#  Bridging the Gap 

 





September 23, 2025

 

 

Tiara Lacey already had an impressive academic resume when she participated in Harvard’s Summer Honors Undergraduate Research Program (SHURP) in 2017: undergraduate biology major at Spelman College with work in the labs of Morehouse College as well; Biomedical Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at Yale; summer research experience at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Nevertheless, she says that SHURP was where she learned to become truly fluent in the language of science.

“Every subfield has their own terms,” she says. “When you’re an undergraduate trying to raise your knowledge set to the graduate level, it’s a big chasm to jump across. SHURP is where I learned the language and the methods for doing high-level science at a research one university.”

Lacey’s SHURP experience led her to the PhD program in biological and biomedical sciences at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she models how the composition of cerebral spinal fluid changes in pregnant people following the activation of their immune system, and how those changes impact the development of their baby’s brain in mice in the lab Professor Maria Lehtinen. It also led her full circle to involvement in the program as a mentor herself. Today, Lacey helps undergraduates new to careers in research cross the academic chasm to groundbreaking science.   
[Read the full article here.](https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/bridging-gap)



 

 

 



 

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