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, connecting research and real-world interventions for impact.

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 focused on connecting research and real-world interventions for impact.

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.

Read the full article about connecting research and real-world interventions by Sophia E. Alcacer and Jen L. Phan at The Harvard Crimson.