‘Learning without a net’

Summer break offers a time for a different kind of learning in labs and research centers across campus. Hundreds of Harvard College students are conducting hands-on research with faculty and making discoveries — about the material and themselves.

There are 350 undergraduates participating in the Harvard Summer Undergraduate Research Village, and another 150 are enrolled in the Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Summer Scholars program. These programs house students on campus all summer while they work alongside faculty mentors on cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines.

An additional 200 students are pursuing off-campus opportunities with support from the Harvard College Research Program.

“We are so excited to see our students ‘learning without a net’ and looking to answer questions with no known answers,” said Jonna Iacono, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

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Sam Capehart ’28

A native of Virginia, Capehart is assisting Sophia Wiesenfeld, a Ph.D. student at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in Michael Baym’s lab at Harvard Medical School. They are working on a project exploring the role plasmids play in the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Plasmids are mobile genetic elements that can transfer between bacterial cells. The DNA molecules can carry genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics and can pass those genes between different species, which is a major concern among public health experts.

“Thinking toward the future, especially for our generation, antibiotic resistance is something we have to contend with,” Capehart said. “The bacteria will always be one step ahead of us. So I think any research that we can be doing now that’s even tangentially related to antibiotic resistance could potentially save millions of lives in the coming years.”

The Baym lab, which is part of the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Microbiology, investigates whether it might be possible to combat antibiotic resistance by outcompeting it.

Since the most “fit” plasmids replicate the most and dominate within bacterial cells, the researchers are working to design a highly fit plasmid that can dominate and displace plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes.

In the lab, Capehart has been doing “competition experiments” to identify which plasmids come out on top when placed in the same bacterial environment.

Using samples from the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, she isolates bacterial plasmids and introduces two different ones into cells to observe how they behave over a nine-day period and see which takes over. She compared it to making a March Madness bracket.

“We’re hoping to determine whether plasmid hierarchy exists,” Capehart said. “Does plasmid A always win over the other plasmids, or is it more of a rock-paper-scissors system? Developing some sort of probiotic plasmid would depend pretty heavily on its ability to defeat all other plasmids. So if we can find a ‘king plasmid,’ that could point us toward mutations that we could then use in the future.”

Capehart said her experience in a wet lab environment is the perfect complement to her coursework. While she hasn’t declared a concentration yet, she’s leaning toward chemical and physical biology.

“Having the hands-on skills that I’ve been learning these past couple of weeks is invaluable,” Capehart said. “I’m a nerd. I love reading books as much as the next person, but there’s nothing quite like actually getting your hands dirty with wastewater to understand the subject.”

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Nouraldeen Ibrahim ’26

Ibrahim is a chemical and physical biology concentrator who has worked in Philip Cole’s lab at the Medical School since he was a first-year. He is studying the function of an enzyme released by Legionella pneumophila, the bacteria responsible for Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia.

Specifically, he is looking at how the enzyme functions at the molecular level. The enzyme has a role in modifying DNA, leading to a reduced response in immune response genes, which allows the pneumonia to develop.

“I have access to this enzyme, which is fairly new and not much work has been done on it,” Ibrahim said. “I’m using some tools in our lab to better understand the function of this protein. What is its shape? What does it like to interact with? Which metal ions does it contain? The goal is finding ways to curtail this enzyme and making sure that maybe in the future we could have a way to prevent the spread of this disease.”

Ibrahim first became interested in epigenetics in high school after visiting his grandmother in Egypt while she was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma.

“I began thinking about how we can look at a more targeted way at how these diseases or bacteria are able to modify your DNA before looking at the outcomes,” said Ibrahim. “Chemotherapy looks at the outcome and then tries to kill those cells. But maybe if we could look at the start and what happens in the first place to lead to these downstream effects, it could be useful.”

Ibrahim, who hopes to attend medical school in the future, said being able to work in the Cole lab as an undergraduate has been transformational.

“Getting to go hands-on in the lab, having one-on-one conversations with one of the top professors at Harvard and Brigham Women’s Hospital, and being able to gain from his expertise has been crucial for me,” Ibrahim said. “Just pipetting things, working through my own experiments, designing my experiment from scratch, having my idea that I conceptualize, and seeing outcome and data is super powerful.”

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Eunice Kim ’26

Kim’s research focuses on the history of heat mortality in Los Angeles County, particularly in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries before air conditioning became common.

Kim has been assisting David S. Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, with research for his forthcoming book on how heat waves came to be seen as public health threats. The work has required her to play detective, scouring online newspaper archives — including the 1870s Los Angeles Daily Star newspaper — to find records of major heat waves that impacted the region, and how residents responded to them.

“We’ve known about heat waves for a long time,” said Kim, who is earning a double concentration in the history of science and human developmental and regenerative biology. “It was mentioned in the Bible — people have been writing about it since basically the beginning of time. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, interestingly enough, that people realized this was going to be a re-occurring issue of experiencing heat waves, and that something had to be done in order to create better structures so people can live through heat waves and actually survive.”

