within the next 10 to 15 years, but the significant invasiveness required to implant the devices will limit accessibility and exacerbate gaps in care and capabilities. Shriya Srinivasan aims to make neurotechnology scalable and accessible by developing neurostimulation devices that can be precisely implanted through a single skin injection. Preliminary prototypes in rats have demonstrated that Srinivasan’s lab can read high-resolution neural signals and stimulate discrete muscles for fine motor control. The system can stimulate the muscles to provide sensory feedback about the movement of a prosthesis or robotic, augment forces in weak muscles, and potentially relay complex physical data through the body’s neural processing centers. The implications of Srinivasan’s project are significant for treating neuromuscular diseases, studying human sensorimotor performance, and advancing consumer technology.


Melanie Weber

“Geometry-informed Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning”

Melanie Weber.
Assistant professor of applied mathematics and of computer science, SEAS.


Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing scientific research, with foundation models driving breakthroughs that may hold the key to challenges such as climate change or currently incurable diseases. But there are limitations: Foundation models require extensive training data and substantial amounts of computing resources, posing challenges when the data is expensive or limited. For example, a foundation model for weather prediction may need training on millions of data points to provide accurate results. Encoding data geometry, such as symmetries arising from fundamental laws of physics, could significantly reduce the data and resources needed by providing the model with information it can use to avoid wasting resources on pursuing scenarios that we know cannot exist. Melanie Weber seeks to develop geometry-informed models that balance the strengths of current geometric models and general-purpose foundation models to produce models that are both resource-efficient and applicable to a wide range of scientific problems.


Civil discourse that exceeds 150 characters

New Ethics Center events mull real-life conflicts, with first focusing on improving campus discourse on hard topics in social media age


Campus & Community

Civil discourse that exceeds 150 characters

Nien-hê Hsieh (standing) posed a hypothetical to the panel.

Harvard Business School’s Nien-hê Hsieh (standing) posed a hypothetical to the panel.

Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

6 min read

New Ethics Center events mull real-life conflicts, with first focusing on improving campus discourse on hard topics in social media age

Social media exerts a powerful influence on college campuses. Has the technology helped broker new connections across ideological difference? Or has it simply siphoned students into conversations with those who share their views?

This was the topic of last Thursday’s inaugural Ethics IRL (or, in real life,) a new series organized by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Its format, inspired by the 1980s PBS show “Ethics in America,” uses the Socratic method to engage Harvard community members on pressing issues.

Things got underway with moderator Nien-hê Hsieh, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, posing a hypothetical: Assigned reading for a general-education course covers immigration, with students required to post their responses to a class discussion board.

One student writes: “I don’t understand why people who want to defend their country are being called racist, are being called xenophobic nationalists. Since when did it become a crime to defend the borders of your country?”

“I don’t see how you can live in a country where federal agents are ripping children from the arms of their parents and families,” responds another. “This is basically state-sanctioned trauma.”

On the panel were a dean, an activist, a journalist, an influencer, and a current undergraduate who largely avoids the technology. Hsieh instructed the group to put themselves in the place of students.

“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous.”

Soleil Golden ’24
Soleil Golden ’24,.
Soleil Golden.

“Would you give your honest opinion no matter what people might say in response to those posts? Would you carefully craft a neutral position and try not to attract your classmates’ attention?” he asked.

“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous,” answered Soleil Golden ’24, a premedical neuroscience student at Boston Children’s Hospital with more than 70,000 Instagram followers, who described using social media to hone her rhetorical skills. “If it’s anonymous, I think people would feel a lot freer in voicing their opinions.”

And what if the instructor pulled those comments into the lecture, pressing both students to elaborate on their positions?

“I think I’d be more inclined to speak out,” answered Brody Douglass ’27, an economics concentrator and Navy ROTC midshipman who said he limits social media in favor of in-person socializing. “I believe that, in general, better dialogue happens when it’s actually dialogue rather than just a series of discussion posts where words can be taken more easily out of context.”

Panelists offered a mix of deeply personal and evidence-based insights on the state of modern discourse. The series was introduced with support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Civil Discourse initiative.

“Can we imagine how this would have played out on social media?” Hsieh wondered.

“Perhaps there would have been some grains of interesting conversation,” replied researcher and activist Yaёl Eisenstat, a policy director at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, who noted the platforms’ influence on the very formulation of the assignment. “But chances are, in the way social media is constructed today, it would have been drowned out by the more emotional.”

And what if both students were doxed? What if the resulting fear drove one to withdraw from the university entirely?

“I think would be extremely sad if the first student left,” said Sewell Chan ’98, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Speaking directly to the charge that universities have become inhospitable to conservatives, he continued: “We live in a world in which 40 percent or more of the country not only agrees with student number one but would say things much harsher. If we’re acting like we’re so offended or bothered by student number one that we can’t handle what they said, that should say something about us.”

As the conversation progressed, panelists kept returning to the tension between the goals of higher education and the algorithmically driven platforms.

“Universities have a particular mission,” explained Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College. “Their mission is to search for Veritas, as close as they can get. They do that by bringing diverse perspectives and points of view to an environment. They create certain conditions that are different than free speech conditions, which is that you can say what you want to say but you have to defend it with reason and evidence.

“I can stand outside and say, ‘The Earth is flat;’ it’s perfectly within my free speech rights,” he continued. “I can say it in the classroom, but don’t expect it to get marked correct in my Earth and Planetary Sciences class.”

But Eisenstat said that social media algorithms actively undermine the pursuit Khurana described.

“The world that social media has helped create affects how students interact with each other on campus,” she argued. “What the world of social media has done is made it easier and easier to both choose your silos but also be pushed into silos that you’re not aware you’re being pushed into. … It’s the personalization. It’s the using all your human behavioral data to then turn around and target you with the information that is going to most appeal to your lizard brain.”

The event ended with panelists sharing suggestions for community members who want to help foster a climate more conducive to open exchange.

“Push yourself to engage with people who are not like-minded,” Eisenstat said. “But do not therefore think it is too hard to create the social media environment we want and to push for the legislation that would help.”

“I’ve spent hours talking to people online,” Golden said. “While those conversations can be frustrating and you can feel like you’re losing the argument, I have not engaged in any social interaction online where I haven’t walked away with a new piece of knowledge.”

“I now try to discipline myself,” Khurana said. “When I find myself disagreeing with somebody, I assume we’re plugged into different algorithms.”


More evidence for power of exercise in study of colon cancer survival

Post-treatment physical activity narrows gap between patients and general population


Detail of  thesneakers of a person exercising.
Health

Exercise can help colon cancer survivors live longer

Post-treatment physical activity narrows gap between patients and general population, study shows

3 min read

Regular physical activity after treatment for stage 3 colon cancer reduces and may even eliminate disparities in survival between those with cancer and those in a general population of similar age and sex, according to new Dana-Farber Cancer Institute research.

Colon cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. People with the disease face higher rates of premature death than people in the general population with matched characteristics such as age and sex.

“This study suggests that exercise can have a meaningful impact on long-term survival for patients,” said senior author Jeffrey Meyerhardt, co-director of the Colon and Rectal Care Center at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population.

Previous research suggested that colon cancer patients who are more active after treatment have longer survival. This study looked at data from two National Cancer Institute–sponsored Cancer and Leukemia Group B clinical trials — now part of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology — for patients with stage 3 colon cancer. In both trials, CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702, patients underwent surgery, were treated with chemotherapy, and were offered an option to self-report about lifestyle factors during and after treatment.

A total of 2,875 patients self-reported physical activity across the two trials. Survival rates were calculated after a median of six and 5.9 years of follow up, respectively, for CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702. Reported activity levels were converted into metabolic-equivalent hours per week, or MET-hours. A person who walks most days of the week for about an hour will get about 18 MET-hours of activity, Meyerhardt said.

The researchers found that for patients who were alive three years after treatment, those with high activity levels (18 or more MET-hours per week) had subsequent overall survival rates that were closer to those of the matched general population than those with low activity levels (fewer than three MET-hours per week).

For instance, in the analysis of data from CALGB 89803, three-year survivors with low levels of activity had overall survival rates that were 17.1 percent lower than the matched general population, while those with high activity levels had 3.5 percent lower overall survival rates.

In both trials, more activity was associated with improved survival rates and the benefits were seen in patients regardless of their age at the time of diagnosis. “Some exercise is better than none,” says Meyerhardt. “If you can’t get out for an hour, try 10 or 20 minutes.”

In a pooled analysis of data from the two trials, the researchers focused on the 1,908 patients who were alive without a recurrence of their cancer after three years. Among those who reported low activity levels, overall survival rates were 3.1 percent lower than the matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates that were 2.9 percent higher than the matched general population.

Exercise also reduced survival disparities in patients whose cancer came back within three years. Most tumor recurrences are seen within two or three years of diagnosis with stage 3 colon cancer. In these cases, treatment becomes very difficult. For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates 33.2 percent lower.

“Those who were more active had improvements in survival even if their cancer recurred,” Meyerhardt said. “And for those who did not experience a recurrence, their overall survival rates looked better than the matched general population.”


The research described in this study received funding from the National Institutes of Health.


When a stove’s virtues amount to more than just hot air

Science historian examines how Benjamin Franklin’s invention sparked new thinking on weather, technology


Collage of Benjamin Franklin, patent drawing of a stove he invented, and a Gulf Stream map he helped to chart.

Historian Joyce Chaplin’s latest book on Benjamin Franklin (center) explores one of his lesser-known inventions: a stove (left). The science behind it helped further understanding of atmospheric phenomena such as the Gulf Stream (right), which Franklin helped map for the first time.

Images via Library of Congress; illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Science & Tech

When a stove’s virtues amount to more than just hot air

8 min read

Science historian examines how Benjamin Franklin’s invention sparked new thinking on weather, technology

Joyce Chaplin thought she was done with Benjamin Franklin.

“But then I was reading about the Little Ice Age and the particularly bad winter of 1740 to 1741,” said Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. “Major harbors were reported as freezing over — in Boston, in London, in Venice. The consequence was famine in several places including Ireland, where as much as 20 percent of the population may have died — that’s a bigger toll than the more famous Great Hunger of the 19th century.

“And all along I kept thinking, ‘I know the dates 1740 and 1741 from somewhere.’”

Chaplin, an expert on early American science, technology, and medicine, eventually put things together. These were the years when Franklin — a humble printer who went on to become a world-renowned scientist, inventor, and statesman — devised the prototype for his Pennsylvania fireplace, a flatpack of iron plates colonists could assemble and insert into their hearths to improve heating.

“It was developed during this very, very cold winter as a climate adaptation,” explained Chaplin, who has written at length on Franklin’s scientific contributions. “The design was supposed to burn less wood yet make a room even warmer than an ordinary fireplace.”

Franklin went on to develop at least five separate iterations of the influential technology over half a century, moving from wood to coal for fuel. Chaplin’s newly released “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution” finds this seemingly modest invention catalyzing new thinking on weather, technology, and comfort.

We sat down with Chaplin, who is also affiliated faculty in the History of Science Department, to ask about the book and its many lessons for the 21st century. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Joyce Chaplin.

Joyce Chaplin.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer


You published an intellectual biography of Benjamin Franklin in 2006 and edited an edition of his autobiography for Norton a few years later. What draws you to this 18th-century figure time and again?

The popular conception is “Poor Richard,” Franklin’s alter ego from the almanacs he published. But he’s far more complicated than that. He was the youngest son of a Boston chandler, somebody who worked with his hands making soap and candles out of animal fat. It was a completely respectable but not very distinguished background.

The classic ways of getting ahead that were available to a man like Franklin included war or some kind of military career that would advance him beyond the rank he was born to. Politics, if he could get a foot in. Writing, perhaps. Science had also become a part of popular culture, with Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle becoming household names in the wake of their big discoveries.

I think Franklin looked over all these options. He eventually looked at Newton and thought: “Why not try that route?”

Book cover: "The Franklin Stove."

Is it fair to call the Franklin stove one of his lesser-known inventions?

For the moment, I think that’s fair. A lot of people know about Franklin inventing the lightning rod. Those who need progressive glasses at some point probably know he invented bifocals. Others have heard about his more charming inventions — his swimming fins, his folding chair/step stool for reaching books in the library. But given the climate framing of this particular invention, perhaps the public will start to embrace the stove as central to his life in science.

Let’s dig into the environmental issues Franklin faced during the winter of 1740 and ’41. It was more than frigid weather.

Franklin was aware that as more settlers were arriving, being born, and spreading across the landscape, they were going to deforest the territory and make firewood more expensive and possibly even inaccessible to the poor. We have his accounts of people stealing firewood or ripping off pieces of fences.

But the most ambitious part of his plan was to make people more comfortable than ever before. And the fact that it was colder than ever before makes that a really interesting manifestation of enlightenment confidence — that humans could use science and technology to make life better, whatever the circumstances.

“Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors.”

How did the stove help further understanding of the natural world?

Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors. He explained in a self-published pamphlet how his fireplace worked through the principle of convection: that air, when it’s warmed, will expand and rise. And what you want is some kind of heat source that does this layer by layer until the entire room is warmed.

But Franklin also used this concept to explain atmospheric phenomena outdoors. He used it to explain how storm systems move up the Atlantic coast. He eventually used it to explain the Gulf Stream — how heated air moves up from the Gulf of Mexico and out over the Atlantic Ocean with a relationship to the warmer current of water underneath. When making these grand statements, Franklin would often write something like: “Just like there’s a draft of air from your fireplace to the door.” It was a brilliant strategy for making science accessible to a reading public.

Franklin is known for his late-in-life abolitionism, but your book adds one more entry to the list of ways he profited from slavery before that. What new information did you uncover?

I knew from reading my colleague John Bezís-Selfa’s “Forging America” (2004) that there had been an iron industry in the colonies, including Pennsylvania. I also had a sense from reading Bezís-Selfa that enslaved Black people performed some of the labor on these estates.

I went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which holds most of the surviving records of the Pennsylvania iron industry, and indeed found these two enslaved men — Cesar and Streaphon — who worked in the iron establishment that made most of the Pennsylvania fireplaces.

One of these men — Streaphon — managed to buy his own freedom. That, to me, was an important indication that the desire to be free was a constant. It can be seen everywhere in early American history.

What compelled Franklin to try minimizing emissions from his stove?

He was appalled at the filthy air in places like London. So, he tried to design the last three versions of his stove to re-burn smoke — by sending the smoke that would otherwise be ascending into the chimney back into the fire.

Franklin pointed out, correctly, that smoke is really particles of unburned fuel. If you could burn it again, at least it’s more efficient. You’re wasting less fuel. You’re putting less junk into the air. He’s so concerned with doing this that a friend teases him for being “a universal smoke doctor.”

To me, it’s a very interesting statement about questioning the level of emissions that already seemed to be compromising human health. Of course, what gets identified decades after his death in 1790 is that some of these emissions are invisible. The American scientific observer and experimenter Eunice Foote documented the climate-altering effects of CO2 in 1856.

You connect today’s techno-optimism to Franklin and other inventors of his era, who thought they could invent their way out of a climate crisis. What lessons does your book hold for inheritors of this philosophy?

I don’t think Franklin meant to validate burning coal in the industrial sense, but he did validate it as an energy source. That says to me: Don’t pick the quick and obvious solution. Or at least be suspicious and monitor how it’s doing.

We should be wary of this silver bullet fantasy, that we need to find just one thing to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. Or that we can just shift to sustainable energy in the absence of climate mitigation before chemical changes in the atmosphere become too dire.

We’ll need more than one inventor, one device, one hero. There are just too many variables for one solution to be possible. We need to modify our course as soon as possible with a lot of solutions working together.


Is your shirt making you sick?

ChemFORWARD, winner of Belfer Center award, explains how its database of industrial chemicals can help protect human, environmental health


Health

Is your shirt making you sick?

Shirt.
4 min read

ChemFORWARD, winner of Belfer Center award, explains how its database of industrial chemicals can help protect human, environmental health

Have you ever thought of the chemicals that went into making your iPhone? Your favorite pleather chair? The shirt on your back? It takes thousands of chemicals to produce things we use every day, and some of them could be harmful to both your health and the planet’s.

ChemFORWARD, the 2024 winner of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership, is trying to make our products safer by creating a database of industrial chemicals and their effects on human and environmental health.

Heather McKenney, the science and safer chemistry lead at ChemFORWARD, was joined by Kennedy School experts as well as David Bourne, lead sustainability strategist at Google, in a panel last week at the Kennedy School’s Malkin Penthouse to discuss the company’s work as well as challenges the private sector faces in trying to reduce chemical hazards.

“We live in a world with thousands of chemicals,” said Henry Lee, Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and senior lecturer in Public Policy. “They are present in the clothes we wear, what we eat and drink, the furniture in our homes, and even in the health products that we buy. Thus, focusing on what society can do to ensure the protection of public health in this chemical-intense world is especially important.”

ChemFORWARD, a Washington D.C.-based 501c3, compiles and maintains a digital repository of “verified chemical hazard assessments,” or CHAs, available to corporate subscribers in order to make informed and environmentally sound decisions about the chemicals used in their supply chains.

“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use,” said McKenney, who was a lead for the toxicology and product safety team at Honest Company, a baby and beauty products maker, for six years.

“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use.”

Heather McKenney, ChemFORWARD
Heather McKenney and David Bourne.

Heather McKenney and David Bourne.

Benn Craig/Belfer Center

McKenney said there are well-intentioned companies that want to certify their products as safe, but struggle keeping track of every chemical used in their supply chain, and what the impacts of those chemicals are.

“There’s tons of toxicology data out there, and how do we start to apply and share that information such that it’s not just siloed in a REACH dossier in the EU or in an individual organization who’s developed that data?” she said, referring to the EU’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals regulation. “We’ve developed a methodology that houses the chemical hazard assessments across 24-plus human and environmental health endpoints.”

On the human side, ChemFORWARD assesses a chemical’s carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive toxicity, skin irritation, eye irritation, and neurotoxicity, among other things. On the environmental side, they measure things like persistence, or the ability of chemicals to break down.

“Looking at the totality of the data, we then take the totality of the hazards and send an overall hazard classification, or what we call our hazard bands,” McKenney said.

ChemFORWARD hazard bands fall into alphabetical rankings (A, B, C, etc.,) but are also categorized based on how much data is available about a given substance. There are chemicals marked with a question mark when the data is deemed insufficient.

Bourne said companies like his are partnering with ChemFORWARD as an important step toward creating healthier products at his firm and across the private sector.

“What we realize in partnership with ChemFORWARD is that every time we do a chemical hazard assessment, it’s not just proprietary information for Google or for whoever did the assessment. It’s now available to anyone who wants to try to platform. And so the scalability that creates is really what we saw as transformational,” he said. “The analogy I like to give is if you wanted to watch a great TV show, and you had to pay a Hollywood studio to make a show just for you, it would cost you an absurd amount of money. Because they have lots of subscribers to a streaming platform, everyone can contribute and get access to a whole body of content that is valuable.”

Charles Taylor, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, said this type of information-gathering could have important benefits beyond the private sector.

“This kind of information is really important to get out to researchers and others who can … assess if we see chronic effects or downstream effects,” he said.

The Roy Family Award is presented biannually to celebrate an outstanding cross-sector partnership that enhances environmental quality through novel and creative approaches.


We used to read more, scream less

How has the internet changed fiction? 8 writers weigh in.


Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Arts & Culture

We used to read more, scream less

How has the internet changed fiction? 8 writers weigh in.

long read

Fiction is as old as time. From the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” to contemporary novels and short stories, fiction has explored the human condition and pushed us to think outside ourselves and expand our imaginations. The internet, on the other hand, is less than 50 years old. It’s evolved exponentially over the last four decades, and inarguably changed the way we communicate, live, and think.

In these edited responses, writers of the genre share how they believe the internet has changed fiction.


Readers have become audiences

Greg Jackson ’06 is the author of several short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His debut novel, “The Dimensions of a Cave,” was published in 2023.

Fiction is fundamentally about one privacy addressing another. Its power and meaning depend on the writer speaking with uncomfortable candor, channeling a brave private truth, and the reader receiving this message as a solitary conscience. “Write as though your parents are dead,” writers are counseled. But in the age of the internet, writers must go further and write as though the unignorable sphere of a vast judging public did not exist. This is increasingly hard to do.

The internet — what we refer to, in shorthand, as social media — has made personal taste into a matter of public enthusiasm and, as often, condemnation. It has turned “readers” into “audiences.” Taste has become something impersonal, conditioned by influencers, likes, star ratings, Tweets, and lists. Traditional tastemakers — critics, editors, booksellers — have seen their influence overtaken by mass opinion and viral acclaim. Without them, we have few champions of challenging, difficult, and subversive work. Sensitive to their audiences’ whims and the viability of their careers, writers adapt their work to what they think a mass public wants and believes. The imperative to startle readers with what they don’t know they want, with a truth pitched at a deeper place than superficial opinion, disappears. Readers may well forget that this is what fiction offers.

Are there positives? I don’t see many and I think pairing the minuses with some pluses obscures what is, on balance, a negative equation. Sometimes a net effect is simply bad. Literature is a vital companion to self-discovery, illuminating our condition. It addresses a realm of experience prior to politics, mass conviction, commonplace belief, and rote speech. You cannot discover what you already know. Fiction’s radiant core — private truth — may well turn out to be the chief casualty of our age of social media.


A time-saver and a time-suck

Scott Turow, J.D. ’78, is a lawyer and the author of 13 fiction and three nonfiction books including “Presumed Innocent” and the memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, “One L.”

I use the internet for research, and the ease of it is sometimes striking. In my most recent novel, “Presumed Guilty,”I learned about the minutiae of the Nike Air Force 1 sneaker and the question of how far cell signals travel, both with days less time than it would have taken me when I started out 40 years ago. Because of that, I think my books are probably more research-intensive than they would have been decades ago. 

Fiction exists on the assumption that we can learn the inmost thoughts and feelings of others. That people have an appetite for learning that is no surprise, but it makes storytelling a profoundly moral enterprise, because it sharpens our empathy for others. I don’t think posts or emails generally have the same depth.

The internet obviously competes for readers’ time, and I think it’s true that book sales began to drop when people started “cruising the net,” as it used to be called when people just gave themselves over to wandering through the online world. But the internet carries benefits as well, especially the easy accessibility of eBooks. Readers connect online and share word-of-mouth about books they like. So, it’s not all one way.  

The one thing I am sure of is that the novel has withstood technological changes since the 18th century — or the 13th century, depending on how you figure its birth. And it’s not going away soon.  


We lost a major plot device

Jennifer Finney Boylan was the 2022-2023 Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Schlesinger Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of 19 books, including her latest, “Cleavage” (2025), president of PEN America, and the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.

A major plot hook used to be people losing each other, or getting lost, or not knowing where they were, and so on. And this particular situation is now one that’s very unlikely — since we’re always tied into the web somehow. Think of the film “After Hours” (by Martin Scorsese), in which Griffin Dunne’s money flies out of a taxicab window one night and he’s then left stranded downtown, unable to get home. This kind of twist is pretty rare now, isn’t it? And if you think about it, so many great stories — from the “Odyssey” to, say, “Ulysses” — are about people who have gotten lost, or who are trying to find their way home, and the obstacles to their journey consist of not knowing where they are, or being unable to tell their loved ones of their fate.  

In my heart I think we’d all have been better off if the internet — and the iPhone and its knockoffs — had never been invented. We would spend more of our time looking at each other, rather than our screens. We would read more, scream less. Is that world so much worse than the one we live in now?


A time machine for research

Julie Orringer was the 2013-2014 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of three award-winning books: “The Invisible Bridge,” “How to Breathe Underwater” and “The Flight Portfolio,” a novel about Harvard alumnus Varian Fry, an American journalist who traveled to France in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Her work has also appeared in Granta and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction, and she is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize.

Two things that have been really helpful to research are doors that open via the internet. One is newspaper archives. It’s incredibly helpful to be able to go into Times Machine via The New York Times, for example, and look at the newspaper pages exactly as they were laid out and to see the article that you’re trying to read in context, and for that article to be searchable. It used to be that researchers would have to go and look at microfilm, which was just impossible. And so you can page through the day-by-day events of a particular historical moment, but also you get all the context of the other articles, and the ads for hats and suits and foods and theater shows and modes of transportation, and a lot of the other kind of contextual cues that would help to place you in a particular temporal setting.

And then the other thing that I’ve found that’s similarly helpful is radio archives, because we tend to forget what a constant presence radio was in people’s lives, especially when we’re writing about the 20th century. And there are numerous archives that allow you access to the radio shows that people were listening to regularly every day. If you don’t hear the voices that were speaking into people’s ears about the political events and the artistic events and the fashions of a time, then you don’t really have the whole picture.


Less time at the library, for better and for worse

Weike Wang ’11 is the author of several novels, including “Chemistry,” “Joan is Okay,” and “Rental House.” She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories, and she has won an O. Henry Award.

I learned to read at the library. My mother would take me and she would be in the adult section, looking through job listings in newspapers, and I would be in the kids section, reading “Anne of Green Gables” or “Goosebumps” and playing the Oregon Trail. I’m not sure if the internet changed fiction but it changed reading. Without the internet or a phone with internet access, I read for longer, deeper periods. I would spend whole days reading. Now I can’t do that. Also I have more responsibilities and reading has become part of my job rather than my leisure.

The internet has certainly made research easier for stories. Instead of going to the library, I can find more things online. I can Google. I can watch YouTube videos. I also can use Google Maps to see what the area I’m writing about looks like. Without the internet, I would have to go there. I would also have to interview people if I’m interested in writing a character with that occupation. Nowadays, so many people post online about their experiences that writers have easy access to this kind of material.


We need emotional truth too

Min Jin Lee was the 2018-2019 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of the novels “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko,” a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Lee is also the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence.

Apart from the fact that the internet may have contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary 2024 Word of the Year, “brain rot,” and that neoliberalism has made our attention the commodity to exploit without mercy, I remain unreasonably hopeful that fiction will emerge as the primary vehicle of enduring narrative. We may love nonfiction in many of its forms, but fiction has the capacity to enlarge our grasp of emotional truth through the prism of non-fact.


Expanding knowledge

Andrè Aciman, Ph.D. ’88, is the author of several New York Times bestselling novels, including “Call Me by Your Name,” “Out of Egypt,” and “Eight White Nights.” He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Books are important. They mold who you are, and they give you an aperture into history and into the universe that is not available elsewhere. Does “Crime and Punishment” give you a better sense of who human beings are? Absolutely. Does Shakespeare? Yes. But a small article on the net that appears and then disappears? That’s the way people think nowadays, and I have no argument against it.

My experience has been that young people, people under 35 with the exception of a few, don’t read or they are constantly online, reading the newspaper, the magazines. They know all sorts of things that I would never have even imagined existed. I, on the other hand, know nothing except for what I read in The New York Times, and I don’t even read that very thoughtfully. My sons, for example, seem to know so much, as all their friends do, but none of them read books.


Some things ‘can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions’

Yxta Maya Murray is the current Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a law professor, writer, social practice artist, and beginning filmmaker. She also is the David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, where she writes legal scholarship examining the relationship among law, social justice, and the arts. She has published 11 books.

