Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class in a nation where residential segregation is relatively common. It is a dynamic widely viewed as a contributing factor to income inequality and intergenerational social mobility.

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines whether increased exposure to members of other race and class groups affects marriage rates between Black and white partners, based on an analysis of Census data and federal tax records. The overall rate has grown slowly over the years and currently stands at only 11 percent of intermarried couples.

The answer is mixed. 

Greater exposure appears to translate into more marriages across class lines but “has no detectable effect” when it comes to race, according to the paper written by Benjamin Goldman, Ph.D. ’24, assistant professor at Cornell University, Jamie Gracie, Ph.D. ’25, a postdoc fellow with Harvard’s EdRedesign Lab, and Sonya Porter, a U.S. Census Bureau researcher. 

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Goldman and Gracie spoke about the role of residential segregation in both interracial and cross-class marriages and the implications for continuing inequality. 

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Why is it still relatively uncommon for Americans to marry outside their race and class groups?

Goldman: There can be two reasons at a very high level.

One is that people have some preferences, desires, or inherited norms across generations that marriages should be between certain types of people within your own community, whatever it might be. 

The second is that even absent any kind of preferences along those lines, you could still get very low rates of intergroup marriage, simply for the reason that there might not be a lot of contact across group lines. 

We live our lives in a very segregated way in terms of the places we work, live, and socialize. It’s plausible that the reason people tend not to date or marry across group lines is not because they don’t want to, but because it’s harder and there are fewer opportunities to do so.

Gracie: The goal of the paper is to try to understand what drives the low intergroup marriage rate. We basically take one angle on it, which is to think about the role of residential segregation as opposed to going through every single factor and determining how much they each contribute to the fact that Americans rarely marry outside their race or class groups.

What did you learn about the role of residential segregation?

Goldman: What we found was that neighborhoods are important, but it doesn’t mean that you’re meeting your spouse on the corner while you’re trying to cross the street. 

Neighborhoods impact where you work and who you socialize with. Distance and neighborhoods might matter even for dating app technologies, which are now the most common way young folks meet. Those dating apps require you to set a search radius, essentially limiting the pool of possible partners to people who live near you, which is, in some sense, exactly the type of exposure channel we study in the paper.

Gracie: We wanted to test one theory, which is that it’s possible that residential segregation plays a role in the fact that there isn’t that much mixing across people from different groups. 

We know that neighborhoods are segregated in terms of race and class. We found that when neighborhoods happen to have people from low- and high-income backgrounds living in the same area, more of these cross-class marriages form. However, the same wasn’t true for interracial marriage. 

Why is that?

Gracie: At the beginning of the research, it wasn’t obvious that these two types of marriages should react differently to exposure. The main contribution of the paper is to document that difference, as opposed to necessarily trying to understand why. 

Goldman: Part of the reason we focused on the role of exposure was because we saw in the data that a lot of marriages in the U.S. tend to be among two people who have lived very near each other in the past.

We started by looking at two people who just got married this year, and we asked ourselves: Five or 10 years ago, where were those two people living? We saw that most marriages are between two people who might have just lived a few miles away from each other. 

That lends itself to the second point of the paper: If people tend to marry from the pool of their neighbors or those they live nearby, which is already a selected set of people across race or class lines, then that’s a natural way in which you could have that polarization in the marriage market. 

Marriages between Black and white individuals make up 11 percent of all interracial marriages, compared with 43 percent for Latino-white pairings and 14 percent for Asian-white couples. Why is this rate so relatively low?

Goldman: There are two reasons why we focus on the white-Black pairing in particular, as opposed to all the other different pairings. 

One is that’s the pairing where you see the lowest amount of cross-group marriage. Also, if you look at statistics on white-Black household income inequality and white-Black intergenerational mobility, what you see is that who people marry matters for that difference.

Part of the reason why white individuals in the U.S. have higher household incomes than Black individuals is not only because they might earn a bit more on average, but it’s in large part because they’re more likely to have two earners in the household or marry someone who comes from a higher income. 

In that sense, white-Black marriage is important to understand because it’s an input into these broader income disparities between these two groups. 

Unfortunately, our paper is less-well-positioned to answer why white-Black marriage rates are so low. Instead, what we do is we reject one possible hypothesis, which is that it’s all about segregation in neighborhoods and lack of contact between white and Black individuals.

A possible explanation is that it’s not enough to reduce segregation in neighborhoods because even when you have racially diverse neighborhoods, people still self-segregate in terms of their social lives and their own communities. A different explanation would be that people have more ingrained views or preferences toward marrying across race lines. 

What are the implications of low intergroup marriage rates for inequality and social mobility?

Goldman: This is fundamental for how we think about issues relating to inequality and the exchange of privilege across generations.

If you think about a world where all the high-income people marry each other, or all the low-income people marry each other, or people who go to college only marry other people who go to college and so on, what you have is that in the next generation, kids will grow up in households of either haves or have-nots.

You’ll either have two parents who are very privileged and have a lot of resources, or, in some cases, none, or you’re more likely to grow up in a single-parent household. How the marriage market shakes out is first-order in determining the distribution of resources that children will have in the next generation. 

As economists, we tend not to give normative prescriptions, but from an empirical perspective, you could say that if you had more mixing across class lines in marriage, the children in the next generation would grow up in more equitable circumstances, and there’d be less of a difference in the resources between the kids at the bottom and top of the distribution.

There’s good reason to think that that would be important for fostering access to the American Dream and for a more equitable and dynamic society in the next generation. 

Gracie: What we don’t know a lot about is how these preferences, or whatever is not coming from the residential segregation factor, are formed. Does growing up in a more mixed neighborhood shape your attitudes toward people of different groups? We don’t have an answer to that. But I think that’s the type of question that one could think of as future research.

Joyful scenes played out across the Yard last Thursday as Harvard hosted its 375th Commencement. As thousands of graduates and their families and friends, as well as dignitaries and volunteers, packed campus to celebrate, our photographers were there to capture the highlights. 

Kiesse Nanor (clockwise from left) delivers the Latin Oration; Andrew O’Donohue, the Graduate English Address; and Noah Eckstein, the Senior English Address. Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Graduates display tokens that symbolize the Schools, including the T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s signature plastic hands and the Law School’s gavels. Photos by Grace DuVal

The award-winning dark, psychological thriller “Black Swan,” with its haunting hallucinations, body horror, and chilling end, left movie-goers decidedly unsettled when it premiered in 2010.

That included Jen Silverman, who would eventually write the book for a musical based on the film. 

“It really freaked me out in really good ways,” said Silverman, recalling their first time seeing “Black Swan” while in grad school in Iowa City. “The idea of putting some version of that on stage felt like such a challenge that I was immediately interested.” 

As were other members of her team. The end result is A.R.T.’s musical based on the film by Darren Aronofsky ’91, running now through July 5, with an official opening night set for Wednesday.

Silverman was first approached about the idea in 2020. They knew the key was going to be how to depict the internal struggles of the main character, Nina, a talented young dancer with an overbearing mother who desperately wants the lead in a production of “Swan Lake.”

Since then, Silverman and the rest of the creative team — which includes Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Sonya Tayeh (“Gatsby” at A.R.T., “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” on Broadway) and Obie Award-winning musicians Dave Malloy and Or Matias — have been workshopping and revising. 

The result is a work that makes use of music, movement, word, and setting to stretch the boundaries of theater while maintaining some of the intense thematic elements of the original film. 

“It’s been an amazing experience watching that music take form, and from that music, watching the story being updated for the present day,” said Aronofsky in a statement. “I love the music, and I love the movement. I love the dance. I love how scary it is and how crazy it is, and I’m excited for audiences to experience it.”

Melanie Moore, who plays Nina, said that she was approached by Tayeh to become part of the production. She previously worked with Tayeh in 2011 on the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance,” which launched her dancing career and eventually led her to theater.

Moore said that while the Oscar-winning performance of Natalie Portman ’03 in the role was incredible, as a professional dancer she feels she brings unique insights, having experienced the beauty and hardships of the profession, including the never-ending drive for the unattainable goal of perfection.

“There are certain things of yourself that sometimes you have to strip away in order to make things as artists. And sometimes it makes you better, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Moore said, speaking of Nina’s journey in the play. “It is [Nina’s] way to ascend and make her mark on something, and it’s at the expense of herself.”

“Nina has both this incredible vulnerability and also a real steeliness, a real drive that she discovers in herself,” said Silverman. “What is so thrilling about watching Melanie’s Nina is you’re watching someone who is discovering something about themselves for the first time, and who is then in pursuit of that thing, even if the pursuit takes them over the cliff.”

The production leans heavily on many theatrical elements to bring the thrills and chills of “Black Swan” to the stage, no small undertaking.

The narrative is very dance-forward but weaves together singing, music, and choreography to elicit an intense emotional experience for the audience. 

The creative team experimented extensively with how to use horror and thriller mechanisms in unique ways to create the bone-chilling experience of a thriller without the aid of camera close-ups or other cinematic elements. 

“I think some people are going to leave horrified, some people are going to leave like, ‘Whoa, she did it.’ Some people are going to leave just being like, ‘The dancing was amazing,’ and some people might leave being like, ‘What the hell just happened?’” Moore said. “I hope that people leave and they feel inspired to talk about it.”

“Black Swan” will be showing through July 5. To purchase tickets, visit the A.R.T website.

On Thursday, the University awarded a total of 10,143 degrees. A breakdown of degrees and programs is listed below.

Harvard College granted a total of 1,661 degrees. Degrees from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were awarded by Harvard College, the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Design.

All Ph.D. degrees are conferred by the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

All figures include degrees awarded in November 2025, and February, and May 2026.

Harvard College
1,661 degrees

• 1,603 Bachelor of Arts
• 58 Bachelor of Science

Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
1,570 degrees

• 575 Master of Arts
• 265 Master of Science
• 13 Master of Engineering
• 717 Doctor of Philosophy

Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
783 degrees

• 360 Bachelor of Arts (conferred by Harvard College)
• 58 Bachelor of Science (conferred by Harvard College)
• 13 Master of Engineering (conferred by GSAS)
• 246 Master of Science (conferred by GSAS)
• 30 Master in Design Engineering (conferred jointly with GSD)
• 76 Doctor of Philosophy (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Business School
956 degrees

• 821 Master in Business Administration
• 60 Master in Business Administration with Distinction
• 49 Master in Business Administration with High Distinction
• 26 Doctor of Philosophy (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Divinity School
146 degrees

• 49 Master of Divinity
• 88 Master of Theological Studies
• 9 Master of Religion and Public Life

Harvard Law School
802 degrees

• 187 Master of Laws
• 608 Doctor of Law
• 7 Doctor of Juridical Science

Harvard Kennedy School
632 degrees

• 66 Master in Public Administration
• 202 Master in Public Administration (Mid-Career)
• 78 Master in Public Administration in International Development
• 267 Master in Public Policy
• 3 Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government (conferred by GSAS)
• 14 Ph.D. in Public Policy (conferred by GSAS)
• 2 Ph.D. in Social Policy (conferred by GSAS)

Harvard Graduate School of Design
356 degrees

75 Master of Architecture

28 Master of Architecture in Urban Design

71 Master in Design Studies

66 Master in Landscape Architecture

1 Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design

44 Master in Urban Planning

6 Doctor of Design

30 Master in Design Engineering (conferred jointly with SEAS)

35 Master in Real Estate

Harvard Graduate School of Education
733 degrees

• 699 Master of Education
• 17 Doctor of Education Leadership
• 17 Doctor of Education/Philosophy

Harvard Medical School
459 degrees

• 105 Master in Medical Science
• 156 Doctor of Medicine
• 198 Master of Science

Harvard School of Dental Medicine
52 degrees

• 13 Master of Medical Sciences
• 4 Doctor of Medical Sciences
• 35 Doctor of Dental Medicine

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
567 degrees

• 366 Master of Public Health
• 176 Master of Science
• 17 Master in Health Care Management
• 8 Doctor of Public Health

Harvard Extension School
1,426 degrees

• 136 Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies
• 1,290 Masters of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Commencement, of course, comes with a pretty strict dress code: Robes, badges, and caps are all imbued with centuries of tradition and institutional significance.

But many newly minted graduates find ways to accessorize around the margins — most notably, around their necks. 

Everywhere were ribbons and stoles of significance draped over robes.

Many were distributed by student groups to represent pride and affinity: first-generation status, countries of origin, or membership in, say, the Harvard Law Review.

Others were more personal. 

On one end of Daniel Kocot’s stole was Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, on the other, the Polish flag, representing both halves of his family tree.

“My parents surprised me with it,” said Kocot, who is from Chicago and is graduating with a B.S. in electrical engineering. He particularly liked the colorful serape gradient woven in: “It’s traditional in blankets in Mexico, but it’s integrated into the stole itself.”

The best stoles caught the eye from 50 feet out, suggesting that undergraduate black goes with everything. 

Christian Liu, leaving Currier House with a degree in computer science, wore a batik pattern to represent his native Singapore: a looping network of vibrant floral imagery against a navy background, like an electric paisley. 

Sarah Adegbite’s featured a scale icon, rather than the other option, a star — even though she’s a Divinity School graduate, not a lawyer. 

“I studied the history of slavery in Christianity, how enslaved people encountered ritual and sacramental practice,” Adegbite said. “So, thinking about justice and liberation has been a big part of my time at the Divinity School.”

Adegbite, who is Nigerian and was raised in London, made a point of giving thanks to the classmate who sourced stoles that speak to her family’s West African roots. (“Made in Ghana,” says its sticker.)

Lulu August’s parents came to the U.S. from Tanzania for education, and Lulu spent time there with her grandparents, “when I was very young,” while her mother was attending medical school.

By now, in trips back and forth, August’s mom has assembled a whole library of kitenges, colorful cotton patterns widely used in East Africa. “We looked through what she had: My favorite color is blue; her favorite color is orange; so we chose one that had both.” 

While most of these markers lie flat, a few explode into three dimensions.

Lucy Zheng, who is from Shanghai, wore an intricate floral wreath and a stole to match, dotted with what look from afar to be living orchids and other flowers. “They’re not real,” Zheng noted. “I had it shipped from China.”

Zheng’s undergraduate studies centered on East Asian art, and her floral adornments pay tribute to similar crowns, called zanhua, made famous by the women of the fishing village of Xunpu, in southern China.

Some of the accessories, while not unique, capture the almost-unthinkable distances that students travel. 

Twin sisters Cielo and Isa Long grew up on Tinian (population about 2,000) in the Northern Mariana Islands. They feel certain they’re the first Tinianese to get degrees from Harvard. 

In such a remote community, pride runs deep: Marianas grads all wear stoles depicting the Northern Marianan flag — featuring traditional images from the island’s native populations, and a white star symbolizing its status as a U.S. territory.

Isa said: “It’s a way of instilling pride in our people.”

All these students were pleased to say that their families hadn’t just sent stoles but had come to Cambridge themselves for Commencement — even if, for the Longs, that meant 33 hours of travel. 

“Here to Newark, Newark to Japan, Japan to Guam, Guam to Saipan, overnight layover, next morning to Tinian,” Cielo said.

A touch of Revolution

Leading the procession into Tercentenary Theatre were musicians participating in Commencement for the first time who nonetheless brought a bit of tradition to the event.

In honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary this July 4, Commencement organizers asked the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums, a musical corps established in 1982, to participate. 

The 11 MCV participants were attired in the garb of Colonial military musicians: long white coats with blue facings, white pants, and tricorn hats. At their head was drum major John Nichols, a Harvard environmental officer with Environmental Health and Safety and the organization’s director. 

Nichols, a drummer, said he began playing with a youth fife and drum corps while growing up in the Boston area. He joined the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums about 10 years ago because it sat at the intersection of two longstanding interests: music and history.

“I was a history major from Boston College so for me it scratches that itch, continually diving into Colonial America,” Nichols said. “I also love the pageantry of the martial music, with our tattoos and our performances.”

He rose to lead the nonprofit, which is dedicated to educating the public and performing fife and drum music from the 16th through 19th centuries, including “Yankee Doodle” and other Revolutionary War period pieces. 

Though there were volunteer militias in Middlesex County during the Revolutionary War, Nichols described MCV as a “historically inspired” group, rather than a recreation of any particular troop of the era.

For Nichols himself, the experience put a new spin on Commencement, for which he and other environmental safety officers are usually in the Yard as safety ambassadors, assisting visitors and being on hand for emergencies. 

Not only was he in a procession that he typically watches, but some of the organizing meetings were at Wadsworth House, where the Commencement and University Marshal’s offices are located. 

Wadsworth House is the campus’ second-oldest building, after Massachusetts Hall, and was built in 1726-27 for then-President Benjamin Wadsworth.

George Washington stayed there in 1775 while making plans for the early stages of the war and taking command of the Continental Army.

“To take a meeting where we’re talking about celebrating the 250^th at the Commencement, in a room where Washington was writing papers and reports during the Siege of Boston, it was pretty remarkable,” Nichols said. “As a history nerd, it was awe-inspiring.”

Their job: Spreading happiness

Donna Gibson Stone ’66 of Topsfield, Mass., and Bob Phifer ’69 of Wellesley, Mass., met each other while volunteering for the alumni Committee for the Happy Observance of Commencement, also known as the Happy Committee. The two friends have volunteered for decades as volunteers during Commencement festivities — and find it to be one of the most joyous days of the year. 

“It’s a sea of happy faces. Everybody is in a good mood,” Stone said. “The mood is usually quite upbeat, and I find it a joyful experience.”

Phifer said that he appreciates the sense of tradition and ceremony that comes with being part of such a historic institution, which is particularly striking this year, the 375th anniversary. 

