Although Juliana García-Mejía and Karina Mathew study very different fields today at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the two share a preoccupation, reflected in their research, with the prospect of worlds beyond our own. Both are advancing knowledge in ways that could change the way we think about the search for extraterrestrial life. And both are doing work that forces us to reconsider the place of humanity in the stars—and in our own stories.

The New Madrid earthquakes that rocked the present-day states of Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Illinois from December 1811 to February 1812 reshaped not only the landscape but also the history of the United States. So why were the quakes all but forgotten by the time of the Civil War? What caused them and could they happen again? Historian of science Conevery Valencius, PhD ’98, explains.

Picture this: You’re sitting through a conference talk. The speaker is friendly and confident. Their figures are sleek, with plenty of results. Their research methods are elegant. But at the end, you’re still asking...

New ODMA staff support inclusion and belonging in PhD programs across the University

GSAS student Grace Pan hopes to construct a new generation of high-temperature superconductors that could deliver cheap, abundant power and perhaps even help solve the climate crisis.

In her 2022 Harvard Horizons project, “The Secret-Seekers: Renaissance Writers and the Birth of Code,” the PhD student Vanessa Braganza seeks not only to reveal the ways that ciphers shaped early modern English literature but also to inspire both literary critics and general readers to look more closely at texts and question what we think we know.

In the March 2022 B-2 B-Well column, Student Services Director Danielle Farrell introduces and interviews the office’s new case manager, Keenan Bailey.

An associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, Herman Pontzer, PhD ’06, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on metabolism and its development throughout human history. In this interview, the author of the bestselling 2021 book, Burn , talks about how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy.

A PhD student in economics whose work incorporates moral philosophy and theories of justice, Hitzig says that when institutions choose one algorithm over another, they aren’t merely making a technical fix like a civil engineer improving a bridge; they’re making a normative judgment, choosing one set of values over another. In her academic work and her poetry, she lays bare the costs of these choices and offers new ways of making decisions and distributing resources in a democratic society.

In this interview, Charles Weiss , PhD ’65, discusses his new book, The Survival Nexus , and says that the fate of humanity may well depend on its ability to understand and manage the intersection of science, technology, and world affairs.