It was just hours after Harvard rejected the Trump administration’s demands that the stop-work order arrived in Don Ingber’s inbox.

Ingber, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering’s founding director, said the April 14 order targeted two of his organ-on-a-chip projects, which together had more than $19 million in multiyear contracts with a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Ingber, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was among many University researchers who received such orders after the government froze some $2.2 billion in research funding to the University.

The move came in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands that included changes in governance, hiring and admissions, and audits of student, faculty, and staff opinions. A week later, Harvard filed a lawsuit, calling the demands an illegal and unconstitutional overreach and asking for funding to be restored.

After Ingber received the order, work halted but the scrambling — and uncertainty — began for everyone with a direct stake in the projects, including researchers, students, and postdoctoral fellows, he said.

With Harvard and the federal government at odds, with lawsuits filed, and after watching the Trump administration take dramatic steps in other areas only to walk them back, Ingber said he is reluctant to do anything permanent like layoffs.

“This is a stop-work order that could end next week, especially with the lawsuit going,” he said. “We’re going to take care of the people first. The projects need to stop in terms of expending funds, but if there’s spaces on other grants, we’re shifting people to them. We’ll try to find internal funds to keep them going at least until we figure out what’s going on.”

But decisions needed to be made quickly about how to wind down projects. Experiments halted midstream would likely be lost, as would the progress of students and postdoctoral fellows working on theses or papers based on those projects. There has also been a scramble to protect people, Ingber said, by finding places for them in other projects.

The research itself is also of consequence.

Ingber’s primary project uses organ-on-a-chip technology developed at the Wyss to investigate radiation damage to human lung, intestine, bone marrow, and lymph node, providing a tool to both model damage to tissues lining the chip’s tiny channels and identify new drugs that might ameliorate damaging effects.

Ingber said the research is particularly important given the administration’s plans to ramp up nuclear power production to support the energy-intensive artificial intelligence industry.

But even without AI, the project would be useful in modeling radiation damage to human organs in the event of an accident at a nuclear reactor, for cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy, and — in a worst-case scenario — a nuclear bomb explosion.

The second project uses organ-on-a-chip technology to model the effects of microgravity and radiation exposure on astronauts in spaceflight. Scheduled to be aboard the Artemis II mission to the moon, the specialized chips incorporate the astronauts’ own cells to investigate the impact of spaceflight on bone marrow — where blood cells arise.

“Once you get past the Earth’s atmosphere, solar flares generate incredibly high energy radiation that can be lethal,” Ingber said. “Astronauts will undoubtedly be exposed on a long flight to Mars and you can’t just put them up in a capsule made of lead, which is what some people might suggest, because weight is critical to getting out of the atmosphere. Unless we solve that problem, we’re not going to get to Mars with humans. Maybe robots, but not humans.”

The uncertainty is forcing hard decisions. Ingber said he’s already been approached by one scientist on his team who had immigrated to the U.S. and has decided to leave the Wyss to pursue work in Europe. Ingber agreed to give her a recommendation and help her find a suitable position.

“She’s only been here for six or eight months, but she’s terrified. They’re all terrified,” Ingber said. “It’s hard to know what to tell them, other than we’re going to protect them as much as we can.”

It has also affected the decisions of scientists to come to Boston. A European postdoctoral scientist who had accepted a position at the Wyss recently withdrew his acceptance, saying he had been warned by family and friends it’s not safe to be a foreigner in the U.S.

“We’ve been the magnet for the best and brightest around the world. It’s a positive-feedback loop. They really do attract others, build new industries, and become tax-paying Americans,” Ingber said. “Now, no one from America is going to go into science with its lack of stability, and we already have people in Europe turning down job offers.”

Ingber is baffled at what positive outcome the administration hopes to achieve. He spent 90 percent of his time over the last week managing the crisis: meeting with his leadership team, researchers, and staff; consulting with University administrators; and figuring out where funding can be found to meet rapidly shifting priorities.

He’s also writing op-eds about cuts at the NIH, FDA, and CDC and talking to the media in an attempt to make the broader point that academic research is the foundation of America’s innovation economy and underlies many of the things we accept as part of everyday life, from computers to optical cables to iPhones.

“What has driven the economy over the past 50 years is America’s innovation engine that fosters sciences which fuel technology development, driven by the pact between the government and academia,” he said. “This seems to be coming to an end.” 

Harvard’s Stefanie Stantcheva has been awarded the American Economic Association’s 2025 John Bates Clark Medal, an annual prize recognizing an under-40 economist for significant contributions to the field.

“I’m incredibly honored, truly humbled, and very grateful for this award,” Stantcheva, the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, said Tuesday during a department celebration with colleagues and students.

In announcing the award, the association praised Stantcheva for exploring questions in public finance and producing new insights on tax policy and its impact on economic behavior. 

“The tax system is something so powerful that can essentially make or break an economy,” Stantcheva said. “It can either encourage things like innovation — if it’s properly designed — or really discourage economic activity.”

In their 2022 paper, “Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century,” Stantcheva and her co-authors found that innovation responds to changes in tax policy with high elasticity. The study also revealed that higher taxes have a negative effect on the quantity of innovation but not the quality of inventions.

“Stefanie’s important contributions to the field make her so deserving of this award,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s wonderful to celebrate her alongside her colleagues, including several past winners, which speaks to the continued strength of this department.”

“We’ve been extremely lucky this year, but not surprised at all that Stefanie got it,” said Elie Tamer, Louis Berkman Professor of Economics and chair of the Economics Department. “She has done stellar work and we’re very proud. It’s a happy day for Harvard and Harvard economics in particular.”

Stantcheva founded the Social Economics Lab in 2018. Her recent work has tackled issues in trade, immigration, climate change, and social mobility.

“I am excited to continue the work at the Social Economics Lab to better understand how people think about economic issues and policies,” Stantcheva said. “We are currently exploring new topics — such as the interplay between emotions and policy — and key mindsets, such as zero-sum thinking.”

A new study reveals how a critical imbalance in bile acids — the substances made by the liver that help digest fats — can trigger liver diseases, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer. By identifying a key molecular switch that regulates bile, the study sheds new light on potential liver cancer treatment.

The findings were published this month in Nature Communications.

A unique function of the liver is to produce bile, which in turn acts as a natural detergent, breaking down fats into smaller droplets which are more readily absorbed by the cells in the lining of the small intestine. Beyond acting as a detergent, bile acids — a major component of the bile — also play a hormone-like function that governs a number of metabolic processes. Corresponding author of the study, Yingzi Yang, professor of developmental biology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, looked at the delicate control of how bile acids are produced and how disruption of the tight regulation leads to liver injury, inflammation, and eventually HCC.

Yang and her team at HSDM have spent years studying cell signaling. One of the pathways they focus on is the Hippo/YAP pathway — a signaling pathway crucial for regulating cell growth related to cancer.

“In this study we discovered that YAP promotes tumor formation with a surprising role in regulating bile acid metabolism. Instead of encouraging cell growth as expected, YAP acts as a repressor, interfering with the function of a vital bile acid sensor called FXR,” she said. 

YAP activation paralyzes FXR (Farnesoid X receptor), a nuclear receptor essential to bile acid homeostasis. This causes an overproduction of bile acids that build up in the liver, leading to fibrosis and inflammation, ultimately leading to liver cancer.

Blocking YAP’s repressor activity — either by enhancing FXR function or promoting bile acid excretion — could stop this damaging cycle, according to researchers. In experimental models, activating FXR, inhibiting HDAC1 that enables YAP repressor function, or increasing the expression of a bile acid export protein (BSEP), all helped reduce liver damage and cancer progression.

“With this finding, it could lead us to pharmacological solutions that stimulate FXR, which is very exciting” Yang said.

According to Yang, the findings have additional implications as more is discovered about how YAP influences metabolic control by regulating nutrient sensing. Yang’s interest in studying this function came from her longtime work in cell signaling in liver biology and cancer. She is also a member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

The Yang Laboratory uses molecular, cellular, genetic, and genomic approaches to investigate the critical roles of cell signaling in embryonic morphogenesis and adult physiology. Their research focuses on the mammalian skeleton and liver to explore human biology and address the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of diseases, including cancer.

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.

The average citizen shouldn’t be afraid to imagine a radically different future for humanity, Ruha Benjamin argues. After all, the billionaire CEOs of tech companies are doing it.

The professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, who delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center last week, argued that proponents of AI-powered futures often frame their visions as altruistic despite actually being driven by self-interest.

“There’s absolutely no reason to trust that tech elites have any wisdom to offer when it comes to alleviating human suffering,” Benjamin told the audience who packed Paine Hall. “Billionaires building bunkers to survive AI apocalypse, attempting to disrupt death through cryopreservation, scouting the planet for pop-up cities and network states, are not reliable stewards of the collective good.”

Too often AI technologies marketed as “efficient” and “progressive” only create more oppression, Benjamin said, citing examples such as facial recognition software leading to false arrests and automated triage systems deciding who receives healthcare.

Benjamin said AI is often touted as a moral (or, at least, morally neutral) decision-making technology because it operates on math rather than emotion. But making decisions for society based on math and algorithms hurts the same marginalized groups harmed by the 20th-century eugenics movement, she said.

“One of the buzzwords that goes around is that these systems are so special because they’re engaged in ‘deep learning,’ by which people mean computational depth,” Benjamin said. “But what I suggest is that computational depth without social and historical depth ain’t that deep.”

Benjamin said it’s hypocritical to see superintelligence, Mars colonies, and underground apocalypse bunkers as bold innovations while viewing public goods such as free public transportation and affordable housing as impractical.

“This is an invitation to think about the different types of knowledges that we need around the table,” Benjamin said. “We can’t leave it simply to those who have technical know-how. Many of the problems we’re enduring right now are because those people who are creating tech solutions for society don’t know anything about society.”

Benjamin called for a renewed focus on creativity and imagination, urging universities to prioritize inquiry through arts and humanities.

“This is an invitation not only to be critical, but to be creative. To ask ourselves, ‘Now what?’” she said. “Instead of trying to make the world a little less harmful and make these systems a little less harmful, what if we were to completely reimagine them, envisioning a world beyond borders, beyond policing, beyond surveillance and supremacy? In the process, I think we’ll have to work on dismantling the walls in our own minds, those mental barriers that tell us to ‘get real’ when we attempt to imagine otherwise.”

In 2022, Alyssa Tapley was 13, suffering from T-cell leukemia, and facing a grim prognosis after existing treatments failed to improve her condition. Then, a clinical trial using a novel gene-editing technology called base editing cleared her cancer. It was a breakthrough for science — Tapley’s therapy was the first enabled by base editing — and a lifeline for the patient.

“Now, 2½ years later, I’m 16, preparing for exams, spending time with my family, arguing with my brother, and doing all the things I thought I’d never be able to do,” Tapley told the audience at the 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony on April 5. The prizes, whose recipients this year included several Harvard researchers, honor achievements in physics, life sciences, and mathematics.

The scientist behind the technology that saved Tapley’s life is David Liu, the Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences and vice chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 

“It’s incredibly exciting, and also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility, to make sure that — to the extent humanly possible — we have done everything we can to make these agents as safe and effective as possible for use in patients,” Liu said. 

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from genetic diseases. To help them, Liu, with support from the NIH, DARPA, and other federal agencies, has built on and looked beyond CRISPR-Cas9, the transformative gene-editing protein found in bacteria that cuts through DNA like scissors. 

“That approach of cutting the DNA double helix is very useful for gene disruption or deletion,” he said. “But if your goal is to correct a mutation that causes a genetic disease, it’s not easy to use scissors to achieve gene correction.” 

The limits of the “scissors” approach led Liu and his team, including former postdocs Alexis Komor and Nicole Gaudelli, to develop two new approaches to gene editing: base editing and prime editing. Base editing works on the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand — A, C, G, and T — rather than on the entire double helix.

“You can change a C to a T, a T to a C, an A to a G, or a G to an A,” Liu said. “And those happen to be four of the most common kinds of mutations that cause genetic diseases.” 

But what about genetic diseases caused by other kinds of single-letter swaps, or by unwanted extra letters, or by missing DNA letters? For those cases, Liu’s team, including former postdoc Andrew Anzalone, developed prime editors. Liu likened the tool to a word processor, able to search out a flawed piece of DNA and replace it with a synthesized DNA flap that is specified by the user. 

As of today, there are at least 18 clinical trials using base editing or prime editing to treat a range of diseases, with dozens of patients already treated, Liu said.

Liu connects his research to basic science — research that seeks to understand something new about the world without a clear application in mind — that began at Japan’s Osaka University in 1987. There, a team of researchers noticed something unusual in DNA from E. coli bacteria: highly repetitive DNA sequences that were interspersed with non-repetitive sequences, but with the exact same spacing. The phenomenon became known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR.

“There was no knowledge of what CRISPR did, or whether it was going to be useful,” Liu said. “But it was interesting enough for curious people to study. This is the essence of basic science.” 

Over the course of decades, researchers learned that CRISPR was a kind of immune system that bacteria use to protect themselves from viruses. When a virus enters a bacterial cell, the bacterium incorporates some of the virus’s DNA as a kind of genetic memory, allowing it to identify and destroy the virus if it encounters it again. 

“You can imagine a critic saying, ‘Why do I care about a bacteria’s ability to kill a virus?’” Liu said. “The answer is that it turned out to lead to all the CRISPR nuclease clinical trials, and eventually led to base editing and prime editing, and now we can make just about any kind of change in the DNA of living systems, including correcting the vast majority of mutations that lead to genetic disease. And it all came from the basic science of geneticists who first looked at these clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and wondered what they were doing.” 

Liu is loath to call his technologies a cure: “Scientists are reluctant to use that word until there’s evidence of years without any apparent symptoms of the disease,” he said. But, he added, “The writing’s already on the wall: In some of these clinical trials, the patients are no longer on any medication and don’t have any symptoms of the disease.”

Looking to the future of research and innovation, Liu says he’s deeply worried about the current threat to the partnership between higher ed and the federal government, especially as it relates to young scientists.

“There’s a lot of fear and chaos now that is preventing young scientists from entering the phase of their careers where they can contribute to society in a direct way,” he said. “And that’s a very real tragedy.”

Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros were not known as superstars in their field back in 1992 when they discovered microRNA, a feat that would earn them the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

“We were fine. We weren’t terrible,” said Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. “But there was nothing about it that made it seem like, ‘Oh, these guys are walking on water!’”

Even after the former Harvard collaborators published their findings in the journal Cell in 1993, revealing a new level of gene regulation in the C. elegans roundworm, the evolutionary biology community was not overly impressed. It wasn’t clear that the genes Ruvkun and Ambros, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, discovered mattered to other species, including humans.

Instead, their work, mostly funded by the National Institutes of Health, drew interest from a smaller group of RNA researchers and what Ruvkun calls the “worm community” — those interested in the same model organism.

But the interest in the RNA field kept growing. Meetings that formerly would have drawn 100 attendees doubled in size within a few years. It became clear that the same tiny RNAs had the same role in plants and in worms, and scientists in all different fields were interested in the same questions.

Ruvkun started to realize, “This was some revolutionary stuff, and we were the only people thinking about tiny RNAs in the world.”

