Summer 2025

The Harvard-China Project has annually supported summer undergraduate research assistantships since 2017, with most of these projects based in China. Our university faculty collaborators have mentored students on a wide range of research projects, from mapping pathways to carbon neutrality, to measuring NOx emissions, to modeling drought frequency. 

This summer, Sara Dahiya '25, an Applied Math and Economics concentrator, spent eight weeks at Tsinghua University in Beijing where she worked under Prof. Huan Liu at the School of Environment on optimizing marine shipping routes through the integration of offshore wind-powered charging stations. "I conducted comprehensive environmental-economic tradeoff analyses to evaluate the scope and feasibility of implementing renewable energy infrastructure in maritime transportation," explains Sara. "The analysis revealed critical insights into how we can effectively weigh complex sustainability considerations when designing large-scale infrastructure projects, especially at a scale which requires close collaboration with government agencies and industry stakeholders." Read about Sara's research project here. 

Oliver Lontay '27, an Economics and Statistics concentrator, worked at Nanjing University in Nanjing under Prof. Haikun Wang in the School of Atmospheric Sciences, where he studied the growth of China’s data center industry and its environmental impact. "We wanted to understand what factors influence where data centers are built and how energy-efficient they are," explains Oliver. At first, we thought climate factors like temperature would play a big role—since hotter provinces require more cooling—but we found that economic strength and government policies mattered far more. Read Oliver's interview about his summer here.