The first Germans to become Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power may have been ideological zealots, but later members were largely “ordinary men” drawn into the movement by propaganda and social pressure.

That’s one of several key findings in a new paper from Harvard researchers affiliated with the Economics Department and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. 

The researchers used vision-language artificial intelligence to digitize membership cards for more than 10 million members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, expanding on an existing database of 55,000, to illuminate who joined the fascist movement, when, and in what communities. Their findings were published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“What we can do with this new resolution is zoom in much more fine-grained, temporally speaking, but also geographically speaking,” said Luis Bosshart, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at the Weatherhead Center. “What we find is that mass entry occurred in discontinuous waves and that representativeness increased over time. By the end of the regime, the joiners looked much more like the population at large.”

Led by Adolph Hitler, the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, established a totalitarian regime in Germany that triggered World War II and carried out the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. At its height, one in six German adults was a registered member of the movement.

Nazi functionaries tracked information about members’ ages, occupations, addresses, and dates of party entry. Microfilm images of the cards, many of which were handwritten, are held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and open to researchers — but efforts have been stymied by the laborious task of manual transcription.

“Entries are edited. Someone moves, so an address gets crossed out. Some cards are written all over,” said co-author Matthias Weigand, an econ graduate student and an affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development. “Thus, people have been taking random samples for their purposes, transcribing them, and trying to work with that. We now observe the near-universe of membership cards, including features such as membership portraits.”

The team used Google Gemini’s vision-language AI model to extract and standardize the data. The development of their algorithm occurred over a long process in collaboration with the German Federal Archives. They then conducted manual checks to validate the model’s accuracy. 

After a gradual buildup that ran into the early 1930s, the first sharp wave of entry into the Nazi Party occurred in 1933 after Hitler became chancellor of Germany; the second in 1937 after a nearly four-year membership ban was lifted. Early joiners, the researchers found, were predominantly middle-class, male, and from non-agricultural industries. But those differences narrowed over time. When the party dissolved in 1945, new members closely resembled their county demographics.

Much of the existing literature, in line with data constraints, has focused on differences between counties. But by linking the millions of membership cards to census data, the researchers have revealed that 95 percent of variation in Nazi Party membership occurred within counties, not between them. 

Even within the same county, municipalities differed drastically in their party membership share, with no clear differences in population density, demographic composition, or dominant industries. 

Municipalities that were early Nazi strongholds remained so — and municipalities with no early membership were unlikely to develop it later on. In fact, they found that 40 percent of municipalities recorded no Nazi Party members at all. 

The findings suggest that those who joined the party before 1933 were more committed ideologically, but those who joined later were likely responding to social pressures and to changes in the political winds. 

“Historical research suggests this is working through social pressure, social norms, local spearheads flipping,” Weigand said, noting parallels in sociological models of riots. “The first person throwing the stone is always the radical, but the last person maybe not.”

The research does not explore joiners’ ideological beliefs, Bosshart said, but sets out parameters for future explanations.

“Any explanation needs to be able to explain the very different trajectories among neighboring and seemingly similar municipalities,” he said, “and it needs to be able to explain the nonlinear mass entry dynamics.” 

An analysis of hundreds of first-person accounts, collected in 1934 by U.S. sociologist Theodore Abel, shows that “national renewal/order” and “social belonging” were the top two reasons given for joining the Nazis, ranking above anti-communism, economic hardship, and antisemitism. 

“Our research points to coordination as a central force in institutional change,” Bosshart said. “Regime transitions are moments of fundamental political uncertainty, and what people believe about the new equilibrium matters. We see this in the cascade dynamics around 1933. One might also say that similar dynamics were at play after 1945, when former party members rapidly accommodated the new democratic order. There’s a cost of not being aligned. You don’t want to be in favor of the old regime in a stable new democratic equilibrium, just as you don’t want to be the big democrat in a new autocratic equilibrium. 

“These patterns are consistent with an Arendtian point of view,” Bosshart continued, referencing philosopher Hannah Arendt’s argument that mass political violence can be sustained by ordinary people conforming to a dominant order. “If that view is right, the mechanism is general and might not be limited to interwar Germany.”

Patient recovery from debilitating conditions and diseases could be faster and more effective if drugs and therapeutic molecules were delivered right to where they are needed in the body.

One way to achieve this is the use of implantable, synthetically engineered, living cells that can sense injury or disease-associated conditions in their environment and respond by producing the right amount of a therapeutic molecule.

Bacteria, in particular, are promising as they can thrive in harsh physiological environments within the body, such as infected or inflamed tissues, tissues undergoing mechanical movements, and tumors. Some of the microbial therapies have advanced into clinical trials, failing, however, because the microbes could not be contained at specific sites in the body.

Now, a research team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has developed an “Implantable Living Materials” (ILM) platform that offers a compelling solution to this problem. The team, led by Wyss Founding Core Faculty member David Mooney, the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS, encapsulated a genetically engineered, therapeutic strain of E. coli bacteria within a biomaterial designed to regulate bacterial growth and resist mechanical stresses.

The E. coli bacteria were equipped with a synthetic gene circuit that allowed them to sense pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria causing infections and then respond by releasing a therapeutic molecule that killed the nearby pathogens. Implanted into the joints of mice next to a specialized orthopedic implant designed to help heal femoral injuries, the ILM autonomously and effectively treated infections. The findings were published in Science.

“With this new strategy combining both, an engineered material with designed mechanical features, and genetically engineered microbes that produce therapeutic payloads on-demand, we provide a generalizable framework for deploying future microbial medicines,” said Mooney. “The precision, safety, and therapeutic durability afforded by this ILM strategy could be a potential solution for treating a wider range of diseases and infections, enabling therapeutic efficacies that might surpass those of other drug delivery strategies.”

Breathing life into therapeutic materials

“In the beginning, we asked the seemingly simple question, what if we could design a material that safely encapsulates drug-delivering bacteria inside and allows therapeutic drugs to pass through to where they are needed,” said first-author Tetsuhiro Harimoto, who spearheaded the project as a postdoctoral fellow in Mooney’s group. “This was a big ask since the encapsulating material had to reconcile two often contradictory features: it needed to be sufficiently ‘stiff’ so that bacteria pushing against it from the inside can’t break it apart, and sufficiently ‘tough’ to provide an enclosure that protects against external physical stresses in mechanically active tissues.”

To realize ILMs, the team started with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), which is already used clinically, and processed it to form nanoscale interactive crystalline domains. Due to the tiny pore sizes within the PVA material, the bacteria remain constrained while soluble molecules they produce can travel to other sites in the body. The resulting ILM safely contained the bacteria over extended time intervals of up to six months and was resistant to repeated mechanical stresses.

Building in sense-and-response behavior

To provide proof-of-concept for ILMs, the team homed in on the infection from a periprosthetic fracture (a broken bone occurring around an orthopedic implant). To effectively treat this and other types of infection, the therapy-delivering bacteria within the ILM needed to be genetically engineered to function as a drug depot with autonomous “sense-and-respond” capabilities.

“When we tethered a therapeutic ILM to a stainless steel periprosthetic device that was infected with a pathogenic P. aeruginosa strain isolated from a patient’s wound and implanted next to the femur bone of mice, it significantly reduced the pathogen burden while safely containing its engineered bacteria over a three-day treatment course,” said Harimoto. “In contrast, in mice that we treated with a non-therapeutic control ILM that did not produce ChPy, the numbers of P. aeruginosa bacteria continued to rise over the same time interval. This demonstrated the ability of therapeutic ILMs to autonomously sense and treat periprosthetic infection in vivo.”

The researchers think that specifically engineered ILMs as a novel class of therapeutics with excellent safety features and locally targeted drug release capabilities have broad potential, ranging from tissue regeneration to immune modulation in a variety of disease settings. A patent application describing the use of ILMs for drug delivery has been filed.

Adapted from a Wyss Institute press release.

The public health focus surrounding the deadly hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius is now turning to preventing onward transmission, as the 18 American passengers of the vessel arrived in the U.S. on Monday and most of the rest of the travelers are either en route to or back in their home countries.

The World Health Organization reports eight cases and three deaths as of May 8. Hantavirus is deadlier, case-by-case, than COVID, but is significantly harder to spread, according to William Hanage, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In this edited conversation, the Gazette spoke with Hanage, who is also associate director of the Chan School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, about the outbreak and his expectation that it will be fully contained, though that will likely take some time.

Eighteen people, including one who tested positive, are being monitored in the U.S. How dangerous is this? There have been three deaths so far, which sounds like a lot for the number of exposures we know about.

The numbers that float about are around 40 percent case fatality. But it’s always difficult to be sure, because there could be milder cases that we don’t recognize amid the chaos of an outbreak. But it’s certainly toward the more severe end of the range.

They talk about it being passed by close contact. What is close contact?

What we know is that it seems to require reasonably extended contact with a person who is sick and is shedding virus.

One of the cases of transmission was to the doctor on the cruise ship who was attending the index case. Not knowing anything about the precise course of illness, it’s easy to see how a doctor treating an extremely sick patient on a cruise ship is going to be in contact with them, probably in a poorly ventilated space, for quite some period of time and without knowledge of the personal protective equipment that they should be using.

They simply didn’t know what it was.

So, I think that case is not surprising. It does indicate, however, that healthcare staff should take care while treating people who have hantavirus to minimize the potential for transmission.

How concerned are you about the next few weeks to months? Is there a time frame that is critical in giving an indication of which way this outbreak is going to go?

I think that we will learn a great deal over the next month about whether or not any significant transmission chains have been seeded by the people who are currently being chased up. I think we can expect more cases. How many is not clear.

One thing which I’m going to say right now is that I’m absolutely confident that this is going to be limited and contained. The number of people in the world who should be worried about this now is in the low hundreds, if not less. The only question is how long it will take to contain it.

What does the transmission pattern — starting on a cruise ship, people getting onto airplanes, and then to different countries, illustrate about the potential health consequences of our connectedness today?

Infectious diseases are our companions, and their spread reflects the contacts that we make between us.

There’s a classic paper that I’ve seen referred to many times considering three generations from the U.K. A person’s great-grandfather never traveled more than 10 miles from the town he was born in. That person’s father traveled from that town to London and a few places around the country. But his son had traveled to every continent. This really shows the challenges today in responding effectively to outbreaks like this.

It’s made more complicated by the fact that different countries may have access to different resources. Consider, for instance, how the U.K. has used paratroopers to deliver materials to help care for suspected cases on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.

It also is a bit of a call back to COVID, because one of the reasons that was so challenging is that the different countries had different priorities.

Before vaccines and widespread immunity, COVID had the capacity to flatten healthcare systems provided it’s given free reign, but the number of severe cases would be dependent on how many old people there are in the population.

But some countries have a very different age structure and fewer resources. So, for instance, South Africa has a relatively young population and you have to consider COVID rates alongside something like tuberculosis. After Omicron emerged, South Africa essentially started to switch its focus to tuberculosis.

That illustrates the way in which different countries have different resources and different priorities, which makes coordinating a response more difficult. That’s one of the reasons why we need organizations like the WHO.

I know that hantaviruses spread among rats, but what else is important to know about the virus?

Most hantaviruses do not transmit human-to-human. When I saw the headline about this, I thought, “There’s a cruise ship where there was lots of contact with rodent feces? That’s a weird cruise ship.”

