Harvard University Housing (HUH) manages approximately 3,000 apartments, offering a broad choice of locations, unit types, amenities, and sizes to meet the individual budgets and housing needs of eligible Harvard affiliates (full-time graduate students, faculty members, and employees). Harvard affiliates may apply for Harvard University Housing online at www.huhousing.harvard.edu. The website also provides information about additional housing options and useful Harvard and community resources for incoming and current affiliates.

In accordance with the University’s rent policy, Harvard University Housing charges market rents*. To establish the proposed rents for 2026–2027, Jayendu Patel of Economic, Financial & Statistical Consulting Services performed and endorsed the results of a regression analysis on three years of market rents for approximately 14,000 apartments. The data on apartments included in the analysis were obtained from a variety of sources, including rentals posted on the HUH Off-Campus Housing website by private-market property owners, information supplied by a real estate appraisal firm, and various non-Harvard rental websites, in order to provide comparable private rental market listings for competing apartment complexes in Cambridge, Boston, and Somerville. As always, all revenues generated by Harvard University Housing in excess of operating expenses and debt service are used to fund capital improvements and renewal of the facilities in HUH’s existing residential portfolio.

The rents noted in this article have been reviewed and endorsed by the Faculty Advisory Committee on Harvard University Housing and will take effect for the 2026-2027 leasing season. Written comments on the proposed rents may be sent to the Faculty Advisory Committee on Harvard University Housing, c/o Harvard University Housing, Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center, 1350 Massachusetts Ave., Room 827, Cambridge, MA 02138. Comments to the committee may also be sent via email to leasing@harvard.edu. Any written comments should be submitted by Feb. 6.

Rents for continuing HUH tenants

Current HUH tenants who choose to extend their lease, rental rates will remain flat. Heat, hot water, electricity, and gas, where applicable, are included in all Harvard University Housing apartment rents; internet service and air conditioning may also be included where available.

Harvard University Housing tenants will receive an email in March 2026 with instructions on how to submit a request to either extend or terminate their current lease. Tenants who would like additional information or help in determining their continuing rental rates for 2026–2027 may call the HUH Leasing Office at 617-495-1459.

Rents for new HUH tenants for the 2026-2027 leasing season

The results of this market analysis and of other market research indicate that Harvard University Housing 2026–2027 market rents will be as listed below. Heat, hot water, electricity, and gas, where applicable, are included in all Harvard University Housing apartment rents; internet service and air conditioning may also be included, where available.

• 10 Akron Street: studios $2,340–$2,700; one bedroom convertibles $2,964–$3,312.
• 18 Banks Street: one bedrooms $2,820–$3,204; two bedrooms $3,420–$3,588.
• Beckwith Circle: three bedrooms $3,204–$4,164; four bedrooms $3,624–$4,500.
• Botanic Gardens: one bedrooms $2,868–$3,012; two bedrooms $3,384–$3,540; three bedrooms $3,924–$4,164.
• 472–474 Broadway: one bedrooms $2,760–$2,832.

• 5 Cowperthwaite Street: studios $2,496–$2,904; one bedrooms $3,012–$3,024; one bedroom convertibles $2,964–$3,228; two bedrooms $3,468–$4,236.
• 27 Everett Street: one bedrooms $3,156–$3,228; three bedrooms $4,248–$4,956.
• 29 Garden Street: studios $2,172–$2,520; one bedroom convertibles $2,748–$2,784; two bedroom efficiencies $3,084–$3,624; two bedrooms $3,468–$3,552; three bedrooms $4,776–$5,016.
• Harvard @ Trilogy: suite $1,956- $2,196; studios $2,376–$2,604; one bedroom convertibles$3,060–$3,276; two bedroom efficiencies $3,696–$3,948.
• Haskins Hall: studios $2,364–$2,460; one bedrooms $2,628–$2,904.
• Holden Green: one bedrooms $2,508–$2,880; two bedrooms $2,880–$4,056; three bedrooms $3,768–$3,852.
• 2 Holyoke Street: one bedrooms $2,856–$3,024.
• Kirkland Court: one bedrooms $2,532–$3,000; two bedrooms $3,336–$3,588; three bedrooms $4,296–$4,596.
• 8A Mt. Auburn Street: one bedrooms $2,856–$3,024.
• Peabody Terrace: studios $2,316–$2,976; one bedrooms $2,796–$3,312; two bedrooms $3,228–$3,852; three bedrooms $4,740–$5,160.
• 16 Prescott Street: studios $2,316–$2,472; one bedrooms $2,676–$2,880.
• 18 Prescott Street: studios $2,256–$2,328; one bedrooms $2,664–$2,928.
• 85–95 Prescott Street: studios $2,376–$2,628; one bedrooms $2,688–$3,132; two bedrooms $3,144.
• Shaler Lane: one bedrooms $2,544–$2,736; two bedrooms $2,904–$3,444.
• Soldiers Field Park: studios $2,772–$3,264; one bedrooms $3,192–$3,648; two bedrooms $3,912–$4,932; three bedrooms $4,332–$5,668; four bedrooms $5,688-$5,856.
• Terry Terrace: studios $2,448–$2,532; one bedrooms $2,700–$3,000; two bedrooms $3,336–$3,372.
• 9–13A Ware Street: studios $2,352–$2,496; one bedrooms $2,664–$2,988; two bedrooms $3,324–$3,348.
• 15 Ware Street: studios $2,580; one bedrooms $3,504; two bedrooms $4,080.
• 19 Ware Street: two bedrooms $3,876–$3,924; three bedrooms $4,164.
• One Western Avenue: studios $2,532–$2,820; one bedrooms $2,724–$3,180; two bedrooms $3,192–$3,984; three bedrooms $4,608–$4,980.
• Wood Frame Buildings: studios $1,728–$2,448; one bedrooms $2,496–$3,468; two bedrooms $3,132–$4,800; three bedrooms $3,504–$6,384; four bedrooms $5,400–$6,000.

The comments received will be reviewed by the Faculty Advisory Committee, which includes: Suzanne Cooper, Edith M. Stokey Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Nancy Hill, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Howell Jackson, James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Graduate School of Design; John Macomber, Gloria A. Dauten Real Estate Fellow, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School; Daniel P. Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Sean Caron, vice president for Campus Services (chair), Office of Executive Vice President for Administration.

* The rents for tenants of Harvard University Housing are set at prevailing market rates, in keeping with the University’s affiliated housing rent policy. This policy was established in 1983 by President Derek Bok based on recommendations from a study led by Professor Archibald Cox and the Committee on Affiliated Housing. The original faculty committee determined that market rate pricing was the fairest method of allocating apartments and that setting rents for Harvard University Housing below market rate would be a form of financial aid, which should be determined by each individual school, not via the rent setting process. Additionally, the cost of housing should be considered when financial aid is determined.

Eric Cheng had just landed the role of Song Liling in the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s 2019 production of “M. Butterfly,” when the senior got a bit of advice from the ultimate expert.

Actor BD Wong, who originated Song Liling on Broadway in 1988, visited Harvard for two days in 2020 as part of the Office for the Arts’ Learning from Performers program. Wong did a master class with students, spoke to an English class, and attended an “M. Butterfly” rehearsal. He ended up helping Cheng workshop the first love scene between the two main characters.

“I remember showing him around the Harvard campus and just having a conversation,” recalled Cheng, now a content creator and podcast host living in Los Angeles. “There was something to be said about just being with this person proximally — seeing the life of a successful actor and performer — that was exciting and hopeful. I didn’t necessarily have access to many successful people in the arts, so that was really important.”

This year the Office for the Arts is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Learning from Performers program. The initiative brings professional artists to campus for events with students that range from lunchtime discussions to workshops, residencies, classes, seminars, and coaching.

“Learning from Performers gives students the opportunity to interact with world-class artists from across disciplines and understand that what they learn here at Harvard — in traditional classrooms as well as on stages and in studios — can translate into extraordinary careers that define fields and help shape the world,” said the office’s director, Fiona Coffey. “When the OFA operates as a space that has one foot in the professional arts world and one foot in an educational setting, when we can bridge those two worlds together, that’s when our students encounter and understand the full power of the arts.”

The anniversary celebrations kick off Jan. 30 with an event at Sanders Theatre featuring Robert Carlock ’95 and Tina Fey. The comedy A-listers have worked together on “Saturday Night Live,” “30 Rock,” and more. They will share insights about their creative collaboration with an audience of students and community members.

“More than 50 years of Learning from Performers have taught us that often the most daring and impactful art is really rarely a solo act,” Coffey said. “It’s a very collaborative process.”

Learning from Performers, launched in 1975, was the brainchild of then-student Jerold Kayden ’75.

Kayden, who is now Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, said the idea came during his senior year while he was serving as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. He invited cellist János Starker to perform as a guest artist with the ensemble when the cellist’s agent suggested a master class for an additional fee.

“He did a master class that I found very compelling with several student cellists,” Kayden said. “It struck me at the time, ‘This is interesting. I wonder if we could do more of that?’”

With the support of Myra Mayman, the OFA’s founding director, Learning from Performers was born the following fall. Kayden oversaw the program for its first year, when they hosted 19 artists including pianist Les McCann, composer Stephen Sondheim, and vocalist Sarah Vaughan. A program advisory committee formed over the same period that included dancer Alvin Ailey and jazz musicians Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley, and Count Basie.

“It began as a series of conversations, it grew into conversations and workshops, then to something like the BD Wong residency, visiting classrooms and working behind the scenes with students in real time,” said Alicia Anstead, who leads the program as OFA’s Associate Director for Creative Productions and Producer of Harvard Arts Festival. “It continues to morph as we envision new ways of bringing art-making and grounding artists and students together at Harvard.”

Other notable artists to participate in the program include actors Mel Gibson, Whoopi Goldberg, and Laura Linney; musicians Quincy Jones, Bobby McFerrin, and Yo-Yo Ma; playwright Tony Kushner; and artist Maurice Sendak.

Kayden said it is gratifying to see the program he founded as an undergraduate now entering its 50th year. He encourages current students to take similar risks with their own creative projects.

“Taking advantage of what Harvard offers to all of us is a great gift, and the combination of an idea and the convening power of Harvard made this work,” Kayden said. “My advice to students is: If you dream it, you can do it.”

It started with a letter.

In the late 1980s, when James Schiff was a graduate student, he wrote a letter to John Updike ’54, the prominent American literary figure who was the subject of his dissertation and an author he had long admired. A few days later, he received a response in the mail.

“I was astonished,” said Schiff, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. “I didn’t even think I would get a response, and not only did I get a response, but given the timing, he probably got the letter on a Tuesday, and then he had the response in the mail to me on Wednesday with all my questions answered.”

Updike, it turns out, wrote a lot of letters. According to Schiff, who recently published the edited book “Selected Letters of John Updike,” Updike wrote more than 25,000 of them in his lifetime. The volume spans 60 years of the writer’s correspondence, which Schiff considers “an integral part” of Updike’s “astonishing literary output.”

A prolific and versatile author, Updike wrote more than 60 books along with nearly 2,000 short stories, poetry collections, and thousands of essays and pieces of literary criticism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and again in 1990 for two novels from his “Rabbit” series. When Updike died in 2009 at age 76, a New York Times obituary called him a “lyrical writer of the middle-class man.”

Updike’s depiction of small-town, middle-class America appealed to Schiff, who grew up in Cincinnati feeling he “needed to live in Hemingway’s Paris or Tolstoy’s Russia.” Reading Updike changed his mind. “Updike made the mundane, quotidian life of middle America so beautiful, interesting, and mysterious,” said Schiff.

Unlike other writers, Updike didn’t keep journals or diaries, said Schiff, who is now working on a biography of the author. Writing letters was common among Updike’s generation and was a way to record what was going on in his life. “He needed to write the way most of us need to breathe or eat,” said Schiff, a cofounder of the John Updike Society and founding editor of the John Updike Review.

Updike started writing letters as a teen, when he sent fan notes to cartoonists and artists he admired or submissions to magazines from his family farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania. His love for words was inspired by his mother, an aspiring writer. During his years at Harvard, between 1950 and 1954, Updike wrote about 150 letters to his parents about his courses, his roommates, and life in general. His letters from Hollis Hall show a writer with a keen eye and an already precise and refined writing style.

In the first letter he sent home from Harvard, dated Sept. 25, 1950, Updike wrote “Harvard is a difficult place in which to write a letter. … I’m rather frightened by the immensity of intelligence and variety of talents displayed here.” In another letter, a month later, he wrote, “I’m delighted by the way the Yard looks on a sunny day, and the way the front of Widener Library lights up at night. … I revel in the abundance of food, of independence, of thought.”

In other missives, Updike wrote about the fun he had at the Harvard Lampoon as cartoonist, editor, and president, how sad he was when he was “booted out” of an English class, feeling that “his literary career reached its nadir,” and the joy of falling in love with a Radcliffe student who would become his wife at the end of his junior year. “Harvard is a contradictory place,” he wrote. “Nowhere are you allowed so much freedom and given so little time to enjoy it.”

