Their tongue-twister dissertation titles, spoken aloud, were impressive; their intellect and passion even more so. On May 23, 147 graduates received their doctoral degrees at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Sciences (DMS) Hooding Ceremony.
This annual event celebrates students who earned PhDs in one of nine HMS-based programs, six of which are co-administered by DMS. The doctoral degrees are officially awarded by Harvard University’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
HMS Dean for Graduate Education and Professor of Neurobiology Rosalind Segal led the proceedings, opening the ceremony in the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center with a spirit of warm encouragement.
“Each one of the graduates has carried out important and groundbreaking research,” she said. “We now have the opportunity to cheer them as they move on to new endeavors in life sciences.”
She also acknowledged the presence of Griffin GSAS leaders, who make the trek across the Charles River each year to attend this joyful occasion.
Truth, trust, and endurance
After the graduates received their hoods, HMS Dean George Q. Daley spoke about what it will take for the newly minted PhDs to use their degrees for the greater good.
Ceremony Stories
“Your hard work has gained you a permanent place in the scientific family tree. And from your perch, on whatever branch of science you know best, you’re going to have a career that will channel your remarkable curiosities into bold experiments and transformative biomedical change,” Daley said.
He then implored the graduates to always seek the truth, earn the public’s trust, and endure even — and especially — amid harsh setbacks.
Daley’s words reflected the overall tenor of the occasion among the graduates.
“One of the biggest lessons [in science] is accepting failure,” said graduate Sara Hakim prior to the ceremony. Hakim, who received her PhD in biological and biomedical sciences, noted that failures in research can be understood as useful pieces of information that allow people to come closer to uncovering the truth.
Many students expressed that the ceremony was a truly exciting culmination of many years of hard work.
Courtney Benoit, who also received her PhD in biological and biomedical sciences, said her best moments came during her dissertation defense. It was an exhilarating feeling, she said.
“Your defense is like your victory lap.”
Living through life science
Student speaker Alexandra (Allie) Stanton, who earned her PhD in virology, spoke about her admiration for her peers and predecessors. After charming the audience with an anecdote about her earliest research projects, which involved picking scabs off her elbow as a child, Stanton pivoted to a more serious topic: AIDS.
“I came out of the closet when I was 13 and it didn’t escape my notice at the time that there were very few queer adults around me that I could look to,” she said, noting that many of those people died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.
Although a diagnosis of AIDS used to be a death sentence, for most people it is a shadow of its former self, Stanton said.
“Because of the kind of people like you, people who go to graduate school and get PhDs and do scientific research, I have many wonderful queer friends who are very much alive, and we spend the warm, sunny afternoons of our 20s and 30s attending potlucks and open mic nights instead of funerals,” she said.
Stanton became interested in virology when she came down with mononucleosis in high school. During her illness, she became immersed in reading about Epstein-Barr virus and its involvement in mono and cancer. She went on to study at MIT before landing in the lab of Pardis Sabeti, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard.
In addressing her peers, Stanton paid tribute to their aspirations of changing the world through scientific discovery.
“Our greatest and most benevolent achievements as a species have in fact been gifted to humankind by practitioners of the life sciences,” she said. “I think all of us are here at least in part because we wanted to add a small crumb to the totality of knowledge about the natural world, to increase our understanding of the biological systems underlying health and disease, or in other words, to do good.”