Then I heard it came from Argentina, and it made more sense, because the only hantavirus we know of that’s capable of human-to-human spread is the Andes strain.

Is transmission to humans very common with that strain?

It’s not common, though there have been outbreaks. There’s a bit of controversy about how much human-to-human transmission occurs because it’s always very difficult to rule out a common exposure. That’s made more difficult by the fact that it can have a quite long incubation period.

For instance, when you would see cases of COVID-like symptoms developing four or five days apart, you would think, “That’s a transmission chain.” But in the case of hantaviruses, it can be weeks. That can make it difficult to know if two people develop illness a few weeks apart whether it’s due to a common exposure as opposed to transmission.

We’re turning right now to an outbreak that happened in 2018 and that was pretty thoroughly investigated. In that outbreak there were four rounds of transmission, from the index case to secondary, tertiary, quaternary before it was eventually contained.

For a disease like this, the most effective way to control and contain it is going to be quarantine. And that quarantine is going to have to be quite long in order to be secure and effective.

In the 2018 Argentina outbreak, they implemented enforced self-quarantine and put some limitations on large gatherings, which are key to outbreaks and transmission in many cases.

So in order to stop it, people who may have been exposed but aren’t necessarily sick will have to be patient enough to sit in their house for several weeks?

That’s right. Another thing that is important here is that everything we know indicates that people are infectious and most likely transmit as they develop symptoms and once they’ve developed symptoms. That’s actually a good thing, from the point of view of control. It means it’s very, very unlikely to cause anything more than a limited outbreak.

What are your symptoms if infected?

If you have hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, then you have very severe, rapidly progressing respiratory symptoms. Gastrointestinal symptoms have also been involved in at least one case. The onset is quite acute and will include a fever, one of the first indicators of infection.

Of course, fevers are a symptom which is shared with many other infections. That’s one of the reasons why you’re hearing about people with symptoms who are being treated as potential cases but which on further investigation turn out to not be caused by hantavirus.

How did this outbreak get started?

The index patient came aboard in Argentina. Where they acquired it is not clear. There’s been focus on a bird-watching trip to a landfill site where it’s known that rodents — among which the virus is endemic — can be found.

That being said, the trip occurred not very long prior to the index case developing symptoms, so it’s possible there was either an unusually short incubation period or that it could have been picked up in the weeks prior to that.

How does this compare to, say, COVID or measles or flu, other illnesses that are going around today?

It’s much less routinely infectious than any of those. COVID is capable of transmitting before people develop symptoms or when they have very few or no symptoms. The same is true with flu. Measles is extraordinarily transmissible and hangs in the air in aerosol particles for a long time. It is among the most contagious viruses we know and is only held in check by vaccination.

This is comparably much less transmissible.

The outbreak that is most immediately reminiscent is the original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which also had transmission that was linked to symptom development or the onset of symptoms, and that was also driven by a few super spreading events.

It’s very easy to imagine many opportunities for transmission on a cruise ship, but it’s much harder to see the outbreak continuing for a long period once it has been identified.

Harvard has published a database identifying 1,613 people who were enslaved by University leaders, faculty, or staff or who labored on campus as enslaved individuals between 1636 and 1865.

The publicly accessible Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) database is an update on the University’s research, and a result of a recommendation included in the 2022 Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. The report initially identified more than 70 individuals. The new HSRP database includes the names, locations, and documented dates of enslaved people — as well as the names and positions of the Harvard affiliates who enslaved them. The research behind the database is being led by American Ancestors, the nation’s oldest genealogical nonprofit and the research partner of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative. 

“Harvard and our partners have approached this work thoughtfully, seriously, and with respect for those individuals we are able to identify and the family histories we can help recover,” said Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects at Harvard and leader of the H&LS initiative. “To expand our research from just over 70 individuals to now 1,613 has taken genealogical expertise on the part of countless researchers. And, while our work is by no means done, this is a big step forward.” 

The database is the product of rigorous genealogical and archival research. While genealogical research often begins with a living person and traces backward, for enslaved individuals, “We do the opposite: start in the past and move to the present,” said Lindsay Fulton, chief research officer at American Ancestors. “We are basically doubling the research — because you have to research both the enslavers and the people they enslaved.”

To find the descendants of people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, or staff, researchers first built out a list of who held those positions in the years between 1636 and 1865. The University didn’t have a centralized staff registry until much more recently, which meant researchers had to comb through handwritten notes from University meetings, stewards’ books, faculty records, legislative charters, and a variety of other sources to recreate Harvard’s roster from the ground up. Through this work, researchers have verified approximately 3,000 members of leadership, faculty, or staff, creating a framework where none had previously existed. 

“In researching people who were enslaved by Harvard affiliates, we first needed to understand the structure of the University, the different positions people held, and how these changed over time,” Fulton said. “For example, members of the Board of Overseers were often appointed because they held positions within the colonial government or because they were church ministers. But the criteria for who was an overseer changed over time.”

From there, researchers searched for documentation that indicated which individuals enslaved people. This information could lead to uncovering the names, or in some instances where names were not apparent, indications of those they enslaved. The new database identifies 259 members of Harvard’s leadership, faculty, or staff prior to the end of the Civil War who enslaved individuals. American Ancestors’ research into these 259 and other Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff is ongoing and expected to grow significantly.

Performing simultaneous genealogical work for the Harvard leaders, faculty, or staff who enslaved individuals as well as those they enslaved requires diligence and attention to detail. For each of the former, researchers examined a specific set of documents, including probate records, land and property deeds, and marriage records, among many more. 

Identifying enslaved individuals, who were considered property under colonial and pre-Civil War law, can be even more complex. These individuals are often mentioned only in passing in estate disputes that can stretch several hundred pages. In some cases, their names shift over time.

While the database represents a major expansion from the approximately 70 names included in the 2022 report, the growth does not come as a surprise. The presidential committee had anticipated that the list would widen considerably as the H&LS Initiative implemented Recommendation 4 from the report. The H&LS Initiative was established in 2022 to implement the seven recommendations the committee detailed in the report. 

Harvard and American Ancestors acknowledged that the database is far from finished; researchers will continue to identify more individuals enslaved by University leadership, faculty, or staff — and trace the descendants, living and deceased, of those they enslaved. While the work to recover and reconstruct family histories and family trees will take time, so far researchers have identified about 600 living descendants. The H&LS Initiative will continue sharing new findings with the public at key milestone moments, helping support a wider effort of institutions exploring their ties to slavery. The University will contribute this research to the 10 Million Names project, a collaborative initiative led by American Ancestors that is dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America.

“My hope is that, over time, unflinching self-examination will ripple outward, that Harvard will be a leader not only in scholarship but in demonstrating institutional honesty and humility in confronting the complexities of our institutional past,” said Alphonse Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is also a member of the initiative’s Advisory Council. “Every chapter in history, every family tree, and every institution, has its share of shadows and surprises. The journey isn’t always neat and easy, but it’s a crucial part of self-knowledge — an experience both necessary and transformative.”

To explore the HSRP database, learn more about the research methodology, and review resources for pursuing genealogical research, visit the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery website.

Merit Cudkowicz has been working on ALS for three decades. She knew who she wanted to tell as soon as she was able to discuss the breakthrough findings publicly.

“The first person I called was the husband of my very first [ALS] patient, when I was a fellow,” she said.

His wife had been diagnosed at 44 with the fast-moving A4V variant of the deadly disease. The intervening decades were a period marked by “a lot of trials, a lot of progress, but nothing really earth-shattering, right?” Cudkowicz said.

Until now.

A paper published this winter in JAMA Neurology found that a new drug, called tofersen, can radically slow and even reverse the course of the disease in a small subset of patients with a rare genetic variant.

It is a small but unprecedented glint of light in the long, dark struggle with what used to be called Lou Gehrig’s disease, both for the patients who had been staring down certain paralysis and death and for the researchers who work on the disease.

Cudkowicz, the Harvard Medical School Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a co-author of the paper, said the data reveal was “the best day” in her years of confronting ALS.

“It tells the whole field that this illness can be stopped. We thought that was true, hypothetically, but we had never seen it,” she said.

December’s findings came only after years of fitful progress; the paper lists almost two dozen researchers in eight countries. Eleven are based in Boston or Cambridge, including at biotech pioneer Biogen, which is marketing the drug as Qalsody.

Cudkowicz, who directs the Sean M. Healey and AMG Center for ALS, was involved almost from the start.

“I think it was in 2010 that Tim called me,” she said, referring to Timothy Miller, the lead author and an ALS researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. “They had this great therapeutic idea, but they had never developed a clinical trial before and asked if we could help.”

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is uncommon, but its progress is terrifying: something like an irreversible rolling blackout of the motor neurons. What first appears as a slight weakness in the leg or twinge in the throat proceeds to eat away at the muscles, robbing patients of everyday mobility, speech, swallowing and, eventually, breath.

The disease is fickle and incompletely understood. It can progress over decades or kill within a year. Some types are inherited, or “familial,” others “sporadic” — apparently caused by an unseen succession of genetic and environmental causes.

And more than 150 years after it was first diagnosed, medical science has learned to manage ALS, but not cure it.

Cudkowicz was well-positioned to help usher this treatment into the world. In 1995, as a Harvard Medical School resident in neurology, Cudkowicz co-founded the Northeast ALS Consortium, or NEALS. Over the years, it has become a global hub for drug trials that bear on the disease (and changed its name to reflect that broader reach).

Drug trials — often drawn out — are especially difficult with cutting-edge therapies like the one Miller had proposed.

Tofersen is an antisense oligonucleotide, something like a “correction tape” that masks a dangerous piece of genetic code. In this case, it binds to the site of what is called the SOD1 gene.

As first discovered in the lab of Robert Brown at Harvard Medical School in 1993, that gene, when mutated, can produce toxic, misfolded proteins that clump in the spinal cord and brain, causing neuron death.

Cudkowicz said such a treatment had never been approved for use in the human brain, and the path to approval wasn’t straightforward.

A first study in 2010, she recalled, “had some toxicity in the animal studies” and never made it to a human trial.

Miller kept up work through years of biochemical retooling, resulting in the version of the drug that the FDA approved in 2023.

“We’ve been collaborators from the beginning, but it’s his brainchild,” Cudkowicz noted.

By the numbers, the benefits of this drug will be extremely narrow. The study was aimed only at patients with the rare SOD1 genetic subtype of ALS, and only a fraction of those participants showed the most dramatic improvements.

As it first gave approval, the FDA estimated that fewer than 700 Americans might be eligible.

And the therapy is still a major undertaking. The sticker price is between $150 and $180,000 a year — actually affordable, Cudkowicz said, compared to some other emergent gene therapies, but sometimes prohibitively expensive without insurance.

“In Massachusetts, we’ve been able to get coverage for patients. Here we’ve seen someone on a Tuesday, had approval by Friday, and started treating them Monday,” Cudkowicz said. “But it’s not like that state-to-state, and some European countries still won’t pay for it. It’s awful.”

And for now, patients in tofersen therapy must undergo monthly infusions directly into the spinal canal, bypassing the blood-brain barrier that would thwart oral or intravenous applications.

Despite all that, Healey Center staff have come to call their tofersen program “our happy clinic,” Cudkowicz said. “In maybe a quarter of participants, the illness stops — they get better. … We’ve started sending people back to rehab.”

