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Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study welcomed its 26th cohort of fellows, who will undertake interdisciplinary research projects ranging from investigating the importance of human connection in an age of AI to studying indigenous birchbark bookmaking as a form of environmental protest, this fall.
Selected from a pool of over 1,600 applicants, Radcliffe’s 51 fellows will pursue a range of research and creative projects across the arts, social sciences, sciences, and humanities during the 2025-26 school year.
The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program “annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and public intellectuals who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the Institute,” according to its website.
Radcliffe College’s fifth president, Mary Bunting, originally designed the fellowship program to support female artists and scholars. The program now accepts scholars of all gender identities.
In a press release announcing the fellows in May, Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin underscored the significance of the fellows’ interdisciplinary projects.
“In these uncertain times, I am more convinced than ever before that Radcliffe’s interdisciplinary approach is crucial to creating the transformative research, scholarship, writing, art, and, ultimately, societal change that we need,” Brown-Nagin said.
“We welcome this new cohort in the firm belief that bringing outstanding individuals together — with their disparate backgrounds, training, perspectives, approaches, and ideologies — and creating an environment that supports meaningful discourse is how we push the limits of human knowledge and understanding,” she added.
Of the 51 fellows, 11 are pursuing a project related to climate change and five are working on creative works. Many of the fellows’ projects span multiple disciplines.
Radcliffe fellow Rachna Reddy will study wild Ugandan chimpanzees’ social and emotional development during adolescence and write a coming-of-age novel from a teenage chimpanzee’s perspective.
“It’s telling a true story about chimpanzees I know and real events in their lives,” she said. “It’s a way to convey some of their psychological experiences that are fictionalized but scientifically informed.”
Reddy described the Institute as “a really special place to create community and bring ideas together.”
“There’s so many threats in the world to science and art,” she said. “It feels really special to get to be in a place where there’s just a ton of openness.”
Radcliffe fellow Aaron Meisner is using recently released data from the world’s largest camera to search for a rumored ninth planet in the Milky Way. The dataset contains multiple tens of trillions of pixels, and Meisner has recruited around 200,000 people online to “crowdsource” the data analysis.
“In today’s world, it seems like a great thing to try to impart data analysis skills or critical thinking skills or scientific reasoning skills to the general public,” he said. “I think this is one fun way to do it at a large scale.”
On top of pursuing their individual projects, Radcliffe fellows meet each week to discuss each other’s works. According to Meisner, the best part of the fellowship has been hearing about “the incredible breadth of disciplines that are covered by all the other fellows, and learning more about these different areas that I’m not normally exposed to.”
Radcliffe fellow Fowzia Karimi is completing a 13-year project to collect and illustrate Afghan fairy tales in watercolor.
“The tales have not survived these many decades of war intact,” she wrote in a statement. “My project is as much about what has been lost, as about what endures.”
“I hope to honor the many storytellers I’ve interviewed—most of them women, many of them no longer alive—by setting down their stories and voices in literary form,” she added.
Karimi said that her favorite part about the Radcliffe Institute is its “multidisciplinary environment.”
“There are endless opportunities for connection across the fellowship and the greater Harvard and Cambridge communities,” she wrote.
“The only ‘difficulty,’ if you can call it that, is that there isn’t enough time to take advantage of all that the Radcliffe Fellowship has to offer,” Karimi added.
—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.
—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.
