
Anne Harrington
Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Oxford University. Prior to arriving at Harvard, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. She has served as Department Chair (2007-2010, 2012-13), and was also Director of Undergraduate Studies for more than a decade (2010-22). In the fall of 2024, she will be Acting Director of Graduate Studies.
Interdisciplinary collaboration across science and the humanities has been an important goal of her work as a scholar for many years. For six years, she co-directed Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. For seven years, she was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interaction. She served for 12 years on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, dedicated to collaboration between the sciences and various contemplative traditions. She was also a founding co-editor of Biosocieties, a journal concerned with social science approaches to the life sciences.
As a professor and campus citizen, Professor Harrington has invested a great deal of energy in supporting undergraduate academic and residential life at Harvard. From 2013-23, she was Faculty Dean of Pforzheimer House. From 2019-23, she was also Chair of the Faculty Dean Leadership Council, and chaired meetings of the Faculty Deans. In 2022-23, she was appointed Acting Dean of Undergraduate Education for Harvard College, during which time she developed a new Certificate for Civic Engagement program and took the lead in inaugurating a new program for entering Harvard students, the Harvard College Rising Scholar Program. In 2023-24, she was a Special Advisor to the College, working to develop a new concentration initiative for future students focused on interdisciplinary training in the area of environment, climate and sustainability.
Professor Harrington is the author of four books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), Reenchanted Science (1997) and The Cure Within; A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008), and Mind Fixers: Biology’s Troubled Search for The Biology of Mental Illness (2019) She has also published many articles and produced a range of edited collections including The Placebo Effect (1997), Visions of Compassion (2000), and The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006).
The Salata Institute
The Salata Institute supports interdisciplinary research that leads to real-world action, including high-risk/high-reward projects by researchers already working in the climate area and new endeavors that make it easier for Harvard scholars, who have not worked on climate problems, to do so. Faculty interested in the Climate Research Clusters program should note an upcoming deadline for concepts on April 1, 2024.