Featured series 
Experience
Scholars at Harvard tell their stories in the Experience series.
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Nation & World‘I wanted to make a difference in America’
Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’ sounded an alarm we still haven’t answered
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Science & Tech‘The scientist is not in the business of following instructions.’
George Whitesides became a giant of chemistry by keeping it simple
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Work & EconomyStudying ‘why women are interesting, and men are boring’
Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin recounts pioneering career spent tracing major part of U.S. workforce, economy hidden in plain sight
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Campus & Community‘I realized that I couldn’t say no — not because of personal ambition, but given the moment.’
Harvard’s 29th president shares memories and lessons from his early life and career.
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Campus & Community‘If you stay the same in everything you do as things around you are changing, eventually you’re going to hit a wall. You just have to adapt and evolve and change.’
Head football coach Tim Murphy has led the Crimson to nine Ivy League championships, three unbeaten seasons, and a 186-83 record.
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Campus & Community‘I’ve never done work that I was not interested in. That is a very good reason to go on.’
Indian economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, talks about his life as the son of distinguished Hindu academics and how the inequities all around him in colonial India of the 1930s would shape his intellectual destiny.
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‘I wanted to warn future social movements that listening only to one’s own side can generate dangerous amounts of unrealism’
Jane Mansbridge, one of the world’s leading scholars of democratic theory talks about her “jagged trajectory” toward success.
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‘I developed a sense of the enormous, great luck in managing to survive, giving me a strong feeling that I had an obligation to pay it forward’
As he prepares to retire after 52 years, Harvard Law School’s Laurence H. Tribe retraces his journey from awkward immigrant math whiz to leading constitutional law scholar and admired professor.
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‘When you see death all the time, you go into this mode of increased energy and sharper focus’
Pioneering AIDS researcher Myron “Max” Essex was one of the first to propose that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS.
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‘Integrating oral health and primary care can really help the health of this nation and of the world’
Harvard School of Dental Medicine’s dean of 28 years, Bruce Donoff, steps down in January. He discusses his years in leadership and life lessons learned along the way.
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‘To be horrified by inequality and early death and not have any kind of plan for responding — that would not work for me’
In the Experience series, Paul Farmer talks Partners In Health, “Harvard-Haiti,” and making the lives of the poor the fight of his life.
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‘I was confused and inspired. I wanted to do everything’
The first woman to earn tenure at the GSD and the first to chair the department of architecture has made a career of making statements.
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‘The greatest gift you can have is a good education, one that isn’t strictly professional’
The professor who put forward the idea of multiple intelligences talks about his adventures in learning for the Experience series.
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‘What the hell — why don’t I just go to Harvard and turn my life upside down?’
Family, history, and the 1960s all helped to shape the higher ed leader, but it was illness that urged her forward.
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‘There was just no way I was going to do what everyone else did’
Interview with Professor Pamela Silver as part of the Experience series.
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‘There were just so many things that I was curious about’
Interview with Professor Joseph Nye as part of the Experience series.
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‘You can’t let your emotions overtake you so much that you can’t do the work’
Interview with Professor Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard Law School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as part of the Experience series.
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‘I had the conviction that my ideas were correct’
Interview with Nobel Prize winner Martin Karplus as part of the Experience series.
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‘If you can stay present, that’s a better place to be’
Interview with women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith as part of the Experience series.
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‘If you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying as hard as you could be’
Interview with geneticist George Church as part of the Experience series.
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‘People want politics to be about big things’
Interview with Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, as part of the Experience series.
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‘A completely new life was beckoning’
Interview with Gerald Holton as part of the Experience series.
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‘I had this extraordinary sense of liberation’
Interview with Dean Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School as part of the Experience series.
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‘It seemed to me miraculous that you could actually hear Shakespeare or Keats speaking from the page’
Interview with Professor Helen Vendler as part of the Experience series.
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‘I had the advantage of disadvantage’
Interview with Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich as part of the Experience series.
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‘So that represented my own little rebellion’
Interview with Professor Stephen Greenblatt as part of the Experience series.
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‘Physics was paradise’
Interview with Professor Melissa Franklin as part of the Experience series.
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‘I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what might go wrong’
Interview with Professor Walter Willett as part of the Experience series.
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‘What could be more interesting than how the mind works?’
Interview with Professor Steven Pinker as part of the Experience series.
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‘I have always been temperamentally wired to carry on’
Interview with Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as part of the Experience series.
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‘My life was going to have to deal with issues of social injustice’
Interview with Dean Martha Minow as part of the Experience series.
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‘Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression’
E.O. Wilson has devoted his life to a better understanding of the workings of the natural world and to sharing his research and insights with Harvard students.