Decades of federally funded breakthroughs later, microRNAs are considered fundamental to how organisms develop, mature, and function — playing a key role in translating genes into proteins.

Studies have discovered that the human genome contains about 1,000 microRNAs that control most human protein-producing genes. Therapies based on microRNAs to treat heart disease, cancer, Crohn’s Disease, Alzheimer’s, and several other diseases are in clinical trials.

Ruvkun says about three-quarters of his lab research has been funded by the federal government for the past 40 years, at about $150,000 a year. The money provides enough support for about four people. “It’s not like I had a lab of 50,” he said.

He expresses puzzlement at calls to cut federal funding, emphasizing that spending on scientific work is far from wasteful. “The average pay of the people in my lab has always been about three times the minimum wage,” he said. “These are scientists, and they’re super educated. They have Ph.D.s or are getting Ph.D.s, but they’re paid a little better than working at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Ruvkun is proud that basic research from his field has led to major pharmaceutical companies like Alnylam, which focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialization of RNA interference therapeutics for genetic diseases.

“It’s one of the 10 biggest companies in Massachusetts,” he said, “and it didn’t even exist 20 years ago.” He’s also glad that his research had enough of an impact that he can continue doing basic science while others worry about the business implications.

Of the top 500 companies in the country, Ruvkun emphasizes, well over half are driven by technology — much of the foundational research behind them driven by federal grants. He credits federal funding with turning the U.S. into a scientific and economic superpower during and after World War II.

He worries that a lack of investment could push members of his laboratory away from science research.

“I have all of these people who are 25, 30 years old, and they’re like, ‘What career do I have? What am I going to do?’” The answer, he said, might be the reverse of the post-war trend: They’ll leave the U.S. for more stable positions in Europe.

Legendary basketball player, writer, and activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will address the Harvard College Class of 2025 during the annual Class Day celebration on May 28, the day before Harvard’s 374th Commencement.

“We are so excited to welcome Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the featured Class Day speaker,” said Uzma Issa ’25, first marshal of the 2025 Class Committee. “He’s a champion in every sense of the word — celebrated both for his extraordinary achievements on the court and his lasting efforts to build a more just and compassionate world. He has shown that true leadership is measured by the difference we make in people’s lives.”

“It’s a privilege to share this moment with the Class of 2025 and to celebrate all that lies ahead,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “The world needs their ideas, their energy, and their heart. I hope my words will encourage them to keep learning, keep growing, and keep showing up — for themselves and for others.”

Widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Abdul-Jabbar is also an award-winning author, cultural icon, and tireless advocate for social justice. In 2016, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — in recognition of his contributions on and off the court.

The 7-foot-2 basketball Hall of Famer dominated the NBA for two decades with his trademark skyhook, becoming the league’s all-time leading scorer — a title he held for 39 years. A 19-time NBA All-Star and six-time NBA champion, he remains the only player in NBA history to win six Most Valuable Player awards. Time magazine once dubbed him “History’s Greatest Player.”

Since retiring in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar has continued to use his platform to challenge public thinking on a wide range of issues. An influential columnist, he has written for major media outlets worldwide and now publishes regularly on his Substack newsletter. A nine-time Southern California Journalism Awards Columnist of the Year, he is known for incisive commentary on sports, politics, and popular culture. Today, he remains one of the most outspoken and respected voices confronting racism and inequality in America.

A New York Times bestselling author of 20 books, Abdul-Jabbar’s forthcoming book, “We All Want to Change the World: My Journey Through Social Justice Movements From the 1960s to Today,” offers a sweeping account of the protest movements that reshaped America and will be released in May.

Abdul-Jabbar traces his activism back to his high school years in Harlem, when he had the chance to ask Martin Luther King Jr. a question at a news conference. The brief exchange sparked a lifelong commitment to fighting injustice like systemic racism and inequality in education, health, and employment.

Appointed in 2012 as a U.S. Cultural Ambassador by the State Department, he was tasked with promoting education, racial tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding among young people around the world. In 2021, the NBA established the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award to honor the next generation of athletes working to lift up their communities. His public service efforts have earned him numerous honors, including Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal in 2022.

Abdul-Jabbar is the founder and chair of The Skyhook Foundation, which brings science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education to underserved communities in Los Angeles.

An award-winning documentary producer and two-time Emmy-nominated narrator, Abdul-Jabbar is the subject one of HBO’s most-watched sports documentary of all time, “Kareem: Minority of One.” His on-screen appearances span hundreds of iconic film and television roles.

“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime speaking out against injustice and using his platform to educate and inspire,” said Srija Vem ’25, second marshal of the 2025 Class Committee. “As we prepare to take our next steps in life, his legacy reminds us that we all have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to use our voices, our intellect, and our talents in service of something greater.”

In addition to Abdul-Jabbar’s address, Class Day includes award presentations and student orations. The event will begin at 2 p.m. on May 28 in Tercentenary Theatre and will be livestreamed.

Harvard filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, arguing its freeze on research funding is unconstitutional and “flatly unlawful” and calling on the court to restore more than $2.2 billion in research dollars.

The filing, in U.S. District Court in Boston, requests that the court vacate and set aside the funding freeze to allow previously approved funding to flow and halt administration efforts to freeze current or deny future funding without engaging in procedures contained in federal law.

In a message to the community Monday, President Alan Garber said the suit was prompted by steps the government took over the last week, after the University rejected administration demands for changes to Harvard’s governance, hiring, and admissions policies, and to ensure “viewpoint diversity” in part through audits of viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff.  

Garber described those changes — contained in an April 11 letter from the government — as intrusive and said they’d impose “unprecedented and improper control over the University.”

Garber noted some Trump administration representatives have said since April 11 that the letter was sent by mistake. But he said other statements and the administration’s actions since don’t bear that out.

Within hours of Harvard’s rejection of White House demands, the administration doubled down by announcing a freeze of $2.2 billion in funding and has since said it is considering revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status and threatening the education of international students. In addition, Garber said, the administration is considering freezing an additional $1 billion in funding.

“Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority,” Garber said. “Before taking punitive action, the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism. Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach.”

Harvard’s complaint says the First Amendment protects free speech against government interference intended to enforce ideological balance and bars the government from using legal sanctions or other coercion to suppress speech it doesn’t like.

The complaint also describes the government’s freeze-first strategy as violating laws that lay out procedures for research fund recipients suspected of civil rights violations. Prescribed steps progress from voluntary negotiations to an official hearing followed by findings. Then, only 30 days after the findings are released can funding be terminated.

“These fatal procedural shortcomings are compounded by the arbitrary and capricious nature of Defendants’ abrupt and indiscriminate decision,” the lawsuit said.

The filing describes a rapid escalation on the part of the government. After initial inquiries in February from the administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, administration and University officials scheduled an official visit to campus in late April.

In late March, however, Harvard received a letter announcing a review of research grants totaling $8.7 billion to the University and its hospital affiliates. On April 3, Harvard received a list of conditions under which it might ensure continued funding and, finally, on April 11, a letter fleshed out those conditions.

Those details, which included overreaching and broad-ranging demands, prompted the University’s rejection and Garber’s statement that Harvard would not negotiate over either its independence or its constitutional rights.

Garber said the administration’s actions have jeopardized critical research being conducted on cancer, infectious disease, and battlefield injuries.

With funding in flux, the lawsuit says, hard decisions about things like living cell lines being used to investigate disease and the jobs of researchers whose positions are tied to federal grants will have to be made. Unless funding is restored, Harvard’s research programs will be considerably curtailed.

“The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting,” Garber said. “Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

Garber acknowledged that work to fight antisemitism remains to be done on campus. “We need to ensure that the University lives up to its ideals,” he said.

Though Harvard has already taken several steps in that direction, Garber said the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias will soon release full reports.

He described them as “hard-hitting and painful” and said they include recommendations that have concrete plans for implementation.

“As a Jew and an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism. To address it effectively requires understanding, intention, and vigilance,” Garber said. “Harvard takes that work seriously. We will continue to fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law. That is not only our legal responsibility, it is our moral imperative.”

The Trump administration’s decision to freeze more than $2 billion in long-term research grants to Harvard has put a halt to work across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. The action came in response to the rejection of White House demands for changes that the University argues infringes on its independence and constitutional rights and exceeds the administration’s lawful authority.

The NIH had earlier halted an estimated $110 million in grants to Harvard and its associated hospitals since late February.

We interviewed some of the researchers whose projects have been halted or face an uncertain future.

Sarah Fortune

John LaPorte Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Research interrupted: A $60 million seven-year, multi-institutional consortium to study how the immune system controls tuberculosis.

“About a third of the world is thought to be infected with TB and carry TB, and most of those people will not get sick. But every year, 10 million people get sick, and 1 million people die, which makes TB the world’s leading infectious cause of death. We’re trying to understand the difference between protective and failed immunity to TB to better identify people with TB and then prevent TB, ideally with an effective vaccine.

“This consortium was conceived of at the National Institutes of Health as their moonshot effort to move the needle on TB. The goal was to bring together the very best researchers from around the country and around the world to bring the very best cutting-edge technology, the very best science to understand TB immunity. And if it stops, the whole thing is gone.

“I’ve been building this consortium since about 2014. For me, this is over a decade of work. Scientific knowledge, scientific expertise is a craft. And if you blow it up, you can’t just rehire people and recreate it and then start again. It’s gone.”

[Open Philanthropy, a California-based philanthropic group, has authorized a $500,000 grant to allow researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to complete an ongoing tuberculosis vaccine study, The Boston Globe reported Monday. That study is a single piece of the broader project Fortune is working on as a principal investigator.]

Donald E. Ingber

Founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Research interrupted: Two contracts worth under $20 million: one to test and develop drugs to treat long-term radiation exposure, including chemotherapy, and the other to study the effects of microgravity and radiation in space on human cells to help astronauts travel to Mars.

“Both projects were contracts administered by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is responsible for developing countermeasures for biological, radiation, and chemical threats for the U.S.

“The larger BARDA contract focuses on development of human organ-on-a-chip microfluidic culture models of human lung, intestine, bone marrow, and lymph to model the human response to exposure to gamma radiation, and to identify potent radiation countermeasure drugs. We have made great progress on this project.

“The BARDA project supported by NASA is to use human organ-on-a-chip technology to create living ‘avatars’ of astronauts by lining the chips with cells from astronauts and then flying the chips alongside them on space missions. The goal is to use these to understand the effects of microgravity and radiation (which currently makes it impossible for man to go on long space flights, to Mars, for example) and again, develop countermeasures. This initial project is to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

“Radiation countermeasure drugs we are developing would be valuable for cancer patients, many of whom receive radiation therapy and experience side effects (higher and more effective therapeutic doses could be administered with less toxicity) as well as be stockpiled to protect against a nuclear disaster or attack; and they could enable long term spaceflight, and hence, exploration of Mars, which is not possible now.

“As for what the repercussions are, it means that this type of work would stop but more importantly that the salaries of almost 20 students, fellows, and staff are at risk if this stop order is not reversed soon.”

Duane Wesemann

Associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research in peril: A $10 million project grant to fund a large consortium of laboratories to study the immune system and its ability to respond to different coronaviruses as preparation for future possible pandemics. That grant was halted before the most recent freezes and later temporarily reinstated by a court order pending appeal.

“What we learn from coronaviruses is relevant to other infections because we’re trying to understand how the immune system operates.

“We were finishing up our third year of a five-year plan. The termination was a surprise.

“There are multiple levels of loss. On one level, these grants from the NIH are vetted very heavily by independent scientific review, and there’s only a small percentage of grants that end up getting funded because of the review process. Grants like this and others that are terminated, which have been vetted, scored, and deemed important, rigorous, and worthy to happen, represent a loss of all the effort that went into the process.

“For our lab, it is a huge loss of opportunity. We have been collecting longitudinal blood samples from several individuals over many years to try to understand the long-term effects of immunity to the virus, infection, as well as vaccination, to study how long-lasting things are, and what regulates the longevity of the immune response.

“We may have to cancel collecting blood from this cohort. To see this happen to our lab and to see it happen to other labs across the country is devastating.”

Subhash Kulkarni

Assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research facing uncertainty: A $3.5 million neuroscience research project that studies how the neurons in the gut change with aging and conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

 “My research project has not been stopped yet. Whether it will be stopped or not is something that I don’t know.

“My project is based at my research lab, which is a neuroscience lab that studies the gut. We study the neurons that reside in the gut and regulate the human functions related to eating, digesting, and defecation.

“It is important to understand how these neurons change with aging or with conditions such as Parkinson disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or irritable bowel syndrome. What our lab does is try to understand how the neurons in our gut age, and what can we do to make them young again.

“This is an ongoing project. Our ability to keep on going depends upon our ability to keep putting in grants and getting in the money because we are at the end of our grant cycle. If our grants don’t get funded, all that research stops, and the years of work will go wasted. We are in the last year of a five-year grant. If the grant is curtailed even before the time ends, then the work will stop immediately.

“One of the main things to remember is that when we get funding, part of that goes toward salaries, but a significant part goes towards buying reagents and chemicals from American manufacturers and buying mice from American companies. Every single dollar of federal funding is spent toward people’s salaries and reagent materials that are here in the U.S.

“Our ability to train undergraduates, who are American, all stops immediately if our funding gets stopped.”

“There is uncertainty right now. We don’t know how it’s going to go.

“We hope that crucial research is not stopped because every research that we do at HMS and elsewhere is a result of a highly competitive process. This is not funding that we get because of the largess of the federal government. We have to compete with every single lab around the entire country and it’s a function of that competitive process that we get grants to do the work that we do.”

After years of careful stewardship, the University began this fiscal year with its endowment worth a record-setting $53 billion. 

But that overall number can conceal several important details. Most of the endowment is not only restricted by donors and held in separate funds, but the majority of those funds belong to one of the University’s 12 Schools. Less than 5 percent of the overall value is unrestricted and directly under the discretion of University leadership.

After the conflict that erupted last week between the University and the White House, the Trump administration moved to freeze billions in long-term research grants, with many more “under review.” The president has also argued that Harvard should lose its status as a tax-exempt institution. 

To some degree, endowments can be used to allay financial uncertainty and cover unexpected costs. But those decisions come with costs of their own. 

In this edited conversation, John Y. Campbell, who has served as the Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics at Harvard since 1994, talked about how the endowment actually works.

Campbell’s research focuses on long-term investing, asset pricing, and personal finance. He served on the board of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment, from 2004 to 2011. And in 2021, he was a member of a working group that helped reimagine endowment management for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, or FAS. 

In 2024, you co-wrote a paper on endowment management, using Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a kind of case study. What generally did you find?  

That paper sought to give a framework for helping the FAS think about its long-run budget situation. I, along with my co-authors Jeremy Stein and Alex Wu, were motivated by a frustration with the usual accounting approach, which is all about managing this year’s cash flows so things add up.

So, for example, if you’re short of money and you can spend a little more from the endowment, that fixes the problem this year. But of course, it takes away resources that you would otherwise have in the future. It doesn’t help you in the long run.

This is an economist’s perspective on what can seem like a very large amount of money. You found that — in the case of FAS — the endowment is already being used to cover what would otherwise be a large budget deficit. 

