capstone project harvard

 Wednesdays @ 12:45pm - 3:00pm SEC LL2.223 (Allston Campus)

Capstone research project course, ac297r, fall 2022 weiwei pan, founded by the institute for applied computational science (iacs)'s  scientific program director,  pavlos protopapas , the capstone research course is a group-based research experience where students work directly with a partner from industry, government, academia, or an ngo to solve a real-world data science/ computation problem. students will create a solution in the form of a software package, which will require varying levels of research. upon completion of this challenging project, students will be better equipped to conduct research and enter the professional world. every class session includes a guest lecture concerning various essential skills for one's career -- from public speaking, reading and writing research papers, how to work remotely on a team, everything about start-ups, and more..

Data Science: Capstone

Show what you’ve learned from the Professional Certificate Program in Data Science.

Associated Schools

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

What you'll learn.

How to apply the knowledge base and skills learned throughout the series to a real-world problem

Independently work on a data analysis project

Course description

To become an expert data scientist you need practice and experience. By completing this capstone project you will get an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills in R data analysis that you have gained throughout the series. This final project will test your skills in data visualization, probability, inference and modeling, data wrangling, data organization, regression, and machine learning.

Unlike the rest of our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, in this course, you will receive much less guidance from the instructors. When you complete the project you will have a data product to show off to potential employers or educational programs, a strong indicator of your expertise in the field of data science.

Instructors

Rafael Irizarry

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SEAS Design & Project Fair

• Computational Science and Engineering Capstone Project (APCOMP 297R)

The Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) capstone project is intended to integrate and apply the skills and ideas CSE students acquire in their core courses and electives. By requiring students to complete a substantial and challenging collaborative project, the capstone course prepares students for the professional world and ensure that they are trained to conduct research. Students deal with real-world problems, messy data sets, and the chance to work on an end-to-end solution to a problem using computational methods.

• Identifying submarkets using a Bayesian approach
• Various methods for predicting unobserved gene expression in maize
• Healthy Aging Signal Research Study
• Named Entity Recognition of IEEE Abstracts

Title : Identifying submarkets using a Bayesian approach

Members : Nam Luu Nhat, Preston Ching, Marcel Hedman, Owen Schafer

About : In this project, we experiment on using a Bayesian hierarchical approach to identify submarkets of the Denver real estate market. The goal is to explore whether these submarket classifications, as a combination of geographical, physical and socio-environmental factors, will add value to the prediction of demand for residential housing in the Denver area.

Title : Various methods for predicting unobserved gene expression in maize

Members : Victor Avram, Eagon Meng, Wenhan Zhang, Sergio Jimenez

About : The project explored way of modeling the effects of gene perturbations and whether or not gene expression levels are informative of each other, specifically in maize. Several predictive models were built, with the ultimate goal of elucidating relationships across genes in the maize genome.

Title : Healthy Aging Signal Research Study

Members : Eleonora Shantsila, Daniel Cox, Yaxin Lei, and Aaron Jacobson

About : The process of ageing causes observable changes in each of our cells. This process does not necessarily run at the same speed from person to person, meaning individuals of a given chronological age may have different biological ages. In this project we build models to predict true chronological age from DNA methylation data, with the goal of these to serve as a baseline against which specific individuals might be compared. Poor predictions would potentially indicate aberrant cellular ageing. Our best models predict chronological age over the entire range of adulthood to an error of less than four years.

Title : Named Entity Recognition of IEEE Abstracts

Members : Paulina Toro Isaza, John Alling, You Wu, Justin Clark

About : The main objective of this project is to identify named entities in IEEE Xplore article abstracts. The three entity classes of interest are: Methods, Products, and Organizations. We are using state of the art Natural Language Processing models to extract these entities and then clustering them with other entities that have the same reference.

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Each student develops a capstone project in their second year of studies that challenges them to perform an in-depth structured scientific and business analysis of a biotechnology opportunity. The capstone requires students to combine lessons from their MBA and MS coursework. Students will receive guidance on their work from faculty mentors and present their work to their classmates and joint-degree program faculty at the conclusion of the course.

As in the real world, conversations take surprising directions.

The presentations are wide-ranging discussions. Like in the case method classroom, the presenter, advisors, and fellow students share their opinions and experiences. It’s a collegial conversation, a debate stage, a celebration of hard work, and a showcase of two years of building the foundation to lead transformative organizations that will advance new drug discoveries and therapeutics with those equally passionate about changing the business of healthcare for the better.

