Weihua is a PhD student in sociology, doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy at Kennedy School of Government and graduate associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He holds a master degree in statistics from Harvard and has strong interests in quantitative methods, especially causal inference, social network analysis, and Bayesian statistics. In sociological domains, he specializes in formal and statistical analysis of inequality and social policy, and sociology of health. He likes playing basketball in leisure time and is an avid fan of Celtics (of course), Lakers (unfortunately) and Rockets (sometimes when Yao plays well). He would be more than happy to meet you to chat about anything related to sociology, statistics, public policy, sports, California, China, Beyonce, That 70's Show, The Colbert Report, Hanna Montana, The Daily Show, The Late Show, Gong-Fu Panda, How to Increase Your Friendship Network Centrality (both on Facebook and in real life) ...

I have been a non-resident pre-med tutor since 2005. My wife and I live just a block from Pfoho, and I have taken advantage of that to try to be an active member of the House. I eat at the House twice a week on the average, and we come to concerts, Pforums and the like. I have also rowed with the Pfoho IM crew for the past three years, and I plan to continue to do that as long as my erg scores are competitive. I am always happy to chat with members of the House, and I hope that anyone who sees me in the dining room will feel free to introduce themselves and join me. I have other interests besides medicine and psychiatry. I am trained both as a psychiatrist and psychologist and I am professionally active. My primary work is at Mass General where I am part of the Law & Psychiatry program in the Department of Psychiatry. I do some clinical teaching, some clinical research, see patients, evaluate a wide variety of people involved with the law—from persons facing a death sentence, to police officers with ptsd, and other problems that arise in a legal or adversarial context. I am also an Associate Medical Director at the Office of Clinical Affairs for Massachusetts Medicaid. I’m involved in a couple of projects there—one on a possible diabetogenic effect of psychotropic medication, and one on the health impact of FDA black box warnings. Lastly I serve as the (very part time) medical director for a substance abuse program in Boston. For most of my working life I have been a public sector psychiatrist, and my enduring commitment clinically is to poor people who are sick and/or in trouble.

Hi Pfoho! My name is Chao Du. I was born in Xi'an, the ancient capital of China. I graduated from Peking University at Beijing with a B.S degree in math. Now I am a 4th year statistics Ph.D candidate at Harvard. My current research focus on stochastic inference with the application in biophysics. I am a veteran statistics TF who had taught 4 different courses. I am happy to help those who take or might take statistics courses and those who want to know more about statistics. I am also open to talk about anything about China you may find interesting. I kill my free time by reading books, including classic literature, science fiction and fantasy novels (I am a fan of Martin's epic novel, A Song of Ice and Fire.) and would love to share the reading experience with others. Unfortunately, I am not good at sports. So please always forgive my ignorance on anything related to it. I am excited to meet you and to learn about the house life at Harvard. I hope we can all learn from each other!

Hi Pfoho! I am a graduate of Spelman College, a historically black college in Atlanta, GA and a native of Nashville, TN. While I was a French major at Spelman, I am currently a third year in the department of African and African American Studies with a primary field (kind of like a concentration) in History. I have earned my MA from Harvard in History and my doctoral research focuses on African American women in the 20th century and the history of African American women and feminism. I am happy to talk to those who are considering switching academic fields from undergraduate to graduate education, those who are attempting to combine or straddle different departments at Harvard, and those interested in the graduate school process in general. Outside of school, I enjoy dancing and attending dance performances, watching tons of TV shows of any type, trying new take out food of any kind. I'd be happy to talk to you about all things history, combining history with other fields of study, African American studies, or anything else.

Hi Pfoho! As a member of Pfoho's class of 2009, I'm pumped to be back working with the house as a non-res tutor in economics. I live a 10 minute walk away off of Somerville Ave, and my brother's in Pfoho this year, so I look forward to seeing you all at meals and house events. I concentrated in economics and had a secondary in math, with a decent amount of time spent on statistics, as well. I'm now working for a quantitative hedge fund in Boston. Anyone with questions on economics, policy, finance or stat is welcome to seek me out. As a recent grad, I also know what it's like applying for jobs and internships during this recession, so I'm happy to help with resumes, applications and interviews. I love swimming, singing, playing the guitar, and Boston sports teams, and I'm really looking forward to seeing some legendary Miss Pfoho characters this year.

