(A word of caution: Several minutes into the show, Professor Levering Lewis describes an episode of racist violence. We have preserved that portion of the conversation, rather than editing it out, because it describes a turning point in Du Bois’s life and career.)

Know thyself, answers Duke University Professor Herman Pontzer, PhD ’06. Every body has a story, he asserts in his new book, Adaptable. So does every part of our body. The main characters are our organs and systems. The themes and plot are a mishmash of genes and our environment. The result is an astonishing amount of diversity across humanity, united by our common ability to adapt over time and place. Pontzer says that a deeper understanding of how our bodies evolved and how that process shapes our biology can help us better take charge of our health.

Boston University professor Jacob Brown, PhD ’22 says that where we live shapes the political party we join and the candidates we vote for. The places we grow up shape our views and social pressure influences our affiliations. Moreover, when we change neighborhoods or our neighborhoods change around us, our party ID can change too. That fact—that our affiliations are not necessarily set in stone, but can shift as the people and places around us do—may offer some hope for the future of civic life in The United States . . . if we know what to do with it. 

Anthony Abraham Jack is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center at Boston University, where he is an associate professor of higher education leadership at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, among others. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, earned awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Eastern Sociological Association and was named one of National Public Radio’s Best Books of 2019. His second book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality, and Students Pay the Price, won the PROSE Award in Education Theory and Practice from the Association of American Publishers. Anthony Abraham Jack received his PhD in sociology from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 2016.

At the heart of this vision is the notion that our genetic differences have a big impact on how each of us responds to disease and treatment. To realize a future of personalized medicine then, we need to understand and investigate just how genetic variations, including mutations, contribute to illness and respond to doctors' attempts to address it. But how can scientists do that efficiently with a human genome that spans about three billion base pairs of DNA across tens of thousands of genes? 

That's where the work of PhD student Dawn Chen comes in. A student in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology Program, Chen was named a recipient of the 2025 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Achievement and Exceptional Research in the Biological Sciences, presented by Seattle's Fred Hutch Cancer Center. 

With her colleagues in the lab of Harvard professor Fei Chen, Dawn Chen is developing an innovative gene-editing tool known as helicase-assisted continuous editing, or HACE. A breakthrough in genetic engineering, supported in part by funds from the National Institutes of Health, HACE makes edits to specific genes, allowing researchers to investigate how genetic variations contribute to disease. The technique could lead to the identification of specific mutations that influence the effectiveness of drugs and therapies for illnesses like cancer. 

One factor in prices is fluorination, which plays a crucial role in the production of many widely-used pharmaceuticals. Driven by the high cost of reagents needed for the trifluoromethyl (CF₃) group, the process is expensive—and hard on the natural environment. If there was a way to make fluorination more accessible, sustainable, and affordable—it could reshape how we approach drug synthesis—and much else in chemistry.

Chemist and Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD candidate Brandon Campbell has developed an innovative method of fluorination that could do just that. Using silver and visible light, Campbell’s pioneering approach promises a cost-effective and eco-friendly alternative to traditional synthetic methods.

Feeling concerned? Take heart. Harvard's Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy David Deming says AI is here to make us more productive, not take our jobs—at least not yet. The co-author of the recent paper, "Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market," Deming says that thanks to technology, every small businessperson or professional can now have an indefatigable digital assistant, one with a flawless memory, encyclopedic knowledge, and lightning-fast response time—and one who will never ask for a raise or even a wage.

Deming, who received his PhD from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2010, spoke recently about artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market during an event for the School’s alumni at the Harvard Club of San Francisco. He was interviewed by Harvard Griffin GSAS Dean Emma Dench, whose questions were sometimes submitted by audience members.

Despite his track record, Lichtman has been scorned by election forecasters like Nate Silver, who build probabilistic models based on weighted averages from scores of national and state-level polls. But are these quantitative models really any more reliable than ones that leverage historical fundamentals, like Lichtman's, or, for that matter, a random guess? 

The Stanford University political scientist Justin Grimmer, PhD ’10, and his colleagues, Dean Knox of the University of Pennsylvania and Sean Westwood of Dartmouth, published research last August evaluating US presidential election forecasts like Silver's. Their verdict? Scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes. In the meantime, they see growing evidence of harm in the centrality of these forecasts and the horse race campaign coverage they facilitate. 

This month on Colloquy: Justin Grimmer on the reliability of probabilistic election forecasts. 

 Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson says that the key to squaring this circle is failure-proofing critical areas where best practices are well-known while encouraging experimentation in new fields where useful and productive knowledge can be gathered. That means building a sense of psychological safety among colleagues and coworkers that fosters trust, open communication, and new ideas. 

Not so fast, says Harvard University Jewish studies scholar, Jon Levenson, PhD ’75. He says that, a bit like the old joke about the United States, Great Britain, and the English language, Abraham is the common figure that separates Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. "It is surely the case that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have more in common than their adherents believe," he writes in his 2012 book, Inheriting Abraham, "but the patriarch is less useful to the end of inter-religious concord than many think." 

So how does Abraham and his story play out differently in the three traditions? Why is it important to understand those differences? And if Abraham is not the fulcrum on which efforts for religious conciliation can revolve, what are the areas of commonality that can foster peaceful coexistence, particularly today, when it's needed most? 

Much has been written about the racial wealth gap, but how has it evolved since emancipation? Why has it been so stubbornly persistent over the past 160 years? And what role does this country's original sin of slavery continue to play in its perpetuation? 

The Princeton University Economist Ellora Derenoncourt takes these questions on in "The Wealth of Two Nations," a paper published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Beginning with the Civil War, Derenoncourt and her coauthors chart the way the racial wealth gap narrowed, stalled, and started to widen again in recent years. She writes, "While policies that address racial gaps in savings and capital gains can be a complement, only the redistribution of large stocks of wealth, like reparations, can immediately reduce the racial wealth gap." 

This month on Colloquy: the history of the racial wealth gap.

Dame Louise Richardson, PhD ’89, believes that universities have a key role to play in addressing this crisis. Formerly the head of the universities of Oxford and St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, and now president of the Carnegie Corporation, Richardson says institutions of higher learning can forge a path to more sustainable democracy by modeling a fairer and more representative society, generating and sharing deep knowledge, and advocating for democratic systems. (Dame Richardson’s talk was delivered on November 8 at the 2023 Samuel and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center of International Affairs. )

Public health expert Sara Bleich, PhD ’07, says it’s time to deal with obesity as the urgent crisis that it is. A professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former director of nutrition security for the Biden administration, Bleich says the disease is largely preventable but to make progress, the country must deal with persistent inequities in the healthcare system—and the structural racism that underlies them. Join us this time for a conversation about obesity, public health, and race.

In this episode of Colloquy, we take a step back from perception to look at where we were, where we are, and how we got here. What did the pandemic shocks teach us about government intervention in the economy? What did they show us about inflation and unemployment? And what have economists learned that can help policymakers cope with the next big crisis?

With us to parse these questions is Karen Dynan, a professor of the practice at the Harvard University Department of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School. A senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Professor Dynan is the chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics. She previously served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 1992. 

The culprit behind this unprecedented heat is climate change, driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most well-known greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which comes from burning fossil fuels. Often overlooked is methane, which accounts for about 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and has more than doubled since pre-industrial times. 

Robert Stavins, PhD ’88, says that reducing the amount of methane in the atmosphere is a critical and cost-effective way to slow climate change and its impacts. To get there, the AJ Meyer professor of Energy and Economic Development at the Harvard Kennedy School is leading a new initiative at the University’s Salata Institute which aims to reduce methane emissions from different sectors using innovative approaches and collaborations. If successful, he says the world can “bend the curve” on climate change, giving humanity desperately needed time to address the larger, long-term problem of carbon dioxide.

In this episode of Colloquy, the scholar Adam Longenbach discusses the normalization of military violence in civilian spaces and the role that architecture plays in that process. Longenbach traces the trend back to its beginnings in World War II to show how the built environment, augmented by Hollywood stagecraft, has been used to turn city streets and urban neighborhoods into battle zones. (This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.)

What happened next shocked both the revelers and the country, shutting down what had been hyped as a “hot vax summer,” and signaling that there was a long way to go before the pandemic was over. PhD student Lydia Krasilnikova—who co-led an 80-person, multi-organization collaboration examining the July 2021 superspreader event in Provincetown—talks about what happened and how the outbreak contributed to the US Center for Disease Control’s decision to resume its recommendation of indoor masking later that year.

Today, at Harvard, Bellet researches the ways that those living with PTSD can compulsively seek reminders of trauma. One of the gold standard treatments, exposure therapy, encourages survivors to approach reminders of the traumatic event. But Bellet's studies indicate that some survivors might expose themselves to these reminders in ways that confirm toxic beliefs about themselves. His data suggests that clinicians need to be flexible in their approach to treating the condition, always keeping in mind their patients need to find meaning in their distress. 