The practicalities of business decisions meet the practicalities of hard science.

Students become adept at delving into startup fundraising strategies and at parsing the complexities of medical research. The capstone lets students demonstrate to their advisors (and to themselves) that they have the foundation to successfully enter any new field of scientific interest – not only as researchers, or only as executives, but as both.

Global experts provide guidance across all student interests.

While Capstone advisors often include leading experts in their fields, students have the ability to choose capstones across any medical and biotechnology specialty. Recent capstone topics have included bioelectricity, brain-computer interfaces, genetic medicine, microbiomes, opioid use disorder, organoid systems for drug development, oncology, psychedelics, women’s health, and many more.

Recent Capstone Projects

iPSC-Derived NK Cells – Changing Cancer’s Fate

Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer in 1971, but oncology treatment still has a long way to go. Genetic engineering is one particularly promising type of therapy, in which patients’ own immune cells are altered to specifically target the cancer. This project described a next-generation approach to make this therapy more efficacious and affordable by genetically engineering a new type of immune cell (natural killer cells), rather than the previously used type (T cells).

Circular RNA – Shifting the Paradigm or Reinventing the Wheel?

The genetic information inside our cells is contained within DNA, and that information is made into proteins (which do lots of things) through an RNA intermediary. The role of RNA has recently been more widely appreciated, and millions are the recipients of a RNA vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech for Covid-19. This project described the potential for circular RNA therapeutics, which could greatly stabilize the therapeutic and increase its versatility into applications for other diseases.

TBG – A Promising Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic Molecule for Treating Opioid Use Disorder

Some recreational drugs like LSD and PCP are psychedelics that alter the user’s perception of reality. These drugs act on the brain by interfering with normal cellular signaling. Recently, it has been appreciated that these drugs can provide benefits to patients with severe mental health disorders including depression and addiction. This project described an approach to modify these psychedelic compounds to (in some cases) remove their hallucinogenic properties but keep the therapeutic benefit.

Using TREES as an Innovative Approach to Restore Hearing Loss

Hearing loss can arise from a variety of different causes, some genetic and others environmental. Devices like hearing aids or cochlear implants are able to help in some cases, but not others. This project investigated potential genetic technologies like Tissue Regeneration Enhancer Elements (TREEs), which may enable the replacement of damaged or dead sound-sensing inner ear hair cells.

Redefining Female Reproductive Health

Women’s health as a field is only recently beginning to catch up on centuries of de-prioritization. For example, regulations barred women of reproductive age from clinical trials until the 1990s. Organoid systems, which recreate human physiology, make it possible to conduct scientific investigation far more efficiently than in vitro work. This project investigated the potential of a fully human ovarian organoid system for use in toxicology screening studies as well as in further phases of drug development.

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Capstone Project – Analyzing a Real Transaction

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Capstone Projects, 2019-2020

American studies, christofer rodelo.

I worked to support our interdisciplinary community through designing and leading the G3 pedagogy class, hosting various individual workshops, and providing one-on-one consultations. Some of my major accomplishments include revamping our pedagogy colloquium to better suit the needs of American Studies students, developing programming to address questions of diversity and inclusion in the classroom, and responding to emergent needs wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. I endeavored to solve these issues through connecting students with Bok Center resources and making myself available as a mentor and advocate.

View Christofer's capstone project.

Art, Film, & Visual Studies

Jonathan knapp.

The precise role of the Pedagogy Fellow, and the standards and expectations for the Teaching Workshop organized by this person, have always been a bit unclear in my department. Because of this, I set out to provide a clear series of recommendations for my successors to maximize the impact of the position, which I feel has a great deal to contribute to the culture of the department. I suggest a plan for maintaining institutional memory, and provide a series of recommendations regarding the department’s requirements, and for communicating these requirements to students and faculty alike.

View Jonathan's capstone project.

Chemistry & Chemical Biology

Emily kerr & liz johnson.

One of our key responsibilities is to help run the G1 pedagogy course and support their first teaching assignments. Last year, we refined the process of giving feedback using a Google Form and matching feedback guidelines and saw a positive response to this structure both years. Building on this, we wanted to expand our efforts to support TFs in later teaching terms, including upper level course TFs and head TFs. We had the opportunity to assist all TFs with the transition to remote teaching by creating a repository for helpful resources and helping organize the distribution for online teaching hardware.

