Events

    Astronomy is for All of Us: Celebrating Women Astrophysicists and the History of Cosmic Discovery

    Location: 

    Harvard College Observatory Plate Stacks, 47 Concord Ave., Cambridge

    During Massachusetts STEM Week, join us for an evening celebrating remarkable women in astronomy from across the galaxy. Enjoy a dynamic lecture on exciting applications of astronomy, explore a captivating exhibition in the Great Refractor, engage in family-friendly STEM activities, and cap off the night with fall refreshments and stargazing.

    • Remarks from Professor Lisa Kewley, Director, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
    • Welcome remarks from Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, highlighting...
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    Spotlight Tour: Seeing in Art and Medicine, with Genesis Nam '24

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Genesis Nam ’24 will put visitors in the shoes of the radiologists who have participated in the Seeing in Art and Medical Imaging program, which is offered by the Harvard Art Museums in partnership with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The program promotes empathy, mindfulness, and tolerance for ambiguity in the medical community through conversations about works of art, focused on themes such as care, objectivity, and power. The stops on the tour are Shutter (2006), a glazed stoneware sculpture by Rosemarie Trockel, and an Attic grave stele, Woman dying in...

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    Seeing in Art and Medicine: A Conversation

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join us for a lively conversation about the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine and the museums’ medical humanities program that inspired it. Presenters include the program’s founders, Hyewon Hyun and David Odo, and exhibition curator Jen Thum. The talk will also include interactive segments based on the work of the program.

    Learn more and RSVP.

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    ¡Celebremos El Salvador!

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Celebrate the vibrant culture and natural history of El Salvador. Enjoy captivating folk dances by Grupo Torogoz and try hands-on activities including corn grinding and painting with cochineal insects. Go on a scavenger hunt and discover the rich heritage of animals, minerals, and artifacts from the region. Join an archaeologist for a live-streamed tour of Joya de Cerén, the Pompeii of Latin America. Take a break with Spanish Story Time, enjoy traditional Salvadoran cuisine (available for purchase), and enter a raffle to win a museum gift basket.

    All are welcome to explore,...

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    2023 Aug 25

    Her Luminous Distance: Legacies of Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard

    Repeats every week on Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday until Sun Oct 22 2023 .
    (All day)

    Location: 

    The Great Refractor, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden St., Cambridge

    The Harvard Plate Stacks is presenting a special exhibition, Her Luminous Distance: The Legacies of Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard, in the rotunda and dome of the Great Refractor at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. See Aura Satz's installation artwork installed in the historic telescope dome. Free and open to the public, the exhibition celebrates the legacy of the Women Astronomical Computers and will illuminate to audiences the various disciplines and fields of study that have been inspired by these women and the astronomical photographs that...

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    Science Spotlights

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Meet up-and-coming scientists and learn about questions at the forefront of research today in this series of short talks. Perhaps you’ll discuss how studying dog reactions help us learn about the evolution of social behavior? Maybe you’ll consider the regrowth of a microscopic worm after injury and what that can teach us about any animal cell. Will you look at how trees manage the tradeoffs of building woody tissue or look for geological evidence of Earth’s first billion years? Each Science Spotlight in the series will include several short research talks.

    Ages 10–Adults....

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    Alfred Russel Wallace Is 200!

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History in celebrating the bicentenary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s birth.

    If you are not familiar with Alfred Russel Wallace, you are not alone. Wallace (1823–1913) holds a relatively obscure place in the history of science, despite discovering the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.

    On the bicentenary of his birth and in celebration of Earth Day, the Harvard Museum of Natural History will spotlight Wallace’s contributions to our understanding of biodiversity and highlight why they are relevant...

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    National Fossil Day: More Than Dinosaurs!

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Paleontology is about more than dinosaurs! Harvard paleontologists study amazing non-dinosaur fossils including early mammals, ancient invertebrates, whales, crabs, and more! Meet members of the Stephanie E. Pierce Lab for Vertebrate Paleontology and the Ortega-Hernández Lab for Invertebrate Paleontology to see their favorite fossils, learn about their research, and ask them your questions. See what new techniques and technologies are being used to study fossils, learn what fossils can teach us about evolution, and hear about current research projects. Join us to celebrate National...

