Robin Bernstein was looking for something else when she stumbled on a bit of information about a murder in 19th-century upstate New York.

That accidental discovery served as inspiration for “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” a new book by the Dillon Professor of American History and chair of the American Studies program.

At the center is William Freeman, a mixed-race African American and Indigenous man convicted of horse thievery in 1840. Sentenced to five years of hard labor at Auburn State Prison, Freeman was forced to manufacture goods for various private entities.

Upon his release, he set about campaigning for back wages. When that failed, he lashed out with a grisly crime that would help shape how Americans came to think about race, criminality, and imprisonment.

The Gazette caught up with Bernstein, also a professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, & Sexuality, to learn more about this previously unexamined history. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Where did you find the story of William Freeman?

It was in a footnote. There, I came upon an 1846 theatrical show about how William Freeman murdered four white people, including a toddler and a grandmother.

One of my areas of expertise is theater history. I knew it was nearly unheard of at mid-19th century for a show to depict Black-on-white violence. At the time, even performances of “Othello” took great pains to avoid it, because white people did not want to see it.

I asked myself, “Why were these white people in Auburn, N.Y., behaving so differently from white people across the nation?” I knew something amazing had happened, and I had to learn what it was.

So how did Freeman initially land in prison?

Freeman was from a family that had just completed the process of gradual emancipation and named themselves Freeman. The name speaks to who they considered themselves to be — and what future they were choosing for themselves.

When Freeman was 15 years old, a horse was stolen. He was accused. There was no physical evidence against him, but it didn’t matter. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years in the Auburn State Prison, where he was subjected to convict-leasing. He was forced to manufacture animal harnesses and dyes and carpets, all of which were sold by private companies.

Freeman was furious at being forced to labor, as he put it, “for nothing.” By nothing, he meant no crime — because he always insisted he was innocent of the horse theft — and no pay. He was explicit about both of those meanings. He considered himself a worker, not a slave.

I understand that Auburn State Prison was itself an innovation.

The Auburn State Prison is very important, because it originated prison-for-profit. It originated the idea that a prison could function primarily to generate wealth rather than control or punish or rehabilitate criminals.

There’s a common perception that profit-driven convict leasing was invented by the South after the Civil War, as part of a white effort to re-enslave African Americans. But my book reveals how the North invented this system half a century earlier, in the wake of Northern, not Southern, slavery. 

The Auburn State Prison opened in 1817. By the 1840s, it was an economic force throughout New York State. Meanwhile, the Auburn System, as it was called, was being exported. There were many dozens of prisons being built on the Auburn System all over the United States and Europe. San Quentin, for example, would soon be built on Auburn’s model.

Your book details Auburn State Prison’s innovations in another area: violence. What kinds of violence did Freeman experience there?

One of the central forms of violence was extreme social isolation. The Auburn system involved each prisoner being sequestered in solitary confinement every night. During the day, they worked in factories that were built into the prison, but they were forbidden from ever speaking.

While Freeman was incarcerated, a prison administrator invented a machine for waterboarding. Freeman was waterboarded, but he was also whipped and flogged. At one point he was beaten with a board that split on his head and he suffered a brain injury. He also became almost completely deaf.

I find it interesting that Freeman never sought a legal remedy for his physical injuries. He focused exclusively on back wages.

It was legally possible to sue for injury at the time, but he never tried. When he got out, in 1845, he tried to collect what he considered back pay. He appealed to magistrates. He was laughed at and dismissed. And then he committed an act of terrorism that was a strike against the state, a strike against the system of prison-for-profit.

Freeman stabbed to death four members of the Van Nest family in their home within hours of seeking back pay for the last time. I hesitate to rehash the details.

What was most important to me was not the blow-by-blow of how Freeman killed the family, but rather how he described it: He called it “work.” That tells us what is at the core of his concern. He had been forced to work in prison factories for no pay, and now he extracted “payback” through a murder that he called “work.” It was an immense irony.

Let’s move on to the murder trial. It was a high-profile case and the two lawyers involved were significant historical figures. Who were they and what did they argue?

Twenty years after the trial, William Henry Seward became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, which is what he’s most remembered for today. He’s also remembered for brokering the purchase of Alaska — if you’ve ever heard of “Seward’s Folly.”

 At the time of the trial, in 1846, he was a recent past governor of New York state. He was living and working as a lawyer in Auburn and decided to take Freeman’s case pro bono.

Seward argued that Freeman was insane, and that he committed the crime because he was insane, and that he became insane as a result of racism. Seward was not ventriloquizing arguments that were already widespread. He was crafting them. Seward basically made the social pathology argument that [Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson] Daniel Patrick Moynihan would make a century later [in his 1965 report on Black poverty].

It’s an argument that continues to have enormous purchase today. And let’s name it clearly: It is a racist argument that criminalizes Black people.

Who was Seward’s adversary, and what did he argue?

The prosecution was led by John Van Buren, who was the son of recent President Martin Van Buren. What we know right away is that this was a clash of the titans. This was a former governor versus the son of a president and a grisly crime, an enormously disturbing crime. Newspaper readers across the nation were riveted.

Van Buren made a different racist argument. His argument was that Freeman committed this murder because of inherent racial savagery. In different ways, Seward and Van Buren were both arguing that Freeman committed these crimes because he was Black and Native American, which is completely contrary to everything that Freeman ever said. Freeman said that he did it because his wages were stolen from him by the emerging system of prison-for-profit.

Why did nobody hear what Freeman said about his actual motive?

On some level, they did hear it. They were just enormously threatened, the white population in particular. We need to understand Auburn as a kind of company town. Every person, every business, every physical aspect of the town was connected to the prison. So people had an economic interest in protecting it. The fact that they went to such lengths to invent other reasons for Freeman’s crime, that tells us how hard they were working to not hear what Freeman was saying.

Auburn later emerged as a hub of abolitionist thought. Was there any connection to Freeman?

It’s worth mentioning that the Black community also felt threatened, but for different reasons. Their problem was, how to live in a world in which Freeman had committed these crimes, and how to live with the racist libels that the trial developed and unleashed.

One of the answers became activism. One of the arguments Seward made in court was that Freeman committed his crime because he had been excluded from white schools — and there were no Black schools in Auburn. Afterwards, the Black community very cannily raised money for Black schools.

Also striking was that prior to Freeman’s trial in 1846, there was very little abolitionist activity in the town. All of a sudden, after the trial, Black abolitionist lecturers including Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet become very interested in Auburn.

The first edition of “Twelve Years a Slave” [1853] by Solomon Northup was published there. The first edition of Douglass’ “My Bondage and My Freedom” [1855] was published there. And then Harriet Tubman moved to Auburn — she spent the second half of her life there — and the first edition of her dictated autobiography [1869] was published in the town.

I understand this as a strike against the trial. Freeman was silenced; he never took the stand. His actual argument was buried under the narratives Seward and Van Buren invented and amplified. So how did Black communities respond? They responded by telling their own stories.

Robin Bernstein will be joined by Brandon M. Terry, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, to discuss “Freeman’s Challenge.” 7 p.m. Friday (May 17) Harvard Bookstore.

Harvard Commencement has long been an important day for Katarzyna Hanley. Over the decade that she worked in the Registrar’s office at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she had essential responsibilities to ensure the event went off without a hitch, such as maintaining the official list of graduates, and ordering and preparing the diplomas.

Next week, Commencement will once again be an important day for her, but for a very different reason. Hanley, who goes by Kathy, will finally receive a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Harvard Extension School 13 years after she started.

“I can’t wait. It’s a celebration of a lot of years of commitment, so yes, I’m very much looking forward to it,” said Hanley, 45. “I feel like I’ve been a student for so long, I’m not sure what life after being a student looks like, but I think it’s great. I’m ready to be done.”  

She pursued a bachelor’s degree taking one course per semester while working full-time at Harvard, first in the Registrar’s office and now as a graduate program coordinator in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at FAS, where she provides support for 50-60 graduate students, making sure things run smoothly so they can focus on learning and teaching.

Hanley, who came to the U.S. from Poland when she was 12, had an associate degree from MassBay Community College and was employed for a time as a branch operations manager at a local banking chain, then processed paperwork at a medical records firm. None of it felt fulfilling.

“I just felt like I needed to find a career,” she said about applying to Harvard. “I wanted to get in at the ground level at Harvard University and see where that would take me.”

Hanley joined the FAS Registrar’s office, keeping student records up to date, ensuring University diplomas were printed correctly, and providing administrative support for the graduate program coordinators at various Schools.

Though not required to do her job, Hanley started to feel that a bachelor’s degree was the “bare minimum” she should have working at an institution of higher learning like Harvard, where everyone seemed to already have a college degree or be working toward one. So she began looking into offerings on campus with an eye toward perhaps one day getting a bachelor’s degree.

She attended an open house at Sanders Theatre where Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America and professor of Anthropology at FAS, spoke movingly about Harvard Extension, its students, and the importance of education.

Hanley took her first course in 2011, where her routine involved getting up at 4:30 a.m. to do some reading for class before putting in a full workday on campus and doing “a lot” of coursework on weekends. “I haven’t really had a proper weekend in a long time,” she said.

She credits the Extension School’s robust online learning program with making a difficult work/school/life balance feasible. “The flexibility has made it possible for me to get a degree.”

Hanley wasn’t always confident she’d reach this milestone. Five years ago, she couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and wasn’t sure she could continue.

“I contemplated stopping the program just because it was so much work all the time,” she said of juggling her home life with work, commuting three hours a day roundtrip from Billerica to campus, keeping up with schoolwork, and planning for the next semester. “It was just too much.”

Though overwhelmed at times, Hanley wasn’t ready to bail. “I also felt that I’ve already invested so much time into it, it would be a shame to just throw it away,” she said. With the help of an academic adviser, Sarah Anne Stinnett, she reviewed her progress toward fulfilling the degree requirements and put together a game plan.

“She is amazing,” Hanley said of Stinnett. “She sat down with me and we kind of parsed out what else needed to be done, the options that I could explore, like taking some exams to offset some of the credits, transfer credits. She has led me through the last three to four years and how I could get that accomplished.” Stinnett’s guidance “was critical for me to finish the degree.”

With the path suddenly clear, Hanley put her head down and pushed ahead. “I knew it was going to be a long road ahead and I just kept taking courses, just nose to the grindstone, and kept going,” she said.

Fittingly, Hanley said, she is closing out her time as a student this semester with a course taught by Carrasco, the person who first inspired her academic journey, called “Quests for Wisdom.”

“Wisdom has a lot of definitions,” she said. “And I think to finish my career as a student with a quest for wisdom, where the course itself asks you to find your own ways toward wisdom, I think is just — cosmic design.”

Hanley is thrilled to finally be able to join in the Commencement festivities, this time wearing a cap and gown.

“For a long time, I found it almost embarrassing that it has taken me this long,” said Hanley, who took a couple of brief breaks over the 13 years. She advises other staff contemplating going back to school to just make the leap.

“Life happens, things will happen. So, I think if you want something, just do it. Commit to it, and just be persistent and do it.”

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When schools closed in March 2020, Ilana Kofman ’24 kept up her spirits by summoning one thought.

“I was so excited for my senior prom,” she recalled. “I had bought a dress and started practicing makeup in my free time, because there was not much else to do.”

Kofman was “devastated” when the event was canceled weeks later. For four years, her unworn dress hung in a closet back home in western Massachusetts.

An occasion to don the sparkly green number finally arrived last month. Thanks to efforts of the Harvard College Class of 2024 Committee, Kofman and her friends got to attend a properly posh senior prom, corsages and boutonnieres included.

“It was obviously bittersweet,” said the double concentrator in economics and psychology. “I didn’t get to wear the dress in high school, but I’m very happy I got to wear it in College.”

Of course, a night out in gowns and tuxedos wasn’t the only tradition this year’s seniors missed out on as teens. They settled in as first-years amid the social distancing era, with online learning and 6 feet of separation from any interesting new peers.