View Emily and Liz's capstone project.

Comparative Literature

Hudson vincent.

As a Pedagogy Fellow in Comparative Literature, I helped teach the “Professing Literature” seminar, organized new pedagogy events for the department including a UPF presentation on “An Introduction to Harvard Undergraduate Identities,” and hosted workshops on teaching writing in Junior and Senior Tutorials. In a recent workshop, a timeline like the one linked above generated new insights into our undergraduate curriculum. For example, we noticed that the Junior Tutorial has only two formal assignments during the Fall and early Spring, and we now plan to create a database of model assignments for graduate student teachers to implement in their tutorials.

View Hudson's capstone project.

Christopher Spaide

The purpose of my capstone project, an ongoing Canvas website titled Pedagogy in English, is twofold. For G3s in English becoming first-time Teaching Fellows, Pedagogy in English serves as the full course website for the required pedagogy seminar English 350: Teaching and Professional Development Colloquium, complete with overviews of weekly topics, assignments, relevant links, sample teaching materials, and pedagogy resources. And for English graduate students at any stage of their careers, Pedagogy in English offers an evolving repository of readings, sample teaching and job materials, FAQs, and links to resources inside English, across the university generally, and outside of Harvard.

View Christopher's capstone project.

Madeline Williams

The History Department Teaching Colloquium provides an opportunity to generate enthusiasm, awareness, and buy-in about practices of intentional and reflective teaching. The timing of the graduate program means that TFs are juggling a variety of dissertation-related commitments simultaneous to teaching for the first time. Given this context and a disciplinary preference in History for starting with primary sources, this year we emphasized in-class work with actual examples of pedagogical materials, including but not limited to: sample undergraduate essays; history-specific active learning exercises developed by other instructors; and real History syllabi.

View Madeline's capstone project.

Mathematics

Jun hou fung.

Much of the work I did this year built on the foundations laid by my predecessor, including providing support to our well-established pedagogy course and organizing small workshops. In addition to continuing these efforts, I also created and clarified teaching resources to address contemporary issues, such as new requirements and new positions. I hope this will bolster the initiatives undertaken by future Pedagogy Fellows, and usher in novel perspectives to confront the perennial challenges of awareness and engagement.

View Jun Hou's capstone project.

Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations

Armaan siddiqi.

This year I worked on changing the NELC Doctoral Colloquium’s pedagogy course, based on my own experiences teaching it in the Fall of 2019 as well as feedback from NELC TFs who have taken the course. Employing core principles of pedagogy, each of these sessions seek to instill a core set of teaching tools whose value and purpose will be clearly recognizable and reinforced. Notable changes include shifting the requirement from the G3 year to the Spring of G2 and introducing more NELC faculty-led sessions to inspire enthusiasm for pedagogy and build rapport among the department’s students and faculty.

View Armaan's capstone project.

Javier Caride

The function of this capstone project is two-fold. First, it provides a teaching-fellow-centered website aimed at helping TFs manage discussion sections, especially in courses dealing with ethics. The website provides a backwards-design approach to discussion sections, guiding TFs through the process of identifying learning goals for their discussion sections and finding appropriate strategies for those goals. It also allows TFs to organize strategies by common classroom circumstances and needs. By providing resources specifically for TFs, this project seeks to encourage philosophy TFs to use existing resources to help build a repository of pedagogical resources.

View Javier's capstone project.

Tanya Levari

Instructional Styles in Psychology is a year-long course that all 3rd year psychology graduate students are required to take concurrently with their first year of teaching. The main goals of the course are to provide practical and emotional support for TFs teaching for the first time and to provide opportunities for them to practice, develop, and reflect upon their skills as teacher. These goals are primarily accomplished through classroom discussions, assignments, and guest lectures.

View Tanya's capstone project.

School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Jovana andrejevic.

Opportunities to practice teaching exist in varied forms at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, from the practical, such microteaching sessions and the SEAS Teaching Practicum, to the conceptual, such as pedagogy journal clubs. Here we summarize takeaways from such initiatives this past year, with a focus on concrete suggestions for future Pedagogy Fellows. We propose ideas for a prospective course on the hidden curriculum of graduate school, and skill development workshops applicable to teaching and research alike. We also discuss lessons learned from the transition to remote instruction, and tips shared with current Teaching Fellows that could translate to future online classroom settings.

