Impact Lab Development Fellowship
Training, coaching, and support for Harvard faculty interested in launching an impact lab.
The Fellowship provides a structured space to reflect on what I am doing, why, what next steps might be, and how all the pieces fit together. My coach encourages me to think in new ways: who to connect with, how to frame the problem, and how to act on what I am learning.
About the Fellowship
Harvard Impact Labs offers a 9-month Impact Lab Development Fellowship that provides faculty with training, coaching, and support to conceptualize new research projects that seek to develop concrete solutions to a social problem in collaboration with external practitioners. Faculty who have an existing project or lab and are looking to increase its impact through a new line of work are also invited to apply.
Faculty participate in a monthly three-hour workshop and receive $25,000 in seed funding along with individualized support from Harvard Impact Labs faculty and staff. The fellowship is modeled on one that Stanford Impact Labs has conducted for six years and which Stanford faculty participants credit with providing the frameworks, tools, and resources they needed to move their research to new levels or in new directions.
The monthly workshops are interactive, activity- and discussion-based and cover topics including refining your definition of the problem and how your research will contribute towards scalable solutions, building partnerships and a shared research agenda, fundraising, communications, and developing an operational plan for your impact lab. This year’s workshop is being led by Danielle Allen and Jeffrey Liebman, with guests that include outside experts and faculty and staff already working in this space.
Meet our Fellows
2025-2026 Impact Lab Development Fellowship Cohort
Andrew Crespo
Christine Desan
Sarah Dryden-Peterson
Wafaie Fawzi
Rita Hamad
Sandeep Kumar
David Pedulla
Patrick Slade
Eligibility
To be eligible, applicants must be tenured, tenure-track, or full-time Professors of the Practice or Professors in Residence at Harvard. Both Quad and non-Quad Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine professors are eligible.
The most important criteria we are looking for is a strong motivation to connect your research and expertise with practical approaches to achieving public impact and curiosity for how to best engage with partners to co-create strategies to address a particular social problem.
The strongest applicants will:
- Want to increase the public impact of their research
- Be curious about how to best engage with partners to co-create strategies to solve a particular social problem
- Have a track record of scholarship relevant to the problem area
- Be open-minded, flexible, and humble