Schiff said the John Updike Archive at Harvard was “crucial” to his research. Over the years, Updike had donated portions of his papers to the University, and after his death in 2009 Harvard acquired the full collection, which includes manuscripts, personal correspondence including rejection letters, drawings and sketches, articles, and two bound volumes titled “Letters to Plowville” assembled by Updike’s mother. The documents, housed at Houghton Library, represent the largest collection of Updike papers, said Leslie Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton.

“Almost all of John’s manuscripts and papers, which are voluminous, are held at Harvard,” said Schiff. “Many of his best letters come from that collection, including those letters written to his family.”

Schiff’s volume includes Updike’s letters to his parents, his first and second wives, his children, friends, writers, editors, and colleagues. It took eight years to complete.

Updike’s letters were “seldom boring or perfunctory,” said Schiff, and not only display the “intellectual finesse, wit, and eloquence found in his fictions and essays,” but also attest to his generosity and conscientiousness.

“For somebody who was an artist of such a high stature, he was remarkably open and generous to others,” said Schiff, who over the years exchanged correspondence with Updike and met him on several occasions, including in Cincinnati. “Letters had been so important to him as a teenager, when he wrote fan mail to cartoonists he admired … Perhaps because of those cartoonists who were kind to him when he was a teenager, he felt a need to respond to people who wrote to him. I think that was part of his conscientious nature. For the most part, the volume of his letters indicates he enjoyed writing to people.”

Mindfulness has gone mainstream, with the top 10 smartphone apps for meditation cumulatively reaching some 300 million downloads worldwide. The practice, research suggests, reduces stress and anxiety and improves mood and emotional regulation. 

Advanced meditation may offer even greater benefits — potentially leading to transcendent states of mind and awareness, according to scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital Meditation Research Program who are pioneering studies in the field.

Matthew Sacchet, the program’s director and an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, helped us develop the following quiz on what scientists are only beginning to learn about these deeper practices.

Step 1 of 7

14%

1. What percentage of Americans say they meditate at least a few times a month?

8%

16%

38%

49%

2. What proportion of people — meditators or not — report experiencing altered states of consciousness like out-of-body experiences or changes in perceived size?

10%

20%

35%

45%

3. True or False: Meditation is unique to the Buddhist tradition.

True

False

4. The earliest reference to nirodha samāpatti, a cessation of feeling and perception that can happen in very deep meditation, took place at least how long ago?

200 years ago

600 years ago

1,200 years ago

2,000 years ago

5. What happens in the brains of meditators entering the advanced meditative state of extended cessation?

Brain regions communicate less

The brain’s basic energy patterns drop

Brain modes linked to clarity and alertness are active

All of the above

6. What kinds of experiences can arise in advanced meditation?

Ecstatic bliss

Profound insight into how one’s mind functions

Deep compassionate states

All of the above

7. The ultimate goal of meditative and religious practice has been described in some contemplative traditions as enlightenment, nirvana, or salvation. What term is now being used in scientific literature to describe this class of outcomes?

Deep meditation

Final experiences

Meditative endpoints

Mindfulness meditation

Δ

Harvard scientists have invented a way to create a tiny “time capsule” in cells, one that preserves an archival record of gene expression that can be retrieved long after it normally disappears.

“It’s like a time machine for the cell,” said Fei Chen, associate professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who led the new study. “You can look at a cell now to see how its past influences the present — for example, what genes were turned on in the past to cause a cancer cell to become resistant to drugs.”

Dubbed “TimeVault,” the new technique was published Jan. 15 in Science. It aims to surmount a longstanding limitation in cell research and offer a new tool for studying topics such as cell differentiation, response to stress, adaptation, or drug resistance.

Biologists have long sought methods to study the life history of cells and the molecular changes that unfold during processes such as development and disease.

But most existing techniques cannot measure these processes over time. For example, RNA sequencing provides only a one-moment snapshot of gene expression and destroys the cell.

Numerous other technologies offer different glimpses of cellular activity, but none compile an ongoing record.

To overcome this hurdle, the Chen Lab sought to build a way to record gene activity, store the information within living cells, and later recover it to see how past events influenced the fate of the cell.

The researchers first experimented with bacteria proteins called encapsulins, but they did not perform well. Then they read an article about mysterious structures known as vaults.

Vaults — so named because early researchers likened them to vaulted cathedral ceilings — are enigmatic structures naturally occurring inside cells. Although smaller than the membrane-enclosed organelles such as the nucleus or mitochondria, vaults are the largest particles made by human cells and among the most abundant, with about 10,000 in most cells and up to 100,000 in some immune cells.

First discovered 40 years ago, their function remains unknown. Vaguely resembling footballs or hand grenades, vaults are mostly hollow — meaning they could be engineered to store other molecules. Better yet, they do not trigger an immune response because they already exist within cells.

“The first time we tried it, it just worked so much better than encapsulins — approximately 10 times better,” said Chen. “So we immediately shifted our approach to using vaults.”

First, the method assembles a “transcriptome,” or an inventory of all the messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by the cell at that moment. (Most cells contain complete copies of the genome, but only certain genes are expressed at any given time and thus produce the mRNA instructions to build proteins.)

The system uses poly(A) binding proteins, which naturally bind to mRNA and are widely employed to produce transcripts of gene activity. With bioengineering, researchers attached these proteins to others that naturally form vaults. When the vault takes shape and closes up, the transcript information becomes enclosed within.

“It’s like a magnet for RNA,” explained Kevin Yu-Kai Chao, a Ph.D. student in chemical physics in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the paper. “Then the vault will capture the magnet.”

The vaults act like protective containers and shield the RNA from normal degradation by enzymes.

In experiments, the researchers found that the TimeVaults extended RNA preservation more than sevenfold — from a half-life of about 17 hours in the cell cytoplasm to 132 hours inside the vaults.

This information is even inherited by daughter cells. When cells divide, the vaults are divided between the offspring cells.

Next, researchers used chemical techniques to dissolve the vaults and assemble transcriptome snapshots of past activity, which can be compared with other snapshots taken later.

“It’s a link between past and future,” said Chao. “Previously there was no link.”

The researchers tested the method by subjecting cells to heat shock and mimicking hypoxia (low oxygen), two stressors with well-established effects on gene expression. In both cases, the TimeVaults preserved evidence of the classic cellular responses long after it had vanished from the main body of the cell.

In another experiment, the team used the method to examine why some cancer cells became resistant to therapeutic drugs.

Thus far, the researchers have only used the method to record a single time point, but they hope it can be adapted to record multiple time points — and perhaps someday take scientists closer to a cellular version of a “black box” flight recorder.

“It’s the first way to actually look at the history of a cell and connect it to the future,” said Chen. “We believe there probably will be a lot of cool applications from a research and potentially therapeutic standpoint. We’re actually very excited to share this with the scientific community.”

One colleague, a pioneering biologist known as “The Vault Guy,” is already excited. Leonard Rome, a Distinguished Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA whose team first discovered vaults in 1986, applauded the new method for its innovative engineering of the still-mysterious structures. “Frankly, I’m delighted that Dr. Chen has been able to exploit the properties of the vault particle in this way and by doing so deliver an entirely new method for probing a cell’s history,” he said.

Laboratories turned to a smart workaround when COVID‑19 testing kits became scarce in 2020.

They mixed samples from several patients and ran a single test. If the test came back negative, everyone in it was cleared at once. If it was positive, follow-up tests would zero in on who was infected. That strategy, known as group testing, saved valuable time, money, and resources.

Now, a team of Harvard chemists in collaboration with Merck scientists has adapted the same basic idea to speed up production of drugs and other valuable chemicals.

In a new Nature paper, a team led by Eric Jacobsen, Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, described an experimental and computational framework that uses pooled tests to hunt for cooperative interactions between catalysts, substances that can speed reactions and reduce the energy needed for reactants to transform into products.

This approach dramatically cuts down the number of reactions chemists need to run while still revealing which combinations perform well together.

“This idea of bringing two different catalysts together and seeing if the combination might do something especially powerful — either in a reactivity context or a selectivity context — has been interesting to me and many other chemists for a long time,” Jacobsen said. “We’ve now found an efficient approach to uncovering unanticipated manifestations of cooperativity.” 

Chemists have long known that two catalysts can sometimes cooperate to give higher yields or cleaner products, or to enable milder conditions than any single component can manage alone.

However, even testing a small set of potential candidates, the math quickly becomes brutal: A panel of 50 potential catalysts, for example, contains more than 1,200 unique pairs, not to mention three‑way or four‑way combinations.

To overcome that limitation, the researchers took inspiration from group testing.

In public health, the goal is to identify as many infected individuals as possible using as few tests as possible. In this new research, the tests are looking for catalyst pairs that make a reaction unusually efficient or selective.

“We landed on this idea that comes from COVID testing,” said Marcus Sak, lead author on this study and a graduate student at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “Can we use simple math and statistics to create an algorithm for discovery that needs to know very little — or even nothing — about the chemical features of the system?”

Instead of testing each pair individually, the team designed pooled experiments: Each reaction contained multiple catalyst candidates in a specific pattern. A custom algorithm then examined how each pool performed and used that information to infer which specific pairings must have been responsible for any boost — or drop — in performance.

“It’s not just a matter of pooling and testing. There’s a lot of statistical analysis,” Jacobsen said. “We were able to develop code to predict the best pooling strategies for evaluating different combinations of catalysts.”

There was a key challenge, though: Unlike COVID tests, where a sample is either positive or negative, real chemical systems are messy and complex. Some catalysts help, others hinder, and many can do both, depending on what else is in the flask. 

“Catalysts can cooperate with each other, but they can also inhibit each other,” Jacobsen said. “You could just ask, ‘If cooperativity is so important, why don’t you just throw every catalyst in one flask and see if that soup does better than the individuals?’ The problem is, if you add all the catalysts you know in a soup, you’re guaranteed to get mud. They cancel each other out.”

To make sure their pooling–deconvolution strategy was accurate, the researchers first tested it on simulated data. The algorithm consistently identified the true cooperative pairs while ignoring misleading signals.

Encouraged, the team employed a real-world challenge identified by co-author Richard Liu, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology: a palladium‑catalyzed decarbonylative cross‑coupling reaction. These reactions are essential tools for building complex molecules, including potential drug candidates.

The algorithm identified several ligand pairs that outperformed individual ligands on their own. 

Reducing catalyst loading and energy use are key goals for sustainable chemistry, especially when precious metals are involved. But the authors emphasized that the value of their framework goes well beyond any single transformation.

“I think it’s a very complementary approach to what you might consider the more rational design approach of using our mechanistic understanding to impose the effects we’re looking for,” Jacobsen said. 

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to push beyond pairs to ternary and higher‑order cooperativity, where three or more catalysts or ligands act together.

“Coming up with powerful strategies for looking for interesting chemistry, in this case cooperativity, through high‑throughput experimentation and really strategic analysis can open up an enormous amount,” Jacobsen said. “We’re going to learn a lot of chemistry in the coming years.”

This research was partially funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The Harvard Alumni Association nominating committee has announced its candidates for the spring 2026 elections of the Harvard Board of Overseers and elected directors of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The nominating committee brings together 13 alumni with varied backgrounds and includes three current or former Overseers who have direct experience with the workings and needs of the board. The committee invites and receives suggestions about possible candidates from across the alumni community and reviews information on hundreds of prospective candidates as part of extensive deliberations throughout the fall term.

“The process of identifying candidates for Overseer and HAA elected director once again underscored the extraordinary breadth of experience and commitment found across the Harvard alumni community,” said Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. ’78, chair of the nominating committee, former Overseer, and past president of both the Harvard Alumni Association and the Harvard Law School Association. “These candidates bring a wide range of professional accomplishments, life experiences, and points of view. They share a deep interest in Harvard’s academic excellence and broad institutional mission, and a strong sense of responsibility to the University and its future.”

The committee seeks to develop a set of Overseer candidates that takes account of the board’s present composition and the University’s future needs. The committee considers experience and accomplishment in an academic or professional domain important to the University; interest in and concern for higher education and for Harvard University as a whole; commitment to the overall quality and continual improvement of Harvard’s programs of education and research; readiness to invest significant time in the visitation process, standing committees, advisory functions, and plenary deliberations of the board; understanding of complex organizations, and leadership and consensus-building skills.

“I’m grateful to my fellow committee members for the care and judgment they brought to this work,” Shapiro said. “And we are thankful to the candidates themselves for their willingness to devote the time and energy required for thoughtful and effective service to Harvard and the broader community it serves.”