That’s right: When people in the Harvard community or the public at large look at the endowment, they look at those billions of dollars, and they think that that’s money that can just be spent on anything that the University wishes at any time.

There are two separate problems with that. Yes, much of the endowment is restricted — there are severe limitations on what the money can be spent on. But there’s another problem we identify: That in a certain sense, the endowment revenues have already been spent — to fund the ongoing existing operations of the University. 

Those operations funded out of the endowment vary widely: professorships, research, construction among them. And then about a fifth of the annual distribution allows Harvard to offer really generous financial aid, just increased once more this spring. 

Absolutely — and I’m all for that policy. But it does reduce the revenue that the School could otherwise collect, and thus it puts more burden on the endowment to cover expenses each year. 

Then there are the exogenous shocks: financial crisis, recession, the COVID-19 pandemic. In those cases, a university can — and Harvard has — stepped up distributions to cover shortfalls elsewhere. 

That’s right. You can do it in different ways. You can do a “decap” — using endowment funds for current expenses; you can adjust the payout rate; you can borrow against the endowment.

In a short-term emergency, like the pandemic or what may develop in today’s political environment, it may be entirely appropriate to do so. But the thing you need to be aware of is that, when you do that, you are easing your budget problems this year in return for a tighter budget in future.

Harvard’s approach to endowment management, like many others’, relies on targets and projections: It assumes 8 percent returns on investments, 3 percent inflation, and a payout of roughly 5 percent each year. But if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that reality can be a great deal more volatile than that.

That’s right. Our way of looking at volatility — long adopted by Harvard financial administrators — is, in any one year, to find ways to smooth out its effects.

If the endowment does super-well one year — goes up by 25 percent — now you have a lot of new resources. But you don’t need to spend them all at once; in fact, it would be very imprudent to do so. Instead, you smooth it out, gradually increasing your spending in a cautious, well-planned way. 

Meanwhile, there are also downside risks, too: In the wake of the financial crisis, in 2009, the endowment lost 27 percent of its value. And as of this week billions of federal dollars may be at risk of being frozen or revoked. What are the options now? 

University leaders now need to sit down with the sort of spreadsheet framework that’s in our paper, and they need to do a scenario analysis: “How bad could this get?” 

If there’s an endowment tax, if we lose “x” million dollars in sponsored research funding. You could even look at what might happen if Harvard lost its tax-exempt status.

What they are going to see is — if this a prolonged or permanent change — it’s going to have very meaningful implications for Harvard’s long-term future. And you’ll have to do some radical things: There will have to be a major change in spending or a major change in revenue — where you find it somewhere else. 

You don’t have to do everything at once. That would be foolish. The luxury that Harvard’s endowment gives us is time — you have time to make change in an orderly fashion. But our framework says that if circumstances change so that you have less money coming in on a permanent basis, you are eventually going to have to fully adjust.

Some runners cross the Boston Marathon’s finish line with hands held high, a look of elation on their faces. Others find themselves slumped in a medical tent with Jeff Brown, lead psychologist for the Boston Marathon medical team.

“We’re not talking about, ‘Oh, I need ice for an ankle,’” Brown said about these finishers. “Someone is significantly overheated or underheated. They’re having terrible cramps. They’re disoriented. They might not know exactly where they are.” Laid out on cots are people with extremely low levels of salt in the blood, and others who are sad, fearful, and agitated for reasons they can’t explain. Brown’s role, along with his team of mental health clinicians, is to help perform psychological evaluations and recognize symptoms of a wide range of medical conditions.

Seeing these high levels of acute distress mere meters from the finish line, some might ask, “Why bother?” There are other ways to stay in shape or raise money that don’t require an extreme feat of cardiovascular and muscular endurance over multiple hours in unpredictable weather conditions.

It’s a question that Brown, a Harvard Medical School lecturer, McLean Hospital psychologist, and author of “The Runner’s Brain,” ponders each year as thousands of runners funnel past him. It will no doubt be on his mind Monday during the 129th edition of the Boston Marathon.

The reasons, Brown said, are inexhaustible, but what they have in common is that they’re “very, very personal, and really it is that personal energy and commitment that keeps people going, regardless of where they are in their lives.”

Over the years, he’s met hundreds of people who are running for a recently deceased loved one, contending with a cancer diagnosis, and fundraising for a beloved charity. He’s met women who — monitored by medical staff — finished the marathon while far along in their pregnancies and other athletes who explicitly ignored their doctors’ instructions and ran with cracked femurs, torn muscles, recent sprains, and diabetic complications. “Perhaps it’s not a surprise,” said Brown, “that they meet us in the medical tent at some point.”

A marathon channels people’s energy into a methodical, focused pursuit, and, especially at Boston, one that provides some bragging rights. “It allows people to come to terms with themselves,” Brown said. “When it comes to self-concept and belief about one’s capabilities, we always do better when we have some sort of objective measure.”

That objective nature is crucial, Brown says. Not only do you complete a race, but when you finish, you get a medal placed around your neck. “I think of that as kind of this transformational moment,” he said, “because it’s something that was a hope that is now realized as a wish fulfilled. It’s the mind-body thing happening.”

He loves seeing people he’s treated gather enough mental and physical strength to leave the medical tent and finally collect their medals. “It’s almost like they had a chance to review their whole experience one more time,” he said, “and it might mean a little more to them.” He’s seen huge smiles, tears, and quiet reflection. “I think that’s just a reflection of the vast continuum of emotion and purpose and goals that people bring to running the Boston Marathon.”

Marathon runners invest enormously varying amounts of time and energy preparing for the race. Some are young, single people who sacrificed late nights out and lazy weekend mornings to set a personal record. Others are older, first-time runners who might be taking time away from their kids and spouses to complete a bucket-list item. A few are looking to advance professional running careers, and others show up having done barely any training at all.

A medal — and some bragging rights — are far from the only reward that motivates some people to invest thousands of hours into race-specific training and for others to ignore the sound medical advice of their doctors.

“In our world that’s rather cluttered with a lot of criticism, it’s a really nice way of getting affirmations in a healthy way,” Brown said. “And people, in our heart of hearts, we just want to be treated civilly.”

Running is also an opportunity to change your own conception of yourself and, at least for a few hours, how others view you. “For a while there after you complete a marathon, you’re kind of a hero,” Brown said. “You’ve done something that a lot of other people would never set out to do or think about doing, which is pretty darn cool.”

The mental side of running still fascinates Brown and has kept him on the Boston Marathon’s medical staff for more than 20 years.

“That one day, with 30,000 runners, there are 30,000 different ways of completing that marathon,” Brown said. “Imagine all the thinking and psychological experiences and reflections and motivations and negative thoughts and positive thoughts that went all those 30,000 different ways.”

Lawyer and legal scholar Randall Kennedy can fairly be described as something of an iconoclast.

As a public intellectual, he is known for his openness to different points of view and his nuanced and sometimes provocative opinions about issues such as affirmative action (there are costs along with benefits), racial profiling (not completely nonsensical but ultimately discriminatory), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements (abandon them), and some other issues typically associated with the left.

Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, has also been unafraid to engage with the right. In 2020, the conservative Manhattan Institute invited Kennedy, a longtime questioner of critical race theory, to participate in a discussion on the topic. He eventually took other CRT critics on the panel to task for being too categorically dismissive.

“The great thing about his work is that you can never predict where he will end up — on racial justice, he sometimes seems conservative, sometimes liberal,” said then-Law School Dean Martha Minow in a 2013 profile of Kennedy. “In his field of race and the law, he is unique in the legal academy. I don’t know anyone else who has his commitment to pursuing the truth about controversial issues to wherever it goes.”

Kennedy, 70, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and raised in Washington, D.C. His family’s move north from the Jim Crow South, along with his father’s pessimism about prospects for lasting racial justice in the U.S., left a deep imprint on Kennedy’s intellectual life.

The son of a postal worker and a schoolteacher, Kennedy attended the prestigious St. Albans School, did his undergraduate studies at Princeton, and was a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Yale Law School and has taught at Harvard since 1984. The author of seven books, Kennedy recently spoke with the Gazette about his life, career, and views on racial equality in the U.S. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why did your father decide to move the family from Columbia to D.C.?

My parents were refugees from the Jim Crow South. My father was from Louisiana. My mother was from South Carolina. My father was a postal clerk and my mother a schoolteacher. They met at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, during World War II.

In the mid-’50s, soon after my birth, they left. An incident precipitated their move. It involved my father. He carried a gun as part of his employment driving a truck with the postal service. In some little town in South Carolina a white policeman stopped him. The policeman said, “We don’t allow negroes to have guns. Surrender yours.”

My father refused, and they had a standoff. My father got out of there fast, made it to Washington, D.C., got on the telephone, and said to my mother, “We’re moving.” Years later, I asked my father why he had left inasmuch as he and my mother had just built a house outside of Columbia. He said to me the following: “I thought that if we did not move, I was going to kill a white man, or a white man was going to kill me.”

Did you experience discrimination while you were growing up?

Yes. The most memorable episodes transpired during trips from D.C. to South Carolina for holidays. Even as a kid, I sensed how the atmosphere changed as soon as we went over the 14th Street Bridge from D.C. into Virginia.

I remember a couple of times when my father was stopped by the police as we were driving in Jim Crow territory. The scenario was the same. A policeman would pull our car over. My father would ask, “Is there a problem, officer?” and the officer would say, “No, there’s no problem. I pulled you over because I noticed you have Washington, D.C., license plates, and I wanted you to know that we do things differently down here.”

The policeman was testing my father, and my father played along. He did what the police officer wanted, and what the cop wanted was for my father to call him “sir,” and be deferential, show that my father knew to stay in his place.

My father performed as required, and we went on our way. God bless my father for that! He put as his highest priority the well-being of his family. If he had to swallow his pride to accomplish that aim, so be it. What commitment. What poise. What discipline. What love. Yes, God bless my father for that.

How did your parents’ views on race influence you?

They influenced me greatly in all sorts of ways, some of which undoubtedly are beyond my conscious awareness. One was my father’s bone-deep pessimism about the possibility for lasting racial justice in America. He believed that the United States of America was created to be a white man’s country and would always be a white man’s country, and he never forgave the United States for its mistreatment of African Americans.

At his burial, because he was a veteran, a representative of the U.S. military was on hand to deliver an American flag, nicely folded, to my mother. I remember looking at my brother and smiling amidst the tears. We both knew that our father would have found this scene uproariously funny because my dad was not a patriot. He was an anti-patriot. The effort to understand the sense of aggrievement that he felt has been a big part of my intellectual life.

What memories do you have of your childhood?

I had a wonderful childhood! I spent several summers in Columbia, South Carolina, where I would stay with my Aunt Lillian. I had a great time even though during some of those summers no public parks were open. Why? Because South Carolina preferred to close the public parks rather than see them desegregated. But I had lots of friends, and we had lots of fun.

I also recall my childhood in D.C. with fondness. My parents bought a house two blocks from the Takoma public park. It was at that park that I learned to play football, baseball, and, most importantly, tennis. The tennis courts at Takoma public park are named after my father, Henry Kennedy Sr. He was known as “Mr. Tennis.”

To support his tennis-playing children, he learned everything that he could about the game and became quite proficient as a teacher and organizer of tennis tournaments. When he passed away, people in the neighborhood successfully petitioned the city government to name the tennis courts in his honor.  

Is it true that you were a very good tennis player in your teens and that you played against Robert McNamara, who was then secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson?

I was a very good junior tournament player, as was my brother. He and I took care of the tennis courts at the St. Albans Tennis Club in Washington, D.C., on the grounds of the National Cathedral.

On Sunday mornings we were supposed to close the courts down during the Cathedral service. Usually, we did. But occasionally Defense Department Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow would show up and beseech us to allow them to play. We even played doubles with them from time to time.

On one occasion, a chauffeur came to the courts and announced that the president was on the phone and wanted to speak with McNamara right away. The secretary left for a few minutes, returned, and play continued.

McNamara and Rostow were both quite competitive, but Rostow was the better of the two.

I read that tennis allowed you to attend the prestigious St. Albans School.

When my brother began taking care of the tennis courts at St. Albans, I would help him. When courts were open, and few people were around, I would practice with him.

The head pro at the club, who was also the tennis coach at the St. Albans School, saw me play and contacted my parents about applying to the school. They told him right off that we didn’t have St. Albans-level money. He told them that he could get me a scholarship if I could gain admission.

I ended up applying, gaining admission, and playing No. 1 on the school varsity from the eighth grade to the 12th.

I’ve gone to very fine schools, but the most transformative was St. Albans, where I fell under the sway of my favorite teacher, John F. McCune, known to generation of boys as Gentleman Jack McCune. He was my American history teacher and introduced me to the work of Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University and C. Vann Woodward at Yale University.

Reading their books changed my life. It was Mr. McCune who got me interested in the politics of historiography. He was a thoroughly inspirational figure. We shared a birthday and became close friends. I was with him the day before he died and was honored to speak at his memorial service at the National Cathedral.

How did you become interested in law?

Lawyering as an idea was an active presence in my household. My father spoke often about the time that he saw Thurgood Marshall argue the South Carolina whites-only primary case, Rice v. Elmore, in 1947.

The plaintiff was a Black business owner by the name of George A. Elmore, who challenged the exclusion of Black voters from the South Carolina Democratic primary. The judge ruled that the Democratic Party of South Carolina could no longer exclude qualified negroes from participating in primary elections.

And my parents were very proud of their friendship with the leading Civil Rights attorney in South Carolina, Matthew J. Perry. Most influential, however, was the example set by my brother, a 1973 graduate of HLS, who became a prosecutor, a Washington, D.C., judge, and then a judge on the United States District Court in the District of Columbia. (When he retired, he was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who now sits on the Supreme Court.) 

You seem to have great admiration for your brother Henry.

Yes. He was a conscientious jurist and is a remarkably encouraging and loving big brother. He has been a wonderful cheerleader for me and our younger sister, Angela, who is also an attorney. He has been especially important to me since my wife passed away.

Could you tell me how you met your wife?

My romance with Yvedt L. Matory began when I was a first-year student at Yale Law School, and she was a second-year student at Yale Medical School. We had met previously when she attended Sidwell Friends School, which was a 15-minute walk from St. Albans.

We married in June 1985 and had three children. She was a surgical oncologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She died of melanoma when she was only 48 years old. She passed away two months shy of what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary. I have lived a charmed life. The great tragedy that befell it was the death of my wife of blessed memory.

You served as a clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1983-1984. Can you talk about that experience?

It was thrilling to be able to work with and for “Mr. Civil Rights.” (Two of my co-clerks, by the way, are esteemed colleagues here: Terry Fisher and Howell Jackson.)

A strong argument can be made that Marshall was the greatest lawyer in American history. Think about the variety of posts he held — counsel for the NAACP, court of appeals judge, solicitor general, and Supreme Court justice — and the difficulties he had to overcome to make such positive contributions to American life and law!

I learned a lot working in the Marshall chambers. Seeing him up close was an inspiration that has deepened over time as I’ve gained a better sense of what he was up against and the patience, tenacity, poise, and grit that he displayed over a long period of time.

Did your father get a chance to meet Marshall?

