Ethically Focused Summer Research

Each summer, a select group of Harvard College undergraduates are awarded Kissel Grants to support research and writing that contributes to the understanding of practical ethics. Their projects may involve research for senior theses, case studies for use in courses, essays or articles for publication, or similar scholarly endeavors.

This year’s recipients will use the summer pursuing a diverse and engaging range of topics: the nature and extent of sympathy; the relationship between agency, reason, and love; a universal right to fun opportunities; the practical ethics of federalism; whether large language models possess a genuine introspective capacity; and the ethics of AI data centers.

• Sofia Mikulasek is a junior concentrating in philosophy affiliated with Currier House. She is particularly interested in metaethics, practical reason, and the (later) work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe. 

  Sofia's project, which will eventually constitute her thesis, will focus on the nature and extent of our sympathy by asking what it is to say that one has understood another's confession of pain. She will ask what normative obligations arise out of such confessions, and if traditional understanding of mind and language give way to acceptable normative implications (her strong suspicion is that they do not!).

• Andrés Muedano is a Mexican writer studying Philosophy at Harvard College. He is a current Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation, a Berta Greenwald Ledecky Fellow at Harvard Magazine, and a former Outrider Foundation Fellow at Inside Climate News. His academic interests draw from ethics, the environmental humanities, and comparative literature. As an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, he has researched the moral standing of non-human animals and non-sentient entities.

  Andrés’s project will explore the philosophy and fiction of Iris Murdoch. Drawing from Murdoch's essay "The Sovereignty of Good" and her novel The Bell, Andrés plans to investigate the relationship between agency, reason, and love.

• Rita Palácio is a rising senior in Mather House concentrating in Government and Philosophy. She is interested in well-being, distributive justice, and international development. Outside of class, Rita can be found editing articles for the Harvard Undergraduate Law Review and playing the saxophone in the Jazz Combo Initiative.

  Rita’s senior thesis analyzes the possibility of a universal and equal right to opportunities for fun in community, and the obligations such a right would impose on governments. To develop this project, she will use her Kissel grant to conduct qualitative research in Finland and South Korea. 

• Luka Pavikjevikj is a resident of Quincy House, studying History with a double concentration in Government, specializing in legal history, intellectual history and political theory. Originally from Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, Pavikjevikj co-chairs the student advisory board of the Intellectual Vitality Initiative and is a founder of the Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom. He was a Harvard-Cambridge Summer Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 2025.

  Luka’s project examines how three deep constitutional disagreements over the nature of the Union were confronted in the antebellum period. By exploring how political actors negotiated competing claims of sovereignty, the study applies the diversity of political imaginaries to investigating whether a plurality of histories is feasible. The project analyses the continuous redefining of a federal state and the ways in which federal units resolve conflicts without resorting to violent means, thereby highlighting the practical ethics of federalism.

• Agastya Sridharan is a Harvard College undergraduate jointly concentrating in Computer Science and Philosophy. He is broadly interested in the intersection of AI safety, philosophy of mind, and technology policy. As a research scientist at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Cambridge AI Safety Hub, Agastya studies model introspection, mechanistic interpretability, and AI governance. He has previously developed a novel neural network architecture inspired by biological features and helped design AI-assisted civic technology in the Office of the Mayor of San Diego. Outside of academics, Agastya enjoys playing the Carnatic, or Indian classical, flute and going on contemplative hikes.

  Agastya’s project, “Can AI Know Itself? Mechanistic and Philosophical Tests of Introspection in Language Models,” investigates whether large language models possess genuine introspective capacity or merely simulate self-knowledge. Working with Professor Muhammad Bilal Zafar, he will develop a philosophically rigorous and empirically testable framework for AI introspection, evaluate frontier models using interpretability methods, and translate the findings into policy guidance for high-stakes uses of AI self-reports.

• Jocelyn Xu, originally from Chatham, New Jersey, is a junior concentrating in Social Studies and Economics. After working on farms across rural America during her sophomore year summer, she became more invested in how information access differs across communities. She cares about responsible technology and sharing meals in the dining hall. Outside of class, Jocelyn is a director at Youth-to-Youth (Y2Y) Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, works in a lab for political depolarization, and enjoys runs with friends by the river.

  Jocelyn's project begins with the observation that technology companies are spending hundreds of billions constructing massive AI data centers in Rural America, straining power grids, contaminating water, and disrupting housing markets. Through interviews and fieldwork in Abilene, TX and Doa Ana, NM, two sites within OpenAI's massive Stargate project, she will investigate what happens when rural residents encounter infrastructure they didn't ask for, built by entities that don't resemble them, to serve populations far away.