“There’s nothing like this in the rest of the United States,” he said. “It appeals to my sense of tradition, stability, continuity, and depth … but it’s also a festival. It’s just fun.” 

As part of their marshal duties, Stone and Phifer lend their institutional knowledge and celebratory spirit to help ensure the event runs smoothly.

When asked about the traditional marshal uniform — a suit and top hat for men and black clothing with an extravagant hat of black or red for women — Stone and Phifer chuckled, saying it’s a nice occasion to wear “the same costume every year.” Plus, the eye-catching pieces make it easy for attendees to find help if they need it. Stone pointed to her own hat and said it was one from the first batches of hats ever given for Commencement, created in Jamaica Plain by local haberdashery Salmagundi. 

More than just a festive day, Phifer said Commencement provides a moment to pause and remember that there is a rhythm to our lives, one that can be grounding. It’s a call to keep doing our part to make the world a better place.

“It’s nice to go to something which has been predictable for three centuries,” he said. “It kind of gives you a center, a meaning, a compass for the way in which we should go forward. Commencement is a beginning, a chance to go forward again, to amend our lives and move forward. So let’s hope these graduates will do that.”

‘My family is amazing’

There are small children everywhere at Commencement, but they may be in highest concentration at the party for graduates of the Division of Continuing Education.

Gathered for a quick lunch at the quadrangle in front of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, some mothers wearing mortarboards and holding toddlers looked almost stunned to have made it to this day.

“There were times when I wasn’t sure if I could do this, but I did,” said Kelsea Binns, as her husband, Mustafa, wrangled their 2-year-old behind her. She corrected herself: “We did.”

After years working as a consultant in Seattle, Binns decided to pursue a master’s degree in sustainability offered remotely through the Extension School. It was an enormous commitment for a young parent with a full-time job. 

“I was working at my consulting firm, like 60 hours a week. And then every Saturday I went to a coffee shop, for at least eight hours, and worked on homework,” Binns said. Pointing at her son, she said, “I saw him, maybe, one hour a day sometimes.”

Binns quickly found she was not alone.

During remote classes, “Plenty of babies would pop in the screen to say goodnight,” said Ashley Rutkowski, who is graduating from the same master’s program. (Her own son, nearly 2, was lounging in a stroller on the lawn.)

Rutkowski, too, thanked her support system.

“He’s the one with the baby, my parents on the weekend,” she said of her partner.

She was moved by Conan O’Brien’s Commencement message that all success comes backed by a team. “My family is amazing,” she said.

The spouses were celebrating, too. Mustafa Binns said that Kelsea had been there for him during his own spot of mid-career “upskilling.” “It feels like a joint accomplishment,” he said.

In an ideal world, sustainable practices would be quickly woven into the fabric of corporate America. But in Binns and Rutkowski’s experience, it made sense to dive in intensively, though it made for tiring weeks. 

They took courses on how to incorporate climate resilience, planning for weather events and eliminating waste in their everyday work.

Binns hopes to focus on “nature-based solutions,” using green space and the built environment to mitigate the effects of disasters.

“The goal is to save the planet,” Binns said. And in a fit of parental practicality, she added, “and also to make money somehow.”

Company — and a company — for a grad

Astra and Lori Wagman were sitting on folding chairs in the shade in front of Lamont Library, surveying the scene, which felt kind of expected yet surreal.

The two were preparing to cheer on Astra’s husband and Lori’s son, Bradley Wagman, who was graduating from a joint program between the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Graduate School of Design.

Wagman, completing the two-year master in design engineering degree, is a U.S. Army veteran with an interest in helping those with conditions that affect mobility, such as veterans with disabilities and people suffering motor diseases.

Wagman and another Army veteran, Harvard College senior Viktor Bokisch, who also graduated, with a bachelor of science degree in bioengineering, designed and built an AI-driven sock, called Sole 1, that addresses a condition called “foot drop.”

Foot drop is caused by paralysis or weakness in the muscles that raise the front of the foot and is commonly seen in those with nerve injury or conditions like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Those with the condition tend to drag their toes when walking, which can cause trips and falls and lead to further injury.

Wagman conducted dozens of interviews of patients and found deep dissatisfaction with current braces. As an alternative, Wagman and Bokisch designed a soft robotic sock whose AI brain detects impaired gait and employs what the two describe as “synthetic muscles” to lift the front of the foot and create a more natural gait.

The device was a finalist for Harvard’s 2026 President’s Innovation Challenge and in September won a James Dyson Award. The two have founded a startup, Sole 1, with Wagman as chief executive officer and Bokisch as chief technology officer, to develop the idea further.

While a lot of work lies ahead, Thursday was for celebrating achievements. Lori, Wagman’s mother, flew up from Pennsylvania, while Astra, his wife, lives with him in Cambridge.

Astra wasn’t surprised that Wagman was accepted to Harvard, but somehow never thought she’d actually be sitting at a Harvard commencement. So, while she was absolutely proud of her husband, the whole event still was a bit of an “out of body experience.” In a good way.

Get your Harvard gear here

Holding signs offering a 25 percent discount on all Harvard apparel, rising sophomores Achilles Anderson and Michael Young were hoping to attract buyers to the tent of The Harvard Shop, the University’s official student-run campus store. 

It was for a good cause, said the Dunster House residents as they stood near Tercentenary Theatre. The tent was pulsing with activity as customers purchased T-shirts, hats, and other merchandise.   

“All the sales from The Harvard Shop go to financial aid and student wages,” said Anderson, a psychology concentrator who hails from Chicago. “And for me personally, this is important because without financial aid, I wouldn’t be able to attend a school like this. It’s like I’m paying it forward for a kid out there next year who, just like me, has the opportunity to come to a school as prestigious as Harvard, but can’t quite pay.” 

Young, an economics concentrator from Ohio, shared the sentiment. “Not only are people getting a great item, whether it be clothing, a water bottle, or an umbrella that has the Harvard brand on it, they’re contributing to students here,” he said.

Both Anderson and Young are affiliated with Harvard Student Agencies, a student-run nonprofit that provides jobs and business opportunities for undergraduates.

Before resuming their sales pitches to passersby, Anderson and Young shared some pieces of advice for incoming students. 

“My main piece of advice is to talk to any and everybody,” said Anderson. “Most people here are nice and won’t turn you down, especially because in freshman year everybody is new. School is important, but relationships matter too. Most of the people that you’ll meet here will probably be lifelong friends.” 

Friendships are important, agreed Young, and coursework and assignments can be difficult, but they are manageable with organization. “Put your time into the right things and work hard,” he said. “You’re going to love your experience here.”

Work-school balance

Commencement was a kind of reunion for Extension School A.L.M. grads Curtis Steinhauer and Stephanie Borcea, both of whom concentrated in global development practice. Steinhauer lives in Washington State, Borcea in Washington, D.C. They took classes remotely and hadn’t met in the flesh since the program’s in-person summer intensive. 

Borcea entered the School at a difficult time in her personal life. She had a background in land use, human rights, and indigenous rights, but had taken time off work to grieve the death of her mother. Grad school, she thought, would be a great way to get back into the swing of things. 

“It’s kind of cheesy, but I can’t express enough how much this pulled me out of a dark place,” she said. “Coming into this program, feeling enthused by learning again, being in a cohort of people who are just nice, kind, earnest people, it brought me back to life.” 

About a year into the program, Borcea got a job at the World Research Institute, helping support community deforestation efforts in the Amazon, the Congo River Basin, and Indonesia. 

Steinhauer was also able to leverage his classwork into a new job before he finished his degree. When he took his first class in 2017, he worked for a county in Washington State as a homelessness and housing coordinator. He is now the policy coordinator on land use and housing for the Washington State Association of Counties. 

“In a pretty competitive job market in 2022, the degree helped me stand out to the organization I work for now,” he said. 

Steinhauer particularly appreciated coursework that taught him skills he might not have had the chance to prioritize on the job, like negotiation and conflict resolution. 

“I was reflecting a little bit today during Commencement, when they talked about the Veritas books facing out towards the world,” he said, referencing Rabbi Getzel Davis’ invocation of the Harvard shield and its three open books. “The Extension School has been a really incredible opportunity to learn more and immediately apply the skills in the community that I live and work in.” 

Deeper learning 

Meghna Middha filed into Tercentenary Theatre Thursday morning, proudly holding the signature golden oil lamp that all Extension School graduates carry during the ceremony. 

“To me it represents us burning the midnight oil, because all of us are Extension students balancing work, life, classes, and adulting,” she said. 

Middha, who received an A.L.M. in psychology, began her career as a teacher — she also holds a Ph.D. in English literature — but realized that her students, mostly teenagers, needed more support. She trained as an arts-based mindfulness practitioner and worked as a counselor. 

“I wanted to deepen my knowledge of psychology, perhaps get another Ph.D. in psychology,” she said. With a laugh, she continued, “I might have gone a bit crazy, but I found my calling in adolescent well-being.” 

Middha, who is 40, fit in her Extension School classes over the course of five years. As part of her capstone project, she developed what she calls the ABCD model of adolescent well-being:

“A for awareness, B for balance, C for choice, and D for direction. It’s everything repackaged for our teenagers, developing the skills teenagers need.” 

She plans to combine her literature background with her newfound expertise in psychology into a series of workbooks and stories for adolescent readers — and she hopes to conduct research that bolsters the ABCD model. 

“If anybody’s listening, I really want to do this, get in touch,” she said, laughing again. 

Saying goodbye to a second home

As the procession slowly moved through the yard, Lulu August chatted and laughed with her fellow graduates. Her family, who traveled from Maryland for the special occasion, stood nearby, taking pictures and jumping over to the line of graduates to give August hugs and well wishes. August took it all in stride but noted that she felt overwhelmed with the various emotions associated with her College days coming to an end. 

“I feel a bit in denial. I feel theoretically sad, like it’s going to hit me in a few hours,” she said with a laugh. She concentrated in environmental science and public policy with a secondary in women’s studies, a decision largely shaped by a childhood spent in Tanzania. “This is a place where I’ve grown a lot into the person that I am and feels like a second home.” While at Harvard, August also operated as a peer advising fellow, volunteered at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, and was a member of Omo Naija x Wahala Boys, Harvard’s undergraduate West African dance group.

Her parents, Agnes Mwakingwe-Omari and Kakuri Omari, said they are so proud of everything that their daughter has accomplished. Agnes remembered the day they moved August into her dorm, pointing to Cabot House and saying the day felt like a moment where they had come “full circle.” Serendipitously, that moment was also captured on camera. “We are very, very proud of her because she’s worked really hard,” her mother said. “She’s liked being here and she’s learned a lot.”

After graduation, August will be moving closer to home to work as a paralegal for Planned Parenthood in the D.C. area. While she’s happy that she’ll be nearby, Agnes is mostly excited that August will be following her dreams. “We really raised Lulu to just go wherever she wants to go, wherever she has the opportunity to do what she really loves to do.” 

Her father added that Harvard has been an important part of their daughter’s journey. “It’s been a good four years and we’re sorry that it’s come to an end,” he said. “We look forward to the great things I hope she will do based on the education that she got here.”

While leaving is bittersweet for August, she’s also happy for the time she spent on campus and the memories she made. 

“It’ll be exciting to see what happens next in the next chapter of my life, but I’m grateful to have had these four years,” August said.

‘The most rewarding and surreal experience’

Walking through the Yard, Sandra Taves Bhutto felt like she was actually walking on clouds. 

The new graduate and ultrasound technologist at SickKids, a hospital in Toronto, was accompanied by her husband of five years, Mustafa Bhutto, who was beaming. 

“It has been an incredibly hard journey, but it’s been the most rewarding and surreal experience in my life,” said Bhutto, who received a Master of Medical Sciences in Medical Education from Harvard Medical School. 

Bhutto, who applied to Harvard at her husband’s encouragement, took four years to complete the two-year program as she worked at the Canadian hospital. The program helped her gain training in pediatric ultrasound education, she said. 

“I wanted an opportunity to improve healthcare globally,” said Bhutto. “Harvard Medical School’s master’s program was the best opportunity to get the education to do that.”

Bhutto said she’s going to miss the program’s intellectual stimulation and the camaraderie among the students. “Everyone is so engaged and just thrilled to be there and to contribute,” she said. “Everyone embraces the challenges and really pushes each other to do what’s best for the world. That’s what’s been so rewarding over the past four years.”  

As for her plans after graduation, Bhutto is preparing to become a new mother and to return to the hospital to do the work she is passionate about.

‘Change is a constant’ 

Indra Gonzalez Ojeda was raised in Cabo Rojo, the home of the best beaches in Puerto Rico, in her humble opinion. 

Back then Gonzalez Ojeda, who is graduating with a Ph.D. in biophysics, thought she would grow up to become a physician. Over the years she decided that path was not the one for her.

She did enjoy science, though, and while in high school she participated in a biomedical research program at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, where she would eventually do her undergraduate degree in chemistry

She never thought of attending Harvard until she went to a summer research program in her senior year and met Kevin Wood, a professor of biophysics and physics at the University of Michigan. 

Wood, who would become a mentor, asked whether she’d considered applying. 

“It just didn’t feel like something that was possible,” she said, in her graduation regalia. “There was this aura of intimidation.” 

He wrote her a letter of recommendation, and Gonzalez Ojeda got in.

At the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), Gonzalez Ojeda rotated through many different labs and ended up studying evolution. 

“I like that it’s about change, and change is a constant,” she said. “In biology, there are few constants.” 

Grateful to the mentors who helped get her to Harvard, Gonzalez Ojeda helped lead an outreach program during her studies that matched graduate students with undergraduates seeking some guidance. 

Many of the students she’d worked with are working on PhDs right now — at Yale, the University of Iowa, the University of Chapel Hill — and she still keeps in touch.

As her academic journey continues next year as a post-doc at Stanford, she’s glad she can continue paying that mentorship work forward. 

Raised near stunning beaches, she can perhaps enjoy some warmer weather now and may even see how coastal California compares to Cabo Rojo. 

What’s with all the moral outrage?

Dylan Tweed studies moral outrage but is not particularly susceptible to feeling that way himself.

His sister, visiting for graduation, agrees, describing him as measured and calm.

It was partly Tweed’s slowness to anger that drew him to the subject in the first place. 

“I just saw it everywhere, and myself not feeling coalitionally affiliated with an actual moral tribe, I was just curious,” he said. “I haven’t experienced this very strongly, so why is everybody else doing this?”

The curiosity turned into a six-year project under Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and Tweed’s adviser at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

Tweed began working in evolutionary psychology as an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). There, he studied under anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides, who helped found the field and deeply influenced the work of Pinker. 

“Steve’s in the family,” Tweed said, smiling.

Community, humility top of mind

One line in particular from Conan O’Brien’s speech resonated with Marley Dias, a sociology concentrator with a secondary in African American studies.

“My wish for you is not that Harvard becomes the last thing people know about you,” O’Brien said to the graduates, “but instead that Harvard become the least important thing people know about you.”

Beyond her studies, Dias, a Winthrop House resident, started the #1000blackgirlbooks drive to increase diversity in school reading lists and authored an inspirational book herself, “Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!”

“I’ve always tried to let my activism and the impact that I make in my community be the biggest highlight of it all.”

Dias said the speech also left her feeling thankful for the people who helped her get across the finish line. In addition to O’Brien’s remarks stressing community and humility, College seniors were also prompted by Dean David Deming in the morning valediction to write thank you notes to two people in their lives.

“I think the idea of gratitude as a part of this moment is really important, because you feel like you do it alone, but you really don’t,” Dias said.

Dias was joined in Winthrop’s courtyard by family. She credits her mom, sociologist Janice Johnson Dias, as her biggest supporter on her journey to Harvard.

“Whether it’s been joining the Black Arts Collective of Harvard, or just making new friends, she’s always encouraged me to be myself, to say the things that I want to say, and to say please, and thank you,” Dias said, “And that advice has ushered me into what feels like a very exciting future, because I know who I’m grateful for, I know who’s helped me along the way, and I want to help other people.”

Dias plans to continue writing after graduation. She has a second title, “I am the Dream Come True,” a children’s book, set to publish in June — co-authored by her parents.

Her mother remarked that Commencement is a fitting celebration ahead of the release of the book about migration and family legacies.

“I’m an immigrant,” Johnson Dias said. “Her father’s family is an immigrant family, and we had all these rituals today, and so forth, that our families could have never participated in. And now she gets to be a part of this new formation.”

A secret dream fulfilled

For College graduates, Commencement doesn’t stop after the ceremony in Tercentenary Theatre. The graduates gather later in the afternoon with family and friends at their respective Houses to celebrate and collect their diplomas.

Taye Revels, a neuroscience concentrator at Lowell house, was one of many that brought an entourage. Revels’ mom, dad, two little sisters, older sister, two aunts and a family friend all gathered in the House courtyard to watch her receive her degree.

 And while she shared the celebration openly with her loved ones, Revels said she initially kept her dreams of Harvard under wraps.

“I actually didn’t tell anyone I was applying but my mom,” Revels said. “So I kept it a secret until the results came out in December, and that’s when I revealed to everyone that I’d gotten in. They were so shocked, but they were really happy.”

Revels, who came into College pre-med, said she’s setting her sights on law school after Harvard with ambitions to pursue the arts as well.

Not that Revels regrets pursuing a neuroscience degree. For the last two summers, her expertise has come in handy at the law firm where she’s worked helping with pro bono cases representing clients with neurodegenerative diseases. She’s also used her skills as a senior editor for the Harvard Undergraduate Health Policy Review.

In the immediate future, Revels said, she’s heading back to her hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, then off to Chicago in late June to start a gap year before law school. In the meantime, she’ll miss Lowell house.