Beyond those personal miracles, Cudkowicz sees other upsides to tofersen.

First, the researchers won their expedited FDA approval based on an emerging index of neurological damage called the neurofilament light chain, which can be detected in a patient’s blood. (Tofersen can lower its levels by around 50 percent, and that lowering corresponded to clinical success.)

“That kind of surrogate biomarker can really accelerate a field,” Cudkowicz said. “All of a sudden, you have something you can measure in a short time and that’s predictive — it cuts the cost of drug development.”

That will bring in new firms, she added, some of which are already pursuing less-invasive ways to administer drugs like tofersen.

And since the misfolded proteins present in the SOD1 population can sometimes be found in people without these genetic mutations, others have launched a small trial to see whether tofersen can help in those far more common cases of “sporadic” ALS.

Tofersen appears to work best when administered early, and there is another benefit.

Cudkowicz’s team has already partnered with the University of California’s San Francisco campus to analyze patients’ skin samples and identify potential candidates for the earliest possible intervention.

But in the struggle against such a devastating illness, the human impact of a breakthrough can’t be overstated. Which is why Cudkowicz couldn’t wait to make that call to her former patient’s family.

She said, “I just wanted him to know that it finally happened” — the closest thing yet to a cure.

At a time when prospects for attaining the American dream feel to many like they’re slipping away, education remains key to ensuring that children realize their full potential, and it still provides for many a pathway out of poverty and into the middle class. 

Recent research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, director of Opportunity Insights, and others have shown that improving school quality alone isn’t enough to boost the future economic trajectory of a child from a low-income family. To make a real difference, those efforts must also address the circumstances and conditions in students’ lives outside of school that undermine their ability to succeed academically.

That’s no easy task, but there are some very promising solutions happening in cities and towns across the country that deserve far more attention, said Rob Watson, executive director of the EdRedesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, which conducts research and training that focuses on ways to improve educational achievement beyond the classroom. 

“Universities are in the business of generating knowledge, but where we often fall short is ensuring that knowledge gets to people who are in positions to do something with the good research and innovation that happens here or that we study from across the country and around the world,” he said.

To try to bridge the persistent information gap between scholars, practitioners, and the public, the Lab launched “Dream On,” a new video series collaboration with independent journalists Joe Posner, a Vox Video co-founder, and James Watson, who’s also an Ed Redesign Lab fellow.

The series spotlights communities and organizations across the U.S. that are tackling the complex challenges of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods. Those featured have found locally-driven solutions that are grounded in the research of scholars across Harvard and the country and can be duplicated in other places.

“There are no silver bullets. There is no one thing that’s going to solve issues of intergenerational poverty in the country, but there are things that are working,” said Watson. “And often, practitioners and people on the ground are hungry to know about these stories and think about how they can adapt and innovate on them in their local context.”

The first episode profiles Communities in Schools, a nonprofit that provides schools in high-poverty areas in 29 states and Washington, D.C., with “navigators” who help families, teachers, and school administrators find the most appropriate support services for a child’s specific needs, such as housing, nutrition, and healthcare. 

“Often, the absence of those types of supports doesn’t allow a kid to come to school ready to learn, or a teacher or principal to do their job,” said Watson.

Future episodes will focus on efforts in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that have yielded significant strides in educational achievement but also reduced violent crime and spurred new housing in the city, as well as on the Child Poverty Action Lab, a data-driven organization that focuses on reducing childhood poverty in Dallas.

Watson, who grew up in a low-income area of Poughkeepsie, New York, said he “saw firsthand how important it is to see strong examples of community-led solutions to big problems we’re facing in every community.”

He hopes the stories will demonstrate to policymakers the viability of these efforts and inspire parents, teachers, school districts, local and state officials, and philanthropists to come together and find an approach that works for their community, whether urban, rural, or anything in between.

“We think the powerful part of this project is not just a technical challenge of declining economic mobility or educational limitations or poverty, it’s also that in red, purple, and blue America, at the local level, people are coming together to get things done for young people and families,” said Watson.

When Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine in 2022, Anastasiia Pereverten was more than 5,000 miles away, studying at the University of Wyoming. From that distance, she watched a surge of support from Americans who were far removed from the conflict.

“All this, so far away from Ukraine?” said Pereverten. “People were so incredibly vocal and supportive, and wanted to know more. I wanted to understand what shaped that.” 

That question — how public support for foreign policy forms, and how it can be mobilized — became the focus of her academic research. 

Pereverten, who completed her bachelor’s degree in 2024, is now graduating from Harvard’s Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia master’s program. Her thesis examines how Ukraine advocacy groups persuaded and mobilized Americans to support Ukraine, and how Americans form their opinions about foreign policy. 

“I’ve worked with many students over the years on their research projects, but few have been as focused and self-motivated as Ana,” said her thesis adviser George Soroka, a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Government. “Her findings are important and resonate beyond the immediate context of the Russo-Ukrainian war.” 

Pereverten’s thesis draws on interviews with 30 advocates and activists in the U.S., as well as an original survey of more than 600 Americans. It describes how Ukraine advocates capitalized on intense media attention to marshal support for policies and humanitarian aid. 

Her work builds on existing political participation research that shows people are likelier to take action — whether calling an elected official, donating to a cause, or posting a sign on their front lawn — when they are already psychologically engaged with an issue, believe their actions will be effective, and observe similar behavior from people in their social networks. 

“I now understand the importance of visibility of the issue that creates its salience for the public,” Pereverten said. “Knowledge about the war and about Ukraine, along with the salience of the conflict as a public issue, was shaped by strong media coverage, which helped keep the public aware and engaged.” 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerated Pereverten’s interest in public policy and international relations, but it didn’t begin there. Growing up in Kyiv, she closely followed the political upheaval that unfolded during Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests, sparked when former President Viktor Yanukovych changed course on a deal to pursue closer ties with Europe.

“We were watching the news, and I remember the atmosphere of, ‘What’s going to happen next?’” recalled Pereverten, who was about 11 at the time. “Everything was changing.” 

Pereverten is also passionate about the arts. She studied piano and worked at an art museum in Kyiv. For college, she combined her interests in art and international relations and pursued a degree in cultural diplomacy at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. 

But when her university went online at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she applied for the U.S. State Department’s Global Undergraduate Exchange Program, which offers one-semester scholarships to U.S. schools. She was awarded a scholarship to the University of Wyoming. 

“I got there in January 2022, and in February 2022 the full-scale invasion of Russia began,” Pereverten said. “So the school, after some time, offered me a scholarship to finish my degree there.” 

The early weeks of the war were a challenging time for Pereverten. “People I knew were risking their lives, and I was in physical safety in Wyoming,” she said.

She became a vocal advocate for Ukrainians in the Wyoming media and organized lectures and art exhibits to help Americans understand what was happening half a world away. 

“It was the least I could do. I realized that I could be useful in international relations and diplomacy.” 

Eager to deepen her understanding of international relations, public opinion, and persuasion, Pereverten applied to several master’s programs but decided on Harvard after attending Admitted Students’ Day. She became one of eight students in the two-year Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies graduate program cohort and quickly fell in love with the center’s close-knit international community. 

“It’s a very close cohort, and all of us really shaped each others’ time at Harvard. We have people from Estonia, Lithuania, the U.K., Poland. It’s such an incredible, international environment that I don’t take for granted.” 

At Harvard, Pereverten got to work acquiring the tools to answer her questions about foreign policy opinions. Courses in data science helped her analyze public attitudes, while John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Government Joshua D. Kertzer’s graduate seminar on political psychology and international relations equipped her with theoretical frameworks to interpret the results of her research. 

In the summer of 2025, Pereverten interned at the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., where she supported diplomatic engagements by drafting briefing material and knowledge notes. 

Soroka commended her hard work under difficult circumstances. 

“Despite all the turmoil the war has caused her, Ana is remarkably warm and charming — always quick with a smile and a joke. Her poise is all the more remarkable given how deeply worried she is about friends and family back home.” 

Soroka continued, “I have no doubt in my mind Ana, and people like her, will be critical in rebuilding Ukraine once the current war inevitably ends. And I’m so happy that Harvard played a role in shaping who this remarkable young woman is — and will one day become.” 

Pereverten hopes further research can illuminate how persuasion works in low-information domains like foreign policy and how audiences can be mobilized to take action.

She dedicated her thesis to her uncle Zhenya, a soldier in Ukraine’s armed forces who was injured in 2025 and has been undergoing a “long and challenging process of rehabilitation.” 

Pereverten is eager to get back to Ukraine. After she graduates, she plans to join the World Bank Group’s Pioneers program there, where she will monitor and report on global aid flow. 

“I am excited to return to Kyiv — to be close to my family, be an active citizen, and put everything I’ve learned at Harvard in political science, negotiations, and public opinion research to work for Ukraine’s resistance and reconstruction.”

Suicide deaths among young adults and youth declined after a federal agency simplified the phone number for a national crisis hotline and increased resources, a new study says.

The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, run by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, replaced 1-800-273-Talk in 2022, accompanied by a $1.5 billion campaign to expand crisis center capacity and workforce nationwide.

The change came amid a national conversation about declining mental health — particularly among American teens — that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, suicide deaths among young adults and youth have declined 11 percent — representing 4,372 lives — from the level anticipated by a long upward trend before 2022, researchers say.

“This is one of those rare good-news stories in public health,” said Vishal Patel, first author of a paper on the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April. “Most population health research diagnoses issues like rising mortality and widening differences, so it was refreshing to see this intervention having an effect, though it’s not going to solve the issue on its own.”

Patel, a clinical fellow in surgery at Harvard Medical School and surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that when researchers first examined figures for all age groups, the lifeline’s potential impact appeared to be slight.

But when they broke down the data, they saw a significant decline among those age 15 to 34 — encompassing the high-risk teenage years — that had been masked by results in other groups.

The researchers noted a decline from both observed suicide deaths in 2022 and from predictions based on a long-term upward trend. In 2010, about 11 suicides per 100,000 were reported in that age group. By 2022, that had risen to nearly 18 per 100,000. Three years after the 988 number went online, however, that had fallen to approximately 15 per 100,000, according to the study.

Another high-risk group also saw suicide mortality decline after the hotline started. Adults age 65 and older saw suicide mortality fall 4.5 percent.

In recent decades, the overall U.S. suicide rate has become a major public health concern.

Suicide mortality had declined from the mid-1980s until 1999. After 1999, however, it began climbing, peaking in 2018 then resuming its climb in 2020, during the pandemic and post-pandemic years, according to information from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Patel said he and co-authors became interested in the hotline in July, when its federal funding was partially cut. The cuts targeted specialized services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer adults, a high-risk group who represented about 10 percent of lifeline callers.

Patel said he wanted to know whether the funding change was due to the hotline’s poor performance, so he and colleagues gathered statistics from the National Vital Statistics System to conduct their analysis.

In addition to the nationwide figures, state-by-state data also shows an association with the establishment of the 988 number.

The 10 states with the largest increases in calls after its establishment — 146.2 percent more — also saw a larger decline in suicide deaths, about 18.2 percent. The 10 states with the lowest call volume increase — about 23.6 percent — saw a lower, 10.6 percent decline.

