Faculty & Community

Insights into groundbreaking faculty research, innovative projects, and academic thought leadership across Harvard’s schools and institutes.

Alan Garber speaking at a podium in Memorial Church, with wooden panels in the background.

In Sermon, Garber Urges Harvard Community to ‘Defend and Protect’ Institutions

Harvard’s president uses traditional Memorial Church address to encourage divergent views.

by Jonathan Shaw

Tyler Moore, left, with Allan Friedman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society

Tyler Moore explains how the bad guys take over personal computers

Phishing pits an organized criminal ecosystem against a jumbled array of private "takedown" firms, domain-name registrars, and ISPs.

by Jonathan Shaw

Jill Lepore on Ayelet Waldman, Michael Lewis, and the cultural history of parent

History professor Jill Lepore's take on recent parenting memoirs

David Kennedy

A professor with Harvard Kennedy School ties attacks gang violence.

A professor with Kennedy School ties questions zero-tolerance policing policies.

Robert Patterson’s letter to Thomas Jefferson included a worked example of his cipher. He began by writing his message in lower-case letters and in columns, running top to bottom like Chinese. This example begins with the words “Buonaparte has at last given peace to Europe,” legible in the first two columns.

Jefferson's Conundrum

Mathematician Lawren Smithline ’94 has decrypted an encoded message sent to Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

by Craig Lambert

Traditional light-microscopy, such as this image of human brain-tumor cells in culture, still has a place in cancer research.

Virtual Tumors

Modeling tumors may help scientists beat cancer.

by Mike Martin

Brain images show the differences in activity patterns between the two groups of subjects that professor of psychology Jill Hooley examined. The brains of recovered depressed subjects (left) had more active amygdalae while listening to criticism than did the brains of subjects who had never been depressed. The brains of the latter showed more activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (center) and the anterior cingulate cortex (right) compared to brains of subjects with a history of depression.

How Depression Lingers

After depression patients recover, their brains still process criticism differently.

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Scenes from Havana, taken in March 2007

Cuba

Raúl Castro is changing Cuba. Will the United States respond?

This portrait of Smith forms part of a mural, by Nelson Chase, that decorates the Aesculapian Room of the Harvard Club of Boston.

Theobald Smith

A brief profile of the pioneering comparative pathologist

by Steven M. Niemi

Michael McCormick

Sexual apartheid in medieval England

Cutting-edge science helps historians push further and more fully into the past.

by Jonathan Shaw

All in a day’s treatment: Khaled, seen in these photographs with hemapheresis practitioner Beverly Gedutis, R.N., and author David Nathan, spent May 8 at Children’s Hospital Boston, where for decades he has been transfused with red blood cells every three weeks. The bottles he carries below contain the iron chelator deferisirox.

Lessons from an Unexpected Life

One patient’s struggle with chronic illness highlights the complexities of modern medicine and the healthcare challenge.