“If you speak to most students in the Class of ’24 — not just at Harvard, but around the country — the lack of closure to high school and the difficult start to college makes people feel like they’re lacking something,” said Class of 2024 first marshal Fez S. Zafar, a government concentrator from Iowa.

As a result, the 33-member Class Committee resolved to play up the fun factor from the start of classes last fall.

“Our class has been through so much,” offered second marshal Chibuikem C. “Chuby” Uche, a native Texan studying government. “We felt like, you know what? It’s time to wrap things up on a high note.”

That meant throwing a series of gatherings, not just on campus but also at venues in Boston. It also meant heeding calls to host something like a prom.

Demand was high for the April 25 event, held at a nightclub near Boston’s Government Center. The tickets, which ranged from $20 to $40, sold quickly.

Nearly 500 students partied past midnight in their fancy prom attire. One of Kofman’s favorite memories was dancing with her Leverett House roommates to a mix of pop and hip-hop spun by friend and classmate Hanna Pak ’24. For Zafar and Uche, it was watching musician Prazul Wokhlu ’25 — who enrolled with the Class of 2024 before taking time off during the pandemic — perched with his saxophone atop the DJ stand to offer a few riffs on “Careless Whisper,” Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” and more.

“The venue was packed to the brim,” Uche said. “There were so many smiling faces, so many people singing ‘Dancing Queen’ at the top of their lungs.”

Also part of the festivities was a court of prom royalty. Jeremy Ornstein, a social studies concentrator and climate activist known for work with the Sunrise Movement, was voted king by the Class of ’24. The evening’s queen was Saylor Willauer, an applied math concentrator from Maryland who’s known about campus for running intramurals. Ironically, both pack a little extra prom experience under the crowns, having graduated from high school in 2019.

“It was just a really nice, really special thing for the class marshals to do for us,” Kofman said, of the whole evening. “I’m extremely grateful that I did get my prom in the end.”

In December, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, began a process of self-examination, publishing articles about the Journal itself and its handling of a series of key historical injustices in medicine, including eugenics, slavery, oppression of Native Americans, and, in an issue published in April, the rise of Nazi Germany.

One major challenge, according to two medical historians, is how little the NEJM had to say about Nazism and its systematic and genocidal oppression of Europe’s Jews beginning in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power.

That came as something of a surprise to Allan Brandt, the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine and professor of the history of science, and Joelle Abi-Rached, Ph.D. ’17, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The pair contributed to the series, which was initiated by David Jones, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine. Brandt praised the publication for its willingness to face what may be an uncomfortable history.

With so little material available, the two researchers, in a conversation with the Gazette, discussed their dilemma: How do you parse a near silence? This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Knowing the prevailing attitudes toward race and ethnicity in the World War II era and the decade leading up to it, were you expecting to find a complicated situation?

Brandt: Yes. The New England Journal’s effort is very similar to what Harvard did in its exploration of slavery on campus — Harvard faculty and administrators held slaves and did not challenge slavery often. These are the kinds of institutional self-observations that I think are important. It’s often been perceived as a reputational risk in opening up the archives and facing these things. But I think the reputational risk is in not doing it and the Journal very appropriately recognized that.

When we look at your specific findings, what do you think is most important?

Brandt: When our colleagues were working on other papers in this series and ran their digital investigations, they literally came up with hundreds of hits. For us, the experience was like putting a search term into Google and getting no response. We expected that, given the dimensions and the horrors of the Holocaust, we would find that the Journal said a lot during that time. But our initial finding was that there was almost nothing.

Abi-Rached: The omission, absence, and silence startled us, so we made an extra effort to find anything that was written on the rise of Hitler. We did come across a few items and these became the backbone of the paper. They were illuminating.

One piece published in 1933 is a very short piece that even people who have read our paper have trouble finding. It’s a short communique published at the end of a very long and tedious paper on surgery. The communique, “The Abuse of the Jewish Physicians,” is revealing because the concern was not discrimination or persecution but the fact that these Jewish physicians were dismissed and lost their livelihood. That was the only piece published in 1933.

Then there is a controversial, longer piece published in 1935 by Michael Davis, an eminent health reformer, with a German nurse who later research would reveal was a Nazi sympathizer. And then there was nothing until 1944.

In 1944, the Journal published its first editorial, an important piece in which the Journal takes a stance on the humanitarian disaster that the “Nazi tyranny” had caused in occupied Europe.

Then you have another key article published in 1949, long after the conclusion of the Second World War, by Leo Alexander, who was a Viennese-born neuropsychiatrist who gathered evidence for the trial of the doctors at Nuremberg. So, this absence of debate around the rise of Nazism and its persecutory, racist laws became our guiding thread.

How would you describe what must have been the Journal’s approach during those years?

Brandt: Joelle and I talked about how we could understand silence, or an omission. We speculated about structural or institutional racism and thought about whether, in a medical or scientific journal which is typically reporting clinical findings and new knowledge, it might have been possible for editors to say, “This isn’t really part of our remit. It’s terrible, but that’s not what we do.”

So we decided to go to other leading journals, Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association, to see if that held up — sometimes you have to go outside to look on the inside. We couldn’t get to it in an article of this length, but I think if we more closely examined Boston medicine at the time, between academics at Harvard Medical School and the Journal, we might have gotten additional insight. It was not a diverse group.

Abi-Rached: The point we make is that the silence, the omission, was not banal. It was not mere ignorance. The discriminatory nature of these policies that were implemented by the Nazi regime were reported in the U.S. press.

JAMA and Science did report on what was happening in Germany vis-à-vis the Jewish physicians, who were the victims of such policies. The Dachau concentration camp was established in 1933 and Davis and Krueger, for example, mentioned labor camps in their piece, but they omitted the term “forced” labor camps, rendering them somehow unproblematic.

These camps were mentioned in other journals, the persecution of Jewish physicians was mentioned in JAMA, decried in Science. They were more explicit. Science was more forthcoming and did not mince words at all. They mention repression, active antisemitism, and the weaponization of education. That was probably what alarmed Science most.

JAMA was more interested in the persecution of Jewish physicians, especially the restriction of their practice, of their education, and the consequences of laws that were persecutory in nature. And this was two years earlier than the publication of the Davis and Krueger paper.

Your critique of the Davis paper was that it focused on economic issues and read as if nothing outrageous was happening outside of the economic sphere?

Brandt: The Davis piece is remarkable for its opacity, its ability to focus on a reform and not have any context around it. Davis’ response to one critic of the article makes that clear. He said, “Of course I’m concerned about what’s going on with Jews in Germany. But we were writing about a social reform, a health reform.”

The kind of denial that it takes to dissociate the social and political context from what you’re centering your attention on is why we use the term “compartmentalization.” These are the psychological and institutional structures that permitted racism to persist.

Joelle and I explored the fact that Davis had done much for the poor. He was trying to expand insurance coverage in the U.S., so in this instance, this narrowness was really shocking, especially given the fact that his ancestors were Jewish.

Was there a change among the editors after the war when coverage changed?

Abi-Rached: The evidence was so obvious that the doctors were part and parcel of the genocidal nature of that regime that a journal like NEJM could not remain silent. It’s an important moment in the history of medical practice and medical research that had a profound effect on how experiments were conducted later on, in the second half of the 20th century.

A paradigm shift happened: You could not be silent and blind and not engage with what was happening especially because it concerned medical practitioners. It also laid bare how the Hippocratic Oath was insufficient to protect patients or anyone else. There was a clash between the very paternalistic nature of the Hippocratic Oath and how institutions, even regimes, can politicize that oath to their own advantage and how medical doctors are enmeshed in that institutional framework, whether they serve the state or an insurance scheme.

The Journal could not remain silent, and it is only in the 1960s onwards that you come across editorials, perspectives on the ethics of medical experimentation, and so on.

Are there lessons for today here?

Abi-Rached: An important conclusion is that silence is not neutral. It says as much as it hides. Reading the past also tells us something about our contemporary moment, our failings, including our moral failings.

Another point is that medicine cannot be dissociated from social and political issues. They are intertwined. Medicine is the product of societal beliefs, norms, and prejudices. The Journal is a reflection of wider social, political, and moral biases. It’s a reflection of a wider society.

It’s one thing to dream up a next-generation quantum internet capable of sending highly complex, hacker-proof information around the world at ultra-fast speeds. It’s quite another to physically show it’s possible.

That’s exactly what Harvard physicists have done, using existing Boston-area telecommunication fiber, in a demonstration of the world’s longest fiber distance between two quantum memory nodes. Think of it as a simple, closed internet carrying a signal encoded not by classical bits like the existing internet, but by perfectly secure, individual particles of light.

The groundbreaking work, published in Nature, was led by Mikhail Lukin, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor in the Department of Physics, in collaboration with Harvard professors Marko Lončar and Hongkun Park, who are all members of the Harvard Quantum Initiative. The Nature work was carried out with researchers at Amazon Web Services.

The Harvard team established the practical makings of the first quantum internet by entangling two quantum memory nodes separated by optical fiber link deployed over a roughly 22-mile loop through Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, and Boston. The two nodes were located a floor apart in Harvard’s Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering.

Quantum memory, analogous to classical computer memory, is an important component of a quantum computing future because it allows for complex network operations and information storage and retrieval. While other quantum networks have been created in the past, the Harvard team’s is the longest fiber network between devices that can store, process, and move information.

Each node is a very small quantum computer, made out of a sliver of diamond that has a defect in its atomic structure called a silicon-vacancy center. Inside the diamond, carved structures smaller than a hundredth the width of a human hair enhance the interaction between the silicon-vacancy center and light.

The silicon-vacancy center contains two qubits, or bits of quantum information: one in the form of an electron spin used for communication, and the other in a longer-lived nuclear spin used as a memory qubit to store entanglement, the quantum-mechanical property that allows information to be perfectly correlated across any distance.

(In classical computing, information is stored and transmitted as a series of discrete binary signals, say on/off, that form a kind of decision tree. Quantum computing is more fluid, as information can exist in stages between on and off, and is stored and transferred as shifting patterns of particle movement across two entangled points.)

Using silicon-vacancy centers as quantum memory devices for single photons has been a multiyear research program at Harvard. The technology solves a major problem in the theorized quantum internet: signal loss that can’t be boosted in traditional ways.

A quantum network cannot use standard optical-fiber signal repeaters because simple copying of quantum information as discrete bits is impossible — making the information secure, but also very hard to transport over long distances.

Silicon-vacancy-center-based network nodes can catch, store, and entangle bits of quantum information while correcting for signal loss. After cooling the nodes to close to absolute zero, light is sent through the first node and, by nature of the silicon vacancy center’s atomic structure, becomes entangled with it, so able to carry the information.

“Since the light is already entangled with the first node, it can transfer this entanglement to the second node,” explained first author Can Knaut, a Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in Lukin’s lab. “We call this photon-mediated entanglement.”

Over the last several years, the researchers have leased optical fiber from a company in Boston to run their experiments, fitting their demonstration network on top of the existing fiber to indicate that creating a quantum internet with similar network lines would be possible.

“Showing that quantum network nodes can be entangled in the real-world environment of a very busy urban area is an important step toward practical networking between quantum computers,” Lukin said.

A two-node quantum network is only the beginning. The researchers are working diligently to extend the performance of their network by adding nodes and experimenting with more networking protocols.

The paper is titled “Entanglement of Nanophotonic Quantum Memory Nodes in a Telecom Network.” The work was supported by the AWS Center for Quantum Networking’s research alliance with the Harvard Quantum Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms (an NSF Physics Frontiers Center), the Center for Quantum Networks (an NSF Engineering Research Center), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and other sources.

Mayflies live for only a day. Galapagos tortoises can reach up to age 170. The Greenland shark holds the world record at over 400 years of life. 

Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel laureate and author of the newly released “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality,” opened his packed Harvard Science Book Talk last week by noting the vast variabilities of lifespans across the natural world. Death is certain, so far as we know. But there’s no physical or chemical law that says it must happen at a fixed time, which raises other, more philosophical issues.

The “why” behind these enormous swings, and the quest to harness longevity for humans, have driven fevered attempts (and billions of dollars in research spending) to slow or stop aging. Ramakrishnan’s book is a dispassionate journey through current scientific understanding of aging and death, which basically comes down to an accumulation of chemical damage to molecules and cells.

“The question is whether we can tackle aging processes, while still keeping us who we are as humans,” said Ramakrishnan during his conversation with Antonio Regalado, a writer for the MIT Technology Review. “And whether we can do that in a safe and effective way.”

Even if immortality — or just living for a very, very long time — were theoretically possible through science, should we pursue it? Ramakrishnan likened the question to other moral ponderings.

“There’s no physical or chemical law that says we can’t colonize other galaxies, or outer space, or even Mars,” he said. “I would put it in that same category. And it would require huge breakthroughs, which we haven’t made yet.”

In fact, we’re a lot closer to big breakthroughs when it comes to chasing immortality. Ramakrishnan noted the field is moving so fast that a book like his can capture but a snippet. He then took the audience on a brief tour of some of the major directions of aging research. And much of it, he said, started in unexpected places.

Take rapamycin, a drug first isolated in the 1960s from a bacterium on Easter Island found to have antifungal, immunosuppressant, and anticancer properties. Rapamycin targets the TOR pathway, a large molecular signaling cascade within cells that regulates many functions fundamental to life. Rapamycin has garnered renewed attention for its potential to reverse the aging process by targeting cellular signaling associated with physiological changes and diseases in older adults.

Other directions include mimicking the anti-aging effects of caloric restriction shown in mice, as well as one particularly exciting area called cellular reprogramming. That means taking fully developed cells and essentially turning back the clock on their development.

The most famous foundational experiment in this area was by Kyoto University scientist and Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that just four transcription factors could revert an adult cell all the way back to a pluripotent stem cell, creating what are now known as induced pluripotent stem cells.

Ramakrishnan, a scientist at England’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He said he felt qualified to write the book because he has “no skin in the game” of aging research. As a molecular biologist who has studied fundamental processes of how cells make proteins, he had connections in the field but wasn’t too close to any of it.

While researching the book, he took pains to avoid interviewing scientists with commercial ventures tied to aging.

The potential for conflicts of interest abound.

The world has seen an explosion in aging research in recent decades, with billions of dollars spent by government agencies and private companies. And the consumer market for products is forecast to hit $93 billion by 2027.

As a result, false or exaggerated claims by companies promising longer life are currently on the rise, Ramakrishnan noted. He shared one example: Supplements designed to lengthen a person’s telomeres, or genetic segments that shrink with age, are available on Amazon.

“Of course, these are not FDA approved. There are no clinical trials, and it’s not clear what their basis is,” he said.

But still there appears to be some demand.

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The core of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 consists of 37 words that prohibit sex discrimination in any educational program or activity that receives any federal funding.

Although Title IX itself has remained constant, in recent years its interpretation has been amended, altered, and redefined by the federal government and the Supreme Court. Initially, Title IX was known for expanding access to academic institutions and requiring that support for female-dedicated athletics programs equal that of male-dedicated programs, especially at the collegiate level. In 1992, Title IX’s protections were interpreted to encompass sexual harassment, including sexual assault. And since then, the Department of Education has defined — and redefined — sexual harassment and misconduct and described how academic institutions should respond, with two significant changes to guidance and regulation in 2011 and 2020, respectively. Last month, the Department of Education once again issued regulatory changes to Title IX.

To better understand the latest changes to the regulations, which will take effect Aug. 1, the Gazette sat down with University Title IX Coordinator Nicole Merhill, who is also director of the Office for Gender Equity (OGE). OGE is currently consulting with various stakeholders across the University to explore the necessary revision to University policies, procedures, and training for students, staff, and faculty to ensure Harvard remains in compliance with the latest changes to the Title IX regulations. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What is your overall impression of the new regulations?

There are many changes, from definitions to scope of conduct, to applicability of sex discrimination, to coverage. It’s not so much an expansion of what was covered, but really a clarification on the application of Title IX.

When I’ve heard people talk about the new regulations, they talk about a “rollback” to the pre-2020 regulations and prior. This is not a rollback or reverting to what the regulations used to be five years ago. It’s more of a slide and a pivot.

For example, prior to the 2020 regulation change, the definition of what constituted sexual harassment was, in part, unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that was severe, persistent, or pervasive, based on the totality of the circumstances.

In 2020, the definition for what constitutes sexual harassment shifted, in part, to unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that was severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.

The new definition for sex-based harassment includes a definition for hostile environment harassment, which is unwelcome sex-based conduct that, based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is severe or pervasive. We are not returning to the pre-2020 standard of severe, persistent, or pervasive.

It is essential that people understand that the requirements throughout these regulations are not simply rolling back to how things were done before 2020. They’re different.

How will protections for gay, transgender, and non-binary people be affected?

The new regulations expand the definition of what qualifies as discrimination on the basis of sex. We knew that was this coming due to the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., which ensures that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is included under Title IX on the basis of sex discrimination. So, this was already in effect, but now we have it actually written into the regulations. And that’s really important. The regulations now clarify that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Are there different protections for pregnant students?

Pregnancy or related conditions always have been part of the Title IX regulations, and discrimination based on pregnancy and related conditions has always been prohibited. This set of regulations, though, really strengthens the requirements and increases our obligations, such as providing students who are pregnant with information about the University’s obligations, reasonable accommodations, voluntary leaves of absence, and lactation spaces. So, it’s another really noteworthy shift.

How have the regulations changed when it comes to the grievance process for sexual harassment complaints?

There are some significant changes in the grievance process. Under the 2020 regulations, there must be a hearing, there must be cross-examination, and that cross-examination must take place through personal advisers during a live hearing.

Under the new regulations, there must be a process to assess the credibility of parties and witnesses, including follow-up questions that challenge credibility, but a live hearing is no longer required.

Another big change is the move away from mandatory dismissal. Under the 2020 regulations, if conduct didn’t meet the narrow definition of Title IX sexual harassment, complaints had to be dismissed. Most institutions, including Harvard, created additional policies to address these complaints. With mandatory dismissal now gone, that likely means that many institutions will likely go back to a single policy that encompasses all behaviors within the realm of sex-based harassment.

Are there changes in how complaints are filed?

The 2020 regulations required complaints to be formally made in writing and signed by the person, the complainant. The new regulations define a complaint differently, and they allow for oral complaints. Under these regulations, if a person goes to a faculty member and says, “I experienced sexual harassment by a classmate, and the University should investigate this,” that puts the University on notice and triggers our response obligation, including our obligation to conduct an investigation, as appropriate.

Given these changes, will there be training for faculty and staff navigate to learn how to handle a complaint?

Yes, we are required by the new regulations to annually train all our employees. The good news is we already have systems in place to roll out training for staff and faculty. Faculty and staff should see trainings in their email inbox on the new regulations as well as our policy changes in the coming months.

With all of these changes, is anything staying the same?

Yes. There will be no change in the structure of the Office for Gender Equity, including SHARE, Title IX, and Prevention. These new regulations have broad, sweeping implications, but we have a good team of people working on this.

Our SHARE team will continue to provide a range of support to all community members impacted by harm. These services include trauma-informed counseling, education and support groups, and a 24/7 confidential hotline. OGE’s Strategic Prevention Initiatives team will continue to engage with community stakeholders to expand prevention initiatives, including those focused on creating culture change. Our network of local Title IX Resource Coordinators will continue to serve as the primary point of contact for supportive measures. And the Title IX team within OGE will serve as an additional support service for community members, including via our anonymous disclosure tool, the Resource for Online Anonymous Disclosure.

In addition, the Office for Dispute Resolution will continue to offer impartial, professional investigative processes for students, staff, faculty, postdoctoral parties, and third parties.

Saif Kamal is the kind of person who pursues opportunities and helps others do the same. Kamal was in his late 20s and working as head of design and marketing at the Dhaka Tribune, a newspaper in Bangladesh, when he got the idea for a startup — a business incubator for local entrepreneurs.

“That’s where I found out a lot of Bangladeshi young people were winning all these competitions, but they couldn’t transform their star ideas into proper startups, enterprises, or other sales coming in,” he said. “And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew why I wanted to do. I knew that an idea that can change the lives of millions cannot die just because a person is born here and not in a privileged place.”

To pursue his idea, Kamal found a mentor in India, and moved there to start his multinational Toru Institute of Inclusive Innovation. After three years in operation, he was chosen to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland in 2017 as one of the “global shapers of the world.”

He didn’t know it then, but soon after he would be confronted with a series of life-threatening medical challenges that would change the trajectory of his life and eventually lead to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a fresh start.

Riding the high from Davos, Kamal ended the year with his annual trip to reunite with Jamal, a close friend from his youth. The two vacationed in Singapore where, over drinks, they got to talking about their health.

“One day he’s like, ‘You know what? We should get a full-body checkup.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because we’re getting older,’” Kamal recounted. “I said, ‘Speak for yourself.’”

The 35-year-old Kamal relented. The two made appointments before the vacation’s end. Expecting a clean bill of health, Kamal never would have predicted what happened next.

“The woman doing the echo[cardiogram] stopped and said, ‘You need to see a heart surgeon immediately.’” 

One of Kamal’s heart valves had expanded to the point where if it increased just a fraction of an inch more, he would likely drop dead.

Kamal found a surgeon in Bangalore, India, and was in the hospital for nearly a month and a half while doctors tried to figure out what had caused the enlargement. They reached no conclusions but removed Kamal’s thymus and replaced his aortic valve. Finally, although he was without answers to what had caused the swelling, Kamal thought the nightmare was over.

A year later, he was back flying to Bangkok to meet Jamal and celebrate his near-miss with death. He arrived at his hotel, told his friend he wasn’t feeling well and that he would see him at lunch.

After not seeing him then, or for dinner, or for breakfast, Jamal had hotel staff break into Kamal’s room. They found Kamal passed out after having suffered a stroke.

“I woke up in an ICU after 14 days,” Kamal said. “When I woke up, my left side was paralyzed. My vision was gone. I couldn’t move anything, and 60 percent of my brain was damaged.”

The day was Oct. 2, 2018. Kamal says that is burned in his memory because the people in his hospital room were discussing the death of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, who had been assassinated by Saudi agents.

“I still remember the day because I couldn’t figure out anything, but I could hear that,” Kamal said.

A team of doctors was able to determine that what had been plaguing Kamal all along was Behcet’s disease, also called Behcet’s syndrome — a rare disorder, thought to be an autoimmune disease, which causes blood-vessel inflammation throughout the body.

Over the next three years, immunocompromised Kamal suffered lung failure, a COVID infection, and a tumor that needed removal. He continued to struggle with impaired cognition, and a slow muscular recovery. His emotional saving grace? Pandemic shutdowns.

“When the world is always moving and you’re not, you feel that you’re falling behind. When the rest of the world slowed down, I felt relieved,” Kamal said.

Saif lived with his brother Onik in Dhaka during his recovery, and the height of the pandemic.

“It was challenging emotionally, because the threat of losing Saif was higher for us. We were very helpless,” Onik said.

But every day in quarantine with his brother he was doing memory games, learning to walk again, talk again, and even learning to cook in their shared kitchen.

“I usually tell Saif that he is a very bad cook. But he was trying to learn new things and fed me a bunch of stuff,” Onik added. “Our dinners were special.”

Eventually, Saif even learned to swim and do some gymnastics moves.

Despite his successes, Saif Kamal had his bad days too, when he couldn’t find the words to express himself, or couldn’t get rid of the aches in his joints. Due to his illness and the global economy taking a hit from COVID, Kamal eventually lost his business.