Overseer candidates

Salvo Arena, L.L.M. ’00
J.D. ’93, Ph.D. ’99, University of Catania; Partner, Chiomenti
New York

Nisha Kumar Behringer ’91, magna cum laude, M.B.A. ’95
Independent Director and Audit Committee Chair, Birkenstock Holding PLC
Greenwich, Connecticut

Clive Chang, M.B.A. ’11
B.Mus. ’07 with honors, B.Com. ’07, McGill University; M.F.A. ’09, New York University; President and CEO, YoungArts: The National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists
Miami

Teresa Hillary Clarke ’84, cum laude, J.D. ’89, M.B.A. ’89
Chair and Executive Editor, Africa.com; Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
Miami

Arti Garg, Ph.D. ’08
A.B./B.S. ’99, M.S. ’01, Stanford University; M.S. ’02, University of Washington; EVP and Chief Technologist, AVEVA
Hayward, California

Trey Grayson ’94, cum laude
J.D. ’98, M.B.A. ’98, University of Kentucky; Partner, FBT Gibbons; Former Secretary of State, Commonwealth of Kentucky
Walton, Kentucky

Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena,L.L.M. ’98
J.D. ’95, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Former Justice, Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (Mexico)
Mexico City, Mexico

Nadine Burke Harris, M.P.H. ’02
B.A. ’96, University of California, Berkeley; M.D. ’01, University of California, Davis; Pediatrician and Former Surgeon General of California
Sebastopol, California

Philip L. Harrison ’86, magna cum laude, M.A.R. ’93 with distinction
Chief Executive Officer, Perkins&Will
Atlanta

HAA elected director candidates

Mia Esther Alpert ’99 cum laude
Founder and President Emerita, Harvardwood
Los Angeles

Jimmy Biblarz ’14, magna cum laude, J.D. ’21, cum laude, Ph.D. ’23
Attorney, Hueston Hennigan; Lecturer in Law, UCLA School of Law
Los Angeles

Allison Charney Epstein ’89, magna cum laude with highest honors
M.M. ’91, A.D. ’94, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University; Opera Singer, Producer
New York

Medha Gargeya ’14, magna cum laude, J.D. ’19
Senior Associate, WilmerHale; Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School; Captain, U.S. Air Force Reserves
Washington, D.C.

Jakob Haesler, M.P.A. ’99
M.Sc. ’97, University of St. Gallen; Global Head of Consulting, Forvis Mazars Group
Paris, France

David G. Lefer ’93, cum laude
M.Sc. ’95, Columbia University; Director of the Innovation and Technology Forum and Industry Associate Professor, New York University
New York

Margarita Montoto-Escalera ’78, M.B.A. ’85
Consultant, Reichard & Escalera LLC
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Yoshiko “June” Nagao ’96 cum, laude
Private Investor
Tokyo, Japan

Jeffrey H. Tignor ’96 cum laude
J.D. ’99, Duke University; Attorney-Adviser, Federal Communications Commission; Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke University School of Law
Washington, D.C.

Candidates for Overseer may also be nominated by petition, by obtaining a required number of signatures from eligible voters. The deadline to submit petitions for the 2026 Overseers election is Jan. 29. Find more information on the nomination and election process here.

The election begins April 1. Completed ballots will be accepted until 5 p.m. on May 19. Harvard degree holders can vote online or by paper ballot for six anticipated vacancies on the Board of Overseers and for six openings among the HAA elected directors. This year the committee has nominated nine candidates for Overseer, rather than the usual eight, in light of an additional vacancy on the board due to the resignation of Vikas Sukhatme, M.D. ’79, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Medicine at Emory University. The sixth-place finisher will complete the remaining two years of Sukhatme’s term.

All Harvard degree holders as of Jan. 1, except for officers of instruction and government at Harvard and members of the Harvard Corporation, are eligible to vote for Overseer candidates. All Harvard degree holders as of Jan. 1 may vote for HAA elected directors.

The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. Formally established in 1642, the board plays an integral role in the governance of the University, complementing the Corporation’s work as Harvard’s principal fiduciary board. As a central part of its work, the Board of Overseers directs the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning, bringing broad, informed perspective to issues of academic excellence, long-term planning, and institutional priorities. More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives, helping to inform decision-making across the University. The board also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of Corporation members. The current membership of the board is listed here.

The HAA board, including its elected directors, is an advisory board that aims to foster a sense of community, engagement, and University citizenship among Harvard alumni around the world. The work focuses on developing volunteer leadership and increasing and deepening alumni engagement through an array of programs that support alumni communities worldwide. In recent years, the board’s priorities have included strengthening outreach to recent graduates and graduate school alumni and continuing to build and promote inclusive communities.

Many young writers think the first step is finding a voice.

Ocean Vuong shakes his head at this. Spending time searching for a distinctive style could limit your growth as an author, he says. Better to focus on developing and shaping it along the way.

“It makes sense that in our culture of gain and scarcity that [finding a voice] should be a hunt or search or possession, but I don’t think that’s true,” said Vuong, an award-winning poet, novelist, and the featured speaker at the recent annual Eliot Memorial Reading. “I don’t think one finds a voice … I think one develops it throughout one’s life … I’m still discovering mine.”

“We all have a thumbprint; it’s idiosyncratic to us,” he said at the event presented by the Woodberry Poetry Room and funded by the T.S. Eliot Foundation. “Language syntax, how you arrange your words; that’s the thumbprint of an inner life, and that could be replicated, shifted and grown inexhaustibly.” 

The author of several poetry collections, Vuong wrote “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a New York Times best-selling book that has sold more than a million copies and has been translated to 40 languages since its publication in 2019.

A recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Vuong was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. at age 2 as a refugee with his mother and other relatives. He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and teaches modern poetry and poetics in the M.F.A. program at NYU.

The event was dedicated to the poet, novelist, and activist Fanny Howe, who was to be this year’s speaker but fell ill and died in July. Christina Davis, Curator of Poetry of the Woodberry Poetry Room, reached out to Vuong, who agreed to fill in. Davis noted that six years ago Howe had replaced Vuong, who had to cancel because of his mother’s failing health.

“Could it be, I wonder, that this reading might be a chance for the kindness she [Howe] once bestowed on Ocean to experience a form of eternal return?” Davis told the audience. “It seemed so unlikely, given Ocean’s notoriously packed schedule … but all I had to do was speak three words: For Fanny Howe …”

After paying tribute to Howe, Vuong read several new poems of his own, among them one about his 12-year-old dog named Tofu, another about President Abraham Lincoln, and an ode to the last dinosaur.

In a Q&A period, Vuong shared pieces of advice to aspiring writers. He told them to work seriously on their craft because perseverance is more important than talent.

“Talent is real, but a lot of times, talent can be a great hindrance,” said Vuong. “It’s not a marker of a successful writer. It’s really about endurance … Because everything outside of your desk, outside of your home, conspires to destroy you.”

Asked if he writes out of anger and how he manages to remain hopeful, Vuong said his Buddhist practice helps him manage his emotions and focus on writing not out of anger, but out of care, which he describes as the “afterlife of anger.”

Hope is a guiding principle in his work and life, he said.

“I’m angry often, but I’ve never written out of anger,” said Vuong. “Anger is not useful for me because I destroy myself as I use it. It’s a radioactive energy for me; it wounds as it’s being wielded, and it’s only a matter of time before it sputters out … To me, the most productive work comes out of care and then compassion.”

When Ichiro Kawachi established a cohort study in Iwanuma, Japan, in 2010, he thought he would be researching the predictors of healthy aging. 

But seven months later, his plans changed when a magnitude 9.1 earthquake, the fourth most powerful since 1900, struck 50 miles from his field site, triggering a massive tsunami and widespread destruction. 

“We had this unusual natural experiment where we had all the information about people’s lifestyle and health behaviors before the earthquake, and we could track people afterwards,” said Kawachi, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It turned into a follow-up study of disaster survivors.”

In a paper in Communications Psychology, Kawachi and co-authors, including lead author Yasuyuki Sawada of the University of Tokyo, found a significant increase in obesity and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions associated with cardiovascular disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes) among people who suffered housing damage or destruction in the March 11, 2011, disaster. 

“Overweight and obesity rates increased from 25 percent before the earthquake to 35 percent among people who lost their homes, whereas it remained pretty much level among people who did not experience this kind of asset loss,” Kawachi explained. “That was a big surprise for us.” 

Rates of drinking and smoking also increased for people who experienced heavy damage to their homes. 

This might not be surprising to epidemiologists, who have consistently found that people who have survived natural disasters tend to engage in risky health behaviors at higher rates than peers who have not. What’s novel in Kawachi’s research is the underlying mechanism: present bias, also known as hyperbolic discounting, brought about by exposure to scarcity. Present bias is the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over larger, future benefits, even when the benefits of waiting are clear.

The researchers analyzed data from 337 participants from parts of Iwanuma that had recorded a large variation in home damage on each block, about three years after the quake. They collected an additional round of data in 2017. 

They supplemented data from Iwanuma with that of 187 survivors of a separate natural disaster — torrential rain and typhoon-like flooding that struck a village south of Manila in the Philippines in 2012. 

“We set this up as an independent sample of people who have experienced asset loss,” Kawachi said. “In that location, they also saw an increase in poor dietary habits, hypertension, and metabolic problems.” 

Unhealthy behaviors and increased present bias both persisted six years after the disaster. 

To identify present bias as the mechanism behind the increase in unhealthy behaviors, Kawachi and his team created a version of the psychology experiment on delayed gratification known as the marshmallow test. Participants we re asked if they would like to receive a sum of money today or a larger sum of money at a later date. 

“From the choices they make in different scenarios, we can quantify their internal discount rate. Thus we can show that there’s a dose response between the extent of people’s housing damage and the extent to which they discount future benefit for present gain.” 

All of the behaviors recommended by public health officials — healthy eating, drinking in moderation, exercising, getting a good night’s sleep — involve what researchers call the intertemporal choice problem: The benefits of the behavior and the cost of the behavior fall in different time periods. 

“When we fall under the sway of present bias, it becomes much more difficult to invest for future health gain,” Kawachi said. 

Interestingly, he added, the paper found that participants’ tolerance for risk did not change as a result of housing damage or housing loss. “This is a very specific mechanism about people’s ability to forgo gratification, to invest for the future, and that’s another way of trying to think about these risk behaviors.” 

Kawachi sees implications for the research beyond natural disasters. “There was widespread asset loss and scarcity during COVID,” he said. “And we also know that during COVID, all sorts of bad behavior increased: There was a rise in alcoholic cirrhosis, a rise in opioid poisoning. Some of that could be because of an interruption in access to services for treatment, but you could also put a kind of scarcity spin on what was happening at the population level.” 

The study described in this story was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

A wider public conversation has arisen over whether it’s time for a shift in how we think about categories of autism, amid rising interest in the disorder across the country.

For instance, some op-eds, written in recent weeks by parents and activists, argue the current definition of the condition as a unified spectrum comprising several subtypes is too broad, and the unique issues and intensive needs of the most severe cases get lost.

It’s an argument that sits poorly with Ari Ne’eman, assistant professor of health policy and management at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a longtime disability rights activist. He worries that creating a high-needs category risks a return to segregation and neglect — though he doesn’t rule out the possibility that other subdivisions may make more sense. 

“The concern is this is a reboot of that fight, with this ‘profound autism’ construct as a new vehicle for litigating fights about inclusion that took place a generation ago around intellectual disability,” said Ne’eman, who was an adviser to the working group responsible for creating the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder more than a dozen years ago.

“I worry that the ‘profound autism’ construct is a political category designed to justify more segregated services, more than a scientific one — there is not really a clear reason to believe the different groups it combines belong in a distinct diagnosis,” he said 

The disagreement emerges as a national spotlight has been turned on the disorder. With autism rates surging in the nation, federal officials have recently announced moves to respond to it.

According to the CDC, about one in 31 8-year-olds has been diagnosed with the condition across 16 surveillance programs nationwide, a rate more than four times higher than when the CDC began tracking in 2000.

It is a condition that includes both individuals with minimal or no verbal ability who require round-the-clock care, along with others like activist Greta Thunberg and academic and author Temple Grandin.

In a September press release calling autism an “epidemic,” President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called attention to contested links between autism and acetaminophen and announced investments into research into potential environmental, nutritional, and medical causes.

On Nov. 19, the CDC updated its website, noting that HHS would be looking at possible causes of autism, including possibly vaccines.

Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of such a link. Scientists say most of the current research suggests the causes of autism are overwhelmingly genetic. 

The overall rise in diagnosis, Ne’eman explained, is likely due in large part to greater awareness on the parts of schools, parents, and clinicians. In addition, the medical establishment has been refining diagnostic criteria, changing who would qualify as autistic.  

The American Psychiatric Association’s official handbook is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, first published in 1952. Autism was officially recognized as a separate disorder in the DSM-III revision released in 1980. Prior to that, it was considered a form of schizophrenia.

A later edition also added a condition called Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or PDD-NOS.

Those conditions were later consolidated. In 2013, the DSM-5 — which Ne’eman advised on — further changed the game, including adding sensory issues to the diagnostic criteria and instigating a three-tiered categorization to distinguish between levels of support needs. 

“Major factors contributing to the increase in autism diagnoses include diagnostic substitution and the broadening of the autism criteria,” said Tara Eicher, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Chan School. “Both of these changes are overall positive, because they result in more people receiving the services they need.” 

Eicher’s work focuses on identifying genetic causes of autism. To date, hundreds of genetic mutations have been implicated in autism, with more expected to be identified in the future, and in many cases the interactions between genetic mutations, gene expressions, and behavior remain unclear. 

As calls for a new “profound” category grow louder, Ne’eman worries that such a category risks a return to problems surrounding care. In the 1970s through the 1990s, he explained, advocates in the field of intellectual disability rights successfully campaigned against institutionalization and sheltered workshop jobs at subminimum wages, which were common practices at the time. 

But with more people who might once have been labelled intellectually disabled now diagnosed as autistic, Ne’eman fears the table could be reset.