View Jovana's capstone project.

Joseph Wallerstein

This project showcases an effort to rethink the “hot moments” exercise new TFs do every year in the Department of Sociology’s teaching practicum. The examples in the curriculum, and the design of the exercise, were years old, and it became apparent some of the language was foot-in-mouth. I wrote new examples and altered the format of the exercise. My hope is that future PFs in the department will continue to audit and rework various elements of the teaching practicum's curriculum.

View Joseph's capstone project.

Anthropology

Eric johnson.

My goal for the 2019-2020 academic year was to convert a series of pedagogy workshops into a required course for graduate students in Anthropology. Building from the previous Pedagogy Fellow’s work, I wrote a syllabus which covered the need-to-know basics of teaching in anthropology and beyond. As a “half course” for G2s before they begin TFing, the class met eight times throughout the semester, and assignments struck a balance between useful but not burdensome. I also built the course Canvas site, which serves as a repository for resources, links, bibliography, and schedules of pedagogy-related events in the future.

View Eric's capstone project.

Anna Hopper

This project involves cataloging experiences of moving learning activities online in Spring 2020. This semester provided a unique scenario where both students and faculty did not sign up for online teaching but were thrown into the situation unexpectedly. This is markedly different than when a course is originally designed to be taught online. The project aims to add to the Bok Center's existing resources about teaching online by providing examples of how students and teachers have experienced this semester's unique transitions.

View Anna's capstone project.

Amy Lakeman

In the politically polarized context of contemporary America, university students and instructors can struggle to manage classroom ideological conflict. Students wish to engage in meaningful discussion around contentious topics, and pedagogical literature suggests avoidance is harmful. Yet TFs may feel ill-equipped to respond to challenging discussion topics, particularly if there is an ideological disagreement with students. I surveyed Harvard undergraduates regarding their experiences with ideological conflict in the classroom. I draw on their stories to develop a one-page resource sheet for TFs. In the future, these efforts could be expanded into a workshop for TFs.

View Amy's capstone project.

Kimberly Moore & Kari Taylor-Burt

Clear communication is essential for a successful career in science and beyond. For our Capstone Project, we taught a 6-week Bok Seminar on science communication. Each week we focused on a different aspect of communication, with a corresponding real-world product:, including motivation and audience, storytelling, visuals, teaching, and outreach and informal conversations. We have compiled resources to help future Pedagogy Fellows lead this course, including lesson plans. In the future, we hope that Pedagogy Fellows will be able to incorporate training in modes of online communication including podcasts and social media.

View Kimberly and Kari's capstone project.

Jorden Sharick

This feedback form is designed to collect information about TF experiences during the transition to and work of remote teaching in Spring 2020. The details it gathers could help departments as they prepare for the possibility of remote teaching in Fall 2020 and in their broader efforts to develop durable programs of pedagogical support for TFs. I hope that it serves as a useful tool for reflecting upon and recording the realities of our online teaching in the current moment—and that it contributes to conversations about the value of such reflection for future moments of in-person teaching as well.

View Jorden's capstone project.

Thomas Wisniewski

As a teacher of new teachers, I’ve focused on training graduate students to work on improving their methods of communication by: one, envisioning teaching as public speaking that varies according to the social context in which it’s done; two, practicing leading seminar-style dialogues in lieu of monologues (lectures); and three, taking risks and experimenting with novel pedagogies such as Pre-Texts, which radically decenters and destabilizes traditional structures of authority in the classroom.

View Thomas' capstone project.

Suzanne Paszkowski

Pedagogy by Design is based on pedagogical methods like "backwards design" or "understanding by design," whereby you identify your goals and then plan accordingly. It also captures the notion that seemingly simple "design" elements--for example, when a course meets, how long it lasts, how it is organized--can have a big impact on course success. Combining these two ideas, I had the goal of making the Classics Teaching Colloquium more useful and I accomplished this by implementing some seemingly small design changes, but those changes ended up having a big impact on the G3s' experience of the colloquium this year.

View Suzanne's capstone project.

East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Dana mirsalis.