“It’s about just getting to the edge of pushing yourself and then giving yourself the kindness to stop,” Kamal said. “You will move 10 steps ahead, and you will fall back eight … even though I would say that I’m still two steps ahead than where I was yesterday, I would not be satisfied. That is the challenge of perfectionism.”

Eventually, all his relearning made him realize he wanted to study how humans learn best.

“So I applied for Harvard,” he said.

Kamal spent the last year working on a master’s in learning design innovation technology, focusing on state-of-the-art tech and strategies, along with the fundamentals of the learning process.

One class in particular, an introductory course called “Becoming an Expert Learner” taught by Professor Tina Grotzer, stuck out to him.

“She said, ‘Imagine if we had to remember everything that we come across, how crazy the world would be, how crazy our brain would be. So it’s good to forget.’ And that gave me so much of power, so much of agency to be myself and to be OK with forgetting. And to be awkward about asking questions, to be kind to myself, and not to compare myself to my past but to stay present,” Kamal said.

The third week of Grotzer’s class is dedicated to looking at memory. The class explored the story of Clive Wearing, a British musician and conductor who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia, meaning he could neither remember his past nor easily form new memories.

“So that they can get a really deep appreciation for what it means to have a memory and how central that is to our sense of self and our being,” Grotzer said.

She said Kamal’s connection to the material and candidness was invaluable to fellow students.

“He just had these nuggets, these gold nuggets of insight and thoughtfulness and ability to reflect on challenges that I think brought everyone to a close, a deeper appreciation for their humanity and their ability to think and reason in the ways that they do,” Grotzer said.

Kamal, who continues to wrestle with vision impairment and immune issues, said his time at Harvard changed his outlook.

“I can physically, mentally, cognitively feel change in me,” he said. “They say that if you take the frog out of a pond, the frog will die. Sometimes you need to get a frog out of the pond so it will find new ways to survive and jump around and learn new things.”

Kamal said that his career goal now is to find ways to empower others to change the world through their entrepreneurial leadership.

“I think that no matter what he decides to do, but particularly if he decides to work in education, he is going to understand things about the mind, and how it works, but also have the humility about learning that he will be able to share with others and with learners,” Grotzer said. “That will be a gift to them.”

Having more education has long been linked to better individual health. But those benefits are also contagious, say the co-authors of a new working paper. 

“It’s not just that the individuals who have more years of education are in better health,” said David M. Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics. “It’s that even people with fewer years of education — for example, people with just a high school degree — are in better health when they live around people who have more years of education.”

The paper examines why cities with more college graduates see lower mortality rates for residents overall. It’s not due to spatial sorting, or the practice of relocating to live amidst those with similar habits. Nor did the researchers find a particularly strong correlation with factors like clean air, low crime, and high-quality healthcare infrastructure. Instead, most of the explanation involves rates of smoking, physical activity, and obesity. 

The pattern has everything to do with a community’s common culture, said co-author Edward L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and chair of the Department of Economics. “Smoking, for example, is a social activity,” he said. “Fundamentally, being around other smokers is fine if you’re smoking, but it’s usually pretty unpleasant if you’re not smoking.”

Glaeser, an urban economist and author of “Triumph of the City” (2011), has spent decades studying how varying education levels play out across U.S. society. One well-established finding concerns economic resilience. “If you ask yourself, which American cities managed to turn themselves around after the very difficult period of the 1970s and 1980s? Educated places like Seattle or Boston did. Less-educated places did not,” Glaeser said. 

For his part, Cutler, a health economist, spent the last few decades parsing the strong link between education and individual health outcomes. All the while he kept collaborating with Glaeser to explore obesity, smoking, and other health-related behaviors at the community level. The economists revisited these issues in the book “Survival of the City: The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation” (2021).

Also collaborating on the new paper were Jacob H. Bor, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, and Ljubica Ristovska, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Together, the researchers rejected the spatial sorting explanation with the help of data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study. Similar analysis was done using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of young women and men. Results showed that unhealthy people of all ages relocate more frequently than healthy ones. But both groups settle in areas with roughly equal levels of human capital (defined here as a population’s years of education). 

The team analyzed a variety of information sources — from county-level homicide statistics to regional estimates of air quality and a federal measure of hospital quality — to see whether mortality differentials are due to area amenities. “We estimate that at most 17 percent of the human capital externality on health is due to these external factors, driven largely by greater use of preventative care,” the co-authors wrote.

Instead, the majority of the correlation between human capital and area health — at least 60 percent — is explained by differences in health-related behaviors, the researchers found. Combining data from both the U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that every 10 percent increase in an area’s share of college graduates was associated with an annual 7 percent decrease in all-cause mortality. 

With additional data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), the researchers were able to probe connections between human capital and various health-related behaviors. Every 10 percent increase in an area’s college graduates was associated with a 13 percent decrease in smoking, a 7 percent decrease in having no physical activity, and a 12 percent decrease in the probability of being very obese. 

“It really opens up all these questions of how people form their beliefs,” Cutler said.

The paper went deepest on smoking, given the wealth of historical numbers on cigarette initiation, cessation, and beliefs. CPS data showed that in cities where people have more years of education — New York City, Boston, or Seattle, for example — people are more likely to think that smoking is bad for you. Residents of these cities are also likelier to support smoking regulations. For every 10 percent increase in bachelor’s degrees, the probability of working at a place with a complete smoking ban increases by 2 percentage points. 

Cutler and Glaeser were especially fascinated to find a growing connection over time between human capital and area health, especially between the years 1990 and 2010. As the correlation between individual education and behavior increased, they explained, the relationship between a community’s education levels and its mortality rates slowly followed suit. 

“Just look at people who were 70 in 2000,” said Glaeser, who has observed a similar dynamic over the same period between human capital and earnings. “These people were 30 in 1960. A lot of people were smoking in 1960, and there wasn’t nearly as strong of an education gradient as we saw 30 years later.”

Julia Tellides discovered the rich Jewish heritage of Thessaloniki two years ago on a Harvard Summer School Study Abroad program.

“It was the first time I heard about there being a large Jewish community anywhere in Greece,” said the graduating senior, a joint history and classics concentrator. “I thought, why have I never heard about this before? If anyone should know about this history, it’s me.” 

Tellides, who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, with a Greek father and Jewish mother, went on to devote her senior thesis to the city’s politically active Jewish residents during a period of upheaval in the early 20th century. Once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish population in Europe, Thessaloniki (traditionally known as Salonica or Salonika) proved a gold mine of Jewish culture and resistance, with Tellides surfacing new insights on the community’s struggle for survival. 

“For an undergraduate to have gone into such depth, and with such originality, is remarkable,” said Tellides’ thesis adviser Derek Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Greece’s second-largest city, situated 300 miles north of Athens on the Aegean Sea, once served as an economic and cultural crossroads. “It was one of the most important ports in the Ottoman Empire,” Tellides explained. It was also a melting pot where Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in relative peace. 

That changed when the Greek government took control in the early 20th century, with Thessaloniki changing from “a multicultural, multireligious empire to a Christian nation-state,” said Tellides, whose second thesis adviser was Paul J. Kosmin, the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History.

According to a 1913 census, the Jewish population in Thessaloniki numbered around 90,000. Tellides’ scholarship focused on the community’s activism in the years between World Wars I and II, with Jewish residents organizing in opposition to rising antisemitism and discriminatory public policy. One example is a 1924 mandate for all businesses to remain closed on Sundays.

“Other historians have acknowledged the significance of the Sunday closing law — if Jews observed the Sabbath they effectively lost a day of work, which made it very hard to make a living,” Penslar noted. “Julia’s original contribution was depicting how the Jewish community reacted to the crisis, how they interceded with the Greek government, and even more interestingly how they interceded with international organizations in the spirit of the Minority Rights Treaties created after World War I.”

Tellides, a history lover from childhood, also examined a moment in the 1930s when the Greek government sought to take over the city’s vast Jewish cemetery, with more than 350,000 graves dating as far back as the Roman era. “They wanted to build a university campus on top of it,” she said.

With support from Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, and Department of the Classics, the Leverett House resident traveled to Thessaloniki last summer to conduct archival research and explore the city. But Tellides, who bolstered her Greek skills with coursework at Harvard, quickly found herself unable to decipher materials written in Ladino, a Romance language developed by Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century. 

“What I read instead was their correspondence with international Jewish organizations,” shared Tellides, who plans to teach English to kindergarteners in Athens following graduation. “They were desperately trying to overturn these laws through diplomatic channels, political pressure — anything they could possibly do.”

As Tellides walked the streets of Thessaloniki, she found little that celebrated the city’s Jewish heritage. All that exists are a couple of Holocaust memorials, two surviving synagogues, and a small but impressive Jewish museum. 

“Many of these spaces commemorate the community’s death rather than its life,” she writes in her thesis before calling for more memorials to the lasting influence of Jewish residents. 

One thing the city has in abundance are vestiges of the ancient Jewish cemetery, which was in fact dismantled during the Holocaust. “They used the tombstones to rebuild after World War II,” Tellides said. “They’re built into landscaping walls and parks. One of the biggest churches has Hebrew inscriptions in its floor.”

That harrowing chapter wasn’t a focus for Tellides, but it was impossible to set aside entirely. Thousands of Jews had already left Thessaloniki by the 1940s. During Nazi occupation, about 96 percent of the remaining population was deported and killed in concentration camps. 

“So much is gone,” Tellides said. “Not only in terms of the amount of people killed, but all their synagogues, communal centers, and neighborhoods — everything was confiscated or actively destroyed during World War II.”

For Tellides, the scale of loss made it all the more important to focus on the interwar period. “It’s really inspiring, but also difficult to understand how hard they were working to save their community,” she said.

“The thesis is a case study of the failure of the Minority Rights system of the interwar era,” Penslar observed. “Julia catalogs and analyzes Jewish activism and agency in Thessaloniki in ways that go well beyond existing scholarly literature on the subject.”

Milk is something of a head-scratcher for Christina Warinner.

It is rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals and has served as an important food source since prehistoric times. For much of human history, milk has been consumed in various parts of the globe and has helped shape civilization, said Warriner, an anthropologist specializing in biomolecular archaeology.

But the genetic and nutritional story is complex for most of the world’s population and that has puzzled Warriner.

“We produce nearly 700 million tons of milk each year,” said Warinner, the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at Radcliffe, during a Wednesday webinar, “The Milk Paradox.” “And yet we know that most of the world’s population has a lot of difficulty digesting fresh milk. So how do we get to the point where we have this food, which is spread globally and is consumed in so many different places and on every continent in various contexts, and yet it’s very difficult for us to digest?”

When humans are infants, they produce an enzyme called lactase that helps digest lactose, a sugar found in milk, but when they become adults, they stop producing it, which leads to lactose intolerance, a condition present in 65 percent of the adult human population around the world.

“When you’re an adult, you don’t produce lactase anymore, and the lactose will pass undigested into your large intestine, which is full of trillions of bacteria,” said Warinner. “They are more than happy to help you digest that lactose. The problem is in the process, because they will produce about eight liters of hydrogen gas for every quart or liter of milk that you consume.”

In her talk, Warinner, who is also the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, spoke about her interdisciplinary approach, which includes archeology, anthropology, and ethnography, to reconstruct the prehistory of milk, the origins of dairying, and its spread throughout the world.

The story of dairying took place over thousands of years from its origins in the region that encompasses West Asia, the Balkans, and North Africa to its migration to Europe and then around the world.

Scientists believed for decades that early Neolithic farmers developed a genetic mutation that allowed them to produce lactase during adulthood to properly digest milk. This change proved beneficial as they migrated to Europe, which helped them expand over the continent and replace most of the previous hunter gatherers, said Warinner.

Today lactase persistence is common in people of European ancestry as well as some African, Middle Eastern, and Southern Asian groups.

New scientific developments, including ancient DNA analysis and genome sequencing, found that there was no lactase persistence among early farmers during the Neolithic era, and raised questions about the moment when this genetic mutation took place, said Warinner.