Combining very different kinds of severe impairment — communication and cognition — into a single catch-all category could result in segregation of some patients and a shift away from community living, he argued. 

Still, Ne’eman empathizes with the families of those with severe impairment who don’t feel seen by the current system. 

“I do have a lot of sympathy for families who say, ‘Listen, I want to be able to talk about the challenges around severe impairment,’ and to have a language for that, to recognize that things are often quite a bit harder than for people who can talk or don’t have an intellectual disability.” 

That nuance is one reason Michael Stein, visiting professor of law at the Harvard Law School and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, says the terms themselves matter less than how they’re used. 

“Whether the category is broader or whether it’s narrower, ultimately, it’s how scrupulous and thoughtful the clinicians and social policymakers are as far as how these individuals are treated and supported, rather than what label we place on them,” he said.

Randomized clinical trials remain the gold standard for establishing a medication’s effects, producing the evidence by which most drugs and interventions in the U.S. are approved.

But these studies typically require large numbers of patients, huge amounts of data, and thorough follow-ups, none of which comes easy or free. The upshot is fewer investigations into scenarios that are clinically important but unlikely to yield a profit for the firms funding them.

Accordingly, researchers have been developing an option that uses real-world data from insurers to save patients from falling through the cracks.

“There’s little incentive for pharmaceutical companies to test combinations of treatments, for example, because a manufacturer typically aims to market its own product rather than evaluate it alongside another,” said Sebastian Schneeweiss, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School. In addition, subsets of patients — such as pregnant women — are excluded from trials for ethical reasons, leaving gaps in knowledge.

“There are very tangible use cases where we would love to have trials, but we’ll never have them, and we need to recognize this,” said Schneeweiss, who also serves as chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “And at the same time, we’re sitting on this huge pile of longitudinal and patient-level data, of which only a very small proportion is used today to turn into evidence.” 

This untapped data could help answer critical questions — such as whether a drug approved for diabetes could also prevent heart attacks or whether a treatment tested on middle-aged men works equally well for pregnant women — much faster than an RCT can.

For nearly a decade, turning these findings into actionable evidence has been the goal of Schneeweiss and Shirley Wang, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

As co-directors of RCT-DUPLICATE (Randomized Controlled Trials Duplicated Using Prospective Longitudinal Insurance Claims: Applying Techniques of Epidemiology), they have developed methods that use real-world evidence (RWE) — like insurance claims from Medicare and Medicaid collected during routine clinical care — to determine whether a medicine might be effective beyond a trial’s original indication.

“We love RCTs,” said Wang, “but they can’t answer all questions.” 

To understand when and how RWE studies can complement trials, the team emulates the design of a reference trial as closely as possible using the RCT’s study design. “We’re trying to predict what those results would be,” said Wang, “and see how close we can get.”

From there, the team benchmarks their results against the reference RCT. When the emulation closely reproduces the trial’s results, this suggests that the data, design, and analysis infrastructure is robust and researchers may be more confident about expanding the original research question to populations or outcomes the original trial didn’t address. 

Beyond expanding the scope of existing RCTs, the group aims to demonstrate the validity of using data routinely collected in clinical practice to produce meaningful conclusions — pushing back against those who dismiss the use of real-world evidence.

“There’s criticism, of course, that you already know what the results are, so maybe you’re tailoring to get those results,” said Wang.

To counter this criticism, the team has emulated more than half a dozen trials that had not yet released data, running analyses to see how well their methods could predict unpublished results. The group also publishes their protocols before they run their analyses, allowing people to see their methods and preventing themselves from adjusting analyses to fit an existing result.

As the core methods have been validated over years of work, the group has put them into practice.

Building on the RCT-DUPLICATE framework, Nils Krüger, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, showed in two recent studies that GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide yield cardiovascular benefits beyond their FDA parameters.

While the drugs are generally approved to treat obesity and Type 2 diabetes, Krüger’s analyses showed that the drugs lowered the risk of hospitalization for heart failure or all-cause mortality by 40 percent compared with a placebo proxy. 

The study has since informed the World Health Organization’s international guideline on the use and indications of GLP-1 medicines in obesity and was recently recognized among the American Medical Association’s “Research of the Year” selections for 2025.

In another study released last month, Krüger showed that tirzepatide and semaglutide provide comparable cardiovascular benefits to one another, refuting conflicting presentations from their parent companies that claimed superior results for one or the other.

Krüger hopes that the study will help clinicians better understand how these medications perform in the broader, more diverse patient populations routinely seen in everyday practice.

Besides identifying new indications, Wang hopes these studies can support clinical decision-making and justify reimbursement from Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) and payers who require compelling evidence before covering an intervention. The approvals could help more people access effective treatments sooner.

She pointed to DOACs — direct oral anticoagulants with better effectiveness and fewer side effects than older blood thinners. With each new indication, DOACs improved treatment for people suffering from conditions like atrial fibrillation and deep vein thrombosis. Yet reaching the broad range of approvals they hold today took more than a decade.

With emerging anticoagulants such as Factor XI inhibitors — which could further reduce bleeding risk while preventing blood clots, Wang wonders whether it is necessary to wait that long again.

“Do we wait 15 years for more trials to be completed, or can we get more expedited evidence that is well grounded?” she asked. “That’s an open question, so we’ll see what the FDA says and work with them to explore how real-world evidence can complement RCTs.” 

For Wang, Schneeweiss, and Krüger — and the team of researchers behind RCT-DUPLICATE — the point is to save more lives today, with data that already exists.

To get a better look at brains, Harvard researchers are making microscopes work more like human eyes.

Until recently, the quest to build high-resolution maps of brains — otherwise known as “connectomes” — was stymied by the slow pace and cost of powerful electron microscopes capable of systematically capturing neuroanatomy down to billionths of a meter.

But now a team of scientists at Harvard and MIT have found a way to bypass that bottleneck: using machine learning to guide a simpler, less-expensive variety of microscope in real time. The idea is to home in on key details first and minimize time spent on areas of lesser interest — the same way we might zero in on words on a page instead of margins.

Researchers say the innovation, known as SmartEM, will speed scanning sevenfold and open the field of connectomics to a broader research community, boosting our understanding of brain function and behavior. 

“SmartEM has the potential to turn connectomics into a benchtop tool,” said Professor Aravinthan Samuel, a researcher in the Department of Physics and Center for Brain Science and one of the senior authors of a new paper published in Nature Methods. “Our goal is to democratize connectomics. If you can make the relatively common single-beam scanning electron microscope more intelligent, it can run an order of magnitude faster. With foreseeable improvements, a single-beam microscope with SmartEM capability can reach the performance of a very expensive and rare machine.”

The method is the product of a five-year collaboration between researchers at Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and microscope manufacturer Thermo Fisher Scientific.

In December, the same journal proclaimed electron microscopy-based connectomics its “Method of the Year” for 2025 and cited SmartEM an example of cutting-edge innovation. 

SmartEM marks a new advance in the decades-long quest to create “wiring diagrams” of brains from across the animal kingdom, from worms to fruit flies to humans. 

For example, two years ago Harvard researchers published the first nanoscale map of one cubic millimeter of human brain. Packed into that poppy-seed-sized sample were 150 million synapses, 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and a wondrous diversity of structures never seen before. 

Researchers elsewhere have completed connectomes for the fruit fly and zebrafish. The next grand challenge is one for the mouse.

To build these maps, scientists have relied on a technique known as serial-section electron microscopy. It entails shaving samples of brain tissue into thousands of ultra-thin sections, which are then scanned and imaged by powerful electron microscopes.

Next the images are stacked on top of each other to create 3D digital replicas. For example, that one cubic millimeter of human brain tissue published in 2023 was sliced into more than 5,000 sections, each thinner than one-thousandth of a human hair. 

These endeavors pose monumental technical hurdles for both capturing the images and processing the data.

Until recently, connectomics had been the exclusive purview of a small number of researchers and institutions that can afford multimillion-dollar hardware such as high-throughput electron microscopes with up to 91 beams. 

With growing demand to generate brain maps of many species, one obvious way to push forward connectomics is to recruit more microscopes — particularly single-beam electron microscopes, which are widely available at research institutions around the world.

Their speed largely is a function of the “dwell time” that the beam devotes to each pixel. In the standard approach, specimens are scanned with the same high resolution for all pixels.

“We usually shoot the picture first and then we aim,” said Science Dean Jeff Lichtman, Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Santiago Ramón y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences, a co-author of the new paper. “From the data that you’ve shot, you then look at the particular things that you find interesting. And that’s not the way our eyes work.”

Instead, people focus their attention on key details such as the eyes and mouths of other faces or a fly on the wall instead of the larger white background.

“This is similar to what we are doing,” said Yaron Meirovitch, chief architect of SmartEM and the lead author of the new paper. “The machine learning and microscope are taking a fast image, getting a sense of where are the important parts, then going there and dwelling longer, until it understands what it is seeing.”

The new system uses machine learning to transform single-beam machines into “smart” microscopes.

First, the microscope performs a rapid, low-quality scan of the entire sample. Then a neural network analyzes the image and identifies key features of interest — such as synapses in brain tissue — or error-prone regions. Only these regions are scanned at high resolution and longer dwell times.

Finally, SmartEM uses an algorithm to blend the composite images into a single scan of uniform appearance.

The method demonstrated dramatic improvement in scanning times when tested on tiny brain tissue samples from a worm, mouse, and human.

For example, the SmartEM technique was tested on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm species used four decades ago for the first wiring diagram ever produced. Normally, a single-beam microscope scan of the worm brain and body would require about 1,400 hours, but SmartEM completed the job in only 200.

“The ultimate wiring diagram result is identical,” said Lichtman, “because you’ve only done that slow scanning on the places where it’s not a waste and where you really needed that information.”

That means that mapping brains may move within reach of research institutions that cannot afford multibeam machines with price tags of several million dollars.  “It’s part of the notion of democratizing connectomics,” added Lichtman, “and making the field a little more accessible to people who don’t have the deep pockets.”

In the summer of 1900, the rhythms of campus were transformed as more than 1,200 Cuban educators arrived for a six-week summer school.

“Everywhere there were scores of strange faces — men chatting in groups and smoking black, tobacco-covered cigarettes; women walking to and fro from their recitations, conversing rapidly in Spanish, and innumerable Cubans drinking at the college pump,” recalled a College alumnus who signed on as an English instructor that summer.

“So many were here,” he continued in his essay for a campus publication, “that one of the teachers themselves said: ‘Cambridge es Cuba chiquita.’ Cambridge is a tiny Cuba.”

An exhibition at Pusey Library, on view through Jan. 15, revisits this remarkable convergence with photos, letters, and other rich materials. At a recent panel discussion, hosted by the Harvard University Archives, historians detailed how the Cuban Teachers’ Expedition challenged orthodoxy on both sides of the exchange regarding matters of race, gender, and national pride.

The teachers, men and women ages 16 to 60, traveled to Massachusetts via U.S. Army warship and mugged for a group photo before Memorial Hall. Organized by Harvard in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War as the devastated island was occupied by U.S. forces, the expedition was meant to introduce Cuban teachers to the emerging superpower’s educational practices and cultural values.

“Today we could call this a soft-power initiative — a term that didn’t exist back then,” said moderator Erin Goodman, executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, co-sponsor of the panel.

Lillian Guerra, a professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida, fleshed out the expedition’s backstory and central characters, the subject of a 2017 documentary film. At the heart of her presentation was 1890 Harvard Law School graduate Alexis Everett Frye, installed by the island’s U.S. military governor as superintendent of Cuban public schools.

Frye, who had also earned a Harvard master’s degree in 1897, planned the summer school in partnership with University President Charles W. Eliot. In the summer of 1900, Frye was well on his way to revolutionizing the island’s educational system. By the time his teachers arrived in Cambridge, Cuban parents were enrolling their school-age children at a pace of 2,000 per day.

“Those people were simply thirsty for education and to afford their children this advantage,” Frye told the Boston Herald. “The Cuban parents are making sacrifices that would put some of us Americans to shame.”

As for the teachers, Guerra said, they seized upon the trip as a public relations opportunity. United in their opposition to annexation of their island by the U.S., the teachers kicked off their visit with a Fourth of July celebration on Cambridge Common. A Cuban flag was hoisted alongside the Stars and Stripes. According to news reports, passersby picked up the strains of a patriotic Cuban song.

“The fact that singing the Cuban national anthem and displaying the Cuban flag were illegal under the U.S. occupation of Cuba was not lost on readers of the Cuban press, which received and then proudly recorded all of these participants’ letters to editors and gave multiple live-action photographs,” Guerra said.

The multiracial delegation, representing Frye’s integrated schools, was hosted and welcomed by the Harvard community at a time when prominent U.S. scientists embraced racist claims of Black inferiority, explained Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics.

Cuba, in particular, was pathologized due to its mixed-race population. Meanwhile, de la Fuente continued, a white supremacist political order was forming on the island.

“If you keep that context in mind, this moment becomes even more surprising, even more interesting,” offered de la Fuente, who is also a professor of African and African American Studies and of History. “It’s not only that these 1,200 people came from Cuba … It is also that many of them were visibly of African descent.”

