Harvard Community

Explore Harvard community news, alumni, faculty, students, and campus life. Curated stories and perspectives from Harvard Magazine.

An image of three of the fellows from the Radcliffe Institute selected to be 2026-2027 fellows

Radcliffe Institute Announces 2026-2027 Fellows

Scholars will tap Harvard’s intellectual resources during the coming academic year.

by Olivia Farrar

John Payne teaches a saxophone student at his music center in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Saxophonist John Payne teaches ensembles, jazz, and improvisation

Rejecting the “tyranny of competence,” John Payne helps musicians bloom.

by Craig Lambert

Analytics has the power to transform government

Harnessing civic data makes governments more responsive to citizens.

by Stephanie Garlock

Illustration showing man kneeling and looking through the floor onto a blue sky with clouds

Max Bazerman on making organizations act ethically

Max Bazerman wants leaders to take notice of ethical challenges.

by Sophia Nguyen

The young Laughlin in his New Directions office at his aunt’s home in Connecticut

James Laughlin at Harvard, by Ian S. MacNiven, from LITERCHOOR IS MY BEAT

James Laughlin’s transit to Harvard and Europe—and pioneering literary publishing

Sven Beckert

History turns toward the global, the scientific, and the quantitative

Scholars pursue sweeping new interpretations of the human past.

by Jonathan Shaw

Muir (at right) with his daughters Wanda and Helen and a friend at Kings Canyon, California, in 1902

John Muir

A brief life of a Scottish-American conservationist

by Steven Pavlos Holmes

Sociologist Orlando Patterson does landmark work on slavery and freedom.

Orlando Patterson may be the last of Harvard sociology’s big thinkers.

by Craig Lambert

Michael Rohan has developed a magnetic-stimulation machine that shows promise for the immediate treatment of depression.

Magnetic Waves show promise in treatment of bipolar disorder and depression

Researchers at Mclean Hospital develop a magnet that treats depression and bipolar disorder

by Erin O’Donnell

David Ellwood

Harvard Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood steps down

The Harvard Kennedy School’s leader will conclude his service at the end of the academic year.

The image shows human-stem-cell-derived beta cells that have formed islet-like clusters in a mouse. The cells were transplanted to the kidney capsule (the fibrous connective layer surrounding the kidneys); the photograph was taken two weeks later, by which time the beta cells were making insulin and had cured the diabetes in the mouse.

Harvard's Douglas Melton creates functional insulin-producing human beta cells

Douglas Melton creates working beta cells from stem cells for eventual use in treatment of Type 1 diabetes.