“I’m going to miss seeing my friends every day, and even the people that I’m not super close to that I have daily conversations with who are moving to different parts of the country,” she said.

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Staff writers Sy Boles, Anna Lamb, Max Larkin, Liz Mineo, Samantha Laine Perfas, Alvin Powell, and Jacob Sweet contributed to this report.

Conan O’Brien brought his absurdist humor to bear Thursday as the principal speaker at Harvard’s 375th Commencement, poking fun at the University’s history and culture while also urging the Class of 2026 to set their sights beyond their academic achievements.

His wish for them, he said, was that one day, their status as Harvard grads might be “the least important thing people know about you.”

“I really understand how much hard work it took for all of you to get to this point,” O’Brien, a 1985 graduate of Harvard College, told the crowd at Tercentenary Theatre. “You should feel enormous pride, just as I did on my Commencement day.”

But a Harvard degree can be double-edged, he added.

“Many people are happy to mistake the lucky poker hand for their own brilliance, and fighting that human instinct has kept me sane.”

“Your real education starts now, with friends you’ve made and friends you get to meet, with stunning successes and miserable defeats, and with a humble acceptance that your greatness comes from the mess around you, not despite it,” O’Brien said.

He was quick to note that he was speaking from deep experience, crediting his own successes to help he’s received from “an infinitely packed clown car of multitudes” — and to luck. In that spirit, he urged his audience to resist the “extreme narcissism” of the times, with pointed reference to U.S. leaders and smartphone-fueled self-absorption.

“Many people are happy to mistake the lucky poker hand for their own brilliance, and fighting that human instinct has kept me sane,” he said. “I honestly believe that community, spontaneity, and a real commitment to humility have helped me build a rich life.”

The comedy legend’s remarks included riffs on recent University news. Thanking President Alan Garber for his stewardship of the graduating class, he said: “Fantastic job, sir. Really nice. Normally, I would give you an A+, but in keeping with upcoming Harvard policy, I’m adjusting your grade to a C-. Trust me, it’s for the good of the school.”

O’Brien touched on the federal government’s ongoing legal battles with the University, joking that he too was suing Harvard for indignities he endured at the College, like the cast-iron bunk bed he slept on as a first-year (“an instrument of divine cruelty”) and his underwhelming dating life.

“I’m confident that my claims will have more merit than those filed by the president of the United States,” he said to cheers.

In his opening address, Garber struck a more solemn note about the political, legal, and academic challenges facing Harvard.

Recalling the University’s long history as a leading light for intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, he said, “Our cause is just. Our principles are worthy. And our contributions to the common good are vital. This moment demands of us ongoing vigilance and unyielding effort as we continue to defend the University and its ideals.”

He praised students’ embrace of opportunities “to disagree constructively, listen generously, and speak freely” and their finding ways to bring people together in order “to nurture pluralism, mutual respect, and empathy.”

A Brookline native, O’Brien was twice elected president of the Harvard Lampoon. He made his name as an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer for  “The Simpsons ” and “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1980s before starring in NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” which ran from 1993 to 2009.

In 2010, he launched a new show, “Conan,” that ran until 2023 on TNT network. He now hosts a popular podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” Last year, O’Brien received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The University conferred O’Brien with a doctor of arts degree, which he accepted on behalf of his late grandfather, a Worcester traffic officer who left school to help support his family in seventh grade. Other honorary degree recipients were Audra McDonald, a Tony Award-winning Broadway actor and singer; conservative political columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan; AI innovator Geoffrey Hinton; and historian Noel Malcolm.

Closing his speech, O’Brien offered students congratulations, “not for any piece of paper you received today, but because of your hard work, determination, humanity, and the boundless community that you have and will create.”

In this year’s alumni elections, Harvard degree holders selected seven fellow alumni to join the University’s Board of Overseers and six to join the board of directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA). The new Overseers will assume their roles on May 29, while the HAA directors will begin their terms on July 1. 

New members of the Board of Overseers

Five new Overseers, listed in ballot order, were elected for six-year terms.

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

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

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

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

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

Two additional Overseers were elected to finish the terms left by Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87, who resigned in anticipation of joining the Harvard Corporation in July, and Vikas Sukhatme, M.D. ’79.

Salvo Arena, L.L.M. ’00 — Elected to serve a three-year term.
J.D. ’93, Ph.D. ’99, University of Catania
Partner, Chiomenti
New York

Clive Chang, M.B.A. ’11 — Elected to serve a two-year term.
B.Mus. ’07 with honors, B.Com. ’07, McGill University; M.F.A. ’09, New York University
President and CEO, YoungArts: The National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists
Miami

Nine candidates for the Board of Overseers were nominated by an alumni nominating committee whose 13 voting members are appointed by the Harvard Alumni Association executive committee. Harvard degree holders cast a total of 31,818 ballots in the election.

The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. Formally established in 1642, the board plays an integral role in the governance of the University, complementing the Corporation’s work as Harvard’s principal fiduciary board. As a central part of its work, the board directs the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning. More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. The board also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of Corporation members. Additional information about the board, its members, and its work can be found on its webpage.

Newly elected HAA directors

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new directors were elected for three-year terms. They were chosen from among nine candidates, nominated by the same HAA committee that puts forward candidates for Overseers. Harvard degree holders cast 32,867 ballots in the directors election.

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

The University will confer five honorary degrees during Thursday’s Commencement ceremony.

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Geoffrey Hinton

Doctor of Science

The man who has been twice dubbed the Godfather — of both AI and deep learning — earned his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence two decades before most people had personal computers, and more than 10 years before the internet became a go-to for news, email, and chat rooms.

But though he helped bring AI to the fore, Geoffrey Hinton has now become its prognosticator, speaking out about the dangers of deliberate misuse, technology-driven unemployment, and the existential risk of overdependence on artificial intelligence, rather than human brains. And despite many honors, including a Turning Award and a Nobel Prize in physics, he has said that a part of him regrets his life’s work.

Hinton was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a B.A. in experimental psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in AI at the University of Edinburgh, was the first director of University College London’s Gatsby Charitable Neuroscience Unit, did postdoctoral work at the University of California San Diego, and spent five years on the Computer Science faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University. He joined the University of Toronto in 1987, and is now University Professor emeritus there.

According to the Royal Society of London, where he was a fellow, “Hinton is distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets, especially how they can be designed to learn without the aid of a human teacher. This may well be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines.” His other expertise lies in deep learning algorithms, and he is noted for co-inventing the Boltzmann machine, a system that “pretrains” backpropatation methods. (Asked by New York Times reporter Cade Metz what that means, Hinton quoted Richard Feynman: “Buddy, if I could explain it in a couple of minutes, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.”)

After years in academia and as a Google vice president, Hinton resigned from the latter position to “freely speak out about the risks of AI.” In 2023 he told Metz, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” and warned that AI becomes more dangerous the smarter it grows.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

Upon receiving the Nobel Prize, Hinton called for urgent research into AI safety and the establishment of safety guidelines to learn how to control it. He told Metz, “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”

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Noel Malcolm

Doctor of Laws

Among the powers — and responsibilities — of the press are its duty to disseminate accurate information and its role as a watchdog, checking the actions of every branch of government and holding them accountable. It is perhaps then in his position as political columnist and foreign editor of Spectator magazine from 1987-1992 that Sir Noel Malcolm made his greatest mark.

Albin Kurti certainly thought so. The longtime Kosovar politician and current prime minister said that when the Balkan war started in the late 1990s, Malcom — Margaret Thatcher’s adviser on the Balkans in that time, president of the Anglo-Albanian Association, a member of the Academies of Sciences of Albania and Kosovo, and then at Harvard  — was a crucial voice.

“At the outset of the war in Kosova in 1998, he published the most important international historical account of the country,” Kurti said. “His work was timely, as propaganda was being used to justify genocide, and it documented the systemic discrimination of Albanians.

“He set the record straight at a moment when distorted history was being weaponized, so that the truth of the past could shape a more just future.”

There is no doubt Malcolm knows the truth of the past. He studied history and English literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, England, and was a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, also in Cambridge. In 1999 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard, and he gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford and the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge in 2001 and 2012, respectively. He has been a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, since 2002.

His notable books include the definitive “Bosnia: A Short History” and “Kosovo: A Short History,” which challenged nationalist myths in the Balkans; the “Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes”; the intellectual histories “Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750” and “Agents of Empire,” which focused on Venetian-Albanian relations; and “Human Rights and Political Wrongs,” in which he wrote that human rights “are concerned not with everything that is morally important, but rather with essential limits on the use of state power.”

A fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, at Cambridge he is an honorary fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius.

The late Queen Elizabeth II knighted Malcolm in 2014 in recognition of his work in scholarship, journalism, and European history.

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Audra McDonald

Doctor of Arts

Along with an Emmy and two Grammys, Audra McDonald has 11 Tony nominations and no less than six wins, making her the most-awarded performer in Broadway history — and the only actor ever to win in all four acting categories, lead or featured actor in a musical or play.

A Juilliard School graduate, McDonald made her stage debut in “The Secret Garden” in 1992. Two years later she won her first Tony for her role in “Carousel,” followed closely by a winning turn in “Master Class”; her other winning stage roles were “Ragtime” (1998); “A Raisin in the Sun” (2004); “Porgy and Bess” (2014), which before it hit Broadway was an A.R.T. production that sparked controversy by reimagining the opera as a musical; and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” in 2014.

“I’m somewhere in the middle between opera, musical theater, and I’m loving being there,” she told American Masters in 2000.

On TV, she made an early appearance as a daughter in “The Cosby Show” pilot, but gave it up for the stage. She had a breakout year in 1999 with roles in “Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years,” “Annie,” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and she won an Emmy in 2015 for hosting “Live from Lincoln Center.”

In the studio, the classically trained soprano was recognized with two Grammys, best opera recording and best classical recording, for her work on Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” in 2008.

McDonald is also known for her advocacy work, saying, “Maybe it’s because my uncle and my parents were always very involved with the Civil Rights Movement, so I just grew up and I was raised that you have to speak out and look out for your fellow man, woman, and child.” She helped found Black Theatre United, telling The New York Times in 2007, “I refuse to be stereotyped. If I think I am right for a role I will go for it in whatever way I can. … I can’t control what a producer will do or say but I can at least put myself out there.”

She is on the board of Covenant House International, an organization that fights human trafficking and supports homeless young people, and a prominent advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights, recognized with the PFLAG National Straight for Equality in Entertainment award, the Human Rights Campaign’s Ally for Equality award, the National Equality Award, Broadway Impact and Freedom to Marry. She also took part in “Singing You Home,” a bilingual children’s album that supports charities for families separated at the border.

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Peggy Noonan

Doctor of Laws

In addition to her many awards (including a Pulitzer, in 2017), honorary degrees (UPenn, Notre Dame, her own Fairleigh Dickinson University), and New York Times bestsellers (five), Peggy Noonan is a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library, an award that honors outstanding achievements — in her case, her “Declarations” column in The Wall Street Journal, which has run weekly for 26 years, and her 2017 essay collection, “The Time of Our Lives.”

Noonan began her career working at CBS Radio for Dan Rather, did a stint as a newswriter at WEEI Radio in Boston, and worked as an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. She had a notable career as a speechwriter, contributing to Ronald Reagan’s addresses marking the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, and his “shining city on a hill” Farewell Address. For George H.W. Bush, she created the catchphrases “kinder, gentler nation” and “a thousand points of light,” which urged Americans to solve problems through community service. 

Raised a Democrat, Noonan grew disenchanted with the student counterculture and anti-war movements of the 1960s, later writing, “My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana.” She became a prominent Republican in 1984.

Noonan has written 11 books on U.S. politics, culture, and religious faith, including the critically lauded “What I Saw at the Revolution,” which Time magazine called “A love letter to the American political process,” and her most recent, “A Certain Idea of America.” In 2024, she described America as “Big, raucous, troubled, frayed.” She is one of 10 writers and historians who contributed essays on the presidency to “Character Above All,” which profiled presidents from FDR to Bush.

Noonan has said that, “Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out” — courteously.        

“You don’t tell people who disagree with you they’d be better off somewhere else. And you don’t reduce them to stereotypes; you address them as fully formed people worthy of respect. You try to persuade them.”

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Conan O’Brien

Doctor of Arts

On April 25, the Harvard Lampoon celebrated its 150th anniversary. It was only right that longtime late-night host Conan O’Brien — who served as a two-term president of the third-longest continually running humor magazine — would return to the Castle to mark the occasion.

On May 28, he’ll be back for another reason: The Class of 1985 alumnus and Bay State native will come home to address this year’s graduates as their Commencement speaker.

Again, it’s only right: O’Brien made his bones at Harvard and The Lampoon. “Legend has it that O’Brien spent a night in jail following a stunt he pulled as an undergraduate. (On ‘advice of counsel,’ O’Brien declined to comment.) Having procured a jack-hammer as well as several hard hats and other construction-related paraphernalia, he and a group of fellow students cordoned off a section of street in downtown Boston and went to work, as it were, tearing up the pavement,” Harvard Magazine reported in 2004.

O’Brien allegedly followed up with two calls, one to the Boston police to complain about College students ripping up the street, the other to state police to say that construction workers trying to do their job were being harassed by students posing as Boston cops.

O’Brien went on to wider audiences. He was a writer on the sketch show “Not Necessarily the News,” and later joined “Saturday Night Live.” As a writer and producer on “The Simpsons” he was responsible for the fan favorite episodes “Marge vs. the Monorail” and “Homer Goes to College.” But he found his metier as a television host when he took over the “Late Night” chair from David Letterman. He hosted the show for 16 years, earning an Emmy in the process, and at one point joining Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for a “Late Night fight.” (O’Brien’s best move: a two-for-one punch worthy of the Three Stooges. Runner-up: the dance-off.)

In 2009, O’Brien left “Late Night” after a conflict with NBC. From 2010 to 2021 he hosted “Conan” on TBS, and since 2018 he has run the podcasts “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” (the first one to visit was Will Ferrell) and the spin-off travel show “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”

Other hosting stints have included the Emmy Awards twice, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and two Oscar ceremonies (with a third set for next year). He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2025, and received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor the same year.

Recognizing that “Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42.” O’Brien has also noted that, “Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

And finally, “When all else fails there’s always delusion.”

Speaking Wednesday at Class Day, Emmy Award-winning comedian Ronny Chieng couldn’t have been less interested in urging grads to master artificial intelligence to advance their future careers. Instead, he told the Class of 2026 to apply AI to research in medicine and physics, but never as a replacement for creativity and critical thinking.

Using colorful language, Chieng leaned into his AI skepticism in remarks at Tercentenary Theatre, citing a 2025 MIT study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” which found that overreliance on language learning models can lead to cognitive debt.

“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” said Chieng. “I know someone sitting out here right now who is saying, ‘What about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?’… If you’re using it for that purpose, you’re not the problem. I’m talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models … This is why you should be scared of AI.”

Chieng, who received commerce and law degrees from the University of Melbourne, has released three Netflix specials. His movie credits include  “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Kung Fu Panda 4.” He is a correspondent and rotating host for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

Addressing students, Chieng scoffed at using AI for reading and answering emails. “You know who else can do that? Me,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience. “If you can’t do that, how useless are you?”

Chieng, who grew up in Singapore and lived part of his childhood in Manchester, New Hampshire, reminded students that creativity is a deeply human endeavor. “Creating is the fun part,” he said. “Why would I want AI to take that away from me? The best part of comedy is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing.”

He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. … It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.”

Class Day is an annual celebration of graduating students and features student speeches and a guest speaker invited by the Class. In introducing Chieng, Nicholas S. Kalkanis ’26 highlighted the role of humor and comedy in highlighting life’s contradictions and absurdities.

“Comedy can challenge us to be curious and honest about what we see,” he said.

The event included a moment of silence remembering class member Lakota Tolloak, who died in January 2025 after a brief illness. David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, and David Battat, incoming President of the Harvard Alumni Association, also offered remarks.

In closing, Chieng asked students to be make sure their “offline world is better than their online world,” and to refrain from “chasing the money.” The better course is the more personal one, he said.

“Follow your passion. For me, that was stand-up comedy. When you have clarity of purpose, and you’re doing something you love, every day can be a joy, and that joy can spread to others.”

In October 1952, a young Harvard alumnus named Sherrod Skinner was killed after rolling onto a live grenade to save his fellow Marines. Skinner, a second lieutenant, was a junior officer thrust into the Korean War just months after his commissioning in Harvard’s ROTC program.

On Wednesday, Skinner’s memory was offered as an example of the leadership traditions of two important American institutions, Harvard and the military. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Clark held up Skinner as an example to the 19 graduating seniors who were commissioned as second lieutenants and ensigns into the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Space Force on Wednesday. 

Clark said Skinner’s leadership and cool head despite being twice wounded helped his Marines hold off enemy forces attempting to overrun their outpost. When they ran out of ammunition, he ordered his remaining forces, which had fallen back into a bunker, to feign death. The ploy worked until an enemy soldier tossed in a grenade, which landed between Skinner and another Marine. 

Skinner’s actions earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor, one of 18 awarded to Harvard alumni. His example, Clark said, offers lessons in leadership and honor that are instructive for young officers. Just months earlier, Skinner had been on Harvard’s campus, yet, despite his inexperience, he didn’t hesitate in making the ultimate sacrifice. Clark, who led the Air Force Academy and is a pilot with 400 combat flight hours, said the story makes him wonder what he might have done in a similar situation.

