Most Mysterious: Alexander Chen

Clad in a beige trench coat, a man of ambiguous age and average stature enters a taxi. As he rides through Western New Guinea — or perhaps some part of the Virgin Islands, India, or Malaysia — he strikes up a conversation with his driver, describing his job as an English teacher.

And yet, in another taxi ride, he is a light natural gas engineer. In another, a graduate student studying archeology.

Evidently, these professions are lies — personas that Harvard senior Alexander J. Chen ’24 takes on “for the memes, to see how people react to different things,” as he explains it. While the hoodwinking might be harmless, each driver has been shortchanged nonetheless, for Alexander is withholding the bountiful knowledge that he holds, be it on the white matter of fox brains, undocumented Papuan lowland languages, Czech folk music, or ancient Roman numismatics.

The taxi driver will never know the true Alexander Chen. But even those who do know the real Alexander are absolutely mystified by how he manages to do so many goddamn things.

A double concentrator in Chemistry and Neuroscience and a premed, Alexander has taken at least five classes (most of the time, six) since his freshman spring. He’s done research in fields ranging from neurobiology and animal neuroscience to psychology and ethics. He’s been published in multiple scientific journals for helping physicians develop an algorithm to compile and analyze Covid-19 case data. He’s also studied anxiety behaviors in mice at the Boston Children’s Hospital. “That was really fun,” he says. “It got me really interested in the intersection of the brain and the mind, which is actually a field I want to go into.”

And for his thesis, Alexander is now examining the white matter (“the highways of the brain,” he explains) of foxes, hoping to establish ways in which conductivity between critical regions differ between aggressive, docile, and control foxes. (Not to mention his research with the Safra Center on ethical education in the U.S.)

Alexander sees a throughline between these diverse interests: He cares about “using data, and using quantitative approaches, to tackle problems [that] are very qualitative.”

Did you think that was it? Alexander leads the Phillips Brooks House Association’s Chinatown ESL program, working with elderly Chinese speakers on Zoom every weekend, all while directing various committees for Harvard Model UN. He’s been a bass singer for the Harvard Glee Club since his freshman year and briefly worked on a Doordash-meets-farmers-market startup called Harvest Haul.

Last year, he wrote a biweekly opinion column for The Crimson called “Artifactual” in which he highlighted artifacts from the Harvard Art Museum’s collection in discussing contemporary events like the crypto craze. Recently Alexander began working shifts at the Quincy Grille, and he has just joined Harvard Radio Broadcasting’s classical music department.

“What baffles me is he doesn’t even have a calendar,” his friend Alan F. Zhang ’24 tells me. “He holds everything in his mind. And he somehow makes time for everything.”

Alexander, meanwhile, perceives his approach a bit differently: “I’m a very very big procrastinator, but I think it’s like a Jenga tower, you know; it balances.”

During his sophomore year, while bouncing between his six classes, various random conferences, and numerous extracurriculars, Alexander began reading a paper on undocumented and dying languages (“Totally for pleasure,” he wrote in an email — I had to clarify). Looking further, he identified that a language called Mawes, found in the lowland region in Papua — an Indonesian province in Western New Guinea — was essentially undocumented.

After reaching out to various Swedish and Indonesian researchers, Alexander was able to spend a month this past summer living with the 800-person Papuan tribe. Engaging in anthropological research, he spoke with the locals in Indonesian and began cataloging the basics of Mawes. “I was able to do some pioneering work on the language,” he says.

Passion for preserving linguistic diversity practically bursts out of the man. “In every way a language chooses to express something, is embedded so much cultural color,” he tells me. During the two hours we spent together he shared dozens of “etymological tales,” such as the Arabic-influenced etymology of “California” to the linguistic puzzle as to why the Greeks described the sky using the word “bronze” (spoiler: because bronze turns blue after oxidizing).

He traces his interest in linguistics back to his childhood struggles with stuttering. “The difficulty of language to me, as someone who stuttered severely as a child, made the spoken word all the more precious,” he says. Alexander no longer stutters, but his experience moving through the world with a speech impediment sparked his interest “in how stigma arises, with disease. And in general, the social aspects of medicine.”

While Alexander is pursuing many interests here at Harvard, he’s staying true to his core passion of medicine — “the one discipline that captures all I want to do.” He aspires to be a physician “who is much more than just a pill pusher. Someone who looks at medicine as synonymous with human existence and nature,” he tells me.

He hopes to follow a similar path to Paul Farmer: practicing medicine while addressing health disparities and “also synthesizing this linguistic work with my public health work,” he tells me earnestly. “That’s the dream.”

— Associate Magazine Editor Sam E. Weil can be reached at sam.weil@thecrimson.com.