My father met Justice Marshall on the next to last day of my clerkship. My father told “Mr. Civil Rights” how inspiring it had been to see him in that courthouse fighting for Black folks’ rights in a fashion that elicited grudging respect even from racist enemies. 

How did you come to Harvard Law School?

When I left Yale Law School, I was all set to go work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after my clerkships with Judge J. Skelly Wright and Justice Marshall.

But near the end of my third year of law school, I got a telephone call from HLS Dean James Vorenberg, who invited me to the Law School to talk with him and other members of the faculty about a career in legal academia. I shall always be grateful for his solicitude.

When I talk about my fondness for HLS, some friends tease me, calling me a Pollyanna. Too bad! It’s hard for me to imagine a better setting for a professor than Harvard Law School. I have been surrounded for nearly 40 years by wonderful colleagues and students. Working here has been a blessing.

What role does teaching play in your career compared to research and writing?

I thoroughly enjoy research and teaching and am engaged in writing all the time. The course that I’ve taught the most is contracts. For a long time, I felt considerable anxiety before every class. Over the past decade, though, that anxiety has steadily dissipated. Now teaching contracts is wholly fun. One of my upcoming books will be about contracts in the context of intimate associations — friendship, dating, marriage, surrogacy, adoption, etc.

Much of my teaching and almost all of my writing thus far has been about the regulation of race relations. I am about to complete a book on which I have been working for nearly a decade. It responds to the following question: How did protests over racial injustice in the mid-20th century change American law? I seek to answer that question in 800-plus pages.

You wrote a book that examines the historical, cultural, and social significance of one of the most offensive words in the English language. Can you talk about it?

It is my only best-seller and has generated considerable controversy. It provoked an attempted assault at a bookstore reading and has triggered walkouts. It has also prompted lawyers to seek my assistance as an expert witness in employment discrimination suits, union grievance actions, and prosecutions for murders and assaults in which I have testified for the defense in some cases and for the state in others. By the way, the full title of my book is “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”

There were many people who said, “Well, you could have titled your book something else,” and there were people who would say, “You’re just trying to be sensationalistic.” My main goal was to educate, but how do you educate? If you’re boring, you’re not going to educate. You have to do something to get people’s attention and keep people’s attention. Do I try to do that? Sure, I try to do that. But I don’t view it as a bad thing.

Some in the media have, at times, labeled you a conservative. How do you respond to that?

Anybody who labels me conservative has not paid attention to what I have written over the course of my life. I believe that the United States is afflicted by unjustifiable hierarchies and inequalities that generate avoidable social misery. I think that it is scandalous that in a country this wealthy, there are so many people who are insecure regarding nutrition, shelter, healthcare, employment, and personal security due to crime and poor policing. I am in favor of reforms that aggressively address these problems.

The intellectual and ideological communities I find most attractive find voice in magazines such as The American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation, and The London Review of Books. If that makes me conservative, so be it.

I think that some observers have erroneously pegged me as conservative because I savor the company of intelligent conservatives such as my recently departed friend and colleague Charles Fried, because I participate enthusiastically in programming sponsored by conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society, because I strongly criticize certain policies such as mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements for university hiring and promotion, and because I indulge in certain rhetorical gestures that raise eyebrows — such as my use of the word “negro,” a term that I began using in 1984 at the insistence of my boss Thurgood Marshall and continue to use in homage to him and A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, W.E.B. Du Bois, my grandmother Lillian Spann, “Big Momma,” and countless other admirable souls.  

You said that your father was pessimistic about the possibility of achieving lasting racial justice in America. What is your view?

Yes, my father was a pessimist on the race question. He did not believe that we shall overcome. The tradition he voiced is a strong tradition that includes the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Derrick Bell. Tragically, there is much to which proponents of this tradition can point to substantiate their view that racial justice in America is doomed.

I place myself, however, in a different tradition, the tradition expounded by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., the tradition that embraces the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that racial decency will become an increasingly large and influential feature of American life.

I am deeply alarmed by the effective mobilization of racial resentment that has gripped American politics. But I take solace ironically in recognizing that a substantial part of that menacing reaction stems from remarkable successes in racial reform. 

When I was born on Sept. 10, 1954, my home state of South Carolina explicitly subjected African Americans to a degraded, stigmatized status. It was not alone. Pigmentocracy was pervasive. 

Yet, within a lifetime, by dint of remarkable struggles undertaken by Americans of all complexions, things changed sufficiently to enable a Black man to be president of the United States — a Harvard Law School alumnus who comported himself with consummate intelligence, grace, and honor.   

Finally, what advice do you have for young lawyers?

Keep the fun quotient high by finding work that you love.

SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, is getting a new home.

Word of the project’s upcoming move was shared recently by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. “I’m pleased to tell you today that the SlaveVoyages site, with all of its databases, will live in perpetuity here at Harvard University,” Gates announced at a conference dedicated to celebrating the open-access resource.

SlaveVoyages was the result of nearly four decades of scholarly contributions, with researchers from multiple institutions working painstakingly to digitize handwritten records from archives worldwide.

Today, its multisource dataset, currently housed at Rice University, features information on more than 30,000 slaving vessels that traversed the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. Also documented are details on nearly 221,000 individuals involved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including ship captains and the humans they trafficked.

The project’s website, launched in 2008 at Emory University, brings data to life with rich visualizations. A time-lapse animation tracks each of the individual voyages on a map of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A pair of 18th-century French slaving ships, both bound for present-day Haiti, have been recreated in 3D video based on surviving drawings.

As SlaveVoyages expanded, the Hutchins Center provided key funding along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emory University. Stepping up to help support the project in its new home is the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative (H&LS).

“Education is central to the mission of the initiative,” said Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects and the leader of H&LS. “SlaveVoyages’ databases build on the curiosity of Harvard students who catalyzed the University’s ongoing reckoning with its ties to slavery. By cofunding the project with the Hutchins Center, the initiative can help amplify knowledge-sharing and visibility, empower scholars and students worldwide, while also reaffirming our commitment to truth.”

The April 3-5 conference, hosted by the Hutchins Center, attracted researchers associated with the project as well as those it has inspired.

“This conference brings together generations of scholars who dedicated their lives to unearthing centuries of data to help us understand in detail and with nuance the contours of the slave trade — a quantifiably brutal trade in human beings that spanned oceans and continents while devastating millions of lives,” said Gates, who is also a member of the initiative’s Advisory Council.

Over three days, sessions covered a wide range of topics suggesting the global scope of the slave trade. The conference kicked off with a panel on the genetic impacts of the slave trade featuring David Reich of Harvard Medical School, Kasia Bryc of the Broad Institute, as well as scholars from Johns Hopkins University and the National Center of Medical Genetics of Cuba.

Rice University associate professor of history Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, who currently serves as host of the SlaveVoyages project, unpacked his findings on Brazil’s 19th-century slave trade. Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, an assistant professor of history at University of Texas at San Antonio, discussed the potential integration of AI into the database. Jane Hooper, a professor of history at George Mason University, explored shipboard uprisings on Indian Ocean voyages.

A final panel addressed the South West Pacific trade, with Francis Bobongie-Harris, Queensland University of Technology educator and researcher emphasizing the human cost.

Gates opened one of the afternoon sessions with a surprise for SlaveVoyages originator David Eltis, an emeritus professor of history at Emory University and the University of British Columbia, bestowing on him the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal “in recognition of his unyielding vision that brought to life a resource that has transformed our understanding of one of the most cataclysmic and consequential economic, social, and cultural forces unleashed in the history of humanity.”

The medal is “especially fitting” for Eltis, Gates added, given the fact that Du Bois, the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, wrote his 1895 dissertation on efforts to suppress the trade of enslaved Africans in the U.S.

Social distancing, school closures, and stay-at-home orders became hotly disputed during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. How should these protocols be viewed today?

The new book “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us” by a pair of Princeton University professors finds no evidence these “non-pharmaceutical interventions” actually reduced mortality rates. What the co-authors do find is that the measures did significant damage to U.S. society — with many mainstream scientists, journalists, and scholars reluctant to make a frank appraisal.

“We argue that, in the pandemic, disagreement was moralized prematurely, and dissent was treated intolerantly,” said co-author Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at the University Center for Human Values. “We see these as failures of educated elites to live up to some of our own deepest values of being open to criticism and divergent points of view.”

In a talk last week hosted by the Department of Government, Macedo and co-author Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs, outlined the book’s thesis and took tough audience questions.

Macedo kicked things off with a survey of pandemic planning documents that predate COVID-19. Reading John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza” (2004) had piqued the interest of former President George W. Bush. His administration advanced a strategy of containment, influenced by mathematical modelers who said children would likely be primary carriers.

A National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan, released by the Centers for Disease Control in 2006, emphasized the promise of school closures. “They predicted that school closures, by themselves, could secure a 50 percent reduction in peak death rates,” Macedo said.

Over the next 13 years, several experts cautioned against what the American Civil Liberties Union characterized as “aggressive, coercive actions” in its own 2008 pandemic preparedness report. Frequently emphasized was the danger of disproportionately harming vulnerable populations, including kids from low-income families.

“But the policy flipped on a dime in March 2020,” Macedo said, citing a February 2020 World Health Organization-China report from Wuhan. “The joint mission report unequivocally urged every country in the world to embrace what was, in effect, a zero-COVID policy by the severe implementation of lockdown policies.”

There was some pushback from infectious disease experts in the early days of the pandemic. But, the authors say, the marketplace of ideas was experiencing its own lockdown by the October 2020 release of the Great Barrington Declaration, with its urgent call to relax restrictions for those at minimal risk. The statement, written by three epidemiologists with distinguished credentials, drew thousands of signatories. But it was quickly branded by critics in public health and government as “dangerous” and “fringe.”

“Part of it was that people settled on a wartime framing,” Macedo offered, citing the titles of two early pandemic memoirs — Deborah Birx’s “Silent Invasion” and Sanjay Gupta’s “World War C.”  

Co-author Lee picked up the thread by examining pandemic outcomes across 50 states. At first, blue and red states implemented similar measures, she recalled. But the policymaking appeared deeply polarized by Labor Day.

“Across the South, the Plains, and the Mountain West, schools reopened in the fall of 2020,” Lee said. “But nearly half of public schools around the country were still closed in March 2021.”

By January 2023, states led by Republicans had suffered mortality rates nearly 30 percent higher than their Democratic-led counterparts, according to the co-authors’ assessment of CDC data. But they found no evidence that blue states benefited from longer school closures and stay-at-home orders.

“If you examine COVID mortality across the period before vaccines became available,” Lee said, “there’s not a statistically significant difference.” This was true even when controlling for the percentage of elderly, uninsured, or obese residents. A separate analysis, published in the Lancet in 2023, surfaced similar conclusions.

Yet these non-pharmaceutical measures came at a steep cost, with Lee quickly rattling off more than a dozen examples — from a spike in alcohol-related deaths to emptied downtown business districts and learning losses for schoolchildren.

The injury was also fiscal. Congress authorized more than $5 trillion in COVID relief spending, aimed mostly at helping Americans stay financially afloat during the shutdowns.

“In the first quarter of 2020, total debt held by the public leapt from 80 percent of gross GDP to more than 100 percent,” Lee explained. “This higher plateau persists post-pandemic — and that higher level of indebtedness also entails a higher cost for debt service that puts constraints on our ability to respond to the next economic crisis or address other priorities.”

Are educated elites, largely aligned with the Democratic Party, finally ready for an honest reckoning with the COVID era’s groupthink? Macedo has his doubts. He pointed to an August 2023 JAMA Network Open article outlining varieties of misinformation shared by physicians on social media, with the aim of helping governments and professional societies censor bad actors.

Included were the Wuhan lab leak theory, concerns about the harms of masking children, and suggestions that natural infection can contribute to herd immunity. “All of these matters, as of August 2023, were either true or at least arguable,” Macedo said.

In a lightning-round review of the book’s lessons, Macedo emphasized the need for open debate and viewpoint diversity in navigating future crises.

“We also need greater honesty on the part of public officials — especially in public health,” he concluded, noting the resulting hit to the field’s credibility. “There’s too much of a tendency to not tell the whole truth, because they see their role partly as messaging and trying to nudge people’s behavior. But I think we are owed honesty about the limits of their knowledge.”

During the Q&A session, one attendee pushed back on the authors’ call for prioritizing honesty in a public health emergency. Given the pandemic’s devastating loss of life, the comparison to wartime governments protecting national security was made.

In response, Macedo referred to previous scholarship on the Vietnam War, including Barbara W. Tuchman’s “The March of Folly” (1984). “We think this is another case where people are engaging in wishful thinking — trying to get the public to go along and not being transparent about the cost of these measures and the likelihood of success,” he said.

Harvard on Monday rejected demands by the Trump administration that link $9 billion in federal funding to compliance with changes to University governance and hiring practices, viewpoint “audits” of academic departments, students, and faculty, and other measures.

The funding, more than $2 billion of which was frozen hours after Harvard responded to the demands, supports research that “has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields,” according to a message President Alan Garber sent to the Harvard community Monday afternoon.

The government has cited concerns about campus antisemitism in explaining its decision to halt funding at Harvard and several other institutions of higher education.

On Tuesday, we sought reactions to the funding cuts in conversations across campus.

“I feel like at some core level, it violates our rights as people and researchers and scientists — and as a university as well,” said Xie, whose research focuses in part on quantum computing.

Like many students and scholars, she worries that major funding cuts at institutions such as Harvard will slow or in some cases halt scientific progress.

“Universities play a major role because it’s where a lot of research takes place,” she said. “There are companies and startups that do this kind of work, but I feel like it’s truly in universities where a lot of the fundamental work is done, and a lot of the pioneering work in terms of allowing us to not only better understand the platforms like the ones I work with, but also help put them into real-world applications.”

“I think there’s a much bigger job to be done, and that is for all those who disagree with the dramatic and, in my view, dangerous decisions being taken by the new administration to speak up,” said Tyrie, who is studying regulatory reforms in advanced Western economies in his time at the Kennedy School. 

Everyone engaged in academia and politics should be outraged by the Trump administration’s stance, he said.

“And of course, as a non-U.S. citizen, I am concerned about the wider effects on the world — both the prospects for growth and prosperity, but also for its security and stability,” he said. “What I’m not asking is for people to speak up in the interests of the world, but to speak up in the interests of the United States of America. This is weakening the United States and imperiling the prosperity and the security of millions of Americans.”

“I study, to some extent, authoritarian regimes, and I think that some of what we’re seeing — while it’s not equivalent to fully formed authoritarianism — is starting to approach it in terms of trying to have the government dictate the ideas that are taught, that can be expressed and that can’t be expressed,” said Cherniss. “I think that it’s important that Harvard and other universities not buckle under what I think is pretty clearly an assault on academic freedom and university self-governance.”

Cherniss studies political theory, particularly defenses and critiques of liberalism. He said he worries about the impact of funding freezes on fellow scholars inside and outside his field.

“We may have to cut a lot of the most socially useful work that we do in medical sciences and technology — things that have really benefited America and benefit the world in very practical ways,” he said.

First they met for coffee. This month they came together for a full meal.