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    The Descendants (A Novel)

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Ladee Hubbard is a writer whose most recent novel is “The Rib King” (Amistad, 2021). In this lecture, she will discuss her current project, a novel that examines the implications of the ways in which Black people in the United States have historically been represented as an internal threat to both public health and safety, placing the 1980s War on Drugs in dialogue with the larger history of African Americans being used in drug trials and medical experiments.

    ...

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    How Beer Made Kings in Early Egypt

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    The remains of a 5000-year-old brewery found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos are providing insights into the relationship between large-scale beer production and the development of kingship in Egypt. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Abydos brewery produced beer on a truly industrial scale—something unparalleled in early Egypt. Matthew Adams will share findings from recent excavations at the brewery and will consider it in context as part of a broad pattern of royal activity at the site that served to define the very nature of kingship at the beginning of Egypt’s history...

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    How We Incarcerate Young People: A Conversation about Policy and Neuroscience

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Across the United States, children under the age of 18 can be tried as adults in criminal court. Although the practice is condemned by international law, we are the only country in the world that sentences young people to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the same time, recent developments in neuroscience research demonstrate that the human brain is not fully developed until after the age of 25.

    This program will consider the ways we punish young people in the American criminal legal system and how our policies could be reformed. We will bring together a...

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    The Popularization of Doubt: Scientific Literacy & Alternative Forms of Knowledge in the Soviet Union after World War II

    Location: 

    Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

    Alexey Golubev, assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston, is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows.

    This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in...

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    Enduring Unethical Lessons from the Past: Learning from the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

    Location: 

    Harvard Medical School—Online

    The United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is used as a case study of the exploitation of communities of color at the hands of medical professionals. What are the lessons learned and how far has medical ethics really come in terms of the treatment of Black and other communities of color? Lillie Head, president of Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, and Riggins R. Earl, Jr...

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    Diving with a Purpose: A Fifteen-Year Odyssey

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Diving with a Purpose is an organization dedicated to the documentation and protection of African slave-trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans. Jay Haigler and Albert José Jones will share a documentary on the organization’s work and recent discoveries. They will discuss the importance of submerged heritage resources in advancing the fields of maritime archaeology and ocean conservation and the need for a better understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and its global, cultural, and social-economic impact on society.

    ...

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    National Fossil Day

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

    Celebrate National Fossil Day—a celebration organized by the National Park Service—by taking a closer look at museum fossils with Harvard paleontologists. What can we see on ancient seafloors? How do modern animals help us understand extinct animals? What fossils still amaze scientists? What is it like to be a practicing paleontologist? Bring your curiosity and questions to this online event for all ages!

    Learn more about and RSVP for National...

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    Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier

    Location: 

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

    The first person who will set foot on Mars is alive right now. We believe this, but even if we're wrong we know the first crew to arrive there will look nothing like the ones that landed on the Moon fifty years ago.

    Our world has changed for the better, and ASTRONAUTS tells the story of the women who built this better world. The main character and narrator is Mary Cleave, an astronaut you may not have heard of. It's not because so many people have been to space; only a few hundred have! It’s because this graphic novel isn’t about fame. No astronaut you'll ever meet took the...

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    Wonderful Cambrian Beasts

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

    Earth is home to a vast diversity of organisms that collectively define the modern biosphere. How did this diversity come to be? Javier Ortega-Hernández will discuss his approach to answering this question by studying organisms that lived more than half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Period (485–541 million years ago). By focusing on the earliest-known animals—some of the most versatile to ever exist—Ortega-Hernández aims to reconstruct the early evolutionary history of major animal groups and contribute to our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity.

    ...

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    Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of

    Location: 

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

    Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."

    It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...

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    The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe

    Location: 

    Online Event

    Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet empire, the West faces a new era of East-West tensions. Any vision of a modern Russia integrated into the world economy and aligned in peaceful partnership with a reunited Europe has abruptly vanished. Two opposing narratives vie to explain the strategic future of Europe, one geopolitical and one economic, and both center on the same resource: natural gas. In The Bridge, Thane Gustafson, an expert on Russian oil and gas, argues that the political rivalries that capture the lions share of media attention...

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