I have written several novels that are steeped in legal, scientific and archival research. And these books would have been impossible for me without the internet. My 2020 book, “The World Doesn’t Work that Way, but It Could” is a collection of stories reflecting President Donald Trump rolling back the administrative state, by which I mean unraveling safety regulations in the Department of the Interior and EPA. I did legal and scientific research and asked the web to deliver me reports. But the research alone can’t enliven the text. There are things that are not available on the web, and that can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions. So I did interviews. Fiction is important so that we can imagine other people’s lives, so that we can develop empathy, so that we can move outside of ourselves, and we can see ourselves mirrored. It’s galactically important, because only a very small part of reality can be expressed, and if you confine yourself to nonfiction and are trying to do a good ethical job of that, then you strangle the ability to express all sorts of other parts of human experience.


Uncovering the palette of the past

Project maps pigments used in South Asian art


Arts & Culture

Uncovering the palette of the past

Uncovering the palette of the past

Jinah Kim.

Photo by Grace DuVal

7 min read

Project maps pigments used in South Asian art

When Jinah Kim learned in 2016 that Museum of Fine Arts conservation scientist Michele Derrick had detected cobalt in a 15th-century Indian manuscript, she was presented with an obvious explanation: the document had probably been retouched later, potentially with synthetic pigments. After all, European-made cobalt-based pigments like smalt were widely imported to South Asia only in the 17th century, and synthetic cobalt blue was popularized only in the early 19th century.

But Kim, who was gathering data on pigments as research for her second book, wasn’t convinced. 

“What do we know about actual pigment usage in this region at this time period?” Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art & Architecture, asked herself. “Does it all have to come from Europe? It’s possible there are indigenous knowledge of colorants that we don’t know about.” 

Further analysis by Katherine Eremin, Patricia Cornwell Senior Conservation Scientist at Harvard Art Museums, confirmed that the smalt found in the Jain manuscript had a different composition from European-manufactured smalt, indicating it came from a different source. 

It was a “eureka” moment for Kim, who hypothesized that some pigments believed to have gotten to South Asia as imports from Europe may in fact have been used in South Asia long before. The result was the “Mapping Color in History Project,” an ongoing effort since 2018 to create an object-based pigment database for historical research on art from this region. 

“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been,” Kim said. “If you look at Asian materials, especially South Asia, Himalaya, and Southeast Asia, everything is so colorful but the baseline understanding of what colorants were available is not known.”

“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been.”

Jinah Kim

The open-access database allows users to search by painting title, keyword, pigment, color, or element, and filter results by artist, date, and more. There’s also a map to search by location of origin. On each artwork’s page, users can view an analysis of what pigments were found in the painting, what method was used to identify them, and the scientists’ confidence level. Kim wants the database to be useful for “anyone interested in color,” including people in the cultural heritage field, art historians, curators, teachers, and students.

Kim describes Mapping History as highly collaborative, bringing together experts in digital humanities, conservation science, and art history.

“I do describe it as a three-legged stool,” Kim said. “It cannot be done by one person because it requires a lot of different expertise. You need to do computer programming to make this database, you need to work with material analysis, and you need art historical research to map it in history and time.”

Kim worked with Rashmi Singhal and the Arts & Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) team and Jeff Steward from Harvard Art Museums on the technology aspects of the project. The database was built from scratch.

Tracy Stuber, digital humanities specialist with DARTH who acts as bridge between the research teams and software engineers, said the Mapping Color website is unique because it links two types of data that are usually siloed and used by separate audiences: data about the artwork itself and data about the scientific analysis.

“Because we know approximately where or when an artwork was made, we’re then able to say, ‘This pigment that we’ve identified in this artwork was therefore made approximately in that place at that time,’” Stuber said. “Linking them together in a database not only makes that data accessible to the other audience but facilitates more collaboration and conversation between those two disciplines.”

Working with ancient art means that scientists can’t usually take samples for analysis. Mapping Color’s scientists rely 99% of the time on non-destructive methods, according to Eremin, who is one of the project’s core partners.

When Eremin analyzes an artwork, she typically starts with imaging which can identify certain pigments that behave differently in infrared and ultraviolet lights. Indian Yellow, for example, glows under UV light. She also examines the pigment under a microscope to see the blend of colors used.

“You look at them to begin with and you think, ‘Oh that’s beautiful,’ but then you actually look down the microscope and see the really fine details,” she said. “You think, ‘that’s just blue,’ and then you look at it and see that actually it’s lots of different things mixed together.”

She will then try to identify elements using x-ray fluorescence to see what characteristic x-rays are emitted from the painting. For example, a green can be identified as copper green if there are visible copper rays, or yellow orpiment (an arsenic sulfide mineral) blended with blue if there are visible arsenic rays. To gather information at the molecular level, Eremin uses Raman spectroscopy, a non-invasive laser technology which can reveal if a copper green is either malachite or atacamite.

On rare occasions if an artwork is already flaking, it may begin a conversation between conservators, curators, and scientists about whether to take a sample. Eremin used an infrared light technique known as Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy on one tiny particle taken from a crumbling 16th-century Indian manuscript, and identified that kaolin clay was used for the white border detail.

The findings give insight into the vision of the artists. In an analysis of a 1588 “Divan of Anvari” manuscript series, Mapping Color scientists realized the artist used an Indian yellow pigment for the pure yellow of figure’s clothing, but used orpiment, an older arsenic sulfide yellow, for highlighting leaves on a tree.

“What that tells me is that artists are trying to get to that pure form of brilliant yellow, and they’re discerning between different shades,” Kim said.


“Krishna’s Manifest Vision through Sound (Kavitt),” from a Rasikapriya series, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Philip Hofer

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1984.458

The Mapping Color in History Project has also collaborated with Jaipur-based traditional Indian painter Babulal Marotia to analyze samples of pigments he uses in his studio. It’s helpful to study materials used by contemporary artists like Marotia, who are carrying on artistic traditions that have been passed down for generations, according to Kim.

“You can’t dissolve a 700-year-old painting to see what has happened.” Kim said. “This gives us an access point to that historical moment through this type of material that’s still being used.”

Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.

Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.

“If you look up certain Indian painting in a museum’s database, it will say, ‘North India, 17th-18th century,” Kim said. “You cannot map “North India, 17th -18th century” in any point in time and place. That’s where we need to do more research on objects, find more relevant information and answer comparative studies to narrow it down and come up with better attribution.”

Kim has a list of ideas for how to improve the database (adding more artworks, visualization tools, and certainty indicators) that she is excited to implement.

“I want to understand certain trends, I want to be able to see patterns, I want to see things that were not visible before,” Kim said. “But a database is only as good as the data itself, so there’s a lot of work that still needs to go in.”


Some of the work on the database was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.


An architect-detective’s medieval mystery

Exhibit traces scholar’s quest to reconstruct abbey destroyed after French Revolution


Arts & Culture

An architect-detective’s medieval mystery

Exhibit traces scholar’s quest to reconstruct abbey destroyed after French Revolution

Photos by Justin Knight; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

6 min read

Exhibit traces scholar’s quest to reconstruct abbey destroyed after French Revolution

Cluny III, once the largest building in Europe, was little more than rubble when Harvard architectural historian Kenneth Conant laid eyes on it in the 1920s. His efforts to painstakingly recreate the medieval abbey as it looked in the Middle Ages — outlined as part of an exhibition now on view at the Graduate School of Design — illustrate how architects learn to see what isn’t there. 

Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025,” on view in the Druker Design Gallery through April 4, explores the ways that the study of medieval architecture has changed, from hand-drawn sketches to photography to 3D digital models and virtual reality.  

“The exhibit is the story of a man and his passion, which is the Cluny abbey church, and how we can experience it today using modern tools,” said Matt Cook, digital scholarship program manager at Harvard Library, who worked closely with curator and architectural historian Christine Smith. “Several teams across Harvard Library allowed Christine to realize her vision for the exhibit with emerging technology.”

Construction began on the Benedictine abbey of Cluny III, located in the Burgundy region of France, in 1088. It stood for more than 700 years, growing to more than 500 feet long and 100 feet high; at one time, it was home to about 1,000 monks. But after the French Revolution, the impressive structure was demolished and sold for scrap materials.

When Conant first arrived at Cluny decades after its destruction, all that remained was the south transept and eight partially destroyed capitals, or the decorative tops of columns, which once stood behind the altar. 

Conant received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard and taught architectural history at the University from 1920 to 1954. It was an era when architectural historians were still learning to classify medieval architecture and to understand what a building might have looked like in its original form before pieces were added or taken away over the centuries. 

Kenneth Conant as a student at Harvard University.
Conant inside an excavation at Cluny III.

“It’s a kind of an idealism,” said Smith, who is the Robert C. and Marian K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History. 

The “idealist” task that Conant gave himself was to imagine Cluny III as it once was, in excruciating detail, based on what he knew of similar buildings and on 20 years of excavations. 

“In my own work, when I’m studying something, I try to know it in such reality and detail that I live it,” Smith said. “I think that’s what he’s doing: He’s living it. He wants to see it. He wants to feel it in many different ways. He wants to understand it objectively, but also in terms of the color, the light, how you moved around in it, how it felt to be there.” 

Technology allows viewers to interact with architectural designs in ways Conant’s contemporaries could not have imagined.

The enduring mystery of the Cluny capitals 

The eight capitals discovered at Cluny III fascinated Conant. They were damaged, with key details missing, but each seemed to feature ornate designs of people, plants, and musical instruments. It wasn’t clear which sides ought to face the front, or what order they should go in, or if they even told a cohesive story. 

Some of the Cluny III capitals are theorized to represent the four seasons, the four winds, and the eight modes of music.
It’s possible that sculptors drew inspiration from the columns from the illustrations in contemporary manuscripts.

“Some people think they’re all by one sculptor; other people think they’re by two identifiable sculptors; other people think we don’t know,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about them, which is what’s fun.”

Early in his career, Conant hoped the columns told a single story about the virtues of monastic life, Smith said. But eventually, he came to believe there was little uniting them as an octet. To this day, there are no firm answers, but they remain an object of study as one of the earliest examples of figural sculpture in the Romanesque era. 

From plaster casts to 3D 

Contemporary students of architectural history don’t have to rely on the stone capitals themselves, or even the unwieldy plaster casts that scholars have traditionally used as aids. 

Use your cursor or fingers to manipulate these 3D recreations of Cluny casts.

Using a method called photogrammetry, Harvard Library Imaging Services photographed the plaster casts of the Cluny columns to create the 3D models that are featured in the exhibit. The team took hundreds of individual photos of each capital cast to create each model. Additionally, library conservators, archivists, and curators prepared the print and photo reproductions on display. 

Viewers can interact with historic architectural designs up close.

With the 3D scans, Smith and her students can zoom in, rotate, and rearrange the eight capitals and each of their designs in a way previous generations never could, giving them new insight into the enduring puzzle of the octet. 

“I can compare them in a way that I can’t with the plaster cast,” Smith said. “I can look at all eight of them in a row.” 

It’s a different experience for today’s architectural students than for Conant and his contemporaries, she said. But at the core, the exercise is the same: Learning to see what’s there, and learning to imagine what’s not.


“Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025” is on display through April 4 in the Druker Design Gallery.


Rakesh Khurana shares lessons learned at helm  — and as an influencer, off- and online

Danoff Dean of Harvard College to step down at end of academic year after 11-year tenure of advances, innovation, and challenges (including pandemic)


Rakesh Khurana.

Photos by Grace DuVal

Campus & Community

Rakesh Khurana shares lessons learned at helm  — and as an influencer, off- and online

long read

Danoff Dean of Harvard College to step down at end of academic year after 11-year tenure of advances, innovation, and challenges (including pandemic)

For Rakesh Khurana, understanding the mission comes first. Without it, the what-do-we-do-next-and-how are meaningless.

That principle helped guide Khurana, who will step down at the end of the academic year after 11 years as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and return to teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Business School.

Khurana, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development and a professor of sociology, first arrived at Harvard in 1993 for graduate school, earning a master’s in sociology in 1997 and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1998.

During his tenure as dean, Khurana worked to enhance opportunities in the arts and public service, reorganized office infrastructure to better align supports for students, helped launch the Intellectual Vitality initiative, and defended the goal of recruiting students to the University from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.

And, of course, he built a presence on Instagram affectionately known as the Deanstagram. In this edited conversation, Khurana talks about the work he’s done and the lessons he’s learned — about himself and the community.


You’re one of the longest serving deans of Harvard College. Can you talk a bit about aspects of your tenure that you found particularly gratifying?

I think I’ve had the best role in higher education. As an immigrant to this country, growing up in a family that held higher education and education as sacred and Harvard as being one of the institutions that embodied that idea, I feel lucky.

Part of what we accomplished from the start was knowing that we were going to be a mission-oriented organization and institution, going back to the founding. Our aim has been to educate citizen leaders and be clear how we do it — through the transformative experience of a liberal arts and science education and developing specificity around the intellectual, the social, and personal transformation.

One of the things that I feel good about is that there’s a strong sense of understanding of the College’s mission. That clarity has let us take numerous actions on everything ranging from adopting an honor code, which is emblematic of the kind of aspiration that we want to have for our students, to the renewal of the Gen Ed program, which occurred at a time when there was a debate over whether it would even continue.

The commitment to the idea of a general education that’s broad and anchored in the liberal arts and that centers on important questions of society is really critical. Professor Michael Sandel’s renewed class “Justice” is one example of creating a intergenerational connection between our students and alumni who took that class decades earlier that both honors the past, but that’s also relevant/critical for the issues of today.

I am also proud of our work on the Intellectual Vitality initiative, which was something the team had been focused on for several years. Having a data-informed but also flexible approach helped us recognize how Harvard could avoid the fashion of the day and rather commit to substance on these issues. I hope the approach of holding true to our mission and at the same time evolving is remembered as one of the mainstays of my deanship.

“To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege.”

During your tenure as dean, you faced various challenges. Is there one you think you learned the most from?

Universities reflect the world, but they can also magnify what is happening beyond our campus. Bringing together people who are, for the first time, living with and learning from people with very different backgrounds and experiences is probably the greatest opportunity we have.

But creating this community requires building a lot of capacities and skills and role modeling. Maybe in the past we could take for granted that this all existed, but I think we can’t assume that students and faculty and staff are coming here with this understanding.

We have to recognize that Harvard is not a perfect institution. I think recognizing this work of bringing together people with different backgrounds and experiences has existed in this institution from Day One. This is an institution that recognizes that excellence comes in a variety of forms. In the process of that evolving understanding we get closer to our motto of veritas.

How different was the job of being dean from what you expected?

My background is as an organizational sociologist, and my particular focus is studying institutions, leadership, and bureaucracy. In that field, you learn a lot of theory, do empirical work, write case studies.

There’s a lot of knowing, and then there’s the doing, and then you discover the knowing/doing gap. While some of what you teach are concepts that are helpful and useful, they’re often ideal types that don’t take into account all the particular contingencies and challenges of the specific experiences.

There are three things that, for me, held true. A sense of mission — “What is our purpose?” The vision — “Where are we going?” And the values, or “How are we going to get there?” The power of that is something I’d been teaching about for years, and it’s so interesting to see how powerful it is and how easy it is to forget. I start every meeting with the College mission. If people who are leading are not minding the mission and the vision and the values, who is?

The second lesson that I learned is the microscope that we’re under. When you’re in a position of responsibility, you are constantly role modeling. People are not just paying attention to what you say, but to what you do. Your walk has to be your talk. In fact, your walk is probably more important than your talk.

Something you learn working with students and your team is that you’re a coach, and you’re often trying to figure out what people’s aspirational skills are, what their motivations are. While you’re coaching them to try to help connect those two, in the process you’re coaching yourself.

The other thing I learned is that we’re all works in progress. We’re all trying to become better versions of ourselves. If you’re surrounded by people who care about the mission, who understand the vision of where we’re going, and desire to operate with those values, you can create incredible trust, allowing you to do important things, including getting through some really difficult moments.

Structurally, the most difficult moment was COVID-19.

In many ways we had to live without the things that made us distinctive, the day-to-day being on this campus: the serendipity, the sense of learning to see behind each other’s eyes and hear from each other’s perspectives, not only in the classroom but in the dining halls, in our student organizations. To de-densify campus in a short time period, to try to deal with the reality of the situation, the uncertainty that it presented, and keep academic continuity. Keeping the academic mission going and then restarting and bringing people back to campus in a safe way with the protocols and the testing. That was the most challenging moment, but it was the moment where the University worked as one institution to move forward in a really powerful way.

“Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game.”

You’ve been vocal in warning about the challenge higher education faces with declining trust. How do we rebuild that?

Rebuilding trust is not something that can be done overnight. Part of what we have to do is to make sure that our core is quite strong. The basic functions that people expect of a university around teaching and research must be rock-solid.

For a place like Harvard our legitimacy has depended on two things: a commitment to academic excellence and a commitment to meritocracy.

I would say there are three things that institutions like ours should be doing. One is that we convene excellence — in our faculty, our students, and staff. We should be highlighting excellence in bringing people together.

Second is our commitment to veritas. The reason we depend on academic excellence and meritocracy is that it gets you to a better understanding of the truth. We need to be an institution that lives with an uncomfortable truth rather than a comfortable delusion.

The third thing we need to do is streamline as an institution.

In our commitment to being a place where people across differences and backgrounds and experiences can openly and thoughtfully discuss complex issues, we have two responsibilities.

First, we have to make sure that if we’re asking families to invest in our education, we have to educate effectively.

Then there’s the moral responsibility. Any institution that takes on the responsibility of educating youth is a moral institution at the same time. And this cannot be politicized. When you are politicized, people believe you are producing biased research, not encouraging independent thinking, inculcating ideology, or not allowing for conversations on difficult topics.

Many in the community think one of your defining characteristics is your approachability. Is that something that you’ve always had, or did you develop that over time, and if so how?

It would probably surprise people that during the time I spent in college, I could count on my hands how many times I ate a meal with somebody. I had a small group of friends, but they kept very different hours than I did. They were all artists and painters, and so they would work like night owls. I was in social science and would get up early, go to the library to study.

I ate most of my meals by myself, but I never felt lonely. I had my books. I always felt I was in conversation with scholars like Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, and others. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people. I was using the four years I had in college to do something I didn’t think I’d ever have the time to do again — work on my thinking and understanding of the world.

In hindsight, I think I should have realized that I had just as much to learn from my peers. Something I learned from my mother and from Stephanie, my partner, is that everybody has an important and interesting story to tell.

My mother would always say, “Nobody’s better than you, but you’re also not better than anyone else.” That kind of humility is something that I just love my parents for because when I came to graduate school I just found myself being friends with and getting to know everybody — not only my peers, but also the custodial staff and the staff at the sociology department and at HBS. I just started realizing that everybody had such an interesting story to tell.

I would often look for the student who was sitting by themselves at a meal and think to myself, “I wish somebody would have sat with me at that time.” I always found myself drawn to sitting with students, which culminated in us becoming faculty deans at Cabot House. That’s when I became comfortable with being uncomfortable in terms of just sitting with somebody new and asking them a couple of questions, and it has become one of the most joyful parts of my day.

Something that you’ve often spoken about is being an immigrant kid who attended New York City public schools. Did that kid ever think he would be the dean of one of the world’s leading educational institutions?

I was born in India. My parents immigrated to the U.S. the same way millions of other families have for the same reason of trying to build a better life for their kids, and primarily for the educational opportunities.

My mother was a public school teacher in the Bronx, and my dad was an accountant for the city. I always remember that we would move because my mom would look at which schools had higher Regents scores, even a couple of blocks, so that we would be zoned for that school. I know firsthand the transformative power that education has — not just on the individual life, but the generational impact that it has.

My higher education experience began at SUNY Binghamton, and then I transferred to Cornell when a professor came up to me after class and said, “You’re doing well in this class. You should think about transferring to Cornell.” I was like, “Why?” He said, “I went there, and I think you would do really well.”

I had never had a teacher say something like that. It showed the power of a teacher seeing something in you that you didn’t even see yourself. This highlights the power of the mission. How do you create those opportunities for interaction where a conversation, question, or suggestion ends up shaping and changing the trajectory of your life?

After college, I worked in a small tech startup that ended up growing. Somebody from HBS came to write a case study on the company and that conversation led me to apply to graduate school. The next year I was at Harvard.

What does working on this campus mean to you now that you’ve been teaching and leading for so many years?

One of the things I love to do is just go to higher education institutions and visit campuses. I remember the first time seeing the libraries, the first place I would go when visiting. Visiting Cornell’s Sage Hall library, Widener and Baker libraries at Harvard, and dropping off my brothers at Dartmouth and Wesleyan.

To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege. At times when things can feel challenging, we need to remember that colleges and universities are a candle in the darkness. We have a special responsibility to make sure that that candle is burning bright.

Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game. Our aspirations should always run ahead of our reality.

Final question: Are we going to have to go to Allston to get a selfie?

It will be interesting to highlight the life of a professor, so I plan on continuing my Instagram. I think sharing our experiences on campus helps also with the element of rebuilding trust, because it takes away the mythology that institutions like ours don’t have people who are working hard and trying to do their best for the world. As former President Drew Faust said, “Harvard’s not trying to be the best in the world. It’s trying to be the best for the world.” My sense is that is what the community is, but you can’t tell that. You have to show it.


Nonie Lesaux named HGSE dean

Scholar in literacy development and early learning has served as interim dean since July 2024


Nonie K. Lesaux.

Nonie K. Lesaux.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Nonie Lesaux named HGSE dean

Scholar in literacy development and early learning has served as interim dean since July 2024

4 min read

Nonie K. Lesaux, the Roy Edward Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lesaux has served as interim dean since July.

“For the past eight months, Nonie has led as interim dean with a wonderful combination of energy and insight,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “Amid unprecedented challenges to both K-12 and higher education, she has demonstrated her ability to meet the moment, bringing to her work courage, humility, and respect in equal measure, motivated always by a deep sense of obligation to the School and its vital mission.”

Lesaux is a developmental psychologist whose career has focused on strategies and innovations to improve learning opportunities and literacy outcomes for children and youth and on leading system-level change in education.

She is currently co-director of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at the Ed School, which addresses the global challenge of scaling and improving the quality of early education through research, professional development for educational leaders, and graduate training. The Zaentz initiative includes the Early Learning Study at Harvard, a first-of-its-kind statewide study that examines the effects of early education and care settings on children’s learning and development.

“This is a complex time for the education sector, but I can think of no institution better matched to address today’s needs,” Lesaux said. “In the eight months since I assumed the role of interim dean, I have witnessed the ways in which our Ed School community has stepped up to think both critically and collaboratively about our mission and work in service to society. Our collective effort matters more today than perhaps ever.”

A widely respected scholar and educator, Lesaux has written and edited numerous scholarly publications on children’s literacy development and learning. She has also translated ideas from her research into several books for school leaders and educators.

This work has informed how states and districts approach the teaching of reading across the country, including inspiring Massachusetts legislation intended to advance third-grade reading proficiency. Her research was also used to establish a framework for literacy reform in the New York City and Chicago public schools.

Lesaux has served in leadership roles on the national and state level, including as a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Reading First Advisory Committee and the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8.

In addition, she chaired the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care from 2015 to 2022, which provided oversight of the state agency that licenses and supports childcare and community-based public programs for young children.

Her previous institutional leadership roles at the Ed School include academic dean and faculty director of doctoral studies.

“I’m delighted that Nonie Lesaux will become dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” said Provost John F. Manning. “She is a collaborative, creative, and inspiring leader, who will lead HGSE with distinction.”

Lesaux joined the Ed School faculty in 2003 as an assistant professor. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and was a postdoctoral research fellow at BC Children’s Hospital. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology, with honors, from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.

Lesaux has earned numerous honors, including the William T. Grant Scholars Award and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young professionals beginning their independent research careers. In 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Education.

She serves on the board of the Spencer Foundation and as an expert consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Lesaux succeeds Bridget Long, the Saris Professor of Education and Economics at the Ed School and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, who left the post at the end of the last academic year.


Results from global collaboration raise questions about future of universe

CfA astronomers play crucial role in DESI analysis of dark energy, matter


Science & Tech

Results from global collaboration raise questions about future of universe

The Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, shown here beneath star trails.

Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Tafreshi

3 min read

CfA astronomers play crucial role in DESI analysis of dark energy, matter

New results from the international Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, which includes researchers from Harvard, suggest that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be weakening over time. This suggests the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.

The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy, which is the force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. DESI tracks dark energy’s influence by studying how matter is spread across the universe. The new analysis, using the largest 3D map of our universe ever made, looked at dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years.

The results, using the first three years of collected DESI data, were announced in a March 19 press release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Events in the very early universe left subtle patterns in how matter is distributed, a feature called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. That pattern acts as a standard ruler, with its size at different times directly affected by how the universe is expanding. Measuring the ruler at different distances shows researchers the strength of dark energy throughout history.

Combining the data of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars with the results from other experiments, scientists have stronger evidence that the impact of dark energy may be evolving in unexpected ways.

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) researchers, led by Harvard Professor Daniel Eisenstein and his group, were crucial contributors to the DESI collaboration in multiple ways, including co-developing algorithms and simulations that led to the latest results.

Cristhian Garcia Quintero is one of the collaboration leads on the cosmological interpretations of the results. Michael Rashkovetskyi performed calculations that are critical for the distance measurements. Claire Lamman is the co-chair of the DESI education and public outreach committee and helped create the visual material for the public. Eisenstein served as co-spokesperson of the collaboration from 2014 to 2020. 

DESI involves more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab. The collaboration shared its findings in multiple papers to be posted on the online repository arXiv and in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.

Alongside unveiling its latest dark energy results at the summit, the DESI collaboration also announced that its Data Release 1 is now available for anyone to explore. With detailed information on many millions of celestial objects, the data set will support a wide range of astrophysical research at CfA and elsewhere.

In addition to contributing to DESI’s cosmology goals, CfA researchers are using the collaboration to study galaxy evolution, the cosmic web, and the structure of the Milky Way. The DESI survey continues each clear night, extending its map of the cosmos and giving astronomers a continually improving view of the physics of the Universe.


Declassified JFK files provide ‘enhanced clarity’ on CIA actions, historian says

Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer winner writing three-volume Kennedy bio, on what surprised him and what he’d still like to know


Nation & World

Declassified JFK files provide ‘enhanced clarity’ on CIA actions, historian says

Recently declassified documents related to the President John F. Kennedy assassination.

Declassified documents related to the President John F. Kennedy assassination were released on March 18.

George Walker IV/AP Photo

6 min read

Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer winner writing three-volume Kennedy biography, shares takeaways from declassified docs

Six decades later, Americans know a bit more about the CIA’s clandestine operations in the early 1960s, particularly in Cuba and Mexico, thanks to a new tranche of declassified documents concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy released last week.

The more than 77,000 pages released by the National Archives and Records Administration do not appear to contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But historians say the papers hold important new details about the CIA’s involvement in foreign elections during the Cold War and its infiltration of Fidel Castro’s inner circle.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history and the Kennedy School’s Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, highlights key details in the documents, shares what he’d still like to know, and offers some thoughts on why the assassination of JFK remains fodder for conspiracy theorists. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Logevall published the first book in a three-volume series on Kennedy in 2020. The second volume will be published next year.


What’s your impression of this new tranche of JFK records? Have you seen anything noteworthy so far?