This document is an outline of an introduction to accessible education workshop that was supposed to be offered in March but was unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic. It is intended to introduce participants to accessible education, connect them to further resources, and hopefully motivate them to learn more. The first half of this workshop seeks to introduce participants to disability at Harvard, what accommodations are, and how AEO functions. The second half invites them to reflect on their own teaching and how they might be able to make their classrooms more inclusive with Universal Design for Learning.

Sarah James

My goal this year was to institutionalize the major changes that I have made to our department pedagogy course so that future PFs can make adjustments but do not have to start from scratch on building out a curriculum. I expanded the number of required sessions for our pedagogy course, developed a series of "choice" sessions for TFs to chose from, and added in explicit connections to inclusion and equity into each session. My Capstone project consists of a scope and sequence with organized spaces for documenting successes and challenges for each session. I also created a timeline of tasks to help future PFs communicate early and often about pedagogy course expectations.

View Sarah's capstone project.

Linguistics

Tiffany yang.

This is a summary of what I did as the Pedagogy Fellow of Linguistics during my term. I was lucky enough to be appointed this position. It was my honor working with incredible Bok Center mentors and staff. I am pleased that I was able to bring what I learned from PF training to my department. I hope I was helpful to TFs and future TFs in the linguistics department. I look forward to implementing what I learned from the PF program in my career!

View Tiffany's capstone project.

Andrew Friedman

I started my Music Example Repository Project a couple years back so I could always have a few great examples of many music theory concepts at hand when teaching. Pamela Pollock had the wonderful idea of sharing it with the music department's TFs as a capstone project. My hope is that present and future TFs might find it useful, perhaps add to it, maybe begin repositories for musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, and possibly make it interactive with links to scores and sound files. Think of how encyclopedically knowledgeable we'll all look to our students when we can furnish off the top of our head 6 examples of French-augmented 6ths chords resolving to Cadential V4-3 suspensions!

View Andrew's capstone project.

Organismic & Evolutionary Biology

Ava mainieri.

Every 4th year OEB graduate student is required to present their research at a department-wide symposium during the spring of their G4. In preparation for the symposium, I created several workshops to help with public speaking and presentation preparation. These included sessions on oration, figure design, and practice talks. These workshops were designed not only to inspire graduate students to attend, but provide tools applicable to all areas of science communication.

View Ava's capstone project.

Rhine Samajdar

Extensive research on pedagogical practices has underscored time and again the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging in classrooms. This capstone project seeks to explore how one can learn from these studies and develop strategies applying this knowledge to everyday teaching, in order to circumvent the problems associated with non-inclusive environments. We also discuss ways of disseminating information about inclusive teaching methods and building awareness thereof, in the context of the Harvard Physics department.

View Rhine's capstone project.

Romance Languages & Literatures

Xiomara feliberty-casiano & matthew rodriguez.

Second language pedagogy theory in practice guided our work this year. In our pedagogy course sequence, we prioritized building a strong community while supporting instructors with observations, recordings, and consultations. We supported the transition to remote teaching with weekly meetings to share online teaching strategies. We shared sample lessons adapted to online teaching with the Language Center. Finally, we helped instructors develop their reflective practice through a panel on teaching and the academic job market.

View Xiomara and Matthew's capstone project.

Slavic Languages & Literatures

Giulia dossi.

My capstone project is a timeline that will hopefully serve as the basis to create a structured pedagogy course in Slavic. I suggest starting by introducing four workshops a year: focusing on teaching in the Fall, professional development in the Spring. Additionally, I started a G2 shadowing program. The idea is to introduce G2s to teaching more gradually, providing them with a space to ask questions and get more information about what to expect in the Fall, and giving them the opportunity to observe some language classes and literature sections taught by their colleagues who are G3s and up.

View Giulia's capstone project.

Nicole Pashley & Sanqian Zhang

This year, we made changes to the pedagogy class in the Department of Statistics based on three themes: 1) Teaching in statistics in a big data world, in which we added themes to microteaching sessions to address the need of teaching coding and communicating with different audiences. 2) Integrating resources, in which we brought in pedagogy content from various sources. 3) Adapting to remote teaching, in which we modified classroom activities into offline assignments to allow for more flexibility in the online learning environment. We believe these changes updated the course in meaningful and relevant ways.

View Nicole and Sanqian's capstone project.