Centers & Initiatives
We are closely linked with a variety of multidisciplinary and innovative education and research institutes, centers, and initiatives.
Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment
The Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment is a research program focused on China’s atmospheric environment, energy system, and economy, collaborating with researchers at Chinese universities and across the schools of Harvard. It conducts interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed studies related to air pollution and greenhouse gases in China, from root causes in the energy demands to power its economy, to the chemistry and transport of pollutants in the atmosphere, to their impacts on public health, to policies to protect air quality and limit climate change. It is based at SEAS and receives major support from the Harvard Global Institute.
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC)
The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Harvard is one of eleven such centers sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Center is the focus of interdisciplinary research at the University.
The participants of the MRSEC are drawn from five areas, including SEAS; Chemistry and Chemical Biology (Chemistry), Physics; Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS); and the Medical School (HMS).
The center is organized into three Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGS): IRG 1: Multiscale Mechanics of Films and Interfaces; IRG 2: Engineering Materials and Techniques for Biological Studies at Cellular Scales; and IRG 3: Interface-Mediated Assembly of Soft Materials.
Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for Quantum Optics (MPHQ)
MPHQ aims to foster research and education in quantum optical science. We support interdisciplinary research and educational activities in fundamental and applied sciences involving light-matter interactions, ultra-cold matter, quantum sensing, metrology, quantum control, and new, related interfaces with chemistry, biology, and information science.
Harvard Quantitative Biology (QBio)
Harvard Quantitative Biology (QBio) is a community of researchers working at the interface between the life, physical, mathematical and engineering sciences. This interdisciplinary research effort invents novel techniques to capture living systems in action, develops causal predictive mathematical models to explain the behavior of living matter, and engineers new bio-inspired systems to test predictions.
Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program
Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program produces research that advances solar geoengineering’s science and technology frontier, publishing high-impact papers, and disseminating ideas that are taken up by other researchers and government research programs. The program takes an active stance on research with a unique mandate to develop new path-breaking technologies that might improve solar geoengineering’s effectiveness and reduce its risks. The program also employs Harvard’s convening power to bring together scientists, environmental leaders, and government officials to discuss the technology and its governance.
Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE)
The Harvard University Center for the Environment encourages research and education about the environment and its many interactions with human society.
The Center draws its strength from faculty members and students across the University who make up a remarkable intellectual community of scholars, researchers, and teachers of diverse fields including chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, engineering and applied sciences, biology, public health and medicine, government, business, economics, religion, and the law.
The most pressing problems facing our natural environment are complex, often requiring collaborative investigation by scholars versed in different disciplines. By connecting scholars and practitioners from different disciplines, the Center for the Environment seeks to raise the quality of environmental research at Harvard and beyond.
Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis (IMASC)
The Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis is an Energy Frontier Research Center, headquartered at Harvard University. The vision of IMASC is to advance the fundamental science necessary to change the face and carbon footprint of the chemical industries sector. Established in 2014, IMASC showed that a fundamental understanding gained from model surfaces at the molecular scale can be used to predict catalytic performance for support-free dilute alloys. This introduced a new paradigm for catalyst discovery. Renewed in 2018, IMASC is advancing this ground-breaking work at the intersection of surface chemistry and physics to transform how catalysts are designed.
The Microbial Sciences Initiative (MSI)
The Microbial Sciences Initiative at Harvard is an interdisciplinary science program aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the richest biological reservoir of the planet, the microbial world. Microbes are ubiquitous and have an impact on every aspect of our existence.
Yet, their intrinsic invisibility has meant that they have remained largely unknown, their effects and enormous potential often unrecognized. The recent realization of the vastness of microbial diversity and the genomics revolution have propelled the microbial sciences into an exciting new era of investigation.
The Rowland Institute
The Rowland Institute at Harvard is dedicated to experimental science over a broad range of disciplines. Current research is carried out in physics, chemistry, and biology, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary work and the development of new experimental tools.
The Institute is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts near the Longfellow Bridge over the Charles River, a few miles downstream from the main campus.
The Institute was originally founded by the late Edwin H. Land in 1980 as The Rowland Institute for Science, a privately endowed, nonprofit, basic research organization, conceived to advance science in a wide variety of fields. Currently members of the Institute are performing research in several areas of physics, chemistry and biology.