2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Katherine Venturo-Conerly is on a mission to revolutionize access to effective mental health care—particularly for young people. Her research project, "Tackling the Global Youth Mental Health Challenge: Lessons from Psychotherapy Research in Kenya," focuses on creating and implementing effective, accessible mental health interventions for children and adolescents in multiple countries, with a particular focus on Kenya. As co-founder of Kenya’s Shamiri Institute with her Harvard College classmate Tom Osborn, Venturo-Conerly is developing a collaborative and sustainable approach to bridge the mental health care gap around the world. In this talk delivered in April 2025 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Venturo-Conerly talks about creating, testing, and implementing effective, accessible mental health interventions for children and adolescents across multiple contexts.

The US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard made it illegal for colleges and universities to use race as a factor in choosing their incoming classes. As a result, schools are working harder than ever to recruit and admit first-generation and lower-income applicants to preserve the diversity of their student bodies. But the Boston University sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack says American higher education wasn’t ready for the diversity they were recruiting before the Court's ruling—and they're still not ready now. His research shows how schools often fail to acknowledge the inequities of class and race that students bring to campus from home. The solution? Pop the campus bubble and begin looking at the ways that place impacts the challenges low-income and first-generation students face.

Anthony Abraham Jack is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center at Boston University, where he is an associate professor of higher education leadership at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, among others. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, earned awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Eastern Sociological Association and was named one of National Public Radio’s Best Books of 2019. His second book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality, and Students Pay the Price, won the PROSE Award in Education Theory and Practice from the Association of American Publishers. Anthony Abraham Jack received his PhD in sociology from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 2016.

Imagine your doctor could precisely predict your personal risk of disease, diagnose the cause of illness with pinpoint accuracy when it did occur, and develop an effective treatment plan with low side effects the first time, rather than through trial and error. That's the promise of personalized medicine. And it would be a revolution in healthcare.

At the heart of this vision is the notion that our genetic differences have a big impact on how each of us responds to disease and treatment. To realize a future of personalized medicine then, we need to understand and investigate just how genetic variations, including mutations, contribute to illness and respond to doctors' attempts to address it. But how can scientists do that efficiently with a human genome that spans about three billion base pairs of DNA across tens of thousands of genes?

That's where the work of PhD student Dawn Chen comes in. A student in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology Program, Chen was named a recipient of the 2025 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Achievement and Exceptional Research in the Biological Sciences, presented by Seattle's Fred Hutch Cancer Center.

With her colleagues in the lab of Harvard professor Fei Chen, Dawn Chen is developing an innovative gene-editing tool known as helicase-assisted continuous editing, or HACE. A breakthrough in genetic engineering, supported in part by funds from the National Institutes of Health, HACE makes edits to specific genes, allowing researchers to investigate how genetic variations contribute to disease. The technique could lead to the identification of specific mutations that influence the effectiveness of drugs and therapies for illnesses like cancer.