Harvard Impact Labs has selected eight faculty from seven schools across Harvard University for the 2026-2027 Impact Lab Development Fellowship. The faculty were chosen through a competitive application process to participate in a nine-month fellowship providing them with training, coaching, and $25,000 in seed funding to develop collaborations with public and private leaders aimed at producing evidence-based, scalable solutions to social problems.
Launched in spring 2025, Harvard Impact Labs is a university-wide initiative created to strengthen the capacity of Harvard faculty to design and scientifically test solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges. The initiative provides resources, training, and opportunities for faculty to work alongside leaders in government, nonprofits, and the private sector.
The professors participating in this year’s fellowship span fields from education, law, and political science to public health, medicine, and anthropology, and seek to develop solutions to problems as diverse as the high maternal mortality rates in the U.S., and the low U.S. voting and civic participation rates, to human rights laws not keeping up with technological changes in warfare. Several tackle problems created by rapid technological changes, with the goal of ensuring that technological developments improve lives rather than harm people and increase inequality.
The eight fellows, listed below, will participate in monthly workshops co-led by Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, and Jeffrey Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and faculty co-director of Harvard Impact Labs. The workshop sessions will cover topics such as refining problem definitions, building partnerships, scaling, fundraising, and communications.
“The selected faculty come from different disciplines but share a common desire to leverage their skills and expertise to solve pressing societal problems and improve lives,” said Liebman. “I was astonished by the concrete progress the first cohort of fellows made during the nine-month fellowship — moving from early-stage concepts to exploring new research partnerships with government, nonprofit, and private-sector organizations, securing funding for their research, publishing op-eds, and launching pilots with organizations.”
“Each of these fellows is eager to learn from leaders outside of academia and work alongside them to develop and test solutions that match the scale of the problem,” said Allen. “The Fellowship provides them with the tools, coaching, and resources to accelerate the development of research partnerships with the potential to driven meaningful change.”
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