Spurred by the Gaza conflict, Nim Ravid ’25, an economics concentrator from Israel, wanted to find new ways to connect students across the College. Last summer, he co-founded “Our Harvard” with five of his peers, and one of their first efforts was pairing students for coffee chats meant to encourage conversations across differences.

On April 1 at Smith Campus Center, the group hosted a larger gathering: “Food For Thought: Our Harvard College,” an evening of conversation during which students offered their perspectives on a range of issues.

Ravid was heartened by the results.

“It was the most vulnerable and honest I’ve ever heard Harvard students communicating with each other, which I think reflects our efforts to bring students from across campus together to this event and create an environment where students assume best intentions and say what they actually think,” he said.

The conversation, which was followed by a meal provided by Harvard University Dining Services, was moderated by Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government.   

“There’s a risk with conversations like this, that everyone will think it’s much safer to just celebrate diversity, eat some food, and go home, but that would miss the learning and the struggling and the wrestling with the questions out of which friendships and genuine dialogue can be forged,” Sandel told the crowd.  

One by one, members of Our Harvard and those in the audience spoke about feeling ostracized for their identity, national origin, or beliefs, and finding it difficult to establish friendships across differences. Frederico Araujo ’25, an Our Harvard founder from Portugal, discussed his struggles connecting with students from Brazil.

“Sometimes when I came to Annenberg and I initiated a conversation that I hoped would be about our shared language, our shared food, our shared music, and our many shared traditions between Brazilian and Portuguese culture, I would actually get the cold shoulder,” he said. “I don’t need to give a history lesson about the historical background between Portugal and Brazil, but I wasn’t aware that those historical ties would be sufficient for someone to ignore my friendship.” 

In response, Sandel said, “Sometimes seeming similarities can be startling for their distance.”

The conversation covered the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Ravid and others expressing their fears about sharing personal experiences. Several participants with no direct connections to the war said they have found themselves uncomfortably in the middle of friends with different views.

Angie Gabeau ’25, another founding member of Our Harvard and a sociology concentrator, acknowledged being apprehensive when the conversation turned to the Middle East, but said that it was beneficial in the end.

“I’m actually glad that it was brought up,” she said. “If you are talking about the hottest topic on the market right now and are still able to make yourself vulnerable to discussing with people who might not agree with you, then other cases will be a lot less daunting.”

Gabeau, a Boston native, told the audience that she arrived at Harvard hoping to connect with other Black students after coming from a predominantly white high school. The Winthrop House resident joined the Black Students Association, the Kuumba Singers, and Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys, an African dance troupe.

“I was so happy to be able to find a community here,” she said. While emphasizing the importance of these groups, Gabeau also said that she believes it’s important to build relationships across differences. “This conversation wasn’t to shadow the importance of affinity organizations but seeing how we can both share our cultures, ideas, values, and morals with each other, while being able to feel safe here at Harvard,” she said after the event.

Harvard College Dean of Students Tom Dunne found it meaningful “that the core group of students who are organizing this are seniors in their last weeks on campus.”

Ravid expressed his hope that Food for Thought will help spark similar movements at Harvard. “I also hope this event will encourage others to not treat other students differently based on their identity, but rather for who they are,” he said. “I hope students will really take time to get to know each other before they judge.”

Gabeau noted that Our Harvard has set goals that do not ask too much of students.

“I don’t want this to come off as, ‘We can all be friends and everything’s going to be perfect,’ because that’s not really what we’re trying to do,” she said. “There’ll be people who have disagreements that won’t foster friendship. I wouldn’t want people walking around campus pretending to be friends.”

She continued: “It’s not supposed to be creating a perfect utopian universe but rather pushing people to go the extra mile in terms of seizing all the opportunity in the different pockets of joy and growth that there is on campus.”

Harvard on Monday rejected demands from the Trump administration that threaten $9 billion in research funding, arguing that the changes pushed by the government exceed its lawful authority and infringe on both the University’s independence and its constitutional rights.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community. He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

Garber’s message was a response to a letter sent late Friday by the Trump administration outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.

The $9 billion under review by the government includes $256 million in research support for Harvard plus $8.7 billion in future commitments to the University and several renowned hospitals, among them Mass General, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Boston Children’s. Late Monday, the Trump administration announced that it was moving to freeze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.

The Trump administration has been critical of Harvard’s handling of student protests related to the Gaza war. It has accused the University of failing to adequately protect Jewish students on campus from antisemitic discrimination and harassment, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Garber emphasized that Harvard remains committed to fighting antisemitism, including through a series of campus measures implemented over the past 15 months. In addition, he said, the University has complied with the Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious admissions and has worked to broaden intellectual and viewpoint diversity at Harvard.

The University’s objectives in fighting antisemitism will “not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” Garber said. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”

Harvard is just one of dozens of schools targeted by the Trump administration in recent weeks. Last month, the Department of Education sent letters to 60 universities, including Columbia, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and Tufts, threatening enforcement actions for noncompliance with anti-discrimination provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The administration has taken the additional step of freezing research funding at several institutions.

Robust research and innovation partnerships among universities, the federal government, and private industry date to World War II. Government-backed research conducted at schools across the nation has led to countless discoveries, devices, treatments, and other advances that have helped shape the modern world. Computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, vaccines, and treatments for devastating diseases have all stemmed from government-financed research that crosses from labs and libraries into industry, creating new products, companies, and jobs.

In March, a report from the nonprofit United for Medical Research showed that every dollar of research funded by the National Institutes of Health — the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research — generates $2.56 in economic activity. In 2024 alone, the NIH awarded $36.9 billion in research grants, generating $94.5 billion in economic activity and supporting 408,000 jobs, according to the report.

In an interview on Monday, Daniel P. Gross, an associate professor of business administration at Duke University and co-author of a recent NBER working paper on the decades-long partnership between the U.S. government and higher ed, said the withdrawal of research funding from universities would be “catastrophic” to American innovation.

“Universities are such an integral part of the modern U.S. innovation system that it wouldn’t stand without them,” said Gross, who taught at Harvard Business School before moving to Duke.

George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said that biomedicine has long depended on a strong partnership with the federal government, one that has paid off for Americans in life-saving advances. Just this month, he noted, the Medical School’s Joel Habener was recognized with a Breakthrough Prize for his work on GLP-1, which has led to diabetes and anti-obesity drugs. Daley also cited transformative work in cardiovascular health, cancer immunotherapy, and a host of other conditions.

“As we look back over the 70 years of that partnership, it has returned brilliantly on the investments the government has made,” he said. “The fact that we have Harvard, MIT, and all these extraordinary hospitals, that has been a magnet for venture capital investment and now we have the pharmaceutical research infrastructure being brought into our community. All of this is a jewel in the crown of American bioscience.”

The threat to that science is an even bigger issue in an era of stepped-up competition with China, he added.

“It seems self-defeating and injurious to the economy and to U.S. leadership in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals,” Daley said. “It feels like the hammer has come down in a way that threatens something that is intrinsic to U.S. leadership and ultimately to our economic competitiveness with places like China, which are investing very, very heavily in biotechnology.”

In his message to the community, Garber stressed the contributions of university research to scientific and medical progress while underlining the importance of independent thought and scholarship.

“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he said. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”

Dance dominated the 39th annual Cultural Rhythms festival as students showcased impressive footwork from around the world.

“It just feels right to be surrounded by so many young individuals who are dedicating themselves to representation and to leaning into authenticity,” said five-time Latin Grammy nominee Becky G, honored as Artist of the Year at the April 5 production.

Since 1986, Cultural Rhythms has united the Harvard community for a celebration of the cultural and ethnic diversity of its student body. The tradition has grown into a weeklong series, including a fashion show and food fair. The grand finale, hosted by the Harvard Foundation, is a student-led performing arts showcase and Artist of the Year ceremony at Sanders Theatre.

The award’s past recipients include musical performers Lady Gaga and Rubén Blades as well as actors Courtney B. Vance, Angela Bassett, Eva Longoria, and Viola Davis.

“It’s a heavy-hitting list of incredible individuals who’ve accomplished so many things,” Becky G, 28, told the Gazette. “I feel like I’m just getting started.”

This year’s around-the-world tour featured Harvard Dankira Dance Troupe, with its Ethiopian- and Eritrean-inspired folk dances, and Bhangra, which pumped up the crowd with electric Punjabi moves. Audience members were pulled to their feet by Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys, who put on a Vegas-worthy dance skit. Becky G was seen cheering from her seat as Bryant Valenzuela ’25 and Mariachi Veritas x RAZA Ballet Folklórico performed Mexico’s varied movement and musical traditions.

The 2½-hour program, titled “Global Encounters,” included musical performances by 10 student groups. A highlight came when the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College offered their powerful rendition of “Can’t Give Up Now” by the duo Mary Mary. The song includes an adapted chorus from the Black gospel classic “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired.”

Habiba Braimah, senior director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, offered her thoughts on the impact of these sets. “We are reminded that art is powerful,” she told the audience. “Dance, storytelling and music is healing, and culture — all cultures, your culture — matters in a world that makes you feel divided, where our identities might be misunderstood or even challenged.”

Becky G was honored for artistic excellence and other positive contributions. At the end of the evening, the singer, songwriter, actress, and activist took the stage with festival co-directors Anapaula Barba ’25 and Hayat Hassan ’25 for a conversation covering everything from career to mental health and philanthropy.

Becky G, whose real name is Rebecca Marie Gomez, has been open in the past about her anxiety. At Sanders, she encouraged those in the midst of mental health struggles to ask for help, no matter what cultural taboos they face.

“I realized as I got older that my responsibility isn’t necessarily to be a role model but to be a real model,” Becky G said in an interview. “That means speaking to the fact that I am imperfect and that I make mistakes.”

With more than 28 billion career streams and high-profile roles in the films “Power Rangers” (2017) and DC’s “Blue Beetle” (2023), along with her hit songs “Shower” and “Mayores,” performed with Bad Bunny, Becky G uses her position to raise awareness for vulnerable communities.

“One thing that comes to mind is that there’s no lack of talent and there’s no lack of passionate individuals who are willing to do what it takes to do the work, but there is a lack of opportunity,” she said.

She is active with Altadena Girls, an organization supporting girls who lost their homes in this year’s Eaton Canyon fire.

A big fan of the late Selena Quintanilla — aka the Queen of Tejano Music — as well as contemporary reggaeton artists, she celebrated the fact that Latinx artists no longer need to “cross over.” Breaking into the U.S. market may have required performing in English for past generations. But Spanish-speaking singers today can stick to their roots.

“When we open the door for ourselves, we’re holding it open for the next generations and we’re making things better brick by brick,” said Becky G, the first Latina to receive Artist of the Year in a decade.

Examples of how Harvard scholars are tackling real-world problems — through critical research supported by federal funding — appear daily in the Gazette. The following is a snapshot of recent coverage.

Preventing opioid deaths

The fentanyl crisis hits close to home for Harvard-trained researcher Travis Donahoe, whose research probes the forces driving opioid deaths and the best ways to intervene. “Ending this epidemic is one of the most important changes we can make to improve the health — and dignity — of all Americans.”

Repairing eye damage once thought untreatable

A stem cell therapy developed at Mass Eye and Ear safely restored the cornea’s surface for 14 patients in a clinical trial. When a person suffers a cornea injury, it can deplete the limbal epithelial cells, which can never regenerate. People with these injuries often experience persistent pain and visual difficulties.

Creating at-home test to catch Alzheimer’s early

Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham developed olfactory tests — in which participants sniff odor labels that have been placed on a card — to assess people’s ability to discriminate, identify, and remember odors.

Identifying 296 genetic disorders that can be treated before birth

“We saw a critical gap in prenatal care and an opportunity to define the genetic disorders that are treatable during this time,” said the study’s senior author. “These conditions are actionable — meaning that, empowered with diagnostic information, we can intervene early and improve outcomes.”

Exploring a cheaper way to make RX drugs

Chemist and Ph.D. candidate Brandon Campbell sees in silver an opportunity to lower the cost of medicine in the U.S., where consumers pay nearly three times more than 33 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Anticipating surge in demand for AC

A Harvard startup has developed a “third way” of pulling moisture from the air that works like a coffee filter. It uses much less energy than traditional air conditioners and dehumidifiers and is more stable than desiccant systems.

Tracking dark energy, future of universe

The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy, which is the force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. New research suggesting that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be weakening suggests the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.

Uncovering potential new therapies for autism, anxiety

New insights on how inflammation sparked by the body’s immune response alters mood and behavior could lead to alternatives to traditional psychiatric drugs that act directly on the brain. These treatments would work indirectly by altering immune chemicals outside the brain.

Examining links between diet and healthy aging

“Studies have previously investigated dietary patterns in the context of specific diseases or how long people live,” said one of the researchers. “Ours takes a multifaceted view, asking, how does diet impact people’s ability to live independently and enjoy a good quality of life as they age?”

Building a lens now found in millions of electronic devices

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

Advancing progress toward treating rare, fatal condition

“Milestone” in nine-year quest to find a treatment for prion disease is personal for patient-scientist and her husband.

Calculating longevity benefits of simple dietary swap

A study finds that replacing butter with plant-based oils cuts the risk of premature death by up to 17 percent.

Solving confounding medical mysteries

With key contributions from Harvard researchers, the Undiagnosed Diseases Network identifies the rarest of illnesses and discovers new ones.

Opening new fronts against A-fib

Researchers double the number of genetic factors associated with a condition that affects more than 5 million Americans.

Making leap in quantum computing

For the first time, scientists succeeded in trapping molecules to perform quantum operations. The technology promises speeds exponentially faster than classical computers, which could enable game-changing advances in fields including medicine, science, and finance.

Finding powerful tool for colon cancer survival

Patients who exercise regularly after treatment live longer, according to research from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute research.

Taking big step toward targeted molecular therapies for cancer

Researchers developed innovative approaches to understand, target, and disrupt uncontrollable growth of disease.

Discovering citrus might be a mood protector

A physician-researcher outlined gut-brain clues behind an “orange a day” depression finding.

Unlocking possible key to diseases linked to X chromosome

A Jell-O-like substance could be key to treating Fragile X and Rett syndromes, researchers found.

A Harvard expert in environmental law said a recent set of Trump administration regulatory changes targeting initiatives in the climate change battle will reverse progress made over decades.

Richard Lazarus, Harvard Law School’s Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, said the late U.S. Sen. John McCain described the first Trump administration’s approach to cutting government programs as using a “meat cleaver” rather than a scalpel.

“I would say that Trump 2.0 in the first 71 days has been more akin to a nuclear explosion, with a bull’s eye on programs related to climate change,” Lazarus said on April 1, during an online discussion of the administration’s new goals for the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed last month.

Regulatory whipsawing is common, Lazarus said, as administrations undo what they see as predecessors’ harmful actions and overreach. Efforts in Washington D.C. today, however, go far beyond disagreement over how to regulate, questioning whether to regulate at all.

Carrie Jenks, executive director of HLS’ Environmental and Energy Law Program, agreed, saying that in mid-March the EPA laid out a roadmap of 31 steps it would take, targeting issues including climate change-related regulation, power plant and greenhouse gas reporting requirements, and support for electric vehicles. The steps also included reconsidering restrictions on the oil and gas industry, mercury standards that affect coal power plants, wastewater regulations for oil and gas development, air quality standards, and others.