With respect to the assassination, there’s little or nothing that’s new, at least in terms of what I’ve been able to see thus far. I can’t say I’m surprised — going in I didn’t expect we’d learn anything that would overturn our understanding of what happened in Dallas. The releases are, however, quite interesting on U.S. covert operations in the Cold War in the early 1960s. Some of them range beyond Kennedy’s years, but it’s for this period that they’re most interesting, especially with respect to Latin America. That’s actually been quite revealing to me.

“Interesting” in terms of what the CIA was doing or the volume of things they were doing back then?

In a way, it’s both. A lot of the “new” documents had been released before; the difference now is that they are unredacted. In 2017, for example, we got some really important CIA documents, but they would have certain words or passages blocked out. What’s been illuminating for me, even though it’s sometimes just a handful of words, is to have those words inserted. This matters, because as we know even a few words can change the meaning of a sentence or a passage dramatically. What we see with enhanced clarity is just how involved the United States was in other countries, not least in interfering in elections. In the past, country names or the names of leaders would have been omitted. Now they are there in black and white. There’s just something about seeing it say “Brazil” or “the Finnish elections,” for example, that makes this more clear, more stark. Also, you see just how large the presence of the CIA was. In certain embassies, those who are attached to the CIA could make up almost half the total personnel. Even those of us who are historians of the Cold War were somewhat taken aback by these figures. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that in this or that key embassy, there’s probably 20 percent max secretly attached to the CIA. I had no idea that it was sometimes approaching 40 or 50 percent.

Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall.

Photo by Peter Hessler

Did we learn more about why Kennedy had a fraught relationship with the CIA?

We have not, though this could be buried in there and I just haven’t seen it yet. I thought we might learn more about that important relationship. You’re right to say that there was a wariness between JFK and the agency for various reasons. Some authors have exaggerated the depth and width of the schism, but it was there.

What’s something notable that you discovered?

In one CIA document, dated April 24, 1963, we learn that 14 Cuban diplomats were our agents. That’s quite significant — the degree to which there were people inside the Cuban government who were, in fact, working for the agency. In terms of the so-called Operation Mongoose, which was the effort to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government, this helps us better understand to what extent were Cubans assisting in that effort. Later in the same document, we learn that there were two Cuban ambassadors on the payroll who provided first-rate reports and were closest to the bone in what Castro was thinking.

What are some key questions historians still have about the Kennedy assassination? Is there much left to learn?

I would like to know more about Oswald’s movements before Dallas. I would like to know more about his visit to Mexico City, which was in late September-early October 1963, just a few weeks before the assassination. He was flirting with defecting to Cuba, and so, in Mexico City, he met with both Cuban diplomats and Soviet diplomats. What exactly was said in those conversations? I’m interested, more broadly, in what U.S. intelligence agencies knew and didn’t know about his whereabouts in these weeks. That’s maybe the biggest issue for me.

The JFK assassination is often cited as the progenitor of modern conspiracy theory culture. Why is there still so much suspicion around it?

Part of it is simply because a president was killed, a president seemingly in the prime of life. I think we human beings have a natural inclination to believe that great events must have great causes. It seems somehow impossible that it was a lone misfit named Lee Oswald who took it upon himself to shoot the president. There’s got to be more to it than that, we tell ourselves. And so, the conspiracies will continue to fly. Regardless of what these documents would or would not have revealed, it would not have satisfied people who believe others were involved.

Someone asked me why we don’t seem to have the same consuming interest in, say, Lincoln’s or RFK’s assassination. It might have something to do with a few things. First there’s the fact that Oswald himself was killed two days later. Understandably, this makes people say, “How was that allowed to happen?” Second, the Warren Commission, which was a government commission formed to investigate the murder, was serious and thorough, but it made mistakes, notably in neglecting to interview everyone it might. Third, the fact that the assassination was captured on film might make a difference. So many of us have seen the Zapruder film, and it lives on in our mind, makes the whole thing more real, more eternal. Finally, there’s the oft-heard suggestion — the implications of which I’m still trying to sort out myself — that something important was lost on that day in Dallas, that it marked the end of American innocence somehow.

Put all of that together, maybe you have part of the explanation for why this particular event has been such fodder for conspiracy theories.


A year into role, Chan School dean focused on driving change amid deep challenges

Andrea Baccarelli has laid out a vision for expanding the School’s impact while navigating a rapidly shifting landscape for federally funded research


Andrea Baccarelli.

Andrea Baccarelli.

Campus & Community

A year into role, Chan School dean focused on driving change amid deep challenges

Andrea Baccarelli has laid out a vision for expanding the School’s impact while navigating a rapidly shifting landscape for federally funded research

9 min read

Andrea Baccarelli has been managing change since he started as dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in January 2024.

On his very first day, Baccarelli entered an environment where the war in Gaza exerted pressures across campus. More recently, rapid shifts in federal policies have raised immediate implications for the Chan School. With about 60 percent of its revenue coming from research grants, primarily from the federal government, the School would face a significant blow to its budget if deep cuts proposed by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies were implemented. Baccarelli has convened a financial planning group of senior leadership, including academic department chairs, to plan for the potential effects.

Amid these challenges, Baccarelli has been developing plans to expand Harvard Chan School’s reach by nurturing high-quality, interdisciplinary, solutions-focused science. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Baccarelli discusses this vision and his approach to current funding uncertainties.


You recently introduced your “AAA Vision” for Harvard Chan School. What does it look like?

Our work is all about saving lives through the highest quality science. That hasn’t changed since our School was founded 112 years ago. We have an exceptional track record. For instance, scientists at our School created a low-cost, easy-to-ship rehydration solution that has saved more than 25 million children from death due to diarrheal disease. They engineered infertile mosquitos to eradicate malaria and are developing new therapies to treat diabetes. Rooted in this record of excellence, the AAA Vision is a strategic path to expanding our impact still further. The three As, which grew out of my listening tour, stand for agile, accessible, and accountable.

Agility is all about being able to pivot quickly to respond to new opportunities. As a School, we must be more entrepreneurial. That will require forging collaborations — inside and outside of Harvard — with all sorts of people who are not traditional partners for public health, like engineers and industry CEOs. The way I see it, we all share an interest in developing solutions to problems with immense human and economic costs, like rising rates of Alzheimer’s disease and the spread of multi-drug-resistant infections. Public health is all about taking on these challenges, and we stand ready to work with anyone who can help.

The second A, accessibility, relates to both education and research. I hope to significantly expand our educational offerings by creating more short courses and certificate programs and by delivering more content online. There’s a tremendous need for public health knowledge in just about every profession, and Harvard Chan School has the potential to be a hub for people who want to expand their skills at any stage of their careers.

On the research front, we need to keep working to get our findings in front of pharma executives, biotech investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, the public, and potential collaborators — to make our science accessible. After all, our goal is not just to advance knowledge in the abstract, but to develop solutions that will make a real difference in people’s lives.

The final A is for accountable. We must be accountable to our mission, delivering the very best education and conducting the highest-impact research to improve health for all communities. We must also be accountable to our values. Public health starts at home, and I am committed to building a pluralistic and inclusive community where everyone feels welcomed and valued.

The uncertainties driven by shifts in federal policy are especially acute at Harvard Chan School, which relies heavily on federal grants. What impacts are you seeing at this point?

Unfortunately, we have had more than a dozen federal grants terminated so far because they do not align with new priorities at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. Those terminations have abruptly cut off important research.

Like the rest of the University, we are also closely monitoring the proposed NIH cut to facilities and administration funding. F&A funding is often called “indirect” funding, but there’s nothing indirect about it. It truly is essential funding for research. A cut of the size the NIH has proposed — to a flat rate of 15 percent — would be devastating. It would have huge impacts on our ability to do critical research in fields like preventing cancer, slowing neurodegeneration, and identifying dietary factors that contribute to longevity.

As dean, how are you considering addressing this gap in federal funding to support research at the School? Can philanthropy make up the difference?

Philanthropy plays a very important role in supporting our research and education mission, but it’s unrealistic to imagine it could make up for our long-standing partnership with the federal government. That said, we are working hard to connect with potential donors to explain why our work matters. In fact, I just got back from a trip to Europe where I talked to supporters in several countries. The top message I shared was that our research has tangible impacts in the real world, helping to shape policies and programs that keep us healthy. And donors can make that research happen.

As one example, private philanthropy just funded a 10-year study of the health impacts of wildfires. This is groundbreaking work: A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Chan researchers is assessing all the pollutants that people living near the Los Angeles wildfires have been exposed to, mapping how these toxins spread or dissipate over time, and tracking the short- and long-term health effects. It’s an incredibly important study, made possible entirely by a generous donor who loves L.A. and wants to protect the public’s health. I hope to encourage more such partnerships with philanthropists who are aligned with our mission of using science to build a world where everyone can thrive.

Returning to the AAA Vision: Can you share a bit more about how you’re approaching accountability and what that looks like with respect to the mission?

Yes, In fact, it’s fundamental to what we do at the Harvard Chan School.

We must put in place processes that ensure that our School’s courses and degree programs consistently offer the highest level of excellence. As a starting point, I recently appointed a faculty working group to review processes and criteria for appointing and renewing instructors. At Harvard Chan School, instructors are non-ladder appointees who play a crucial role in classroom teaching. I tasked this working group to ensure rigor and consistency in how our instructors are appointed and renewed and ensure they have the excellent academic credentials and specific expertise they need to teach classes with the depth and rigor our students deserve. We will then go through a similar process for each tier of academic appointment at Harvard Chan School — lecturers, research scientists, adjuncts, etc. To complement this initiative, I also plan to strengthen our internal review processes for courses and degree programs to ensure they consistently meet the highest academic standards.

To a similar end, I have also relaunched periodic reviews of our centers and programs to ensure the highest quality of scholarship and teaching excellence. For instance, late last summer we initiated a comprehensive review of our FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. We have appointed a blue-ribbon panel of experts to conduct this review, which will conclude this spring. The charge to the review panel is to rigorously evaluate the FXB Center’s current status and future potential, offering candid, forthright, and thorough feedback, including any shortcomings or areas of concern, to ensure the Center meets — and is held to — the highest standards of excellence expected of a University-wide center at Harvard. While this review is ongoing, we have halted the formal collaboration between the FXB Center and Birzeit University. This allows the panel to objectively evaluate partnerships and collaborations and ensure the center exemplifies academic excellence in alignment with our mission. We will conduct similar periodic reviews of all our centers and programs.

I’m also putting a lot of focus on building a pluralistic culture that is accountable to our values. From my earliest messages to the community, I have tried to make clear that all of us can expect to be exposed to speech that we disagree with, even speech that offends us, during our time at Harvard. That’s to be expected at any university with a commitment to free speech and academic freedom. Of course, I have zero tolerance for any speech or conduct that constitutes discrimination or harassment — such behavior is wholly unacceptable and will be addressed decisively at our School. But I’ve emphasized how important it is to be open to learning from people with different views — and how important it is to be able to communicate respectfully and with integrity.

To build those skills, my team and I launched an initiative called Harvard Chan LEADs, which stands for Learn and Engage Across Differences. We created a new module for orientation to engage students in these values as soon as they arrive on campus. Since then, we have hosted quite a few workshops and events, including special trainings to help faculty foster respectful conversations in the classroom, even when the topics are divisive.

I’m also launching the Harvard Chan Citizenship Awards. This award will be given each year to three people — a student, a staff member, and an academic appointee — who best represent our values and who have done the most to create a culture of pluralism and inclusivity. It’s all part of making sure we are accountable to our mission, our values, and one another.

What are some of the key ways you’re mobilizing around the other two As, agile and accessible?

We have taken some promising steps toward making both our education and our research more accessible. On the education front, I set up a working group to assess opportunities for expanding our non-degree offerings. On the research front, our Center for Health Communication has launched an innovative project to connect our faculty to social media creators, with the goal of expanding the amount of scientific content on platforms like TikTok.

In terms of agility, I’m very excited to be collaborating with Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on a research project that models the kind of interdisciplinary problem-solving I’d like to see more of. Our goal is to develop new models for prioritizing and incentivizing preventive healthcare in the U.S. We could save a lot of money and prevent a lot of suffering with a shift to prevention, so this is a project with immense potential.


‘Two Human Beings,’ again and again

An exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums asks what we can learn from Edvard Munch’s 40-year obsession with a man and woman at the shore.


Arts & Culture

‘Two Human Beings,’ again and again

Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums.

8 min read

An exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums asks what we can learn from Edvard Munch’s 40-year obsession with a man and woman at the shore.

Two figures, a man and a woman, stand at a shoreline. They face away from the viewer and toward the sea, side by side and yet isolated from one another. 

Sometimes the woman is on the left. Sometimes she’s on the right. Sometimes these figures, and the rocky shore around them, are rendered in careful brushstrokes; other times, perhaps there is a sense of urgency, of haste, of canvas left untouched. 

This is “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones,)” one of the most famous motifs by the Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch (1863-1944.) Munch returned to this motif again and again over more than 40 years, in paintings, metal-plate etchings, and a series of woodcut prints, each with slight differences in color, shape, or technique. 

“He couldn’t let go,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums and the co-curator of the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,” on view through July 27. “There are so many more iterations of [‘Two Human Beings’] … in black and white, in grayscale, all violet, monochromatic but in different color schemes, totally different color combinations. There was one we saw in neon color, and the whole thing became psychedelic. With the intensity of variations, the motif starts to have less and less singularity and it can be a vehicle, an exploration of pretty much anything under the sun.” 

Munch’s repeated returns to the motif demonstrate the way his paintings informed his prints, and vice versa. He first painted it in 1892, but the painting was destroyed in 1901 in an explosion onboard a ship that was transporting his works for exhibition. When he next painted the motif in about 1906-1908 (above left), he had already experimented with woodblock prints of the theme. The figures appear in reverse from the original painting and were thus likely based on the printed versions, which he would have had as a ready reference. 

“He’s mixing a huge range of different painting techniques,” said Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, co-curator of the exhibition. Munch left some of the canvas unpainted; in some places, he applied paint thickly or scratched color away. It’s more than a demonstration of versatility, Roth said: “It also creates a kind of vibration, a sensation of these figures, a dynamism in the painting itself.”

The final version, made in about 1935 (above right), appears more spontaneous than its predecessor, with exposed lines from Munch’s preparatory sketch, large swatches of color, and areas of exposed canvas. 

“It was something we were hoping to highlight,” Roth said. “Why this return? What is he learning over time and through the different techniques?”

The Lonely Ones, together and apart

© Munchmuseet / Richard Jeffries; © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

In his prints, Munch exploded “Two Human Beings” and put it back together again. He used a jigsaw method, inscribing his design onto a block of wood and using a fretsaw to cut each element into its own piece. Then, he could ink each piece separately, push them back together, and run the reunited composition through the press, creating endless variations of color.

Munch incorporated the male figure into the landscape but cut the woman into her own solitary block. 

“She almost feels like a doll,” Roth said. “You can take her out, as opposed to the man, who becomes a part of the printing of the landscape. In many of the prints, he begins to feel like he’s more a part of the landscape, whereas she is able to be this very singular figure and a very important one for Munch.” 

“He embraced the non-perfect alignment, the break in the block that would be seen then in later prints, the fact that in the painting, things are dripping, things are imperfect. That was something he emphasized: That the too-perfect finish was actually the enemy of the good in a work of art.”

Lynette Roth

“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” has long been understood as a rumination on isolation, on the sense of loneliness that one can feel even in the company of someone else. But after spending time with Munch’s multiple iterations on the motif, Roth said she’s not so sure that’s the only interpretation. 

A savvy businessman, Munch originally titled the work simply “Two Human Beings.” But when others ascribed loneliness to the figures, Munch leaned into it.

“The more I engaged with this, I started to feel like they actually aren’t that lonely,” Roth said. “They’re connected to the landscape; they’re connected also to each other in the way that color unites them, and the way he’s inching toward her. … For me, it’s also companionship and contemplation, which doesn’t have to be devastating or alienating or cause for anxiety.”

© President and Fellows of Harvard College; photos courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums.

© President and Fellows of Harvard College; photos courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums.

© President and Fellows of Harvard College; photos courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums.

A new lens on Munch

Munch has long been understood as a deeply troubled artist whose struggles with mental health are apparent in psychologically evocative works like “The Scream.” But “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” invites viewers to disentangle Munch’s artwork from his biography and to view his recurring motifs not only as a window into his psyche but as another material, like paint or charcoal, a vehicle through which Munch explored his artistic practice. 

“We know that people will react emotionally or psychologically to what’s on view,” said Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. “Two things can be true: Munch did suffer psychologically; although he was wealthy and well-off, he did have a lot of crises in his life. And he was also a mastermind of getting his work out there and exploring it.”


“Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” is on display through July 27 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3 at the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collection. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the U.S. 


Harvard launches pilot initiative to tackle some of today’s biggest challenges

Harvard Impact Labs will provide funding and support for faculty to conduct solutions-focused research and drive real-world impact


Harvard Kennedy School.

The new initiative will be housed at Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard file photo

Campus & Community

Harvard launches pilot initiative to tackle some of today’s biggest challenges

Harvard Impact Labs will provide funding and support for faculty to conduct solutions-focused research and drive real-world impact

5 min read

Harvard announced Wednesday the launch of a pilot for a new University-wide initiative called Harvard Impact Labs. The initiative will support faculty working in collaboration with leaders in government, nonprofits, and the private sector to develop solutions to pressing societal problems. 

Universities have long led the way in generating scientific knowledge to improve the human condition through research in the life sciences and engineering. Harvard Impact Labs seeks to support the impact-focused work of social scientists, harnessing the tools of scientific research to help public leaders solve the problems they confront every day. Each lab will focus on a specific societal challenge, such as local economic development, affordable housing, educational achievement, high-quality healthcare, or public safety.

During the pilot phase, the initiative will have three core components: (1) a fellowship program to support faculty as they develop meaningful scientific collaborations with leaders in the public and social sectors, (2) start-up funding to support these types of collaborations as they design, test, and scale solutions in real-world settings, and (3) public service leaves to give faculty the opportunity to embed in governments or nonprofits to learn more deeply about the problems they wish to work on. Through these functions, Harvard Impact Labs will support faculty who are already doing this critical work and provide others with the skills and resources they need to put their research and expertise to work for society.


“Just as Harvard faculty in the life sciences have long worked to develop medical cures that save and improve lives, Harvard Impact Labs will help faculty and students in other disciplines address the real-world challenges that our society faces,” said Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the C.Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences, and the Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences.  


“In this moment of dissatisfaction with the status quo, declining faith in expertise, and skepticism of government and democracy, there has never been a more important time for an initiative like this,” said Jeremy Weinstein, dean of Harvard Kennedy School and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. “By giving faculty and students the support they need — and connecting them with real-world practitioners — Harvard Impact Labs can help tackle our biggest challenges and improve lives across the world.”


“Harvard Impact Labs builds on the extraordinary work being done by many of our faculty in partnership with communities across the nation and around the globe, whether improving education, healthcare, housing, public safety, the environment, or a host of other issues,” said Nonie K. Lesaux, the interim dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development. “Communities and leaders are working hard to develop solutions, and we can help accelerate more of that work.”


“We are eager to enable more Harvard faculty to work with public- and private-sector changemakers to develop, test, and scale solutions to a range of social problems,” said Jeffrey Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School and co-faculty director of Harvard Impact Labs. “At the Government Performance Lab, I’ve seen firsthand how faculty and students can simultaneously change lives and advance scientific understanding by working directly with those on the front lines of society’s biggest challenges — and I’m thrilled to be building upon that mission with Harvard Impact Labs.”


“Many Harvard faculty are eager to put their expertise to work making a difference outside of Harvard, but it can be hard to know where to start,” said Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor, co-faculty director of this initiative, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. “This initiative is going to make it possible for more faculty to have impact at scale and lead to more rapid progress on some of the nation’s and the world’s most difficult social problems.”

Faculty at all Harvard Schools will be eligible for funding and support. The initiative will be housed at Harvard Kennedy School and report to the deans of the Kennedy School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Education. It will be guided by a distinguished group of faculty advisers from across the University and led by co-faculty directors Danielle Allen; Jeffrey Liebman; James S. Kim, professor of education; and Amanda Pallais, the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics. Its executive director, Pauline Abernathy, brings a wealth of experience creating reform at the national, state and local levels while in senior positions in government, nonprofits, and philanthropy. She is a graduate of the Kennedy School’s Master in Public Policy program. 

This pilot is made possible by a generous donation from Julian Baker, who graduated from Harvard College in 1988 with an A.B. in social studies.

More information on the initiative can be found on the Harvard Impact Labs website.


Panelists look at challenges, opportunities of GAI tools

New initiative advances conversations about role of AI


Michael Brenner,  Matthew Kopec and Sean Kelly.

Michael Brenner (from left), Matthew Kopec, and Sean Kelly discuss generative AI.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Panelists look at challenges, opportunities of GAI tools

New initiative advances conversations about role of AI

3 min read

When asked if it’s appropriate to use generative AI to grade student papers, write letters of recommendation, or screen job applicants the audience couldn’t come to a consensus.

Posing the questions was Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean Kelly, who kicked off the panel discussion “Original Thought in the AI Era: A Faculty Dialogue on Authorship and Ethics” by polling the audience before turning to the panel.

First up: Matthew Kopec, program director and lecturer for Embedded EthiCS, who opined, “Science is less fun because of all these tools.”

Quick to push back were Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, and Michael Brenner, Michael F. Cronin Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at SEAS.

“We’re in the business of making discoveries to improve the world for humans,” Brenner said. “We should use every tool that we have at our disposal to do that.” He and King posited that while GAI may make certain scientific endeavors easier, it can also encourage researchers to work on harder problems.

King, who is also the director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, noted that Harvard has long taught its students the latest technology to address problems faster and more easily, and GAI is no different.

“The first mathematics books had long passages trying to explain how to do mathematical calculations without wasting valuable paper. Most of us now spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do calculations without blowing up our computers,” he said. “You should be the kind of person that uses whatever the best tools are to progress the fastest and go the farthest.”

The hourlong panel was the first installment in the spring GAI Dialogues series, part of a wider initiative exploring the impact generative AI has on the FAS educational mission. The initiative, a priority of Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra, is being led by her senior adviser on artificial intelligence, Chris Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy. 

The conversation also examined concerns with ethical issues. Despite being an enthusiastic proponent for the use of GAI in science and math fields, Brenner acknowledged the need for scrutiny over who can or should control GAI tools.

King was blunter. “Yes, this technology can be used for harm. Any technology can be used for that. The causal factor isn’t the technology, it’s the humans that decided to use it,” he said.

A question from an audience member on AI’s potential environmental impact had all the panelists agreeing that the technology heavily consumes energy. King answered that AI may ruin the environment, or incent faster creation of new industries to generate clean energy.

“Before you single-handedly eliminate these incredibly visible tools, let’s just figure out the cost and benefits,” he said.

Upcoming events in this spring’s GAI Dialogues include “Teaching With Integrity in the Age of AI” with the College’s offices of Undergraduate Education and Academic Integrity at the Smith Campus Center on Monday. The faculty workshop will explore best practices for using AI in the classroom, potential coursework violations, and prevention strategies. Other events will focus on critical reading and writing in the age of AI, on April 3 and 24, respectively, and “Preparing Students for the Future: AI Literacy in the Liberal Arts” on May 5.


From Capasso lab to your living room

Rob Devlin helped develop innovative new mini-lens as grad student. Now startup he runs produces millions of them for consumer electronics.


Science & Tech

From Capasso lab to your living room

A 12-inch Metalenz wafer.

Image courtesy of Metalenz

6 min read

Rob Devlin helped develop innovative mini-lens as grad student. Now the startup he runs produces millions of them for consumer electronics.

Over the course of his Harvard doctoral studies, Rob Devlin must have made 100 of a new kind of mini-lens, experimenting with materials and prototyping new designs to bend light like a traditional camera only using a series of tiny pillars on a millimeter-thin wafer.

This new device would be smaller, cheaper, and able to be mass produced — if demand ever warranted it — in semiconductor chip foundries.

Today, demand warrants it.

Metalenz, a startup founded in 2016 with exclusive rights to commercialize the device Devlin helped develop in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics, says some 100 million of its light-focusing metasurfaces have been made and are installed in an array of consumer electronic devices.

Metalenz — with Devlin now as CEO — wouldn’t disclose which companies are using its devices in their products, but at least one report from a company that does teardowns of consumer products, Yole Group, says metasurfaces are in the iPad, Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Google’s Pixel 8 Pro.

“It’s remarkable to think that something that started at Harvard — during my Ph.D. and with the work of all the other folks in the Capasso lab — is now out there and people are using it,” Devlin said. “There are many examples of university technology that have great promise, and having metasurfaces actually end up in real-world devices at the scale that we’re now talking about definitely has a great feel to it.”

Sam Liss, executive director of strategic partnerships at Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, said Metalenz emerged from a group that was cross-disciplinary, leveraging different scientific backgrounds and perspectives into a product that is breaking new ground.

“[Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries.”

Sam Liss, Harvard Office of Technology Development

“It’s really taking conventional optics, which have been around for a very, very long time, and disrupting that industry,” Liss said. “That’s what I think university startups are really great at: true disruption. [Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries. And that always resonated with me.”

Capasso’s early work on metasurfaces began in 2007 or 2008. By 2012, when Devlin arrived at the lab, the science was mostly figured out. In a 2011 paper in the journal Science, which has garnered more than 10,000 citations, Capasso and members of his lab showed they could tune nanostructures on the metasurface to control light at will.

Shortly after, they demonstrated the first metalens, which was able to focus light — albeit inefficiently — on a single spot. From there, Devlin added his expertise in materials and nanofabrication, working with other members of the lab to refine the product. And Capasso set the bar even higher: He wanted not only a product that worked, but one that could be mass-produced using existing fabrication methods so they could go to market quickly.

“In record time, metalenses went from a research prototype in 2016 to the creation of Metalenz in the same year and mass manufacturing for the consumer market in the following years,” Capasso said. “Kudos to Rob Devlin for successfully leading this transition.”

All along, researchers knew the device had the potential to disrupt the traditional business of making lenses from curved pieces of polished glass or plastic. As manufacturers crammed more and more features into smartphones, tablets, and other devices, it became clear that the real estate taken up by bulky lenses was a bottleneck to more advanced designs.

A major early victory for Metalenz came in 2021, when the startup signed a contract with STMicroelectronics to put its metasurfaces into STMicro’s FlightSense module.

The distance-measuring module uses near-infrared light for 3D sensing, and the metasurface is involved in both emitting light and in detecting its reflections. The time taken for the infrared light to bounce back provides key data in drawing the 3D picture. It is used in facial recognition, 3D room mapping, augmented reality, and similar applications.

Though these metasurfaces are not typically used for visual images, they can provide depth information that helps focus visual camera lenses.

Rob Devlin.

Rob Devlin.

Photo courtesy of Metalenz

Metalenz is currently based in Boston’s North End and has doubled in size to about 45 employees over the last three years. The company doesn’t need all that much space, because the manufacturing is left to large semiconductor foundries, which turn out more than a trillion chips a year for the global technology industry.

At Metalenz, Devlin said, the staff focuses on improving performance of their current product and developing what they hope will be the next big breakthrough: Polar ID.

Polar ID uses polarization of light to provide an additional layer of security for smartphones with a dramatic reduction in cost and size.