“He took that explosion himself to save his men. Lt. Skinner knew what it meant to hold the line. He knew what it meant to commit to something greater than himself,” Clark said. “Twenty-two years old, a year in the military, and he led with everything that he had, and gave everything that he had.”

Clark said leadership is made up of three things: integrity, humility, and excellence. With integrity, your actions follow from your morals and ideals. With humility, you don’t think less of yourself, Clark said; you think of others more and yourself less. And with excellence, you commit not to an impossible ideal of perfection, but to continuous improvement and being better the next day than the day before.

“Lt. Skinner continued to get better, because he became so incredible in such a short time,” said Clark. “Integrity, humility, excellence, those are the values he had.” 

Clark, whose daughter Zoe Clark was commissioned as an Air Force second lieutenant Wednesday, was the keynote speaker at Harvard’s 2026 ROTC Joint Commissioning Ceremony held in Sanders Theatre in Memorial Hall. 

Harvard President Alan Garber, who delivered welcoming remarks, told the ROTC cadets and midshipmen that they are at the intersection of great American institutions where excellence has flourished for centuries. 

Garber offered the example of Paul Revere’s grandson, Edward Hutchinson Revere, who graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School in 1849. Revere treated Union wounded on the battlefield during the Civil War. He was captured, imprisoned, and released. He returned to the battlefield to treat the wounded and was killed at Antietam, one of the bloodiest single days in American history.

“In the year of the United States Semiquincentennial, we are reminded of the role that this place of learning and the people it has educated have played in the making of America,” Garber said. “We are reminded that this country is the result of innumerable efforts — from every kind of person with every kind of skill — to ensure that the Republic endures. And we are reminded that how a duty is discharged often holds as much meaning as the duty itself.”

The walls of Memorial Hall, where the 90-minute ceremony took place, are inscribed with the names of 136 Harvard students and alumni who died on Civil War battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run.  

The 19 ROTC cadets and midshipmen who entered Sanders Theatre on Wednesday left as newly commissioned junior officers: second lieutenants in the Army, Air Force, and Space Force, and ensigns in the Navy. They join a Harvard military history that dates back to the nation’s founding in the American Revolution and includes nearly 50,000 alumni and 18 Medal of Honor recipients, more than any other college or university outside the U.S. service academies.  

The new officers are headed to careers in the infantry, in military intelligence, piloting planes and working on submarines, in the medical corps, in cyber electromagnetic warfare, and in other areas. Most are going on active duty, with stops for additional training, but two are joining the Army Reserves, and two more are getting educational delays to attend law or medical school before reporting for duty.

The main part of the event was the commissioning ceremony, which also included remarks from Lt. Col. Tom Allen, Professor of Military Science at MIT for Army ROTC. During this, the cadets and midshipmen took the oath of office and received the official insignia of their new rank — single gold bars for second lieutenants and shoulder boards for ensigns. They also received a gift from the University of a biography of Winston Churchill and a coin with an image of Memorial Hall on one side and the Veritas shield on the other. 

Once the oath was performed and the new officers pinned, each received his or her first salute from an enlisted service member, a friend, family member, or instructor, after which they gave the individual a silver dollar coin. 

Commissioned on Wednesday as second lieutenants in the Army were Quin Daly, Mike Greenway, Sisira Holbrook, Zoe Kim, John Marcucci, Jack Martin, Max Morehead, Aidan Pesce, Eva Rankin, Adler Schultz, and Anthony Stackle.

Commissioned as second lieutenants in the Air Force were Zoe Clark, Joseph Hwang, and Christopher Shen. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Space Force was Michael Kuhl.

Commissioned as ensigns in the Navy were William Kaufmann, Thomas Leeds, Lucas Martin, and Sydney Slazak.

Also recognized on Wednesday were five graduating seniors whose training will be completed this summer in Cadet Summer Training. These “End of Camp Commissionees,” all Army cadets, are Lael Ayala, Jason Kwak, Anna Keller, Noelle Keto, and Pranav Pendri.

Three graduating students selected in a University-wide competition with their peers will deliver speeches Thursday at Tercentenary Theatre in one of Harvard’s oldest Commencement traditions.

Kiesse Nanor, a senior, will deliver the Latin Salutatory; Andrew O’Donohue, doctoral candidate in political science, will present the Graduate English Address; and Noah Eckstein, also a senior, will give the Senior English Address.

---

Kiesse Nanor has long been drawn to the lessons of the ancient world.

She was just 12 years old when she purchased “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.” She’d grown up listening to Greek myths, but the book — written by Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature — made her think about how intertwined they were and what they said about what it means to be a hero.

“Taking stories and looking at them as something that can be analyzed really productively — that was just really cool for me,” she said. 

When she entered high school at Exeter, she considered taking French, which she’d grown up speaking with her mom, but opted for Latin instead. 

“I’d never encountered a language that was so grammatically precise,” she said. Every word seemed to have an implication behind it.

As a junior, she fell in love with Virgil’s poetry. Beyond translating the text, she liked having an opportunity to discuss it in class and with the school’s Classics Club on Friday evenings (“pretty bad for our social lives,” she said, but lots of fun).

When she arrived at Harvard, she took the course that inspired Nagy’s book. “I sat in the first row of the Gen Ed course, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the professor whose book I’ve read for the past six years!’” she said.

The department was so small the classics concentrator got to work closely with Nagy and several other professors as she studied the deep connections between ancient texts.

Along the way, she added an economics concentration, especially enjoying learning about the incentives and reasoning (logical or not) behind how people make decisions. 

But Nanor’s time at the College was not all work. She had a longstanding interest in music, having studied piano since age 5, so she made time to get involved in several musical endeavors and theater. 

After about 20 years of mostly solo piano, she enjoyed coming to rehearsals and knowing she “wouldn’t be the only person there.” 

The focus on the value of being part of a group also affected how she chose to lead. As music director of the Din & Tonics, she steered the jazz a cappella group toward arrangements that highlighted the group’s new voices and range since going co-ed in 2018, taking advantage of diversity instead of just trying to fit new members into the old sound. 

Nanor thought she’d write a thesis on Latin texts but challenged herself to write it in Ancient Greek ones instead. She studied the poets Sappho and Alcaeus, who both lived on Lesbos around the same time. 

While many scholars use the poets’ works to decipher what it was like living on Lesbos at the time, Nanor was more interested in studying the poetic relationship between their works. She found they were complementary, and the tendency to separate their output into a binary of war and politics for Alcaeus and women loving women for Sappho didn’t capture their complexity.

After graduation Nanor will attend law school at New York University but said she’ll always have some Greek and Latin books on the shelf to come back to for pleasure and comfort, even when she’s studying something completely different. 

In her oration, she hopes to demonstrate part of what drew her to Latin as a child. “These aren’t just dead languages,” she said. “These are things that have real relevance and still resonate with people today.” 

And, she said, “I think my 12-year-old self would be very excited to see that I’m the one doing that for people.” 

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Growing up with a twin sister in a family with two sets of twins, Andrew O’Donohue quickly learned the art of compromise. 

“You don’t always get to pick the movie every night,” he joked. “You have to think about ways of coming up with solutions that work for everyone.” 

This focus on finding solutions helped drive him toward studying political science as an undergraduate at Harvard College. An interest in languages and his Armenian relatives’ history escaping from Turkey helped draw him to study political systems outside of the U.S. 

He became interested in studying democracy while interning with the State Department in Turkey in 2016. Working near the Bosporous, he and his colleagues watched in confusion, and then panic, as tanks started blockading a nearby bridge — part of a coup attempt by a faction of Turkey’s military.

When the uprising was foiled, he watched as some citizens celebrated while thousands of others were arrested after the president used emergency powers to purge judges and imprison opponents.

The State Department assigned O’Donohue to write a human rights report. But some people his group wanted to work with were in prison. Others didn’t want to speak with American diplomats because the U.S. had been accused of planning the coup. 

He wanted to understand why democracy seems on shaky ground around the world — and what people could do to protect it. 

The desire brought him back to Harvard as a Ph.D. student. 

“The traditional model of thinking about democracy was that we, the United States, have lessons to share with the rest of the world,” said O’Donohue. “Over the course of my Ph.D., I’ve tried to put that in reverse and think about what the rest of the world can teach the United States.” 

O’Donohue’s research focuses on the courts. While U.S. citizens tend to think of the courts as defenders of democracy, his experience studying countries like Turkey and Israel helped him understand how courts can sometimes undermine it. 

During his Ph.D., O’Donohue conducted interviews with high-ranking judges on Turkey’s Constitutional Court and Israel’s Supreme Court and analyzed thousands of decisions by both bodies.

In his dissertation, which he plans to turn into a book as a fellow at Princeton University and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, O’Donohue highlights how politicians are sometimes able to bend courts to their will and how courts depend on allies, protestors, and politicians to make decisions that help bolster democracies.

O’Donohue never had ambitions to be a Commencement speaker but felt compelled to speak to the value of the University amid divisive times. He’s seen students over the past few years attempt to avoid civic involvement by refusing leadership positions or refusing to sign petitions, and he argues these seemingly small expressions of free speech are crucial to democracy. 

“Our universities and our democracy depend on one another,” he says in his oration. “We must speak in defense of both.”

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Noah Eckstein remembers listening to a Bruce Springsteen album on television as a child. The screen simply displayed a picture of Springsteen holding a guitar. “Five-year-old me was like, ‘That’s cool,’” Eckstein said.

So he began classical guitar lessons — not exactly the style Eckstein had imagined, but cool nonetheless. More than a decade later, picking which college to attend hinged on whether he could continue practicing and performing music alongside a degree in physics.

This other passion came about during freshman year in high school. 

Oddly enough he failed his first exam in the subject (a classical mechanics test Eckstein still remembers in great detail), but quickly embraced the challenge and grew to love the field. By the time he finished high school as a home-schooled student in Bedford, Texas, he had taken every physics class available at the local community college. 

Eckstein was attracted to Harvard College because of the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program, which allowed him to do work at both places.

Before starting College, Eckstein briefly considered other concentrations besides physics. But things became clearer after he took Physics 19 in his first semester. The course steeled his interest in the subject — and introduced him to Jacob Barandes, senior preceptor in physics, who would become a mentor.

 “Jacob has this funny trick that he plays,” Eckstein said, “which is he teaches you a lot of things without you realizing it.” 

After Physics 19, Eckstein jumped into Quantum Mechanics I, typically taken by sophomores. Eckstein approached Barandes “dazed and confused” during the second week of class, not sure whether he would continue. 

“Every physicist has to take quantum mechanics when they’re ready — only when they’re ready, not before, not after, but when they’re ready,” Barandes told him, “and you’re ready.” 

He stuck with it. Soon, he began doing research and eventually enrolled in a concurrent master’s program. 

Susanne Yelin, professor of physics in residence, introduced Eckstein to a first-year graduate student with a shared academic backstory and interest in quantum physics. They started working together after Eckstein returned from doing research at the University of Tokyo in his junior year. “Utopia,” Eckstein called the program.

The two began working together on quantum simulation of gauge theories, figuring out how to use quantum systems to simulate other quantum systems — like particle physics and black hole dynamics — that classical computers struggle to imitate.

All the while, Eckstein managed to keep up his music composition classes at Berklee and contribute to what he called Harvard’s “Musicians Underground” of student projects that could always use a guitarist. 

Eckstein valued all of the opportunities available to him at the College, so he always tried to push himself as hard as he could. “I don’t necessarily recommend this approach,” he said, half-joking, “but I definitely found my limits. You learn a lot about yourself.” 

He’s excited to begin his Ph.D. in physics next fall at Harvard’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he’ll continue studying quantum physics. 

He also plans to continue pursuing music. This summer, he’ll be working as an audio director with a video game studio. 

“I thought for sure after graduating I would have to choose one path,” he said. “I found a way to kind of make it work, and nobody’s stopped me yet.”

In his oration, Eckstein reflects on the need to build understanding in a world where people are often pushed to choose a side and vociferously defend it. 

Born to a family of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Eckstein shares a lesson his relatives taught him: “The counter to division isn’t necessarily agreement,” he writes, “it’s understanding.”

Part of a series of occasional features marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

It was a historic thank you.

Harvard President Samuel Langdon and the fellows of the College held an assembly and voted to award Gen. George Washington an honorary doctoral degree on April 3, 1776, about two weeks after the Continental Army forced the British out of Boston, a turning point in the War for Independence.  

“Harvard awarded Washington this degree partially to recognize the success of the work that he did as a general, driving the British forces from Boston and freeing the city and Harvard from occupation,” said University Archivist Virginia Hunt. “We conferred the degree as an expression of the gratitude of the College for his eminent service to his country and to society.”

Washington was neither the first, nor would he be the last, major figure of the Revolution to be honored by the University. But the degree reflected the close ties between the history of the institution, which holds its 375th commencement this year, and that of the nation’s founding 250 years ago.

The English translation of the degree, originally printed in Latin, lauds Washington “for his distinguished Virtues, both Civil and Military … through all the Fatigues and Dangers of a Camp, without accepting any Reward, he might deliver New-England from the unjust and cruel Arms of Britain, and defend the other Colonies.” 

Hunt said at this time it was unusual for colleges and universities to award such an honor. At the time, Harvard had granted only a few honorary degrees of any kind.

In fact, his was the first doctor of laws degree to be granted to a non-alumnus and even predated the founding of Harvard Law School. Washington was also the first veteran to receive an honorary degree from the University.

“It wasn’t routine to award honorary degrees at the time, as it is now,” Hunt explained. “These special awards were usually granted when an individual did something for society or the larger community that was significant or had a profound impact.”

In 1775, Washington arrived in Cambridge to lead the Continental Army as the conflict between the British monarchy and Colonial settlers grew from political unrest to revolution.

The entire Harvard campus was turned over to wartime use, resulting in the student body’s temporary relocation to Concord for a year. 

Washington moved first into Wadsworth House and later into Longfellow House, where he set up headquarters. 

“Harvard didn’t exist in a bubble,” Hunt said. “A good number of Harvard graduates at this time became key revolutionary leaders, and they fostered a lot of new ideas in the intellectual and academic debate and [in] how the new country was conceived and understood.”

The diploma given to Washington was signed by Langdon and five fellows of the College. Notably, the diploma was missing the signature of College Treasurer John Hancock, who was in Philadelphia preparing to sign the Declaration of Independence. 

Washington would go on to become the first president of the U.S. in 1788. He was not the only founder to receive an honorary degree before, during, or immediately following the establishment of the new nation. A long list of others — including Ben Franklin, Horatio Gates, John Warren, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — were also honored.

And of the 56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence, eight were Harvard graduates. 

“All of these leaders who came through Harvard were leaders in the American Revolution,” said Hunt. “Their experience at Harvard, their education and their being together while [the war was] happening shaped how we as a newly forming nation started to think about what we wanted the country to be.”

Washington’s diploma currently is in the Library of Congress, but a reproduction of the original, created by N.D. Gould, is part of the Harvard University Archives’ collections and included in the Harvard and the American Revolution exhibition that is open to the public through 2027 in Pusey Library and online. 

Another reproduction is located in Wadsworth House, the current Office of the University Marshal. 

Hunt said the awarding of the degree highlights the value the University has placed over the course of history in celebrating the ways individuals courageously step up to lead.

“So many leaders in American history have come through Harvard in one way or another,” Hunt said. “I like to think that [this degree] helped inaugurate what we think of now as the beginning of a long tradition of honoring national leaders in all areas of society who have achieved great things  — or made profound and positive impacts on our world.”

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Sanders Theatre swelled with poetry and music, orations and awards on Tuesday morning, at the unofficial kickoff to Commencement week.

These were the 234th literary exercises of the University’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, inaugurating Harvard College’s top-performing juniors and seniors into one of the nation’s oldest academic societies.

But the celebrations were cut liberally with injunctions and warnings — sometimes stern — about the great responsibilities that fall upon new chapter members, half of whom are poised to graduate on Thursday.

The intellect and drive of these students are not in question: The chapter admits, at most, only one in 10 undergraduates based on their academic performance. But throughout the 90-minute program, speakers insisted that, on their own, intellect and drive are not enough — for responsible citizenship, or even for a meaningful life.

The chapter’s new members were enjoined to keep, and cultivate, their intellectual courage, in an opening invocation by the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the Pusey Minister, and by Meghan O’Rourke, the exercises’ poet. 

Potts’ invocation followed on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous address at the 1837 exercises. “The scholar’s basic task is a form of bravery,” Potts said. “The scholar turns toward danger, and by taking courage to comprehend that danger, defies it.”

O’Rourke — herself a PBK graduate of Yale, and now a professor and editor on that campus — noted that as she joined the society ahead of graduation, she felt “proud to have done what was asked of me, and done it well.” 

The difficult part comes next, she said, as each young person figures out “what you are going to ask of yourself.” 

It is frightening work, she said, drawing upon the tradition of James Baldwin, who was a teenage preacher long before he was a writer. 

Baldwin came to see the two roles as almost antithetical, she noted: “‘When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as if you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something that you don’t know … [even] what you don’t want to know.’”

O’Rourke read three poems, the last of them a recently finished reflection on holding her young son in the predawn hours: “Did You Use Your Time?”

It was long in coming, she said, begun in the immediate aftermath of mass killings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. 

My son’s skin, water-soft, is still unmarked
And he holds a bear in his left hand
And looking at it, he says,
“I love you, Mr. Bear.”
And what can I say?
I can’t say, “The love you have for animals
Doesn’t stop you from eating them.”
We have already compromised you.
There is everything you can do
And nothing to do, and everything to do.
And when you are old …
To whom will you tell 
How much you loved the world?

