Colloquy

Fail fast, fail frequently, and learn from it. That's the mantra adopted by many Silicon Valley firms in recent years. Fine. But would you tell that to your emergency room doctor for someone who's managing your retirement funds or the pilot of your next flight?

 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. 

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent, they’re everywhere, and they're probably bad for you. PFAS are probably bad for you. Some of the detrimental health effects associated with the chemical compounds include liver disease, decreased fertility and hypertension in pregnant women, immune and developmental effects in children including decreased antibody response to vaccines, and certain organ cancers. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, scientist Heidi Pickard, PhD '24, uncovers the prevalence of PFAS, as well as their impact on the environment and health.

You’re being tested. You don’t know the criteria used to determine your score—or even your results. The test is being administered not by a human teacher or moderator, but by machines. And it’s going on 24 hours a day, every day of your life. Harvard Griffin GSAS historian Juhee Kang traces the emergence of the obsession with mass-data collection in the early 20th century.

As a member of the "people operations" (human resources) staff at Google in the mid-2010s, Harvard Griffin GSAS historian of science Tina Wei was struck by how many perks employees received in the office: door-to-door shuttle service to work, fitness classes, massages, and pantries stocked with snacks, to name just a few. The company even offered a meditation program—with its own branding worked in. In this talk delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Wei argues that, while physiological research on bodily fatigue was originally used to support calls for better protection of US laborers’ safety, over time views of fatigue as a mental issue gave employers an excuse to avoid investing in improvements to working conditions.

Clare Lamman is part of a team of astrophysicists using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map as many as 50 million galaxies. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Lamman describes her distinctive contribution to this effort—gauging the “intrinsic alignment” of galaxies to better understand the universe and how it evolves. 

Who cares for babies while their mothers are incarcerated? How stable are these households? And how does being exposed to a mother's incarceration in utero impact child development? These are the questions Harvard Griffin GSAS social scientist Bethany Kotlar set out to answer in her research. Combining her experience working with these families and high-quality social science research methods, Kotlar goes beyond the mother-infant dyad to assess the mother-infant-caregiver triad unique to this population. 

Humanity generated over one septillion bits of data this past year alone. All that information takes energy to transmit. Lots of energy. In fact, data-associated technology could account for up to 20 percent of global energy production by 2030. Using light at the nanoscale level, physicist Dylan Renaud thinks he may have a way to meet the almost limitless need for information while meeting the planet’s need for sustainable practices. 

Like the poetry of his fellow Latin Americans, the scholarship of Mauro Lazarovich, PhD '24, is not only humanist but also humanitarian. “I wanted to make a contribution to the humanities by saying that literature and art have something to bring to the table when we are talking about refugees,” he says. “And not only literature in general but specifically Latin American literature.” In this talk, delivered at the 2024 Harvard Horizons Symposium, Lazarovich shines a light on the experience of the stateless—and the writers and artists who brought those “erased” by governments and bureaucracies back into view through their creative work.

In advance of Juneteenth 2024, we speak with University of Texas Professor Shirley Thompson, PhD '01, author of the forthcoming book No More Auction Block for Me, about how the experience of being treated as property has shaped the way that African Americans understand and relate to property themselves. Acknowledging the trauma of racism and white supremacy, Professor Thompson looks at the ways that community, creativity, and resilience enabled Black folk to assert their humanity in the face of objectification. 

If you're one of the 32 percent of US adults who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression last year, your doctor or mental health care provider may have recommended you learn meditation to help manage your stress. But how exactly does this age-old practice change the brain? This month on Colloquy, Richard Davidson, PhD '76, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses his decades of research on meditation and dispels myths about how it works—and when, where, and how it can be done.