Devlin said that a traditional polarization camera is about 100 millimeters long and costs $500 to $1,000. Smaller versions have been created but are found only on top-end devices. Metalenz’s polarization metasurface is about 5 millimeters long and costs roughly $5, Devlin said, which would allow their deployment at low cost in many more devices.

“I can get a standard image of you. I can recognize the distance between your eyes and how far your eyes are from your nose and all of these key landmarks,” Devlin said. “But the polarization signature of you is unique, meaning that even if someone came with a perfect 3D mask of you and put it in front of the device, the polarization signature of that 3D mask would be different than your polarization signature.”

Polarization can be used in other applications as well. For example, skin cancer’s polarization signature is different from healthy skin, so it can be used to detect dangerous growths. It can also be used to monitor air quality.

“There are a lot of exciting things stemming from the power of the metasurface to take complex modules, shrink them down, and let you do entirely new things,” Devlin said.

As with any successful product, other companies are working to catch up, Devlin said. Metalenz’s strategy is to continue to improve current products and develop new ones that leverage the technology to do new and interesting things.

He also counted among advantages their continued relationship with Capasso — a Metalenz founder — providing a pipeline to new developments from his lab.

“There’s a lot of competition and folks are trying to catch up to us,” Devlin said. “The benefit we have is really the first applications we’ve already deployed, and we’ve already started to move on to something where we’re using even more of the unique aspects of the metasurface.”


How rat watching can yield benefits for people

New AI method lets researchers get better handle on brain-behavior link, may offer insights into disorders like autism


Postdoctoral Fellow Ugne Klibaite (left) and Bence P Ölveczky, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

Ugne Klibaite (left) and Bence P. Ölveczky.

Photos by Grace DuVal

Science & Tech

How rat watching can yield benefits for people

New AI method lets researchers get better handle on brain-behavior link, may offer insights into disorders like autism

5 min read

It’s all about the body language.

A new AI method for tracking the social lives of rats may help researchers better understand the relationship between the brain and social behavior, with possible implications for human conditions such as autism.

The machine-learning technique was detailed in a paper, “Mapping the Landscape of Social Behavior,” recently published in Cell. Bence P. Ölveczky, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology (OEB) and co-author of the paper, explained: “We are really mapping the social life of rats by capturing the details of their every movement. We see how they interact with each other, and we see the same forms of engagement over and over again.

“We see personalities in these animals that are intriguing. In many ways, these variations can help us understand the basis for a lot of interesting behavioral phenomena, including sociality,” he added.

Rats are social creatures. Much like humans, they interact with each other in ways that influence their behavior through complex social patterns of touching and body language. These rat interactions are not that far from our own, the researchers say.

Ölveczky gave a real-life example: “When people come into my lab, I scratch my head a little bit and soon after they will scratch their heads, or I cross my legs, and they cross their legs. We are subconsciously communicating with each other.”

Although studies of rat behavior have existed for years, in the past they relied on observation and a limited number of data points.

video of computer models that collected data on rat behavior.
From videos, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted.

“The standard in the field is for somebody to just watch hours and hours of rat videos and say, ‘Oh, I think that they touched each other there. I think that this guy was mimicking the other guy,’” Ölveczky said. 

The new study was able to take an in-depth look at how those social behaviors are communicated thanks to groundbreaking technology. From videos of the interactions, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted. Researchers could then graph how these animals behaved around others, including how they learned and changed through these exchanges.

“By having this methodology, we can replace the subjective human observer with a very rigorous and reproducible method for behavioral quantification and identification of particular gestures or even interaction motifs,” said Ölveczky.

AI also allowed the researchers to “analyze amounts of data that would take humans years and years to scroll through,” said Ugne Klibaite, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ölveczky Lab and lead author on the paper.

“Given how far computer vision and deep learning has progressed and the technology, the cameras, and the computers we have, we can actually get high-resolution animal movement in 3D,” said Klibaite. Now, she continued, “we have a chance to think about what that might mean.”

This advance is already opening new areas for research into autism. A complex disorder, autism probably has environmental components, said Ölveczky. It also seems clear, however, that there is a genetic component, with certain high-risk genes predisposing an individual to autism.

“The question then is how does a mutation or a knockout in this gene affect the brain, and how does that lead to changes in social behavior?”

With funding from the Simons Foundation for Autism Research, which provided rats that had variations in these specific genes, the researchers were able to look at how these genetically modified rats socialized.

While stressing that autism is a human condition, the researchers did find some intriguing parallels.

“This is a spectrum disorder, and we see some of that variability in our different rat models as well,” said Ölveczky.

Noting that children on the autism spectrum often socialize in different ways than children not on the spectrum, he said, “We also see a whole variety of different types of differences in social interactions in these rats that depend on the particular gene that was knocked out.”

Ongoing research will explore these similarities and how they might relate to the altered genes.

“Using this platform, we are going to ask questions about how different parts of the brain process social gestures,” said Ölveczky. “Can we go deeper and really pinpoint the circuits that are responsible for this difference in behavior? And when we can do that — if we can do that — then that could very well inspire new approaches to therapy.”

Adding to the value of the study, the data — the films of the rats and the movement trajectories distilled from them — will be shared, said Klibaite, who led the data collection and behavioral analysis.

“Hopefully by releasing this to the community and getting people to engage with the data as well, we’ll have people in the conversation making better models of how the brain underlies social behavior.”


Funding for this research came, in part, from the National Institutes of Health.


Sniffing out signs of trouble

Researchers develop at-home test to ID those at risk of Alzheimer’s years before symptoms appear


Health

Sniffing out signs of trouble

Illiustration of nose sniffing.
3 min read

Researchers develop at-home test to ID those at risk of Alzheimer’s years before symptoms appear

When it comes to early detection of cognitive impairment, a new study suggests that the nose knows.

Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham developed olfactory tests — in which participants sniff odor labels that have been placed on a card — to assess people’s ability to discriminate, identify, and remember odors. They found that participants could successfully take the test at home and that older adults with cognitive impairment scored lower on the test than cognitively normal adults. Results are published in Scientific Reports

“Early detection of cognitive impairment could help us identify people who are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease and intervene years before memory symptoms begin,” said senior author Mark Albers of the Laboratory of Olfactory Neurotranslation, the McCance Center for Brain Health, Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Our goal has been to develop and validate a cost-effective, noninvasive test that can be performed at home, helping to set the stage for advancing research and treatment for Alzheimer’s.”

Albers and colleagues are interested in whether olfactory dysfunction — the sometimes-subtle loss of sense of smell — can serve as an early warning sign for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and traumatic brain injury. Albers helped found a company that makes the Aromha Brain Health Test, which is the test used by the research team to conduct the current study.

To evaluate the olfactory test, the team recruited English- and Spanish-speaking participants with subjective cognitive complaints (those with self-reported concerns about memory) and participants with mild cognitive impairment. They compared these participants’ test results with those from people who had no sense of smell and with cognitively normal individuals. 

The research team found that odor identification, memory, and discrimination declined with age. They also found that older adults with mild cognitive impairment had lower scores for odor discrimination and identification compared with older adults who were cognitively normal. Overall, the researchers found that test results were similar across English- and Spanish-speakers, and participants performed the test equally successfully regardless of whether they were observed by a research assistant.

The authors note that future studies could incorporate neuropsychological testing and could follow patients over time to see if the tool can predict cognitive decline.

“Our results suggest that olfactory testing could be used in clinical research settings in different languages and among older adults to predict neurodegenerative disease and development of clinical symptoms,” said Albers.


The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.


What are the odds of picking a perfect NCAA bracket?

Statistician explains why ‘it’s unlikely to happen in anyone’s lifetime’


Chalk drawing of quarter final chart.
Science & Tech

What are the odds of picking a perfect NCAA bracket?

Statistician explains why ‘it’s unlikely to happen in anyone’s lifetime’

2 min read

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Kevin Rader is the senior preceptor in statistics and associate director of undergraduate studies.

Typically, you’re talking about the perfect bracket of 64 games. Sixty-three teams lose and one team doesn’t, and to get the perfect bracket, you have to pick right in each of those games. The equation is 1 over 263, which is some astronomical number, it’s in the quintillions. It’s like winning the Powerball two drawings in a row.

No one has gotten a perfect bracket ever, or at least not that has been reported. This year, we’re about halfway through the games, and there are no perfect brackets remaining of all the publicly available ones. It’s unlikely to happen in anyone’s lifetime.

The top seeds almost never lose, at least not in the first round. So it’s not really like flipping 63 coins; it’s like flipping 47 coins. So the chances are more like winning the lottery twice out of the next three draws.

The best chance for anyone to get a perfect bracket is if all the best teams win. But there are always going to be some upsets — and good luck correctly picking those.

Winning your office pool is almost a more difficult question. It mainly depends on how many people are in the pool. You need to distinguish yourself from your competition. Yes, you pick the favorites most of the time, but you have to pick a few upsets to distinguish yourself from other people, especially if it’s in a big pool with lots of entries.

To pick the upsets correctly, use the information you can. At a certain point, it’s almost a coin flip, but when there’s a big discrepancy between the teams, you shouldn’t use a coin flip; you should pick chalk.

As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer


Maybe a teacher. Or maybe an education policy reformer.

Andrew Zonneveld believes public service is way to make a real difference in world


Campus & Community

Maybe a teacher. Or maybe an education policy reformer.

Andrew Zonneveld

Andrew Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base in North Carolina, is studying government and education.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

4 min read

Andrew Zonneveld believes public service is way to make a real difference in world

Andrew Zonneveld sees teaching as the most important job in the world.

“Doctors are great. But doctors are only doctors because they had great teachers,” said the first-generation college student from North Carolina.

Zonneveld ’26, a government concentrator with a secondary in education studies, is attending Harvard College on full financial aid. Graduating debt-free means he can prioritize public service.

“I would love to be a public school teacher for a few years,” said the Leverett House resident.

“He talks a great deal about going back to North Carolina and helping the schools there,” said his mom, Jennifer Eirich. “I think it has a lot to do with the strong connections he formed with the teachers he had as a kid. But I guess I think there’s something bigger out there for him. Maybe he’ll go and change the educational system for the whole country. Maybe he’ll go into politics.”

Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base and counts many servicemembers in his family, has been interested in the intersection of education and policy from an early age. He recalled pitching an elementary school teacher on forming the school’s first student government.

“I won president in third grade or fourth grade,” he said. “In my speech, I promised the principal would kiss a pig if we raised enough money through Box Tops — remember those?”

Entering Onslow Early College High School — where students work toward their diplomas while earning free credits from Coastal Carolina Community College — provided Zonneveld with his next opening. He spent the summer before ninth grade drafting a constitution for the student government association he later helped launch at the newly opened public high school.

“I could tell from the beginning how motivated he was,” remembered Hannah Padilla, a former guidance counselor there. “Within a week or two, he had come out of his shell and was just unapologetically Andrew: a dedicated student who knew exactly what he wanted from life.”

The Class of 2022 valedictorian assumed he would attend North Carolina’s flagship public university. The school offered him a generous scholarship. “But it was still going to cost me 15 or 20 grand per year,” Zonneveld said.

Opening an acceptance letter from Harvard College was a tearful occasion — and a total surprise after applying on a last-minute whim. “Not in a million years did someone from our county think something like this could happen,” Eirich said.

The family had been concerned about covering college costs, so the University’s offer came as a big relief.  “Financial aid is really the only reason I’m here at Harvard,” he said. “It’s the only way I can afford it.”

The support also means Zonneveld’s attentions are no longer so splintered. He had trained as a lifeguard in his early teens, and sometimes worked full-time at area pools while attending high school.

At Harvard, Zonneveld has continued teaching aquatics at the Malkin Athletic Center. But only because he still enjoys passing on his knowledge. “I don’t have to work crazy hours,” he said.

Help from Harvard also made other opportunities possible. Zonneveld was able to complete an internship last summer at a research institute in Berlin with the support of the Government Department. He also traveled to Thailand and Vietnam with Harvard Model Congress to teach high schoolers about policy and public speaking. Over spring break, he helped the organization run a government simulation with teens in Brussels.

“Financial aid didn’t just bring me here,” Zonneveld said. “It allowed me to travel the world, to go home and see my family during breaks. It allowed me to have access to opportunities I would have never had anywhere else.”


Passion for advocacy nurtured at home

Maryam Guerrab, a child of Algerian immigrants, seeks to combine important lessons from classroom with powerful ones from life


Campus & Community

Passion for advocacy nurtured at home

Maryam Guerrab.

Maryam Guerrab, who is from North Carolina, is studying government on the political economy track.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

4 min read

Maryam Guerrab, a child of Algerian immigrants, seeks to combine important lessons from classroom with powerful ones from life

Maryam Guerrab says her upbringing, as one of five children of Algerian immigrants, fueled her passion for advocacy.

“Public service work is incredibly important to me, I think in large part because of how I grew up. I come from a large immigrant family whose parents are both blue-collar workers,” Guerrab said. “I’ve seen a lot of the obstacles that different communities face through both my personal experiences and professional experiences I’ve pursued.”

At Harvard, Guerrab is concentrating in government on the political economy track.

“I thought that studying government, learning more about the local and economic institutions that shape the world we live in today, informing how many people lead their lives and the problems they face, would be the best way to advocate for people’s rights,” she said.

Guerrab, now just months away from graduation, was apprehensive about applying.

“I did not think Harvard was an option for me. It seemed this almost mystical place where the upper echelons of society would go, and that was not me,” said the 21-year-old from North Carolina. “I was privileged enough to know that I was going to go to college, but I thought it would be a state school or somewhere nearby.”

She learned about Harvard’s financial aid program in high school but joked with her family that she’d probably never get in anyway.

“There was this confidence from them when I told them I was applying,” she said of her parents. “I was like, ‘Mama, I don’t really know if you realize that very few people get in, and I don’t know if I can do it.’ And it was always, ‘It’s fine! It’ll be OK.’”

Mama turned out to be right.

Guerrab said getting assistance and not having to worry about paying for college has allowed her “to thrive as a student, pursue opportunities that potentially wouldn’t have been possible.”

The senior has received two Priscilla Chan Summer Service Stipends and hopes to apply again this summer. The stipend allowed her to travel to Belgrade and Serbia, and to work with the refugee organization IDEAS: The Center for Research and Development of Society.

She also received a launch grant, which is part of the support students on full financial aid receive to help pay for post-Harvard needs such as Medical College Admission Test-prep guides (she is planning to apply in May) and books.

She later added: “I recognize all the privilege that I have been given, and I want to use it to give back.”

Guerrab said she felt she has made the biggest impact during her College career as a case management director for Y2Y Network, which provides overnight housing for unhoused young adults in Greater Boston. The opportunity allowed her to engage with young people in the program and mentor other Harvard student volunteers.

“What drives my persistent pursuit of both my academics and community service work is my passion to give the best service I can and to take advantage of every opportunity,” Guerrab said. “Harvard is a once-in-a-lifetime experience — on the academic end, [being able to] learn from people with such diverse experiences. Harvard provides me an opportunity to learn as much as I can about the fields that I’m passionate about.”

She continued: “Taking what I learned in the classroom to inform how I’m interacting with the communities that I serve is super important.”

Between classes and volunteer work, Guerrab stepped out of her comfort zone and joined the mountaineering club on campus. She acknowledged that growing up, outdoor activities weren’t as accessible.

“I didn’t even think it was something I wanted to explore,” she said. “The Mountaineering Club was definitely something that I was like, ‘I’m just gonna try something crazy and see what happens.’”

Guerrab said her first mountaineering trip to the Boston Basin of the North Cascade National Park in Washington was a mental, physical, and personal “growth moment” that made her aware of her resilience.

“It was something that taught me that I can really do anything, even in really hard moments,” she said.


Her parents came from India. She wants to help other newcomers.

Merlin D’souza has her sights set on medical school


Campus & Community

Her parents came from India. She wants to help other newcomers.

Merlin D'souza.

Merlin D’souza from Casa Grande, Arizona, studies human developmental and regenerative biology and hopes to go into medicine.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

4 min read

Merlin D’souza has her sights set on medical school

Merlin D’souza learned about artificial wombs in her high school Career Technical Education biotechnology class. That experience led her to look for unique biomedical programs when considering colleges. Harvard’s Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology Department immediately caught her attention.

“They were working with stem cells and doing projects that focused on the regenerative aspect of medicine,” said the senior from Casa Grande, Arizona. “As someone who wants to go into medicine and wants to be part of the technology and development [side], that was really exciting for me.”

D’souza, a concentrator in human developmental and regenerative biology and global health and health policy, has really enjoyed her time at Harvard, but the road to Cambridge was not entirely smooth. Her family was unsure how they would be able to afford paying for school. Immigrants from India, her father left school at a young age to begin working to support his family, while her mother was also unable to continue her education.

“My mom had a love and dream to go and study, but she had to help her mom in the rice fields and the farm. She always was like, ‘Wherever you want to shoot, however high you want to go, we’ll support you.’ Harvard was that [for me],” she said.

Getting full financial aid from Harvard allowed her to attend worry-free. “Tuition and the grants that I’ve been able to receive have been super helpful, because I’m not shifting the burden on my parents. That was a big concern for me,” she said. “Having that support as I study and go through this hard curriculum has been such a relief.”

D’souza took full advantage of the opportunities she found. During the last four years, she has traveled to India to teach at under-resourced schools, conducted research on mental health with the help of the Boston Public Health Commission, and presented research to the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health.

Financial aid assistance not only has made attendance possible, but also helped D’souza pursue medical school. In the fall of her junior year, she received a launch grant designed to help students transition from Harvard. With that money she was able to pay for the Medical College Admission Test and cover the costs of applications. She highlighted other support available to financial aid students like herself, including funds to buy a winter coat.

“The reason I want to go to medical school is mostly because I want to help populations from the communities I came up in. My parents were immigrants. They didn’t have access to the best medical resources,” she said.

Outside of academics, D’souza has found ways to give back. She serves as a peer advising fellow with the Advising Programs Office, where she supports first-years as they transition to college. She also volunteers at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“We get a chance to provide support to and play with a kid going through dialysis. It’s really the highlight of my week,” she said.

After graduation, D’souza will take a gap year to teach or do research before starting medical school, a break that she said wouldn’t have been possible if she was saddled with a lot of loan debt.

“One thing that people don’t think about with tuition assistance is that most people need it,” she said. “Tuition assistance has such a long-reaching impact. I’m able to have this education and pursue a degree in a profession that helps to give back. It’s kind of like a full circle.”


Providing medical care is important, but so is ensuring access

Morgan Byers grew up in a small Georgia community with big ideas of how to help


Morgan Byers.

Outside of class, Morgan Byers works as an EMT with Crimson EMS and conducts research at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Providing medical care is important, but so is ensuring access

Morgan Byers grew up in a small Georgia community with big ideas of how to help

4 min read

Morgan Byers grew up in Commerce, Georgia, a community of about 8,200 residents, where she saw how limited access to medical care can be. She was particularly interested in the disproportionately high maternal mortality rate in the South.

“The South has the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, which is due to a complicated recipe of racial and gender discrimination, socioeconomic inequity, and limited access to reproductive health care,” said Byers ’26. “It absolutely breaks my heart that as medicine advances, these regions and women are entirely left behind, coping with the same maternal mortality rate in 2025 that was present in Massachusetts in the 1970s.”

That perspective inspired the Pforzheimer resident’s desire to become a doctor and led her to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to her studies.

“I eventually decided to study human developmental and regenerative biology out of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which is super research-heavy. I paired that with government, so that I can study medicine, research, and then access,” the double concentrator said.

“My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”

Morgan Byers

Harvard proved to be “a transformative experience” that allowed her to “study absolutely everything,” she said. The summer after her first year, Byers headed to Portugal through the Office of International Education to study with its country’s doctors.

“I was fascinated by Portugal’s universal health care system after learning about it in a health care economics class,” Byers shared. “That summer, I woke up every day and studied a different specialty, being enthralled by the medical knowledge I was picking up. But I was even more fascinated by the health care system and how policy directly impacts medical practice.”

Beyond academics, Byers works as an EMT with Crimson EMS and conducts research at the Breault Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. At the lab, Byers works on intestinal organoids and enteroendocrine cells under the supervision of Daniel Zeve, an endocrinologist and lecturer on pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

She also works as a campus tour guide and mentors Boston high school students through the Emerging Leaders Program at Radcliffe Institute.

Although she has taken full advantage of her time at the College, Byers said she wasn’t always sure she would be able to attend. “Nobody in my family had ever gone to college before,” she said. Her mother works as an administrative assistant at a high school, and her father works in equipment management.

She added: “I definitely did not think Harvard was an option for me. I honestly didn’t want to get myself excited about that possibility and it just to be ripped away.”

Even after she was accepted, Byers said her family remained concerned about covering costs. “It’s truly the biggest blessing in the world,” she said. “I was worried that I was going to have to say no because of money, but because of significant tuition assistance that was not the case.”

Her mom, Mandy Byers, added: “If it was not for Harvard’s financial aid program and all the wonderful people at the admissions office that we talked to in the beginning, I don’t know that it would have been an option for her.”

The 21-year-old wants to attend medical school in the South, where she hopes to make an impact on health care access. Several of her Harvard courses have highlighted for her the importance of implementation science, or the study of methods to promote evidence-based practices into public health care.

“I dreamed of being a bridge between the resource epicenters of the world, like Harvard, and the places so desperately in need of that research,” she said. “Those places were small towns all over the South, just like the tiny ones that I come from. My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”

“Morgan has more ambition and drive than most adults,” her mother said. “She wants to help people, and I really can’t see her doing anything else. Even if medicine doesn’t work out, it’s going to be serving people in some capacity.”

Byers acknowledged that some students come to college with a clear idea of their path through higher education and beyond. “I’ve tried very consciously to not make it like that at all,” she said. “I’ve tried to be very grateful of the fact that I get to pave my own way at every turn.”


What happens to your data if 23andMe collapses?

Health law policy expert says biotech firm’s uncertain future shows need for protections of personal, genetic information


Nation & World

What happens to your data if 23andMe collapses?

A 23andMe kit.

Jon Elswick/AP

8 min read

Health law policy expert says biotech firm’s uncertain future shows need for protections of personal, genetic info

A recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine calls for regulations to protect customers’ personal and genetic data in light of biotech company 23andMe’s uncertain future.

The genetic testing firm became wildly popular after launching in 2007, with millions of customers sending in saliva samples for analysis to learn about their ancestry and genetic makeup.

The company was valued at $6 billion, or $17.65 a share, shortly after going public in 2021. It has since fallen to about $48 million, or $1.78 per share, after a 2023 data breach and resignation of some board members. The firm said in January that it’s exploring “strategic alternatives,” including a sale of the company or assets, restructuring, or business combination, among other options.

In this edited conversation, I. Glenn Cohen, one of the paper’s authors and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, explains the legal landscape surrounding genetic data, the reasons for more consumer protection laws, and the steps for consumers to protect their personal and genetic data.

Glenn Cohen.

I. Glenn Cohen.

File photo by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer


If 23andMe were to file for bankruptcy protection, what might happen with the genetic data of 14 million people the company holds?

As 23andMe faces significant financial distress and might be purchased directly or go bankrupt and its assets sold, all of the genetic and health information provided by people is a valuable asset to the company. Many people have used services like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and others which are direct-to-consumer genetic tests companies, to answer questions about their ancestry or their genetic code.

But in the course of answering these questions for themselves, they’ve also contributed to these huge genetic databases. Our concern is that they may end up in the hands of somebody other than 23andMe, in a way that many people who have given their information to 23andMe never contemplated and might object to.

What are the possible case scenarios, and what are your concerns?

One is about data security. We saw that 23andMe itself was subject to a massive data breach in 2023, and if the company that takes over the data lacks good data security, there’s a possibility of breach.

Interestingly, once upon a time, the Pentagon told military personnel not to use these at-home DNA kits because it was concerned about national security. A more quotidian concern is that your genetic information might become available to others, and it’s possible you could become reidentified.

To give you an example from a study several years ago, a number of researchers used genetic data to try to identify, through what’s called genome-wide association studies (GWAS) technology and approach, what parts of the genome were associated with being gay. Many people who had given their genetic information were understandably upset at the idea this could be a possible use of their information.

So, while customers have made the decision to share with 23andMe, from whom they get a lot of benefit, they really have very little say about what will happen should the company be taken over or should the company go bankrupt, and its assets sold.

 “I would love to see a space where people can get the information they want without feeling as though that information might put them at risk.”

Do federal health privacy regulations offer privacy protections to consumers?

The Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the law that, among other things, when you speak to your doctor, creates rules about what can be shared under what context.

The problem is that HIPAA’s definition of covered entities and business associates means that when you have provided information, including your genetic data, not to a hospital system, not to a physician, but to a direct-to-consumer company like 23andMe, you are not covered by HIPAA. You are treated by the law essentially as a consumer, not as the patient.

Now, there are other federal laws that cover you a little bit. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents health insurers, but also employers, from using genetic information in a way that is discriminatory. So that kind of law still will apply, but health privacy laws at the federal level won’t directly apply when you are dealing with a private company like 23andMe.

What about the privacy protections 23andMe offers to consumers?

We should say at the front end that it asks its consumers for consent to use their data for research purposes. There is the option not to consent although roughly 80 percent of the consumers have given consent.

The consumer agreements have a privacy statement that says all U.S. customers have certain rights, such as a right to opt out of the storage of saliva samples and the right to request the deletion of their account. It also says that it doesn’t share individual-level information, on diseases or genotypes, or de-identify information voluntarily with insurance companies, employers, public databases, or law enforcement agencies without a subpoena.

But the company shares personal information with service providers and contractors for sample analysis, marketing, and analytics. Also, the privacy statement reserves the company’s right to transfer customers’ personal information in the event of a sale or bankruptcy, and customers can’t protect their data from being accessed, sold, or transferred as part of that transaction.

Can bankruptcy laws offer some safeguards to 23andMe consumers?

One of the paper’s co-authors, Melissa Jacoby, is a bankruptcy law scholar. My specialty is health law, but I’ll do my best to explain. Many companies that have held sensitive information have filed for bankruptcy, and in the course of that bankruptcy they’ve sold consumer data to a third party.

Bankruptcy law offers some protections. Bankruptcy itself is a public process. There’s attention from the public, and sometimes regulators, like the [Federal Trade Commission] or state attorney generals, can get involved in cases and can seek to enter the bankruptcy proceedings. A federal court oversees a bankruptcy, and the U.S. Trustee Program, an agency within the Department of Justice, can sometimes get involved as well.

In some instances, bankruptcy law had required a consumer privacy ombudsperson to investigate a sale and determine whether it’s keeping with the bankrupt company’s privacy statements, as well as the law.

These are some protections, but they’re not perfect. One thing we want to highlight is that when most people have given their genetic information, they’ve never thought about this, and we just want people to pay attention to it.

What are your policy recommendations to protect consumers’ personal and genetic data?

The U.S. has a federal health privacy law that’s a bit out of date compared to our peer countries in Europe. One solution to this problem would be to have more general data privacy protection that would cover all personal data, including genetic data, and that would apply in bankruptcy cases as well.

There have been many attempts to get Congress to comprehensively update federal privacy law, including health privacy laws. They haven’t really succeeded. So, we’re not holding our breath.