As a control, researchers compared suicide mortality in the U.S. to that in the United Kingdom over the same three-year period, during which the U.K. did not change its intervention policies and saw no comparable reductions in mortality.

“This is an intervention that seems to be working,” Patel said, “so it’s one of those things that should continue to receive funding, not one we should start to scale back.”

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Dennis Frank Thompson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: May 12, 1940
Died: March 30, 2025

Dennis Frank Thompson once described the early days of the program he founded at Harvard as the work of “a peripatetic Director” on “a quixotic undertaking.” The skeptics, he noted, fell into two camps: “Some critics complained that we were teaching people to be ethical, which they assumed is impossible, especially at Harvard.  Other critics complained that we were not teaching people to be ethical, which they assumed is irresponsible, especially at Harvard.”  He could hold both objections in view, find humor in each, and build an institution that outlasted them both.

Dennis was born on May 12, 1940, in Hamilton, Ohio, to Frank and Florence Thompson. He was the first in his family to attend college.  He graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary in 1962, then crossed the Atlantic as a Fulbright Scholar to Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a First in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.  He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Government at Harvard in 1968.

Thompson began his teaching career at Princeton University, where, for 18 years, he taught political science and ethics.  Thomas Scanlon, who taught philosophy alongside him, credited Thompson with pushing him to consider how philosophy fit into the wider life of institutions and politics and how things actually worked inside them.  In seminar, Thompson used a chess timer so that every student received equal time; when the bell rang, one stopped, even mid-sentence.  But he was at his best at a seminar’s close, gathering an afternoon’s worth of remarks that had pulled in different directions and weaving them into a Hegelian synthesis — one that made each person’s contribution sound more interesting than when it was first offered.

In 1986, at the invitation of President Derek Bok, Thompson returned to Harvard to found the University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions — now the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics — the first interfaculty initiative at a university where, as Thompson put it, “every tub on its own bottom” was an article of faith.  He was simultaneously appointed Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government.  Over more than 20 years as director, he built a community that brought scholars and practitioners from law, medicine, government, business, and the humanities into sustained conversation about moral questions in public life.  Where others might have seen mission creep, he saw mission enrichment.  It helped that John Rawls told colleagues he thought some of the most interesting discussions at the university were taking place in the Program’s seminars, which he attended regularly.  The house that Thompson built has inspired similar centers at universities around the world.

Thompson also served Harvard as Associate Provost, Senior Advisor to the President, and twice as acting Provost.  Beyond the university, he consulted with the Joint Ethics Committee of the South African Parliament, the American Medical Association, and the United States Senate Ethics Committee, where he assisted in the investigation of the Keating Five scandal.  He first testified before Congress in 1980 and returned so often that he joked, under oath, that he would keep coming back until they solved institutional corruption.

With Amy Gutmann, Thompson co-authored “Democracy and Disagreement” and “Why Deliberative Democracy?,” works that advanced the claim that democracy depends not merely on aggregation but on reasoned exchange and mutual respect.  His distinction between personal and institutional corruption opened a new field of inquiry and reform.  His books — among them “The Democratic Citizen: Social Science and Democratic Theory in the 20th Century,” “Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States,” and, again with Gutmann, “The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It” — showed how philosophy could engage the friction of actual governance without losing its grip on principle.  He wrote of politicians with a generosity rare among political philosophers, urging that we learn to tolerate some inconsistency between promise and performance, lest politics be abandoned to, in his phrase, “cynics and the prigs.”

Thompson’s intellectual gifts and his gifts for community were not separate things.  At annual dinners, he moved from table to table, naming every person in the room and saying something about their work that made clear he had been paying attention all year.  He was a jazz pianist of real skill, and his renditions of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at closing dinners — with annually revised lyrics reflecting the exploits of that year’s fellows — became the Center’s unofficial anthem.

Thompson’s humor was wry and precisely timed.  He could tease, but his targets tended to feel flattered.  His feedback on student work began with what had been done well before turning to what needed repair — the reverse of standard academic practice — and it made his praise, when it came, something to remember.  Former fellows, over the years, have said that their year at the Center under Thompson was the best of their academic lives.  A colleague once told him that he made disagreement almost sound like fun.

Thompson is survived by his wife, Carol, whom he met in high school; his sons, Eric and David; and three granddaughters.  He died peacefully on March 30, 2025, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

On Oct. 11, 2023, the Ethics Center dedicated its seminar room in his name.  The Dennis F. Thompson Seminar Room now hosts the kind of exchange he spent a lifetime orchestrating — frank, generous, and shaped by the conviction he once put this way: “The ethics of public life is too important to be left only to ethicists.”

Respectfully submitted,

Danielle Allen
Michael Sandel
Eric Beerbohm, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Martin Karplus was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: March 15, 1930
Died: Dec. 29, 2024

Martin Karplus, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Harvard University and a 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, died on Dec. 29, 2024, at the age of 94.  His work — entirely computational but always inspired by experimental observations — spanned chemistry, physics, and biology.  In a career that extended over more than half a century and resulted in nearly 900 publications, Karplus transformed our understanding of molecular systems through his groundbreaking work in computational modeling by molecular dynamics simulations.

Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 15, 1930, into a family with a long and distinguished medical lineage.  His early years were marked by a culture of intellectual richness and suburban comfort in the wine-growing district of Grinzing, but his peaceful Viennese childhood was shattered by the rise of Nazism and the Anschluss in March 1938.  Within days, Karplus, his brother, Robert, and their mother fled by train to Switzerland, while his father was forced to remain behind in a Viennese jail as a hostage to ensure the family’s assets were not smuggled out.  The family eventually secured visas for the United States through an affidavit provided by his uncle’s employer in Boston.

The Karplus family arrived in New York on Oct. 1, 1938, and settled in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, where they faced a starkly different economic reality than their comfortable life in Vienna.  Karplus quickly adapted and became a street kid who played stick-ball, while temporarily refusing to speak German to be accepted as an American.  His parents worked as domestics during their first American summers, with his father serving as a handyman and his mother as a cook.

Karplus’ scientific interests blossomed in the woods as an avid birdwatcher.  At Newton High School, he conducted a study on the behavior of nesting birds, which led him to become a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.  He entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1947, finishing in just three years with a concentration in Chemistry and Physics, and moved for his Ph.D. studies to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).  He joined the group of Linus Pauling, one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.  His doctoral research on the bifluoride ion brought him back to the rigors of chemistry and physics.  Pauling described him as “my most brilliant student.”

After finishing his Ph.D. in 1953, Karplus received a National Science Foundation fellowship to conduct postdoctoral research at Oxford University under Charles Coulson.  This period in Europe was as much about cultural exploration as it was about science; he used his stipend to travel extensively and developed a lasting connection with France.

Karplus’s independent academic career began at the University of Illinois in 1955, where he made one of his many enduring contributions to chemistry: the Karplus Equation.  In those early days of applying nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to chemistry, he discovered a mathematical relationship between the dihedral angles of atoms in a molecule and their spin-spin coupling constants.  This equation became a fundamental tool for determining the three-dimensional structures of molecules, and Karplus often spoke of it with the affection of a proud father.

In 1960, Karplus moved to Columbia University, holding a joint appointment with the IBM Watson Scientific Laboratory.  His work shifted toward reaction kinetics, involving complex trajectory calculations of the H + H₂ reaction using early computers.  He returned to Harvard in 1966, eventually becoming the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry in 1979, a chair named after the first American Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

The 1970s marked Karplus’s return to biology, when he applied the principles of physics and chemistry to large biological macromolecules.  He became fascinated by the dynamics of hemoglobin, the protein responsible for oxygen transport in the blood.  While on sabbatical in Paris in 1972, he wrote seminal papers on hemoglobin dynamics.  His research challenged the prevailing view of proteins as static structures, suggesting instead that their internal motions were critical to their function.

In 1977, Karplus and his colleagues Andrew McCammon and Bruce Gelin published the first molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of a protein, the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI).  This 9.2-picosecond simulation was a watershed moment in macromolecular chemistry, demonstrating that computers could be used to see the dance of atoms within a protein.  To support this burgeoning field, Karplus led the development of CHARMM (Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics), a software package that remains a standard for simulating the motion of proteins, DNA, and lipid membranes.  This work led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel.

Karplus was a professional-quality photographer.  Exhibitions of his photographic work captured everything from the landscapes of the American West to the daily lives of people in Asia and Europe.  He was also an accomplished chef with a deep appreciation for French cuisine.  During some summers, Karplus would sometimes work as a substitute in the kitchens of famous restaurants in France.

Karplus is survived by his wife Marci, who became his partner both in life and in the management of his international laboratory.  His first wife, Susan, died in 1982.  His children followed various intellectual paths: his daughters, Reba and Tammy, became physicians, fulfilling the family destiny that had been set for him in Vienna; his son, Mischa, pursued a career in law.

Karplus was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society.  He divided much of his later career between Harvard and the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, maintaining a global presence in the scientific community.  His legacy lives on through the “Karplusians” — the scores of students and postdocs he mentored, many of whom are now leaders in computational biology and chemistry.  In his epilogue to his memoir “Spinach on the Ceiling,” Karplus noted that “contributing to the education of so many people in their formative years is a cardinal aspect of university life.”

Respectfully submitted,

Stephen Harrison
Stuart Schreiber
Xiaowei Zhuang, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Akira Iriye was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: Oct. 20, 1934

Died: Jan. 27, 2026

The life of Akira Iriye, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Emeritus, who died in Jan. 2026 at the age of 91, was profoundly shaped by the forces of 20th-century international history.  He, in turn, transformed the writing of that history.

Born in Japan in 1934, Iriye was in the first grade when the Pacific War began and in the fifth grade when it ended in 1945.  More than seven decades later, he recalled his shock when the U.S.-led occupation authorities in Japan ordered that school history textbooks be completely rewritten:

I still remember the day when our classroom teacher told us to bring a brush and ink so as to erase sections that were considered unacceptable to the occupation authorities. . . .  It seemed to us that what our teachers (as well as our parents and other elders) taught us yesterday was no longer true today. . . .  In retrospect, that experience may have had a great deal to do with my decision to become a historian.^[1]

After high school, Iriye won a scholarship to come to the United States to study at Haverford College, a small liberal arts school near Philadelphia.  There he encountered Wallace MacCaffrey, a historian of Tudor England (and later chair of the Harvard Department of History), who set him on a path to graduate study in history.  Iriye arrived at Harvard in 1957 intending to continue his study of British history, but he found his way instead to a newly established program in what was then called American-Far Eastern Relations.  There he studied under the U.S. foreign relations historian Ernest R. May, later his longtime colleague at the Harvard Department of History.

After earning his Ph.D. in 1961, Iriye taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago before returning to Harvard as Professor of History in 1989 and becoming the Charles Warren Professor of American History in 1991.  Although he retired from teaching in 2005 (he explained that he had promised his wife he would retire at 70), his appetite for scholarship remained undiminished, and he continued writing and publishing for many years afterwards.

Iriye’s Harvard dissertation became his first monograph, “After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East,” 1921–1931, published in 1965.  It was the first major study of the international history of East Asia to use sources in Japanese, Chinese, German, and Russian (the latter of which he learned after graduation since he felt the book would otherwise not be complete).  In the ensuing decades, Iriye produced a steady stream of books and articles, many of which were centered on the international history of East Asia and were distinguished by his multilingual, multi-archival approach.

