Presenter: Chloe Chapin
Date: Monday, June 26
Time: 12:00 – 1:30pm

Come take a tour of the Harvard Libraries available to pre-college students during their time on campus! You'll explore the quiet reading rooms, learn how to access the stacks and browse books, and learn about the vast history of Harvard's libraries.

Instructor: Brittany Petros
Date: Tuesday, June 26, 2023
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Format: In-person

The advent of genetic sequencing has fundamentally altered the way that we study viruses and other infectious pathogens. Here, I describe the ways that genomic tools have revealed insights into viral transmission and the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). In describing my research, I will also highlight the occasionally surprising ways in which knowledge and skills from other disciplines-- including mathematics, statistics, and medicine-- inform my biological research.

Instructor: Jalen Benson
Date: Monday, June 26
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pmET
Format: Virtual

We all want to change the world and promote equity in the fields we work in. You are future doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs. lawyers, and all kinds of leaders. You will have so many skills or expertise but what can you do with that? You have drive, passion, and determination, but what does it look like to actually make changes in the field you care about? Ever wanted to know what it would look like change the United States?

In this session we are going to take examples from medicine, education, and other areas to talk about what it could look like to marry your passion with policy to actually change the world. This is geared towards pre-meds, pre- government, and anyone who wants to make an impact on the world!

Instructor: Ryan Ritraj
Date: Monday, June 26, 2023
Time: 3:30PM – 5:00 PM ET
Format: Virtual

This presentation will offer an interdisciplinary approach to the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS. It will explore the biology of the virus, the pharmacology of treatments, the history of the epidemic, the sociology of stigma against gender/sexual and racial minority communities, medical management and prevention, and the public health considerations of managing the epidemic.

Instructor: Apoorva Sehgal
Date: Monday, June 26, 2023 
Time: 1:30pm - 3:00pm ET
Format: In-person

Hey, are you interested in the latest updates in education technology (ed-tech)? Want to learn how online learning, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are changing the way we learn? Join our presentation on ed-tech updates, where you'll discover the latest trends and innovations in this exciting field. You'll also learn how you can break into ed-tech and explore career opportunities in this growing industry. Don't miss out on this chance to stay ahead of the curve and transform the way you think about education!

Instructor: Sparsha Saha
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

Our global food system faces many threats, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and land-system changes. This session will take you through the top peer-reviewed research on this topic, with a particular focus on a landmark research paper published in the journal, Science (Poore and Nemecek, 2018). What is food’s impact on climate change? What is driving this impact? In what other ways does our food system impact other critical planetary boundaries like biodiversity loss, water use, land use, and biogeochemical cycles? Students will also be exposed to how food systems interact with the zoonotic transmission of infectious diseases (pandemics), including the growing dangers from antimicrobial resistance.

Instructor: Danielle Langford
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Time: 12:00 – 1:30pm ET
Format: In-person

This presentation takes a deep dive into the world of business and kindness. While preparing for the business world, let us remember one of the prerequisites; kindness. It is the currency that moves cultures, by placing people over profits. Find out how, with this dynamic presentation.

Instructor: Thomas Ponniah, Ph.D.
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Time: 1:30PM – 3:00PM ET
Format: In-person

Global Great Books: studying the classics from around the world. The goal of the presentation is educate students on the value of studying the classical "Great Books" and of studying them cross-culturally (Greece, India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Mayan civilization). A study of the major texts of the ancient world increases students’ imaginative capacity as well as their skills as potential global citizens. The presentation will begin by asking a key pedagogical question: are their texts that all students should study? Traditionally many have argued that students study the great books of Western civilization. In contrast, over the past generation scholars have proposed that students should they be encouraged to research diverse texts that include the contributions of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized groups. The discussion will examine each side of the debate while proposing alternative ways of achieving both the universality of the traditional with the diversity of the contemporary world.

Presenter: Matthew Reichert
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm ET
Format: In-person

In this small workshop, students explore a workhorse tool of modern scientific practice: the clinical study. Students learn why randomized control trials are considered the “gold standard” for scientific evidence through an in-class simulation of a clinical trial with human subjects, including recruitment via random sampling, random assignment, compliance, dropouts, and missing data. Students learn the life cycle of a clinical study in the real world, from case study to pilot to RCT to implementation study, and about the many hands make an RCT work, from principle investigators, to project coordinators, to research assistants, to recruiters, to statisticians, to grant writers, to peer reviewers.