A more targeted approach might be thinking about expanding the scope of the HIPAA law to cover companies like 23andMe, or potentially expanding what the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act covers, in terms of discrimination and genetic information. New regulations could also address instances when you have the overlap of a company that has genetic information and goes bankrupt. That’s what we’d like to see. Whether it will happen, I’m not sure.

What could consumers do in the meantime?

Going forward, I would think about these things as you decide whether the kind of information you are going to get from a direct-to-consumer company like 23andMe is worth the risks.

Also, when you are given the right to choose not to consent to sharing of data, I think that’s worth thinking about. And if this is something that worries you, this might be a time to go in and delete that information in your account, even though it’s not a perfect solve.

There are a lot of reasons why people are curious about their ancestry or genetic information. My hope is that this experience might also cause companies to be more privacy sensitive. I would love to see a space where people can have their cake and eat it too, to get the information they want without feeling as though that information might put them at risk if there’s a bankruptcy and the like.


Women’s basketball on the road to March Madness

Ivy League champs return for first time in 18 years,


Campus & Community

Women’s basketball on the road to March Madness

Ivy League champs return for first time in 18 years

3 min read
Coach Carrie Moore getting on the bus with her team.

Coach Carrie Moore and her Ivy League champs depart for the airport.

Photos by Christina Richson/Harvard Athletics

The Harvard Women’s Basketball team headed to North Carolina on Thursday as the No. 10 seed in the upcoming NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, marking the squad’s first trip to March Madness in 18 years. The flight to Raleigh came days after a thrilling 74-71 Crimson victory last Saturday against Columbia that gave the team its first-ever Ivy League Tournament Championship.

Helming this meteoric run is Carrie Moore, the Kathy Delaney-Smith Head Coach for Harvard Women’s Basketball.

Women's basketball holds the trophy,
The Ivy League Tournament Championship trophy on display.

“I couldn’t be more proud of my team and the staff,” said the third-year coach. “It was a dramatic way to end the tournament, but if it didn’t end that way, it wouldn’t be us. You couldn’t write the story any better. It makes everything we’ve gone through over the last three years worth it.”

Moore said she is especially proud of how the team battled moments of adversity.

“I’ve always told our team, ‘You either win or you learn,’” she said. “That’s who we are. That’s our makeup. We are a resilient group. We’ve done a really good job this season of having a ‘next-play mentality’ and focusing on the process and not the outcome. We knew we were going to take these games one possession at a time, and one timeout at a time, and we never panicked.”

“From the top down, I’m so proud of the program,” said team captain and forward Katie Krupa ’26. “Coach Moore has done an excellent job handling each and every challenge.

“It was such an overwhelming feeling of joy and pride in the group. Everything we worked for and wanted was building to that moment. We’ve all really jelled this year and got the dynamics right off and on the court. This sisterhood is as strong as it’s ever been,” she added.

The Crimson, led by senior Harmoni Turner, who scored 44 points to help the Crimson reach the Ivy League championship, will play No. 7 seed Michigan State on Saturday afternoon. Moore said Harvard is ready for the national spotlight, and eager to make its presence known to the nation.

“We’re not just excited to be there,” Moore said. “We’re excited to go into this tournament, play really well, and win some games this weekend.”

“You go through so many peaks and valleys on and off the court during a season, it’s all about how you respond each time you hit that valley, and we’ve responded excellently every time this season,” added Krupa. “We have nothing to lose. We can go out there and show the world what we’re made of.”


4 things we learned this week

How closely have you been following the Gazette? Take our quiz to find out.


A collage of photos of the week's news.

Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Campus & Community

4 things we learned this week

1 min read

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The rent is too dang high. A global crisis led to lifesaving innovations. Sugar cravings are real, but sugar addiction might not be. Loving your job has downsides.


1. What percent of fully employed renters were cost-burdened as of 2023, according to recent research?
2. When did America’s public-private biomedicine partnership begin?
3. True or false: Quitting sugar cold turkey is the best way to manage cravings.
4. What is a potential downside to a highly passionate workplace, according to recent Business School research?


Machine healing

Artificial intelligence is up to the challenge of reducing human suffering, experts say. Are we?


Collage of medical and technology images.

Photo illustrations by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff

Health

Machine healing

long read

Artificial intelligence is up to the challenge of reducing human suffering, experts say. Are we?

When Adam Rodman was a second-year medical student in the 2000s, he visited the library for a patient whose illness had left doctors stumped. Rodman searched the catalog, copied research papers, and shared them with the team.

“It made a big difference in that patient’s care,” Rodman said. “Everyone said, ‘This is so great. This is evidence-based medicine.’ But it took two hours. I can do that today in 15 seconds.”

Rodman, now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, these days carries a medical library in his pocket — a smartphone app created after the release of the large language model ChatGPT in 2022. OpenEvidence — developed in part by Medical School faculty — allows him to query specific diseases and symptoms. It searches the medical literature, drafts a summary of findings, and lists the most important sources for further reading, providing answers while Rodman is still face-to-face with his patient.

“We say, ‘Wow, the technology is really powerful.’ But what do we do with it to actually change things?”

Adam Rodman

Artificial intelligence in various forms has been used in medicine for decades — but not like this. Experts predict that the adoption of large language models will reshape medicine. Some compare the potential impact with the decoding of the human genome, even the rise of the internet. The impact is expected to show up in doctor-patient interactions, physicians’ paperwork load, hospital and physician practice administration, medical research, and medical education.

Most of these effects are likely to be positive, increasing efficiency, reducing mistakes, easing the nationwide crunch in primary care, bringing data to bear more fully on decision-making, reducing administrative burdens, and creating space for longer, deeper person-to-person interactions.

Adam Rodman.

Adam Rodman, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

transcript

ADAM RODMAN: I am obsessed with metacognition, with thinking about thinking. So what excites me most about AI and medicine? Well, the optimist in me hopes that AI and medicine can make us doctors better versions of ourselves to better care for our patients. I think the best case scenario for me is a world in which an artificial intelligence is communicating with me and my patients, looking for signs of implicit bias, looking for signs that I might be making the wrong decision, and more importantly, feeding back that information to me so that I can improve over time, so that I can become a better human. My worry is actually directly related to this. These are very powerful reasoning technologies, and really what is medical education other than a way to frame and shape the medical mind? So part of my worry is that because these technologies are so powerful, they’ll shortcut many of the ways that we know that doctors learn and get better, and we may end up with generations of physicians who don’t know how to think the best. I don’t think that this is the foregone conclusion, but it really is my worry about the way that things are going.

But there are serious concerns, too.

Current data sets too often reflect societal biases that reinforce gaps in access and quality of care for disadvantaged groups. Without correction, these data have the potential to cement existing biases into ever-more-powerful AI that will increasingly influence how healthcare operates.

Another important issue, experts say, is that AIs remain prone to “hallucination,” making up “facts” and presenting them as if they are real.

Then there’s the danger that medicine won’t be bold enough. The latest AI has the potential to remake healthcare top to bottom, but only if given a chance. The wrong priorities — too much deference to entrenched interests, a focus on money instead of health — could easily reduce the AI “revolution” to an underwhelming exercise in tinkering around the edges.

“I think we’re in this weird space,” Rodman said. “We say, ‘Wow, the technology is really powerful.’ But what do we do with it to actually change things? My worry, as both a clinician and a researcher, is that if we don’t think big, if we don’t try to rethink how we’ve organized medicine, things might not change that much.”

Shoring up the ‘tottering edifice’

Five years ago, when asked about AI in healthcare, Isaac Kohane responded with frustration. Teenagers tapping away on social media apps were better equipped than many doctors. The situation today couldn’t be more different, he says.

Kohane, chair of the Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine’s new AI initiative, describes the abilities of the latest models as “mind boggling.” To illustrate the point, he recalled getting an early look at OpenAI’s GPT-4. He tested it with a complex case — a child born with ambiguous genitalia — that might have stymied even an experienced endocrinologist. Kohane asked GPT-4 about genetic causes, biochemical pathways, next steps in the workup, even what to tell the child’s parents. It aced the test.

“This large language model was not trained to be a doctor; it’s just trained to predict the next word,” Kohane said. “It could speak as coherently about wine pairings with a vegetarian menu as diagnose a complex patient. It was truly a quantum leap from anything that anybody in computer science who was honest with themselves would have predicted in the next 10 years.” 

Isaac Kohane.

Isaac Kohane, chairman of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine’s new AI journal

transcript

ISAAC KOHANE: I am most excited that AI is going to transform the patient experience. Just merely having an instant second opinion after any interaction with a clinician will change to the better the nature of the doctor-patient relationship. Also, with regard to what things I fear could go wrong, it’s that parties that do not have the patient’s best interest will be the ones steering the tendencies/biases or prejudices of our new AI companions.

And none too soon. The U.S. healthcare system, long criticized as costly, inefficient, and inordinately focused on treatment over prevention, has been showing cracks. Kohane, recalling a faculty member new to the department who couldn’t find a primary care physician, is tired of seeing them up close.

“The medical system, which I have long said is broken, is broken in extremely obvious ways in Boston,” he said. “People worry about equity problems with AI. I’m here to say we have a huge equity problem today. Unless you’re well connected and are willing to pay literally thousands of extra dollars for concierge care, you’re going to have trouble finding a timely primary care visit.”

Early worries that AI would replace physicians have yielded to the realization that the system needs both AI and its human workforce, Kohane said. Teaming nurse practitioners and physician assistants with AI is one among several promising scenarios.

“It is no longer a conversation about, ‘Will AI replace doctors,’ so much as, ‘Will AI, with a set of clinicians who may not look like the clinicians that we’re used to, firm up the tottering edifice that is organized medicine?’” 

Building the optimal assistant

How LLMs were rolled out — to everyone at once — accelerated their adoption, Kohane says. Doctors immediately experimented with eye-glazing yet essential tasks, like writing prior authorization requests to insurers explaining the necessity of specific, usually expensive, treatments.

“People just did it,” Kohane said. “Doctors were tweeting back and forth about all the time they were saving.”

Patients did it too, seeking virtual second opinions, like the child whose recurring pain was misdiagnosed by 17 doctors over three years. In the widely publicized case, the boy’s mother entered his medical notes into ChatGPT, which suggested a condition no doctor had mentioned: tethered cord syndrome, in which the spinal cord binds inside of the backbone. When the patient moves, rather than sliding smoothly, the spinal cord stretches, causing pain. The diagnosis was confirmed by a neurosurgeon, who then corrected the anatomic anomaly.

One of the perceived benefits of employing AI in the clinic, of course, is to make doctors better the first time around. Greater, faster access to case histories, suggested diagnoses, and other data is expected to improve physician performance. But plenty of work remains, a recent study shows.

Research published in JAMA Network Open in October compared diagnoses delivered by an individual doctor, a doctor using an LLM diagnostic tool, and an LLM alone. The results were surprising, showing an insignificant improvement in accuracy for the physicians using the LLM — 76 percent versus 74 percent for the solitary physician. More surprisingly, the LLM by itself did best, scoring 16 percentage points higher than physicians alone.

Rodman, one of the paper’s senior authors, said it’s tempting to conclude that LLMs aren’t that helpful for doctors, but he insisted that it’s important to look deeper at the findings. Only 10 percent of the physicians, he said, were experienced LLM users before the study — which took place in 2023— and the rest received only basic training. Consequently, when Rodman later looked at the transcripts, most used the LLMs for basic fact retrieval.

“The best way a doctor could use it now is for a second opinion, to second-guess themselves when they have a tricky case,” he said. “How could I be wrong? What am I missing? What other questions should I ask? Those are the ways, we know from psychological literature, that complement how humans think.”

Among the other potential benefits of AI is the chance to make medicine safer, according to David Bates, co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems at Mass General Brigham. A recent study by Bates and colleagues showed that as many as one in four visits to Massachusetts hospitals results in some kind of patient harm. Many of those incidents trace back to adverse drug events.

“AI should be able to look for medication-related issues and identify them much more accurately than we’re able to do right now,” said Bates, who is also a professor of medicine at the Medical School and of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

David Bates.

David Bates, co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems at Mass General Brigham

transcript

DAVID BATES: AI has a great deal of promise. Burnout is rampant in many parts of medicine, especially, for example, primary care, and artificial intelligence will make many routine tasks like documentation much faster. Ambient scribes in particular are already doing that. There are also concerns about things going wrong. There are many ways that any time gains could be used, for example, just to increase physician workloads. It’s also very important that medical records be correct, and AI has a tendency to hallucinate, and that is a worry, because we don’t want things in people’s records that are not really there.

Another opportunity stems from AI’s growing competence in a mundane area: notetaking and summarization, according to Bernard Chang, dean for medical education at the Medical School.

Systems for “ambient documentation” will soon be able to listen in on patient visits, record everything that is said and done, and generate an organized clinical note in real time. When symptoms are discussed, the AI can suggest diagnoses and courses of treatment. Later, the physician can review the summary for accuracy.

Automation of notes and summaries would benefit healthcare workers in more than one way, Chang said. It would ease doctors’ paperwork load, often cited as a cause of burnout, and it would reset the doctor-patient relationship. One of patients’ biggest complaints about office visits is the physician sitting at the computer, asking questions and recording the answers. Freed from the note-taking process, doctors could sit face-to-face with patients, opening a path to stronger connections.  

“It’s not the most magical use of AI,” Chang said. “We’ve all seen AI do something and said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ This is not one of those things. But this program is being piloted at different ambulatory practices across the country and the early results are very promising. Physicians who feel overburdened and burnt out are starting to say, ‘You know what, this tool is going to help me.’” 

Bernard Chang, Harvard Medical School Dean for Medical Education

transcript

BERNARD CHANG: What most excites me about AI’s promise in medicine is that these technological tools will allow physicians to spend more time on the human aspects of the profession, which is sorely needed, while facilitating the ability to access information quickly, analyze large amounts of important data, and make the difficult connections necessary to consider the rare diagnoses, the less obvious treatment paradigms, and ultimately the optimal care for patients. In medical education, students can use AI tools to accelerate their learning and move more quickly beyond rote practice to higher levels of cognitive analysis on their way to becoming the most outstanding doctors of the future. Whether things might go long lies in our hands. We need to be cautious about hallucinations and misinformation, bias, an erosion of fundamentals in learning, and an over-reliance on machines. As a society, we need to be mindful of the environmental impacts of the high energy costs involved. On the whole, I see AI as a transformative tool on par with the availability of the internet in terms of its effect on medicine and medical education.

The bias threat

For all their power, LLMs are not ready to be left alone.

“The technology is not good enough to have that safety level where you don’t need a knowledgeable human,” Rodman said. “I can understand where it might have gone aground. I can take a step further with the diagnosis. I can do that because I learned the hard way. In residency you make a ton of mistakes, but you learn from those mistakes. Our current system is incredibly suboptimal but it does train your brain. When people in medical school interact with things that can automate those processes — even if they’re, on average, better than humans — how are they going to learn?”

Doctors and scientists also worry about bad information. Pervasive data bias stems from biomedicine’s roots in wealthy Western nations whose science was shaped by white men studying white men, says Leo Celi, an associate professor of medicine and a physician in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Leo Celi.

Leo Celi, associate professor of medicine and a physician in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine

transcript

LEO CELI: AI could be the Trojan horse we’ve been waiting for to redesign systems from a clean slate. I am talking about systems for knowledge creation, health care delivery, and eduction, which are all quite broken. The legacy of AI is to make us better critical thinkers, by putting data at the front and center, and making the breadth and the depth of the problems crystal clear. But we need to design human AI systems, rather than build algorithms. We have to be able to predict how humans will mess up. The designs should be similar those of systems for aviation, road safety, space, nuclear power generation. We need psychologists, cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, anthropologists to design human AI systems.” 

“You need to understand the data before you can build artificial intelligence,” Celi said. “That gives us a new perspective of the design flaws of legacy systems for healthcare delivery, legacy systems for medical education. It becomes clear that the status quo is so bad — we knew it was bad and we’ve come to accept that it is a broken system — that all the promises of AI are going bust unless we recode the world itself.”

Celi cited research on disparities in care between English-speaking and non-English speaking patients hospitalized with diabetes. Non-English speakers are woken up less frequently for blood sugar checks, raising the likelihood that changes will be missed. That impact is hidden, however, because the data isn’t obviously biased, only incomplete, even though it still contributes to a disparity in care.

“They have one or two blood-sugar checks compared to 10 if you speak English well,” he said. “If you average it, the computers don’t see that this is a data imbalance. There’s so much missing context that experts may not be aware of what we call ‘data artifacts.’ This arises from a social patterning of the data generation process.”

Bates offered additional examples, including a skin cancer device that does a poor job detecting cancer on highly pigmented skin and a scheduling algorithm that wrongly predicted Black patients would have higher no-show rates, leading to overbooking and longer wait times.

“Most clinicians are not aware that every medical device that we have is, to a certain degree, biased,” Celi said. “They don’t work well across all groups because we prototype them and we optimize them on, typically, college-age, white, male students. They were not optimized for an ICU patient who is 80 years old and has all these comorbidities, so why is there an expectation that the numbers they represent are objective ground truths?”

The exposure of deep biases in legacy systems presents an opportunity to get things right, Celi said. Accordingly, more researchers are pushing to ensure that clinical trials enroll diverse populations from geographically diverse locations.

One example is Beth Israel’s MIMIC database, which reflects the hospital’s diverse patient population. The tool, overseen by Celi, offers investigators de-identified electronic medical records — notes, images, test results — in an open-source format. It has been used in 10,000 studies by researchers all around the world and is set to expand to 14 additional hospitals, he said.

Age of agility

As in the clinic, AI models used in the lab aren’t perfect, but they are opening pathways that hold promise to greatly accelerate scientific progress.

“They provide instant insights at the atomic scale for some molecules that are still not accessible experimentally or that would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to generate,” said Marinka Zitnik, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the Medical School. “These models provide in-silico predictions that are accurate, that scientists can then build upon and leverage in their scientific work. That, to me, just hints at this incredible moment that we are in.”

”What is becoming increasingly important is to develop reliable, faithful benchmarks or techniques that allow us to evaluate how well the outputs of AI models behave in the real world.” 

Marinka Zitnik

Zitnik’s lab recently introduced Procyon, an AI model aimed at closing knowledge gaps around protein structures and their biological roles.

Until recently, it has been difficult for scientists to understand a protein’s shape — how the long molecules fold and twist onto themselves in three dimensions. This is important because the twists and turns expose portions of the molecule and hide others, making those sites easier or harder for other molecules to interact with, which affects the molecule’s chemical properties.

Marinka Zitnik.

Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics

transcript

MARINKA ZITNIK: I am most excited about AI’s ability to learn and innovate on its own, instead of just analyzing existing knowledge. AI can generate new ideas, uncover hidden patterns, and propose solutions that humans might not consider. In biomedical research and drug development, this means AI could design new molecules, predict how these molecules interact with biological systems, and match treatments to patients with greater accuracy. By integrating information across genetics, proteins, all the way to clinical outcomes, AI can speed up discoveries in ways that was previously not possible. A major challenge, however, is that AI models tend to focus on problems that have already been extensively studied, while other important areas receive less attention. If we are not careful, medical advances may become concentrated in familiar areas, while other conditions remain under-explored, not because they are less important, but because there is less existing knowledge to guide AI systems. Another issue is that AI-driven drug design and treatment recommendations often rely on experimental findings generated in research labs that might not fully capture the complexity of real patients. Insights from research labs don’t always translate into effective treatments, and AI could amplify this gap if it’s not designed to bridge it. The opportunity is to build AI that makes discoveries and ensure that those discoveries lead to meaningful advances, bringing innovation to areas where it’s needed most.

Today, predicting a protein’s shape — down to nearly every atom — from its known sequence of amino acids is feasible, Zitnik said. The major challenge is linking those structures to their functions and phenotypes across various biological settings and diseases. About 20 percent of human proteins have poorly defined functions, and an overwhelming share of research — 95 percent — is devoted to just 5,000 well-studied proteins.

“We are addressing this gap by connecting molecular sequences and structures with functional annotations to predict protein phenotypes, helping move the field closer to being able to in-silico predict functions for each protein,” Zitnik said.

A long-term goal for AI in the lab is the development of “AI scientists” that function as research assistants, with access to the entire body of scientific literature, the ability to integrate that knowledge with experimental results, and the capacity to suggest next steps. These systems could evolve into true collaborators, Zitnik said, noting that some models have already generated simple hypotheses. Her lab used Procyon, for example, to identify domains in the maltase glucoamylase protein that bind miglitol, a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes. In another project, the team showed that Procyon could functionally annotate poorly characterized proteins implicated in Parkinson’s disease. The tool’s broad range of capabilities is possible because it was trained on massive experimental data sets and the entire scientific literature, resources far exceeding what humans can read and analyze, Zitnik said.

The classroom comes before the lab, and the AI dynamic of flexibility, innovation, and constant learning is also being applied to education. The Medical School has introduced a course dealing with AI in healthcare; added a Ph.D. track on AI in medicine; is planning a “tutor bot” to provide supplemental material beyond lectures; and is developing a virtual patient on which students can practice before their first nerve-wracking encounter with the real thing. Meanwhile, Rodman is leading a steering group on the use of generative AI in medical education.

These initiatives are a good start, he said. Still, the rapid evolution of AI technology makes it difficult to prepare students for careers that will span 30 years.

“The Harvard view, which is my view as well, is that we can give people the basics, but we just have to encourage agility and prepare people for a future that changes rapidly,” Rodman said. “Probably the best thing we can do is prepare people to expect the unexpected.”


How World War I veterans shaped the Civil Rights Movement

Study traces surge in activism among Black men who faced discrimination while defending country


Nation & World

How WWI vets shaped Civil Rights Movement

Study traces surge in activism among Black men who faced discrimination while defending country

4 min read
Soldiers from the Black 92nd Infantry Division line up in the rain in New York City following World War I.

Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division take part in a victory parade on 5th Avenue in New York City following World War I.

European/FPG/Getty Images

Black men drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I were significantly more likely to join the NAACP and to play key leadership roles in the early Civil Rights Movement as a result of the discrimination they experienced while serving the country, according to a new study by Harvard Kennedy School economist Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, a doctoral student in economics.

Looking to measure what drove the postwar boost in political activism among Black veterans, the researchers combed through millions of military records, U.S. Census data, as well as membership rolls for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the decade following the war. They found that by 1930, World War I veterans comprised 15 percent of male members of the NAACP, the leading civil rights organization of the period.

The significant discrimination Black troops faced while serving in the Great War — working in segregated units with little formal training — “seeded deep feelings of institutional betrayal and discontent” that compelled many veterans to challenge the status quo after 1918, Ang and Chinoy concluded.

Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy.

Desmond Ang (left) and Sahil Chinoy.

Photo by Grace DuVal

Black men who were induced to enlist were three times more likely to join the NAACP, the study found. Since the early 1800s, Black Americans had been barred from serving in the military and attending institutions such as West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy. When World War I broke out, the U.S. needed to beef up its defensive ranks quickly, so in 1917 it instituted the first nationwide draft of Black men, conscripting nearly 400,000. The move was unpopular, particularly within the all-white armed forces, and Black and white servicemen were segregated. Nearly 90 percent of Black troops were assigned labor-intensive or menial jobs, say the researchers, and most were denied combat and officer training, firearms, and promotions.

Soldiers who were most caught off guard by the hostile treatment they received were the likeliest to become politically active, the study found. For example, researchers traced the highest NAACP enrollment to veterans of the 92nd Division, who risked their lives in combat while facing constant racial abuse. The study saw lower enrollment among noncombatants and veterans of the 93rd Division, who experienced less discriminatory treatment while brigading overseas with the French military.

Identifying the private motivations of veterans from a century ago was difficult, so to help understand how Black soldiers felt about the war, Ang and Chinoy reviewed questionnaires administered by state commissions asking veterans to describe their service and how it affected them. Those who served in camps that denied training or promotion opportunities were more than twice as likely to cite injustice in their survey responses.

Another rich source of information, said Ang, were contemporaneous reports assembled by U.S. military intelligence, which had a department monitoring what it called “Negro subversion.” White officers would go from camp to camp taking the temperature of Black troops. The two greatest causes of discontent cited by Black service members in the reports were the dearth of promotion opportunities while laboring under often cruel and unqualified white supervisors, and the lack of military training in return for their service.

“The government had a really good handle on what things were really upsetting Black people,” which “speaks to this idea that a lot of this was very deliberate, institutional decisions that were happening,” said Ang. “It really seems to corroborate this narrative [historian] Chad Williams and others have talked about, which is the sense of hypocrisy and injustice that was going on.”

Ang and Chinoy say the research may “underestimate” how influential World War I veterans were in terms of the potential spillover effects on their families, friends, and others in the Black community, a subject they intend to explore next. Also, the researchers are starting to look at how the backlash to the NAACP’s rise and the Civil Rights Movement sparked a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow in the 1920s.

Citing the white power movement following the Vietnam War and the paramilitary styling of some far-right groups today in the U.S., Ang wonders whether the dynamics at play during World War I is a piece of a much larger puzzle. “Is this something that we can see historically, and what are the aspects of military service” that may drive people to become politically active?


Sick again? Maybe your building is to blame.

Take our research-based quiz to learn more about how indoor air quality can harm or protect your health


Health

Sick again? Maybe your building is to blame.

people standing in the windows in a brick apartment building

Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

1 min read

Take our quiz to learn more about how indoor air quality can impact your health

Do you ever find yourself feeling tired or struggling to concentrate while at the office? In “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick — or Keep You Well,” Harvard public health and business experts Joseph Allen and John Macomber explore how the places we spend most of our time — our homes, workplaces, and schools — affect our well-being, focus, and problem-solving ability. Allen helped us develop the following quiz based on his research on indoor air quality.


Step 1 of 10

1. How much of their lives do Americans on average spend indoors?


When creativity calls

Harvard staff cultivate talents that flourish beyond the gates


Campus & Community

When creativity calls

Eight staff artists are featured in their homes, studios, and work spaces.

Photos and video by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

8 min read

Harvard staff cultivate talents that flourish beyond the gates

Nearly 300 talented artists from across the University are displaying their work in the annual Harvard Staff Art Show. Created as a venue where staff can share their creativity with the broader community, the show is now in its fifth year. Below are profiles of eight of these creatives who were happy to chat about their projects.


Scott Murry

Designer, Illustrator, and Photographer
Senior Designer, Harvard Library
Scott Murry, Digital Illustrator and Senior Designer at the Harvard Library, is photographed in his apartment in Jamaica Plain.
Scott Murry in his apartment.

Scott Murry said his “Find Yourself,” part of a series of monoline-style digital drawings about mental health created during the pandemic, is about “trying to think about who you are with intentionality.”

Murry’s interest in the visual arts was nurtured in ninth and 10th grades by teachers who motivated and challenged him to achieve. He went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Art Institute of Boston and “was wild about editorial illustration and children’s book illustration” before taking on various roles at design agencies, in environmental design, and at the Weekly Dig.

These days Murry is being intentional with his time, drawing, designing, doing concert photography, publishing a children’s book, and working on a photo book of his son, Elliott. He is particularly excited by the design possibilities of the double Ls and double Ts in his son’s name.