Throughout Iriye’s career, he showed a special interest in the role of culture in international relations, including the impact of mutual perceptions and cultural exchanges between nations on the conduct of international relations.  This approach found expression, inter alia, in his seminal 1979 article Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations and in his influential 1997 book “Cultural Internationalism and World Order.”  There he traced the history of the transnational movement to foster understanding among nations through programs of cultural exchange, including student exchange programs of the sort that he himself had been part of more than four decades earlier.  A stable world order, he argued, could not rely only on governments and power politics; it also depended on mutual understanding among peoples.

Iriye always believed in historical knowledge as a force for international understanding and in that understanding as the foundation of peace and the integration of humanity.  To some, those commitments appeared utopian, perhaps even a little naive, but they were deeply held and rooted in his wartime experiences and his belief that hard-won peace in Asia could be extended to the whole world.  Iriye’s urge to understand the underpinnings of international cooperation led him to produce pioneering work on the history of international organizations, notably with his landmark 2002 study, “Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World,” which has served as a foundation for a flourishing field of scholarship.

Iriye is survived by his wife, Mitsuko; his daughters, Masumi and Keiko; and his granddaughters Lucy and Maeva.  He liked to claim to have married up as his wife came from an aristocratic background (and was born in Paris) while he was allegedly descended from pirates.  He was well known in Japan as an expert on the United States; for many years, if you came into Robinson Hall on a Sunday, you might have run into a Japanese television crew taping his weekly interview.  Once, when a Harvard History colleague visiting Japan casually told his hosts that he was off to meet Iriye Sensei, they were astonished he knew such a towering figure.  Indeed, in 2005, the Emperor of Japan awarded Iriye the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, in recognition of his distinguished service to the public.

Iriye garnered many other major awards and honors in his career.  He was elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1978, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and became the first and, to this day, the only Asian or Asian American president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1988.  In his AHA presidential address, The Internationalization of History, he called on the discipline to become “less nation-centered” and “more globally oriented.”  Later, looking back on his storied career, Iriye said that he felt fortunate to have studied history at a time “when both history and historiography” were “moving in the direction of global interconnectedness and interchange.”^[2]  In fact, it was not simply a matter of good fortune; he was instrumental in making it so.

Respectfully submitted,
David Armitage

[1] Akira Iriye, “A Historian’s Formative Years,” H-Diplo Essay 272 (2020), https://hdiplo.org/to/E272 [accessed March 30, 2026]

[2] Iriye, “A Historian’s Formative Years.”

In our increasingly online lives, convenience has come at a cost. 

The average person has more than 100 online accounts, and creating a new one often requires handing over personal information like an email address or a birthdate. 

Researchers at the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society say the current system puts your privacy at risk and makes you more vulnerable to identity theft, and they have a plan to fix it. 

As part of a digital identity symposium in April, engineers from ASML launched the Keyring wallet, an open-source identity verification tool. Rather than surrendering personal data to be stored in corporate databases, Keyring lets users keep their information on their mobiles and disclose only what is absolutely necessary to verify who you are. 

“Identity is actually deeply personal,” said ASML principal investigator James Mickens, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Your age, your name, your location, your gender — all of these are inextricably tied to you as the user, not to some company or some particular piece of technology.” 

During the symposium, researchers described what they see as an increasingly insecure digital identity ecosystem. Meg Marco, senior director of ASML, said individuals have too much data spread out over too many accounts they don’t fully control. 

“This is important, not only because it is annoying. It is also insecure,” Marco said. She pointed to the 2022 breach of the password manager LastPass’s cloud database, in which hackers obtained copies of tens of millions of users’ encrypted data. 

Keyring, which was developed in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group, was designed around a user-owned identity wallet where users can share a specific but limited aspect of their identity. That might mean revealing age but not birth date or that they possess an account with a specific email provider without disclosing the username.

To use the wallet, users prove their identity through biometric data such as a fingerprint or face scan, which is only stored on the user’s cellphone. They can also add verifiable credentials like a digital version of a driver’s license or proof of employment. 

Keyring also supports verification of in-person connections without a company operating as an intermediary — for instance, two people who meet at a professional conference could securely verify their identities and confirm they met in person without handing over their data to a service like LinkedIn. 

Each securely verified connection contributes to what researchers call a decentralized trust graph: There is no centralized database of identity data, but each user can be sure of the credentials of everyone in their network. 

“Our hypothesis is that this type of trust graph can help address important challenges in social media, such as distinguishing people from AI agents, providing age assurance or determining the origin of certain content,” said principal engineer Brendan A. Miller.

Nicole Brennan, senior UX designer, said one of the main goals for Keyring ease of use. “We were handed a problem nobody had solved. We had no UX patterns, no templates, no precedent. And we built something that a real person can pick up and use in seconds,” she said.

According to Yajaira Gonzalez, a product leader at ASML, the technology’s main challenge is buy-in from institutions, governments, and corporations, because they would need to issue and recognize verified credentials. Without their participation, the system is limited to peer-to-peer or experimental use. 

“Incentives for all of these entities to join into this model are misaligned,” Gonzalez said, “because currently they do benefit a lot from owning and controlling your data, because at the end of the day, they monetize it.”

Gonzalez said there may be technological workarounds, but her main hope was for a grassroots movement demanding greater agency over user data.

Mihir Bhaskar was a self-described “total nerd” in high school. He volunteered at a computer history museum and became obsessed with the hardware and how it all came to be: from abacuses to punch cards, vacuum tubes to personal computers.

“I was really fascinated with the history of computing, the development of the semiconductor and transistors and things like that,” said Bhaskar, who received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 2021. 

Over the past decade, Bhaskar and other grad students, postdocs, and professors have made strides in developing quantum computing, work that one day may land their devices in a museum display. The pace of their progress has already fostered three startups, a sign the game-changing technology may be developing ahead of expectations, researchers say.

“I have never seen a science that is so ‘blue sky’ go out into the commercial sphere so quickly,” said Evelyn Hu, Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering. “Where are we now compared to where we thought we’d be in 2018? We are so much farther ahead than I think any of us could have imagined.”

One of the three startups, LightsynQ, was co-founded in 2024 by Bhaskar to commercialize his doctoral research in quantum networking. The company was acquired last year by publicly traded IonQ, where Bhaskar is now senior vice president for research and development.

Another, QuEra, was founded in 2018 by Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering, and Markus Greiner, George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, with partners from Harvard and MIT. 

QuEra recently shipped its second commercial quantum computer — based on technology from their Harvard labs — to Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. 

The third, CavilinQ, launched in order to develop and commercialize another quantum networking technology, is taking initial steps into the market, having announced $8.8 million in seed funding.

Brandon Grinkemeyer, a postdoctoral fellow in physics and, with Shankar Menon, one of CavilinQ’s founders, said that quantum networking is important for the same reason that it is in classical computing. 

The ability to connect many processors together increases computational power and is what makes supercomputers so powerful. The same principle applies to quantum computing, he said, where networking quantum processors enables them to tackle problems that no single processor could handle alone.

“Connecting processors can offer fundamentally new functionality beyond just scaling up,” Grinkemeyer said. “It unlocks capabilities like quantum enhanced imaging and fully secure quantum computation.”

Quantum computers leverage the strange physics that rules in the atomic and subatomic quantum realm, where ones and zeroes — the bits that drive classical computing — become ones and zeros and every value in between.

In addition something called “quantum entanglement” means particles can influence each other even when separated by a great distance.

Harnessing these and other properties at work in the atomic realm has the potential to enable vastly more powerful computers, researchers say, with potentially revolutionary applications in drug discovery, finance, materials science, cryptography, exoplanet research, chemistry, and high-energy physics, among others. 

Hu is co-director of Harvard’s Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering, from whose affiliated labs key developments have emerged.

Established in 2018, HQI researchers like Hu and Lukin, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, credit the entrepreneurial environment in and around Harvard with fostering research partnerships with industry, including Amazon Web Services, which in turn has encouraged the development of startups to promote and further develop advances in quantum computing and networking. 

Of particular importance, Lukin said, is improved fault tolerance, a recent advance out of his lab that reduces errors in calculation that are byproducts of the quantum forces at work. Those errors can cascade and render results unusable. 

The advance was reported late last year and has cleared a way for technology to leap beyond where many thought it would be at this stage.

“People initially thought that this sort of fault-tolerant, large-scale, quantum computers would be coming some time by the end of the next decade, and I think it’s quite likely that actually they will be here — at least in some form — by the end of this decade,” Lukin said. “So, we’re at least five, maybe 10 years ahead. And it’s really a lot of the work in the HQI that fueled that.”

Bhaskar agreed that the technology has advanced faster than he expected and said that a key element has been industry support.

“I couldn’t have predicted this. I got into the field because I knew there was promise, but the pace of innovation, the pace of development, the pace of — honestly — capital going into the technology has far exceeded what I could have possibly imagined or dreamt of,” Bhaskar said. “I didn’t get into this space to be an entrepreneur, I got into this space because I was really interested in working on the fundamental computing information processing technology and the physics of it. That’s what I love to do.”

Harvard Chief Technology Development Officer Sam Liss said the advances and their early commercialization through startups are a product not just of the drive of the researchers involved and the support from their partners, but also the Greater Boston ecosystem, which he described as a “quantum hub.” 

“It’s an area of research with commercial potential, that’s one aspect of it,” Liss said. “It is a mindset and a culture of entrepreneurship within HQI, and it’s the ecosystem in which we reside. Boston is a quantum hub — this is an area of focus for the region — and that, along with the engagement of supporters and alumni, is making all the difference.”

Liss is also eager to see more quantum research projects evolve into startups, like QuEra, LightsynQ, and CavilinQ. The support and enthusiasm for quantum means that academic discoveries have the potential to become impactful ventures. 

The Harvard Grid Accelerator was created by the Office of Technology Development to do exactly that, offering funding, mentorship, industry connections, and support to help research in engineering and the physical sciences turn into startup companies. Recent support from the Grid Accelerator led to the launch of CavilinQ.

Researchers say some fields will obviously benefit from quantum computing, but some important, even revolutionary, applications may come in areas where they’re not anticipated.

“The transistor was invented in 1947 and initially nobody knew what major application would benefit from its use,” Hu said. “They knew it was important, but it was perhaps too early to identify the ‘killer apps.’ The initial applications were for hearing aids and then later transistor radios.”

While useful, neither of those had the society-shaping force of the computer revolution that was enabled by transistors, which are electronic switches present on modern microchips by the billions.

But those early devices served a useful function: They kicked off the new technology’s commercialization, which got people wondering what else they might be able to do. 

As with the transistor, Lukin said, we may not know until more quantum computers are out there, grinding away at problems, letting people see what they can do and begin to imagine new possibilities.

“This is completely new technology. A quantum computer is different from any kind of classical computer that’s ever been built,” Lukin said. “There are two key challenges in this field. One is building these quantum machines, and the other is using them. While a lot of hard work remains to be done, for the first time, building useful quantum machines is in our direct line of sight.”

It’s clear that artificial intelligence is changing everything, from the way we learn to the way we work. What’s far less clear is how AI’s insinuation into everyday life is changing the way we relate to each other in the non-digital world.

