Dear GSAS Students, I wanted to make sure you saw the communication from Martha Whitehead, vice president for the Harvard Library and University librarian, to Harvard faculty about planning for phased reopening of physical libraries for research,... Read More

Dear GSAS Students, As Harvard continues to evaluate the changes to our academic mission brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many graduate students have raised concerns about the scheduling of fall 2020 undergraduate courses and the availability of... Read More

From the algorithms that we use to optimize manufacturing to the cryptography that keeps our personal data secure, computational complexity plays an essential role in modern life. But how can we determine which complex problems are easy for... Read More

Albert Fishlow has been improving our understanding of the economic history and development of Brazil and Latin America for six decades—and counting. He is professor emeritus at two institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, where... Read More

When NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter in 1995, Margaret Kivelson was on the brink of a revolutionary discovery: Earth is not the only ocean world in our solar system. By studying magnetic field data, Kivelson demonstrated that Europa... Read More

When the poet Wallace Stevens speaks of “The vital, the never-failing genius, / Fulfilling … meditations, great and small” in the final canto of “The Auroras of Autumn,” one could easily imagine that he is speaking of... Read More

On May 27, 2020, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) awarded the Centennial Medal to four distinguished alumni who have made fundamental and lasting contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, to their colleagues, and to society... Read More

Dear GSAS Students, I am pleased to announce that those benefitting from guaranteed financial support will receive a 2.8 percent increase to their stipend for the 2020–2021 academic year. I hope this is welcome news as you make plans for the... Read More

Dear GSAS Students, As you know from my email in February 2020, Garth McCavana, dean for student affairs, will retire from his position at the end of the academic year after serving GSAS for 26 years and Harvard for 32 years. I am pleased to share... Read More

For some students, the pressures of pursuing a PhD would be challenging enough. For Blakely Bussie O’Connor, who will receive a PhD in bioengineering in May 2020, it was only the beginning. During her six years at GSAS, O’Connor became a mother, a... Read More