Although I wish I could tell you how I became a world-famous rock star, I can only tell you how one gets to be a doctor. Originally from Colorado, I got my bachelors degree in chemistry from Stanford, and my PhD in virology and MD from Harvard Medical School. I am currently in my second year of medical residency at the Beth Israel Deaconess. In July, I will begin a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care at UCSF. I'll look forward to meeting all of you, even if you don't care about medicine.

My name is Thomas Herold. I was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and I have studied in Berlin and Zurich. I have worked and lived in Providence and New York City and I am now finishing my dissertation on time and literature in the German Department. Come talk to me about classes in the German (language and literature), German concentration, secondary field, or language citation, study or work abroad, the Harvard Summer School programs in Munich or Bonn, or anything else. In any case, come to the German language table in the dining hall (dates TBA).

I graduated from Harvard College in 2003. As an undergraduate, I lived in Eliot and was a psychology concentrator. I was very involved with PBHA, the Prisoner Education Program, and the (now defunct) Coalition Against Sexual Violence. I am currently a fifth-year Ph.D. student in clinical psychology. I love all sorts of outdoor activities, running, swimming, biking, scuba diving, and yoga. I am happy to talk to students about psychology, graduate school, or anything else.

All my life I wanted to design things. I started big: drawing maps of ficticious countries, making fantastic primitive and contemporary cities viewed from the air, reimagining the solar system as inhabitable worlds. But humility set in, somewhere in my awkward teenage years, and I built at a reduced scale: small model buildings, I rearranged the furniture when my parents left town (now that's a party), and I shoveled maze paths in the high Maine snow to make the experience getting from the house to the driveway more "memorable". Now, I’m a registered architect, and have been practicing since I graduated from Tufts University in 1998, where I studied Engineering and Art History. I later received my Architecture degree from an art school, Rhode Island School of Design, where my degree project was on the connection between “building” and “decaying” in the physical world (human-built/nature-built), and the program was a rethinking of the industrial areas of Everett, Masschusetts. I studied wabi-sabi in Japan, ancient structures in Rome and lived briefly in Spain as a child. I teach graduate level studios at the Boston Architectural College, and work for a design firm here in Cambridge. Please, don’t hesitate to contact me if you have even a passing interest in pursuing a study or career in art, design or architecture. I’d love to learn about your interests!

As a former undergrad at Pfoho (class of ’03) I’m thrilled to return as a non-resident tutor. Although I studied social anthropology previously, I am currently a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health and interested in international development and health issues. I was raised in Greece but have spent five years living in Beirut, Lebanon, most recently working as a Programme Officer for the United Nations Secretariat. I love to travel and hope to combine this passion with my professional career at the United Nations or elsewhere. I would be happy to talk to any of you about public health or international development work (I also taught for a few years at an international school). I also enjoy running and playing basketball and soccer, and going to the movies. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions on any of these interests.

I'm a composer and piano player and a sort of writer about music (mostly 20th century American and British music) and I've been a non-resident music tutor at Pfoho for a long time. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, went to New England Conservatory, lived in England for two years, where I studied with a composer named Peter Maxwell Davies, and then came back to Boston and went to Brandeis. I've been around ever since. After a long, long time, I went back to Brandeis and got my doctorate. I teach at the Preparatory School at New England Conservatory (where some number of current Pfohosers were formerly students of mine) and at Boston University. I was a TF in CORE Music Courses at Harvard (mostly First Nights, but also Chamber Music and The Swing Era) for a number of years and I've also taught in the Music Department. Aside from music, I'm interested in books, movies, and politics, and I like talking about all of them.

I am originally from Des Moines, Iowa. After majoring in Political Science in college, I worked at a women's center in Pskov, Russia for ten months. I then deferred law school two years and spent the time in England pursuing a master's in Comparative Government. Last summer I was in London working in international arbitration and this summer again finds me at a firm in London. At law school I have worked as a research assistant and a teaching assistant and have found my greatest interest to be in international law, although my interests are quite varied. Outside of law school, I enjoy traveling, soccer and listening to music.