Then came the formal address, delivered by President Emeritus Larry Bacow. As he looked over the crowd of mortar-boarded students, Bacow smiled and said: “You are some of the most ambitious people in the world.

“I don’t say that as a criticism. Ambition is not a vice; it is in many ways what brought you here, not just to Harvard, but here, today, to Phi Beta Kappa.” Bacow added. (He was himself part of MIT’s inaugural PBK class in 1972.) 

“But there’s a version of ambition [that] curdles into something else: an ambition that is never satisfied, that treats every achievement as merely a platform for the next one,” he said.

At times, Bacow — an economist and administrator, a lifelong student of institutions — sounded despairing about the current political moment. 

Things he thought of as sources of consensus — like truth and universal human dignity, kindness and the rule of law — are “not as secure as we once believed.”

Bacow’s talk turned on the teachings of Simeon ben Zoma, a second-century Talmudic sage, who sought to overturn the commonplace understandings of power and achievement of his time.

“Who is wise?” ben Zoma asked. “One who learns from all people. Who is wealthy? One who rejoices in his portion.”

The powerful, ben Zoma found in turn, are those who “exercise self-control.” 

It was that teaching that Bacow wanted to stress, given the moment. 

The class of 2026, who came to Harvard amid the most profound disruptions associated with the pandemic, will leave campus with war raging in the Middle East, and as AI begins an unpredictable upheaval of the human intellectual enterprise as it has played out for millennia.

In remarks aimed — though never by name — at some among the nation’s ruling class, Bacow said, “We are surrounded by people who have confused the ability to compel others with genuine strength.”

Self-control, then, Bacow said, is not just a private virtue but a public duty — critical to finding remedies for our most urgent crises.

“Your election to Phi Beta Kappa tells us something about your minds. What you do next will tell us about your character,” Bacow said. “The world does not need you to be merely clever. It needs you to be good.”

For better or worse, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence coincided with the Class of 2026’s undergraduate years, Harvard President Alan Garber said in his Baccalaureate address Tuesday. It is now up to graduates, he said, to decide how to live with it. 

“There will always be value in toiling laboriously to reach new levels of understanding,” Garber said. “When you do so, you do more than celebrate the exquisite potential of human beings; you elevate the meaning of your singular existence.” 

In November 2022 — just months after members of the Class of 2026 began at Harvard — the release of ChatGPT launched a new era of scientific discoveries and advances in productivity alongside fresh fears about job losses and the value of human labor. But Garber, who graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude 50 years ago, reminded the seniors and their loved ones assembled in Tercentenary Theatre that this is far from the first time a novel technology brought with it novel anxieties. 

He cited a 1903 opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Gazette in which a writer — “Someone we could now call an influencer,” Garber said — fretted about tethered balloons in Switzerland bringing tourists to the height of the tallest Alps in as little as 10 minutes. Having attained that awesome perspective with little effort, the tourists could gaze down with derision at the alpinists toiling through great difficulty up the snowy mountains. 

“We live today in an age of balloons, gaining perspectives in fractions of seconds rather than tens of minutes, dispensing with the toil of the climb in favor of the ease of flight,” Garber said. “There are, of course, places we can only hope to reach by balloon — landscapes too complex and vast for humans to navigate, no matter how hard humans try. If artificial intelligence — generative, agentic, or otherwise — can accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation, revolutionizing how we undertake research and lifting humanity to great heights, then working from a wicker basket may be not only wise but necessary.” 

Still, he added, it is the task of every human to decide which mountains are still worth climbing. 

“You alone will have to determine what it is that you want to know, which knowledge you are not willing to relinquish for the promise of push-button omniscience,” he said. “Effort still matters.” 

The address, Garber’s third, took place under crimson banners and the dappled shade of Tercentenary Theatre’s oaks and elms. The Baccalaureate Service extends a tradition dating back to Harvard’s first Commencement in 1642, when the graduating class heard from the University president and clergy. Today, the service features an address from the president and comments from faith leaders of many traditions, as well as students’ recitations of holy texts and prayers. This service included readings from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, and Salish traditions. 

Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. ’13, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, said it was not the reading of scriptures that made the service holy; rather, it was the assembly of students from so many backgrounds and traditions, from so many places around the world. 

“If you are here today, it is because you are descended from generations, people who have come from all over this globe and who have survived deprivations or immigrations or persecutions or liberations, just so you could sit here this day,” Potts told the graduating class. “You are the answer to their hopes and prayers. You are your ancestors’ dreams come true.” 

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein ’04, echoed Potts’ invocation of those who came before. Rubenstein, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, shared a memory of entering Harvard Yard for the first time 26 years ago. He saw the wonder on his father’s face, that his father’s father, Nathan Rubenstein, couldn’t have guessed what his sacrifices as a Polish immigrant caring for his sons under difficult circumstances would make possible. 

“Each of you has a Nathan Rubenstein, whether you know it or not,” he said. “Perhaps more important yet, each of you will become a Nathan for those who come after you.”

Rev. Monica Sanford, assistant dean for multireligious ministry and lecturer in ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School, reminded students of the Buddha’s teaching: Those who want happiness should work for the happiness of others. 

“In their happiness we find our own, for in their freedom we find our freedom. For those who are happy and free harm none and wish only to help others find happiness and freedom,” she said. 

In closing his speech, Garber urged this year’s graduates to go forth with eyes open, determined enough to make their own way and wise enough to know when to change their path. 

“May the future be as kind to you,” he said, “as all of you are to each other.” 

From childhood, Blake Mincey wanted to know how the world works. He still doesn’t have all the answers, but at this point in his life, he has amassed enough life experience and academic training to feel as if he’s made some progress.

The 39-year-old Georgia native is set to graduate this spring with his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College — decades after his search for answers to big questions began. His path has been interesting if not direct.

“As a kid, I wanted to know why things were the way they were,” he said. “And in high school, physics and chemistry really fascinated me, because I started finally getting real concrete answers for all this curiosity that I had.” 

Mincey grew up in Adairsville, a small town in northern Georgia. He spent his high school career prodding teachers about electrons, protons, and neutrons. Impressed by his curiosity, a teacher bought him a copy of “The Elegant Universe” by theoretical physicist Brian Greene. 

“Of course, I didn’t understand any of it at the time, but I found it fascinating. So it kicked off this thing where for the rest of my life, I would just read all of these different trade books by like Sean Carroll or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or just physics books written for the general population,” he said.

After graduation Mincey decided to join the Army, where he did 4½ years in the infantry. He deployed to Iraq in 2006 and spent 15 months overseas.

During that period, he ended up spending a lot of time in Hawaii and California — and he developed a taste for a more adventurous and transient lifestyle. When he got out of the service, he used the GI Bill to train as a drummer at the Atlanta Institute of Music. 

“I’m a drummer and spent about 12 years after that playing music professionally — bar gigs and stuff,” Mincey said. “And then from like 2015 to 2019 I toured the country with a country band.”

But the scientific curiosity remained. During his time with the band, Mincey met his wife — a medical student in surgical residency at the time. 

“I decided to take a hiatus from the band, and I had more GI Bill money left over from the military, so I was like ‘I’ll go back to college,’” Mincey said. “It was always in my back pocket as kind of a backup plan.” 

So while his wife was finishing her residency, Mincey went back to school at Georgia State.

Another fork in the road presented itself when it came time for her to apply for surgery fellowships, and she matched at the University of San Francisco.

“I loved California when I lived there in the military, and I’d been back in Georgia for like, 10 years. So we were like, ‘Let’s just pack everything up,’” Mincey said. 

He applied to transfer his college credits to the University of California but ran into some administrative snags. Mincey also submitted applications to other schools, including some he considered a reach.

“Somehow,” Mincey said, “I got into Stanford.”

Then the pandemic hit, forcing all Stanford classes online. Mincey spent the next year doing his coursework online, while his wife finished her fellowship. 

When she was done, the couple decided it was time for a new adventure.

“We’re go-with-the-flow people,” he said. “We just try to, try to do things that we find interesting, try to live in places that we find interesting, and wherever that is and whatever that is, we just go until we find it.” 

So the couple moved to Chicago, where they stayed for about two years, and college plans got put back on the back burner.

“Then we decided to try out the Northeast,” he said. “And so I just applied to everywhere on the East Coast.”

Once again, he thought his unconventional record might get in the way of his highest academic ambitions. And once again he was proven wrong, as Harvard offered him a seat, and he started taking classes in Cambridge in fall 2023. 

Returning to school in his 30s, Mincey said, was a challenge from the start. To retake the SATs, he had to relearn all his high school math using YouTube and Khan Academy. 

“I just started at, like eighth-grade algebra and just went through the courses, one at a time, until I felt confident enough to take the SAT,” he said. 

The jump in rigor from Georgia State to Stanford had been astounding, he said. And then moving from remote classes at Stanford to in-person at Harvard was another shock.

He also discovered some holes in his academic preparation. Mincey, unlike his classmates, who were coming straight from high school, had long forgotten some of the basics for his physics curriculum. Then there was the matter of never having had calculus till College.

But, he added, even though the coursework has been challenging, it has allowed him to explore complex ideas he couldn’t otherwise. 

“He asked many interesting questions,” said astronomy lecturer Xingang Chen, who taught Mincey in his undergraduate cosmology course. “And some of these questions clearly reflected ideas he had been considering for some time, even before taking the class, but further deepened and sparked by the content we learn in the class.”

As for what comes next, Mincey says he explored environmental physics during his time at Harvard and is open to applying his degree in any new way that piques his interest. 

But mostly, he said, he’s looking forward to spending more time with his family, including his 1-year-old daughter. 

“I’m ready to work a little less, to be honest,” he said. “I think even getting a 40-hour-a-week job is going to be a reduction in workload. So that’ll be nice. And I’m just excited about what the future holds.” 

Over its 390-year lifespan and 375 Commencements, Harvard has accumulated a lot of lore. Prove how much you know about America’s oldest university in this quiz. 

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Seth Rosenberg is the rare student who, as one of his professors put it, can jump out of a helicopter wearing a 120-pound backpack yet also speak Latin.

The Minnesota native followed in the footsteps of family members and joined the military upon graduating from high school in 2017. After completing his training for the Marine Corps, he was assigned to be a combat photographer. Over five years, he worked with nearly every branch of the military and traveled to dozens of countries.

Engaging in global military operations was eye-opening, said Rosenberg — and while he was honored to be part of such an elite institution, when his deployment ended, he decided to continue his education to explore the strategic side of things.

“I really want to become someone who can be in the planning room and make systems better,” he said.

Initially, Rosenberg focused on psychology, specifically decision-making and behavioral economics. But as he continued his coursework, he became more drawn to political science and government. He will graduate with a double concentration in government and psychology.

During Rosenberg’s deployment to various countries, he interacted with communities, providing humanitarian aid after natural disasters or working with local leaders. These experiences made him curious about motivations, particularly how people use and assert power. Power dynamics are often overlooked in political science, he said, but have profound impacts on international relations.

“Power is the motivation for everyone’s actions,” Rosenberg said. “It’s very interesting to see how these dynamics play out again and again throughout history, and we still don’t know what drives them.”

Josh Kertzer, the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Government, worked closely with Rosenberg during his time at Harvard.

“There was a time when scholars, not just in political science, but more broadly, were under the impression that war was disappearing,” said Kertzer. “Seth has this appreciation and understanding that the best way to prevent war from occurring is to understand why people fight in the first place.”

Rosenberg’s research focus on power is one that will pay dividends, according to Hanh Annie Vu, a College Fellow in the Department of Psychology, who said that understanding power matters immensely at this moment in time.

“People tend to trivialize a lot of these conflicts as normal in-group and out-group, which really ignores their imbalance dynamic when it comes to power,” Vu said. “[Seth’s research focus] has always been relevant, but it’s not being paid enough attention to.”

Sergio Imparato, a lecturer in government and assistant director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Government, was struck by Rosenberg’s smart, provocative participation in his seminar class, “Grand Strategy and International Relations.”

Students often are a bit timid, he said, but this was never the case with Rosenberg, even when he held a minority position on an issue.

“He was never afraid to speak his voice, always original in his way of thinking,” Imparato said. “When you give him a chance to engage with a meaningful moral question, he doesn’t hold back, and he engages in dialogue in the most respectful, kind way possible.”

After graduation, Rosenberg will head to UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in international relations. Reflecting on his own journey, his advice to others is to stay open to different opportunities and allow your experiences to shape your path.

“He worked as a pirate hunter in Southeast Asia,” said Kertzer. “I think he once he told me he nearly died from hypothermia after his snow machine got caught on cracked ice during a mission along the Yukon River. He’s worked on humanitarian aid strategies in the Philippines.”

For Ketzer, Rosenberg is the perfect example of why bringing people with different experiences to the University is so beneficial — to the individual student, but also to the Harvard community.

“There’s a long history at Harvard of veterans coming to Harvard, and I think Seth shows why it’s such a rewarding experience,” Kertzer said. “It’s not just that he’s getting the opportunity to have this excellent training in whatever discipline he chooses to study, but he really brings and contributes a lot to the classroom.”

When visual artist Azadeh Akhlaghi began staging photographs of pivotal moments in Iranian history, she thought that with enough research, she could uncover the truth of each moment. 

By the end, she wasn’t so sure. 

“I found so many contradictions in the records. In interviews, people censor themselves. There are historical documents from the secret police of the Shah that even now the government wouldn’t give me,” Akhlaghi said. “You can never really find the truth.”

An exhibit of Akhlaghi’s work, “From Iran: A Visual Testimony,” opened early this month at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and runs through March 21. 

The staged photographs cover a period from 1908, when the Russian-led Cossack Brigade bombarded Iran’s parliament during the Constitutional Revolution, to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Drawing from archival research, interviews, and her background in cinema, Akhlaghi recreated 11 incidents from Iranian’s tumultuous 20th-century history at a panoramic scale — the largest of the images spans 3 feet by 15 feet. 

Akhlaghi was the 2019 recipient of the Peabody Museum’s Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, which supports an established photographic practitioner producing a major project “on the human condition anywhere in the world.” Born in Shiraz, Iran, she studied computer science in Australia before returning to Iran to work in the film industry. She later turned to staged photography. Her 2012 work, “By an Eyewitness,” has been exhibited internationally. 

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Akhlaghi shared her inspiration for the work and how it feels to launch the exhibit amid the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. 

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What was your inspiration for this body of work? 

This came after my previous project, “By an Eyewitness.” That project started in 2009 after the Green Movement in Iran, when there were these big demonstrations in Tehran. People died in the streets, and among those was a girl, Neda Agha-Soltan, whose death was captured by a video. 

After I saw that video, I thought about all these people who had died in a similar manner, but there was no camera to capture the moments of their deaths. 

“By an Eyewitness” contained 17 images, each reconstructing the moment of the death of an Iranian freedom fighter, writer, or journalist who died in a suspicious or tragic way, and where there was no camera available to capture the moment of their death. I reconstructed those moments based on documents and interviews. 

This new project depicts some of the turning points in Iranian history between the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In each image, I reconstruct some of the repeating themes we experienced in this time: military coups, national resistance, suppression, and moments of victory that then led to a new cycle of suppression and tyranny. I really wanted to focus on this vicious cycle. And I wanted to focus on the unknowns, the people who are only a line in the history books. 

Can you talk about one image in more detail? 

In the 1910s, Iran had a very strong women’s movement alongside movements in the U.S. and Britain. My image “The First Iranian Women’s Movement” was inspired by just a couple of lines in a book called “The Strangling of Persia” (1912) by W. Morgan Shuster, an American who was invited to be the treasurer-general of Iran and was later forced out by the Russians. He wrote that he witnessed 300 women with guns come to Parliament, warning that if Iran capitulated to Russian demands, they would kill their husbands, their sons, and the members of Parliament — basically threatening to take over Parliament. 

I wanted to know more about that moment. Who were those women? How did they organize such a thing? I found out that they had organized through six or seven societies that met in secret to talk about their demands. They published a newspaper, Danesh, which means “knowledge.” The woman who ran the paper was also Iran’s first female ophthalmologist, and the paper was run out of her clinic. You can find her at the center of the image, as well as other figures, like the first Iranian singer to perform without a hijab in front of men.

My piece imagines the Danesh offices, moments before these women march on Parliament. 

How does your work play with the notion of truth in photos that are staged recreations of moments both deeply researched and imagined? 

When I started this project, I thought I could figure out what really happened in the past and depict it. But now I’m not sure that’s ever possible. I found so many contradictions in the record. In interviews, people censor themselves. There are historical documents from the secret police of the Shah that even now the government wouldn’t give me. You can never really find the truth. 

That’s why I always put myself somewhere in these images, in a red scarf, to say that this is my imagination of what happened — and it’s why I wanted to make the images as big as possible. I wanted to fit in so many stories and people. I wanted them to feel like the huge history paintings like you might see in the Louvre. These are not photojournalistic images: They’re not real. They’re art. 

Why did you choose the time period you did?  

I focused on events between 1906 and 1979 because I was interested in moments that shaped contemporary Iran. Yet history often echoes itself. Even when an image refers to an earlier historical moment, viewers sometimes recognize connections across different periods and bring their own interpretations to it. 

You began this project long before the current war. But I’m curious what it means to you to have this exhibit launching at this heightened political moment. 

I’m really honored to have received the Robert Gardner Fellowship and to have the first exhibit of this work be at the Peabody Museum. But I’m also sad, because I wanted to have my first show in Tehran — I worked on this project for 14 years; I had many actors, a big team there. But that’s impossible now. Even my father, who lives in Iran, can’t see my images because they don’t have internet. I’m very worried about the future. 