“So this opens up a huge question, because medically we explain lactose tolerance on the basis of these mutations or adaptations,” said Warinner. “And yet for 4,000 years, people are dairying; they developed this whole food purposefully, and then they had no genetic basis to digest it. How does this work?”

It is a question that Warinner has tried to solve in her research. “I started to wonder if there might be alternative ways of adapting to a dairy-based diet that isn’t based on your own genome, but might be adapting through the use of microbes, whether that might be, for example, culinary microbes, and through fermentation, or by adapting your own gut microbiome to be able to facilitate and improve digestion.”

Warinner’s research took her to Mongolia, a country with a long history of dairying whose economy is still centered around it, and where local herders milk more species of livestock than anywhere else in the world.

Warinner’s five-year research effort included working with archeologists in Mongolia to reconstruct genomes of ancient Mongolians to see whether they showed signs of lactase persistence.

They found low lactase persistence, which is still the norm. They also studied local cattle and yak herders to analyze their gut microbiomes and compared them with those of residents in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city.

What they found was riveting, said Warinner. Their research was able to trace the history of dairying in Mongolia, which goes back 3,000 years. The analysis of hardened tooth plaque from human skeletons found in burial mounds revealed traces of milk proteins from cows, yaks, goats, and sheep.

When they analyzed lactose intolerance among herders and urban residents in Mongolia, they found that herders showed very few symptoms of lactose intolerance and low hydrogen presence. They also found that the herders’ gut microbiome showed a high volume of lactic acid bacteria, or probiotics, which may help digestion, as well as bifidobacteria, or healthy bacteria that are especially abundant in young infants and help metabolize lactose without producing any hydrogen, said Warinner.

During her talk, Warinner highlighted the way in which archaeology can help inform present-day issues or challenges, such as finding out the many ways in which humans developed dairy products and adapted to consuming milk and dairy products.

“There’s one trajectory, which is to alter the human genome, and we’ve seen this in a number of populations around the world, but an alternative pathway seems to alter the microbes that we interact with both through food and through our own gut microbiome,” said Warinner.

As for the questions guiding her next research, Warinner said, “What change caused the genetic adaptations that occurred in some populations? We don’t know what the trigger was for it, or why in Mongolia, even when it’s introduced, it was never selected for. Those are open questions that we hope to resolve.”

The 16th annual Harvard Allston Partnership Fund awarded grants totaling $200,000 to 26 Allston-Brighton nonprofits at a special gathering in April.

Held at the Harvard Ed Portal, the event brought together interim President Alan Garber, Boston’s Chief of Planning Arthur Jemison, City Councilor Liz Breadon, and State Rep. Kevin Honan among others.

Since its inception, the fund has provided $1.8 million in grants to the local community, aiding a variety of grassroots organizations.

“Allston-Brighton is home to an exceptional network of nonprofits, and I thank all grant recipients — past and present — for delivering meaningful initiatives and programs,” said Garber. “I also thank our advisory board members for evaluating grant applications each year and for helping to determine how best to serve the needs of our community.”

HAPF was established by Harvard University and the Boston Planning & Development Agency, in collaboration with the Allston community, as part of a cooperation agreement related to development approval of Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex in 2008. Since then, thousands of residents in Allston-Brighton have benefited from programs funded by these grants in areas ranging from youth enrichment programs to public health initiatives.

“This fund is a great example of a community harnessing the power of development to positively impact its residents,” said Jemison.

One of the grant recipients was Road to the Right Track, which received $10,000 to fund educational scholarships for team members from Allston-Brighton. “The money we’re receiving tonight will be going directly to the kids,” said founder and head coach Frank Hughes. “Nobody receives a paycheck for this work, so we really appreciated these funds and they will make a huge impact.”

Other grant recipients ranged from Boston String Academy and other programs for youth music instruction, to the Brazilian Women’s Group for mental health and domestic violence advocacy, to summer camp scholarships. A complete list of recipients can be found here.

In addition to presenting the grant recipients with certificates, the evening celebrated four Harvard College students from Allston-Brighton — Richard D. Flores ’25, Jose Marco C. “Marcky” Antonio ’25, Khalid Abdulle ’26, and William A. Hu ’27 — who are recipients of the Joseph M. Smith Scholarship Program. Also honored were the five retiring members of the Harvard Allston Task Force, a city of Boston advisory body for Harvard’s institutional development. Breadon presented the retiring task force members with a resolution from the Boston City Council “in recognition of their years of service on the Harvard Allston Task Force.”  Breadon noted that many of the retiring members of the task force had served for more than 20 years and thanked them for their “incredible service to the community.”

A volunteer board of community members evaluates the grant applications and makes annual funding decisions for the Partnership Fund. For more information.

When LyLena Estabine was applying to college as a high schooler in Olathe, Kansas, she wanted to become a civil engineer. Harvard College didn’t offer that field of study, but her parents nudged her to apply anyway. Estabine got accepted to many of the schools she’d applied to — including Harvard. She faced a dilemma: go to one of the schools that would allow her to pursue her dream of becoming a civil engineer or pursue the unknown at Harvard University.

She went with Harvard and has no regrets. Not only did Estabine forge a new scholarly path there that combined her love of numbers and people, but she also discovered a knack for leadership and got involved in student government and public service. She also changed faiths, shifted political leanings, released two musical albums, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

“Looking back now, I can be sure that this is where God wanted me to be,” she said. “The people that I’ve met here and the experiences that I’ve had … I could have only had at a school like Harvard.”

Once Estabine committed to an uncertain path at Harvard, she first gave economics a try. She liked the quantitative aspects of the field but wanted to incorporate social issues. Eventually, she decided to concentrate in sociology with a track in data analytics.

“It is dedicated to asking these questions about how we can live and work together better,” she said. “I really felt like it was a discipline that sparked my curiosity and engaged me intellectually.”

Estabine said quantitative research can be helpful when evaluating whether systems are working, but it’s crucial to talk to the actual people behind the numbers.

She applied that lesson during her sophomore year while serving on the Undergraduate Council. When the student body decided to transition to a new form of government, Estabine was an integral part of the structure that took its place: The Harvard Undergraduate Association.

“We realized that the system in place was not properly structured to facilitate student engagement and student changemaking within the larger system of Harvard,” she said. Once the HUA was established, Estabine was elected co-president, alongside Travis Allen Johnson.

Jason Meier, the associate dean for student engagement in the Dean of Students Office, was very involved in the development of this new governing body. He had only just started in his position when he met Estabine, and said that his early days in the role were inseparable from her support.  

“LyLena takes the approach of servant leadership, this importance of giving back to something that is greater than one person,” Meier said. “Not only did I have this incredibly kind, thoughtful person to work alongside, but I felt like the student body was in good hands with her leadership and her very gentle, reassuring nature.”

Estabine’s leadership style developed in part from her commitment to the Catholic faith. While she was raised in a Christian family, she underwent a spiritual awakening while at the College. She was looking for answers to some of life’s big questions and found guidance and comfort at St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square.

Patrick Fiorillo — who recently took a new assignment within the Archdiocese of Boston — met Estabine during her junior year while he served as the Undergraduate Catholic Chaplain at St. Paul’s. “I got to see firsthand her own kind of spiritual journey quest and see her wrestle with many deep questions.”

After Estabine converted to Catholicism, she served her faith community as a Harvard Catholic Forum Fellow. In this role, she encouraged other students to bring their whole selves to conversations. Fiorillo said that Estabine had a natural gift for helping students bring their “heart and mind and body and soul.”

“She clearly has an interest in applying her gifts and talents for the good of society at large and other people,” he said.

Estabine’s various leadership roles did not come without challenges. There were a few points when students questioned her ability to lead the student body. For one, she was open about her religious beliefs. She also became politically conservative during her time at Harvard.

“No one really understood that I could be those things and also serve them,” Estabine said.

Meier, who worked alongside Estabine during this time, said it was difficult to see her attacked, often anonymously. Even during this time, he was struck by her maturity and grace.

“She never let it deter her work,” he said. “She continued to trudge forward because she knew serving students would be more important and that’s where she needed to put her energy.”

During her co-presidency Estabine helped establish multiple resources for the Harvard community. One is the Crimson Career Closet, a collection of professional attire available for students to rent located in the Smith Campus Center.

As a singer and a songwriter, she received the First-Year Creativity Award and performed at multiple events, including at Claudine Gay’s presidential inauguration. And over the past few years, she released Vol. I and Vol. II of her music project, “Songs of Prophets.”

As for what’s next, Estabine, who was inducted into the Alpha Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, is entering another time of uncertainty. As she leaves campus, she will be pursuing work as an analyst in the D.C. area.

She offered this advice for students who come after her: “Be fully who you are and don’t struggle to fit yourself into one box fully. You can change always, and you should.”

Molly Przeworski launched into a lecture on genomic trait prediction with disappointing news: Using your genes to read the future is a murky practice.

The Columbia University systems biologist, who visited Harvard last week as featured speaker in the annual John M. Prather Lecture Series, explained how current approaches to genomic trait prediction in humans are imperfect. In a sample of 150,000 people, she said, more than 600 million positions in the genome differ among individuals. Over the past decade, it has become routine to survey such variation in large samples and try to associate variation in traits, such as height, to these genetic differences. Companies now aim to use DNA profiling to make personal predictions — height, cancer risk, educational attainment, which wine would best suit their palate, and even the right romantic partner.

“There are areas, notably for medical prognosis, where genomic trait prediction may turn out to be useful,” said Przeworski, whose lab studies how evolution, natural selection, recombination, and mutation operate in humans and animals. “But by and large, genomic trait prediction is much less informative than these ads and headlines would suggest.”

At the moment, she said, the most useful application is not for humans, but rather for studying other species’ ecological responses to climate change. Her team has used genomic trait prediction among coral species in the Great Barrier Reef to shed light on which are most susceptible to coral bleaching.  

In human genetics, the typical approach for associating some trait of interest (height, cancer risk) to specific genes is called a genome-wide association study. The test relates trait variations to genotypes (base pairs AA, AG, etc.) in certain positions on the genome, and fits them to a line.

However, many traits are associated with a large number of genetic variants. For example, one study Przeworski cited found 12,000 unique positions on a genome in which changing one base pair letter would have a small effect on one’s height. What’s more, environmental factors, such as nutrition, also affect height.

“I think a lot of us have this implicit model of what genomic trait prediction should mean —­ that we understand something about how that genetic variant affects the protein, affects the cellular phenotype, affects development, and therefore affects height,” she said. “In practice, for almost all complex traits, we are very, very far from that. All we really have is this massive correlational study.”

So if genomic prediction is murky, why bother? Przeworski admitted to asking herself the same question years ago, and investigating contexts in which confounding genetic clues wouldn’t matter as much as simply making a helpful, reliable prediction. “It occurred to me we could make predictions about ecologically important traits in the response to climate change,” she said.

She spent part of her talk describing how her lab followed up, partnering with Australian scientists who study how ocean warming affects coral reefs. Due to temperature-related disruptions in the symbiotic relationship between certain coral species and the algae they farm, some colonies lose their pigment and become “bleached,” which stunts growth and leads to colony death. Przeworski’s team has used their expertise in genomic trait prediction to build models that determine which corals are most vulnerable to bleaching.

“As it becomes more straightforward to collect genomic information, I think its greatest promise may be in applications outside humans,” she said.

The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

A woman is relaxing before a fireplace when a male figure enters the frame.

“Here you go,” he says, handing her a vial. “That’s a good five milliliters.” 

It’s but one quietly awkward scene from the documentary “Spermworld,” directed by Lance Oppenheim ’19. Everybody in the film is connected to a Facebook group called Sperm Donation USA, where prospective parents can connect with volunteer donors, without the anonymity and cost of traditional sperm banks. 

The film, now streaming on Hulu, was produced by The New York Times and inspired by a 2021 story on the high demand for rogue donors.  