In 1900, Massachusetts was a center of feminist activism, noted Cuban historian Marial Iglesias Utset, a visiting scholar at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, another panel co-sponsor. (The event also received support from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.)

Not only did the Cubans rub elbows with several Radcliffe College graduates that summer, the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs organized a meeting with the delegation’s 675 female teachers.

“The whole idea is that they should get familiar with the idea of a women’s club,” Iglesias Utset said.

For the next several decades, a constellation of teachers who participated in the summer school, including the U.S.-educated Julia Martínez — known as the “Jane Addams of Cuba”— remained active in what Iglesias Utset called “a pan-American network of women’s associations.”

In 1909, they co-founded a women’s club in Havana, the first in Cuba. They kept up correspondence with Alice Paul and other prominent suffragists in the states. Martínez even traveled to Chicago to represent the local club at an international convention.

She lived long enough, Iglesias Utset noted, to see Cuban women win the right to vote in 1934.

Excerpted from “Barbieland” by Tarpley Hitt ’18

King Gillette was a cork salesman and congenital tinkerer, always inventing some knickknack. Toward the end of the century, he had been working on something he hoped would be more permanent — an earnest, prescient, and intermittently hilarious tome of utopian social reform called “The Human Drift.”

The manifesto took aim at the gross inequality of the Gilded Age and laid out a plan that might “dam the golden flood which flows incessantly into the hands of the nonproducers, the interest-takers, the schemers, and the manipulators.” Gillette loathed market competition. The eternal fight for material wealth at the expense of everyone and everything else was, in his view, an “insane idea,” an “element of chaos” that could only lead to one end: “the final control of the commercial field by a few mammoth corporations.” (At one point in the book, he wrote an extended verse monologue in which Satan describes inventing capitalism to keep “alight the fires of hell.”) Gillette wanted to ensure the equitable distribution of goods and resources. But — and perhaps this is where he lost some readers — his solution was to replace all production with one unified stock corporation, run, along with the rest of society, from a gargantuan, perfectly rectangular, ceramic-tiled mega-city to be constructed near and powered by Niagara Falls.

And yet shortly after the book came out, Gillette was struck with another idea: a razor with disposable blades. “It was almost as if Karl Marx had paused between ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and ‘Das Kapital’ to develop a dissolving toothbrush,” Gillette’s biographer remarked. A decade later, after years of honing the manufacturing protocol, Gillette was awarded the first patent for a mass-produced disposable razor. In the process, he inspired a business model perhaps as influential as the device itself. His company realized they could sell the razor at a loss — luring in customers with a low-cost product — and profit instead from the marked-up blades they inevitably came back to buy. Gillette continued his writing career, self-publishing a pamphlet on a plan for universal employment and elaborating on his public corporation in two more books, one cowritten with Upton Sinclair. But in the end, Gillette became better known for his shorter writing. As his possibly apocryphal line went: “Give ’em the razor, sell ’em the blades.”

Gillette’s “razor blade model” spawned many copycats. Consumers still encounter it now, when suspiciously affordable printers beget years of extortion for ink. But the technique did not translate neatly into the world of toys. Toy manufacturers are beholden to seasonality. Men need razors year-round; offices can run out of toner cartridges any old month. But while parents may buy the odd game or doll or gun for birthday parties or the occasional treat, mass toy-buying is concentrated around the holidays. Many toy companies will spend most of the year in the red, only to enter the black in the final quarter. It was a perpetual worry for American toy makers. As early as 1916, one trade association had tried to float the idea of turning Independence Day into the toy-buying equivalent of a Christmas in July. It didn’t take off.

Seasonality remained an issue when Mattel entered the toy business, and by the time Barbie debuted, it had become a subject of great concern. If Mattel went public, as the company planned to the following year, founders Ruth and Elliott Handler would face Wall Street pressure to deliver profits, not just annually or in the months before Christmas, but every quarter. Sponsoring The Mickey Mouse Club had been an early major attempt to solve the problem. Mattel had become the first, and for a time, the only toy advertiser “to use network television 52 weeks a year.”

But Mattel’s investment in year-round advertising had attracted “many imitators,” and not just from toy makers. “Suddenly programming which used to be a TV toyland,” a Mattel memo read, was selling “candy, cookies, toothpaste, cereal, soft drinks, gym shoes, et cetera.” The Handlers worked hard to maintain their lead. But even with TV show tie-ins for every season, Mattel noted, “the majority of buying was still concentrated in the last quarter.”

But Austrian psychologist Ernest Dichter, the Handlers’ marketing consultant, had pointed out that, when it came to Barbie, the “clothes sell the doll.” His idea was to not just pitch kids on buying one or two dolls, but to bill Barbie as a talisman to what Ruth called “the World of Barbie” — not a terminal product that ends with the first sale, but something to collect, nurture, and feed with a constant supply of costumes and accessories, or risk missing the latest small shoe or bitty bag and finding their figurine comically out of date. If this “‘collection’ type sequence is promoted,” Dichter wrote, “continued purchases could be encouraged.” The Handlers embraced Gillette’s razor blade technique — but Mattel did it even better. Barbie wasn’t free, or even, in the grand scheme of toy price points, especially cheap (a $3 doll, adjusted for inflation, would now run about $32). And yet she had the same effect. In lieu of the dead-ends of toy companies past, Mattel continued creating new stars in the Barbie cosmos, offering a collection kids could never complete. Internally, staff would call her: “Our Lady of the Perpetual Income.”

By Barbie’s first birthday, Mattel had already sold some 351,000 Barbies, and “several hundred thousand” outfits, prompting such an order backlog that they ran out of their first edition — the coveted model collectors call the “No. 1 Ponytail” — and started putting out No. 2 (which featured a lighter, plastic stand), then No. 3 (which sported a softened brow). By 1961, when No. 5 came out (featuring a hollower, and thus cheaper, body), Barbie’s wardrobe included three dozen costumes. Her hair came in blonde, brown-black, and “Titian red,” styled with curly bangs or in a Jackie Kennedy−inspired “Bubble Cut.” Barbie had become so popular that she started to get fan mail, as her German inspiration Lilli once had. Soon, Ruth gave Barbie a plus-one. As a press release announced in August: “Mattel Creates Ken, Boyfriend for Barbie.”

Ken followed the Barbie format, debuting with his own collectible accoutrements, selling so successfully that other companies copied the idea. In 1964, three years after Ken’s debut, the rival toy maker Hasbro introduced its own boy doll, whose accessories included a literal long rifle, G.I. Joe. He was billed, not as a doll, but as “an action figure.” Ken was just the beginning. Over the sixties, Barbie’s social network grew to include her friend Midge, who came in four hair colors; Ken’s friend Allan, whose sole selling point was that he fit in Ken’s clothes (slogan: “All of Ken’s Clothes Fit Him”); a younger sister, Skipper, who introduced junior versions of Barbie’s outfits; Skipper’s two friends, Skooter and Ricky; and a cousin named Francie, the first Mattel doll to come as both white and black. Soon, Barbie acquired two new twin siblings, Tutti and Todd; Tutti’s friend Chris; four more friends, Casey, Stacey, Twiggy — based on the distinctly unbusty model of the era — and Christie, the second black doll in the Barbie canon, but the first to be given her own name.

As Barbie’s social scene grew, so did her résumé, adding gigs as a fashion designer, singer, flight attendant, ballerina, and nurse. She became a “career girl” in 1963, and a “drum majorette” the year after. Her professional ascent endowed her with new marketable skills. “Miss Barbie” introduced bendable legs. “Color Magic Barbie” could use a special solution to dye her hair. And “Talking Barbie” gave the doll, suffering in silence for nine years, her first words. (Among them: “I love being a fashion model.”) Ken evolved in his own way too. The first iteration, which had three-dimensional hair, turned out to suffer from male pattern baldness when washed. Mattel secured his successor’s hairline by coloring it onto his scalp.

Barbie and friends had a range of transit to choose from, including a Ken’s red hot-rod, Barbie’s lilac convertible, a lime-green speedboat, and a blue “sports plane.” At night, they could curl up in the first Barbie Dreamhouse, initially a cardboard single-story home, in a ranch style with red plaid drapes and “mid-century wood grains.” Barbie enthusiasts could join the “Official National Barbie Fan Club,” read Barbie short stories in the official Barbie magazine, or dive into longer Barbie novels via several Random House Barbie books. Barbie herself was a reader. One doll came with three knuckle-sized manuals: “How to Travel,” “How to Get a Raise,” and “How to Lose Weight.” The last one advised: “Don’t eat!”

Barbie’s success was contagious. “She was a merchandiser’s dream,” an Esquire article noted, “a mixture of precocious sex and instant affluence.” Mattel licensed the Barbie name liberally and devised their own products too. The market flooded with Barbie-adjacent goods: Barbie bubble baths, Barbie suitcases, Barbie bedspreads, Barbie diaries, Barbie record players, Barbie records, Barbie beds, Barbie cars, Barbie friendship rings, Barbie lockets, Barbie makeup, Barbie books, Barbie comic books, Barbie puzzles, Barbie greeting cards, Barbie thermoses, Barbie lockets, Barbie pencil cases, Barbie lunch boxes, Barbie tea sets, Barbie clothing patterns, Barbie umbrellas, and, to bring it full circle, Barbie paper dolls. In a speech on merchandising, Ruth announced: “The name Barbie is magic.”

As Barbie expanded, so did Mattel. The company went public in 1960, the year after her debut, with a small offering of over-the-counter stocks — shares that were “quickly spoken for.” By early 1962, Mattel was raking in nearly $50 million in annual sales, a record they were “well ahead of” before Christmas. The next August, Mattel debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1964, Mattel opened new factories in Los Angeles, Canada, and New Jersey. They set up a sales office in Geneva, Switzerland, and a new headquarters building in Hawthorne, California.

The company was growing fast and unchecked, but each new spurt seemed to only multiply sales. “We were gutsy people,” Ruth said. “We were young and full of fire and cocky and everything worked.” Mattel had hit on a formula, The Wall Street Journal drooled: “once a toy craze has been created, ride it for all it’s worth with an endless proliferation of new items tied to the original product.” Mattel expanded its product line by some 50 percent in 1965 —then “the biggest increase in the company’s history.” That year, sales topped $100 million. They were making so much money, they seemed to barely know what to do with it. At one point, just to keep their retailers in good spirits, the company spent two years and “well into six figures” producing an all-male original musical called “Mattelzapoppin’” — then toured it to some 8,000 toy buyers across 27 different cities. One Christmas, the R&D Department splurged on thousands of frozen turkeys — one for every employee. When the staff got a little buzzed at the office party, they began “clobbering each other with the rock-hard birds.”

The mood at Mattel was one of “near euphoria,” a reporter observed, “a feeling that Mattel had the Midas touch.” It seemed the Handlers could do no wrong. “Mattel is energetic, deep-thinking, and far and away above the field in product development,” a Chicago toy buyer told the Journal. “I simply can’t see its downfall.”

Copyright © 2025 by Tarpley Hitt. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers / Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Tucked behind Hollis Hall in a quiet part of Harvard Yard, students are digging into the ground. It’s the 20th year of the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project, and the 10th dig. The project, which explores the lives of the students who attended Harvard College in the 17th century, and its associated classes, Archaeology of Harvard Yard I and II, are devoted to understanding the history of Harvard from the ground up.

This year, the project zeroed in on a section of earth near Holden Chapel. Students hoped to find artifacts from the old Harvard Hall, which was built nearby in 1677 and burned down in the winter of 1764, along with John Harvard’s bequeathed library of books.

The Harvard Hall fire could represent a snapshot that holds clues of Harvard’s transition from a religious institution to one that incorporated more scientific study. The burned hall contained an array of spaces and items: a kitchen, student chambers, study rooms, library, lecture halls, and scientific equipment. This diversity adds to the site’s archaeological potential.

“We think of college buildings now as, you know, either dormitory or administrative. This was a building that was everything,” said Diana Loren, co-lecturer of the course and deputy director for curatorial affairs and senior curator at the Peabody Museum.

“It’s a really unique experience for students excavating in the Yard. If you think about it, this is their home for four years. They live in the Yard, they live in the Houses, and the Yard is the landscape they become familiar with,” she added.

At the dig site, students used dustpans, trowels, buckets, and sifting screens. Periodically, an object would reveal itself: animal bones, pieces of pottery, tobacco pipe stems, a metal piece of a book cover, lead printing type. The students wipe off the dirt, hold the object up to the daylight, and pass off their find to a classmate.

In the companion spring semester class, students perform detailed analyses of the excavated materials, putting the recovered items into historical context before they are accessioned into the Peabody Museum collection.

“It’s important for students to have this experience to understand the potential for stewarding cultural resources in their community,” said Patricia Capone, co-lecturer in the class and a curator of North America collections at the Peabody Museum.

Digging Veritas, an exhibit dedicated to the project’s history over the years, is on view at the Peabody Museum.

Harvard University on Thursday announced the creation of the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics at Harvard, a new initiative focused on strengthening fundamental physics research and connecting physicists across the United States. 

Made possible by a $20 million gift from the Leinweber Foundation, the institute, housed in the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Division of Science, will be a hub uniting researchers across the University with those at other leading research institutions to explore the theoretical principles of the physical world.