But I hope people take away this idea of the vicious cycle of Iranian history. Iran has just been repeating the same thing since the Constitutional Revolution, and it’s getting worse. And I hope people can see that even though my work is about Iranian people, it’s really about all people. A mourning mother is the same everywhere.

On any given day in the past year, Grier Wilt may have been, quietly, the most interesting person in Cambridge.

Not yet 40, Wilt has worked and studied on four continents. By now she’s an advanced speaker of French and Russian, and currently studying Arabic and Japanese. She’s certified as both a private pilot and an open-sea diver, with degrees or coursework in mechanical engineering, national security, business, and ethnomusicology.

And weeks after Wilt receives her latest diploma — her master’s in public administration, following a whirlwind year at the Harvard Kennedy School — she’ll resume the life-or-death responsibilities she holds at NASA: as a capsule communicator, spacewalk flight controller, and astronaut instructor.

You’d never know it, her teachers note.

Kessely Hong, who taught Wilt in a class last fall on negotiations, will remember her as “incredible … insightful and generous” — and, for a lifelong space obsessive — “very down to earth.”

“She’s just an amazing human with an amazing background,” agreed Eric Rosenbach, who taught Wilt in a survey course on emerging technologies this spring. “And she has this humility, despite all that, that’s unusual at Harvard.”

Wilt says she’s just following through on a childhood commitment. Seeing a comet in the skies over her Central Pennsylvania hometown, she asked her father how she could go.

“He said, ‘Become an astronaut,’ probably not thinking anything of it,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Now I know what I’m doing for the rest of my life.’”

Wilt’s neighbors still remember her as their town’s “space girl.” She realized only recently that her first contact with NASA came when she was just 7, when she participated in monthly science classes it funded. A first-generation college student, her first official NASA job was a 2004 internship.

Taking a year off to study public administration just as human space exploration is reaching new heights, Wilt admitted, may not “seem like a very logical step.”

But as Wilt’s responsibilities have grown, she’s realized there’s more to NASA’s work than rocket science. “We’re working in teams, we’re working internationally,” she said. “There’s a lot of decision-making, a lot of leadership involved.”

Every launch, for example, involves a difficult negotiation. To reach escape velocity, a spacecraft must strike a delicate balance between its thrust — the power of its engines — and the weight of what’s on board.

Inevitably, she said, that means all of the various teams at NASA — among them human health, engineering, safety, and operations — “have to give up something” they had hoped to include to ensure the overall safety or functionality of the final vessel.

Classes like Hong’s gave Wilt a new perspective on how to read “the different positions, the overlapping interests … how you can come to a consensus collaboratively.”

For over a decade Wilt’s primary NASA role has been as an EVA flight controller and instructor: in short, preparing astronauts for spacewalks. While a given “Extra-Vehicular Activity” is inevitably limited in duration — spacesuits hold only 6½ hours of oxygen — Wilt said her preparation for each one can take as long as two years.

She guides astronauts through their tasks, both in “neutral-buoyancy” underwater rehearsals and in virtual reality. The job involves both rote learning and creativity: imagining surprises, including worst-case scenarios. “You’re planning down to every single operation. What happens if a bolt breaks, or if it’s not turning? What contingencies, what tools do you want to have in place?” she said.

Unsurprisingly, another favorite course this year was “Thinking Analytically,” taught by Dan Levy.

“It’s about what to do when you don’t have all the information — and how to think probabilistically,” Wilt said. “It gave me a different framework to look at the things that I was already doing, and to be more comprehensive.”

Finally, her work has come to require precise communications. Wilt became a “capsule communicator,” or CAPCOM, in 2022. In that seat, she serves as the intermediary between a crew in space and mission control at the Johnson Space Center. “If you’ve heard the expression, ‘Houston, we have a problem’? My call sign is Houston,” Wilt said with a smile.

When she got the job, she remembers a veteran colleague telling her, “You have to be a sponge”: keeping earthbound anxieties from affecting the astronauts, and vice-versa, “just absorbing the emotion,” and passing along information only when it is practical.

The Midcareer M.P.A. aims to build up just that kind of intangible capability, said Hong, who also serves as its faculty chair.

“As people rise to higher and higher positions of leadership, it becomes important to go beyond the technical skills — to understand what’s motivating people, to integrate competing priorities, to move forward with everyone’s full support.”

Wilt admits she occasionally felt some “internal conflict” sitting next to classmates who run Indian police forces or fight famine in the Horn of Africa, “working on these really important humanitarian issues.”

But she came away recommitted to her path: not just as a source of knowledge but as a common cause for a divided planet.

Ambitious space exploration has typically been motivated by great-power competition — Wilt noted that it is no coincidence that the Artemis program coincides with the Chinese National Space Administration’s own moon mission.

But at Harvard she was impressed anew by a mission’s tendency to escape the terrestrial conflicts that motivated it.

As classmates expressed their fondness for her employer, Wilt said, she “realized how much soft power NASA still has abroad. To them, it’s not just the U.S. doing something, it’s, like, humanity … It made me proud to work there.”

If it weren’t for her enrollment at the Kennedy School, Wilt might have been a supporting CAPCOM during the recent Artemis II mission, bearing four astronauts she helped train. She didn’t even use a pass to observe the April 1 launch in Florida — she had class.

“It was a little bittersweet,” she said, to miss out on the first crewed flight to the moon since 1972.

But some 1,100 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center, she and Rosenbach arranged the next-best thing on JFK Street: a launch-night watch party during the middle of his course’s unit on space.

“There were, like, 40 students who showed up in their own time, on a Wednesday night,” he said. “And Grier walked us through everything that the astronauts, and that NASA, were doing and thinking … It was one of those totally iconic Kennedy School moments.”

After Commencement, Wilt will have a rare break — one she may use to visit the far-flung friends she made in the past year.

She’ll also take a couple of weeks, she said, “to let it all settle in, to reflect.” She expects to be back in Houston by early July, where the lengthy preparations for future Artemis missions are already underway.

With Artemis IV set to include a crewed return to the moon as early as 2028, Wilt is overseeing a U.S.-Japan effort to develop a pressurized rover to facilitate the first long-distance travel on the lunar surface.

Her growing responsibilities leave little free time for Wilt to fulfill her original childhood dream: to go to space herself (though she hasn’t given up on the idea).

Rosenbach concluded that it would be unwise to set any limits on Wilt’s future trajectory.

“I know she’d like to be up there on a spacewalk herself, and she could certainly do that,” he said. But when he looks at his student from NASA, he comes away “almost certain” that she’ll end up running the place.

More than 20 years ago, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology got a call from a photographer named Roger Marshutz. 

He wondered if the museum would like more than 3,000 photos he’d taken in Pusan, South Korea, at the end of the Korean War. 

Not sure what to make of the inquiry, Rubie Watson, the first Howells Director of the Peabody Museum, reached out to Carter Eckert, then the Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History at Harvard University. 

“He explained what an extraordinarily valuable contribution this would be to the Harvard Museums, as well as to Korean studies at Harvard,” said Sean Kim, co-author of “The Forgotten Home Front: Roger Marshutz’s Photographs of Pusan, South Korea, 1952-1954.”

The book makes Marshutz’s photos available in a new format and shares context on what has been called America’s “forgotten war.” 

“Roger Marshutz is one of the best photographers you’ve probably never heard of,” said Kim’s co-author, Ilisa Barbash, curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody Museum.

Despite 37,000 Americans losing their lives in the Korean War, Barbash said, “It’s called forgotten because it’s sandwiched temporally between World War II and the Vietnam War, and received a lot less attention, ultimately, in the history books.” 

The war also profoundly shaped the Korean economy, its politics, and its culture. It is estimated that about 3 million Koreans — about one-tenth of the total population — were killed, wounded, or went missing during the three years of the conflict. Another roughly 5 million were displaced, fleeing north or south, with many becoming separated from family members and in some cases never to see them again. Many of those who fled south found relative safety in the southeast port city of Pusan, known today as Busan, in the region that was the only part of the country not captured by North Korean forces. 

Conditions in Pusan’s improvised refugee communities were cramped and impoverished, but Koreans went about life there as best they could, often without much privacy. The conditions allowed Marshutz, who was an outsider and who spoke no Korean, to access intimate moments of their lives. 

The photos, Barbash said, “were not about what you really think about when you think about war. Instead, they were about the collateral damage of war.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1929, Marshutz was best known as a Hollywood photographer, capturing iconic images of the luminaries of the mid-20th century: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman. But he honed his skills as an Army photographer in Pusan. When he wasn’t performing his official duties photographing Brig. Gen. Richard S. Whitcomb, Marshutz wandered the streets, capturing the port city in a remarkable moment of transition. He was also drawn to scenes of children, and to the fast integration of American culture and imports into Korean life. 

Barbash and Kim noted that Marshutz, who died in 2007, was working at a time when photographers were less likely to get permission to photograph their subjects or take down their names. They hope the book, which is available in English and Korean, helps reunite people with photos of their relatives or even of themselves.

“The photos reveal a country that is just beginning to recover from the ravages of war,” said Kim, who holds a Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard and is now a professor of history at the University of Central Missouri. “There are heartbreaking scenes of refugee camps and orphan shelters. But in spite of the bleak circumstances of wartime Pusan, there’s a vitality, an energy that comes through the photos. From the hustle and bustle of the markets to the children at school and at play, Korean daily life resumed as the war drew to a close. And Roger Marshutz, with his camera, captured these images of vitality and hope for the future in a way that no words ever could.”

Raymond J. Lohier Jr. ’88, a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has been elected president of the Harvard University Board of Overseers for the 2026-2027 academic year. Sheryl WuDunn, M.B.A. ’86, an author, management consultant, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will serve as vice chair of the board’s executive committee for the same term.

“Raymond Lohier and Sheryl WuDunn are distinguished alumni whose devotion to the University shines through their service,” said President Alan Garber. “They share a deep commitment to the well-being of our students, as well as a keen interest in strengthening our visitation process. I appreciate their work on behalf of our community. I am eager to see the ways in which their leadership will advance the efforts of the board.”

The larger of Harvard’s two governing boards, the Board of Overseers is composed of and elected annually by Harvard degree holders. Overseers play an integral role in the governance of the University and direct the visitation process, the primary means for regular external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, Overseers examine the quality of Harvard’s programs and assure that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning.

Drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board also provides counsel to Harvard’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. It also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of members of the Corporation, Harvard’s other governing board. 

“This is about giving back,” said Lohier. “It’s a privilege to serve on a board of dynamic, committed, and extraordinarily talented people of all backgrounds and experiences who offer their time, expertise, and thoughtfulness to the task of advising the University. No matter the circumstances, the board is committed to ensuring that Harvard’s departments and Schools continue to deliver the best education and academic scholarship in the country and the world.”

Lohier has served as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit since December 2010. After earning his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1988 with a concentration in philosophy, and his J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1991, Lohier began his legal career as a clerk to Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before becoming an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York. He later served as a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he led the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, among other roles.

Alongside his judicial responsibilities, Lohier has held leadership positions at a number of professional and academic institutions, including at the Judicial Conference of the United States, the American Law Institute, and the board of trustees of New York University School of Law. He also recently co-chaired an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

As a Harvard Overseer since 2021, he has chaired both the standing committee on arts and humanities and the elections working group. He also serves on the executive committee, the committee on institutional policy, the subcommittees on visitation and governance, and the governing boards’ joint committee on alumni affairs and development. He has also played a key role in University visiting committees, including those for classics, philosophy, and Harvard Law School.

WuDunn, the first Chinese-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is the co-author of five books and the co-founder and principal of consulting firm FullSky Partners. She previously served as a vice president in the private wealth investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and held a range of roles at The New York Times, both as an executive and as a journalist. WuDunn holds a B.A. from Cornell, an M.P.A. from Princeton, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

“It is a tremendous honor to serve as vice chair alongside Ray Lohier, all my dedicated fellow Overseers, and in partnership with President Garber and leaders across the University,” said WuDunn. “At a moment when higher education faces extraordinary challenges and scrutiny, I believe the role of the Overseers in helping safeguard the University’s academic excellence, integrity, and long-term mission has never been more important.”

WuDunn is a member of the board of directors of BayFirst Financial Corp., and a trustee at Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Oregon Journalism Project. She is also a former member of the boards of trustees at Princeton University and Cornell University and has been a Hauser Visiting Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School.

As a Harvard Overseer, WuDunn serves on the executive committee; the committees on humanities and arts and Schools, the College, and continuing education; the elections working group; the subcommittee on visitation; and the advisory committee on honorary degrees. She has also served on the committee on social sciences and the governing boards’ joint committee on alumni affairs and development, and has been engaged on visiting committees for Harvard Business School, Harvard University Information Technology, and Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Lohier and WuDunn will take up their roles after Commencement, succeeding outgoing Overseers president Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87 and executive committee vice chair Monica Bharel, M.P.H. ’12.

That Lael Ayala chose a time-saving device makes sense.

The mechanical engineering concentrator and softball outfielder’s senior thesis project is an autonomous robot that can detect and collect softballs in the outfield after hitting drills.

“What stood out to me most was that the project was directly connected to her passion for her sport, and she was very motivated to use her engineering background to address a real-world problem,” said Professor Seymur Hasanov, Ayala’s thesis project adviser.

Shagging balls may seem mundane, but it is time-consuming, and Ayala ’26 had little to spare.

When she wasn’t running drills with her Crimson teammates on Soldiers Field, she was either in the lab, hip-deep in engineering homework, or doing coursework for Army ROTC. The little discretionary time she had left was taken up by meetings for Harvard Athlete Ally or giving tours at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“If I was to be an athlete at any other school, I wouldn’t have the time to pursue my engineering goals” and other interests, said Ayala, a native of Atlanta. “Our coaches and the Ivy League allow us to develop so many different interests and ideas while still competing at a high level.”

When it came time to come up with her thesis project, Ayala was pleased to be able to merge her two major passions.

“I built a robot that can shag balls, almost like a Roomba, out in the outfield during practice,” she said. “To be able to combine both of my worlds is truly special.”

Ayala began work on her project in the fall, employing machine learning to train her SoftBot, using hundreds of photographs, to recognize softballs.

This spring, she combined all the systems to create a cart-like robot that could collect, on average, 6.5 softballs per testing session. A horizontal roller would take in the softballs, and a ramp would slide them down into the onboard storage.

“Over the course of the thesis project, Ayala grew significantly as an engineer and designer. With each iteration, she became more confident in making technical decisions, testing her ideas, and improving the robot based on what she learned,” Hasanov said.

In ROTC, Ayala gained useful leadership and tactical skills that translated to other areas of her life.

“I think the skill that transfers the most between softball and ROTC is building camaraderie. All the things you do within the military are highly challenging, and you have to find ways to stick together during those difficult moments,” Ayala said. “The same applies to softball. When you’re down in the seventh, how do you build that camaraderie to make the comeback and win? Having that fortitude translates to both.”

After graduation, Ayala will attend cadet summer training and be commissioned as an Army officer. She plans to also continue working on her startup, Gander Robotics, a company that is developing autonomous underwater drones that use sonar to find victims in maritime search and rescue missions.

Blake Lusty grew up sure of two things: He wanted to serve his country in the Navy, and he would always fight for what he believed in. A late-stage cancer diagnosis at age 20 only steeled his resolve.

The first in his family to pursue a college education, Lusty was raised by his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“Mom worked incredibly hard to make ends meet, often working multiple jobs,” he said. Through it all, she encouraged him to consider the wider world, saying, “Think about the time we have and how we can make a difference.”

Lusty volunteered at a Veterans Administration hospital near his home as a teen and spent a lot of time with his grandfather, who as a Canadian farm boy had worked on early iterations of reconnaissance aircraft used in World War II. Those experiences convinced Lusty that military service was his calling.

He had set his sights on the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, but with no special connections, let alone resources, it was a longshot given the institution’s storied history. However improbable, the decision turned out to be “divine intervention.”

“It’s one of those things in my heart that I knew that was the right step for me,” Lusty said.

“I absolutely loved it. I loved the structure, the shared mission. I really loved the idea of putting your values into an organization that’s bigger than yourself.”

In 2010, Lusty’s sophomore year, tragedy struck. He was diagnosed with late-stage cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and lungs. Determined not to let it derail his education, Lusty juggled classes and exams while undergoing aggressive chemotherapy treatments at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“After some deep reflection in that first week of chemo, I didn’t know how much time I had left, but I wanted to go down fighting for what I believe in,” said Lusty, who will graduate from Harvard Business School with a master’s in business administration later this month.

A cancer diagnosis, particularly one that’s advanced, is often a disqualifier for military service. Because Lusty remained cancer-free and graduated from the Academy in 2012, he persuaded the Navy to take a chance on him, securing a commission as an intelligence officer with his first assignment at the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Serving in a combat unit was Lusty’s dream. In April 2015, after reaching the all-important five-year cancer milestone, Lusty received some welcome news. He could transfer to a Navy destroyer, the USS Forrest Sherman, to serve as a surface warfare officer. On the day he received the approval letter, routine test results showed a new tumor.

“I could see this dream job just flash away from me in a second,” he said.

But after another round of chemotherapy and surgery in the fall, he again was cleared for duty. Lusty returned to serve and went on to complete four combat deployments, including to South America at the height of the pandemic, the Western Pacific, the Arctic, and later to the Middle East.

After seeing the operational safety challenges that sailors regularly confronted while at sea, and the slow tempo of Navy acquisitions systems, Lusty started to think about how he could help bridge the gap between national defense capabilities and the business world.

In 2022, within weeks of promotion to special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C., doctors once again found a dangerous tumor, this time on his heart. Days later, Lusty underwent open-heart surgery.