Lazarus and Jenks’ assessments were part of a conversation hosted by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The hourlong event, part of its “Harvard Voices on Climate Change” series, was moderated by Salata Institute Director James Stock, Harvard’s vice provost for climate and sustainability and the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy.

A key administration initiative, they said, is the launch of a formal reconsideration of the 2009 “endangerment finding.”

That finding, ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007, concluded that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers human health. It provided the legal foundation under the Clean Air Act for government regulation of climate warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

Jenks described the finding as “a trigger” for subsequent regulation, so an attractive target for those seeking to undermine federal action on climate change. Attacking the decision on the basis of scientific fact, however, may be difficult, since the science is well-established.

Instead, Jenks said the administration might try to argue that the EPA doesn’t have the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases or has the discretion to choose not to.

“I think they’re going for more legally risky strategies that have more damaging outcomes if they’re successful,” Jenks said. “Each action taken by the EPA under [Barack] Obama, [Joe] Biden, and even in some cases, the first Trump administration, recognized climate change, and the debate was about how to regulate, not whether to regulate. Now, I think, it’s very different from what we’ve seen in the past.”

Whatever approach they take, Jenks said, they will have to go through a process of proposing regulatory change, taking public comments, and finalizing the rule, which takes time and allows environmental groups and others who disagree to voice their opinions.

“I’m sure those actions will then be litigated, and any regulatory action should need to be grounded in the statutory criteria that Congress has required EPA to consider, which generally has at least one component connected to emissions or pollution reduction,” Jenks said.

Jenks said she expects the EPA to move quickly, but that could become difficult if staff cuts deplete the agency’s expertise on these matters, as the underlying rationale for regulatory change has to have supporting data.

Another option, Lazarus said, is the GOP-dominated Congress could decide to use the Congressional Review Act as a weapon against environmental regulation. The law would allow the House and Senate, by majority vote, to overturn a rule by any federal agency and then prohibit that agency from reissuing the rule or creating a similar rule unless authorized by Congress.

That strategy was in full view in February when Congress overturned EPA’s rule implementing the “waste emissions charge” on methane emissions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. The result, Lazarus said, is that though the IRA requires companies emitting methane to pay the charge, there are no regulations in place for that to happen, leaving the companies and the fee in limbo.

Congress might employ the same strategy to remove California’s ability to exceed federal regulations on vehicle emissions standards, which has not only allowed California to create the strictest standards in the country, but, once set, can be followed by other states.

The IRA itself is under attack as the administration tries to claw back funding in an array of programs intended to provide incentives for climate-friendly action. Like the moves that gutted USAID, choosing not to spend funds on congressionally approved IRA programs on climate change is illegal, Lazarus said. But the administration appears to be unconcerned with running afoul of the law and is pushing hard to bring change quickly.

“They don’t mind forcing the courts to act and litigation takes time,” Lazarus said. “The practical effect of a freeze and a contract violation is it takes time to undo it. In the meantime, money isn’t being spent. The contractors aren’t getting it. People’s salaries aren’t being paid. People have leases that aren’t being paid. Right now, it’s chaos among all those recipients around the country. And the Trump administration will keep changing the legal rationale, making it very elusive and just saying, ‘We’re pausing it,’ or ‘We have to study it more carefully.’ The practical effect is quite serious.”

In the end, Jenks and Lazarus agreed, it may be the effect on individual lives that does the greatest harm. Regulatory changes can be undone or rewritten and new regulations passed, but layoffs, reassignments, and hostile working conditions threaten to rob the agency of the scientific and legal expertise that has ensured continuity from administration to administration.

While some of the firings and other personnel steps undertaken by the new administration may be halted or reversed by the courts, people are leaving voluntarily because they are demoralized and have bills to pay.

“Many are leaving,” Lazarus said. “To lose not just the regulations, but potentially lose that career expertise, and the funding of the IRA, is potentially devastating.”

For two years, grief left her body feeling like a pressure-cooker.

“It wasn’t until my junior year that I discovered something that really helped with the release of my emotions,” said Brooke Stanford ’25, who lost her mother, Andrea, to pancreatic cancer two weeks before arriving on campus as a first-year in 2021.

“The one thing that really helped was running.”

Now Stanford is using the sport to honor her mother and lift other families facing the disease. She’s been training for this year’s Boston Marathon while soliciting donations for Project Purple, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting pancreatic cancer and supporting patients. Every year, the Boston Athletic Association partners with a set of charities, which in turn recruit marathoners to raise money ahead of race day.

Stanford won’t be the only College runner hitting the 26.2-mile course for a loved one on April 21. Each of these students is vying for a strong finish — and a fundraising haul for a cause close to the heart.

‘I was just so excited I got to do this’

Stanford discovered Project Purple last summer while browsing a list of approved charities for the marathon.

“I knew I would want to run for some sort of cancer research organization, but I didn’t think that there would be one so fitting to what I had been through,” she said. “After that, I made it my No. 1 mission to get a spot on the Project Purple team.”

The trouble was, the odds were on par with getting into Harvard.

“I had just under 150 applications for five spots,” said Project Purple program director Vin Kampf.

Stanford, a Dunster House resident and applied math concentrator, soon found herself swept into phone calls and interviews with Kampf and the nonprofit’s other top brass.

“You would think I was applying for a job at an investment bank,” she said. “A lot of people think the hardest part about running for a charity is raising the money. But the hardest part is 100 percent getting a spot on the team.”

The final step was a formal presentation of her fundraising plans to Project Purple last fall. “I spent a full week putting together this very detailed PowerPoint and Excel,” recalled Stanford, who vowed to raise $50,000 by soliciting individual donations and hosting special events. “I spent way longer doing that than on any assignment Harvard has ever given me.”

A week later, she received the good news in a tearful call with Kampf. “I was just so excited that I got to do this — and do it for my mom,” she said.

The first-time marathoner, who dons purple leggings for every training run, has continued giving it her all. She surpassed her $50,000 pledge nearly two months ago and currently ranks in the Top 10 of Boston Marathon fundraisers this year. According to Kampf, she also ranks among Project Purple’s most successful charity runners ever.

“In some ways, I feel like I found my life’s purpose,” Stanford said. “I want to work more with Project Purple. I want to do more to make a difference. I want to help end pancreatic cancer.”

‘Just imagine if this was the Boston Marathon’

At first, Grace Taylor ’25 didn’t tell her friends about her cancer diagnosis. She was too busy working as a peer adviser for incoming first-years.

“I wanted to be the best peer adviser I could be,” said Taylor, a rising sophomore at the time. “I knew that if I let my own stuff in, I wouldn’t be able to serve the entryway very well.”

When she texted her pal Andrew Athanasian ’25 a few days later, he too was a bit occupied.

“I was walking across the river to go work out when Grace texted, ‘Hey, can we talk?’” Athanasian recalled. “I was like, ‘Is it important?’ And she replied, ‘No, not really.’”

“I didn’t want to distract the workout!” cracked Taylor, a Crimson lacrosse player.

Taylor broke the news later that day. Athanasian immediately stepped up, becoming a pillar during his friend’s treatment for an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. Not least, he and Taylor’s Quincy House roommate, Amy Wotovich, made countless runs to BerryLine for (among other things) throat-soothing ice cream. With the help of them and her parents, Taylor said, she persevered without dropping out for the semester.

Athanasian, an econ concentrator who lives in Lowell House, joined Taylor and her family last fall at the Mass General Brigham Eversource Cancer 5k, a benefit for the oncology practice that saw Taylor through two surgeries and radioactive iodine treatment.

“Seeing how Grace and her family responded to that 5k,” Athanasian recalled, “I found myself saying: ‘Just imagine if this was the Boston Marathon.’”

After nabbing a spot on the Mass General Marathon Team, the first-time marathoner has made that vision a reality. Athanasian aims to raise $10,000 for the hospital’s pediatric oncology unit, with part of the proceeds earmarked for the adolescents and young adults cancer program that saw Taylor through treatment into remission.

“I’m running for Grace but I’m also running for everyone who didn’t make it,” emphasized Athanasian, remembering a friend from his Long Island hometown killed by brain cancer at age 17. Athanasian, a committed Catholic, has inscribed his Asics with references to scripture as a reminder of his inspiration. (Hebrews 12:1, on his right, feels tailor-made for the modern charity runner.)

On race day, Taylor hopes to glimpse her friend from the celebration hosted by Mass General, a long-standing fixture at Mile 20 — just before the course crests Heartbreak Hill.

“That’s the darkest part of the course,” Athanasian said. “But they’re bringing out all the pediatric oncology patients to cheer us on. How can you not become Usain Bolt after seeing those kids?”

‘The opportunity to call upon her strength’

Every Sunday, Cohasset, Mass., native Bridget Kondrat ’26 would attend Mass with her large extended family. Then everyone would head over to her grandparents’ place and spend the day together.

“We have always been so close,” said Kondrat, who counts three siblings and 18 cousins. “And my Nana was really the heart of that.”

For 14 years, Kondrat’s maternal grandmother, Cleida Buckley, fought multiple myeloma with the help of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Through it all, the 5-foot-2 powerhouse maintained her status as the family’s hostess and connector.

“She just kept showing up for us,” Kondrat said.

Watching the marathon became another family tradition after Kondrat’s mom, Liz, ran in 2000, and Buckley proved a memorable presence from her perch on Heartbreak Hill.

“She was so freaking cute, just sitting there in Newton Centre with her little beach chair,” Liz said.

That’s why training for the 2025 event with the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team struck Kondrat as the perfect way to honor her grandmother, who died in 2022.

“Running with Dana-Farber gives me the opportunity to call upon her strength,” said Kondrat, who hopes to raise $10,000.

The Harvard-Radcliffe rower and Eliot House resident has ambitious goals for her second marathon. Charity runners can run Boston without meeting the race’s strict qualifying times. But the economics concentrator hopes to best the event’s official 3 hour and 25-minute cutoff (with an average pace of 7:49 per mile) for women ages 34 and younger.

Kondrat, who started running with her mom in fourth grade, has been following an ambitious training program complete with speed workouts, intervals, and long runs at her target marathon pace.

“I biked next to her last week when she ran 12 miles,” Liz said. “She was doing 7:30s the whole time!”

Keeping up the regimen has been a challenge for a full-time student-athlete and part-time fundraiser, Kondrat said. But it’s nothing compared with the marathon battle Buckley endured.

“Whenever I start to complain or lose motivation,” Kondrat said, “I just think about everything I watched my Nana go through.”

‘She started showing me her medals’

In seventh grade, Maggie Chiappetta-Uberti ’26 came home feeling discouraged after her first track practice. She was exhausted. She was sore. All she wanted to do was quit.

“My mom Lainee sat me down and right away started instilling me with confidence,” Chiappetta-Uberti recalled. “She started telling me about the records she set in middle school and high school. She started showing me her medals.”

That inspired Chiapetta-Uberti to stick with it. “I’m so grateful to her for pushing me to continue,” said the Kirkland House resident, who competed in cross-country and track through high school.

Her mom, Lainee Uberti, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at 58. “She immediately started walking four miles every day,” recalled Chiappetta-Uberti, who was in ninth grade at the time.

More than six years later, Uberti is still religious about her daily jaunt. “Getting out there and running or walking,” she said in an interview, “that’s what keeps us going.”

Once again, that strength has inspired her daughter to tackle a big challenge. Chiappetta-Uberti is training for her first marathon while raising funds for the Alzheimer’s Association. Each member of Team End ALZ is supposed to bring in a minimum of $10,000. But the neuroscience concentrator set the loftier goal of $26,200 — or $1,000 per mile.

As part of her efforts, she’s also populating a TikTok feed with training videos, Alzheimer’s awareness, and tributes to Uberti.

“It’s so special that Maggie is going the extra mile — no pun intended — to raise awareness, raise money, and put her heart into representing our family,” said Chiappetta-Uberti’s other mom, Laura Chiappetta. Both parents will travel from their home in Los Angeles to cheer their daughter’s 26.2-mile debut.

The punishing race feels like an appropriate gesture when her mom is dealing with an incurable disease like Alzheimer’s, Chiappetta-Uberti said. “I want her to know there’s support for her — she’s not facing this alone.”  

At Harvard, thousands of scholars are working to advance knowledge on a wide array of topics. Eight students are selected each year to workshop ways to bring that knowledge from the University to the wider world through Harvard Horizons.

Now in its 12th year, the program invites doctoral candidates to share their work in a one-night academic symposium. Students receive one-on-one mentoring to hone their presentation skills and research ideas.

“It is crucial that both faculty and students are able to communicate and connect with the broader world,” said Karen Thornber, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. “These multimodal skills are foundational, both for engaging students in the classroom and for ensuring that research which has the potential to contribute significantly to the well-being of all is both accessible and impactful to a wider audience.”

Harvard Horizons is a project of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Bok Center.

Ancient structures are not as set in stone as we once thought. Alarcón Robledo is trying to better understand the histories of tombs in North Saqqara, Egypt, using 3D modeling and a process called photogrammetry — mapping structures onto archaeological sites with archival photography and software. He’s found that tombs changed over time, with additions and reconstructions, from places purely for funeral services to sites of ritual practices and community gatherings.

“Buildings are like people, and writing about their history is very much like writing their biography,” he said. “In our lives, there may be many moments which are representative of our identities … but even freezing one moment of everyday of our lives would not be representative.”

Getting older can be beautiful, says Braslavsky. Her talk centered around what scholars can learn from older female poets, including how to embrace aging instead of succumbing to the narrative of decay and decline.

“While the cultural zeitgeist tells us to fear aging, aging is more a part of the human experience than ever before,” she said.

Her work in particular focuses on three Slavic poets — Elizabeta Mnatsakanova, Bohumila Grögerová, and Krystyna Miłobędzka — who wrote and created into their later years.

“These women show us through their work that time can be filtered through our perceptions, that time can be measured as much emotionally as it can be empirically,” Braslavsky said.

Silver, according to Campbell, may be good for more than jewelry. His work is attempting to use silver in a chemical process that would make the production of pharmaceuticals a fraction of the current cost. The trifluoromethyl group is essential to many modern drugs, but it can be hard to synthesize. Using photochemistry, Campbell has been working to utilize trifluoroacetate as a trifluoromethyl source — a notoriously hard process.

To do this, he’s utilizing a special type of silver (Ag²⁺) — a highly reactive form of the metal that can be recycled and reused to not only cut costs but potentially also make strides in sustainability.

“At the outset of my Ph.D., very few Ag²⁺ compounds had ever been made before. But in this absence of knowledge, in this lack of precedence, I saw opportunity, and I seized it by devising a new synthetic strategy toward isolating large quantities of silver compounds,” Campbell said.

Before there were spreadsheets, there were khipus. Twisted twine with series of knots, khipus were the ancient Inca’s alternative to written script. They were used to record data, including census counts, taxes, and maybe intricate narratives and songs.

FitzPatrick has been studying a collection of 33 khipus from cliffside tombs at Laguna de los Cóndores in Peru to better understand the people who made them.

“I decided to put the process on its head, working backwards to understand how khipus were made, who made them, and what this can tell us about their use,” FitzPatrick said.

