15 Professors of the Year


Marjorie Garber

" Teaching a course is a matter of trying to find out where students’ interests are and presenting the material so that it catches fire for them," says Marjorie Garber. "That’s the thrill of it and the risk of it."


Katherine Merseth

"I would say the big issue in education today is both equity and excellence," says Katherine Merseth. " I’m working to see if we can raise both excellence and equity. That is my life’s work."


Timothy P. McCarthy

"I march and I rally, but I also teach and write," Timothy P. McCarthy says. "I do a lot of things that are in service to a larger resistance. I’m never particularly willing to accept the status quo. I’ve always been a rebel, a protestor, a rabble rouser."


Charmaine Nelson

"I’m here at Harvard researching slavery in the regions that became Canada. The average Canadian doesn’t even realize transatlantic slavery happened in Canada," says Charmaine Nelson of her work. "Canadians got to that point through an erasure—we offload it onto the United States."


Shiv S. Pillai

"In science, you are never done," says Shiv S. Pillai. "There is always something that’s not finished. The only way to survive in this type of field is to really enjoy the stuff you do, and to have fun with whatever comes out of it. "


Joshua W. Buckholtz

"I have an opportunity to tell a bunch of people things that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives, and maybe make their lives and the lives of the people around them a little bit easier," says Joshua W. Buckholtz. "What more could a professor ask for?


Alex Krieger

For Alex Krieger, architecture is personal. "It’s kind of nice to know that you helped improve the well being of a bunch of people, whether it’s a health care building, or a promenade, or a modest center for a private school in Cambridge," he says.


Fifteen Professors of 2017: Carla D. Martin

Chocolate is Carla D. Martin's calling.


Robert J. Wood

Wood also repeats many of the aphorisms typical of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: He describes the ever-arching motivation for his work as the desire to design and build completely novel creations.


Glenda R. Carpio

In her current work on immigrant literature, Carpio is interested in when “America fails the person or when the person can’t cope with the difficulties of becoming someone else."


Matthew J. Liebmann

Compared to many other archaeologists’ work investigating thousands of years into the past, Liebmann’s focus on the archaeology of early Native American encounters with Europeans is practically breaking news.


Brandon M. Terry

Now teaching at his alma mater just 15 years later—though “it feels longer every year,” he quips—Terry sees his role as a responsibility to push students outside of their comfort zones.


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