Oppenheim’s topic is unusual and provocative, but he said what struck him were the motivations of his subjects. “It’s not just about the desire to have a child,” offered the bicoastal director, whose first full-length documentary was “Some Kind of Heaven” (2020). “It’s about not feeling alone in this world. It’s about something bigger than yourself.” 

We caught up with the 2019 Art, Film, and Visual Studies graduate to learn more about his new project. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The film opens with an encounter between Anica and a donor named Kyle. How long ago did you capture this footage? 

We started filming with Kyle in 2021, and that was our second day of shooting. For me, it’s an important scene for a few reasons. For one, it’s the only scene in the film that results in a successful pregnancy. I also wanted the film to have this uneasiness, this unpredictability. How do these two people know each other? What are they even doing? And because she successfully gets pregnant — leading to this beautiful, transcendent experience — it showcases the potential, the magic that “Spermworld” can yield.

When did you know this subject could sustain a feature-length documentary?

The process of looking at people’s Facebook posts … I was like, “There’s no way this can be a short film.” The fact that there were so many people attempting to find themselves through the process of creating life — that to me felt like a deeply existential thing you could watch forever. 

Say more about the Facebook group and its role in the filmmaking process. 

I kept going back to it, because I was really moved by the sense of community there. You see not just men advertising themselves, hoping someone will choose them. You see people talking about their desires. It’s almost like a support group for people trying to get pregnant. 

Whenever I was confused about where the film was going, or why I was making it, I would go back to their posts. I knew I wanted the movie’s tone to mimic the experience of reading them. 

What drives women to this group and similar online forums?

There are many reasons, but a major one is economics. Sperm banks are cost-prohibitive for so many. The idea that you can get free sperm from someone who’s willing to hand it over gives some people a real sense of agency and community.

I didn’t know sperm banks were so expensive.

It’s crazy. You have to pay like $1,000 per vial. Maybe it’s strange to see people in the movie going the unregulated route, but there’s nothing stranger to me than going to a place that’s so deeply monetized.

Let’s turn to some of the characters we meet in the film, starting with super-donor Ari Nagel, who has fathered well over 100 children and spends his time crisscrossing the globe to visit them. 

He’s been in the media so many times; initially I was wary of engaging with him. But then I became interested in how he was stuck in this loop. Everyone around him was saying, “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself. You have a problem.” He sort of acknowledged that he wanted to stop and chart a new course. But also, he was aware that he could never stop because it gives his life so much purpose. 

I was really drawn to donor Tyree and his fiancée, Atasha, a woman who dreams of becoming pregnant herself.

I found Tyree on Facebook and then an associate producer, David Malmborg, first talked to him over Zoom. David told me Tyree was engaged, and maybe his fiancée would want to participate in the film. So that was the first place I went — “I find you interesting, but I find your fiancée interesting as well.” These movies require so much vulnerability and trust. I have to be honest with everyone from the very beginning about what I’m trying to do. 

Also fascinating is Steve, a 60-something divorcé and brand-new donor. He appears romantically inclined toward Rachel, a much younger woman who hopes to become pregnant despite living with cystic fibrosis.

Donating is something he’s doing to fill this void, to feel he can contribute meaningfully to society. His relationship with Rachel starts in this ambiguous place, where the two of them are spending more time together than you would expect with the traditional sperm donor/recipient dynamic. Ultimately, whether or not there’s a romance is irrelevant, because they’re both so aware of their own mortality. 

It occurs to me that our culture fixates on certain women’s drive to become parents. Did you set out to capture that urge from the male side?

One thing I noticed early on is that women joined the Facebook group with the desire to get pregnant. And if they achieved that, they would quickly leave. The men stuck around. They fulfilled other people’s desires. But then they returned to their lives, where they are in most cases completely disconnected from their donor children.

I was really interested in that purgatorial space, where they’re doing this to help people, but they’re really doing it for themselves. They’re giving back to give their own lives purpose. And when they’re done, they basically return to a world that feels meaningless. This theme keeps coming up, and I knew it wasn’t necessarily gendered after finding Atasha and Rachel — whom I consider the heart of the movie. These are people solely defining themselves by their attempts to have children — and hoping it will change things for the better. 

We’re now three academic years beyond the pandemic. A lot of families think things are back to normal. Thomas Kane disagrees.

“A lot of parents misperceive how much students have lost,” said the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research. “That has been one of the biggest things hampering the recovery, parents thinking things are fine now that kids are back in school.”

According to Kane’s research, on average students have lost about a half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. But that’s on average; individually, some schools are doing even better than before the pandemic, while others have lost as much as two grade levels in education.

Heather Hill, a co-director of the teacher education program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said one thing she noticed was that students forgot how to “student.” Gone were skills in studying, sitting in classrooms, and taking notes.

“When teachers came back they said, ‘Wow, these kids have forgotten how to be students,’ and one of the things we saw pretty immediately was a rise in behavior issues,” Hill said. While a lot of those issues have been addressed, she said, others — like the rising absenteeism rates that are nearly double pre-pandemic levels — have not.

Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.’06, a New York State Master Teacher who teaches math at Colonie Central High School, said educators are facing higher expectations than ever.

“We’re asked to be counselors, social workers, teach math, teach writing, and teach students how to be students,” Conklin said, pointing to rising rates of turnover and burnout. Guests talked about the need to better support teachers and what that might look like beyond pay raises.

In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Kane, Hill, and Conklin about post-pandemic challenges in the classroom and how to fix them.

More episodes

Anti-Jewish hate is often connected to anti-Muslim hate, said political scientist Nazita Lajevardi, and she has the data to prove it.

“Our research … finds that there is a group of people who not only agree that Muslims contribute to all problems in American society, but who also agree that Jews contribute to all problems in American society,” she said.

Lajevardi laid out the evidence during the “Pernicious Prejudice: Scholarly Approaches to Antisemitism and Islamophobia” panel last week at Tsai Auditorium. Part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences initiative on civil discourse, the conversation featured four experts on these forms of animus. The event was hosted by Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, which co-sponsored the event.

Lajevardi, an associate professor at Michigan State University and author of “Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia” (2020), drew from her 2023 paper concerning the shifting patterns of hate speech and hate crimes following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where antisemitic rhetoric was prominently featured.

She and her co-authors analyzed information on hate incidents reported by the FBI, Anti-Defamation League, and Council on American-Islamic Relations. They also drew data from the mainstream social media site Reddit as well as more fringe platforms 4Chan and Gab.

Slurs against Muslims and Arabs decreased both on- and offline starting about one month before the rally, Lajevardi said. “What becomes incredibly important to know is that slurs against Jews increased right after the Unite the Right rally. In fact, slurs against Jews increased to 225 percent of their prior levels on Gab.”

Perhaps most revelatory were the researchers’ one-by-one scrapes of user feeds on the same platform. “What we found here is that people stopped mentioning Muslims and replaced those slurs with mentions toward Jews,” Lajevardi said. “We found a target substitution effect at the individual level.”

Kassra A.R. Oskooii, an associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, spoke to the particularities of Islamophobia.

“Our research … finds that attitudes toward Muslims are distinct insofar as they’re closely associated with tropes of terrorism, violence, and existential threat on the one hand — and perceived cultural incompatibility with the American way of life on the other,” he said.

As a result, social scientists have failed to predict political outcomes that curb civil liberties and religious freedoms specifically for Muslim Americans, Oskooii argued.

“We have looked into measures such as passing laws that restrict the number of mosques and Islamic centers, which gained a lot of traction after mobilization against the construction of Park51 Islamic center in lower Manhattan,” Oskooii said. Also cited were restrictions on immigration from Muslim-majority countries under former President Donald Trump and increased surveillance following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Speaking directly about antisemitism was Jeffrey Kopstein, a political science professor and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. After a long academic career spent studying past discrimination, he was surprised by the reaction to his move from the University of Toronto to UCI in the mid 2010s.

“People said, ‘You’re crazy. Why are you going? It’s an antisemitic campus,’” he recalled.

That inspired research into contemporary attitudes toward Jews at the school, with Kopstein measuring the prevalence of various antisemitic stereotypes. At the behest of the Anti-Defamation League, the investigation later expanded to include three more UC campuses, with Kopstein collecting data both before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

The results have yet to be published, but Kopstein previewed key findings. For example, before Oct. 7 about 25 percent of respondents agreed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the U.S. Thirty-five percent agreed after the attacks.

“The thing about these results is, they’re not out of line with the rest of society,” offered Kopstein, pointing to broader data from the ADL.

Also measured was whether seniors harbored stronger anti-Jewish sentiments than first-years, with Kopstein finding “no change” between the two groups, rebutting conservative claims that colleges and universities push radical ideas that result in discrimination.

“The U.S. doesn’t have a campus problem,” he concluded. “It has an antisemitism problem.”

Sabine von Mering, Brandeis University professor of German and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, used her time to call for greater scrutiny of social media sites. Her 2022 book “Antisemitism on Social Media,” co-edited with the University of Haifa’s Monika Hübscher, is filled with case studies of antisemitic incidents on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, highlighting the role of algorithm-driven technology in propagating prejudice.

“One thing I always want to emphasize is that this is happening for profit. The platforms being used in all of these cases are profiting handsomely from the spread of hate,” said von Mering, who also directs Brandeis’ Center for German and European Studies.

A German translation of her book is currently being reworked to incorporate Hamas’ use of social media on Oct. 7, she shared. “These images and videos were seen by millions around the world in real time,” von Mering said. “And again, social media companies were profiting in real time as well as advertisements were being sold.”

Seray Sener and Alan Rheaume came to the U.S. to begin working on master’s degrees at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in June 2022.

Sener, who worked for Pfizer in Turkey, and Rheaume, a neurosurgery resident in Canada, enrolled in the same “hybrid” epidemiology program, mixing two intensive, three-week stays on campus with four semesters online, ideal for working professionals and foreign students. Each hoped the program would help them take the next steps in their careers.

Neither came to Boston expecting to find a life partner, however.

Heather Baer, faculty director of the MPH in Epidemiology program, said the program is designed to bond classmates rapidly during campus stays. Its intensive nature keeps the 50- to 60-person cohort together both inside and outside of class, allowing them to bond over academic material, program-sponsored social events, shared housing at nearby Massachusetts College of Art, and during down time, when they’re free to tour the city, walk on Boston Common, kayak on the Charles, and engage in other activities.

It might be an understatement to say that for Sener and Rheaume it worked better than it perhaps ever has.

“The three weeks they’re on campus are very intense. It’s typical for the students to become really good friends during that time,” said Baer, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School and of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “One of the main points of that three weeks is for students to bond so that when they go off for the next year — much of which is online — they’re interacting with people they already know really well. But I don’t think we’ve ever had any other couples get engaged.”

Sener and Rheaume say the first day of class included a touch of love at first sight despite their different backgrounds. She’s from Turkey, where he “melted” in the 104-degree heat during a recent visit, and he’s from Canada, where she was greeted with minus 4-degree Fahrenheit temperatures during a visit for Christmas and New Year’s 2022.

The frosty capper on that visit was an invite by his family to a celebratory polar plunge in Lake Ontario’s 39-degree water. The air temperature by then had warmed to a balmy 28.

“It’s difficult because you cannot breathe, you cannot control your body,” Sener said of the experience. “And I didn’t have health insurance in Canada.”

“We found we have this shared mission together, as well as a personal connection and similar values.”

Alan Rheaume

Sener said that the two getting engaged was a bit of a surprise, especially since her mother warned her that North American men might break her heart. Sener was initially looking for a native English speaker to pair up with for homework — English is her second language — and was determined whoever that was would remain forever “in the friend zone.”

Those homework sessions, however, turned into trips to the gym together, and then dates around Boston. Though the pair faced both geographic and cultural gulfs, they found that they nonetheless had a lot in common: ambition and a drive to succeed academically and professionally paired with a deep appreciation of social and family connections.