Part of this process, he said, has been to become a khipu-maker himself. During his presentation, FitzPatrick distributed a homemade khipu to each member of the audience.

The ancient Greek poet Sappho has long been considered by scholars to have been lost to time, only to be rediscovered in the late 19th century when fragments of papyrus containing her poetry were unearthed in Egypt. But Horgan says she was never really lost.

“She has been continually present in poems and plays, in sculptures and statues, and in the minds of the readers who have imagined her again and again and again, regardless of the presence or absence of her poetry,” Horgan said.

Horgan’s work is focused on dispelling the myth that the work of Sappho — a famously queer poet — was purposely oppressed. In reality, she said, Sappho and her queerness have been present in countless works of scholarship and art since her life in the time before Christ.

“My hope is that this work provides not only narratives of queer suppression, but queer survival. Sappho did not survive in spite of her queerness, but in fact, because of queerness,” she said.

Courts, key institutions in democratic societies, can both help and hurt democracy, according to O’Donohue. The Ph.D. candidate, who witnessed a military coup attempt while working for the U.S. State Department in Istanbul, said in his talk that this is particularly apparent in places like Turkey, as well as Israel and even the U.S. Israel and Turkey, according to O’Donohue, exemplify opposite ends of the “judicial power-sharing” spectrum — or the need for cross-partisan compromise to appoint judges to the country’s highest courts.

“I came to Harvard because I had this problem I needed to solve,” he said. “Why do courts defend or undermine democracy in particular by upholding legal constraints of powerful political leaders?”

Are we using AI wrong? Raux says we are. According to his research, humans project their own thinking onto artificial intelligence, leading us to miss out on what the tech can really do for us.

“We need to make sure that as humans, we can fully harness the potential of AI,” Raux said.

Conducting experiments using chatbots, Raux had the AI answer questions about parenting advice. His aim was to show that human intelligence is vastly different than artificial intelligence, and that what makes something difficult for humans may be different from AI and vice versa.

“But do people realize this when interacting with AI?” he asked.

Ultimately, Raux hopes that his work will help both researchers and users better harness the technology’s power.

Venturo-Conerly has a lofty goal: to bring mental healthcare to every young person across the world. She’s starting in Kenya. Building on work she started as an undergrad with fellow Harvard alumni Tom Osborn, Venturo-Conerly has been programming mental health services for Kenyan youth through the Shamiri Institute. Named for the Kiswahili word meaning “thrive,” Shamiri uses a tiered system of laypeople, supervised by mental health professionals and experts, to deliver counseling and academic support to Kenyan students. Along with mental health, their work focuses on academic, financial, and social well-being.

“Instead of focusing on psychopathology, it circumvents stigma by focusing on positive concepts, growth mindset, gratitude and values, affirmations, all of which are research-backed interventions theorized to produce an upward spiral of change in beliefs and behaviors,” Venturo-Conerly said.

Shamiri is in its sixth year of operation, and Venturo-Conerly and Osborn continue to study its impacts.

Jeffrey L. Page is an opera and theater director of both classical and contemporary works and a lecturer in Harvard’s Theater, Dance & Media program. He was the co-director of the revival of the musical “1776” and has won an MTV Video Music Award for his work with Beyoncé.

We all want to be seen.

Ralph Ellison wrote this book, “Invisible Man,” which was essentially about Black people. As I walk through my life, many a time, if I’m not already invisible, I have to make myself invisible so that I’m not disrupting a process or shaking the boat. I have to become invisible in order to adhere to respectability politics. But dance is all about being seen. How can the narrative that I’m putting into space, with my body, be read like a book? I believe dancing can do that. Dance as if we’re all watching. What do you want us to see?

Imagine you’re writing an essay. You’re working on this sentence for maybe eight hours. You’re trying to put the words together. The moment you find that sentence, it’s like, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the sentence. That’s the paragraph. That’s the story.’ That’s what it feels like to go from a non-dancing body to a dancing body. It’s cathartic. It’s as if I’m accessing a reservoir of information that has been locked away.

In Mali in West Africa, they have a practice known as djine foly. I’m sure people have heard of djinn, the Islamic mystic or spiritual guides; we might also know them as genies. Those djinn exist in Malian culture, too. Djine foly means the dancing space of the djinn. The dancers dance themselves into a trance-like state. When they have achieved this trance-like state, they become happy. An explosion of feeling comes upon them. In the Black community, we call it catching the holy ghost. It’s a spiritual thing. The way we unabashedly dance with abandonment and intention, it’s a spiritual phenomenon.

Students who take my class enjoy the class because I scream and I holler and I get them to release all of the stuff that’s sitting on their shoulders and sitting on their heads. Sometimes you just gotta shout to get the thing off of you in order to relax! Ain’t nobody concerned if you look good! Just dance!

Sometimes our logical mind is so strict and unmoving that, baby, it just needs to be a shout to get the logical mind to release itself so I can find that trance and attain my djinn.

— As told to Sy Boles, Harvard Staff Writer

A handwritten note from former President John F. Kennedy to his Harvard College classmates. A 1905 letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to his mentor, Albert Bushnell Hart, discussing race relations in America. A screen capture of The Harvard Crimson from March 2020 with the headline: Harvard President Bacow Tests Positive for Coronavirus.

Drawn from the Harvard University Archives, these items — on display through April 30 in the “Archives Inside Out” exhibit — tell a story of Harvard that is also a story of America. They also show how items enter the archival record and become part of Harvard, and American, history. 

“We wanted to demystify the work that we do and make it more accessible to the public,” University Archivist Virginia Hunt said of the goal of the exhibit. “The items on display celebrate Harvard’s institutional and community history while showcasing the unique expertise of our dedicated staff.”

Exhibit curators invited their colleagues to submit their favorite items, with an eye to surfacing pieces of history that shed a light on the nature of archival work. Staff were asked: What stands out to you and why? When you go home to your family and you talk about your day, what are you excited to talk about? What is your special find from the collections?

“This was a unique exhibition model and we wanted to get input from all our staff,” said Sarah Martin, Associate University Archivist for Community Engagement. “From the submissions, we selected items that not only tell compelling stories but also best represent the form and function of the University Archives.” 

Below are select items from the exhibit, with accompanying text from the archivist who chose it. The full exhibit is open to the public and on display in Pusey Library’s Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery through the end of the month. 

Letter from John F. Kennedy to members of the Harvard College Class of 1940, circa 1946 
HUD 340.506

Photograph of a group of women computers at the Harvard College Observatory, circa 1900
HUPSF Observatory (45) 

Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Albert Bushnell Hart, Oct. 9, 1905 
HUG 4448.27 Box 4

Perpetual calendar, circa 1885
UAI 15.892 

The Harvard Crimson, March 24, 2020
H-Sites: Harvard Life and Learning reproduction 

Sketches from the Harvard Lampoon, 1882
HUD 3511.182

Letter from Seamus Heaney to Helen Vendler, Oct. 30, 2006   
Accession 2024.1069, Box 5 

Letter from Ragan Henry to Joseph Levow Steinberg, June 25, 1953 
HUM 340 original and reproductions 

Bound typescript of “We Also Have a Voice: The Story of Harvard Pacifists During the Second World War,” edited by Arthur Stanley Harris Jr., circa 1942
HUD 3669.242 original and edited reproduction 

“Archives Inside Out” was curated by Emily Atkins, Ed Copenhagen, Hannah Hack, Virginia Hunt, Juliana Kuipers, Sarah Martin, Jehan Sinclair, and Caroline Tanski of the Harvard University Archives.

People who eat more meals with others tend to be more satisfied with their lives and are more likely to express positive emotions, according to a study published in the annual World Happiness Report. According to the finding’s authors, sharing meals is as predictive of happiness as income or employment status — across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and religions.

It may be a problem, then, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey found that Americans are spending more and more time dining apart, numbers the authors cite in their study. “In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day,” the study said, “an average increase of 53 percent since 2003.” This trend holds across all age groups, with the most dramatic drop among young people.

“It’s just surprising to me that this increase would be so clear and so severe,” said Micah Kaats, a doctoral student in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School who co-wrote the report.

While the study shows a strong correlation between the number of shared meals and happiness, it does not state whether sharing meals causes happiness or whether happy people tend to share more meals. “In all likelihood, I would be willing to put money on both being true,” Kaats said, “but which of those factors is stronger is definitely a task for future research.”

Meal sharing and happiness in the U.S.

The correlation itself is an important development for the field, according to Kaats, in part because happiness is hard to measure. When researchers ask someone to rate themselves from one to 10 on a happiness scale, Kaats says, it’s hard to pinpoint what a one or 10 might mean for any given person on a single day.

Though these subjective measures can be valuable to social scientists and policymakers, researchers often use income, insurance rates, and other factors that have shown strong correlational links to well-being as proxies. But these factors themselves are often hard to measure. “A lot of people don’t want to report their income,” Kaats said. “Those who do want to report their income are a select group.” From there, it’s difficult to tell the accuracy of what’s being reported, the exact type of income one might report (Pretax? Household? Posttax?), and how incomes can be compared between countries and over time.

Compared to these often-used variables, the number of shared meals is relatively clear-cut: “Yesterday, did you eat lunch or dinner with someone you know?” Kaats hopes that the question will find a use among other objective indicators linked to social connection — such as density of civic organizations or the number of political groups per county — that are used to gauge amorphous concepts like happiness and social trust.

In future research, Kaats hopes to tease out whether people become happier when they share more meals. But regardless, Kaats believes that the correlation between shared meals and happiness is important on its own. “If I want to know about your well-being, it’s much more informative for me to know how many meals you ate with other people in the last week than how much money you make,” he said, “so whatever the causal dynamics are, that seems important and interesting and worth further study.”

As researchers and policymakers contend with worsening mental health and increasing social isolation, shared meals could be both an important indicator of well-being and a source of policy intervention.

“We can’t solve every problem at once,” Kaats said, “but if we can get people to share more meals with each other, and that would improve people’s well-being, it’s a good place to start.”

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made the bench “hot.”

Noel Francisco said lawyers used to be able to present arguments at their own pace before facing justices’ questions. But “Scalia changed that dynamic because he was the first one who was an active questioner.” Since then, other justices have taken up Scalia’s style, leaving lawyers less opportunity to shape the exchange.

Francisco should know, having worked on both sides of the bench. He clerked for Scalia from 1997 to 1998 and later served as U.S. solicitor general during the first Trump administration, arguing cases before the Supreme Court on the government’s behalf.

Last Friday, Francisco was joined by Elizabeth Prelogar, J.D. ’08, and Neal Katyal, who served as solicitors general during the Biden and Obama administrations, respectively. During a conversation with Richard Lazarus, the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, the three offered an insider’s look at the job and how it has changed since 2017 with the addition of four new justices.

Changes to the court’s composition over the last two decades have affected the tone and the dynamic between the justices and advocates, and between the justices themselves, the trio noted.

There can be a “learning curve” for everyone, even the other justices, whenever a new justice gets seated, they noted. Sometimes, even a single justice, like the influential conservative Scalia or centrist Anthony Kennedy, often a “swing” vote, can have an impact on how lawyers argue cases.

Recalling one of his first appearances before the court, Katyal said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor “cared a lot about the facts of the case.” But after she stepped down, factual questions became “just one part” of the court dynamic at oral argument until Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s arrival in 2009.

The justices typically “didn’t have their minds made up as often as I feel like they do now,” Katyal said. Kennedy, in particular, “really didn’t know what he was going to do at the time of oral arguments in a lot of the big cases,” which gave the lawyers on both sides a greater opportunity to persuade the court.

Prelogar credits Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a former law school professor, with asking some of the toughest questions.

“She has this incredible ability to go multiple layers deep in unpacking an issue, always in a very fair way, a way that’s totally within bounds, and a way that’s very driven by a genuine desire to fully understand the ramifications of the government’s position in a particular case,” said Prelogar.

Kagan, the former HLS dean, is by far the toughest, say Francisco and Katyal, because she “dissects your case” and tests the very outer limits of one’s argument.

No question, they said, it can be terrifying, especially the first few cases before the court.

Francisco recalled referring to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Justice O’Connor, to gales of laughter from the gallery. They each sought advice from experienced colleagues or trusted law professors on how to manage their nerves and use their time at the podium wisely.

Katyal credited Lazarus’ counsel to get past his anxiety early in the job by viewing the back-and-forth with the justices at oral argument not as a battle to be won, but as a collaboration of ideas.

Win or lose, whatever you do, remember who the client is and don’t say something you later have to walk back.

“When you represent the United States and you’re standing at the podium in the Supreme Court, you’re committing the United States to a particular view of the law. You’re speaking this with the authority of the federal government, and you have to take some care, not ad hoc, making determination about what the positions of the United States will be,” Prelogar said.

The nation faces “a moral crisis” over whether we allow our best or worst impulses to prevail in a battle for the soul of America, historian Jon Meacham told Harvard President Emerita Drew Faust during a conversation about history and U.S. democracy Wednesday at the Kennedy School.

Author of the 2018 book, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” Meacham said, “We either will decide that we can live in a country where we defer our immediate gratification in order to enter into a covenant where the rule of law prevails” — or we won’t.

Meacham believes an important political shift has taken place in recent years. In past presidential elections, like Richard Nixon’s narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Americans could count on candidates to accept defeat regardless of how close or controversial the contest. That is no longer the case, he said.

“My central worry at the moment is that there’s an autocratic trend in the country that will be deepened and accelerated,” said Meacham, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book on Andrew Jackson, “American Lion.”

His fascination with presidents is not to build up Great Man-style mythology, but to reveal their inherent humanity, Meacham said.

“If history has any moral utility — and I think it does — I hope it is not to intimidate people with the grandeur and glory of someone’s life, but to show that flawed and broken people can do great things.”

Meacham served as an informal adviser and speechwriter to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and was sometimes called Biden’s “muse” for their closely shared views of American democracy. When Faust, a Civil War historian, asked how he was able to go from writing about history to becoming part of that history, Meacham answered with a vivid memory.

“It was the moment I had been waiting for since I was 6 years old,” Meacham said. “It’s the Oval Office. The president of the United States is sitting behind the Resolute Desk, the sunlight streaming in. I can smell FDR’s cigarette smoke; I can see RFK reaching out to the Soviets. And I sit down next to the president’s desk, and the president of the United States asked me a question, and I start talking, and I didn’t make a goddamn bit of sense,” he said. “It was horrible.”

Meacham said that if he were president, he would not hold a serious meeting in the Oval Office because of how the past can overwhelm the present.

“I think it distorts things, and I think it’s really hard for presidents to get honest advice, particularly in that room,” he said.

Asked by a student how the legacy of slavery informs the current political climate, Meacham answered: “I think that we have not dealt with it, and we live in the extraordinarily long shadow not just of Appomattox, but of Reconstruction.”

Referencing Edward Alfred Pollard, the Richmond newspaper editor who coined the term “The Lost Cause” in his 1866 history of the war, Meacham noted, “He says explicitly that ‘Though we have lost the war, we have not lost the fight for the principle, which was the principle of white supremacy.’ And I think we live with that tension now.”

Cooperation, community, and a sense of adventure may be the keys to our survival, even in these violently divided times.