Is this saying from a Zen Buddhist Text? The Hindu Bhagavad Gita? Actually, these are the words of Jesus . . . according to the 2,000-year-old Gospel of Thomas. The Princeton University scholar Elaine Pagels, PhD '70, says that this text—discovered in Egypt in 1945 along with the Gospel of Philip—contains Christ’s “secret teachings,” in contrast to those meant for public worship and included in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. 

So why were the gospels of Thomas and Philip banned by the church as illegitimate and heretical over 1600 years ago? And how do they change the way we understand the Christian tradition today?

This month on Colloquy: The “Gnostic Gospels” and their place in the history of early Christianity with Elaine Pagels.

Garry Mitchell wants to trouble the notion of this path as an unqualified good for students of color. An educator and GSAS PhD student who studies college prep school programs, Mitchell says that these initiatives often don't dispel the racist paradigm of twice as good, they institutionalize it. The cost to participants can be a loss of community and sense of themselves as they exist outside of majority white spaces. The cost to society, he says, is the perpetuation of systemic inequality. 

Speaking to these questions are New York Times executive editor, Joe Kahn, AB ’87, AM ’90, and Danielle Allen, PhD ’01, Harvard's James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Their conversation, which took place at the Harvard Club of New York City last November, is moderated by Columbia University School of Journalism Professor Michael Schudson, AM ’70, PhD ’76. 

In this episode of the Colloquy podcast, Harvard Medical School Professor Anne Becker, PhD ’90, one of the country’s leading experts on eating disorders, talks about why the illnesses are so deadly, why they so often go undiagnosed, and what we can do to help friends or family members who may be suffering. 

This month, we discuss the history and state of our democracy with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar. Professor Keyssar’s books include The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which was named the best book in U.S. history for the year 2001 by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In 2004 and 2005, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections. Keyssar's latest book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? looks at that institution’s persistence despite several attempts throughout history to reform it. Alex Keyssar got his PhD from GSAS in 1977.

So, can anything be done about the problem in a society as politically polarized as ours? David Hemenway, one of the country's leading experts on guns and public health, says yes. If we set aside our prejudices and assumptions and focus on areas of common concern, we can work together to improve safety and public health—even in places where gun rights are sacrosanct. But Hemenway says we shouldn't stop there. There's plenty to be done in states like Massachusetts, where guns are more strictly regulated.

David Hemenway is a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The author of five books, Professor Hemenway, has written widely on injury prevention, including firearms, violence, and suicide. He headed the pilot for the National Violent Death Reporting System, which provides detailed and comparable information on suicide and homicide. In 2012, he was recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the 20 most influential injury and violence professionals over the past 20 years. Professor Hemenway got his PhD from GSAS in 1974. 

Jamie Marsella, a Harvard PhD candidate in the history of science, says that in historical terms, Miller's distinction doesn't make much difference. Looking back over a century to the Progressive Era, she finds that maternal and reproductive health policies were driven by racial imperatives. President Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, saw declining birth rates among white people as the country's greatest problem and spoke publicly about, quote, "race suicide.” This month on Colloquy, Marsella discusses the American ideal of motherhood, its racial overtones, and its echoes in the renewed wrangling over reproductive freedom epitomized by the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. 

This month on Colloquy: race and the pursuit of the American dream in suburban schools with Dr. Natasha Warikoo. 

This month on Colloquy, we're taking a deep dive into the graduate student mental health crisis with Dr. Emily Bernstein, PhD ’20, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Digital Mental Health. In 2018 while working toward her doctorate, Dr. Bernstein and her cohorts piloted a successful group intervention for GSAS students that’s still offered today. Since then, she and her colleagues have published research on ways to address the increasing need for mental health services. She talks about that work, the challenges faced by graduate students, and why she thinks our smartphones could become an important vehicle for delivering mental health care. 

So why were the quakes all but forgotten by the time of the Civil War? What caused them and could they happen again? 

Joining us to discuss this long-overlooked disaster in this Earth Month episode of Colloquy is Dr. Conevery Valencius, author of the recent book The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes. Dr. Valencius is a professor of history at Boston College and has taught at Washington University, Saint Louis, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She's been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Debonair Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Dr. Valencius is currently working on a book about earthquakes and the modern energy sector. She received a Ph.D. in the History of Science from GCIS in 1998. 

Engaging Dr. Hill in discussion is Graham Allison,  the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Allison is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision-making. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Professor Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." He received his PhD from GSAS in 1968.

Next on Colloquy: Russia, Ukraine, and avoiding WWIII.