Presenter: Zachary Stuart
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Format: In-person

This is a hands-on, interactive workshop exploring the foundations of improv Theater and how they can help us with the skills of public speaking. Whether it be in a job interview, giving a presentation to an audience or sharing your own narrative, improvisation offers many ways to help us structure our ideas, connect with our audience and go with the flow. Trough a series of activities we will explore some of these creative tools and apply them to our practical goals.

Instructor: Jessie Bullock
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Time:5:30pm - 7:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

Across the world, citizen dissatisfaction with poor public services, high corruption, and crime highlight the difficulty of holding politicians accountable to the voters who put them in office. Re-elections are meant to give voters a tool to reward or punish incumbents for their behavior in office, and government oversight agencies like auditing institutions are designed to police politicians from within. Despite this range of methods for keeping politicians accountable, why is there still so much corruption and impunity within government? Why don’t politicians provide the policies and public services people seem to want? This workshop will introduce students to political science research on political accountability, focusing on the main constraints citizens face in keeping their politicians accountable, such as access to information, the collective action problem, and weak institutions, and highlighting new research that offers hope for how these challenges can be overcome.

Instructor: Chloe Chapin
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2023
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm ET
Format: In-person

Gender may be both unstable and ongoing, but it is also an important element of how people identify and communicate their sense of self. As gender binaries break down, it can be challenging to understand how best to communicate your own evolving gender expression, or how to read other people’s presentations of gender. In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore when and how to communicate what pronouns other people should use for you, practical issues like gendered bathrooms, and how to advocate for a gender-inclusive campus. We’ll also address how to ask someone else about their gender identity or pronouns, what to do if you accidentally mis-gender someone, and how to be a good gender-inclusive ally.

Instructor: Matthew Reichert
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2023
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Format: In-person 

This small workshop exposes students to art, literature, music, and other forms of cultural production from authoritarian settings, and teaches about the regulatory administration that governed this work. Using the Soviet Union as an animating case study, but with comparisons around the world, we consider post-revolutionary artistic pluralism and the avant-garde, state-promoted tastes under totalitarianism, and the emergence of apathy and anti-politics in mature authoritarian regimes. Students are asked to respond to a range of primary sources, from manifestos, to architectural plans, to clothing design, to films, to folk ballads.

Instructor: Britta Clark
Date: Friday, June 30, 2023
Time: 9:30am - 11:00am ET
Format: In-Person

This session will give an overview of some contemporary philosophical debates related to the climate crisis, including debates over burden sharing, intergenerational justice, and new technologies such as solar geoengineering and negative emissions. In doing so, this session will make the case that climate change is a fundamentally ethical problem--not an economic or a technical one and introduce some of the tools that philosophers can bring to the table to address the climate challenge.

Instructor: Blake Smith
Date: Monday , July 3, 2023 
Time: 9:30am - 11:00am ET
Format: In-person

In the last 10 years, cancer immunotherapy has fundamentally changed the landscape of cancer treatment for patients with metastatic melanoma and B cell leukemia and lymphoma. The central goal of cancer immunotherapy is to harness and reinvigorate a patient’s own immune system to recognize and attack their tumors, which has resulted in countless cancer cures using modalities like monoclonal antibodies (a-PD1, a-CTLA4) and chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy. However, many solid tumors (aside from melanoma) have yet to benefit from this form of revolutionary therapy and we are only scratching the surface of the types of approaches that can be used to reawaken the immune system. This academic exploration will delve into the background on how powerful this approach can be, what current therapies are used clinically (FDA-approved), and what types of scientific approaches are actively being taken to further increase the number of patients who can benefit from this form of revolutionary therapy.

Presenter: Stephen McKean
Date: Monday, July 3, 2023
Time: 1:30 – 3:00pm ET
Format: In-Person

Many people are surprised to hear that there is research happening in mathematics. What questions do modern mathematicians try to answer, and why are these questions important? In this presentation, we will survey the broad landscape of research math, along with some examples of how math connects to other areas of science. Our narrative will be built around three forms of beauty in math: certainty, generality, and similarity.

Presenter: Amelia Thompson
Date: Monday , July 3, 2023
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

This presentation will explore an initiative that tackles gender inequality and period poverty locally and around the world through a five-pronged approach that includes advocacy and direct services support.