In fact, their decisions to earn advanced degrees have already reaped gains, even ahead of graduation this spring. Sener said the program has already fostered her promotion to a new position with the multinational company, where she is now global director of oncology.

Rheaume said his studies have given him the quantitative tools for what he anticipates will be a career combining roles as a neurosurgeon and an academic researcher. He’s been accepted into a cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery fellowship at Stony Brook University Hospital on New York’s Long Island.

“The work that we want to do is not just something to make money, but a vocation where you can contribute and give back to your community,” Rheaume said. “We found we have this shared mission together, as well as a personal connection and similar values.”

That isn’t to say that things have been entirely smooth over the last two years. Though they were on campus together for six weeks and managed weekslong visits to each others’ home cities, there were months of dealing with the complications of a long-distance relationship and the nine-hour time difference between Edmonton and Istanbul.

She once called from the beach, for example, while he was in emergency surgery. He called back when the surgery ended, but she was then in a meeting with Pfizer executives.

Still, both did what they had to in order for it to work. Rheaume said his medical training made him a champ at getting up at odd hours for a phone call, and he blithely handled oddities like red wine for a remote dinner date, despite it being breakfast time in Edmonton.

“There were times when, because of the time difference, I’d be downing red wine at 9 a.m. on a Saturday because that time worked for her on a Saturday night,” Rheaume said.

All this occurred against the backdrop of the pair’s busy professional lives and a significant course load. The remote portion of the program was designed to be mostly asynchronous, with students able to view course modules on their own time, but it also included weekly live classroom sessions, discussion groups, and homework, some of which had to be done in collaboration with classmates.

“They’re clearly both bright and there’s no question about them being smart, motivated, capable people,” Baer said. “On a personal level, they are both very charming as well.”

The pair put those capabilities to work, both in the classroom and out.

Outside of class, Rheaume managed to teach himself Turkish using a cellphone app. He and Sener eventually solved the logistical puzzle of their long-distance relationship when Sener moved to Edmonton, and they plan to move to New York together in the coming months.

Now, though, their looming graduation has brought both their Harvard and personal journeys full circle. Just weeks after they receive their hard-won degrees — Commencement will be the first time their families will meet — they’ll get married in Turkey and have invited their entire cohort and several program faculty and staff members to attend.

“We want them to be with us because they saw us from day one and supported us,” Sener said. “They’re really close friends.”

Colleges and universities have been wrestling with concerns over plagiarism and other ethical questions surrounding the use of AI since the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022.

But Sam Altman, whose company, OpenAI, launched the chatbot app, said during a campus visit Wednesday that AI is such a powerful tool that higher education would be doing its students a disservice by turning its back on it — if that were even possible now. And some of the old rules of ethics will need to be rethought.

“Cheating on homework is obviously bad,” said Altman. “But what we mean by cheating and what the expected rules are does change over time.”

Altman discussed AI in the academy, along with the subtleties of using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, while at the University to receive the Experiment Cup from Xfund, an early stage venture capital firm. That event was sponsored by the John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard Business School, and the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS). It featured a conversation between Altman and Xfund co-founder Patrick Chung ’96.

Speaking to the Gazette before the Cup presentation, Altman likened the initial uproar at schools over ChatGPT to the ones that arose after the arrival of calculators and, later, search engines like Google. “People said, ‘We’ve got to ban these because people will just cheat on their homework,’” he said.

Altman, who left Stanford at 19 to start Loopt, a location-sharing social media app, said the reaction to calculators, for instance, was overblown. “If people don’t need to calculate a sine function by hand again … then mathematical education is over,” he said, with a gentle half-smile on his face.

Altman helped launch OpenAI in 2015 and its wildly influential ChatGPT — which can write papers and generate computer programs, among other things — before being removed in 2023 and then reinstated four days later as the company’s CEO.

ChatGPT, he said, has the potential to exponentially increase productivity in the same way calculators freed users from performing calculations by hand, calling the app “a calculator for words.”

He warned, “Telling people not to use ChatGPT is not preparing people for the world of the future.”

Following a bit of back-and-forth about how the ethics of using ChatGPT and other generative AI may differ in various disciplines, Altman came down hard in favor of utility, praising AI’s massive potential in every field.

“Standards are just going to have to evolve,” he said. He dismissed the notion that ChatGPT could be used for writing in the sciences, where the emphasis is on the findings, but not in the humanities, where the expression of ideas is central.

“Writing a paper the old-fashioned way is not going to be the thing,” he said. “Using the tool to best discover and express, to communicate ideas, I think that’s where things are going to go in the future.”

Altman, who last month joined the Department of Homeland Security’s Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board, said ethics remains a concern, and one that has yet to be resolved.

“There will be a conversation about what are the absolute limits of the tool, how do we as a society … negotiate ‘Here is what AI systems can never do.’ Where do we set the defaults? How much does an individual user get to move things around within those boundaries? How do we think about different countries’ laws?”

However, that discussion should not slow the development of AI. Instead, Altman described parallel tracks.

“Generally speaking, I do think these are tools that should do what their users want,” he said, before adding an important, if less than specific, caveat: “But there are going to have to be real limits.”

Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman has been appointed dean of science, effective July 1, by Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is a pioneering experimental neuroscientist who uses electron microscopy and computational reconstruction to study neural connections in the mammalian brain. One of his major research goals is to generate a complete map of the brain’s complex connective pathways.

“I am thrilled to welcome Jeff into this new role and to have him advancing the extraordinary possibilities of our academic community,” Hoekstra said in a message to the FAS community.

A member of the faculty since 2004, Lichtman said his strong desire for a prosperous and growth-oriented science enterprise at Harvard, as well as his personal and professional commitment to the institution, drove his decision to take the leadership role.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity,” he said. “Obviously it is a great challenge, but I like hard work.”

Lichtman was a founding affiliate of the Center for Brain Science, a University-wide coalition of researchers seeking new insights into neural circuits and how they translate to thought and behavior. Among Lichtman’s research interests is studying how mammalian brains are rewired during postnatal learning — the phenomenon that explains why the young often can learn complex tasks more quickly than adults.

Answering such questions led Lichtman and colleagues to develop visualization technologies for neural connections and for monitoring how they are altered over time. One of their inventions, the “Brainbow” method, uses fluorescent proteins in transgenic mouse brains to distinguish individual neurons from each other.

Recently, Lichtman partnered with computational neuroscience colleagues at Google, MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere to focus on the watershed challenge of creating a synapse-level wiring diagram of an entire mammalian brain. In this and other work, he brings together researchers from the life and physical sciences as well as computer science and engineering. 

Beyond his own research program, Lichtman serves as faculty director of the Harvard Center for Biological Imaging and is on the steering committees of the Center for Brain Science, the Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, and the Harvard Brain Science Initiative. He is also director of undergraduate studies in neuroscience and chair of the curriculum committee of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Lichtman came to Harvard after working for 30 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also did his M.D. and Ph.D. work (1980). He received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College.

He succeeds experimental physicist Christopher Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, who assumed the role as dean in 2018 after an interim term. Stubbs will continue to have a leadership role in the FAS as special adviser on artificial intelligence to Hoekstra.

“Chris Stubbs has been an outspoken advocate for the division, a highly effective leader of FAS initiatives from pandemic scenario planning to pedagogical responses to AI, and a generous and collaborative partner to me in my time as dean,” Hoekstra said.

Lichtman also reflected on the changing landscape of scientific research and education in the age of instant, AI-generated answers. “Thinking about our educational mission, as dean, I’d like to explore not just how we can more effectively convey to our students the explosive growth in scientific knowledge, but also how can we better instill in them the essential importance of learning how to ask questions that don’t yet have satisfactory answers,” he said.

The same week President Biden signed legislation to provide $61 billion to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia discussed the run-up to the war during a visit to the Kennedy School.

John J. Sullivan, a Boston native, was appointed by former President Donald Trump in late 2019 to serve as the nation’s top diplomat in Moscow. Though he strongly opposed Vladimir Putin and his regime, he wasn’t “looking for a fight.” 

“I was looking for the few areas that we could cooperate,” Sullivan said on Wednesday — like space, cyber, strategic stability, and arms control. He also hoped to discuss the return of wrongfully detained Americans. “I’m sorry to say we made progress on none of that,” he said. 

There was little indication that Russia was planning to attack Ukraine during the final year of the Trump presidency or in the first six months of the Biden administration, Sullivan said. Ukraine had not been a major diplomatic concern and rarely came up in talks between the two countries. 

But by October 2021, as Russian military infrastructure and troops were amassing on the Ukraine border, U.S. officials realized that Russia was indeed planning to invade its neighbor. Sullivan recalled joining CIA Director Bill Burns to confront Kremlin officials the following month, as Russian officials continued to deny attack plans while boasting about the country’s military capabilities. 

In hindsight, Sullivan said, Putin was always going to invade Ukraine regardless of any outside circumstances, including a Trump victory in 2020. 

The Russian leader hasn’t been and won’t be dissuaded even by the great damage the conflict has inflicted on the Russian economy, the military, and its population, according to Sullivan: “Putin does not have an off-ramp; he does not want an off-ramp in Ukraine.” He continued: “It’s a catastrophe what’s happened to Ukraine. I feel passionately about it, but it’s equally tragic what’s happened to Russia” under Putin and as a result of the war. “This is a great country and a great people who could make contributions to humanity.” 

A key U.S. priority during Sullivan’s tenure was to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was set to expire less than a month after Biden took office. Sullivan described a frustrating series of talks with Russian officials en route to a deal. “Nothing is ever easy, even if we both wanted the same thing,” he said. (The Russians have since suspended their participation in the treaty.)

Sullivan was the deputy secretary of state from 2017 to 2019, and served briefly as acting secretary after Rex Tillerson was fired from the post in 2018. He succeeded Jon Huntsman as ambassador to Russia after Huntsman stepped down to run for governor of Utah. In fall 2022, the Russian government froze him out and ordered him to leave Moscow, which he did. He’s now banned from traveling to Russia. 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sullivan said, the Russians didn’t feel the Trump administration went easy on them. He saw no evidence that Putin had compromising information on Trump that would explain the U.S. president’s stated admiration for the Russian leader. Sullivan also pushed back on the perception that Putin and Trump had some “corrupt, special relationship.” 

Trump had the same kind of relationship with other world leaders, he said, including Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India, and Recep Erdoğan of Turkey. “It’s all about what benefits him, Trump, personally, without a vision of what’s in the interests of the United States more broadly,” he said. 

In 2019, when David Velasquez heard that Massachusetts General Hospital was convening a working group on homelessness among its patient population, he wanted to help.

Alister Martin, an MGH Emergency Department resident, welcomed Velasquez, telling him there was plenty of work to go around and any willing hands were welcome. But as he listened to Velasquez’s story, Martin realized his new colleague not only brought passion to a tangled, societal-scale problem, but also valuable perspective: No one had to explain the challenges of poverty and homelessness to him.

“He told me his story, how he had struggled with homelessness. It was clear this was not just an academic issue to him,” said Martin, today an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It was clear. This is a guy coming in for the right reasons.”

Velasquez grew up in Southern California, the son of asylum seekers from war-torn Central America. He is graduating from the Medical School this spring after seven years on Harvard’s campuses. The first of his family to go to college, Velasquez was not satisfied with a single Harvard degree, or even two — he took a break between his third and fourth years at HMS to earn a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and one in business administration from Harvard Business School. The dual degrees, he said, are tools to extend his medical career beyond the clinic into policy and business with the aim of reforming a healthcare system too often inaccessible to those on society’s fringes.

When asked about his childhood, Velasquez describes a setting quite distant from the white marble and granite of the HMS quadrangle in Boston.

When his family arrived in the U.S. in 1993, they lived for a year in an East Los Angeles church that welcomed undocumented immigrants. Velasquez was born after that time, but his parents still struggled financially, limited by elementary school educations to low-paying jobs.