“Expanding opportunities for collaboration accelerates scientific progress,” said Harvard President Alan Garber. “This new institute will strengthen relationships among researchers within our community and across institutions who are working to deepen our understanding of the universe. We eagerly anticipate their discoveries, and we are grateful to Larry Leinweber and the Leinweber Foundation for their support of fundamental research.”

A growing network

With the creation of the Leinweber Institute, Harvard joins a growing national network of theoretical physics centers supported by a total investment of more than $150 million by the Leinweber Foundation. The institute will collaborate closely with peers working at California Institute of Technology; the Institute of Advanced Study; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Chicago; and the University of Michigan, with each site contributing complementary strengths and shared research fellowship programs.

Underpinning the effort is the idea that theoretical physics progresses most rapidly when scholars from diverse specialties share ideas, tools, and perspectives. The institute’s programs will support scholar visits, thematic workshops, and collaborative projects, creating new opportunities for partnership between Harvard theorists and visitors from around the world.

“The foundation’s vision is to build a national ecosystem to support theoretical physics — a network of institutes that support one another, challenge one another, and accelerate discovery in ways no single institution could do alone,” said Larry Leinweber, founder and president of the Leinweber Foundation. “Harvard is an essential part of that vision. Its history of excellence and its culture of rigorous, creative inquiry make it an ideal participant in the vision. I am especially proud that this gift will help launch and sustain young scientists whose ideas will shape the future of the field.”

Investing in the future

The gift also establishes the Leinweber Physics Fellows program to support emerging scholars in theoretical physics. A postdoctoral fellowship will enable fellows to pursue independent research under the general supervision of Harvard faculty affiliated with the institute, while faculty and graduate student research will be aided by awards for institute faculty and fellowships to Ph.D. students, attracting top scientists to the field and building a pipeline for innovation and discovery. 

“Investing in science is an investment in people — students, postdocs, and faculty whose curiosity and dedication drive every breakthrough,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS. “This remarkable gift strengthens our ability to support scholars at every stage of their careers and gives them the resources and freedom to pursue bold ideas. We are deeply thankful to the Leinweber Foundation.”

The Leinweber Institute’s work will span high energy theory — including particle physics, string theory, and quantum gravity — cosmology, and aspects of condensed matter theory that illuminate basic laws of nature. The institute will also support theoretical studies that propose or analyze novel experiments or observations aimed at revealing new facets of fundamental physics.

The institute will be led by incoming faculty director Matthew Reece, a professor of physics in the FAS whose work in particle physics, cosmology, and quantum gravity seeks to uncover physics beyond the Standard Model by connecting fundamental theory to observations and experiments. He has developed new ideas about dark matter, the early universe, and the unexplained features of the Standard Model, and has worked extensively on how data from the Large Hadron Collider, future colliders, and astrophysical measurements can test these ideas. 

“It is a great privilege to help launch an institute dedicated to fundamental theoretical physics, at a time when the central questions of the field are as profound and challenging as ever,” said Reece. “The Leinweber Foundation’s generous gift will sustain and strengthen Harvard’s long tradition of training and mentoring great theoretical physicists. I’m delighted by this new opportunity to bring some of the world’s best young theorists to Harvard and to give them complete freedom to pursue their scientific interests. I’m excited to see the new ideas and discoveries that will emerge from collaborations fostered within our institute and with the broader Leinweber Network.”

Building on strength

Harvard’s theoretical physicists have long been central to many of the field’s most influential advances. Drawing on close collaborations across physics, astronomy, mathematics, and engineering, researchers at Harvard have helped deepen our understanding of the most fundamental laws of nature — ranging from particle physics and cosmology to quantum field theory and gravity — and continue to shape the direction of theoretical research worldwide.

“Harvard’s Department of Physics has pushed the boundaries of knowledge in many directions over many decades,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor and Physics Department chair. “The generous gift from the Leinweber Foundation enables us not only to enhance our efforts in undertaking theoretical research in fundamental physics at a critical time when there are tremendous financial pressures, but also to better connect us with a network of peer institutions to promote a young cohort of students and researchers, which will impact the future of the field for decades to come.”

At crunch time at the end of fall semester, Easton Singer ’26 had many things piled on his plate: an orchestra performance, final exams and projects, a senior thesis, and applications for graduate school. Yet he put all that aside to spend a precious Saturday in the middle of reading period voluntarily taking yet another exam — one that had nothing to do with his classes nor any impact on his transcript.

The Kirkland House resident was among more than 50 Harvard students who participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the premier math contest for college undergraduates in North America. Now in its 86th year, the Putnam has a storied history, and many top finishers have gone on to become prominent mathematicians, professors, and winners of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.

“I take it just because it’s fun,” said Singer, a math concentrator with a secondary in computer science. “It’s the best chance to do math problems. I get the sense that other people also do it not because of a particular competitive drive, but more because it’s fun and because their friends are also doing it.”

Fun? The Putnam exam is notoriously difficult even for people who normally consider themselves pretty good at math. The six-hour exam has 12 questions worth 10 points each. A perfect score of 120 is a rare feat achieved only five times since the competition began in 1938. Last year, only five students in the world scored 80 or higher. Only 45 people — barely 1 percent of the competitors — managed to get even half the available points.

Among nearly 4,000 students in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico who took the exam in 2024, the average score was only 8; half of the test-takers scored 2 or lower. Results for the 2025 test will be released around February.

Contrary to common assumptions, the test does not require much higher-level math, although some can be helpful. But it does test problem-solving ability, time management, and mathematical intuition for shortcuts that can quickly arrive at short proofs — and bypass more laborious, time-consuming routes to the same answers.

“It just feels good when you solve the hard problems,” said Andrew Gu ’26, who has twice finished among the Putnam’s top 16. “In some problems, discovering the little trick that they put in there just feels magical.”

Historically, Harvard has the most first-place and top-five finishes in the team competition. In recent years, however, MIT has dominated the Putnam. Last year, our crosstown rivals claimed 69 out of the top 100 finishers and the entire top five (who are honored as “Putnam Fellows”) for the fifth year in a row.

In the 2024 team competition (the sum of the ranks of the top three finishers at each school), Harvard finished second with a team composed of Gu, Kevin Cong ’26, and Eric Shen ’25. Harvard last won in 2018 and has placed second behind MIT in four of the last five years.

“It’s worthy to note how well Harvard does despite the lack of departmental-organized practices and training, especially against large universities that hold Putnam workshops and classes,” said Cindy Jimenez, the undergraduate program coordinator for the Department of Mathematics.

MIT places greater emphasis on the Putnam and offers a preparation class for credit. In contrast, the Harvard Department of Mathematics has made a deliberate choice not to push the exam or organize any official prep sessions. Aside from advertising the event and handling registration, the department hosts only one event related to the competition — a “Putnam Postmortem” to review the questions on the last exam led by Professor Noam Elkies, who was a three-time Putnam Fellow as an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1980s.

“I think it makes sense to de-emphasize competition mathematics,” explained Elkies. “As one progresses from grade-school math to college and beyond, one moves further from the domain of competition problems that are guaranteed to be solvable within an hour or so under the constraints of a closed-book exam.”

The exam is held in early December, typically a busy time for Harvard students during reading period at the end of the semester.

Cong has never missed a Putnam.

“It’s sort of a fun hobby,” he said. “It’s also somewhat nostalgic, having done that stuff in the past.”

Cong became interested in math as a child after discovering some math texts and series of books on math topics called “The Art of Problem Solving.” He found he was good at math contests, won numerous competition medals, earned invitations to national training camps, and a spot on the 2022 USA team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a gold medal, alongside Gu, who won silver.

The tournament chops mastered in high school continue to serve him well. Like most of his Harvard friends, Cong doesn’t do much preparation for the Putnam. This year his only departure from his normal routine was going to bed and rising a bit earlier than normal before the test.

“Not many people here, as far as I know, do it seriously,” said Cong, a math and statistics double concentrator who finished in the top 25 of the 2024 Putnam. “I think most people just view it as a cool competition that they can spend six hours of their Saturday doing once a year. They’re really cute problems.”

Likewise, Singer did not do much preparation. But he too is steeped in the subject: He did math competitions during high school, serves as a course assistant for classes such as Math 55, and co-authored a paper titled “Factorization in Additive Monoids of Evaluation Polynomial Semirings.”

“I just woke up early enough so I could be awake by the time I got here,” he said after the exam. “Also, so I could eat breakfast, which I don’t normally do.”

“I did not successfully eat breakfast!” Cong chimed in with a laugh.

After the exam, the Science Center hall buzzed with energy and bursts of laughter as students gathered to compare answers. Some wrote solutions on the chalkboard. There were a few palms slapped to foreheads when people realized solutions they had missed.

“It was really cool seeing other methods people use, because there are so many different ways to get the same answer,” said Matteo Salloum ’28. “It’s very illuminating, because math is very collaborative. It’s very interesting to see the ways different ways people take to get the solution.”

Singer — who was taking the exam for the fourth and final time as a Harvard student — felt content. “I’m happy, because I think solved six in total,” he said, expressing hope that he had managed to achieve his best score yet.

Then he looked at the clock.

“I should not be here right now,” he said. “In fact, I need to go to rehearsal — Harvard College Opera. I’m playing the piano.”

In the eyes of some, an end to the Russia-Ukraine war may be closer than ever. Officials from the U.S., Ukraine, and the European Union met this week in Berlin and came away from the talks sounding optimistic about a reaching a deal, in part because Ukraine has reportedly backed off its long-held ambition to join NATO, a concession Russia has long sought. In exchange, Ukraine would receive what’s described as a “NATO-like” security guarantee, though specifics remain vague and Russia, absent from the talks, has not signaled its approval. 

Ivo Daalder does not expect a breakthrough any time soon.

In this edited interview, Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013 and is now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, outlines key tensions between Russia and Ukraine and explains why he’s skeptical that these latest negotiations, however productive, will culminate in a ceasefire in the coming weeks.

The president of the European Commission praised the talks as cooperative, saying that the parties had made “real and concrete progress.” Do you see signs of real progress on a deal?

I see signs of closer alignment between Ukraine and Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other hand. But I don’t see that as progress toward ending the war, because the fundamental problem isn’t an alignment between Ukraine, Europe, and the United States; it’s an alignment between Ukraine and Russia. And that alignment is as far away today as it has been in any time in the last four years. So yes, there’s progress on one side, which is important, but there’s no progress getting to an end of the war.

Russia and Ukraine have fundamentally opposite goals. Russia wants to subjugate Ukraine — control its future from Moscow. It wants to deny its sovereignty and independence, as well as take chunks of its territory. And Ukraine wants to be a sovereign country that has control over all its territory. That’s what this war is about. The war is not about whether the United States and Europe and Ukraine can agree. The war is about who decides the future of sovereignty of Ukraine — is it Ukraine or Russia? And that fundamental conflict is as big today as the day the war started.

What do you make of President Zelensky’s willingness to set aside Ukraine’s hope to join NATO, at least for now, in exchange for a security guarantee?

I think it’s a good-faith effort, but he also realizes two things: that making concessions to the United States isn’t about getting to a peace deal, it’s about demonstrating to the United States that Ukraine is not at fault. That’s No. 1. No. 2, saying that Ukraine is not going to be joining NATO anytime soon, is just reality because the United States is opposed. The decision on whether Ukraine joins NATO is not Moscow’s — but it’s not Kyiv’s either. It is the decision of NATO’s 32 member states, one of whom happens to be the United States.

Control of the Donbas region remains a sticking point. Do you see any scenario in which Ukraine or Russia might compromise on this point?

Not at present. Sometime in the future, when one or both sides have decided that a negotiated peace that includes some territorial concessions is preferable to continuation of the war, you might get there. But today, you’re nowhere near that.

What’s the best potential outcome for Ukraine? What’s realistic?

The best outcome is a ceasefire along the current line that is monitored by international capabilities, whether that’s the U.S. or others, with a commitment from the United States and Europe to back Ukraine’s sovereignty up to and through the ceasefire line, and that commitment made conditional on Ukraine not trying to change the status quo through the use of force. So that’s the best they can hope.

How likely is that?

Ukraine is prepared to do that today, so it really depends on Russia. The question is, at what point does the cost of continuing the conflict to Russia outweigh the benefit of stopping? Today, they believe they’re winning and are economically still capable of producing the equipment and paying for the manpower to continue the fight. It’s only when you run out of people or the cost of getting people to the front is too high and/or imports to equip their forces become too high. The likelihood of that happening sometime in 2026 or early 2027 is high if the United States continues to put pressure on the oil sector, which has had a significant impact on Russian revenue streams. The goal for Ukraine and the Europeans is to convince President Trump that this entire problem is made and continued by Russia, and that the only way to get the solution he wants is to pressure Russia. That’s the goal. It’s not to get to a peace agreement because they don’t believe there’s a peace agreement today. Down the line, yes, but not now.

Stroke, dementia, and late-life depression are more preventable than you might think — and they all share a set of common risk factors that can be addressed through lifestyle change. It’s a hopeful message, says Sanjula Singh, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), whose research showed that a higher result on the Brain Care Score was associated with a lower risk for all three conditions. Singh and her postdoctoral fellow Evy Martina Reinders helped us develop the following quiz based on their research into the modifiable lifestyle factors and 12 metrics tracked in the Brain Care Score that was developed at Harvard and MGH.

