At Harvard, thousands of scholars are working to advance knowledge on a wide array of topics. Eight students are selected each year to workshop ways to bring that knowledge from the University to the wider world through Harvard Horizons.

Now in its 12th year, the program invites doctoral candidates to share their work in a one-night academic symposium. Students receive one-on-one mentoring to hone their presentation skills and research ideas.

“It is crucial that both faculty and students are able to communicate and connect with the broader world,” said Karen Thornber, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. “These multimodal skills are foundational, both for engaging students in the classroom and for ensuring that research which has the potential to contribute significantly to the well-being of all is both accessible and impactful to a wider audience.”

Harvard Horizons is a project of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Bok Center.

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Courts, key institutions in democratic societies, can both help and hurt democracy, according to O’Donohue. The Ph.D. candidate, who witnessed a military coup attempt while working for the U.S. State Department in Istanbul, said in his talk that this is particularly apparent in places like Turkey, as well as Israel and even the U.S. Israel and Turkey, according to O’Donohue, exemplify opposite ends of the “judicial power-sharing” spectrum — or the need for cross-partisan compromise to appoint judges to the country’s highest courts.

“I came to Harvard because I had this problem I needed to solve,” he said. “Why do courts defend or undermine democracy in particular by upholding legal constraints of powerful political leaders?”