During a talk this week at the Barker Center, panelists discussed the rapid development of generative AI chatbots, like Claude and ChatGPT, and the ethical implications for how we communicate and connect as human beings.

The event, moderated by Eric Beerbohm, faculty director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, kicked off a series that will consider how AI is transforming both civil and uncivil disagreement.

The panel referenced a now-famous JAMA Internal Medicine article about patients perceiving AI responses to online health questions as more empathetic and accurate than those from human physicians.

Training AI chatbots to seem empathetic in order to boost engagement may be a smart business decision for tech firms, and may be preferred by users, but such constant reflexive validation comes at a cost, said Carissa Véliz, associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford.

Chatbots are “the ultimate bullshitters because they don’t care about anything, they’re not truth tracking, and they will say whatever human beings prefer.” The “empathy” as a design feature lulls users into thinking the chatbot understands them and has their best interests at heart when it does not, she said.

“There is no one there on the other side of the screen, there’s no one who cares about you,” said Véliz. “And even to call it empathic, I think, is a mistake. It’s a kind of simulation of empathy, which is very different.”

The potential for distorted social and cognitive effects from chatbot use, particularly among children and teenagers, is worrisome, she said.

“I think it’s very healthy to experience the frustration of other people. If you’re boring, it’s good to know that you’re being boring. Yes, it’s painful, but it’s valuable feedback,” she said.

Panelists agreed that perpetual validation can lead to an overreliance on AI for emotional support and stunt the development of critical thinking skills, as well as prompt users to hold everyone to the “infinitely patient and sycophantic standards” of chatbots.

“One of the advantages of talking to another human being is that, annoyingly, they disagree with you and they push back, and they don’t see things the same way as you do. That’s very frustrating and incredibly healthy because it grounds you to reality,” she said.

Since ChatGPT’s introduction in fall 2022, chatbots have greatly advanced in sophistication and accuracy, especially in medical diagnostics and laboratory research, said Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, a professor of computer science at John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

However, much like antibiotics that may be helpful in the moment, there’s a real danger that the easy availability of medical chatbots can be socially corrosive and instigate a much larger, society-wide problem if we are over-reliant on them, he said.

“It is the poor man’s version of artisanal contact with a human being, and it will provide a crutch so that we never have to provide” real human-to-human interaction, said Zittrain, who is also the faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Not only do people lose the therapeutic value of personal contact when a medical chatbot is in charge, but it becomes much more difficult to hold anyone accountable when something goes wrong, Véliz noted.

Algorithms, especially on social media, are often used as a barrier to minimize a technology company’s accountability, so it’s important that the question of who’s responsible for a chatbot’s faulty diagnosis or mishandling of treatment gets answered, she said.

Zittrain said while today’s AI chatbots present some risks of diminished interpersonal connection, they also offer immense promise that we shouldn’t simply turn away from out of fear or skepticism.

“I just I think we need to be really gimlet-eyed about just how far functionally these things have come, even if what has gotten them the most distance lately has been parlor tricks strung together,” he said.

If humans could tweak chatbots so they aligned with their long-term goals and helped them stay on track, Zittrain asked, “Would you turn that down, especially in a world where as soon as you leave this building, or if you’re on your phone right now, you’re getting importuned on all corners by people appealing to your momentary impulses?”

Rather than extinguishing our taste for cultural artifacts like books and art, the ubiquity of AI may instead remind us of their value, said Véliz.

“I think that when we look at AI, one of the things that becomes more salient is the beauty and richness and resources of everything that’s not AI — all of the richness of the analog world,” she said.

“No matter how good AI becomes, it will never be analog, and no matter how digital we become, we will never be completely digital. The richness of the natural world, of the cultural world, of paintings, of coffee shops, of bars, of universities, is something that I think we should cherish a lot more and that becomes brighter in light of AI.”

Harvard has announced a three-year, $1.05 million grant to the Association of Historically Black Colleges and Universities Research Institutions (AHRI), a new coalition of 15 HBCUs working to enhance their collective research, innovation, and impact.

The grant, made through Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative, will support research infrastructure and technical assistance at these schools as they build research capacity and seek to achieve R1 status — the highest research designation offered to United States universities — under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) will provide technical support.

“Through this three-year grant to AHRI, the H&LS Initiative is deepening our commitment to developing enduring partnerships with HBCUs,” said Sara Naomi Bleich, vice provost for special projects at Harvard. “We are honored to leverage our expertise in research infrastructure and capacity-building to help further HBCU research excellence.”

The new funding strengthens Harvard’s commitment to building partnerships at HBCUs, while enhancing their ability to attract top research talent and funding that come with R1 research classification. Howard University is the first HBCU to have earned an R1 designation and is currently the only partner institution in AHRI with that designation.

The grant directly implements Recommendation Three from the 2022 Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which called on the University to forge lasting connections with HBCUs.

“The launch of AHRI represents an important inflection point for HBCU research institutions. The 15 universities in this coalition collectively account for 50 percent of all competitively awarded federal research funding among HBCUs — underscoring the scale and strength of our research, doctoral education, and innovation,” said Tomikia P. LeGrande, president of Prairie View A&M University and vice chair of AHRI. “As Carnegie-classified institutions spanning R2 and R1 designations, we are aligning that strength through AHRI to amplify impact, accelerate discovery, and define the future of research while firmly establishing HBCUs as central to that future.”

“AHRI marks a new chapter in the HBCU research landscape,” said Ruth Simmons, senior adviser to the president on HBCU engagement at Harvard and president emerita of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University. In 2024, Simmons and Bleich began talking about ways Harvard could support advancing research capacity at HBCUs. “This association brings institutions that have too often worked in isolation into sustained collaboration with one another and with the country’s leading research universities. Harvard’s partnership with AHRI offers a powerful model of a more forward-looking approach to higher education.”

Along with the OVPR, Harvard’s Office for Sponsored Programs (OSP) will provide technical assistance and guidance in designing and strengthening research administration and compliance infrastructure across AHRI member institutions. This will include participating in the inaugural AHRI symposium, hosting HBCU administrative staff at Harvard, and assistance with lifecycle grants administration and compliance.

AHRI formally launched April 29, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a national press conference and inaugural symposium, “Expanding the Research Mission of HBCUs.”

Beyond the new AHRI grant, the H&LS Initiative also supports the next generation of HBCU leaders through Harvard’s Seminar for New Presidents leadership program, which provides a collaborative cohort learning model for HBCU and non-HBCU presidents. Additionally, the H&LS Initiative supports capacity building through the HBCU Digital Library Trust, which has engaged more than 90 HBCUs in digitizing high-priority collections on a single platform and providing professional development programs. The initiative also funds research opportunities like the Du Bois Scholars Program, a summer research internship at Harvard University for undergraduate students from 21 research-intensive HBCUs.

On this side of the Atlantic, World War II can appear in the popular imagination as a contest between liberal democracies and totalitarian empires.

That narrative, shaped largely by Cold War enmity between Washington and Moscow, tends to overlook the unimaginable sacrifices of the Soviet Union and its people, roughly one in seven of whom died in the conflict. 

So, though it covered familiar names and dates, Jochen Hellbeck’s lecture on campus last Thursday carried an unusual charge.

Hellbeck, a German-born historian who now teaches at Rutgers University, has spent his career using archives to relocate the center of the European war to points well east of Normandy — specifically, to the collision between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

By the numbers, that shouldn’t be controversial. As they invaded the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1941, Germany and its European Axis allies opened the bloodiest theater of war in human history. 

All told, the Soviets counted roughly 26 million dead — more than half of them civilians lost to starvation, siege, and several years of clockwork atrocities. Three out of four of the Third Reich’s own 5.3 million military fatalities came in the East. And the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 marked a turning point in the German war strategy.

Hellbeck’s latest book, “World Enemy No. 1,” goes further, arguing for the central role of anti-Soviet sentiment in what he called the “Nazi designs for mass extermination.” 

To be clear, Hellbeck doesn’t dispute the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism. But he notes that from Hitler’s earliest days as a political figure, that hostility was often intermingled with a violent hatred of the Soviets, captured most succinctly in the party’s stock phrase: “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

“World Enemy No. 1” has proven controversial, Hellbeck acknowledged — most of all in his native land.

When an early edition of the book appeared in German, the reception was icy. Hellbeck recalls being told that “the established history of the Holocaust, as Germans understand it, must not be overturned.” 

He is of two minds about that reaction. As a historian, “There’s always excitement, to see that you touched a nerve,” he said. “But then not to have a chance to discuss it, in those rooms, is disappointing.”

In any case, his revision aims not to overturn a narrative, he said, but to widen the frame around that war’s infernal final years.

“Traditionally, we have understood the Holocaust as derived purely from anti-Semitic venom — and of course, that was a very central element,” Hellbeck told his audience at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  

“I’m just adding a political dimension to that — that is, the Nazis’ anti-Communism — and arguing that the drive to exterminate came during the conflict with a Communist enemy who was coded as Jewish.”

Hellbeck came to Harvard to deliver the 11th annual lecture in memory of Hilda B. Silverman (Radcliffe ’60), a longtime peace activist and University affiliate, who died in 2008.

The lectures touch on issues that were near to Silverman’s heart, including the Holocaust and the ways it still shapes our politics and culture.

Sara Roy, CMES affiliate and chair of the lecture committee, said that Hellbeck clearly fits the mold. By giving voice to the human beings who lived under Stalin and helped defeat Hitler, he has “contributed greatly to a more capacious and humane understanding,” even of geopolitical adversaries.

Hellbeck spent much of his lecture resurfacing the Nazi regime’s enduring obsession with defeating Communism.

As early as 1921, Hitler, still a regional figure, alleged that “400 Soviet commissars of Jewish nationality” lived well while millions of citizens suffered in poverty.

Once the Nazis took power 12 years later, German citizens were treated to a battery of anti-Soviet propaganda and traveling shows, including the 1936 exhibition that gave Hellbeck’s book its title. 

With lurid posters and slogans, “They taught Germans that Bolshevism was evil and bestial … that it was the work of Jews who are the most monstrous and menacing in their Soviet Communist incarnation,” Hellbeck told his audience. “And these shows drew millions of German spectators, including young boys who would later fight as soldiers at the Eastern Front.”

It was on that front that Nazi mass extermination began in earnest. Before death camps came the “Holocaust by bullets,” mass shootings committed by so-called Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories of the U.S.S.R. 

That campaign’s targets were described in one context as “politically and racially unacceptable elements.” It would leave millions of Jews, but also Communist party officials and Soviet intellectuals, dead in mass graves across Eastern Europe.

Images and stories — some factual, some exaggerated — of Soviet brutality were circulated in the Nazi press. And Hellbeck argues that acts of resistance by European Communists during Nazi occupation allowed the German regime to win consent for its mass killing: by redefining Jews not just as racial “others,” but as “Stalin’s auxiliaries” — enemies within.

While it might not be surprising that Nazi anti-Bolshevism was downplayed while Western countries were embarking on their own long anti-Soviet struggle, Hellbeck noted that his work is aimed at a historical “lacuna” that has endured to the present day.

“In 2019, the European Union passed a resolution … to essentially indict Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as equivalent totalitarian powers,” he said.

He argued that that measure dishonors the memory of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who, during Nazi occupation, came to see even the brutal Stalin regime as the lesser of two evils.