My name is Shila and I am the new MCB/SCRB tutor. I’m originally from Israel but I grew up in California and went to UCLA (Go Bruins!). I took a little time off after I graduated, I travelled a bit, and then continued to work in a lab until I came to grad school. I am now a fifth year MCB graduate student and my research focuses on epigenetics in stem cells. I enjoy teaching and I’ve been a teaching fellow for a few MCB classes and I’m also involved with the Harvard high school outreach program. When I have free time I try and spend as much of it as I can outdoors and I love all sorts of outdoorsy activities. I also have a small (and adorable) dog named Rocky that comes often to the Quad to play around. Please feel free to stop by my table or email me if you have any questions about pretty much anything. I look forward to meeting you all :-)

Hi! My name is Venice and I am happy to join the Pfoho community as a pre-law tutor this year. I am from Iowa (go Hawkeyes!) and went to Princeton for undergrad, where I majored in Politics and got a certificate in Spanish. College highlights included doing track, cross-country, and theater, studying abroad in Ecuador and Spain, and writing my thesis. I worked in the performing arts following college and just graduated from Harvard Law School. Aside from school I like to travel, practice my Spanish whenever possible, cook, and have fun with friends. I look forward to meeting everyone and would be happy to discuss any questions about law school, studying abroad, non-traditional careers, thesis-writing, fun things to do in Boston, or anything else.

Hi Pfoho! My name is Defne, and I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland and graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a concentration in Social Studies. In college I was a FOP leader, peer counselor, tutor at at a juvenile detention center in Boston, and spent my summers abroad as a researcher-writer for Let's Go. I also lived in Currier (and now live about 500 feet from Pfoho), so I'm a quadling through and through. After graduating, I squatted with my brother in San Francisco for a few months trying to find a job, and ended up coming back to Boston and working for two years in legal services before starting law school in 2008. Law-wise, I'm interested in poverty, criminal defense, race, social policy, and international happenings. Life-wise, I love running, dogs (see picture), being outside, good naps, bad TV, berryline, Foucault, and Sean Penn. I'm always happy to get together and discuss anything, so please feel free to get in touch!

Hi Pfoho! My name is Lisa, and I will be visiting Pfoho to meet with those primarily interested in either consulting or music performance. I'm also available to talk with you about anything in general. I graduated from Pfoho in 2007 with a degree in psychology. While in college, I balanced student life (research projects, papers, reading) with life as a violinist, performing and organizing concerts with friends. For one year after graduation, I explored the commercial world and honed my analytical skills as a private equity consultant. That hiatus from classes gave me the space to appreciate work life, and helped me reconsider my life goals. I ultimately came to the decision to pursue music as a centerpiece to my vocation. I am excited and happy to be coming back to Cambridge, MA where I will pursue graduate studies at the Longy School of Music. My studies this year will include performance studies with the legendary violinist Roman Totenberg, music history, theory, string pedagogy, and musical outreach activities. Feel free to introduce yourself as you see me around the house. Alternatively, you can set up appointments with me via email: lpark@post.harvard.edu. Good luck this year and see you soon!

Hi PfoHo! My name is Sabrina and I'm a fourth year graduate student in Social Anthropology here at Harvard, which means that in a few years I will be officially certified (i.e. have a degree) to talk about...people! However, for someone who studies people and their social activities, I am also spend a lot of time thinking about rocks and ores. My dissertation examines primary resources, and the social and political conditions which allow for their extraction and their circulation in global markets. Specifically, I am doing ethnographic as well as archival work in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the iron mining industry. I am also interested in the comparative cases of countries with exploitable resources who have undergone foreign political intervention, in particular, the very interesting parallels between the Bosnian and Iraqi cases. Be warned: my anthropological roving eye casts a wide net. In the past, I've taught anthro classes on everything from refugees and asylum-seekers to anthropology and film. Last spring I TF'd the anthro Sophomore Tutorial, and this fall I'll be TF'ing Junior Tutorial...so I hope to be seeing PfoHo's anthro concentrators in class again! I grew up in Rijeka, a port city on the Croatian coast followed by high school in Toronto, Canada. I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2003 with a degree in Theater and Russian literature. Before my graduate school nerd-dom, I had a much cooler stint as a set and lighting designer for theater in New York, followed by a brief foray into textile design. I really do hope you will come and see me and that we get to chat about these and many other topics at PfoHo!

I graduated from Pfoho in 2001, spending time as a concentrator in social studies, economics, applied math, and statistics, and finally finishing (accidentally) with a degree in computer science. After graduation I spent four years doing research in artificial intelligence at a think tank in Cambridge, mastering the fine art of using buzzwords and clever acronyms to get the government to fund my research. Some rather dull but pompously-titled publications resulted. I'm now a third-year Ph.D. student in sociology, where I study employment discrimination, urban poverty, and social networks. I'm also on the Sociology Department's committee on undergraduate education, so if you have any suggestions, complaints, or lavish praise for the department, let me know. In my free time, you'll find me producing, spinning, and dancing to electronic music of the Cologne/Berlin/Detroit variety and playing a lot of tennis. I'm excited to be back in the Pfoho community, and I'm here to help the sociology concentrators in any way that I can.

