Cancer turned her into a scientist
Diagnosis transformed Mary Cipperman ’26 into a hyperproductive student researcher with diverse interests in physics, medicine, and AI
Series
Commencement 2026
After failing out and dropping out, Navy vet set to graduate
A few months shy of 30, Richard Glazunov is poised to graduate from Harvard College with a degree in government.
Finding his rhythm between classroom and stage
At Harvard, drummer Raghav Mehrotra ’26 built knowledge about the music industry — and a sizable social media following.
‘It was a deliberate career pivot’
Now she’s pursuing ideas about climate finance and technology developed at Harvard Extension School.
On the path to research, teach, and curate
Working with the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture was formative for integrative biology concentrator Lauren Bartel
Lacrosse teammates, friends felt same call to military service
At Harvard, Francisco Cortes and Owen Guest also shared interest in history and commitment to their athletic regimen
Looking for Ireland’s ‘invisible people’
Andrew Bair is set to graduate from Harvard Griffin GSAS in May 2026 with a Ph.D. in anthropology. He talks about his research challenging the accepted chronology of Irish settlement in the Middle Ages, how his study of archaeology and computer science at Columbia led him eventually to Harvard Griffin GSAS, and about growing up in a curious family and literally growing out of his dream of being an astronaut.
Shaping the world his granddaughters will inherit
At 68, he earned a master’s in sustainability at Harvard Extension School.
Their senior project? Smart glasses for the visually impaired
Electrical engineering concentrators offered a sleek, low-profile navigational aid for visually impaired individuals. More specifically, their project aimed to track and alert users of low-hanging obstacles that are typically missed with a mobility cane.
From software engineer to design engineer
After three years as a Waymo software engineer, Luke Fiorante wanted a change. He’d been coding ever since he was a computer science major at Brown University, but the Vancouver native knew he could do more. Also interested in design and the arts, he decided to search for master’s programs focused on design and engineering.
Ukrainian probes the war of public opinion
When Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine in 2022, Anastasiia Pereverten was more than 5,000 miles away, studying at the University of Wyoming. From that distance, she watched a surge of support from Americans who were far removed from the conflict. “All this, so far away from Ukraine?” said Pereverten. “People were so incredibly vocal and supportive, and wanted to know more. I wanted to understand what shaped that.”
From bionic arms to machine learning researcher
Benjamin Choi built a mind-controlled bionic arm as a high school student in Virginia, and it made him realize something critical about human brains: they’re noisy. Brains constantly send out all kinds of signals regulating everything from breathing to hunger to planning one’s daily schedule. For his prosthetic to work, it needed software that could filter out the noise and recognize the signals specifically intended to manipulate the arm.
Thesis investigates AI-image bias
With artificial intelligence quickly becoming ingrained in everyday life, psychology and government double-concentrator Gauri Sood ’26 is skeptical about non-human technologies mimicking human experiences without bias.
A gene delivery system for the human heart
Engineering Design Projects (ES 100), the capstone course at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, challenges seniors to engineer a creative solution to a real-world problem. Saron Meressi's project focused on optimizing cardiac gene delivery using adeno-associated virus (AAV) technology. She specifically designed a tunable, ventricle-specific gene delivery system that enables more precise targeting within the heart.