While earning a Ph.D. at Harvard, Latif Nasser (Canada, Pearson UWC, Dartmouth ’08) discovered the joy of finding and telling stories of science. He pitched a story to Radiolab, the long-form journalism program of public radio station WNYC in New York City, and was then hired as director of research, a position the station created for him.

Latif’s work has since aired on public radio stations across the U.S. and the world, including CBC in Canada, ABC in Australia, and the BBC. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and has given a pair of TED talks. He was host and executive producer for Netflix’s 2020 documentary series Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything.

“It’s about space lasers and dating apps and Saharan fish and extragalactic potatoes and climate change and nuclear weapons and the breath you just took,” Latif says of the series, “but it’s about more than all that, too. It’s about a single simple idea: no matter what border walls we erect, no matter what skin color we have, no matter what virus is trying to kill us, we are all — and will continue to be — connected.”

At the end of the 2020 academic year, Latif gave the keynote speech virtually at the Arts at Dartmouth Awards. “It’s not the time for you to try to fit into society,” he told the undergraduates, “it’s time to make society better fit you and your ideals. Not just to help pull us out of this crisis, but to help avert the next one.”