That was the theme of Athena Aktipis’ address last week. The Arizona State University psychology professor offered the guidance as part of a Harvard Science Book Talk conversation about her newly published book, “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times.”

We seem to be living in an extraordinarily tumultuous moment of global outbreaks of deadly viruses, a dangerously warming planet, and coming economic and social displacement of technologies, including AI. But, Akiptis said, crises are nothing new to the human race. In fact, we are constantly managing risk. The dilemma is that often the solution isn’t clear-cut.

Akiptis presented the hypothetical case of the “goosile.” A suspicious blob appears on the radar of a mission control professional assessing attack threats. It could be a missile, which should be shot down. Or it could be a harmless goose (hence the mash-up neologism). What do you do?

“The problem is that the world is filled with ambiguity,” explained Aktipis. “Either you correctly identify more missiles but have more goose false alarms, or you correctly reject more geese, but miss some missiles.”

In other words, there may be no “right” answer, and that means more stress.

“The bottom line in managing our stress in these apocalyptic times … is gathering information so you can figure out what you actually do and don’t need to be stressed about,” said Aktipis, co-director of the Human Generosity Project and the Cooperation Science Network.

Taking principles from psychology and evolutionary biology, Aktipis has created an accessible and actionable framework. The first step is to look “at a potential threat from multiple perspectives.” Then, “attend to all of your senses when assessing a threat.” Third, reach outside yourself: “Find as many dimensions of information as you can.” That leads to her next suggested action: “Talk to people who have different knowledge than you do.” And finally, “Know when to stop gathering information.” You may need to move on — or take action. “Don’t get stuck in a risk-assessment loop,” she said.

Instead, she stressed, we must learn to live with risk.

“Thanks to the recent pandemic, many of us are likely accustomed to being miserable a considerable amount of time, even when we’re not facing the red-hot heat of an active apocalypse,” said Aktipis. “We put up with having a life that is often painful, boring, or some combination of the two.”

Changing this mindset can actually make us better prepared, letting us build up “apocalyptic sustenance.”

It may help to change priorities.

“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work hard, just that we should work hard on things that we’re actively deciding to do because they are important. And ideally also what would be kind of fun,” she continued. “We should reawaken that childlike part of us that is curious and likes amusement and then work hard on something that feeds that inner child with something delightfully playful.”

“A Field Guide to the Apocalypse” contains multiple outlines and suggestions for how to make this possible. One example is CHESS, an acronym for incorporating “Curiosity, Humor, Entertaining, Storytelling, and Socializing” into our lives.

Emphasizing the last S, Aktipis said: “The connections that we’ve forged through these social events can form the basis of mutual aid relationships that can come in handy during real catastrophes.”

Apocalypses come in many forms. Drawing on the original Greek definition, an apocalypse was “revelation of the underlying risk in the world and in our lives,” she said: “Rather than thinking of it as the end of the world, it’s an opportunity for us to learn and understand what the world really is like, and that can help us be better prepared and adapt as things are changing.”

Another key is not seeing survival or success as a zero-sum game. That thinking leads to the belief that “we all have to fight over the pie.” Instead, she suggested, “We can work together to make a bigger pie and share it.”

Utilizing game and cooperation theories, she laid out the work of the transdisciplinary Human Generosity Project, beginning with the Maasai people in Kenya, who have a traditional system called Osotua.

Literally translating to “invisible umbilical cord” (according to the Osotua Foundation), this social system assumes members of a group will give when asked, as long as long as they can help “without going below what they themselves need,” with no expectation of return, Aktipis explained.

“The only expectation is that they would be recipients of the same kind of help if they needed it in the future.”

This, she said, is similar to many of our own friendship and family bonds. Indeed, research in Fiji, Mongolia, and ranchers in the Southwest confirmed the universality of such “social insurance” bonds.

“Across all of these societies, people are managing risk through their social interactions, often through these need-based transfers.

“There is a lot of potential to change the way we handle risk collectively,” said Aktipis.

To drive home her points — and, perhaps, to build a little community among the crowd in Science Center A — she invited bluegrass guitarist Forest Thurman to join her as she brought out her ukelele to lead the audience in simple, tuneful singalongs with lines like “Life ain’t a prison/it’s a pie.”

New research provides hope that prion disease — a handful of rare, invariably fatal disorders caused by misfolded proteins in the brain — may, in the not-too-distant future, have a treatment if not a cure.

The work, published early this year in the journal Nature Medicine, showed that altering a single base in the gene that produces the killer proteins can reduce by half the amount of that protein in the brains of laboratory mice, a step that extended their lifespans 52 percent.

Authors of the work, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, caution that several potentially lengthy steps remain before human trials of the technique can be undertaken. Still, they agreed that the results indicate the pathway that they embarked upon nine years ago toward effective treatment in humans appears promising.

“I think it’s a milestone for sure,” said David Liu, senior author of the paper, in whose lab the base editing technology was developed. “One has to be careful to recognize that the path to an actual clinical trial has many such milestones that have to be traversed.”

Prion disease includes several conditions that lead to brain damage and dementia, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease, and fatal familial insomnia. About 15 percent of cases are due to an inherited mutation in the prion protein gene, while 85 percent are “sporadic,” occurring when these proteins spontaneously fold into abnormal, toxic shapes.

‘Personal’ mission for scientist who is also a patient

While laboratory work is often remote from the patients it is intended to help, these experiments are part of a personal mission for several of the papers’ authors. That’s because one of them, HMS Assistant Professor of Neurology Sonia Vallabh, has tested positive for an inherited form of prion disease called fatal familial insomnia.

In late 2010, Vallabh’s mother died of a mysterious, degenerative condition that subsequent tests would confirm as fatal familial insomnia. Not long after, Vallabh herself tested positive for the disease-causing mutation. That prompted Vallabh, who had graduated from Harvard Law School, and her husband, Eric Minikel, who holds a planning degree from MIT, to retrain for careers centered on understanding and developing a treatment for prion disease. Today, the pair run their own lab at the Broad, employing 14 researchers. In a relatively short time, Liu said, they have become experts on the therapeutically relevant aspects of the condition.

“It’s an incredible privilege to be able to work with them,” said Liu, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a core institute member at the Broad. “Their personal connection to the disease provides extraordinary motivation for everybody to try to make as much progress as we can — carefully, but as efficiently as possible.”

The encouraging results build on discoveries in Liu’s lab, which pioneered the single base editing technique used in the experiments. That technique has been used in 13 clinical trials, Liu said, and has benefited patients suffering from hypercholesterolemia, sickle cell disease, T-cell leukemia, and beta thalassemia.

“David took us seriously long before anyone had much reason to, so we’ve had a collaboration with him for a good while,” said Minikel, who is also assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “It’s been a perfect collaboration in the sense that Sonia and I have always felt like we care a lot about this disease, but we’re not technology development people. We’ll say, ‘Here’s the models and assays and the tools needed to develop a drug for this disease,’ but we’re probably not the ones who are going to make the drug.”

In the current work, researchers used a mouse model of human prion disease, which increases the chance the work will successfully translate to humans. The research — funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Broad, the Prion Alliance, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — involved inserting a genetic base editor developed in Liu’s lab into adeno-associated virus, which acts as a vector that homes in on cells and inserts its DNA cargo into their genomes. That rewrites the cellular instructions for producing the protein, in this case halting production.

Meirui An, a graduate student in Liu’s lab and one of the paper’s first authors, said that sometimes the vector itself can cause illness, so to improve safety researchers tweaked that part of the process, ultimately seeing a 63 percent reduction in prion protein production despite using a significantly lower dose of the vector virus.

The prion’s dangerous, infectious nature may make this research among the last conducted with human prion protein, Liu said. Such research was restricted after an accidental exposure in a French lab led to a researchers’ death from prion disease.

Human trials of any therapy that might emerge from the work remain several years away, Liu said. Whatever the needed intervening steps turn out to be, researchers said they will likely include refinement of the base editor — which is so large that it has to be transported into cells in two separate viral capsules — improved targeting to reduce its integration into the cells of other tissue types, and improved efficiency in reducing production of prion protein.

An and others praised the collaborative process between the labs involved, which included that of the Broad’s Benjamin Deverman, who specializes in vector engineering.

“Our exchanges have been really frequent and to me, personally, it’s extremely inspiring to work with patient-scientists,” An said. “I don’t need to find any external source of motivation to work on this project because just having a friend, a collaborator, who could benefit from this treatment really does a lot on the personal motivation side.”

With their ability to store carbon, forests are often considered the lungs of the Earth, but they are vulnerable to the world’s ills, too. A new study, using NASA laser technology from the International Space Station, reveals the impact of climate change on global tropical forests with greater depth and breadth than ever before.

That study, “Environmental drivers of spatial variation in tropical forest canopy height: Insights from NASA’s GEDI spaceborne LiDAR,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used measurements from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), a LiDAR laser instrument on the International Space Station, to look at changes in tropical forest canopy height and study how this crucial measure has been affected by heat, drought, and other aspects of climate change.

The forest canopy, the upper layer of mature trees, “is a very critical indicator of forest health and ecosystem productivity,” explained Shaoqing Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) and the first author on the paper.

“In general, taller canopies are associated with high carbon storage and greater above-ground biomass. Tall canopies can buffer the microclimate,” Liu said, even helping reduce the temperature during heat waves. The study looked at tropical forests in Asia, Africa, and South America — lands with minimal disturbances or human activities such as logging.

To measure changes in such forests, his group used laser measurements from GEDI, which allowed the group to study a wide swath of forests globally, whereas earlier studies had been limited to small areas.

“Over the past decade, NASA has been using the International Space Station as a convenient platform for evaluating new forms of space-based remote sensing measurements,” said Paul Moorcroft, professor of OEB and senior author of the study. “The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation waveform LiDAR is a prime example of this approach.”

GEDI — pronounced “Jedi” — “can tell us the vertical structure of the forest canopy” such as leaf density, said Liu. “Our study demonstrates that climate, topography, and soil properties account for almost three-quarters of the variation in tropical forest canopy height. We also found the elevation, dry season, and solar radiation are the most important variants to determine the canopy height.”

The researchers discovered that “tropical forests in the southern Amazon area are vulnerable to climate change” because of increasingly prolonged dry seasons. “The dry season is the dominant driver determining forest canopy height in this area,” said Liu.

Because global climate model projections show that this area will have longer dry seasons, “We may see significant reductions in canopy height,” he added.

“Understanding the environmental controls of tropical forest height is important for assessing the carbon sequestration and conservation value of different tropical forest areas,” said Moorcroft. “Understanding the environmental drivers of forest canopy height variation is also crucial for understanding how tropical forests will respond to climate change.”

The impact of climate change is not uniform, however. Thanks to GEDI, the researchers were able to view differences in its manifestation and effect on the canopy. “In the central Amazon, because it is relatively moist, the first important driver is actually elevation,” said Liu. This was also true in Africa, the researchers found.

Looking ahead, Liu would like to move beyond studying the primary forest to examine more of the globe’s forest and woodland areas. He said he hopes these studies will influence policy.

“In terms of climate-change policies, we see the tropical forests are not only biodiversity hotspots, they are critical for carbon storage. Protecting them is essential for mitigating climate change,” he said. “We hope to help policymakers help identify areas that are vulnerable to climate change and prioritize them.”

Funding for this study was provided, in part, by a NASA grant.

The Apple TV+ show “Severance” wrapped up its second season last month, leaving fans with a lingering sense of unease about what just happened and what comes next.

“Severance” follows a group of office workers who have chosen to undergo a procedure that separates their consciousnesses into an “innie” who only exists at the office and an “outie” who exists everywhere else, each with no memory of the other’s experiences. It’s about work-life balance, but it’s also about free will, identity, and the feeling of being at war with oneself. 

Among the show’s producers is Nicky Weinstock, who graduated from Harvard College in 1991. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, he talks about “Severance” as a “willfully strange” provocation and a TV sensation, and recalls his transition from Cambridge to Hollywood.

What do you most remember about your time on campus?

At Harvard, I found a lot of friends and professors and inspirations from all over the planet. It was very energizing as a place.

Ironically, I spent a lot of time leaving it, because I was an anthropology major and did anthropology work in Kenya and went to the University of Nairobi for a while, and spent as much time as I could traveling. All of it was very much of a piece, I think, in terms of being free-range and talking about writing and creativity with all kinds of people in all kinds of places. 

To be honest, when I got to Hollywood and started producing, I was shocked that Hollywood did not seem to have much interest in other places. I sucked it up and was able to do a lot of fun, Hollywood-based projects, but I always wanted to have a global sensibility. Finally, about three years ago, I was able to start my own company and draw stories from all over the world. 

How did you get involved with “Severance” and what did you first think of the concept? 

“Severance” found me in a very lucky way. It was a script by Dan Erickson. Dan had never produced a television series before, and in fact he didn’t have an agent. The script started to be passed around and noticed and was generating excitement. I was running a company called Red Hour with Ben Stiller. I had never seen a concept like that. It’s what everyone hopes for in movies and television: something that A) hasn’t been done before and B) is perfectly rendered. This had both, all credit to Dan. 

We began to develop it together and refine the pilot script. We managed to sell it to Apple and proceeded to package it with actors and with Ben directing it, and to make a reality of it in a way that doesn’t usually happen in Hollywood. Most of the time you start with a known writer; you start with massive actors. In this case it was literally the coolness of the idea that attracted everybody: John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette. They all responded to the sheer originality and resonance of the idea. 

Are you surprised that the show has taken on a life of its own? 

Yes and no. It surprised me because it was always willfully strange. It was always committed to the specificity of that world. That can often lead to a very fringe-y phenomenon that doesn’t catch on with a wide audience. 

But then again, I was not that surprised, because what I responded to when I first read it is what people respond to, which is that everybody feels like two people in their lives, at least. Everybody has a certain persona at their job and a different persona at home, and everyone is trying to reconcile different aspects of their lives into some coherent whole, and we spend all our lives doing it. 

The trajectory of the show seems to mirror our experience during and after COVID. Season 1 came out in 2022, and it felt like a very closed world, and then Season 2 expands that world to ask bigger questions about what it means to be a person.

I very much agree. Season 1 was very much a result of how we were living at the time, and that claustrophobia and confusion and isolation was very much part of our culture. I think that’s why a lot of people responded to it the way they did. And the world has only gotten stranger since then. The unpredictability and the shakiness and the bottomlessness that we’re all going through right now is why people responded to the show, too. 

For everyone, across the political spectrum, no matter where you live, there is a sense of “Where is the world going right now?” and “What do the people in power know and what is their intention?” That was not true when I was growing up. “Severance” has become a little bit of a vessel to demonstrate that mysteries abound and we don’t know who to trust. 

The second season ended on a bit of cliff-hanger that I won’t spoil, but was essentially about an “innie” character making a dramatic choice that heightened the stakes and set up a lot of new questions for the third season. Is there anything you can say about where the show will go? 

I can’t say much, but I can say that the concept of severance is so expansive. We wanted to do a first season that was claustrophobic. We wanted to do a second season that was out in the world. The idea of bifurcating your life and having different selves can go in so many directions. All I can say is Season 3 will not look anything like Season 2 or Season 1. It’s an expansive idea.