I am a 2L at the law school and am originally from Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago (yes, the same place as the barbershop quartet from the Usual Suspects). I did my undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis with majors in Psychology, Educational Studies and Spanish. I also wrote a ridiculously long thesis about shifting trends in the allocation of resources within metropolitan areas, which technically falls under Urban Studies or Sociology (Wash U doesn't have a Sociology department) so needless to say, I have a wide range of interests. I spent a semester abroad in Santiago, Chile, which actually meant I spent 7 months traveling around the Southern Cone of South America. After college, I spent a year working for the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago as part of their Immigration Project. I mainly worked with immigrant women who were victims of domestic violence and detained immigrants in removal proceedings. This was an extremely rewarding, but also intense, experience. I'm open to discuss just about anything with you guys but some of my hobbies include running, soccer, watching my beloved Cubs, traveling, being silly and obviously, having fun with everything I do.

Ellie went to Georgetown Day High School in Washington, D.C., graduating in 2002. She then attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she majored in Anthropology and minored in Government. At Bowdoin, Ellie was a four-year member and two-year co-captain of the Women's Varsity Volleyball team, an Admissions Department tour guide and a Baldwin Learning Center Mentor and Tutor. She spent her junior year spring studying abroad in Valparaiso, Chile. Ellie graduated Bowdoin in 2006 and spent the next two years working at the law firm Goodwin Procter, LLP, in Boston as a corporate and real estate paralegal. She spent the past summer at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston as an intern in the Organized Drug Task Force. Ellie is now a second-year student at Harvard Law School where she is a member of the Journal of Law and Gender, the Tenant Advocacy Project and the Women's Law Association.

Hi Everyone! My name is Ben Smith and I am a fourth year graduate student in the Physics Department, where I study particle physics. In June 2005, I graduated from Pfoho with a degree in Physics and Mathematics. Before that, I lived in downtown Manhattan, near the financial district, for 17 years. I am currently a part of the ATLAS collaboration, which is one of the experiments being done at the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland. Outside of physics, I like to cook, watch movies, and play ice hockey. I hope you'll find me if you want to talk about anything from black holes eating the Earth to IM ice hockey.

As a graduate student in OEB, I am fond of most things connected to evolution including the history of biology and natural history. My PhD research focuses on the evolution of cooperative mound-building in some rather enchanting mice, and I am especially interested in the evolution of cooperation, cognition and culture. As an undergraduate at Princeton ('05), I studied zebra social systems in Kenya, and spent two terms as a study abroad student in Oxford. At present, I am one of the teaching fellows for the Harvard Summer School courses in Oxford, so if you have questions about study abroad, fieldwork, graduate school, or evolution, please don't hesitate to contact me. I have also TF-ed for OEB 53 (evolutionary biology) and OEB 114 (vertebrate viviparity). Photos from my research and other trips are online at: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wenfeitong/sets/).

I was born in New York City but I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. I took a “gap year” after high school and before college to study in Argentina. I graduated from Yale University in 2005 and majored in Women’s and Gender Studies and structured my classes within my major to emphasize international development and health care. I was also pre-med for 2 years at Yale – so I’m happy to talk about how I ended up in law school. After college, I took two years off before coming to law school. I worked for Chiquita Brands for a year as an auditor in Costa Rica and as a legal assistant in Cincinnati, Ohio. My second year after college I worked as a paralegal in San Francisco. I’ve spent both of my summers during law school working for law firms in San Francisco. During the school year, I’m the co-Editor-In-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, a Senior Board Member of the Women’s Law Association, and sing in the Harvard Law School Parody. You’ll often find me cooking, singing, and playing fetch with my dog, Sophie, in the Pfoho quad. I’m looking forward to meeting you!

I am an MBA student at Harvard Business School. I grew up in Haiti and did my undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering at MIT. I came to HBS right out of undergrad and would be happy to talk about the tradeoffs of going to business school after college versus after a few years of work experience. In my spare time, I enjoy dancing (did competitive ballroom dancing for a year at MIT), playing soccer, and reading. I am really excited about being part of the Pforzheimer House community!