Harvard College Professor Andrew Murray of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics, and Director of the Rowland Institute at Harvard, has been named a recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize. The award recognizes Murray’s decades of dedication to undergraduate education and his role as co-founder of LS50: Integrated Science, an ambitious interdisciplinary course for first-year students that weaves together biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer programming.
The honor caps a journey that began, by Murray’s own account, about as far from the spotlight as possible. “I grew up as a shy, anxious kid in a small village in the English countryside,” he wrote. Mandatory school drama performances left him visibly trembling and wishing “the earth would open and swallow me whole.” Yet rather than retreating from the stage, he kept returning to it — and a turning point came during his first year of graduate school, when nerves gave way mid-talk to something unexpected. “I continued in astonishment as excitement banished fear.”
Murray joined Harvard in 2000 and has since launched four new courses. LS50, the most ambitious, has its own motto borrowed from Malcolm X — By any means necessary — capturing the faculty’s commitment to helping every student reach genuine understanding. Murray delivered his final LS50 lecture on April 23rd. “As I walked out of NW B108,” he wrote, “one or two tears leaked out.”
He credits a high school chemistry teacher, Doc Powell, as his ultimate inspiration, and is characteristically blunt about the supposed tension between research and teaching: “The great teachers I know are, on average, better scientists than those who are not — and every good teacher puts a huge amount of unseen thought, time, and effort into giving the lectures that their students and colleagues see as effortless.”
Murray will take a sabbatical at the end of the academic year and will retire in July 2028.