Scott Murry, Digital Illustrator and Senior Designer for the Harvard Library, draws in his home office.
Murry works on a drawing from his series that reads, “Have hope it will be better.” The drawing is “related to something from the pandemic or politics, where it just felt very busted, like, you know, you find your car on cinder blocks with a broken windshield, which I have with my own car.”
Scott Murry, Digital Illustrator and Senior Designer at the Harvard Library, arranges pairs of custom Vans shoes that he has printed his designs on.
Pairs of custom Vans shoes printed with Murry’s designs.

Eve Radovsky

Cabinet and Furniture Maker
Faculty Assistant, Harvard Law School
Eve Radovsky, Faculty Assistant at Harvard Law School, woodworker, and crafter poses for a photo with a cabinet she made.
Eve Radovsky holds the cabinet she’s displaying in this year’s Staff Art Show.

In 2018, Eve Radovsky enrolled in a full-time program in cabinet- and furniture-making. “I also have always really appreciated furniture design, and I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands,” she said. Her white-oak-and-maple piece in the show was inspired by an image of a blanket chest created by Thomas Dennis in the 17th century.

Radovsky used carving gouges to remove sections of wood for the front and small metal stamps to create the background. She also used several different types of stains to “age” the piece in a way that mimicked the more dangerous process of fuming.

She has also been a passionate knitter for the past 10-plus years and is currently working on creating a sweater for herself.

A close up of the cabinet Eve Radovsky, Faculty Assistant at Harvard Law School, woodworker, and crafter created.
The front of her cabinet is hand-carved.
Eve Radovsky, Faculty Assistant at Harvard Law School, woodworker, and crafter is photographed knitting while sitting in a chair that she made.
Radovsky knitting while sitting in a chair she made herself.

Yuwei Li

Drawer
Neurotechnology Engineer, The Center for Brain Science
Yuwei Li, Neurotechnology Engineer at the Center for Brain Science and drawer, is pictured with her drawing of her pet, Lou, who is a budgie bird native to Australia.
Yuwei Li holds her drawing of Lou the budgie.

Yuwei Li likes drawing cute animals, including her budgie, Lou, who died right before Thanksgiving. For her, “drawing is a way to relax and be happy,” and the picture she chose to display is meant both to remind her of her pet and thank him for being a part of her life.

“This is actually based on a photo that I took from my cell phone … One day, he was just, like, winking at me. And then I happened to capture him winking with my camera.”

Li, shown in the Center for Brain Science’s machine shop in Harvard’s Northwest Building, uses her talents at work to design and fabricate equipment for approximately 40 different labs. Her latest after-hours project — inspired by “Star Wars” fans she met at Comic-Con in San Diego — is a 3-D print of a one-to-one scale model of R2-D2, which she hopes to mount on wheels and use to carry her tools.

Yuwei Li, Neurotechnology Engineer at the Center for Brain Science and drawer, solders while working on a project for her job.
Li solders a project for her work in the machine shop.
Yuwei Li, Neurotechnology Engineer at the Center for Brain Science and drawer, holds a 3d printed model she made of R2-D2’s head from Star Wars.
Li is assembling her 3-D R2-D2 piece by piece.

Veronica Bagnole

Embroiderer
Digital Project Manager, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Veronica Bagnole (pictured), Digital Project Manager for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and embroiderer, posing for photos with her embroidery in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center.
Veronica Bagnole holds her current embroidery project.

For Veronica Bagnole, embroidery is a calming and historically rich artform. When she isn’t overseeing the GSD’s website and supporting a team of 100 content editors, she works on embroidery pieces that can take hundreds of hours to complete.

Bagnole’s piece shows a woman from the late 18th to early 19th century, whose likeness she created from AI images that she modified to create an outline before adding texture during the roughly 250 to 300 hours it took to embroider.

“When people come to this piece, I want them to look at it and think, ‘Who is that woman? Why did she have her portrait done?’”

Bagnole said embroidery deserves more recognition as not just a craft but a historical art form that allows her to honor and “connect with generations from the past.”

Veronica Bagnole, Digital Project Manager for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and embroiderer, points to the gold necklace she improvised from the original pattern she had created for this embroidery piece.
The gold chain is one of several small details Bagnole improvised.
Veronica Bagnole (pictured), Digital Project Manager for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and embroiderer, showing several of the antique embroidery scissors she collects.
Four pairs of 19th and early 20th century embroidery scissors from Bagnole’s collection. She calls them “beautiful little pieces of history.”

Stanislav Karachev

Dancer and Poet
Energy Performance Engineer, Harvard Medical School
Stanislav Karachev, Energy Performance Engineer for Harvard Medical School, dancer, and poet, posing for a photo in his apartment in Roxbury.
Stanislav Karachev poses in the mirror he used for his poetry and dance piece “My Mirror.” A video recording of his performance is in this year’s Staff Art Show.

When Stanislav Karachev was invited to dance at a venue in New Hampshire, he knew he had to go big. He ended up creating the performance featured in this year’s art show, a mix of poetry, music, and dance he used to express his feelings during a breakup.

Karachev decided that he would incorporate a mirror and engage with the audience during the performance. “Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, you’re like, I’m doing a solo. It’s all about me.’ And it’s not. It’s about the audience and the connection between the performer or performers with the audience.”

Karachev recorded his poem and mixed his backing track with the help of a neighbor who also works at Harvard. He chose krump as the dance style because of its high energy. Karachev said he ended up impressed with where the intensity drove him: “I didn’t know I could move like that.”

Stanislav Karachev, Energy Performance Engineer for Harvard Medical School, dancer, and poet, posing for a photo in his apartment in Roxbury.
The sole of an artist.
A photo of the notebook Stanislav Karachev uses to write his poetry open to the page with the poem performed in “My Mirror.” Stanislav is an Energy Performance Engineer for Harvard Medical School, dancer, and poet.
A page from Karachev’s poetry notebook.

John Buonomo

Astrophotographer
Senior Cloud Architect, Harvard University Health Services
John Buonomo, Senior Cloud Architect and astrophotographer, posing for photos with the Great Refractor at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.
John Buonomo in front of The Great Refractor at the Harvard College Observatory.

John Buonomo’s earliest attempts at astrophotography were in 1978. The self-taught artist said he became fascinated with his subject at 9 years old when a neighbor showed him a view of Jupiter and Saturn through his refractor. Buonomo’s first photographs using film and a manual tracking scope weren’t very successful, but the advent of digital technology “changed everything.”

These days Buonomo uses dedicated cooled astro CCD cameras, high-end optics, auto guiding, and computer-controlled scripting to create his work. Once he’s captured an image, he uses specialized software to stack multiple exposures and adjust other parameters to reveal faint structures. He calls the balance of technical skill and artistic vision “what makes astrophotography both demanding and deeply rewarding.”

Arched-Rock---Goat-Rock-Beach--Jenner-Caif.

Arched Rock at Goat Rock Beach in Jenner, California.

Photo Courtesy of John Buonomo

John Buonomo, Senior Cloud Architect and astrophotographer, looking through one of the telescopes at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.
Buonomo looks through the Clark Telescope at the Harvard College Observatory.

Toru Nakanishi

Photographer and Sculptor
Exhibition Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums
Toru Nakanishi, Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums, photographer, and sculptor at his desk with several of his sculpture pieces in his apartment in Somerville, MA.
Toru Nakanishi with several of his 3-D printed sculptures.

Toru Nakanishi’s love of photography started in college, when he began creating black-and-white photos in a darkroom. But when he no longer had access to a darkroom and couldn’t justify the cost of a digital camera, he began making images on a flatbed scanner.

This year’s show includes one of Nakanishi’s flatbed scans of ramen noodles. To create his images, Nakanishi laid the noodles on the scanner and turned off all the lights to get a black background. For other images, “I made a flatbed scanner with a glass wall on top of it. You can fill it with the water and then float the item in it and then scan it.”

This photograph shown is a piece of a much larger noodle series, one image of which is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Toru Nakanishi, Exhibition Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums, photographer, and sculptor showing two of his sculptures in his apartment in Somerville, MA.
Nakanishi also sculpts in wood.
Toru Nakanishi, Exhibition Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums, photographer, and sculptor showing the photograph that will be in the Staff Art Show.
Nakanishi holds the photograph he is displaying in the Staff Art Show.

Fionnuala Gerrity

Ceramicist
Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services
Fionnuala Gerrity, Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services and ceramicist, photographed at Indigo Fire Pottery Studio in Belmont, MA.
Fionnuala Gerrity.

Fionnuala Gerrity first tried ceramics as a kid, but returned to it before the pandemic by taking courses at Indigo Fire in Belmont. They were surprised by the result: “I had no idea it would grow into an entire body of work, like a side gig to my professional career.”

Today, “everything that I do is based on local forest ecosystems,” Gerrity said. Using slabs as the primary construction method, building the vessel first, and finally adding sculpted elements, Gerrity tries to depict nature as accurately as possible. During the photoshoot, they shared a finished tea set decorated with “three different moths that preferentially associate with bitter nut hickory.”

“I love the idea that they might inspire people to look a little bit more closely at what’s around them,” Gerrity said.

Fionnuala Gerrity, Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services and ceramicist, working on a piece of ceramics at Indigo Fire Pottery Studio in Belmont, MA.
Gerrity working on a current project.
Fionnuala Gerrity, Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services and ceramicist, working on a piece of ceramics at Indigo Fire Pottery Studio in Belmont, MA.
Gerrity at Indigo Fire in Belmont.

Can Europe defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia?

National security expert details what’s being done, what can be done as U.S. appears to rethink decadeslong support


Nation & World

Can Europe defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia?

Employees at a munitions factory in Germany work on weapons in a production line.

Production ramps up at a German munitions factory last year in response to the war in Ukraine.

Fabian Bimmer/Getty Images

8 min read

National security expert details what’s being done, what can be done as U.S. appears to rethink decadeslong support

Many European leaders believe they can no longer rely on the U.S. for the high level of defensive support they have counted on for decades now that President Donald Trump, a longtime critic of NATO and the European Union, has returned to office.

In this edited conversation, Richard D. Hooker Jr., a senior associate at the Belfer Center’s Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses what Europe has to do to get ready for that new reality.

A distinguished veteran, Hooker served in national security roles during the Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush administrations and had been on the faculty of National Defense University, National War College, and U.S. Military Academy at West Point.


You recently wrote that Europe has to shore up its own defense because it is no longer a priority for the U.S. How do things look at this moment?

I think for sure the threat to European security is much greater. The reason is the perception that the U.S. is disengaging and, in some ways, working with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That encourages Putin and dismays the Europeans, which has a downside and an upside.

The U.S. has worked for decades to suppress any notions of European strategic autonomy. We always thought we’d be the primary security provider in Europe, and we like being the leaders of NATO. So to that extent there’s been very halting progress at developing a separate or independent capability in Europe.

There’s an article in The Wall Street Journal that argues that Europe’s got way more in the way of forces and in wealth than Russia. But when you really peel the onion back, there are a lot of problems with that thesis.

The first is that readiness across Europe is quite low, even among the major powers — the French, the British, the Germans, the Italians. They would struggle to put a single army combat division in the field in less than 60 or 90 days. They probably could not put a second in the field for much longer after that.

The U.K. had 66 divisions in World War I, it would struggle to put one out in 90 days to defend the Baltic states. So that’s a pretty low level of readiness.

Why isn’t it more robust?

The militaries across Europe have gotten much, much smaller. In the last 30 years, they’ve gone to volunteer militaries, which are much more expensive, and you can’t generate reserves with volunteer militaries. And we’ve seen from Ukraine that modern warfare, no surprise, causes a lot of casualties and consumes a lot of resources. So that’s a problem.

But the real problem is what we call the enablers. It is all the below-the-line capabilities that enable you to actually fight. This is logistics, air defense, medical support, artillery at the corps level — those kinds of things. You just don’t find those in Europe.

And so, it’s really hard to put a force together that could deter or stand up to the Russian Federation in a major war because those capabilities are either absent or very much attenuated.

Now, the overarching issue for everything is, if the U.S. disengages and withdraws its nuclear umbrella, there’s really no answer in Europe for that. There just isn’t.

That would put the European nations, and particularly those in the east, under great, great pressure, because Putin would threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons, and there’s nothing to deter that. There’s no response other than the U.S. umbrella. And there are those who argue, even now, in practice, de facto, that umbrella’s been withdrawn.

“If the U.S. disengages and withdraws its nuclear umbrella, there’s really no answer in Europe for that.”

Is Europe correct to worry the U.S. nuclear umbrella has been withdrawn?

Has it been withdrawn already? I don’t know. Is it reliable? I wouldn’t think so.

If Putin were to threaten or actually use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or, let’s say in Estonia, would the administration respond with nuclear threats of its own? Personally, I have my doubts. I worked in the first 18 months of the Trump administration. I was the senior NATO guy, which is not a comfortable job to have, and I have my doubts. I’ll just leave it at that.

What are Europe’s biggest defensive shortcomings, ones that hurt its strategic autonomy?

No. 1, of course, is the nuclear question.

No. 2 is they don’t really have higher level formations. They have a lot of corps headquarters, but they’re not real corps headquarters. They don’t have the artillery, the air defense, the engineers, all that stuff that you need to fight at the corps level.

No. 3 is the readiness of the formations they do have is quite low, so they can’t push out meaningful forces in 14 days the way the U.S. can.

It’s very easy to think of Europe as one entity, but it’s really not. It’s 44 different polities, and they all see the world a little bit differently.

The eastern flank countries, they all see the world the same. The Poles, the Baltic states, the Nordics, they all border Russia. They’re spending a lot of money; they’re going back to conscription; they’re getting better every day. They see the world the way it really is. All the other nations, not so much.

Do you think European leaders are genuinely motivated to take action?

I think it’s underway. I really do. But it’s not the kind of thing that you can solve overnight.

One clear sign is that defense spending continues to rise in many places. Not in every place in Europe — there are still some key states that don’t even make 2 percent. But the big ones have all said, “We’re going to work toward 3 percent,” and their budgets do seem to be rising.

Collectively, the Europeans hit the 2 percent target in 2024, and they have been increasing spending quite a bit over the last four or five years, but it hasn’t translated yet into actual capability.

So many people, even experts, just repeat this mantra that “the Europeans aren’t spending enough.” Actually, they spend more than four times more on defense than Russia does. Russia spent about $125 billion — as far as we can tell — in 2024, and the European allies spent about $500 billion, which is a lot.

So, I don’t see spending as the issue. How that money is spent is the real issue.

Which countries have nuclear weapons and might others decide to acquire some in light of the changing landscape?

The British have about 400 deployable warheads. These are essentially strategic warheads. They have three ballistic missile submarines.

The French have about the same number deployed in about the same way. Those can threaten the 10 largest Russian cities. Those are strategic weapons; they’re not intended to try to take out Russian missile silos.

The Russians have more than 10 times that many warheads. Are those deterrents effective for those countries? I think probably yes. Could they, or would they, extend their nuclear umbrella to neighbor states or to allies? I’m doubtful about that.

There’s been discussion in Germany about generating a nuclear capability, but it seems clear the Germans are not going to do that.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Poles might be looking at that. The Ukrainians, who do have a lot of advanced technology and used to have nuclear weapons, it’s possible the Ukrainians might think about developing some kind of nuclear capability. Outside of those cases, I just don’t see it.

Are there any steps Europe can take immediately to defend itself?

No. 1: They can return to conscription because that enables you to grow your forces quickly and generate reserves.

No. 2: It’s really hard to move forces across Europe. This problem is called military mobility. Every time you cross a national boundary, or even a provincial boundary, you get stopped. There’s a paperwork check. The rail gauges are not uniform across Europe, so you might get as far as Poland and then you have to unload everything and put it on a different train. So military mobility is a real issue.

No. 3: Interoperability, which means can we all work together on the battlefield, is a real challenge.

All the Allies can’t talk on the battlefield securely to each other, and they can’t pass data securely on the battlefield because they have different systems.

And No. 4 is just be ready. You’ve got to be serious about the problem and attack it. I do think they’re getting more serious. The question is how fast can they do it, and is there going to be more Russian aggression on European territory before they get there?


He was walking in Washington and just like that he was gone 

Geraldine Brooks traces painful, disorienting pendulum-swing of grief after losing Tony Horwitz, her husband of 35 years


Arts & Culture

He was walking in Washington and just like that he was gone 

Tony and Geraldine.

Tony Horwitz and Geraldine Brooks in their Martha’s Vineyard home in 2016.

Photo by Elizabeth Cecil

8 min read

Geraldine Brooks traces painful, disorienting pendulum-swing of grief after losing Tony Horwitz, her husband of 35 years

Excerpted from “Memorial Days” by Geraldine Brooks, Radcliffe Fellow ’06, visiting lecturer ’21, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

May 27, 2019
West Tisbury

“Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?”

 Yes

“Who am I speaking to?”

 This is his wife

That is exact. The rest is a blur.

“Collapsed in the street … tried to resuscitate at the scene … brought to the hospital … couldn’t revive him.”

And, so, now he’s in the OR. And, so, now we’ve admitted him for a procedure. And, so, now we’re keeping him for observation.

So many things that logically should have followed.

But she says none of these things. Instead, the illogical thing: He’s dead.

No.

Not Tony. Not him. Not my husband out on the road energetically promoting his new book. My husband with the toned body of a six-day-a-week gym rat. The 60-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband, younger than I am — hilarious, bursting with vitality. He’s way too busy living. He cannot possibly be dead.

The resident’s voice is flat, exhausted. She is impatient with me as I ask her to repeat what she has just said. It is, she tells me, the end of her shift. She gives me a number for the doctor who is coming on duty in this ER, 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. She can’t get me off the phone fast enough.

But Tony — I need to see him. Where will he be when I get there?

“We can’t keep a body in the ER. It will be moved to the hospital morgue to be picked up by the DC medical examiner.”

It. A body. She means Tony.

So how will I see him? I’m in Massachusetts, on an island. It’s going to take me hours to get there —

She cuts me off.

“The DC police will need to talk to you. Make sure they can reach you.”

And then she is gone.

At some moment in this call, I stood up from my desk. When the phone rang, at 18 minutes past one, I’d only just sat down to work after a morning of distractions. I’d had a happy conversation on the phone with my older son, a recent college graduate, adventuring around the world and about to board a plane in Manila for the eight-hour flight to Sydney, where he would stay with my sister. A friend, Susanna, had come to borrow or return a book — I can’t recall which. We’d gone down to the paddock to throw hay to the horses and hung around there, draped on the split rails, chatting.

I’d read a long email from Tony about the visit he’d made the day before to the Virginia village where we lived for 10 years. It was mostly unpunctuated, gossipy, catching me up on the doings of our former neighbors — their tribulations with dry wells and divorces (“she refers to him as her was-band”). The email concluded:

“didn’t wish self back there (if for no other reason, 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and still May) but heartened that it seems to have gently evolved while keeping history and quirk. tomorrow back to the grind and am now 2-3 episodes behind on “Billions” so you’ll have rewatch upon return. love and hugs”

I’d hit send on my reply and finally opened the file titled Horse, the novel I was supposed to be writing.

Then, the phone.

Another distraction. I considered letting it go to voicemail.

But maybe there was a question my older son had forgotten to ask. My younger son was away at boarding school, sitting for his end-of-year exams. Perhaps he needed something. I had to pick up.

The caller ID was hard to read in the bright sunlight. Only as I brought the handset close could I make out gw hsp on the display. Don’t tell me I picked up a darn fundraising call. …

Now the dial tone burred. I stared at the handset. My legs started to shake. But I couldn’t sit down. I paced across the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest. I needed to scream, weep, throw myself on the floor, rend my garments, tear my hair.

But I couldn’t allow myself to do any of those things. Because I had to do so many other things.

I stood there and suppressed that howl. Because I was alone, and no one could help me. And if I let go, if I fell, I might not be able to get back up.

In books and movies no one gets this news alone. Someone comes to the door. Someone makes sure you’re sitting down, offers you water, asks whom you’d like them to call.

But no one had done me this kindness. A tired young doctor had picked up my husband’s cell phone, on which he had never set up a passcode, and hit the speed dial for home.

The first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system.

February 23
Essendon

The small prop plane takes off from Melbourne’s Essendon Airport. Suburban rooftops, container terminals, the industrialized mouth of the Yarra River. And then we pierce a flat layer of cloud and the view I’d hoped for, the glittering, island-studded Bass Strait, is obscured. All I can do is watch the mesmerizing blur of the propeller. A smear of concentric circles. The unlikely physics of flight.

I am headed to a shack on the farthest end of Flinders Island to do the unfinished work of grieving. I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was obliged to do in the days and months that followed has exacted an invisible price. I am going to this remote island to pay it.

In the confines of the small plane I overhear snatches of conversation from my fellow travelers:

“I’ve got a hundred acres, it’s quite a big bit of dirt.”

“No one’s prolly fished that spot since we were there last year.”

“You can have the views, or you can have the bars, but you gotta consider the cell tower if you’re building a place.”

“All the pines are gone.”

 “What d’ya mean, gone?”

“I mean gone, mate. Not there.”

Tony died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honors the war dead.

When I get to Flinders Island, I will begin my own memorial days. I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss. “Grief is praise,” writes Martín Prechtel in his book “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

I haven’t honored Tony enough, because I have not permitted myself the time and space for a grief deep enough to reflect our love.

This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay. I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal. I’ve moved around in public acting out a series of convincing scenes: PTO mum, conservation commissioner, author on tour. But nothing has been normal. Here, finally, the long-running show goes on hiatus.

I have been trapped in the maytzar, the narrow place of the Hebrew scriptures. In the Psalms, the singer cries out to God from the narrow place and is answered from the “wideness” of God. Our English word “anguish” means the same thing as the Hebrew maytzar. It is from the Latin for narrowness, strait, restriction. I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief. Instead, it has been this long feeling of constriction, of holding it in and tamping it down and not letting it show.

I am not a deist. No god will answer my cries. The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.

And I have chosen this place, this island, deliberately. Before I met Tony, my life had begun directing me here. Falling in love with him derailed that life, set me on an entirely different course. Now I might glimpse what I have been missing, walk that untraveled road, consider the person I might have become.

Alone on this island at the ends of the earth, maybe, I will finally be able to break out of the maytzar. But first I will need to get back to that moment in my sunlit study when I refused to allow myself to howl.

That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.

Copyright © 2025 by Geraldine Brooks.


At India Climate Conference, Harvard’s South Asia ties take center stage

At India Climate Conference, Harvard’s South Asia ties take center stage


Nation & World

At India Climate Conference, Harvard’s South Asia ties take center stage

Tarun Khanna stands on a staircase in front of windows

Tarun Khanna.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

4 min read

Global summit on adaptation and resilience highlights the Mittal Center’s collaborative focus

When asked in 2010 to lead what would become the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, proposed two guiding rules. One: He wanted the organization to be open to all fields of inquiry. And two: He wanted “feet on the street” across South Asia.

This week’s climate adaptation conference, “India 2047: Building a Climate-Resilient Future,” co-hosted by the Mittal Institute and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability alongside the Indian government, is a sign of Khanna’s push for a strong, multidisciplinary connection between the University and the region, as more than 160 scholars and experts from Harvard and across the world gather to address adaptation to climate change in India.  

The conference is part of the institute’s ongoing climate change initiative focused on South Asia. Since 2023, when the Mittal Institute led its first climate-related workshop in New Delhi, it has been investing in more climate-change adaptation research. Among other projects, its Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies project, funded initially by the Salata Institute, has studied the health effects of extreme heat on workers using sensors that the subjects wear throughout the day. The study will create one of the largest data sets relating to heat and health anywhere in the world.

The leaders of that research — epidemiologist Caroline Buckee and associate professor in emergency medicine Satchit Balsari — will attend the India conference and participate in workshops over several days in New Delhi, as well as a multiday “climate immersion experience” for senior faculty and analysts in Ahmedabad, the site of some of the Mittal Institute’s initial measurement work on heat stress. Among other topics, the group will address links between extreme heat and poverty, food security, rural incomes, and environmental degradation.

This multipronged approach — with collaborators from Harvard and with the Indian government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change and its public policy think tank NITI Aayog — is typical of the Mittal Institute’s appetite for diverse collaborators and areas of research.

Among many projects in recent years, the institute has facilitated joint bioscience and biotechnology research between Boston and Bangalore through its Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences program; supported studies analyzing pigments in historical Indian art; and brought together researchers from the U.S., England, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to study the consequences of the 1947 partition of British India. From the beginning, Khanna said, the institute has tried to equally support intellectual endeavors across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

It has also stayed true to Khanna’s desire for “feet on the street.” The institute has built up a physical presence across South Asia, with offices in New Delhi and Lahore and representation in other countries — each of which raises project money from the countries in which they’re located. “For us to be operating with any degree of credibility, any degree of welcome in a foreign country, people better start thinking of you as embracing their societies as opposed to being an outsider,” said Khanna.

The relationships will be on display at the conference, where Harvard faculty such as Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology Daniel Schrag, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability James Stock, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers will work with colleagues across Harvard’s Schools of business, medicine, and public health and with several agencies of the Indian government. “We have enormous goodwill,” Khanna said. “Especially at a time when higher ed is treated with skepticism, it’s a pristine asset.”

As the event unfolds, one of the largest organized by Harvard outside of the U.S., Khanna believes it’s just the beginning for the Mittal Institute — with many years of collaboration and innovation to come.


Where next for U.S. economy?

Kennedy School analyst includes trade war fallout among 5 recession threats


Work & Economy

Where next for U.S. economy?

New York Stock Exchange tradre in front of computer screens showing economic graphs.

Richard Drew/AP

6 min read

Kennedy School analyst’s recession warning includes worries about trade war, stock market, risk perception

U.S. markets this month suffered heavy losses after China, Mexico, and Canada responded to President Donald Trump’s tariff push by imposing levies on American goods. Many investors fear a prolonged trade war could push the nation into a recession. (The president says that Americans should expect a “period of transition.”) Meanwhile, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index has fallen to its lowest level since November 2022.

These developments serve as a backdrop for meetings this week where the Federal Reserve will weigh whether to resume interest rate cuts.

In this edited conversation, economist Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the impact of the new administration’s tariff policy and the broader condition of the U.S. economy.

Jeffrey Frankel.

Jeffrey Frankel.

Harvard file photo


Is there a good argument for increasing or expanding tariffs?

They’re pretty universally bad — almost all economists are opposed to them. Can there ever be a good justification for a tariff? Three cases I can think of. First, a poor country may have no effective way of collecting revenue other than a tariff. Second, there’s a so-called “infant industry” argument — that if government is able to identify an industry that has potential for economies of scale and spillover effects, they need to protect it against international competition for a few years and then the industry will grow, and the government will be able to remove the tariffs and have it compete on world markets. Third, the Europeans have something called CBAM, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, in the cause of fighting climate change. One might interpret that as a tariff, but my interpretation is that because it helps carry out the Paris Accord, it may be beneficial and indeed is the sort of measure that is fine under the World Trade Organization. There are probably other examples, but none that apply to the U.S. today.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the market selloff a “normal” and “healthy correction” to years of overreliance on government spending, predicting that we’ll end up with a stronger economy. Is that a plausible explanation?

It’s not based on anything. Their way of coping is to stall for time, saying, “Well, of course, we’re going to have some negative effects at first, but this prosperity will come after.” But that’s not based on any kind of economic argument that I have heard, let alone a valid one.