“That moment was the first time that I had thought about maybe writing a letter or making a video for my kids in case they didn’t grow up seeing me,” he said.

Realizing it was time for the next chapter, Lusty was retired from the Navy in June 2024 with the final rank of lieutenant commander. Two months later, he started a new chapter at the Business School.

“Blake is one of the most impressive young men I have ever known,” said Chip Bergh, a senior lecturer at HBS. “Throughout his life and career and his time at HBS, Blake has shown incredible tenacity and drive, not letting anything stop him from pursuing his dream of serving his country and community.” 

“His dedication to learning and making the most of every day here were an inspiration, both to his peers and his faculty,” said Edward Berk, who teaches private equity finance at HBS.

Friends and colleagues also marvel at Lusty’s resilience and determination to forge ahead, no matter how daunting life became.

“I’ve been trying to not let cancer write my story. I’ve been trying to always find creative ways to continue, not letting it define me, not to let it be my whole life,” Lusty explained.

After Commencement, Lusty, his wife, Lauren, a cybersecurity expert, and their young daughters, Emerson and Harper, will return to the D.C. area, where he will be joining Bain & Co. and continuing to explore new ways to bring entrepreneurial energy and investment to the defense industry.

“Going through all this, it’s just doubled down on my conviction that you have to live a life where you don’t live with regrets, as much as you can, because even if things are going really well, things can change in a moment’s notice,” he said.

It was DNA replication that first captured Isaac Witte’s scientific imagination as a high school student in Overland Park, Kansas. “It’s this orchestration of so many different proteins and molecules that come together to do this core element of life,” he said. It always stuck with him how evolution could generate such a complex system that works — and that our cells run all the time.

It wasn’t just the discovery that intrigued Witte — who this month will receive his Ph.D. in biological and biomedical sciences from Harvard Griffin GSAS — but the experiment behind it, “the most beautiful experiment in biology.” By growing generations of E. coli with a heavy isotope of nitrogen and then allowing the bacteria to divide in a solution with a lighter isotope, Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl found that the new DNA was of an intermediate weight, proving Watson and Crick’s semiconservative replication hypothesis.

In the summer after his first year at the University of California, Berkeley, Witte began a research fellowship at Kansas City’s Stowers Institute for Medical Research, where he learned about RNA interference — depleting certain genes in a cell and seeing how the changes affected regeneration. Depending on the genetic pathway he manipulated in flatworms, they could end up with a couple of heads or tails.

His interest in RNA interference led Witte to the lab of like-minded Jennifer Doudna when he returned for his sophomore year, a few years before Doudna received a Nobel Prize for her developments in CRISPR technology. Though Witte was interested in the gene-editing tool’s promise for humans, he was more interested in studying the naturally occurring mechanism behind it.

“There’s a huge diversity within CRISPR systems,” a product of bacteria defending themselves against invading DNA sequences, like phages, and other mobile sequences called transposable elements, Witte said. He began studying CRISPR systems beyond the popular Cas9 mechanism, well-known for its simplicity and efficiency. Some CRISPR systems cut not DNA, but RNA. Others didn’t seem to cut anything at all.

One of the achievements of his undergraduate research was developing a small CRISPR system that bound to DNA and then began indiscriminately cutting other sections. Conducted in a test tube, the system could be useful for diagnostic tests, revealing the presence of certain DNA species. Witte dug deeper into the technology for a company run by former members of Doudna’s lab, seeking to improve the system’s ability to detect dangerous pathogens and viruses that might be present in a patient’s sample. He also discovered a new mechanism for how a Cas protein could modify CRISPR RNA.

Witte came to Harvard to study a different tool: phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE). The process, developed by Witte’s adviser, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences David Liu, allows scientists to accelerate by more than 100-fold the evolution of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules.

Witte found that PACE could help solve a long-standing problem with gene editing. Researchers had recently discovered a CRISPR system in nature that didn’t have to cut DNA to insert new DNA; bacteria simply searched for a target site and latched on. While many CRISPR applications make one edit at a time, the newly discovered mechanism had the potential to perform many more sequence changes at once.

The mechanism had major potential for treating a wide swath of genetic disorders that require tens or even hundreds of genetic mutations. Instead of targeting each mutation individually, the process could insert an entirely healthy version of the gene.

The problem that Witte had to solve was that the naturally occurring CRISPR system rarely functioned in human cells. He and his collaborators decided to use PACE to evolve the system toward higher activity.

The process was challenging. The researchers were performing a directed evolution campaign in bacteria — but, in the end, they really wanted the higher activity to take place in human cells. Determining which traits to evolve the bacteria toward would dominate Witte’s Ph.D. career. Ultimately, he figured out which of the seven protein components the team wanted to increase and which they didn’t.

Co-evolving all the proteins together didn’t work. Boosting the presence of a transposase protein called TNSB had the strongest effect, as it was responsible for joining the new DNA to the target site. Over months, Witte and his collaborators boosted the rate of the process by more than 100 times in human cells.

The results were published in Science, which detailed the potential for the new technique to correct complex disease-causing mutations all at once, without the need for regulatory approval of each specific change.

There was no single “Aha!” moment in Witte’s research. The process was incremental; in each evolution campaign, a certain protein might be five- or 10-fold more present than before. Then he would run another campaign — and that would take several months, as well. “It really was this progress of many incremental advances that amounted to these large improvements,” he said. “I think that was the most surprising and encouraging result.”

Witte’s mechanism could help treat a variety of loss-of-function diseases, especially ones that affect the liver, which has a cell type that’s relatively easy to target with Witte’s CRISPR technique. There are still years until the invention can be used in therapies; though it’s worked in a cell line, it hasn’t yet translated into cell types in the body. Many scientists, including Witte, will try to bridge this gap.

Even as he and others work to apply and optimize this new technology, Witte wants to make sure he has plenty of time to explore new ideas — the reason he got into science in the first place. “The curiosity-based focus is something I’d like to do long-term as a scientist,” he said. As he’s discovered, it’s curiosity, combined with persistence, that has led to the biggest scientific breakthroughs.

When stress affects the gut, the stomach tightens, digestion slows. For some, these symptoms resolve quickly. For others — particularly people with constipation-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-C) and related conditions — they don’t.

In a new study, investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) show how stress hormones directly interfere with gut function, slowing digestion through a newly defined pathway. In preclinical models, the findings point toward a potential way to treat stress-associated constipation.

Led by corresponding author Subhash Kulkarni, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of medicine and principal investigator in the Division of Gastroenterology at BIDMC, the study’s findings are published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The researchers’ work centers on the enteric nervous system (ENS), often called the “second brain” of the gastrointestinal tract. This network of nerves in the gut controls how food moves through the digestive system, and can coordinate digestion on its own, without input from the brain or spinal cord. However, the ENS is connected to the rest of the nervous system and does receive signals from the outside world, meaning the stressors big and small can override its normal functions.

Scientists already knew that stress hormones can disrupt ENS signaling and had demonstrated a disrupted signaling pathway in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). What was not clear was exactly how that disruption happens or whether it could be reversed. In the new study, the researchers show exactly how stress interferes with the pathway and demonstrate that restoring it improves gut function in preclinical models, identifying it as a promising target for new IBS treatments.

Specifically, Kulkarni and colleagues found that stress hormones suppress the gut’s cell-to-cell communication, leaving GI movement slowed and increasing the risk of persistent constipation. The team traced this breakdown to a specific chemical signaling pathway in the gut — involving a molecule called BDNF and its receptor, TrkB — that helps keep digestion responsive.

When the researchers activated this pathway using a compound that stimulates the TrkB receptor, they were able to restore normal gut movement in experimental models of stress.

“This study identifies both the basic biology for why stress slows down your gut and creates a platform through which novel therapeutics can be generated and tested for treating stress-associated constipation,” said Srinivas N. Puttapaka, an HMS research fellow in medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess, who led the study with co-lead author Jared Slosberg, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“By pinpointing how stress disrupts this pathway and showing that its function can be restored, we’ve identified a clear and actionable target for developing new treatments for IBS,” said Puttapaka.

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This work was funded in part by the National Institute on Aging; a Pilot grant from the Harvard Digestive Disease Core to Subhash Kulkarni; the Walter Benjamin Fellowship the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Philippa Seika; Diacomp Foundation; with additional support from Harvard Catalyst and the National Institutes of Health.

David Battat ’91 has built a career on curiosity and service to his communities — as a healthcare CEO, a leadership instructor, a first responder, and a longtime Harvard volunteer. On July 1, he will bring this same approach to a new role as the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) president.

“David brings thoughtful, steady leadership to the HAA,” said outgoing HAA President Will Makris, Ed.M. ’00. “He’s someone who listens carefully, asks questions, and invites a wide range of voices into the conversation. Over many years of service to Harvard, he’s shown a deep commitment to bringing people together, and I know he’ll help our alumni community stay engaged with one another and the University.”

Battat describes his Harvard undergraduate years as “an extraordinary period of discovery and intellectual exploration,” shaped by professors and classmates who encouraged him to explore all the opportunities the University has to offer.

That spirit stayed with him long after leaving campus, taking him from clerking for then-U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to a career in criminal defense and eventually to a medical device company focused on cardiovascular care and oncology. Never forgetting the barriers his former clients faced after their sentences ended, Battat, as the company’s leader, established re-entry programs at its manufacturing facilities.

Throughout, he remained deeply connected to Harvard, volunteering with the HAA in a range of roles, serving on the advisory board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and as co-chair of Harvard’s largest undergraduate admissions alumni interviewing committee.

“Volunteering has been rewarding in ways I never anticipated — giving me an even greater appreciation for the groundbreaking research of faculty and fellows, and the opportunity to see the extraordinary talent of Harvard applicants.”

A volunteer firefighter, Battat was a first responder at Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, an experience that led him to co-found the Harvard Alumni Disaster Preparedness and Response Shared Interest Group, after discovering a large community of alumni working in emergency response and public safety. Several New York City police officers who graduated from Harvard Kennedy School encouraged him to become an instructor in a leadership course for newly promoted captains. “As a former criminal defense lawyer, the last thing I ever thought I’d do is teach culture change at the NYPD.”

“David’s many years of dedicated volunteer service to Harvard, along with his thoughtful alumni outreach and community-building efforts, have prepared him well for this role,” said Sarah Karmon, executive director of the HAA. “We look forward to working alongside him while we continue to engage, support, and bring together volunteers and alumni around the world.”

As he steps into the presidency, Battat’s priority is to foster constructive alumni dialogue and active participation in the alumni community. For Battat, building the alumni community is not about achieving consensus. “The passion behind our disagreements is proof of how deeply Harvard has shaped us — and that shared depth of feeling is what holds us together.

Battat will serve as HAA president for the 2026-27 academic year, taking up the office on July 1. He will welcome the graduating College Class of 2026 to the alumni community at Harvard’s College Class Day celebration on May 27.

Cancer treatment plans are many and varied, but research is beginning to show there is one element that can benefit virtually all patients: a greater focus on nutrition.

“Cancer patients have increased nutritional needs due to cancer itself or due to treatment-related nutrition impacts symptoms, such as fatigue, nausea, vomiting, which place them at high risk of malnutrition,” said Fang Fang Zhang, who specializes in cancer epidemiology and nutrition.

Zhang, a professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, recently spoke on campus as part of the weekly Monday Nutrition Seminar Series at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Zhang explained that up to 85 percent of all cancer patients, especially those undergoing treatment or diagnosed with late-stage disease, are at risk of malnutrition. This can lead to increased inflammation, weight loss, decrease in muscle mass, and weakened immune function, all of which can negatively affect a patient’s ability to tolerate treatment and can lead to more hospitalizations.

For this reason, nutrition-based interventions may provide ways to not just increase the quality of life for patients but also reduce billions of dollars in direct medical costs each year nationwide that occur due to these issues, said Zhang, who is also a faculty member of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts.

Zhang explained that there are three main Food Is Medicine programs that provide nutritional support to patients with diet-sensitive conditions.

The first is through medically tailored meals, designed for the specific needs of individual patients and delivered to their home. This might include high-protein and high-calorie menus for patients experiencing substantial weight loss, texture-modified meals for those with  swallowing difficulties, or carbohydrate- and sodium-controlled foods for individuals with diabetes or hypertension.

Second, there are medically tailored groceries that come in the form of food boxes or meal kits. And finally, “produce prescriptions” can be redeemed at grocery stores in the form of vouchers or electronic benefits cards.

“All of these programs include nutrition education as an essential component,” Zhang said, noting “quite consistent evidence that these programs can reduce food insecurity, can improve dietary intake, and can support mental health.”

Zhang and her colleagues evaluated the effects of a Food Is Medicine program on patients with lung cancer. Those in the control group received printed nutritional education materials only, while those in the intervention group additionally received home-delivered medically tailored meals and remote nutrition counseling from dietitians.

The intervention group exhibited statistically significant improvement in their nutrition as measured by the Healthy Eating Index.

The findings “are still limited,” Zhang said. “There are new studies that have currently been conducted in the space of Food Is Medicine and cancer, so hopefully in the next year or few years from now, we’ll receive more evidence evaluating these programs for cancer.”

But there are barriers, she explained. There is inadequate screening for malnutrition for patients with cancer; standard oncology care offers limited nutrition support; and lack of access to quality, affordable, nutritious food is a hurdle for many patients. 

“Food insecurity occurs in more than half the cancer patients with low income,” Zhang said. “To address these system-level barriers, we need system-level approaches to integrate food and nutrition into healthcare.”

Massachusetts was one of the first states to gain approval for Food Is Medicine programs under the Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration waiver.

To date, 13 states have approved waivers, with three additional states pending, which allow states to experiment with innovative approaches to care. As these programs become more common, Zhang is hopeful that we will better understand their real-world efficacy and how to best implement them to help patient outcomes.

“The overall research direction, I think, for future research is not only to answer the question does it work?” she said. “But also, how does it work in the real world? And ultimately, how do we make it work everywhere?”

When Rosie Rines graduated from Boston’s Roslindale High School in 1964, college didn’t seem like an option. But later this month, at 79 years old, she’ll don a cap and gown and receive her undergraduate degree from Harvard Extension School — with her daughters cheering her on.

“At that time, you either got married and had children or you had a job,” Rines said. “But if you had a job, you still lived at home. I didn’t know I could just say, ‘I’m 18, I’m going to do what I want.’”

Rines is proof that it’s never too late to pursue an education. She married young, moving cross-country to California with her 3-year-old twin daughters. Throughout her 20s and early 30s as a single mother, Rines balanced making ends meet through court transcription work and secretarial jobs while carting her kids to school and field trips and practices and recitals.

She returned to the East Coast when the girls were 7 and a little more independent. It was then that Rines started the long road to becoming a college graduate. At 36, she started taking classes at the local Quincy College. But still juggling full-time work, she stopped at her associate degree.

After another long hiatus, she restarted her studies in 2013, this time at Harvard Extension School. Then life got in the way again. Two years later, following the death of her mother, for whom she had been the primary caretaker, Rines was tired.

“By then so much was going on with school and my mother and family, I needed a break,” she said. “As much as I knew I wanted to finish, it had to come to me.”

In 2022, something shifted. She can’t put her finger on exactly what, but something compelled Rines to return to the Extension School, where she finally finished the coursework needed to walk at Commencement this spring. She will receive a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies.             

Rines’ daughter Karen McCabe, an academic adviser at the Extension School, remembers wanting her mom to finish, but not wanting to push.

“She’s a very stubborn person. So when she said, ‘I’m not coming back,’ there’s no pushing her until she was ready,” McCabe said. “But then she was ready, and it’s really exciting, because I feel like she got a lot out of her whole education, especially the past few years when she had the time and the mental space to do her reading and to do her papers and to engage with her classmates.”

McCabe said that the accomplishment is especially noteworthy because of how strongly her mom urged her and her sister to seek the educational experience she had missed out on.

“She’s been telling us ‘You will go to college’ since the day we were born,” McCabe said. “We never thought about other options.”

Rines added that her belief in the power of education precedes her own missed opportunities.  

“My mother was a seamstress, and she taught sewing at night at the high school,” she said. “But because she didn’t have a college education, they wouldn’t give her a raise. My mother was so qualified yet was kind of pushed aside. I didn’t want that for my daughters.”

Her return to school, Rines said, has made her daughters proud.

“They love education. They love learning,” she said. “So I think that was a big kick for them to see me going back and talking about different things that maybe I would have never either understood or knew was out there.”

The one thing they might not have gotten a kick from, she joked, was helping her navigate the technology needed for classes.  

“I know I drove them crazy, but that’s OK,” Rines said. “I was so afraid to hit the wrong button, because I’m not used to this. I didn’t grow up with the technology. So that’s where I depended on them.”

And while Extension School students range in age — the average being in their 30s and 40s — most of the students in Rines’ classes were significantly younger than her.

“I always felt like I was the oldest, and at first I wasn’t very sure of myself,” she said. “But I did put myself out there during the discussion posts, and it was very affirming to me when someone would respond and say, ‘Wow, I never thought of it that way,’ or ‘What a great point.’”

Now that she’s done with school, Rines said she’s looking forward to continuing to volunteer and take classes at her local senior center, including a dance class and a writing class. She and her daughters are also planning a cross-country road trip to celebrate. 

What can Beyoncé teach students about public policy?

A lot more than you might think, says Ayushi Roy, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School who teaches students how to use digital technology to better provide government services.

The pop superstar’s 2024 album, “Cowboy Carter,” highlights the historically overlooked contributions of Black artists to the evolution of country music and presents an unexpected but relatable framework for Roy’s students as they consider the actual effectiveness of government policies.