That made even this provocative book worth writing, Hellbeck said. 

He closed his lecture with “a plea for an honest reckoning with the past.” His argument for may “run up against the desire of Western leaders to portray their countries as the leading victors … [or] appears to play into the hands of the Russian president, who invokes the Soviet contribution to victory over Nazism as a justification for his current war against Ukraine.”

“That the Soviet Union played such a central role in the Nazis’ deadly designs is an inconvenient truth in today’s world,” Hellbeck said. “But historical truth is not subject to negotiation, and historians must not yield to the political pressures of the present day. Only then can the writing of history become a basis of meaningful discussion and dialogue in tomorrow’s world.” 

Both are among America’s most storied collegiate choral groups.

Harvard Glee Club, the nation’s oldest (1858), helped establish the university choir as a fixture at U.S. institutions of higher education. The Fisk Jubilee Singers (1871) have garnered national and global fame over the decades, pioneering choral versions of African American spirituals, preserving and presenting the unique tradition to new audiences.

Members of the Harvard group say it once had been club lore that theirs was the nation’s first collegiate choir to tour internationally. That is until they discovered Fisk, which first toured Europe in 1873 (and performed for Queen Victoria), had beaten them by about 50 years.

Oddly enough, until this past spring break, the two groups had never shared a stage over the past 155 years.

“These are two of the oldest choirs in the United States, and two choirs that, I think it’s safe to say, have a bit of historical significance, but they’ve never performed together,” said Andrew Clark, director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music at Harvard. “This has always seemed like an omission, or an opportunity that was worth exploring.”

The performance highlighted a two-day gathering of the groups on Fisk University’s campus in Nashville, as part of the Glee Club’s March 13-21 tour across the American South.

G. Preston Wilson Jr., assistant professor of music at Fisk and director of the Jubilee Singers, emphasized the importance of having two days for the groups to work with one another — especially given the Singers’ typically hectic touring schedule.

“It’s usually concert, concert, rehearsal, concert, and we don’t get to exist as musicians together,” said Wilson ahead of the collaboration. “But we’re going to have time for the students to just engage and eat and have conversation. … That’s what makes our performances meaningful. We can sing notes on the page all day long, but what are we doing after that?”

The visit included a “choral share,” when both ensembles got a chance to work under the other ensemble’s conductor.

Preston McNulty Socha, a College sophomore and this year’s tour manager, said he and other members of the club were inspired by the cohesiveness of the Jubilee Singers, who often perform without a conductor or musical accompaniment.

“They all look around, and they’re so deeply connected to each other,” he said. “Almost every person is both a soloist, a conductor, and a member of the team at the same time.”

He called their rehearsals together a mindset shift. While he said he came in thinking of ensemble singing as slotting into a preformed puzzle, it was different with the Fisk singers.

“It was very much — this is my piece; I’ve embodied this piece. This piece is now a part of me,” he said. “And I have this active ownership and potential to really steward and find the direction or inform where the piece is going.”

At the standing-room-only concert at Spero Dei Church in Nashville, the groups performed individual programs and two numbers together: “Witness,” a spiritual arranged by Jack Halloran, and “Due Glory,” composed by Braxton Shelley, a Yale professor.

Shelley, who formerly taught at Harvard and is a minister and performer, joined the chorus during the performance — with his close friend Wilson soloing.

Wilson, a former member of the Jubilee Singers, said he was excited about the Glee Club collaboration.

“I just want to make sure the people know who the Jubilee Singers are in perpetuity — not just because you read about it in a book,” he said. “Come to our concert, visit our campus, take a tour of our campus, and learn about just how wonderful Fisk is and the Jubilee Singers are. Doing this collaboration with Harvard helps that cause.”

The performance is one of several collaborations between the Glee Club and prominent HBCUs over the past few years. These include a 2022 festival weekend collaboration with The Aeolians of Oakwood University, who performed with the Glee Club and The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College in Sanders Theatre.

It’s Clark’s hope that the Jubilee Singers can soon spend a week at Harvard, as the Aeolians did.

Wilson says he’s ready to go.

“Send the invitation and the welcome wagon,” Wilson said, “and I’ll be up there.”

For Catherine Lacey, fiction is a vehicle for discovering personal truths.

“When I start trying to make choices about what to reveal or conceal, it just doesn’t work,” the author said in a recent “Writers Speak” event hosted by Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. “When I try to keep [the personal] out, it gets in anyway, or the book will refuse to be written.”

Lacey’s critically acclaimed debut novel “Nobody Is Ever Missing” provides an early example of the writer putting herself in her prose, even subconsciously. In the story, the main character loses her adopted sister to suicide. Between her finishing the book and its publication, Lacey’s stepsister died as a result of substance use — something the author couldn’t have predicted but nonetheless grappled with on the page, she said.  

“I didn’t have an adopted sister, I didn’t know anybody that had killed themselves, but my stepsister died by suicide — is the simplest way to describe it — after I had finished the book, and it was something that had been present in my life for about five years before,” she said. “It was present in the family and something everybody knew that they didn’t want to know. And I think those are the kinds of things that come out in fiction when a voice starts to feel like — ‘This is me, but it’s not me’ — and it does feel authentic, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

Especially as a young writer, Lacey noted, it wasn’t easy to bring a narrator to life. Now, she said, she knows that when her writing strikes an emotional chord, she’s doing something right.

“It’s terrifying for something to possess a voice,” she said. “It’s terrifying to have disclosures on a page. That even though they’re through a fictional character, it somehow reflects something about you that maybe you don’t even want to expose.”

Even still, Lacey said, she sometimes isn’t cognizant of how much of herself she reveals through her characters.

“I don’t tend to know what the book is about until it’s about to come out, and then a couple months before I realize it’s generally way more personal than I would have thought,” she said. “And if I had been the person in charge of making decisions about what we’re going to write about, what parts of ourselves are going to go in this book, I wouldn’t have put any of them in.”

The short story, in Lacey’s view, is the purest means of letting a narrative come together organically. Her first collection of stories, “Certain American States,” was released in 2018, and “My Stalkers” is forthcoming in 2027.

“When I hear poets talk about writing poems, this is like when you hear flowers talk about being flowers or something … it’s like something happens to them,” Lacey said. “And I think the story is the closest I can get to something happening to me.”

When the characters in a story or the scenes click for Lacey, it’s a quick process from start to finish: “It’s all I can think about for a week or two or three weeks, or however long it takes.”

The characters in “Rate Your Happiness,” published earlier this month in The New Yorker, were bouncing around in her brain for years, she said, waiting for the right threads to connect them. When the scene came to her, all the pieces fell into place.

“There’s just something about suddenly being like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing that I needed,’ that once that was in, I knew that was going to be part of the story — it just spawns everything else,” she said.

But the rush of seeing a story come to life never lasts for long,

“Every time I finish a story, I’ve been like, ‘That might be the last one I ever have,’ because it never really feels like anything else is going to feel like that,” she said. “It’s the magic that helps me not feel like I have a job.”

An experimental gene therapy for people with an inherited form of deafness led to durable hearing improvements, a new study shows, with associated gains in patients’ ability to recognize speech.

The research corrected mutations in the OTOF gene, one of about 200 genes whose mutations are known to cause deafness from birth. Patients 18 and younger saw the strongest gains in hearing and ability to recognize speech. Adults receiving the therapy also saw improvements, though the effect was smaller. Overall, 90 percent of recipients saw their hearing improve, with half reaching normal levels by the study’s end at 2½ years.

“How well it worked is really amazing,” said Zheng-Yi Chen, co-senior author of the findings and a Harvard Medical School associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Mass Eye and Ear. “After 2½ years, more than half of them reached a normal level. They can hear a whisper. At that level, it’s better than mine.”

Worldwide, about 430 million people are affected by hearing loss serious enough to require rehabilitation, including 34 million children, according to the World Health Organization. Sixty percent of deafness in newborns has genetic causes, with mutation in the OTOF gene responsible for between 2 percent and 8 percent of cases. Babies with the OTOF mutation are completely deaf at birth, which affects speech acquisition and can hinder cognitive development.

Though the OTOF gene mutation is responsible for a relatively small proportion of inherited deafness, researchers said the platform developed in this work can be modified to correct other genes implicated in deafness. In fact, Chen said, the research team is already at work modifying the platform so they can treat deafness due to mutations in the GJB2 gene, the most common cause of genetic hearing loss.

The work, published April 22 in Nature, was conducted by researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, and Fudan University, with additional trial sites in China. It builds on research published in 2024 that piloted the therapy among a small number of children. Those trials resulted in improvements rapid enough to surprise researchers and thrill parents, who saw their children go from completely deaf to responding to voices within just weeks.

“As follow-up time goes on, these children continue to bring us ongoing surprises,” said Yilai Shu, co-senior author of the study, whose team at Fudan University’s Eye and ENT Hospital led the study’s clinical work. “They progress from responding to sounds, to imitating speech, to speaking in short sentences, then to reciting poems and even singing. They always fill us with joy and encouragement.”

The therapy targets a condition called DFNB9, caused by the OTOF mutation. OTOF encodes the otoferlin protein, active in a snail-shaped structure in the inner ear called the cochlea. There, sound waves are translated into electric signals that, with the help of otoferlin, are conveyed to nerves and the brain. Without properly functioning otoferlin, electric pulses generated in the ear never make it to the brain.

Researchers said DFNB9 was an attractive target for therapy because it is caused by a mutation in a single gene, simplifying the repair. In addition, though the mutation disrupts signaling between the ear and the brain, cochlear cells are undamaged and ready to perform once the connection is restored.

To treat the condition, researchers injected a neutralized virus carrying a normal copy of OTOF into the fluid of the inner ear. The virus travels to the cochlea and expresses the OTOF gene in cochlear hair cells. That jump-starts production of normal otoferlin and restores the connection between the cochlea and nerves leading to the brain.

The study involved 42 participants carrying the OTOF mutation and ranging in age from nine months to 32 years. They were treated at eight trial centers across China.

Among those who responded to treatment, some reported hearing sound in as little as two weeks. Improvement was rapid over the first six weeks, plateauing around 26 weeks, with hearing recovery maintained through 2½ years. Though half achieved normal levels of hearing by that point, many of those who didn’t nonetheless saw significant improvement, Chen said, though hearing aids or other assistance might be required for day-to-day functioning.

That the effect endured so long was important, Chen said, because early lab experiments in mice saw the effect fade over time. Another key finding, he said, was that the treatment is safe, causing no serious adverse events among participants and no dose-related toxicity among groups that received three different doses.

While research will continue, Chen said that the team, whose work is supported by the Chinese and Shanghai governments and Fudan University, is beginning to explore regulatory requirements for the treatment to be approved for use in the clinic. That effort will begin in China. The hope is that expansion to other countries, including the U.S., will follow.

“The success of OTOF gene therapy marks a paradigm shift in treating hearing loss,” said Shu, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen’s lab. “Going forward, personalized gene therapy approaches can be developed for congenital deafness caused by different gene mutations. These strategies will undergo preclinical efficacy and safety assessments to support their clinical translation.”

The scientists will continue to follow study participants through five years, said Chen, who also holds the Ines and Fredrick Yeatts Chair in Otolaryngology at Mass Eye and Ear. Several outstanding questions remain, including why 10 percent of participants didn’t respond to treatment, and why adults didn’t respond as well as youth.

