Harvard Impacts Labs Awards $1.4 Million to Support Four New Projects

Harvard Impacts Labs announced Wednesday that it will award $1.4 million to support four new faculty-led research projects designed to test policy interventions beyond the University.

Led by faculty across multiple Harvard schools and departments, the projects will partner with government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private-sector groups to design and test policy solutions at scale.

“These labs exemplify what Harvard Impact Labs was designed to do: connect faculty expertise with practitioners to tackle real-world problems,” Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein wrote in the release.

“From protecting workers’ wages to transforming math education, this work will improve lives while demonstrating how universities can help address society's most pressing challenges,” he added.

The Impact Labs — launched in spring 2025 after a multi-year planning process — is a University-wide initiative housed at the Kennedy School and involves more than 20 faculty members.

The initiative was inspired in part by the Stanford Impact Labs, which Weinstein co-founded and scaled to a $315 million incubator before becoming dean of the Kennedy School.

Weinstein’s initiative is funded by a donation from Julian C. Baker ’88, the co-founder of Baker Brothers, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund focused on biotechnology and life sciences.

The Impact Labs also announced Wednesday that it would run a new round of funding this fall, with up to $500,000 available per project for at least two additional projects.

One of the new projects will focus on wage theft, which costs U.S. workers billions of dollars each year. Led by HKS professor Daniel Schneider and visiting professor David Weil, the project will partner with labor departments in New Jersey, Maine, and New York City to develop artificial intelligence and data driven models to improve labor law enforcement.

Another project will target math education in “low-resource settings,” where teachers often lack the capacity to provide individualized instruction. The project will partner with Microsoft and Eedi Labs — a London-based educational technology company — to design and test low-cost, AI-powered instructional tools in classrooms in the United Kingdom and Global South.

The project’s team includes HKS professor Sharad Goel, senior lecturer Teddy Svoronos, Sociology department chair Joscha Legewie, Graduate School of Education professor Ying Xu, and Stanford University professor Emma Brunskill.

A third initiative will examine why education pilot programs often fail to scale or persist. It will be led by HKS professor Asim I. Khwaja, Pomona College professor Tahir Andrabi, and Georgetown University professor Jishnu Das. It will also partner with the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Department, which serves approximately six million students.

According to the release, the project will study how education reforms can achieve lasting impact.

The final project will focus on legal decision-making. Harvard Law School professor D. James “Jim” Greiner and Harvard statistics and government professor Kosuke Imai will develop AI-based “triage scores” as an alternative to commonly used risk scores.

Unlike traditional risk scores, which estimate the likelihood of negative outcomes such as reoffending, triage scores are designed to weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks of different decisions. The project will partner with the Norfolk Commonwealth Attorney’s Office and Philadelphia Legal Assistance to compare outcomes across different decision-making approaches.

“These selected projects are vivid examples of what’s possible when our faculty work in partnership with practitioners to translate rigorous scholarship into solutions that make a real difference in people’s lives,” Economics professor David Cutler ’87 wrote in the release.

HGSE Dean Nonie K. Lesaux emphasized the Impact Labs’ focus on moving research beyond the pilot stage.

“By bringing evidence, innovation, and partnership together, Harvard Impact Labs is helping ensure that new ideas don’t stop at promising pilots but translate into lasting improvements in learning, opportunity, and human development,” she wrote.

—Staff writer Sophia E. Alcacer can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at sophiaalcacer.88. Follow her on X at @sophiaalcacer.

—Staff writer Jen L. Phan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @jenllphan.