Velasquez remembers the family losing their home in 2009 and the six of them — his parents, three brothers, and himself — living in a motel. He also remembers his father standing outside a Southern California Home Depot in hopes a contractor would give him a day’s work and his mother, whom he counts as one of his heroes, working constantly cleaning people’s homes.

Despite his parents’ commitment to hard work, money was always short and healthcare a luxury. He recalls his father once making the difficult decision not to take Velasquez’s sick mother to the doctor because he needed the gas to get to work the next day.

Having a son at Harvard hasn’t proven a shield from life’s financial pressures.

In 2019, money ran out and his mother and father had to give up their home and move into a motel for several weeks. Later that same year, his father had a heart attack, which he survived but which generated a $120,000 medical bill.

Velasquez helped the family navigate that difficulty, consulting lawyers in Boston who counseled that they insist the hospital abide by California requirements that its hospitals provide free care to those who can’t afford it. Velasquez flew home after his OB/GYN rotation that year to talk to hospital administrators and handle the paperwork.

“There were many times when my parents got sick, and they never went to the doctor because my dad needed the gas the next day to go to work,” said Velasquez, who in June starts his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “There were neighbors having legs amputated because of uncontrolled diabetes and so forth. That ultimately taught me that there’s a bigger problem here that I need to understand and think about.”

Velasquez’s parents’ journey to the U.S. started in Nicaragua in the late 1970s when his father, at age 19, began fighting against the dictatorial regime of the Somoza family, which had ruled Nicaragua for decades. In 1983, he picked up arms again, joining the Contras in opposition to the Sandinista government, which had taken over.

After the war ended with the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro, his father left the country out of concerns for his own safety, eventually traveling to Mexico where he met Velasquez’s mother. In 1993, wanting a better future, they came to the U.S. seeking asylum because they were not able to return to Nicaragua. It took eight years, but the request was eventually granted.

Velasquez began college at the University of Southern California, planning to become an engineer. The transition to college was nearly overwhelming, and he wrestled with doubts, considering dropping out during his first year.

“I almost dropped out of my first semester, not because of academic reasons, but because I didn’t believe in myself,” Velasquez said, adding that he uses that experience today when he talks to students from similar backgrounds. “Kids that come from nontraditional backgrounds don’t necessarily believe in themselves and have confidence in themselves. I often tell students two things: ‘You can do it,’ and ‘but not alone.’”

Velasquez credits his success so far to the support of many around him. In addition to his family, friends, and classmates at Harvard, several mentors — including Martin — have provided valuable examples, opportunities, and advice.

Velasquez reconnected with Martin during the pandemic in GOTVax, an effort to bring COVID-19 vaccines to communities where the need was greatest. Martin was an organizer of the effort, and Velasquez ran its East Boston branch, helping deliver 1,000 vaccines to people in the community.

Later, in 2021-22, when Martin was a White House Fellow, he organized a round table on healthcare access and tapped Velasquez to be the panel’s only student participant.

“He’s incredibly driven and passionate, but underneath he is really warm and funny,” Martin said of Velasquez. “The thing that really surprised me was just how effective he was right off the bat, how people really loved working with him and how well he fit in.”  

Velasquez’s mentors haven’t been limited to faculty members. When he was 19 and an intern at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, a nurse named Matt helped him through a key experience: his first time performing CPR on a patient whose heart had stopped and whom they eventually revived.

At just 19, the idea that he could impact someone else’s life in such a profound way nudged Velasquez further from his engineering path and fed a budding interest in medicine.

“The patient comes in — no pulse — and we started CPR. I go second, and we keep going back and forth. He regained a pulse five, seven times and ultimately was resuscitated,” Velasquez said. “I remember coming home and talking with my roommate about how, if I, as a 19-year-old without many skills, could contribute in some way to helping that patient come back to life, how much one could do with the field of medicine?”

Nikole Hannah-Jones was 11 the first time she wrote a letter to the editor. 

She regularly read the paper in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, with her father and was struck by how Black people only appeared there in stories about crime. So when Jesse Jackson ran for president and did poorly in her state, she decided to write about how it made her feel. 

When her letter was published, she said, it was one of the first times she experienced the power of the written word and how journalism could be used as a tool for “telling our own stories.” 

“I could see something that I thought was unjust in the world, and I could write something about it,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in her keynote address at “Reckoning with History, Shaping Our Future,” the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s 2024 Symposium. “I couldn’t change it, but I could at least force people to think about it, to grapple with it.”

As an investigative journalist, Hannah-Jones has devoted her career to highlighting racial injustice around her, a notable example being her award-winning “The 1619 Project,” which reframes American history, placing slavery at the center of the nation’s development and examining how its legacy continues to shape lives today.

The year 1619 had been on Hannah-Jones’ radar since she was 15. She said that as a young person, she noticed how few Black figures emerged in her history class and assumed there must be a good reason for that. But when she took a semester-long class on African American history, she learned “more about Black people’s contributions, not just to the United States but globally, than I learned my entire life.” It was transformative. 

“That’s when I started to understand that what they’re calling history is not actually what happened,” she said. Her teacher introduced her to the book “Before the Mayflower,” in which she was introduced to The White Lion, an English ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to the U.S. in 1619, well before the Mayflower arrived. “As a journalist, I [always felt] like I was working my way slowly back to 1619,” she told the audience. “[Slavery] would corrupt and corrode and shape everything about the United States.”

Hannah-Jones, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, spoke on the first day of the two-day event at the African Meeting House in Boston, the oldest existing Black church building in the country and part of the Museum of African American History. She was joined in conversation by Kiersten Hash, a junior at the College. 

Hannah-Jones pitched her project to The Times when she realized the 400-year anniversary of slavery was approaching. One reason was that she wanted to help people understand the country we live in today and why inequity is so pervasive. But her other reason was that she wanted to answer the question that “every Black person” gets at least once in their life: Slavery was a long time ago, so why can’t you just get over it?

“I was like, ‘I’m going to provide the answer to that, which is we can’t get over it because y’all haven’t gotten over it,’” she said. “We have refused to be truthful about slavery and how it has shaped our society.”

But, she noted, that is only the beginning — a necessary step but not a whole resolution.

“We have to start with the truth-telling, but the truth-telling is just the beginning. No reckoning has occurred. We’re not even close,” Hannah-Jones said. An incredible amount of work still needs to be done, including financial compensation to descendants, investment in communities affected, and further efforts to repair the harm “that cannot be fixed.”

She asked the event organizers to share information about what Harvard has committed to doing, including through a $100 million fund to advance the recommendations from the Presidential Committee; the recommendations serve as a reckoning of Harvard’s own legacy of slavery. Examples of Harvard’s investments in repair work with descendant communities include the Du Bois Scholars Program, an intensive, nine-week summer research internship at Harvard College for students from historically Black colleges and universities, and the Reparative Partnership Grant Program, which is meant for community organizations to advance “innovative and impactful projects that address systemic inequities affecting people who have been harmed by slavery.”

A major reason Hannah-Jones focuses so adamantly on financial compensation is because it seems like “we want to do everything but that.” She reminded the audience that slavery was an economic decision; racism was simply a tool used to justify the act of buying and enslaving people. And as slavery was an economic decision, it requires economic repair.

“We understand in every other aspect of life, if you do something to me, then you have to pay me for that harm,” she said, advocating that even more resources should be going toward descendant communities. “[If you’re] not talking about cash payment, you’re not actually talking about repair.” 

Toward the end of the event, Hannah-Jones shared a bit about what motivated her to do this work. 

“Rage,” she said, which elicited laughs from the audience.

She went on to say there is much that makes her feel hopeless, but she feels her work pays back a debt to her family and her collective ancestors, and paves the way for generations to come. And change is possible.

“If you know that we chose it, you know we can build something else,” she said. 

Jeremy M. Weinstein, an accomplished scholar of political science, experienced academic leader, and dedicated public servant, will become dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on July 1, interim President Alan M. Garber announced Monday.

Weinstein, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, is currently the Kleinheinz Professor of International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. A Stanford faculty member since 2004, he has served that institution by developing and establishing cross-university initiatives and leading efforts to advance the social sciences, global and area studies, and issues of ethics, technology, and public policy.

“Widely respected for his energetic and empowering leadership style, [Weinstein] is responsible for the conception, establishment, and development of major initiatives,” wrote Garber in his message to the HKS community. “Jeremy is an exceptional scholar and leader with significant high-level policy experience who will bring to the deanship a rare combination of talents at a pivotal moment for HKS.”

A tenured professor at Stanford since 2009, Weinstein has worked broadly on issues of comparative politics and public policy, with expertise on civil wars and political violence, ethnic politics, the political economy of development, democracy and governance, policing, and migration.

His scholarship has been published widely in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, and more. His first book, “Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence” won the William H. Riker Book Award from the American Political Science Association for best book on political economy. He is also co-author of “Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action,” which received the Gregory Luebbert Book Award for best book in comparative politics.

Weinstein is co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab, a research team that aims to improve the lives of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants through partnerships with governments, nonprofits, and others to design and evaluate innovative policies and programs.

More recently, Weinstein has been teaching and writing on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy. His recent, co-authored book, “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” was excerpted in The Atlantic, Time, and Fast Company, and reviewed widely.

“The Harvard Kennedy School is a singular institution in the landscape of American higher education known for its unique combination of cutting-edge social science, breadth in public policy, and abiding commitment to public engagement. I am thrilled to return to Harvard to become dean and simply can’t imagine a better platform for working with extraordinary scholars, students, and practitioners to understand and address the most important policy challenges of the next decade.”

In addition to his wide-ranging scholarship, Weinstein is an innovative and experienced academic leader. Working with a team of faculty, he designed and launched Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), a university-wide initiative that trains and invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions to address persistent social problems. As faculty director of SIL, Weinstein is responsible for the leadership, management, and fundraising for Stanford’s key initiative to accelerate the public impact of the social sciences.

Weinstein has also played a critical role in curricular innovations at the intersection of ethics, policy, and technology. He co-teaches a popular undergraduate course in computer science — “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change.”

He also launched and directs a new undergraduate major in data science and social systems, which enables undergraduates to develop expertise in computer science, statistics, and the social sciences, and to apply these skills to address important social problems.

Weinstein’s previous institutional leadership roles include serving as the Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, a role in which he managed 15 centers and programs with a network of more than 400 affiliated faculty members. Earlier in his career, he served twice as the Ford-Dorsey Director for the Center for African Studies from 2007 to 2008 and again from 2011 to 2013.

“We are delighted to welcome Jeremy back to Harvard,” interim Provost John Manning said. “He is a proven institution-builder who has helped bring about innovation across disciplines and impactfully connected his teaching and research to real-world questions that shape the global landscape. He will be a superb and collegial leader for the HKS community in the years ahead.”

A dedicated public servant, Weinstein has also worked at the highest level of government on major foreign policy and national security challenges. Between 2013 and 2015, Weinstein served as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and before that as chief of staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In these roles, he was Ambassador Samantha Power’s principal policy adviser and chief strategist, and led a team of professional diplomats, political appointees, and civil servants.

He also served as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies Committee, which advises the cabinet and the president on foreign policy issues. Before joining the State Department, Weinstein served at the White House as the director for development and democracy in the National Security Council from 2009–2011. He played a critical role in the design and launch of President Barack Obama’s Open Government Partnership, a global coalition of more than 75 governments working to transform how government serves its citizens.

Weinstein earned his B.A. in political science, economics, and public policy with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1997 and received his graduate degrees in political economy and government from Harvard.

Among his many awards, Weinstein received the Karl Deutsch Award for his significant contributions to the study of international relations, the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford, and the Joseph Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, given to the outstanding teaching fellow at Harvard when he was a Ph.D. student.

At Harvard, Weinstein will be joined by his wife, Rachel Gibson, a 2000 M.P.P. graduate of HKS, and two children.

Weinstein will succeed Douglas W. Elmendorf, A.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’89, who has served as dean since January 2016.