“We have been working in this field for decades and there was nothing, nothing, nothing,” Chen said. “Then the treatment came out, worked really well, and now more trials are coming, some of which will be very successful. We’re looking forward to what the future will bring for patients.”

Megan Kate Nelson has often been surprised by the misconceptions people have about the West.

Raised in Littleton, Colorado, in a family of avid road-trippers, she had visited 45 states by the time she started at the College in 1990. Nelson said classmates (who’d presumably spent less of their summers in the family car) would ask, “Did you ride your horse to school?” “I grew up in the suburbs!” she’d say. “No, I didn’t ride my horse to school.”

And those students weren’t alone. Nelson ’94 came to understand over decades of historical research how incorrect the founding myth of westward expansion was: that white men single-handedly brought American ideals to the undeveloped frontier along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails and shaped the West.

In her new book, “The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier” (Scribner), the Pulitzer Prize-finalist historian puts forth a sprawling, interwoven saga through the stories of diverse, dynamic individuals who traveled and settled west of the Mississippi as the U.S. expanded its boundaries and influence in the 19th century.

Nelson’s story runs through seven protagonists, whose paths intersect as they criss-cross American territory, and sometimes beyond it.

Some characters will be familiar to readers, like Sacagawea, the Indigenous woman who helped lead Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition through the Louisiana Territory. Others, like Maria Gertrudis Barceló, a prominent Sonora-born saloon owner in Santa Fe, are lesser-known.

Nelson expands the stories of even characters like Sacagawea, whose life is often described in the context of a single American expedition.

“This was an extraordinary moment in her life,” said Nelson in an interview, “but it was only one moment.”

Before meeting Lewis and Clark, she had traveled a great deal of the American West — born in Shoshone lands in the northern Rocky Mountains, stolen by another tribe, and brought to the Upper Missouri Valley.

Years after the expedition, she put her 6-year-old son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, under the care of Clark, which she believed could help create bonds between the Hidatsa people of Knife River and Americans in St. Louis.

Her son would become a prominent figure in the West, encountering people like Virginia native Jim Beckwourth, a fur trader, scout, and entrepreneur who serves as the connective tissue between many of the book’s protagonists.

Nelson said she’s heard Beckwourth referred to as the “Forrest Gump of the 19th century,” a description that seems apt given Beckwourth’s frequent and varied appearances at important moments in the history.

Born to an enslaver father, he migrates West, joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Co., embeds in the Crow Nation, moves to California for the Gold Rush, discovers and promotes a key route through the Sierra Nevada, and works as an Army scout, among other endeavors.

“We think of the West as such an enormous region, and it is,” said Nelson, “but in the 19th century, the population was relatively small, and the chances that people would run into each other, or had heard of one another, were pretty good.”

The characters throughout the book are always on the move or influenced by those on the move.

Barceló migrates from the northern portion of New Spain, which encompassed a large part of southern and western North America, to Santa Fe and becomes one of the most powerful businesswomen in what would become New Mexico Territory.

Though she remains in place for decades, her life—and fortune—is affected by the people passing through: traders on the Santa Fe Trail after ownership of the region transferred from Spanish to Mexican hands, soldiers from both sides during the Mexican-American War, and migrants settling in the area after the United States took control of the territory.

The book rebuts aspects of the gunslinging, rugged individualistic narrative of westward expansion, weaving instead a tapestry of stories that show how the West became as diverse racially and culturally as it was geographically.

Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, one of the book’s other protagonists, is trafficked from Guangzhou and Hong Kong to San Francisco, and eventually a majority-Chinese town in the mountains of Idaho.

She achieves a level of semi-celebrity, Nelson says, among later visitors who are stunned to discover in the remote rural town an elderly Chinese resident who has been there for 40 years.

“The reason they can’t believe it is because Chinese people have not been included in the frontier myth,” Nelson says.

The characters who populate Nelson’s new history go a long way toward explaining how the American West became the culturally and politically complex region it is today.

While growing up in Brazil, Luiza Lima Vieira recalls walking past children her age living on the streets of her native Sao Paulo and wondering why they went hungry and she did not.

Attempting to answer that question is what led Lima Vieira ultimately to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she earned a master’s of public health in nutrition in December — all while navigating health struggles of her own.

“I didn’t understand why I had access to food and other children my age didn’t, and that didn’t make sense in my head at the time,” Lima Vieira said. “Injustice was something that always shaped my path and I wanted to do something about that.”

Lima Vieira — whose family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was 16 so her mother could pursue medical studies — credits a symposium she attended as an undergraduate at Cornell as the catalyst for her turn to public health.

“I heard students from all different backgrounds talk about work they’d done in public health, and a lot of them mentioned nutrition,” Lima Vieira said. “That kind of clicked in my head. I had a lightbulb moment and since then I’ve been on a path to work at the intersection between nutrition, medicine, and public health.”

But Lima Vieira’s path to medical school took another turn at Cornell when she developed the neuromuscular condition myasthenia gravis. The autoimmune condition affects signaling between nerves and muscles and is marked by muscle weakness, particularly in the face, arms, and legs.

It took months to diagnose the disease. Treatment followed, involving surgery to remove her thymus gland and medication. The myasthenia gravis, Lima Vieira said, was a wake-up call for her not to sacrifice her health to academic and career ambitions.

“I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health. I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

“I like to do everything. I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health,” Lima Vieira said. “I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

So, instead of medical school when she graduated Cornell in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in nutritional sciences, Lima Vieira went to work, taking a job at Action for Boston Community Development as the organization’s health and nutrition services manager. She worked there for two years, managing day care centers for disadvantaged children up to age 5. The experience got her interested in learning how large-scale programs and government policy might help that population.

In 2024, Lima Vieira entered the Chan School’s master of public health in nutrition program and spent the next 18 months learning not just about nutrition, but also about policy.

“I was never interested in politics, but while at Harvard I understood how important policy is,” Lima Vieira said. “Systemic change is the way to go.”

While at the Chan School, Lima Vieira was a teaching fellow for Paul Farmer Professor and chair of global health and social medicine Vikram Patel’s “Foundations of Global Mental Health” class. Patel said it was Lima Vieira’s enthusiasm for the class when she took it a year earlier that made her ask to be a teaching fellow a year later. Patel said she talked up the class so much to her classmates that a good proportion of her cohort took it. And even though her stint as a teaching fellow was her second time through the course material, she stayed engaged during class sessions.

“She was always available and always interested,” Patel said, adding that the course’s mental health focus has connections with nutrition in that people have used food to manage moods for a long time.

Food, in fact, is an important part of how Lima Vieira has managed her neuromuscular condition. In addition to taking medication, she makes sure she eats well and limits ultra-processed foods. She still exercises regularly — she’s a certified classical Pilates instructor — but builds in adequate recovery time, including sleep, between sessions.

Six and a half years of living with the condition have taught her to slow down and focus, to prioritize her health and concentrate on one thing at a time. In fact, after Commencement, she hopes that her new focus will be an old one: medical school. Though she graduated in December, she looks forward to participating with her family in Harvard’s Commencement Day ceremonies. She’s already taking steps, however, for what comes next, having moved back home to Ithaca, where she’s studying for the MCAT exam. She plans to apply to medical schools in June for classes beginning in fall 2027.

“I’ve decided I’m going to medical school and I wanted to take time to focus on this next step, which is studying for this exam, and be close to family,” said Lima Vieira, the eldest of three siblings. “We should not give up on pursuing our dreams even as challenges arise. Staying true to yourself while taking care of your body is the most important thing you can do for yourself and others. The challenges and twists and turns only make us stronger.”

If you give artificial intelligence a goal of maximizing profit, how far will it go? 

AI agents appear capable of lying, concealing, and colluding, according to new research from Harvard Business School.

Researchers found that AI agents — software trained to perform tasks independently — engaged in a “broad pattern” of misconduct after being asked to manage a simulated vending machine business and maximize profits for a year. The agents were neither instructed to cut legal or ethical corners nor prohibited from doing so.

“What’s unambiguous looking at the models is that the misconduct we observed — from not paying a customer refund or deciding to collude on prices — was not an accident. It was deliberately done by agents to maximize profitability,” said Eugene F. Soltes, the McLean Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS and first author of the working paper. 

Soltes and co-author Harper Jung, a PhD student studying accounting and management at HBS and Harvard Griffin GSAS, hope their research will serve as a starting point for more conversation about AI safety in the context of business management control.

The research for the paper, which the group aims to publish and is currently out for peer review, was done in collaboration with Andon Labs, an AI safety company focusing on testing AI models in realistic business operations.

In experiments, 20 commercially available AI models from major firms, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek v3.2, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, independently operated a vending machine over the course of a simulated year.

Tasks included searching for suppliers, buying products, and engaging with customers.

In some experiments, agents operated solo; in others, four agents operated simultaneously in a shared market, where they could communicate with rivals via email. 

Agents started with $500 and a small inventory of chips and sodas. 

“They had to figure it out themselves,” said Jung. “Each agent had to independently search online for suppliers, negotiate wholesale prices, set its own retail pricing, and handle customer complaints.”

Jung and Soltes said the agents demonstrated impressive business savvy. 

“The best models had the capacity to negotiate and calculate valuations like a top-notch M.B.A. student,” Soltes said. 

“When we went through the deliberations and the exchanges the agents made with each other, we were just in shock,” said Jung. “I was amazed at how far these machines can go.”

The agents’ misconduct ranged from the questionable to the comical to the potentially criminal and included denying refunds by claiming defects were normal product variation; inventing nonexistent corporate policies to avoid processing returns; and colluding with competitors to fix prices.

In one instance, agents formed what researchers described as a “three-person cartel,” which the agents named the Bay Street Triumvirate. The alliance fractured, though, when one agent discovered another was undercutting cartel prices, which it called a “declaration of war.” 

The simulations also supplied constraints: Agents were charged a $2 per day operating fee plus a token usage fee — effectively turning time spent “thinking” into an operating expense.

In response, the agents sought to economize. For instance, Soltes said, internal reasoning logs showed agents shifting from carefully weighing refund decisions to dismissing most requests outright, often without review. 

“The agents come to the realization that ‘thinking’ about giving a refund is itself a cognitive burden, and so they just ignore it altogether in some circumstances,” Soltes explained. “People might assume that machines are deliberative, while humans rely on shortcuts and are vulnerable to bias. But it turns out that, under similar constraints, agents reproduce the same myopic and biased behaviors we associate with people.”

The research raises questions about accountability for AI developers and regulators.

The reasoning logs, Soltes said, can sometimes be read as resembling mens rea — the “guilty mind” concept in criminal law used to establish intent. Yet when an AI agent behaves improperly, responsibility is far harder to determine.

“Does it rest with the company that deployed the system, the AI firm that created the model, or the manager who chose to use it?” he asked.

“The most straightforward answer may be to hold the individual managers overseeing the software responsible for its actions, on the assumption that they will monitor and supervise its behavior,” he said. “But that solution also creates a different issue, since many of the promised efficiencies of autonomous AI systems begin to disappear if a human must remain in the loop at every decision point.” A thorny problem, but one that business leaders and lawmakers must deal with, hopefully sooner than later, researchers say.