Faculty

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

Michèle Duguay, lecturer in music at Harvard University

Five Questions with Michèle Duguay

A Harvard scholar of music theory on how streaming services have changed the experience of music

by Olivia Farrar

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.

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

Cutting-Edge Cancer Research Looks Beyond the Traditional Grant Funding System

Medical School professor George Demetri again leads cutting-edge cancer research, in an environment of timid funding for experimentation.

In This Mass Extinction, the Enemy Is Us

The New Yorker magazine quotes Fisher professor of natural history Andrew Knoll on the current mass extinction. The enemy is us.

Part of the Perseus molecular cloud, as seen through the Smithsonian’s MMT telescope in Arizona. Self-gravitating structures—dense areas where stars are forming—appear as dark spots. The L1448 region is located in the upper-right quadrant of the image.

Perseus in 3-D

New three-dimensional PDF technology allows Harvard astronomers—and you—to explore worlds hundreds of light-years away.

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Particulate matter that is 2.5 microns or less in diameter (PM2.5), the kind emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes, is known to be especially harmful. Reductions in such pollution lead to increased life expectancy. In Boston between 1980 and 2000, for example, as PM2.5 concentrations dropped from 18 to 11 micrograms per cubic meter, local average life expectancy climbed four years. Of that increase, four-tenths of a year—or 10 percent of the total gain—was attributable to improved air quality.

Clean Air, Longer Life

Controls on fine particle pollution extended average lifespan in the United States by five months between 1980 and 2000.

by Jonathan Shaw