Step 1 of 7

14%

1. What share of dementia cases are attributable to modifiable risk factors?

10%

20%

30%

45%

2. Which risk factor most significantly increases the risk of brain disease?

Kidney disease

High cholesterol

High blood pressure

Insomnia

3. Which metric is NOT considered one of the risk factors for age-related brain disease?

Hearing loss

Blood sugar

Bone density

Cholesterol

4. Which of the following dietary habits are associated with better brain health?

Four to five servings of fruits and vegetables per day

Two servings of lean protein per day

Three or more servings of whole grains per day

All of the above

5. Why do many people educated about the benefits of healthy behaviors say they fail to engage in them?

Difficulty maintaining healthy habits over a long period of time

Financial problems

Being too busy

All of the above

6. How much physical activity should you minimally engage in weekly, according to the CDC?

At least 200 minutes of light physical activity

At least 60 minutes of moderate physical activity or at least 30 minutes per week of vigorous physical activity

At least 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity

At least 100 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity

7. Improving your brain score by five points reduces the risk of dementia, stroke, and late-life depression by how much?

13%

20%

27%

38%

Δ

As 30 undergraduate students gathered in the Smith Campus Center’s Riverview Commons, the goal was simple: Come up with a new interfaith event for the spring semester.

The group didn’t have to limit itself to one. Getzel Davis, inaugural director of Interfaith Engagement at Harvard, encouraged everyone to break off into pairs. Within two minutes, students had spread across the room, workshopping more than a half-dozen ideas on big sheets of paper that they stuck to the walls.

The group represented the inaugural class of First-Year Religious, Spiritual and Ethical Life Fellowship. They had spent a semester together, learning about one another’s religious and spiritual backgrounds, talking through one another’s biggest challenges on campus, and discussing the hopes they brought to campus.

Now, Davis was asking them to pay it forward. How could they bring more students into meaningful discussions? How could they forge closer connections with one another?

In its first semester, the Presidential Initiative on Interfaith Engagement has pushed these questions to the center of campus discourse. Led by Davis, with support from multifaith engagement fellow Abby McElroy, the program has brought more events, resources, and support for students looking to engage in religious, spiritual, and ethical questions in curious, nonjudgmental environments.

In addition to the First-Year Fellowship, the presidential initiative put on a wide variety of activities that have attracted hundreds of attendees — including twice-monthly interfaith dinners, expert panels, and community service, as well as programs like Frames of Connection and Pluralism Passports that began in previous years.

The increase in activities and resources has been dramatic, said Deexa Kachhia, a Hindu junior in Winthrop House, who organized her first interfaith event last year after completing a fellowship through the nonprofit Interfaith America.

While the event ran successfully, with help from McElroy, Kachhia recalled struggling through logistical hurdles and worrying she wouldn’t be able to reserve an event space.

This semester, when Kachhia met with McElroy and Davis, who had recently been appointed director, they told her not to worry about all the logistics. That was their job, they said. She just had to bring them ideas.

“It was very heartwarming to realize, ‘Wow, there are so many people who are really behind this, and they want to make it happen in the same way that I do.’” Kachhia said. “I didn’t realize how much of a difference having this official support from the University made until it existed.”

This semester, Kacchia helped organize “To Be Continued” chats, small gatherings of students to continue the kind of vulnerable conversations that began at interfaith dinners and assisted with McElroy’s Frames of Connection project.

For Sahar Khan, a one-year L.L.M, student at the Law School who comes from an Islamic Sufistic heritage, the initiative has been an “important and meaningful way to remind ourselves of our common humanity.”

A self-described “third culture kid” who grew up in the Arab Gulf with exposure to multiple cultures, she enjoys that the program isn’t just about theistic faiths but also atheistic belief systems, like humanism.

Over her first semester, she met one of her best friends on campus through the program and had a host of other interesting conversations. She recalled speaking with humanist chaplain Greg Epstein about minority legal rights.

“It’s so beautiful to have these kinds of interactions,” she said. “Because I knew nothing about humanism before coming to Harvard. I started talking to him, and I saw so many similarities.”

David Arbeláez, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in sociology and social policy, also found unexpected common ground through Interfaith Engagement programming. Raised Catholic, Arbeláez entered Harvard agnostic and critical of organized religion.

When he went to the first interfaith dinner of the semester, he thought it might be a “trainwreck of a situation,” he said. His impressions quickly shifted.

“Twenty or 30 minutes into it, I realized that it wasn’t going to be what I expected it to be,” he said. The discussion of the night centered around people’s experiences abandoning religions or approaching it for the first time. He was surprised to hear that many religious students struggled with the same problems he had.

After arriving full of skepticism for the first interfaith dinner, he decided to come to the second one, too — and even volunteered to lead a small group discussion.

In a polarized time when some students are hesitant to publicly disagree with one another, he said the dinners allow students to share their thoughts in a nonjudgmental environment —without ironing over differences.

Davis is surprised and pleased at how students and communities across campus embraced Interfaith Engagement. He was expecting 12 or 15 students to sign up for the first-year fellowship, and they ended up enrolling 30.

He thought they’d get some push-back from student leaders about new religious accessibility training, but instead were met with warm thank-you’s. Due to interest, interfaith dinners went from once to twice a month.

He says that for the fall semester, the goal was for him and McElroy to run much of the programming before letting students take the lead in the spring.

“That’s really exciting for me,” Davis said. “I always believe that students know what students want best.” In some ways, he said, they were approaching the first semester as a lot of experiments, and they would see what stuck.

On a Wednesday night in the Smith Center, the experimentation continued. With students’ event ideas on big sheets of paper across the room, they received feedback on their ideas — and input on ways to fund them — from Nekesa Straker, senior assistant dean of residential life and first-year students; Alta Mauro, associate dean of culture & community; and Meagan von Rohr, Harvard Foundation director.

“Endeavoring to put on a program for your peers in your first year is a big deal,” said Mauro. “It’s a big lift. It takes a lot of vulnerability and effort.”

The students reflected on that vulnerability and effort at the end of the night, with each sharing a memory from the semester.

Azaria Sussman shared a story about how, growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community on Long Island, people told him that he might have to hide his religious identity on campus because it might be dangerous. He was surprised to hear that another student, a practicing Muslim, was told the same thing by her family.

Though he said that he felt safe on campus, having that shared experience was powerful.

“It’s a small example of how lots of faith communities on campus—especially on a campus that’s secular — have lots in common,” he said. “I think that is a big highlight of my experience.”

In the spring, he’ll be running an interfaith event with that student.

Patients with depression are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and a new study suggests that stress may help explain why.

Research from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham indicates that the increased risk is driven by stress-related brain activity, nervous system dysregulation, and chronic inflammation. Investigators also found that patients with both depression and anxiety were at even higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those diagnosed with just one condition. The findings, published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, suggest that stress reduction and related therapeutic targets hold potential for cardiovascular disease prevention.

The researchers analyzed data from 85,551 participants in the Mass General Brigham Biobank. Of these, 14,934 presented with both depression and anxiety, 15,819 had either depression or anxiety, and 54,798 had neither condition. Participants were followed for a median of 3.4 years, during which 3,078 experienced major adverse cardiovascular events such as heart attack, heart failure, or stroke.

“In line with previous reports, we found that both depression and anxiety were linked to a higher risk of heart attack or stroke,” said senior author Ahmed Tawakol, director of Nuclear Cardiology at the Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Notably people who were diagnosed with both depression and anxiety faced roughly a 32 percent higher risk compared with those diagnosed with only one condition. Importantly, these associations remained strong even after accounting for differences in lifestyle behaviors, socioeconomic factors, and traditional risk factors such as smoking, diabetes, and hypertension.”

To investigate whether depression and anxiety might be linked to heart health via systemic stress responses, the researchers also analyzed advanced brain imaging data and biomarkers of nervous system activity and inflammation for a subset of the participants. They found that people diagnosed with depression or anxiety showed increased activity in the amygdala (a brain region associated with stress), reduced heart rate variability (a sign of an overactive nervous system), and higher blood levels of CRP (a protein linked to inflammation).

“Together, these changes seem to form a biological chain linking emotional stress to cardiovascular risk,” said study first author Shady Abohashem, who is head of Cardiac PET/CT Imaging Trials, an investigator at the Cardiovascular Imaging Center of MGH, and an instructor in radiology at HMS. “When the brain’s stress circuits are overactive, they can chronically trigger the body’s ‘fight or flight’ system, leading to increased heart rate, blood pressure, and chronic inflammation. Over time, these changes can damage blood vessels and accelerate heart disease. This reinforces that protecting heart health isn’t just about diet or exercise, it’s also about emotional health.

“For clinicians, it’s a reminder to view mental health as an integral part of cardiovascular risk assessment. For patients, it’s encouragement that addressing chronic stress, anxiety, or depression is not just a mental health priority, it’s also a heart health priority,” added Abohashem.

Because the study was based on observational data, more research is needed to determine whether depression and anxiety are causing cardiovascular disease or whether they are simply associated. The researchers are now studying whether interventions such as stress-reduction therapies, anti-inflammatory medications, or lifestyle changes can help normalize these brain and immune markers and, in turn, lower heart risk.

The research described in this article was supported in part by the American Heart Association and National Institutes of Health.

It began with some intriguing scientific discoveries.

A team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard began to suspect nearly two decades ago that so-called “emerging diseases” such as Ebola and Lassa virus were not quite what they seemed. Rather than being newly evolved contagions, mounting evidence suggested they were ancient pathogens that had circulated among humans for thousands of years. What really was emerging was accurate diagnosis: Medicine only recently had acquired the ability to detect these diseases and track the toll of outbreaks.

Those revelations planted the seed for Sentinel, a disease surveillance network. Last month, the MacArthur Foundation announced a $100 million award to Sentinel — funding that arrived just as the organization faced the possibility of closure after severe cuts in federal support.

“Work in pandemic preparedness and global health is having an existential crisis right now with the drop in federal funding,” said Sentinel co-founder Pardis Sabeti, professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “We were really on a precarious ledge. So this has completely changed everything.”

Origins

As a child, Sabeti loved mathematical puzzles. Tutored at home by her older sister after her family fled Iran and resettled in Florida when she was 2 years old, she began learning math as a preschooler. By the time she began school she already knew the material so she concentrated on doing it faster than everyone else — a drive for excellence that never ceased. As an undergraduate at MIT, her adviser Eric Lander helped her see genetics as the mathematical code of life. She won a Rhodes scholarship, earned a Ph.D. from Oxford, and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School.

In the early years of the millennium, she developed techniques to search for signals of natural selection in newly created databases of human genomes from populations around the world. Her strongest finding showed the Yoruba people of Nigeria had a powerful signature of selection in a gene called LARGE. She later learned that this gene is targeted by the Lassa virus, which was first identified in Nigeria. This discovery suggested that the Lassa fever virus had been circulating for thousands of years and people in the affected areas had undergone natural selection to resist it.

Seeking advice, she turned to Christian Happi, a colleague who had expertise in the same region.

Keeping a promise

Growing up in Africa, Happi suffered several bouts of malaria, and one of the worst occurred when he was about 8 years old. His mother carried him to a local hospital, where he was treated with an injection of quinine. On the way home, they rested beneath a shade tree and Happi asked his mother why nobody had invented a cure for the disease. “The next thing I told her was, ‘Mom, when I grow up, I will find a cure for it,’” he recalled. “That was really what drove me.”

Happi earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon and a Ph.D. from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. In 2000, he came to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of tropical disease expert Professor Dyann Wirth in the School of Public Health. He became a research fellow in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and, after returning to Nigeria, a visiting scientist. He had studied malaria in the Edo State of Nigeria — which also happened to be the hotspot for Lassa fever.

When Sabeti told him of her surprising findings, they began to discuss how to conduct further investigations.

“Before we knew it, we were setting up a field site in rural Nigeria to study the Lassa fever virus,” said Sabeti. “He just moves like the wind. He doesn’t let an opportunity pass him by.”

Ancient diseases, modern methods

They were confronted with stark realities in the field. Happi, visiting a rural hospital at the epicenter of the Lassa fever outbreak, was shocked to find no diagnostic infrastructure in place. A hospital worker showed him a fridge full of vials and explained that they diagnosed Lassa fever by the color of the plasma samples.

The team designed a molecular diagnostic test for the Lassa virus, deployed it in the same rural community in 2008, and trained local personnel to administer the tests.

“The introduction of that test alone actually changed the paradigm in that community,” said Happi. “Because they were able to diagnose people earlier, they were able to save more lives. The fatality rate dropped from 90 percent to 23.6 percent.”

In 2013, Happi and Sabeti won a grant from the World Bank to establish the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease at Redeemer’s University in Ede, Nigeria. Not long after, the Ebola epidemic hit.

In Sierra Leone, the team diagnosed the first Ebola case in the country. Samples were rushed to the Broad Institute, where researchers sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes that helped reveal how the disease was spreading. In Nigeria, Happi diagnosed the first case and led the national response. Nigeria mobilized an aggressive public health campaign that included extensive contact tracing, more than 18,000 face-to-face visits, and broad community outreach.

