On Thursday, May 14, 2026, as part of USC’s multiday Commencement ceremonies, the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study inducted 34 new fellows.
Each new Harman Fellow received an academic stole bearing the emblem of the Academy: Goethe’s color wheel, the celebrated diagram by the Enlightenment-era German polymath that maps the relationships between colors and the human emotions they evoke. To become a fellow, students must demonstrate sustained engagement with the four pillars, or quadrants, of the Academy, and be able to reflect upon their application of polymathic principles to their scholarly work at USC.
USC Libraries dean Melissa Just welcomed the inductees and an overflowing crowd of family members and friends to the ceremony in Doheny Memorial Library by describing why the Academy offers a special home for university students: “The Academy remains truly unique. It has no direct peer. Where else do students from across the university—spanning computer science, media studies, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and beyond—come together to design a game about marine food webs, or to read and discuss Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower? Where else do they spend a weekend on Catalina Island in sustained conversation with faculty and with one another, engaging ideas that cross disciplines and lived experience?”
Academy director Tara McPherson, a professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, highlighted how the students embrace the polymathic nature of the Academy programs: “Harman students want to spend part of spring break talking about complex ideas and learning about exoplanets. They draw connections between disciplines that don’t often speak to each other. The faculty are there to frame the conversations, but the real intellectual work takes place among the students. They come together from different majors, different life experiences, and different belief systems, and their thinking and insights bring us all together. They are able to listen deeply to one another and to talk across the differences of their disciplines and world views.”
The new fellows are:
Shalom Abi
Jelila Ashabi Adedoyin Surakat
Elijah Lee A. Barker
Diana Carpio
Tingyo Lily Chang
Carson Chivers
Alexandra Coyle McDonald
Naya Dukkipati
Misha Faruki
Manas Garg
Kirby Xavier Guerrero
Sydney Hurter
Anya Jiménez
Alexandra Kirchner
Nicolas Lionelli
McKenzie Maresh
Genevieve Marino
Galilea Eden Marquez
Udita Anjali Umesh Mathur
McKenzie L. McCoy
Vidur Mushran
José E. Múzquiz
Amy Nam
Chinelo Nneamaka Ogogor
Ife Olarewaju
Tawfiq Othman
Harshini Rallapalli
Rachael Somers
Dane Sprague
Lisa Staugaard
Sophie Mei Sullivan
Sylvan (Zichen) Wang
Rachel Wiggins
Karissa Yan
As part of the ceremony, several newly inducted Academy Fellows spoke about their time at the Academy.
Anya Jiménez ’26 (Cinematic Arts, Screenwriting) cited playwright José Rivera’s 35th Assumption of Playwriting, which “demands that, in our scripts, we always create one impossible thing. The Harman Academy, I think, is an impossible thing.” Continuing the theme, she described how at the spring retreat on Catalina Island “We debated our respective roles in the zombie apocalypse as we made balsa wood airplanes . . . we swam in freezing bioluminescence, a smattering of constellations above and blue-green dinoflagellates below.”
Sophie Mei Sullivan ’26 (Annenberg, Journalism) paid homage to her fellow inductees: “This is an incredibly accomplished group of people, only in their early twenties, who are already leading communities and research to make a more ethical, more understanding, empathetic world. Students working at complete opposite ends of the spectrum of life and scholarship, but who are united by a love of learning. To combine schools of thought into one, to pull the lessons learned from the laboratory and bring it to the studio and into the garden and even into the newsroom.”
McPherson was joined by Academy director of programs Karin Huebner, Ahmanson Lab director Curtis Fletcher, and USC Dornsife College professor Edwin McCann to present the inductees with certificates and academic stoles.
The Academy was established within the USC Libraries in 2011 by engineer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Sidney Harman, the inaugural Isaias W. Hellman Professor of Polymathy at USC.