I suppose someone could argue that with tariff protection, our manufacturing sector will achieve higher investment and higher productivity growth, and we’ll be more competitive in the long run, and that higher growth will show up in higher incomes. But the Trump approach to tariffs is hurting investment, not helping it. Usually what they say is that boosts confidence, but the current policy chaos is having the opposite effect. It’s reducing confidence.

For countries undergoing debt crises, mainly developing countries, a common pattern is that they’ve been running budget deficits that are too large, and their debt level is getting too high. Then, as part of an adjustment program, usually under the guidance of the IMF [International Monetary Fund], they have to undergo a combination of reducing the budget deficit, monetary discipline, and devaluation. That causes a year or two of severe economic pain but allows a recovery subsequently and a restoration of growth in the long-term. You could characterize Korea in ’98 that way, for example. The excessive debt part of the pattern does describe the U.S. now, but I don’t think the rest applies to the U.S. A debt crisis is not to be recommended and is not what the tariff proponents have in mind.

The latest University of Michigan consumer sentiment index shows economic confidence is at its lowest since November 2022. Also, hiring has cooled. Do these developments point to a recession or something like 1970s-style stagflation?

I think it is appropriate to worry about a recession coming within the next year. It’s much more likely than one would have thought a year ago.

I see five things going on that could logically lead to or worsen a recession. One is the trade war. The second is a stock market crash. The third is major cuts in government spending, assuming Musk and Trump manage to find genuine cuts. The fourth is a U.S. fiscal crisis because of a government shutdown, failure to raise the debt ceiling, or a downgrading by Moody’s, the credit rating agency. The fifth is a general increase in perceptions of risk. Risk is increasing because what Trump has done on tariffs and on government spending has been so erratic. It’s almost as if they’re doing everything they can to increase perceptions of variability and volatility and unpredictability. The uncertainty itself has a negative effect.

The instability has alarmed not just investors, but also sectors like real estate and health care, with many businesses shifting into “wait and see” mode. What are the implications for the wider economy?

If the uncertainty only lasted a minute, it wouldn’t have much effect, but it’s clearly going to last longer than that. Even if it takes a few months to resolve these issues, that could be enough to hurt employment and income and even to cause a recession. In the extreme, if all hiring stops for a month or two, that itself would cause a recession.

The Federal Reserve faces two seemingly contradictory options on interest rates: support the economy and jobs with rate cuts or leave them alone to keep inflation and inflation expectations under control. What’s the Fed likely do?

That’s the tradeoff. In a sense, it’s always the tradeoff, but it becomes much more acute at a time like this, because tariffs and general chaos are adverse supply shocks. They’re like a world oil shock or a COVID shock or something like that. Supply shocks make a tradeoff between output and inflation worse, and they’re not something the central bank can make up for. So, the Fed is worried both about increasing inflation and about a slowdown in the economy. One objective says keep interest rates higher, and the other says cut them. I think they will leave them unchanged.


How to read like a translator

Damion Searls ’92 talks process, sentence structure, and what makes a chair a chair


Arts & Culture

How to read like a translator

Damion Searls

Damion Searls.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

6 min read

Damion Searls ’92 talks process, sentence structure, and what makes a chair a chair

When someone asks Damion Searls how he “chooses” words for a translation, he likens it to asking a reader how they “choose” what Mr. Darcy looks like when reading “Pride and Prejudice.” Neither is so much a choice, he says, but a response shaped by the text.

“We’re not translating the words that are there. We’re having a reading experience, and then we’re giving a version of that that someone who reads English can then have,” Searls ’92 told the audience that recently packed the Barker Center’s Plimpton Room to hear the acclaimed translator. “This is why there are no perfect translations or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ translations, just like there’s no wrong way that Mr. Darcy looks.”

Searls, who works from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, has translated Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Max Weber. He discussed his philosophy, which he outlines in his 2024 book, at a lecture co-hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Philosophy, and the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Rethinking Translation Seminar.

The day before, Searls led a translation workshop with three Ph.D. students from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Comparative Literature’s Secondary Field in Translation Studies.

“Whatever you think translating is, it’s some kind of reading and some kind of writing joined together,” the former Adams and Dunster House resident said. “Reading explains a lot about translation, and if you unpack what reading is you’re going to get most of the way to the philosophy of translation.”

“Reading explains a lot about translation, and if you unpack what reading is you’re going to get most of the way to the philosophy of translation.”

Damion Searls

Searls said translation isn’t that different from other forms of writing in English, which require the same skills. However what distinguishes translation is the way translators read, a close reading that engages deeply with a language’s structure.

When “reading like a translator,” Searls said he must identify which linguistic elements can be omitted in English and which are intentional stylistic choices by the author. When translating Uwe Johnson’s “Anniversaries,” for example, he noticed frequent “not this but that” constructions (“the train leaves at not 7:00 but 6:00”), which are more common in German than in English.

While it would be easy to rephrase for smoother English, he realized Johnson used this pattern deliberately to express a personal vision and “slowly hone in on the truth.”

“We can’t just erase it because it’s not just the German language: It’s him, the author,” Searls said. “Every writer is using the resources of their language to do what they want to do, and as translators we have to do the same thing with an entirely different body of resources.”

In “The Philosophy of Translation,” Searls draws from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception to describe how translating happens, arguing the “living bond” that exists between people and objects also exists between translators and the language they are reading.

Just as a person immediately recognizes a chair, understands its purpose, and is prompted to sit by the object’s existence, Searls told the audience, translators also immediately recognize written language when they read it, understand one of its purposes is to be translated, and are prompted by the language to produce the translation.

Searls also described his process when approaching a new translation, which is usually to do a slow and precise first draft, which allows him to revise later versions without referring too much to the source material. He’ll sometimes read the book beforehand, but more frequently translates as he goes.

“It feels intuitive. I just keep revising it and trying to make it sound good,” Searls explained. “As much as you can avoid looking back at the original will help you direct your attention to: Does this sound like it should sound in English?”

“It feels intuitive. I just keep revising it and trying to make it sound good.”

Damion Searls

One key to a smooth translation is keeping associations similar for readers in both languages, Searls said. While translating Fosse’s “Septology I-VII,” he encountered a reference to Gula Tidend (literally “Gula Times,”) a now-defunct newspaper published in a small town outside the city where the main character lives.

When Searls asked Fosse about the name, he learned that “gula” is an old verb meaning strong wind, and also referred to a medieval Norwegian region, the birthplace of the oldest body of laws in the Nordic countries. Fosse left the choice up to him, so Searls settled on “The Northern Herald,” which evokes medieval heraldry and the northern wind.

Most importantly, he said, his translation avoids disrupting the sentence’s flow by making English readers pause to wonder about the words in the title.

“It seems like this example of the translator being really subjective, but from my point of view, I was just reading,” Searls said. “At first, when I read Gula Tidend I didn’t know how to read it. I didn’t understand what it was doing in the book, why it was there, how it fit together. Then I looked up the words, talked to the author, and got to the point where I could read it. Once I got there, I was totally faithful.”

An audience member asked Searls how to reach the point of feeling like a skilled enough reader to translate. He responded that while some believe mastering the source language is necessary for translation, he sees more nuance. Though he knows Norwegian well enough to translate Fosse, he said, he wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable translating just any Norwegian book.

“It’s also true that there are different kinds of expertise in the world. You don’t want to err so far in that direction that you become a sort of gatekeeper, saying that until you have a Ph.D. you’re not allowed to translate a book, because maybe you bring other things to the table,” Searls said. “It seems like a very good example of do your best and try to get better.”


Is sugar addictive?

Cravings are real, nutrition researcher says — but here’s why lumping sweets with alcohol, nicotine is a problem


Health

Is sugar addictive?

Sugar.
3 min read

Cravings are real, nutrition researcher says — but here’s why lumping sweets with alcohol, nicotine is a problem

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Frank Hu is the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

This is a heavily debated topic. Alcohol, nicotine, and opiates are all classified as addictive substances based on strict clinical criteria, and although sugar has been shown to increase cravings and compulsive eating behaviors, technically it’s not classified as an addictive substance based on current clinical criteria.

But the physical and psychological effects are real. Our food system is loaded with ultra-processed foods that contain not just added sugar but unhealthy fats and sodium. Those kinds of foods increase your cravings, because they’re very palatable, and they’re accessible. That leads to habitual consumption, and when you suddenly stop consuming those foods, you do experience some withdrawal-like symptoms: headaches, dizziness, anxiety, and so on. But it’s a matter of the degree: For alcohol, nicotine, and drugs, those symptoms are very severe, and it’s very difficult for people to completely stop consuming those substances.

We need some sweetness in our diets and in our lives.

So we can say that sugar has some addictive qualities, but it’s not officially classified as an addictive substance like alcohol, nicotine, or drugs.

It’s also important to make a distinction between a food or nutrient that we need to survive versus a drug or substance which can be completely removed from our diet. You can eliminate alcohol or drugs, but sugar is in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, milk, and other dairy products. If you consume low to moderate amounts of sugar, it’s not going to have major health consequences or psychological effects. The most important issue is the dose.

In the U.S. currently, the average person consumes almost 20 teaspoons a day of added sugar in things like sugary beverages, snacks, and sweets, which is enormous — it’s almost 300 calories. The recommendation from the American Heart Association is no more than 9 teaspoons of added sugar for men, 6 teaspoons for women, and much less for children.

People should be aware of the amount of sugar they’re consuming. Read the food labels for your cookies and snacks. Going cold turkey can backfire, so reduce your amount of added sugar gradually.

It’s difficult to classify sugar the same way as truly addictive substances. An appropriate amount of sugar in our diet can enhance flavor and texture; it can increase pleasure. We need some sweetness in our diets and in our lives. So if you classify sugar the same way as nicotine, it may be counterproductive.

As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer


Science? Yes. Fiction? Maybe.

Sci-fi books recommended by faculty, staff probe AI, humanity, censorship


Illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Arts & Culture

Science? Yes. Fiction? Maybe.

Sci-fi books recommended by faculty, staff probe AI, humanity, censorship

6 min read

When the future feels overwhelming, some of us stock up on canned goods while others turn to books. Science fiction has long challenged how we think about technology and society, often serving as a warning about where we are going or as an inspiration to build new worlds. The Gazette asked Harvard faculty and staff from across the disciplines to give us their recommendations.


Karen Brennan

Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies; Faculty Affiliate, Computer Science, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Faculty Co-Chair, Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology

Blindsight’

Peter Watts

“Like many people, I’m thinking a lot about artificial intelligence,” said Brennan, who directs Harvard’s Creative Computing Lab. Brennan recommended “Blindsight,” which follows a crew of augmented humans encountering alien intelligence that seems to lack self-awareness but surpasses humans in capability.

“Through the account of the crew’s increasingly disturbing interactions with the aliens, Watts invites us to confront the uncomfortable possibility that consciousness — an aspect of human intelligence that feels so essential — might actually be an evolutionary aberration, a glitch that more powerful forms of intelligence would lack, beneficially. In this time when we’re trying to make machines more like our own minds, the book’s message feels especially urgent: Perhaps we should be less concerned about artificial intelligence becoming more like us, and more concerned about what it means if it doesn’t need to be.”


Theo Anthony

Radcliffe Institute Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow and Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem

Artist and filmmaker Theo Anthony recommended the 1961 Polish novel “Solaris.”

“A team of scientists travels to the oceanic planet of Solaris, whose waters display potential signs of intelligence. Scientific interventions fail; attempts to communicate come back as staticky echoes. Meanwhile, ghosts of dead lovers haunt the crew. ‘Solaris’ is a novel about encounters at the limits of understanding — a welcome dose of humility in the face of the unknown.”


Amy Deschenes

Head of UX & Digital Accessibility at Harvard Library

‘A Rover’s Story’

Jasmine Warga

Deschenes read “A Rover’s Story,” a middle-grade novel about the journey of a fictional Mars rover, to her 7-year-old. In the story, a rover named Res, short for Resilience, communicates with humans only in code, but is fascinated by humans’ emotions and experiences.

“My son and I chatted about why some people might feel like a machine is their friend or even their child. One of the hazmats (aka humans), Rania, is fully committed to her work, but we know from letters that her daughter writes to Res that Rania is missing out on time with her family in order to make Res’ mission a success. Rania, one of the more pragmatic hazmats, unexpectedly shares a song with Res before he leaves for his mission. She tells him that she hopes he will remember her and that the song will bring him luck. This shift in her behavior, revealing that she does have an emotional connection to Res, was another point my son and I discussed. We speculated that maybe she is missing her daughter and trying to connect with Res in a more meaningful way because of this.

“As AI continues to evolve in ways I can’t even imagine, this gave my son and I the opportunity to reflect on what makes us human. It led us to discuss how machines might act as surrogates for friendship, and why they will never replace true human connections. ‘A Rover’s Story’ invites us to embrace our unique human traits, even as AI and machines become a significant part of our lives.”


Ursula Friedman

College Fellow in Contemporary Chinese/Taiwanese/Sinophone and Latin American Literature, Translation Studies, Comparative/World Literature, Media and Sound Studies

‘Exorcism’

Han Song

Much of novelist Han Song’s science fiction has been censored by the Chinese government for being “too dark,” but for Friedman, that’s part of what makes his work so great.

“The universe has been diagnosed with an incurable disease and has begun to mutate, alternately waxing poetic and killing off patients, in a last-ditch attempt to cure itself,” Friedman says. “Yang Wei awakens to find himself relegated to a geriatric ward aboard the Peace Ark, a military-ward-turned-hospital-ship governed by robots and AI beings. The ship’s operations are overseen by a glitching AI being known as Siming, whose vacillating policies clash with those of the hospital authorities.”

“‘Exorcism’ certainly feels like an instruction manual for averting disaster in today’s world, in the sense that Siming manufactures and dramatizes disaster. In the novel, the key to averting catastrophe lies in recognizing that although the universe may explode at any moment, human beings can create their own narrative culture by questioning the authorities’ version of reality and choosing pain over cultural amnesia. The ‘narrative-implant therapy’ in the novel strikes me as hauntingly similar to much of the political rhetoric spun by the U.S. media. In the novel, the hospital system alters the warp and weft of time and space, just as the current political regime attempts to skew our perception of ‘reality.’ The colorful characters aboard the Peace Ark grow inured to their own insurmountable pain as war and death rage around them. Their anesthetized bodies become war zones upon which industrial progresses clash with the impulse to forget and destroy.”


Jeff Saviano

Business AI Ethics Leader at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics

‘Fahrenheit 451’

Ray Bradbury

Saviano, an AI ethicist, recommended Bradbury’s classic cautionary tale about censorship, saying it serves as an enduring reminder about power and control of information.

“In the novel, books are outlawed, and access to knowledge is systematically erased — not just through brute force, but through a culture of distraction and passive consumption,” he said. “People in Bradbury’s novel are pacified by immersive entertainment, which diminishes their curiosity and critical thinking. It’s not just about what’s banned; it’s about what replaces it.

“This theme is particularly urgent in the new age of AI, where algorithm-driven content curation shapes what we read, watch, and even believe. Just as Bradbury’s world suppresses books in favor of shallow entertainment, today’s AI systems can amplify mindless digital engagement at the expense of deep thought and critical thinking. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ reminds us that protecting intellectual freedom requires more than just keeping books on shelves — it demands vigilance against technology that prioritizes instant gratification over meaningful understanding. A must-read for anyone thinking about AI’s role in shaping the future of knowledge.”


Harvard expands financial aid

New effort ensures that more undergraduates, especially from middle-income families, will receive support


Campus & Community

Harvard expands financial aid

New effort ensures that more undergraduates, especially from middle-income families, will receive support

3 min read
Harvard gate with Veritas shield.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Harvard University President Alan M. Garber and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra on Monday announced that Harvard College will be free for students from families with annual incomes of $100,000 or less and tuition-free for students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less. This significant expansion of financial aid, which begins in the 2025-26 academic year, will make Harvard affordable to more students than ever, especially from middle-income families.

“Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth,” Garber said. “By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the University.”

The expansion will enable approximately 86 percent of U.S. families to qualify for Harvard College’s financial aid, extending the University’s commitment to providing all undergrads the resources they need to enroll and graduate.

“Harvard has long sought to open our doors to the most talented students, no matter their financial circumstances,” said Hoekstra. “This investment in financial aid aims to make a Harvard College education possible for every admitted student, so they can pursue their academic passions and positively impact our future.”

Starting in the 2025-26 academic year, Harvard College will be free for students whose family income is $100,000 and below. This covers all billed expenses including tuition, food, housing, health insurance, and travel costs. Additionally, each of these students will receive a $2,000 start-up grant in their first year and a $2,000 launch grant during their junior year to help support the transition beyond Harvard.

Students with family incomes of $200,000 or less will receive free tuition and additional financial aid to cover billed expenses, depending on their financial circumstances. And many students with family incomes above $200,000 will also receive aid, depending on their circumstances. Harvard’s financial aid staff work personally and individually with students and families to match each family’s specific situation.

“We know the most talented students come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and experiences, from every state and around the globe,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid. “Our financial aid is critical to ensuring that these students know Harvard College is a place where they can be part of a vibrant learning community strengthened by their presence and participation.”

The expansion builds on more than two decades of investment in undergraduate financial aid at Harvard, beginning in 2004 with the launch of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, which completely covered tuition, food, and housing costs for students from families with annual incomes of $40,000 or less. This threshold has increased four times since then — from $60,000 in 2006 to $85,000 in 2023.

In 2007, Harvard eliminated loans, providing all assistance in the form of grants. It also eliminated home equity in determining a family’s ability to pay for College.

Harvard has awarded more than $3.6 billion in undergraduate financial aid since launching the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. Harvard College’s annual financial aid award budget is $275 million for academic year 2025-26. Fifty-five percent of undergraduates currently receive financial aid. Their families paid an average of $15,700 for the 2023-24 year.

“Our team works closely with each student to ensure full inclusion in the Harvard experience,” said Griffin Director of Financial Aid Jake Kaufmann. “The financial aid program is designed so that Harvard students can study, train, research, create, and fully engage in the Harvard experience with minimal constraints.”


Want a less divisive America? Just a matter of trust.

Robert Putnam traces nation’s plummeting social connection and rocketing discord, offers way to start thinking of solution


Robert Putnam.

Robert Putnam, author of the influential 1995 book “Bowling Alone,” spoke at the JFK Forum.

Photo by Martha Stewart

Nation & World

Want a less divisive America? Just a matter of trust.

Robert Putnam traces nation’s plummeting social connection and rocketing discord, offers way to start thinking of solution

6 min read

America is coming apart, warns Robert Putnam. It’s all due to a growing lack of social connection, and it’s visible in our relationships, communities, and deeply riven politics.

The bottom line is that we just don’t trust each other anymore, he said. But there are places to start.

The Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus and author of the influential 1995 book “Bowling Alone” spoke at a John F. Kennedy Forum in a March 12 conversation with former Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus. 

Putnam began with a discussion of national politics. He noted that President Trump’s critics blame him for our problems.

“America is in deep trouble,” said the 84-year-old political scientist. But Trump, he explained, didn’t create the turmoil. “He’s a symptom.”

“The real threat of what’s happening right now in America is not what’s on the surface, but the fact that the underlying causes of that are still there,” said Putnam. “And they will still be there when Trump is long gone unless we do something about it.”

That, said Putnam, is because our isolation — our lack of social capital — is growing worse, particularly among people with less education. “What the election showed is that the people, and above all the working class in America, were isolated. That’s why Trump won,” he said.

Putnam spoke a bit about his latest book, “The Upswing,” co-authored with his former student Shaylyn Romney Garrett. He drilled down on the data about what he called “political polarization, economic inequality, social isolation, and cultural self-centeredness.”

Putnam showed a series of graphs, all of which described a rough bell curve, starting low, peaking, and then coming back down. All of them, he explained, covered the period from roughly 1890 to 2020 in the U.S.

The first measured “political comity or bipartisanship,” which hit its high during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, “the most bipartisan — or nonpartisan — president in our history.” While that chart continued its high through John F. Kennedy’s presidency, its decline has been steady since.

“Now is probably the most politically polarized period in American history, with the exception of a period between 1860 and 1865.” He paused to make sure the room understood why he chose those dates. “That’s how close we are to a civil war,” he said.

The next chart, with a very similar curve, graphed economic equality, which has once again reached such a low level that it rivals the 1890s Gilded Age. A graph of social cohesion followed that same curve.

“Americans were very socially isolated at the beginning of the 20th century.” During that period of industrialization and urbanization, he said, “Large numbers of people were moving from villages in Sicily or villages in Iowa to the big city,” leaving their families and community connections behind. “And they had not yet made new ones.”

But they would.

“You see coming out of the ’30s and up until the ’60s, Americas were becoming much more trusting of one another,” he said.

“It’s not just about economics. Two-thirds of American society are not just unhappy about the fact that they don’t have good income or great chances of upward mobility. ”

Robert Putnam

Describing his own college experience in the ’60s, he recalled, “Most Americans trusted one another. Seventy-five, maybe 80 percent of Americans said they trusted other people,” Putnam said. “I think the latest number I saw was 10 percent of Americans say they trusted other people. And it’s still going down. We’ve still not stopped declining in our sense of connection with one another.”

The roots of these declines have many causes. The first is our definition of community — who is the “we” that makes up America. “The ‘we’ that we built over the course of the first two-thirds of the 20th century was a shriveled ‘we,’” said Putnam. “It was not just a white male ‘we,’ but it was more white than nonwhite” as well as more male than female.

“If we have a new progressive era, it has to have a more capacious sense of ‘we,’” he said.

We are also now isolated by social class, with the biggest gap being between those with college educations and those without. “The people who are left behind are the non-college-educated part of America.

“Only one-third of America has a college degree,” he said. “Do the math. We are never going to win unless we can begin to connect with the less-educated parts of America.”

Framing the issue as not an economic issue but a moral one, Putnam brought up Hillary Clinton’s ill-phrased dismissal of the “deplorables” who supported Trump.

“It’s not just about economics. Two-thirds of American society are not just unhappy about the fact that they don’t have good income or great chances of upward mobility. They don’t think we respect them — and we don’t,” Putnam said, referring to the college-educated, mostly middle-class or higher professional, corporate, and managerial class.

What we have to do is connect, he advised. Rebuild those social networks that allowed Americans to interact across class and education lines. And while many tout in-person connections, Putnam said, “It’s a mistake to think we have to have either face-to-face or virtual connections. Most of our connections are alloys, partially face-to-face and partly virtual.”

Such connections can help us bond in ways not connected with politics. He then gave a very local example: “I happen to be a Red Sox fan,” he said. “If you want to build connections among people from different parts of Boston or different age groups or different genders, bond in Fenway Park.

“Bridging in one direction, often depends on bonding in some other dimension,” he noted.

Ultimately, he said, “It is absolutely crucial that this new movement be based on youth. There are cultural things that young people of any class can bond on, like memes, and bridge other directions.

“I’m not giving you an answer,” he said. “I’m giving you a strategy for approaching an answer.”


‘The Odyssey’ is having a moment. Again.

Classicist Greg Nagy on story’s epic appeal, his favorite translation, and ‘journey of the soul’ that awaits new readers


Arts & Culture

‘The Odyssey’ is having a moment. Again.

Collage of Odyssey adaptations from the A.R.T, Mendlesohn's new book, and Christoper Nolan.

The enduring appeal of the “The Odyssey” can be seen in the A.R.T.’s production; a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn; and a forthcoming movie from director Christopher Nolan (pictured).

Photos by Nile Scott Studio and Maggie Hall; Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

5 min read

Classicist Greg Nagy on story’s epic appeal, his favorite translation, and ‘journey of the soul’ that awaits new readers

Homer’s “Odyssey” has captured people’s imaginations for nearly 3,000 years. Testaments to its enduring appeal abound: A recent stage adaptation of the epic poem at the American Repertory Theater; a movie by Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan is in the works; and a new translation by Bard scholar Daniel Mendelsohn will be published next month.

In this edited interview, Greg Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, reveals his favorite of the more than 100 translations of the poem, explains the appeal of the “trickster” Odysseus, and more.


What can you tell us about Homer?

There is nothing historical about the person called Homer. However, there’s everything historical about how people who listened to Homeric poetry imagined the poet. Homeric poetry evolved especially in two phases. The earlier phase was in coastal Asia Minor, in territory that now belongs to the modern state of Turkey and in outlying islands that now belong to the modern state of Greece. In these areas, around the late eighth and early seventh centuries B.C.E., there was a confederation of 12 Greek Ionian cities, which is where “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” evolved into the general shape that we have. A second phase took place in preclassical and classical Athens, around the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Before such a later phase, almost anything that was epic could be attributed to this mythologized figure called Homer.

Gregory Nagy.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

There have been more than 100 translations of the poem. Do you have a favorite?

I like the translation by George Chapman, a poet in his own right, who published the first complete translation of “The Odyssey” into English in 1616. There is that famous poem by John Keats (1816), in which he speaks about reading Chapman’s Homer. I also like the translation by Emily Wilson, who was the first female translator of “The Odyssey” (2017) into English.

I also like the translations by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, both of whom were dear friends. Lattimore was probably one of the most accurate translators of Homeric poetry; he cared about the original Greek text as it was eventually transmitted. He is easy on the eye, but hard on the ear. Fitzgerald is easier on the ear. And then there is Robert Fagles (1996), who has done the most actor-friendly translation.

I like Wilson’s translation very much. She is a great poet; she has a real ear for what’s going on in the minds and hearts of the characters. One of my favorite parts is how Wilson handles the gruesome death of the handmaidens who are not loyal to the household of Odysseus, and their agonizing death is so beautifully treated without any false sympathy.

Novelist Samuel Butler, who was a real romantic of the Victorian sort, wrote the book “The Authoress of ‘The Odyssey,’” where he imagines that the poem is composed not by Homer, but by Homer’s daughter. For her masterful translation, I would say that Wilson could be considered as the daughter of Homer.

Why do we find Odysseus fascinating? He’s cunning, vengeful, and so flawed …

I learned when I was a graduate student at Harvard from my professor, John H. Finley, that Odysseus, whom we all see as an epic hero, gets “a bad press” almost everywhere except in “The Odyssey.” Odysseus is what anthropologists call a trickster — a hero who is not originally an epic hero, but someone who, by way of knowing all the norms of society, can violate every rule, whether it’s a deeply ingrained moral law or whether it’s a matter of etiquette, as in the case of table manners. The value of the trickster is that it teaches us what the rules are because the trickster will show you how every one of them can be violated.

“The value of the trickster is that it teaches us what the rules are because the trickster will show you how every one of them can be violated.”

What we read in the very first line of “The Odyssey” summarizes it: “The man, sing him to me, O Muse, that man of twists and turns …” What can be more fascinating than somebody who has unlimited capacity to shift identities?

Who is your favorite character? Odysseus? Penelope? Telemachus?

Penelope is my favorite character in “The Odyssey” because she’s so smart. I have written a commentary interpreting the dream of Penelope that she narrates to her husband, who is still in disguise. If my interpretation is right, then the deftness of her narration shows that she is even smarter than Odysseus!

Finally, what should readers learn from the poem?

In the Homeric “Odyssey,” the hero experiences a journey of the soul. Reading the epic can lead to the reader’s own journey.