“Nigeria successfully contained Ebola,” said Happi. “In 62 days, it was over and there were only 20 cases and eight deaths, and this is in a country of 230 million people. That was the first demonstration that if you deploy a system like Sentinel it works. And we repeated this over and over.”

Based on these lessons, Sabeti and Happi sought to establish a permanent system for disease surveillance and response. They envisioned a network of experts and diagnostic and genetic sequencing centers in West Africa that could quickly detect infectious diseases before they spread into larger outbreaks or full-blown pandemics.

In early 2020, the team led by Happi and Sabeti launched Sentinel — just as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. Over the last five years, Sentinel has trained about 3,000 health personnel from nearly every African country, administered more than 300,000 diagnostic tests, and sequenced some 17,800 viral samples. The data collected has helped guide public health responses and contain local epidemics in West and Central Africa.

Sentinel developed a battery of diagnostic tools such as inexpensive paper strips that could detect specific viruses in the field and hospital lab tests that could screen for hundreds of diseases simultaneously. It also developed a cloud-based information platform that allowed health workers to share information and coordinate response in real time.

A new threat has come not from pathogens, but politics. The organization lost millions of dollars in grants from government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Sentinel cut staff and faced an uncertain future. 

“It was literally, will we exist or will we not exist?” said Sabeti. “We lost much of our federal funding and the outlook for new federal funding was bleak. We were facing an existential cliff.”

Then came a lifesaving injection. In November, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded $100 million to the Sentinel project — allowing the organization to not only survive but broaden its work. Already established in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, it will now expand into Senegal, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“If you look at the magnitude of the work that should be done, you realize that $100 million, at the end of the day, is not a lot of money,” said Happi. “But it can be used to steer things in the right direction by using this work to demonstrate what is possible on the continent and that can actually spark a bigger movement.”

Distinct psychiatric disorders have more in common biologically than previously believed, according to the largest and most detailed analysis to date of how genes influence mental illness.

The study, led by researchers at University of Colorado Boulder, Harvard, and Mass General Brigham, examined DNA data from more than 1 million individuals diagnosed with at least one of 14 psychiatric disorders and 5 million with no diagnoses.

The study’s findings were published Dec. 10 in the journal Nature.

Working in collaboration with the international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Cross-Disorder Working Group, investigators discovered that five underlying “genomic factors” involving 238 genetic variants made up the majority of the genetic differences between those with a particular disorder and those without it.

The five categories

The disorders are grouped into five categories, each with a shared genetic architecture, including: disorders with compulsive features such as anorexia nervosa, Tourette disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); “internalizing conditions” including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder; substance use disorders; and neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Notably, the paper groups bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in a fifth category, reporting that 70 percent of the genetic signal associated with schizophrenia is also associated with bipolar disorder. The field of psychology has historically viewed bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as very different, and clinicians typically will not diagnose an individual with both.

“Genetically, we saw that they are more similar than they are unique,” said corresponding author Andrew Grotzinger, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder.

The findings also provide key insight into the biological pathways and gene expression in brain cell types that may underly certain conditions, said co-corresponding author Jordan Smoller, director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Genomic Medicine and director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry in the Mass General Brigham Department of Psychiatry.

“These findings provide valuable clues for advancing our understanding and treatment of mental illness with greater precision,” added Smoller, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Pinpointing biological pathways

The paper points to specific biological pathways that may underlie the individual groupings.

For instance, genes that influence excitatory neurons, which are involved in transmitting signals across other neurons, tend to be over-expressed in both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the research suggests.

In internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety, variants in genes that control non-neuronal cells called oligodendrocytes were common. These specialized cells help maintain and protect the brain’s wiring infrastructure.

The findings suggest that some shared genetic factors play a role very early in brain development during the fetal stages of life, while others could have a greater influence later in adult life. This insight could help to create a more biological way of understanding psychiatric conditions and lead to new treatment strategies, the authors said.

According to one 2018 review, more than half of people diagnosed with one psychiatric disorder will be diagnosed with a second or third in their lifetime. About 41 percent will meet the criteria for four or more.

“Right now, we diagnose psychiatric disorders based on what we see in the room, and many people will be diagnosed with multiple disorders. That can be hard to treat and disheartening for patients,” said Grotzinger. “This work provides the best evidence yet that there may be things that we are currently giving different names to that are actually driven by the same biological processes.”

Grotzinger said it is too early to begin combining diagnoses based on the findings. But as researchers work to update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guiding handbook for the field of psychology, he hopes the new study will be considered.

“By identifying what is shared across these disorders, we can hopefully come up with strategies to target them in a different way that doesn’t require four separate pills or four separate psychotherapy interventions.”

This work was made possible by the contributions of the many investigators who comprise these working groups and the numerous grants from governmental and charitable bodies, as well as philanthropic donation. Additional details can be found in the paper’s acknowledgements section.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” — with its wide vocal range spanning an octave and a half and numerous leaps between notes — famously presents a challenge for singers.

Audience expectations around the song only add to the pressure, according to sophomore Bekuochukwu Uzo-Menkiti — one of several students performing the national anthem this year at Harvard games as part of a new collaboration between the Office for the Arts and Athletics.

“The national anthem is something that you’ve heard at the Super Bowl. You’ve heard the Whitney Houston version, you’ve heard the Lady Gaga version. It’s hard for people to hear someone sing the national anthem and not expect some kind of personal flair,” Uzo-Menkiti said.

If that weren’t daunting enough, knowing how many people feel a deep personal connection to the song can raise the stakes even more, said senior Damla Yesil, who performed last month at a men’s ice hockey game. Reflecting on her parents’ experience as immigrants from Bulgaria and Turkey helped her prepare.

“Once I got up there, all the nerves went away because I was like, ‘Oh, this is not about me,’” said Yesil, a neuroscience concentrator from New York with a secondary in global health and health policy enrolled in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program. “I have to make people feel like America is their home. It’s a special moment for people.”

For junior Zeb Jewell-Alibhai, who moved to the U.S. from Portugal at age 8 and secured citizenship in January, his saxophone rendition to kick off the women’s basketball home opener felt personally symbolic.

“This is the first time I’ve played it since becoming an American,” said Jewell-Alibhai, a double-concentrator in government and music enrolled in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program. “Music has a place in every part of life, and there’s no exception when it comes to basketball games.”

Office for the Arts Director Fiona Coffey offered similar sentiments, calling athletics and music “complementary forms of self‑expression” rooted in creativity, discipline, and heart.

“Harvard students are remarkably multifaceted: artists, athletes, and scholars, who fluidly move among disciplines with talent and passion,” Coffey said. “Many of our students embody this artist‑athlete intersection, modeling how each pursuit deepens the other, and their scholarship.”

Nineteen acts, including solo musicians and two a cappella ensembles, were selected from auditions held in October to perform at games, matches, and meets throughout the year, including some halftime shows.

“Bringing student musicians into our game‑day traditions has been inspiring for our teams and our fans,” said Hannah Miller, director of fan engagement for Harvard Athletics. “These performances remind us how powerfully the arts and athletics can come together to create moments of pride, belonging, and community at Harvard.”

Sophomore Grace Hur, an electrical engineering concentrator from Alabama, sang at two women’s ice hockey games this semester while simultaneously performing the American Sign Language interpretation of Francis Scott Key’s famous lyrics.

“I wanted to take this opportunity to make the anthem a bit more inclusive, and I felt using American Sign Language while also singing it could help me connect with more people of both worlds,” said Hur, who in high school directed an ASL-translated play that featured actors and “shadow signers” side-by-side onstage.

“The national anthem is a song that sends the message of underrepresented groups that can belong, uniting people together,” Hur said. “There are many different ways of signing the same lyrics, because American Sign Language is a meaning-based language rather than a word-to-word translation. Everyone translates and interprets it differently, and so as I’ve gotten to do this, I’ve learned how diverse this one song can be for different people.”

As to the difficulty of the song, Uzo-Menkiti — who will perform at the Feb. 14 men’s basketball game vs. Yale and the Feb. 28 men’s ice hockey game vs. Quinnipiac — has some advice for beginners: Practice makes perfect.

“Repetition is key,” said Uzo-Menkiti, a human developmental and regenerative biology concentrator who sang frequently for football and baseball games at her Utah high school. “If you practice singing a song over and over again, then you get muscle memory. The voice is a muscle, so if you keep training it in one particular exercise, like the national anthem, then inevitably you’ll get better at it. Your pitch will be better, your riffs will be cleaner, and you will be able to reach the notes with ease because you’ve done it so many times.”

Alan M. Garber has agreed to extend his service as president of Harvard University for an indefinite term beyond the end of the 2026-27 academic year, Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, announced Monday.

A native of Rock Island, Illinois, who holds A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, Garber was appointed the University’s 31st president in August 2024, with plans to remain in the role through June 30, 2027. He had been named interim president in January 2024 after having served since 2011 as provost.

“Since taking up the duties of the presidency in January 2024, Alan has demonstrated even more fully the remarkable qualities apparent during his 12-plus years as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer,” Pritzker said.

“He is a servant-leader with uncommon intellectual breadth and unbounded curiosity,” she said. “He is both principled and pragmatic, both deliberative and decisive, and both respectful of tradition and intent on innovation. And, most importantly, he models open-mindedness and civility, with compassion toward others, a selfless concern for Harvard’s best interests, and an unwavering focus on how Harvard can best serve the wider world.”

The announcement comes as “Harvard and other universities continue to navigate a period of extraordinary challenge and work to affirm higher education’s indispensable role in driving discovery and improving lives,” said Pritzker.

In his own message, Garber noted his appreciation for the Harvard community.

“Your commitment to pursuing opportunities to learn and discover, to building a stronger and more welcoming community, and to addressing our shortcomings with urgency and resolve has only deepened my appreciation for our work together,” he said. “Our progress has made me prouder than ever to be part of the University — and determined to see us through this uniquely challenging period in our long history. I am profoundly honored by the trust that the governing boards have placed in me by extending my appointment and deeply grateful for the support I have received from you and from many others.”

Garber also spoke of his aspirations for Harvard beyond the current moment and the important work of advancing Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence in the years ahead.

“Through the centuries, Harvard has drawn its strength from the perpetual curiosity that treats all knowledge as subject to scrutiny, refinement, and revision,” he said. “We meet the present guided by purpose and imagine a future lit by possibility. We continually strive to achieve excellence in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. We promote the free exchange of ideas and foster constructive dialogue. And we build our capacity, as individuals and as a community, to find as much opportunity in challenge as in encouragement. At the heart of our endeavors lies a willingness to consider risk not as an insurmountable obstacle but as a necessary ingredient in achieving our boldest aspirations. Nurturing that inclination will serve us well in the years to come.”

Since becoming president, Garber, working closely with Provost John Manning and the deans of the Schools, has led a series of initiatives to advance Harvard’s academic mission, sought to defend core principles of the University and higher education, and introduced a series of reforms designed to strengthen campus culture.

Under Garber’s leadership, the University has announced an institutional voice policy, launched an initiative to advance open inquiry and constructive dialogue, sought to bring a wider range of perspectives and ideas to the Harvard community, and overseen efforts to implement recommendations of task forces on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.

In a period of extraordinary challenge, he has also led the University’s response to wide-ranging demands made by the federal government, affirming Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, vital research, and the crucial role of international students and scholars in advancing the mission of U.S. higher education.

Responding to an April 11 letter from the government, Garber underscored the singular value of the decades-long ties between the federal government and research universities, writing that “these partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history.”

“New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances — from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility,” he said. “For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.”

The University has continued to make progress in areas such as quantum science, AI, the life sciences, the arts and humanities, and public service under Garber’s leadership.

Announcing the extension of Garber’s presidency, Pritzker noted the feedback she and other members of the governing boards have received in conversations and correspondence with faculty, students, staff, and alumni, saying they have “consistently heard expressions of admiration and appreciation for Alan’s service.”

Speaking to the Gazette in October, Pritzker said that during a period of increasing engagement with the wider community, she and others on the Corporation were “hearing a lot of support for President Garber and how he has led the University during an extraordinarily challenging time.”

“He’s been very clear and proactive in conveying the principles that we stand for and in foregrounding the vital importance and work of research universities,” she said. “There’s a great deal of appreciation for his purpose-driven leadership. Not everyone agrees with every step we are taking as a university, but there’s a widespread belief, I think, that Alan and the entire leadership team have the best interests of Harvard in mind as they make decisions.”

Sylvia Burwell, president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and former president of American University, also lauded Garber.

“Harvard is blessed to have a leader who brings deep humility, a powerful commitment to the purpose and promise of research universities, and the trust and support of the Harvard community,” said Burwell.

“We have seen Alan’s leadership amidst a period of intense challenge,” she continued. “Equally important, however, is that he has the wisdom, vision, and values to take advantage of the many opportunities that will arise in the years ahead and to drive forward academic excellence in Harvard’s vital teaching and research mission.”

An economist, physician, and expert on health policy, Garber holds faculty appointments in medicine, economics, government, and public health. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in three years, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and an M.D. from Stanford University, where he served on the faculty and cared for patients at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center for 25 years, also founding and directing two academic centers.