Instructor: Simge Topaloglu
Date: Wednesday, July 5, 2023   
Time: 1:30pm - 3:00pm ET
Format: In-person

How old are you? When you read this question, a certain number (or rather, the linguistic label that your language uses to refer to that number) pops up in your mind. Yet, if you were a speaker of Pirahã (a language spoken in the Amazon basin), this question would not be answerable for you, since Pirahã is famous for lacking number words (instead, it uses imprecise terms like ‘one’, ‘few’ or ‘many’ to talk about quantities). Even in languages that do have number words, one often finds striking differences in how the numbers are encoded. For example, the English number term ‘twenty-six’ does not reveal the internal compositional structure of this number, but in Korean 26 would be called ‘two-ten-six’ and thereby clearly show that this number is composed of two sets of 10 and six units of 1. 

It has been claimed that this cross-linguistic variation may have significant effects on how people learn math concepts. As a matter of fact, comparative developmental studies of children who speak languages with number words that either reflect or obscure the decimal numeral system enables us to see how language can help (or hinder) children’s math learning. Anthropological studies on languages without number words, on the other hand, investigate whether speakers of these languages show any differences in mathematical reasoning, allowing us to see whether and to what extent our mathematical knowledge is shaped by our linguistic knowledge. The emerging picture about the relationship between language and number is both complex and interesting; and this presentation will explore the vast body research on this topic, as well as how scientists reason about and devise ways to investigate these questions about human cognition.

Instructor: Julie Anne Weaver
Date: Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Time: 5:30pm - 7:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

What shapes the ways that people engage in politics in the Global South? And how does this ultimately impact countries’ prospects for economic development? Drawing on insights from both political science and economics, this workshop introduces students to the latest research trends on political behavior and the political economy of development. Cases will be drawn from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, and will cover topics like corruption, vote buying, participatory governance, social movements and activism, and barriers to equal political participation.

Instructor: Margaret Rennix
Date: Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

Immigration has become a divisive topic in the U.S., as thousands of people fleeing violence and poverty in Central America arrive at the southern border each year. And yet, few people know much about what happens to immigrants at the border, or within the immigration system more broadly. Who are the people coming to the U.S. border? What has motivated their journeys? Once they arrive, what happens to them? This interactive discussion will orient participants to facts about immigration at the U.S. southern border, focusing specifically on asylum seekers and the legal restrictions they navigate. Students will learn about the conditions immigrants encounter in detention and the challenges they must face to apply for asylum. This event is meant to be collaborative and informative, and participants are encouraged to bring questions and think deeply about the ethics of why and how we limit people’s movement.

Instructor: Ashley Nunes
Date:Thursday, July 6, 2023
Time: 9:30am - 11:00amET
Format: In-person

Famed Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter noted that economic progress is tied to innovation. This process of 'creative destruction,' rests upon destroying old ways of doing business and replacing them with new and improved methods. Invention also plays a role in increasing global wealth, as new discoveries spur a range of improvements across many aspects of societal living standards. Consequently, both innovation and invention can help address global challenges, most notably population aging, climate change and global terrorism. This talk explores the consequences of innovation and invention and highlights the potential range that technology has to improve and complicate the economic status quo.

Instructor: Yash Rana
Date: Thursday, July 6, 2023 
Time: 12:00pm  - 1:30pm
Format: In-person

Biological materials, unlike their engineered counterparts, are unique since they are not built top-down based on a blueprint but bottom-up following the laws of physics. What's more is that, unlike non-living machines, they produce their own energy and transform their physical shape depending on their biological function. In this talk, I will share how physicists study biological self-organization using experiments, simulations and theory and how the study of rules of assembly of biological material may help us engineer dynamic functional materials for use in industry and biomedical applications.

Presenter: Ashley Nunes
Date: Thursday, July 6, 2023 
Time: 1:30pm - 3:00pm ET
Format: In-person

Technological advances are changing modern workplace. This talk examines some of these changes, focusing on the medical, financial and service industries. It culminates by asking a simple question: What will the jobs of the future look like? What skill sets will these jobs demand? And most importantly, will society win or lose as a result of technological progress?

Presenter: David Vasquez
Date: Wednesday, July 6, 2023
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Format: Virtual

The global economic outlook demands organizations to optimize costs and improve productivity. Meanwhile, employees are gaining leverage on how, where and why they work or choose an employer. Data analytics provide opportunities to understand how employees' needs can actually be drivers of organizational transformation and optimization. Correlating variables and predicting outcomes are some of the techniques analysts and researchers can utilize to reveal new ways of working and leading.