The course, “Ameriican Requiem: Beyoncé, Benefits and the Gap Between Promise and Delivery,” asks students to go deep into the nation’s social safety net to figure out how and why good intentions can fall short.

“She frames the album as a conversation about the erasure of African American people from country music,” said Roy. But after seeing Beyoncé perform, “You realize that she’s actually making a commentary about Black erasure from ‘country,’ the body politic, not country as a genre of music, and that really inspired me.”

The 35-time Grammy Award winner tells a story of an America where the experiences of women and other marginalized people were overlooked in the official record in much the same way the perspectives and needs of the users of government-assistance programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program get overlooked in the design and delivery of services, said Roy.

“My hope is that I help the next generation of policymakers think more expansively about the kinds of input that define good policy,” so that they can identify potential administrative, operational, and implementation hurdles before they become a hurdle.

In one recent class, while Beyoncé’s “Protector,” a song about motherhood, played quietly in the background, students heard from practitioners, including a former secretary of health and human services for California, about the state’s child welfare system and the Byzantine process that parents must navigate to be reunited with children who’ve been removed from their care.

To better understand the obstacles, a student team built a child reunification simulation program that takes users through the types of conflicting demands and difficult decisions that families often confront. For instance, court hearings that run long could jeopardize a parent’s job, or required parenting classes at inconvenient times or distant locations could wreak havoc on family budgets and work shifts.

The program offers recommendations for ways to ease or eliminate some of the system’s intrinsic frictions.

“A lot of the way the Kennedy School teaches policymaking is based on economics classes, econometrics classes, statistics classes. That’s a really heavy part of the M.P.P. and M.P.A. core curriculum,” said Roy. 

“What is often unspoken is that data, when aggregated and anonymized, isn’t really capturing both the commonplace as well as distinct experiences of the American public. And that is really what makes the difference between [delivering] good policy and standard policy,” said Roy, who would like to see more emphasis on teaching of government implementation, so graduates are better prepared to work on the delivery side of programs and services.

Solving these structural challenges, so that those drafting social safety net policy and those charged with ensuring those in need of assistance do, in fact, benefit, requires a lot more than new apps or fourth-generation AI chatbots in government offices, Roy said.

“I do know as a practitioner, having served in the government for over a dozen years, that the building of technology is the easy part; managing the political feasibility and the implementation is the hard part,” she said.

“Applying private sector technology practices in government is not the solve. It’s really about building this incredibly well-versed student and student professional base of people that think about implementation critically.”

The first James Bond book that Thomas Beale read was not a Bond book at all. It was a fake — a parody titled “Alligator” written by members of The Harvard Lampoon. By the time he realized that, he’d already made significant headway into the text.

“That’s the art of a good parody,” he said. “You don’t quite realize you’re getting spoofed until halfway through.”

A high-schooler at the time, Beale was inspired. He started a humor column for his school newspaper, and when he arrived at Harvard, he joined the Lampoon itself. There, he met his people — a cohort with a “certain personality type,” who find their way to the 150-year-old humor publication.

More than 100 alumni of the magazine gathered in the Harvard University Archives on a recent Saturday morning for a pop-up exhibit highlighting the publication’s history, part of a multiday celebration of the group’s sesquicentennial.

“The 250th of the U.S. is going to pale in comparison,” joked one alumnus.

In addition to the nearly 100 items displayed by University archivists, staff also displayed private collections from the alumni. It was in this section that Beale, a Cambridge resident and longtime treasurer of the group, showed off a parody issue of USA Today that featured a picture of his two young daughters (they’re now grown adults) and the family dog.

Archivists split the items into five categories: early history; rivalries; parodies; celebrations; and art of the Lampoon and ephemera.

Some pieces from the collection were easy to explain to outsiders, such as architectural drawings of the Harvard Lampoon Castle, which was designed by Edmund M. Wheelwright.

Others required some context. “Gripping a .50-caliber machine gun, John Wayne rode an armed personnel carrier into Harvard Square yesterday, in what was billed as an assault on the Eastern Liberal Establishment,” began coverage of a 1974 article. It was one of the many displayed publications covering Wayne’s attempt to defend his honor after Lampoon members had dubbed him the “biggest fraud in history.”

In the parodies section, visitors had the opportunity to read examples over three centuries — from an 1892 faux-Greek trilogy called “The Little Tin Gods-on-Wheels” to the group’s 2013 edition of “The Wobbit.” In between, the group took aim at publications both on campus and off.

The table featured letters to the Lampoon from Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who thought the group could find a better cover model for their mock issue and suggested some headline changes. “I’m enclosing the September issue of COSMO so you can see how few of our own cover lines are sexy,” she wrote.

The lampooning was not always one-sided. The Advocate, The Crimson, and the Spy Club of 1721 (the name is a long story) took turns parodying the Lampoon — and even took their rivalries off the page. Curators displayed a photograph of the 1946 Crimson/Lampoon annual baseball game and a 1910 postcard invitation to the same event. One scrapbook held an invitation to a 1907 inter-paper track meet between the Lampoon, Advocate, and Crimson. Surely human athleticism peaked that day.

While the Lampoon is perhaps best known today for its pipeline into TV writers’ rooms, the showcase revealed the relatively unsung work of the organization’s artists, whose hand-drawn and -painted work filled the pages of nearly every publication.

Curators acknowledged that some of the work had almost been lost to history. Collection development archivist Alexandra Dunn explained that the artwork by Henry Russell Wood, a 1927 College graduate, had been donated by his daughters, who found his art under a bed in a leather suitcase. The long-buried work included a pen-and-ink sketch from a Harvard football game and a colorful medieval-style folio featuring the Lampoon’s Ibis mascot.

Mac Whatley, a 1977 graduate of the College, was glad that so much of the Lampoon work had survived and that Archives is still looking to preserve more. He recalled classmates periodically cleaning out the castle and simply throwing old work out.

“There are things I rescued from the street because I couldn’t bear to throw them away,” he said. He’s held on to them until now, “but this is a much better place to look after stuff.”

If Grandpa occasionally dozes off in front of the TV or squeezes in a power nap after lunch, it’s probably no big deal. But if he can’t keep his eyes open at the breakfast table, even after a full night of sleep, that could be a red flag, according to researchers at Mass General Brigham.

In a new study published in partnership with Rush University Medical Center, excessive napping by older adults is linked with higher mortality rates, signaling a possible connection to underlying disease.

“We know that older people tend to nap a lot. And we do a lot of work on age-related diseases, so we were thinking napping could predict mortality in older adults,” said Chenlu Gao, a researcher in the MGB Department of Anesthesiology, and lead author of the study. Gao is also a research fellow in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“We had this great opportunity to collaborate with the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, who have a comprehensive data set,” said Gao. “Using this data set, we found that there is a connection between daytime napping and mortality in older adults.”

The Rush Memory and Aging Project, which began in 1997 as a cohort study looking at the cognition and neurodegeneration of older adults in northern Illinois, proved invaluable to Gao’s research. In 2005, the Rush project began having participants wear wrist monitors for 10 days to measure rest-activity data — allowing researchers to extract extensive information on nap length, frequency, timing, and day-to-day variability.

“What is great about this study is that it objectively measured daytime napping patterns, not just via self-report,” Gao said.

At baseline, there was little connection between mortality and subjects who napped within or below the “average” amount for their age group — just under an hour for participants in this study whose ages fell mostly in the early 80s range.

“Short naps, or within one hour per day of napping, are most likely benign or not associated with additional risks,” Gao said. “Our participants, on average, nap about 50 minutes per day, and they take on average about two naps per day.”

By 2025, researchers had access to as much as 19 years’ worth of follow-up statistics from 1,338 total participants — all in retirement and older than 56. They found that both longer and more frequent naps were associated with higher mortality in the age group observed. Notably, each additional hour of daytime napping per day was associated with a roughly 13 percent higher mortality risk while each extra nap per day was associated with a 7 percent higher mortality risk.

Gao wants to make one thing clear: These findings do not suggest that the naps cause poor outcomes, but rather that they may serve as a warning sign for underlying disease.

“We think naps are more like a reflection of health conditions,” she said. “If you think about when you get the flu, you tend to be very tired during the day. Maybe you take several naps, but you also have other visible symptoms, so you know the nap is because of the flu. For some older adults who nap a lot during the day, their conditions may not have those very visible symptoms, so they don’t know they have the conditions causing them to feel really tired.”

And while the study is limited in determining a causal relationship between napping and health, Gao said there could be other factors that explain the associations between the two.  

“I would imagine that those who are socially more active and also physically more active tend to be less depressed, less anxious, would be napping less,” said Ruixue Cai, another researcher at the MGB Department of Anesthesiology and the second author of the paper. “And just anecdotally, when we talk to older adult participants in our other studies, a lot of them say that they were really lonely and bored during the day because they’re retired, and so they would go take a nap.”

The data revealed another red flag to researchers — napping in the morning.

“Because for a healthy person, after a night of sleep, they should feel pretty refreshed and able to stay awake in the morning hours, but for people who are not so healthy, they may struggle with sleepiness even in the morning hours,” Cai said.

According to the study, morning nappers had a 30 percent higher mortality risk compared to those who nap in the early afternoon.

However, the occasional napper — regardless of age — should not be alarmed when they feel like getting some quick shut-eye, Gao said.

“I think those are fine,” she said. “We usually suggest limiting the naps to 20 minutes, and finish before 2 or 3 p.m., just so it doesn’t affect nighttime sleep.”

Gao emphasized this new data is no substitute for clinical advice.

“There are studies that try to implement long-term nap interventions to see if that will influence health. This is a really good future direction,” she said. “Findings from these studies would tell us how long-term nap habits influence health and inform clinical nap guidelines, beyond our current findings.”

Educators should teach students how to use AI tools but with an emphasis on the ethics, social impact, and potential biases of the tech, experts said Thursday during a conversation sponsored by Harvard Education Press. 

Stephanie Smith Budhai and Marie Heath, who co-authored “Critical AI in K–12 Classrooms,” told Teddy Svoronos, senior lecturer of public policy at the Kennedy School, that responsible use of AI requires a healthy dose of skepticism. In other words: Resist the hype by asking hard questions. 

“Does this really align with our visions of education?” said Heath, associate professor of learning design and technology at Loyola University Maryland. “Does this serve communities, as opposed to the folks who are developing this technology and telling us it’s going to be transformative?”

Budhai, associate professor of educational technology at the University of Delaware, said that teacher education programs should include training on how to help students examine the effects of AI inside and outside the classroom, including its environmental impact. A sort of critical AI literacy is needed, she said. 

“We’re not saying we have to be anti-tech,” said Budhai. “We’re saying: Let’s think about the bigger questions. … Students need to build a critical consciousness around the ways we interact with AI and understand how it works.” She added: “They need to really understand the harms of it.”

“For people who train teachers to use technology, it’s really important to have a framing where anytime you’re using technology, it’s for a purpose.”

Stephanie Smith Budhai

Educators are concerned about students’ over-reliance on AI and its possible impact on critical thinking, problem-solving, and relationships, the authors noted. The threat is not just to skills students might lose as they outsource essays and other assignments to machines, they said. It runs deeper. 

“Students don’t know how to write a topic sentence because they’re asking AI for the topic sentence,” said Budhai. “They’re ‘never-skilling,’ which is even scarier than ‘deskilling,’ which is losing the skills they had because they’re over-relying on AI. Never-skilling means they’ve never learned the skill because they are using AI for everything, so they don’t even have foundational skills.”

Heath, a former high school social studies teacher, worries about the impact of AI on social interactions and civic life. 

“I think about the ways that these technologies, particularly generative AI, allow us to be frictionless in our activities, and it sort of reduces the need for human interaction,” she said.

“For democracy to function, we need to be able to sit in discomfort, and we need to know what it feels like to disagree and to be disagreed with. One of the things that we give up when we turn to this technology is the ability to sit in discomfort and practice being uncomfortable.” 

The authors also zeroed in on the problem of biases, explicit and implicit, in AI tools. In researching “Critical AI in K–12 Classrooms,” they asked AI for book recommendations for Black and white high school students, and they found that the lists and even the feedback had implicit biases, with the books for Black students disproportionately about crime and poverty.

In a separate research project, Heath detected biases when AI provided feedback on students’ written work.

“AI is laden with all the biases of society,” she said. “If it perceives that the student is either from a higher socio-economic class or white, the feedback it gives is very conversational in tone, like, ‘Have you thought about XYZ?’ If AI perceives that the student is either socio-economically disadvantaged or is a Black or brown student, it uses a very direct, authoritative tone.” 

The message from the tool, Heath said, is, “‘I know what’s right’ and ‘You should do this this way.’”

Sharing takeaways from their findings, Budhai and Heath urged educators to pause over a simple question — why? — before deploying AI the classroom.

“For people who train teachers to use technology, it’s really important to have a framing where anytime you’re using technology, it’s for a purpose,” said Budhai. “We call it ‘purposeful technology use.’ I tell students, ‘How does this help meet the learning objectives?’ Because if it’s not actually doing it, why are we using it?”

When Alison Farrar was in high school in southern California, she volunteered at a local hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. In the tiniest babies, she saw reflections of herself.

“I had been born very prematurely so I had this connection with the patients that we were serving,” said Farrar, who was born two months early after her mother developed sepsis. “I always heard stories growing up about being born so small. When I was born, I was really sick, my mom was really sick.”

The East Los Angeles hospital took care of many disadvantaged families. And as Farrar held the babies and talked with the parents, she saw how some families were struggling to make ends meet, and some babies’ difficulties didn’t end with being premature.

“We took care of a lot of babies waiting to go into the foster care system,” Farrar said. “A lot of it was holding the babies and talking with the families. I got to practice my Spanish and support people going through that emotionally difficult time. I felt that was special work.”

That special work launched Farrar onto a path that led to Alabama, Boston and Harvard Medical School, Oxford, and back. Along the way, she hasn’t wavered in her vision of using medicine to help others, but has taken a broad view, one that embraces physics and math and saw her contributing to research into drug resistance while staffing an overnight crisis hotline — and one that will have her marking her HMS graduation this spring with classmates as she anticipates a career in psychiatry.

That early hospital experience also helped Farrar see the importance of technology. She had heard how risky her own entry into the world was, and how decades earlier it would have been unlikely that she survived.

“I saw how technology had the ability to make a difference. Babies who wouldn’t have survived 20 years ago, we were sending home,” Farrar said. “I realized this was something I really wanted to contribute to.”

Farrar attended the University of Alabama to study physics and mathematics, hoping to apply those skills in medical research. She volunteered at a free clinic, running the diagnostic lab there, where she tested blood and urine samples and even drew blood herself, perfecting the art of relaxing people while standing with a needle in her hand. As with the urban poor she had seen in East LA, most of the Alabama patients were underinsured, and Farrar could see the struggles common between the two populations, even though their daily circumstances were at times starkly different.

“One patient was late for his appointment because his horse was sick. He’d been planning to ride his horse and had trouble getting another ride,” Farrar said. “Things were very different, but it still reinforced the same passion about how to use technology to improve care for people who are underserved.”

Farrar was accepted into the Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. program, and in 2018 arrived on campus for her first two years of study. When the time came to choose her Ph.D. program, however, she chose to study at Oxford University, where, from 2020 to 2024, she earned a D.Phil. in interdisciplinary bioscience. At Oxford, she worked in the lab of biophysicist Achilles Kapanidis. Among other projects, Farrar worked to develop a rapid test for antibiotic resistance that used the altered distribution of cellular ribosomes, tiny protein factories inside the cell.

Earlier work showed that ribosomes shift within the cell after exposure to antibiotics. Farrar and colleagues first made the ribosomes fluorescent, then exposed the cells to antibiotics, which shifted the ribosomes in a predictable way. The patterns were evaluated using an AI deep learning algorithm.

Published in the journal Communications Biology in 2025, the study, with Farrar as first author, showed that the process was highly sensitive: 99 percent effective at detecting drug resistance after examining just two cells. That finding, researchers wrote, had the potential to dramatically decrease processing time — from days to as little as 30 minutes — by eliminating the need to culture cells in order to have enough for analysis.

Farrar’s varied academic background — blending math, physics, and her medical training at HMS — gave her a unique, multidisciplinary perspective among the team, Kapanidis said.

“She’s versatile, fearless, and very, very motivated,” Kapanidis said, adding that much of the work was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added its own challenges and complexities. “She has this spirit of looking forward, being very positive not only as a scientist but as a person, a lab citizen.”

Despite the lab work, Farrar didn’t forget about the people experiencing challenges in their lives. She coordinated the Oxford Nightline, an overnight hotline staffed seven days a week for people in crisis. And there were plenty, she said, with the pandemic taking its toll on mental health, on campus and beyond.

“That was a really meaningful part of my time at Oxford, and I think led me to psychiatry,” Farrar said. “The seeds were sown when I was working in the NICU, but working with Nightline, people were calling in situations of mental health crisis and we were helping them through those moments.”

After earning her D.Phil. in 2024, Farrar returned to HMS for her last two years of medical school, time dominated by the clinical rotations that expose students to different medical specialties. Key clerkships for Farrar were at McLean Hospital’s psychosis unit, on Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s consult psychiatry team, and, in the months leading up to Commencement, in Massachusetts General Hospital’s emergency psychiatry unit.

With both an M.D. and a D.Phil. under her belt, Farrar, who is entering the psychiatry residency research track at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is looking forward to beginning her career as a doctor and continuing her training, which combines clinical training and research.

“I definitely want to continue doing a mix of research and treating patients,” Farrar said. “I’m really interested in digital mental health, wearable devices, and how those can be used in psychiatry research. I’m really looking forward to the next chapter and seeing where my clinical experiences and interests lead me.”