Getting into the swing of things

Students plan concert with saxophonist and composer Ted Nash that ends with enlightening dinner conversation


Timi Esan ’27 (left) and Ted Nash are pictured during rehearsal.

Timi Esan ’27 (left) and Ted Nash are pictured during rehearsal. “One of the takeaways from the couple of days for me was kind of more about the personal interaction with the students than it was even about the music.”

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Getting into the swing of things

3 min read

Students plan concert with saxophonist and composer Ted Nash that ends with enlightening dinner conversation

At Arrow Street Arts, the Harvard Jazz Orchestra found itself swinging with Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer Ted Nash. The Feb. 21 sold-out concert, which I planned alongside Emil Massad ’25, marked an exciting collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The center was eager to collaborate with Harvard because, as Todd Stoll, its vice president of education, noted, “Harvard is such a revered institution worldwide. It is important that people also realize that the arts play a very vital role in the lives of students.”

For this performance, Nash arranged the pieces he played with the orchestra, immersing us in his creativity.

“Ted approached the music with wisdom and attention to detail through the energy and emotion he brought, and the insightful comments, suggestions, and anecdotes he shared,” said saxophonist Zeb Jewell-Alibhai ’27.

After rehearsal, we had dinner with Nash, giving us a chance to connect beyond playing. He talked of growing up in a musical family and always knowing he wanted to be a musician.

“He encouraged us to reflect on our own histories as a way of developing creativity, walking us through how his family and past experiences shaped his music,” making the opportunity to play his arrangements even more meaningful, said Massad.

For Nash, dinner was the highlight. “It was unusual because the students were so bright and open and willing to talk about things that are important to them — that moved me,”  he said.

Nash talked to us about our interests and fears, offering insight and encouragement. He was surprised that most students were not music concentrators, noting, “They had so many other things they wanted to talk about … that actually overlapped with music.”

“Collaborating with Ted Nash was effortless. Ted created an ideal environment with amazing energy, resulting in a successful concert,” said Yosvany Terry, Harvard director of jazz bands and a senior lecturer on music.

Director Yosvany Terry (left) conducts during rehearsal.
Director Yosvany Terry (left) conducts.
Zeb Jewell-Alibhai ‘27 is pictured during rehearsal.
Zeb Jewell-Alibhai ’27 solos on tenor saxophone.
Ted Nash (left) and Dylan Goodman ’25 are pictured during rehearsal.
Ted Nash (left) and drummer Dylan Goodman ’25 speak during rehearsal.
Raghav Mehrotra ’26 plays drums during rehearsal.
Raghav Mehrotra ’26 plays drums during rehearsal.
Christopher Shin ’27 (pictured) performs trumpet during the concert.
Trumpet player Christopher Shin ’27 performs during the concert.
Ed Hutton Ph.D, HMS, (pictured) performs trombone during the concert.
Harvard Medical School Ph.D. candidate Ed Hutton plays his trombone.
Matthew Chen '26 (right) performs on saxophone during the concert.
Alto saxophonist Matthew Chen ’26 (right) solos during the concert.
Director Yosvany Terry (pictured) conducts during the show.
Nash shares, “I felt that a number of the kids in that band played at a professional level, and yet they understand the difficulties of choosing a life of music, and that’s part of their intelligence as well.”
Ted Nash (right) performs during the show.
Ted Nash (right) solos on soprano saxophone.
The audience gives a standing ovation following the performance.
The audience gives a standing ovation following the performance.
A musician carries a freshly signed music case by Ted Nash following the concert.
A musician carries his music case, freshly signed by Ted Nash.

U.S. innovation ecosystem is envy of world. Here’s how it got started.

Economist who studies technological change looks at public-private research partnership amid rising questions on federal funding


Health

U.S. innovation ecosystem is envy of world. Here’s how it got started.

During World War II, government-supported research led scientists to successfully mass produce penicillin. Here workers at a United States Department of Agriculture research lab, ca. 1943, look for mold strains that produce the highest amounts of the antibiotic.

During World War II, government-supported research led scientists to successfully mass produce penicillin. Here workers at a United States Department of Agriculture research lab, ca. 1943, look for mold strains that produce the highest amounts of the antibiotic.

USDA file photo

9 min read

Economist who studies technological change looks at public-private research partnership amid rising questions on federal funding

The participation of the federal government in the nation’s innovation ecosystem has been under scrutiny lately. For decades, federal funds have supported academic research, which in turn, has boosted private development, fueling new discoveries in medicine, technology, and other fields. The Trump administration is seeking to cap reimbursement for indirect research costs for biomedical science, which could mean billions of dollars in funding cuts from the National Institutes of Health.

The issue has turned a spotlight on the nation’s public-private research partnership, which has been credited with advances in a wide array of fields and emulated around the world. The Gazette spoke with Daniel P. Gross, an associate professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and former professor at Harvard Business School. Gross, together with Bhaven Sampat from Arizona State University, authored a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the postwar expansion of biomedicine.

In this edited conversation, Gross said the partnership was a response to the urgent demands of World War II, helped the U.S. and its allies win the war, and seeded the current thriving system.


What is your view of this partnership between the federal government and academia and how did it get started?

That partnership has been in place essentially since World War II. Its roots trace back to June 1940, when a handful of leaders at U.S. universities and industrial R&D labs approached President Franklin D. Roosevelt to propose harnessing civilian scientists to develop new technology for the U.S. military, which at the time significantly lagged on the technological frontier of warfare.

This was over a year before the U.S. entered the war, but it marked the beginning of an undertaking that engaged tens of thousands of scientists at firms and universities in the war effort, yielding numerous breakthroughs then, and was subsequently extended and deepened throughout the Cold War and has continued growing since. This partnership has been a pillar of U.S. technological leadership over the past 80 years, in biomedicine and beyond.

At the time, the National Institutes of Health existed, but it was a shadow of its current self?

The U.S. innovation system, and particularly the biomedical innovation system, looked very different in 1940.

The three pillars of U.S. biomedicine today are universities, the life sciences industry, and the NIH. Today they work together and build on each other. But in the 1930s, they were far more primitive. Universities were less research-intensive and had very little funding. The pharmaceutical industry wasn’t well organized, and to a large degree consisted of chemical companies with a minor subsidiary drug business rather than the large, dedicated drug developers we know today.

Drug discovery then was driven more by trial and error empiricism than science — drugs weren’t even subject to FDA review for safety until 1938 and efficacy until 1962. And the NIH was small and only intramural — it was not yet providing extramural research funding like we have now.

“In nearly every war before World War II, infectious disease killed more soldiers than battlefield injuries. Suddenly, there was an urgent need for innovation with immediate practical payoff — but no real infrastructure for getting it done.”

Daniel Gross.

And that was seen as inadequate once the war began?

The war posed a wide range of technological problems, from detecting enemy aircraft to keeping soldiers healthy. In nearly every war before World War II, infectious disease killed more soldiers than battlefield injuries. Suddenly, there was an urgent need for innovation with immediate practical payoff — but no real infrastructure for getting it done.

The war provided an impetus for organizational innovation to support technological innovation. This included a new agency to coordinate and fund wartime research, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD. It also triggered the invention of the federal R&D contract, new patent policies, peer review procedures, and even indirect cost funding.

Most importantly, however, was the embrace of the idea that R&D investment was an activity for the federal government, and a new pattern of collaboration between the government, firms, and universities.

Was it largely successful? Penicillin is a story that’s mentioned quite a bit.

Most would say yes. After all, the Allies won the war — and technology, medical and otherwise, was an important contributor to that outcome. New drugs are not necessarily the first thing you think of when you imagine military technology. Yet disease and other ailments could debilitate the military’s field forces, increasing required manpower. Tuberculosis, measles, and venereal diseases are all examples of common maladies among soldiers at the time. Malaria was prevalent in the Pacific theater and North Africa.

The broad range of fronts where this global war was fought, and new weapons with which it was fought, certainly expanded the set of problems needing attention — included protecting soldiers from extreme environmental conditions like hot and cold temperatures or oxygen deprivation at high altitudes, disease vector-control strategies, wound and burn treatments, blood substitutes, and much more.

OSRD’s Committee on Medical Research (CMR) directed and funded hundreds of projects on these problems and made significant progress in many of them. You’re right that one of the more important and remembered breakthroughs was penicillin. Though penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, at the dawn of World War II there was no method of producing penicillin in enough quantities even for clinical testing, let alone treatment.

CMR initially set out with two approaches to developing penicillin as a drug, not knowing which would succeed. One was to try synthesize it. The other was to try to grow it in large quantities from the mold that produces it. Scientists initially thought that the synthetic approach held more promise, but in the end it was scaled-up fermentation of natural penicillin that succeeded.

This breakthrough was transformative — not only for military health but civilian health too. The proof is in the data: Between World War I and World War II, military hospital admissions and death rates from most common infectious diseases declined by 90 to 100 percent. World War II research essentially solved the military’s problem of bacterial disease.

Perhaps even more important is that it spawned a golden age in drug development. The antibiotic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s can be directly traced to achievements in the war.

Some things became successful in the postwar period. Why did this effort have such long legs?

Across the CMR portfolio, the work undertaken to meet the urgent demands of war created a foundation upon which postwar biomedical science and technology subsequently began to grow. That foundation consisted of things like new research tools and techniques, new therapies and therapeutic candidates, new drug development platforms, newly developed capabilities at existing and emerging pharmaceutical firms — including experience in specific drug categories and more generally in science-based approaches to drug discovery, like rational drug design — and most importantly, new scientific understanding.

What about training a new generation of scientists?

It’s a great question. Many readers might think that public R&D funding primarily supports research. But scientific training is also important. The war effort engaged not only seasoned scientists but also thousands of graduate students, predoctoral researchers, and recently minted Ph.D.s. This was the case for both medical and nonmedical research: The labs doing the work were teeming with young people. Although we don’t trace the contributions of these students in biomedicine, I think it’s safe to presume that for many, it was formative.

In related work with Maria Roche, an assistant professor and former colleague at HBS, we have shown this was the case for researchers engaged in World War II radar research. More broadly, when you look at university and policy leadership across U.S. science in the first 25 years after World War II, you see OSRD alumni all over the place. The war proved to be a breeding ground for technical and administrative capacity that the U.S. harnessed afterwards.

When you talk about CMR funding, it included reimbursement for indirect costs — a subject of debate today. What was the rationale behind that then?

It’s useful to think about the context: OSRD needed to incentivize firms and universities to take on military R&D projects. Doing so required reorienting existing research efforts and displacing future ones — this was disruptive. Firms were being asked to use their own facilities, equipment, and sometimes best talent on national problems rather than commercial ones. Some were reluctant to do so without complete compensation. Medical researchers were also initially wary of public funding and bureaucratic control.

Reimbursing these R&D performers for overhead expenses, in addition to the immediate incremental costs of OSRD-contracted work, was one way it incentivized participation. Ultimately, the policy goal was for OSRD research to be “no gain, no loss” for its contractors. The structure of and motivations for indirect cost recovery have evolved somewhat since then, but the basic principles trace back to it.

Today it’s a bit different, in that we’re not building something, but we are trying to continue something that has proven to be successful?

It appears it’s been pretty productive. I wouldn’t dispute that there are opportunities to make the system more efficient, but overall, if you look at the output of this 80-year partnership between U.S. universities, federal research funders, and industry, it’s a story of success. I think we ought to be careful that, in pursuing reforms in science policy, we protect the golden goose.

The U.S. innovation system, and especially the biomedical innovation system, is the envy of the world. It has catalyzed decades of innovation that have supported national defense, health, and economic growth. To undo that would be a great loss for the U.S. and the world.


Showing that Black lives matter — everywhere

In a new book, music professor considers race in all its facets


Arts & Culture

Showing that Black lives matter — everywhere

In a new book, music professor considers race in all its facets

3 min read
Jessie Cox

Jessie Cox.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Growing up in Switzerland, Jessie Cox found it difficult to speak about being Black. Black lives remained largely unthought of in the tiny, land-locked nation, he believed.

Since then, he’s thought about them. In his new book, “Sounds of Black Switzerland,” Cox, an assistant professor of music who’s currently teaching an advanced course on studio collaboration, addresses the dynamics of race in a place where it is rarely discussed.

“One task for me was to open a discourse about Black Switzerland. Another task was to contribute to the thinking of Blackness and Black studies,” said Cox, a composer, drummer, and scholar from the western city of Biel.

“Sounds of Black Switzerland,” released in February as Cox dove into his second semester at Harvard, fuses cultural appraisal and sophisticated music criticism. Some chapters are devoted to Blackness and Afrofuturism. Another analyzes how anti-Blackness can rest on color-blindness and erasure. Cox examines the associated challenges with Switzerland’s judiciary system, immigration law, and notions of national belonging.

Yet Cox didn’t want his critique of anti-Blackness to anchor the book.

“Rather, I wanted to uncover the imaginative possibilities that we can come to think and hear under the term ‘Blackness,’” he said. “My goal was to show that there are inherent possibilities uncovered in all these discourses around Black life and Blackness in the U.S. and globally.”

Cox said he was inspired by Nigerian Swiss composer Charles Uzor, who wrote a series that includes “Bodycam Exhibit 3: George Floyd in Memoriam,” to which Cox devotes a full chapter. The 2020 murder in Minneapolis was later compared to the case of Mike Ben Peter, a Black man who died in 2018 after being pinned down by six police officers in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

Determined not to reduce the Black experience to the violence Black communities face, Cox also draws on songs by popular Swiss artists, including the Bern-based rapper Nativ.

“Nativ has this piece in which the chorus says, ‘Today is a good day for change’ in Swiss German, but the word ‘change’ is in English, so it’s a reference to Barack Obama,” Cox explained.

Also unpacked is the seminal title “Farbe bekennen” (“Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out”) by May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. The 1986 book is often credited with kickstarting Afro German studies and igniting discussions on race across Europe.

“To be able to think about what we are going through in our lives and our world in as many facets as we can is crucial to coming together and learning about each other’s experiences,” said Cox, who taught a fall 2024 course titled “Music to Re-imagine the World: From Afrofuturism to Experimental Music Across Planet Earth.”

“There is very radical possibility that we can get — if we invest in artistic practice as a space for imagining new worlds — new ways of being, new commonalities, and new relations,” he said.


Number of those burdened by rental affordability hits record high

Public policy expert discusses possible ways to cut costs amid national housing crunch


Nation & World

Number of those burdened by rental affordability hits record high

Boston city skyline
8 min read

Public policy expert discusses possible ways to cut costs amid national housing crunch

Amid a nationwide housing shortage, a new report shows the number of those burdened by rental affordability has hit a record high.

As of 2023, 22.6 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities, up by 2.2 million since 2019. More than half, or 12.1 million, of those spent more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, according to recent research by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

Worsening affordability affects renters across income groups. Middle-income renters, who earn $30,000-$75,000, comprised 41 percent of all cost burdened households in 2023. Those earning $75,000 and more were 9 percent. A full-time job is no guarantee that housing will be affordable. Indeed, 36 percent of fully employed renters were cost-burdened in 2023.

In this edited conversation, Chris Herbert, the center’s director, explains why renting continues to grow less affordable and what cities can try to do about it.


The number of households struggling with housing costs is at an historic high. What’s driving this?

There’s two things. Since 2021, we saw rents going up at double-digit rates in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In 2023, they started to slow down. In 2024, they were growing at more like an inflationary clip, so “better.” That was a function of very strong demand from the pandemic. Supply couldn’t keep up and led to high rents.

It came on the backs of what had been deteriorating affordability for the last two decades. There was a quiet affordability crisis growing, which is, how many renters were cost-burdened.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we reached a peak around 2011 in terms of both numbers and share of renters who were cost-burdened. From there, things gradually got a bit better.

But underneath the surface, while the overall share of renters who were cost-burdened was edging down, the share of renters working year-round, full-time, at not great but not terrible jobs, we were seeing a sharp increase in the share of renters who were cost-burdened.

What was happening was the cost-burdened/housing affordability issue was really being democratized. It was spreading from just among the poorest households to more working folks, particularly young people.

There was a real worsening of the crisis since the pandemic, but it had already been getting worse, and particularly worse for working people.

The number of cost-burdened renters has hit another record high

moderately cost-burdened and severely cost-burdened are at its highest in 2023

Many more middle- and higher-income renters are struggling with housing costs. What accounts for that shift?

That’s kind of the $64,000 question. The most common answer people give is that we haven’t been building enough housing. To some extent, that’s true. Multifamily vacancy rates had gotten quite tight, particularly in the face of the pandemic surge. So, there was a sense that we didn’t have enough apartments.

That is a piece of the story, but we almost overemphasize it. The other part of the story is that the cost of producing housing units is very high. There’s this notion, “Build more houses, and the price will come down.” You have to bear in mind that builders only build housing if it makes economic sense to do so.

The expense comes in four big buckets: There’s land, and that’s where a lot of the conversation has been around zoning and the fact that we don’t have enough land zoned for high-density housing. And then there’s construction costs — that’s 60 percent of the cost of an apartment building. The land, typically, is only 20 percent. And then there’s the soft costs: architectural, engineering, and then, financing. Those costs go up with a difficult approval process. They’re about 10-15 percent of the cost, so not a big driver. But the financing costs, when interest rates go up to 7 percent, is a big driver.

Housing is expensive for a host of reasons, zoning being one of them, construction costs, and the fact we haven’t had improvements in efficiency in the construction sector, and then the complexity of the approvals process and the high cost of capital.

Boston mayoral candidates Josh Kraft and Mayor Michelle Wu said housing affordability will be a top issue in the upcoming election. Do mayors and cities have any real tools to bring down housing costs?

There’s been a lot of discussion and emphasis on the regulatory processes. How restrictive is your zoning? How onerous is your approval process? How hard is it for a developer to propose a reasonable scale development and get it approved and start work on it? A big thing cities are doing is relooking at their zoning. Cambridge has done various iterations of looking at their zoning.

Related to that can be the approval process: The affordable housing overlay in Cambridge says if you put forth a development that meets criteria in terms of setbacks and density and other factors, we’re going to approve it, and you don’t have to go through a whole process of design review. So, cities can do that.

How does that affect affordability? It reduces the soft costs. To the extent you’re giving me greater density, I may be able to get a better value of land. The challenge is that the land’s value is based on how many units you can put on it. And so, if you tell me I can put two units on it, and the land was worth, say, a million bucks, and then you say, “Now you can put 10 units on it.” That’s $100,000 a unit. I just saved a ton of money.

But as soon as you tell a developer you can put 10 units on it, the developer says, “I’ll pay 5 million bucks for that piece of land.” So, you don’t get as much savings from the density. All cities can do in that regard is try to make it so there’s not more friction and more pressure on prices to go up faster than they otherwise would.

You’re going to have a hard time solving the affordability problem through zoning. And if you’re talking about lower-income households or even moderate-income households, you’re going to have to talk about ways in which you’re going to subsidize the cost of that housing. That means cities have to find ways to get money.

Boston has been very good about linkage payments for commercial development generating a fair amount of money, as has Cambridge, and an affordable housing trust that gets money from that. They can use some general appropriations from their budget.

You can also look for special taxes. Boston put forward a transfer tax proposal that former Mayor Marty Walsh estimated would generate about $100 million a year in income for the Affordable Housing Trust. Mayor Wu pursued it, but the state legislature has stymied them.

A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.

“A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.”

Chris Herbert

And maybe spur innovation in the design of housing. Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab has been looking at how do we get more modular housing, more efficiencies of factory production and how can the City of Boston play a role in trying to help that get to scale.

Any promising policy ideas or positive trends on the horizon?

We’re definitely in a situation where we have to try a lot of things. There’s a lot of experimentation. There’s a piece in the Mass. state bond bill for a revolving loan fund. People have come to the realization that housing affordability has been a long-term problem that’s been a long time in the making, and so we have to have a long-term vision of how we address this.

One of the big ways in which housing inflates in value is through the inflation of land values. Houses depreciate, and so, the value of a house built in 2000 should be less today. But in fact, housing values around here are double what they were in 2000, and that’s all in the land value. It’s land values that capture a lot of the inflation in house prices. And so, one thing to do is to lock in land ownership long term to keep that inflation from affecting the occupants of the home.

The other piece is that if [property owners] manage housing at cost then you can start charging rents that are a lot more affordable. Combine that with public ownership or nonprofit ownership that could be exempt or limited property taxes, low-cost land, at-cost rents, and reduced costs from reduced property taxes, you can start to get housing that is affordable.


The House that will be home

Housing Day — one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions — marks a milestone for first-years


The John Harvard statue, surrounded by Kirkland House signs, is seen during the annual Housing Day tradition in Harvard Yard.

Surrounded by Kirkland House signs, the John Harvard Statue watches over the College’s annual Housing Day tradition in Harvard Yard.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

The House that will be home

5 min read

Housing Day — one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions — marks a  milestone for first-years

When first-year student Wilson Cheung and his four suitemates woke up at 7 a.m. on Thursday, they could already hear upperclassmen gathering in the Yard outside their dorm. They waited excitedly in their room as the sounds drew closer until finally, around 8:30 a.m., a loud group made their way up the stairs.

When Cheung heard chants of “C-A-B-O-T,” he briefly wondered if he was about to be sorted into Cabot House, but when the door opened it was a group of Adams House residents there to greet him enthusiastically and give him his assignment letter.

As he hugged a friend in front of the John Harvard Statue 15 minutes later, Cheung couldn’t stop smiling.

“My suitemate and I got Adams and we’re super happy,” he said. “Adams just finished its renovation, so we’re going live in a brand-new dorm. It’s also close to everything, right in the center of campus. It’s a very cool dorm.”

Dunster House residents play music and dance in Harvard Yard before storming first-year dorms.

Dunster House residents play music and dance in the Yard before storming first-year dorms.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Housing Day, when first-year students learn where they will live for the next three years, is one of Harvard’s most beloved — and rowdy — annual traditions. Upperclassmen representing the 12 residential Houses flock to Harvard Yard early in the morning to showcase their House spirit and friendly rivalry. At 8:30 a.m., upperclassmen storm the first-year dorms to deliver housing assignment letters and welcome their newest Housemates home.

Students danced and celebrated in front of the bronze John Harvard, many in coordinated outfits, such as blue T-shirts for Lowell House and burgundy beanies for Winthrop. Some Dunster House residents walked by playing trumpets and saxophones, while Leverett House residents, wearing green bunny ears, honked green plastic stadium horns. House mascots, like the Dunster House moose, Currier House tree, and Cabot fish, danced around and posed for photos.

Winthrop House residents Ikenna Ogbogu and Ebun Oguntola, both sophomores, rallied with the rest of their Housemates, dressed in burgundy shirts. Ogbogu, who was holding a sign that read “’Throp, what a W,” said he loves Housing Day because getting his housing assignment last year was a milestone in the Harvard experience.

A Winthrop House resident cheers in Harvard Yard.

A Winthrop House resident cheers.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Jeffrey Yang (center), ’26, laughs with his fellow Adams House residents.

Jeffrey Yang ’26 (center) laughs with his fellow Adams House residents.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Pforzheimer House residents cross Garden Street on their way to Harvard Yard.

Wearing polar bear mascot costumes Pforzheimer House residents cross Garden Street on their way to Harvard Yard.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

“You’re part of a larger community with such so much more history than your freshman hall,” Ogbogu said. “Being on the other side now and being able to dorm-storm freshmen, dressing up, shouting in the morning at 7 a.m. is just really fun because you’re part of creating an experience for everyone here.”

Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, paused to take selfies with a costumed group as he greeted students in the Yard. Khurana said the annual tradition is one of the most “incredible” experiences at the College.

“The Houses are what make Harvard College so distinctive,” Khurana said. “One of the things I love about this day is that this is when every House becomes a home for our students.”

Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences said the tradition brings a much-needed boost of happiness to the semester.

“At a time when many of us feel like we need an injection of joy, Housing Day delivered just that,” said Hoekstra. “It’s magical to watch friendships — maybe lifelong ones — form right before your eyes.”

Outside Hollis Hall, Lowell House seniors Anoushka Chander and Una Roven, both in blue jackets, posed for a photo together while their Housemates flooded into the dorm. The seniors, who were holding a sign that read “take the L,” were feeling nostalgic to be experiencing the tradition for the last time.

“It’s just a great tradition to celebrate our House and the wonderful community that we have and each other,” Chander said. “It’s our last Housing Day to let people know they got the best House, and that it will be their home for the next few years.”

Their advice to first-years experiencing Housing Day for the first time?

“Just enjoy it,” Chander said.

“Yeah, enjoy it, any House you get will be awesome,” Roven agreed, then paused. “But Lowell is the best.”

First-years watch Housing Day festivities below their residence hall.

First-year students await their House assignments as they watch the festivities below their residence hall.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Max Wagner, ’27, dressed as a fish, Cabot House’s mascot, prepares to enter a first-year dorm room to notify a resident about their housing placement.

Dressed as the Cabot House mascot, Max Wagner ’27 prepares to enter a first-year dorm room.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

A Currier House resident waves the Currier Flag in Harvard Yard on Housing Day.

A Currier House resident waves the House flag.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Leverett House students boo Dunster House residents as they exit a first-year dorm.

After delivering a Housing Day letter to a first-year dorm, bunny-eared Leverett House students boo Dunster House residents as they exit.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Amelie Lima ’27 holds up a Currier House sign in Harvard Yard.

Amelie Lima ’27 holds up a Currier House sign.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Adams House residents wave to first-years in their dorm rooms.

Adams House residents wave to first-years in their dorm rooms.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Niels Korsgaard ’25 (left) of Mather House rallies atop the John Harvard Statue.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Michael Young '25 (from left), Naomi Whidden '27, Emily Schwartz '27, and Mila Ivanovska '25 pose for a photo together at the Dunster House table.

In Annenberg Hall Michael Young ’25 (from left), Naomi Whidden ’27, Emily Schwartz ’27, and Mila Ivanovska ’25 pose for a photo at the Dunster House table.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Harrison Warfel, ’26, dressed as a penguin, the mascot of Quincy House, speaks through a microphone.

Harrison Warfel ’26 of Quincy House makes himself heard over the boisterous crowd.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Lowell and Eliot house residents rally in front of University Hall.

Lowell and Eliot House residents show their spirit.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

An Eliot house resident in a mastodon costume rallies in front of University Hall.

An Eliot House resident in a mastodon costume rallies the group.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer


5 things we learned this week

How closely have you been following the Gazette? Take our quiz to find out. 


A composite image of photos from the week's news.

Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Campus & Community

5 things we learned this week

1 min read

How closely have you been following the Gazette? Take our quiz to find out. 

Ditching butter has a big impact. Climate change is changing the forest. The cost of homeowners insurance is screwy. Drug manufacturing costs could be lower. Harvard runs (or ran) on typewriters


1. Why did new research suggest that swapping butter with olive, canola, or soybean oils could lead to a 17 percent lower risk of premature death?
2. As climate change impacts the makeup of Harvard Forest, what is replacing dying hemlocks?
3. Climate change is affecting homeowners insurance. How did California regulators change the rules after the recent wildfires?
4. The secret to manufacturing less expensive pharmaceuticals could lie in a modified relative of what common liquid you might have around the house?
5. What famous Harvard scholar said he or she still uses three typewriters purchased from Cambridge Typewriter?