For Kim, who was born and raised in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, it’s a research topic close to home, literally. She grew up experiencing heat waves in the county — sustained high temperatures lasting for two days or more — but began thinking about them more critically as a public health issue in the classroom.

“As global warming is continuing to affect the world and temperatures are continuing to rise, this will continue to become a persistent issue,” said Kim, adding that the research skills she is acquiring will help prepare her to write a senior thesis.

“I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Harvard’s archives, resources, and librarians better,” Kim said. “Hands-on research has taught me a lot about curiosity and patience. I’ve gone into this research with a spirit of inquiry and a hope to uncover unique LA heat wave narratives.”

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Charlotte Paley ’26

Paley is spending the summer researching eating disorders in the lab of Kristin Javaras, assistant professor of psychology at the Medical School. Based at McLean Hospital, Paley’s position is part of McLean’s Student Visitor Program and is funded through Harvard’s BLISS Program.

Paley, a Florida native who is concentrating in psychology with a secondary in global health and health policy, is assisting with a project aimed at investigating the accuracy of eating disorder diagnoses.

She is working under the supervision of Javaras; Jennifer Sneider, assistant director of the Javaras laboratory and assistant professor at the Medical School; and research assistant Lily Suh.

Paley’s role on the project involves reviewing descriptions of patient symptoms (with personal details carefully edited to ensure anonymity) that Javaras’ team have collected to see how well they match up against the formal criteria used to diagnose anorexia nervosa.

The goal is to evaluate the accuracy of the diagnoses in practice, to inform future assessment in both research and treatment. 

“Something I’m particularly interested in is looking at exercise behavior in the data,” Paley said. “Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have some good qualitative findings regarding exercise behavior and the ways these are manifesting across patients of different ages and genders.” 

Paley has also been helping with a neuroimaging study on binge eating that explores how social stress affects food-related decision-making in women. That work has included some data entry and putting up fliers to recruit study participants. 

“Eating disorders are pretty misunderstood and very stigmatized,” Paley said. “There’s so much shame surrounding them. Research is so important to improving outcomes and potential treatments for eating disorders, so I’m really excited about this research and hope that it makes a meaningful impact.” 

This summer offers Paley real-world experience that may contribute to her senior thesis on how weight discrimination contributes to various forms of psychopathology, including anxiety, depression, and disordered eating. She hopes to pursue medicine or public health after graduation. 

“Getting to do research this summer is an amazing opportunity,” she said. “In this current climate where research funding is being cut, it’s very meaningful that I’m getting to do this now. I’m very grateful for this opportunity.”

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Jeffrey Shi ’26

Shi is researching acoustic metamaterials in the lab of Jenny Hoffman, Clowes Professor of Science, a topic that has fascinated him since he first joined the lab as a Massachusetts high schooler.

Shi, a double concentrator in physics and English, has used acoustic metamaterials to help design and simulate a broadband high-Q resonator. The devices trap energy, like sound vibrations, and traditionally are either broadband or high-Q (quality factor), meaning they can resonate either for a long time or at multiple frequencies.

But this new design breaks that barrier, maintaining energy efficiently across a wide range of frequencies. Some potential real-world applications include energy harvesting: capturing energy from the environment and converting it to electricity.

“If you place our metamaterials under train tracks, say, and the train barrels across and the tracks shake, there’s actually a very straightforward way of harvesting the energy using our acoustic materials,” explained Shi, who was first author on a paper on the topic and presented his work at several conferences. “Because our material is both broadband and high-Q, the tracks can vibrate at different frequencies, and we can harvest that energy with high efficiency.”

Acoustic metamaterials are engineered structures designed to manipulate sound waves. Since their properties come from their geometry rather than the materials they’re composed of (they can be made of steel, plastic, or even a trash bag), they are highly tunable and scalable, according to Shi.

They can also be 3D printed quickly, which makes them ideal stand-ins for studying quantum materials, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to create.

“Part of the beauty is that there is easy tunability for whatever purpose that you need these materials for,” Shi said. “Is my layer going to be steel here, or is it going to be a sort of polymer? You can scale it so that you can hold it in your hand or so that it stretches across your entire wingspan. Either way, it’s macroscopic, and it’s easy to build.”

When he isn’t in the Hoffman lab, Shi is an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Kang-Kuen Ni, Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics.

There he assists with improving a component in a complex laser system used for experiments. His group uses these highly focused lasers to trap and manipulate individual atoms, bringing isolated atoms of different species together to study their interactions at the single-particle level.

“I feel very fortunate and grateful to have had a research experience so early, and so many resources and support and guidance from the people around me,” said Shi, who plans to pursue physics at the graduate level. “Physics research has been helpful in terms of knowing what kinds of physics I care about and what kinds of academic work I want to do in the future. I think I’ve learned a lot about myself through my research.”