Learning from nature, native peoples
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. Search the whole world over, and you would be hard pressed to find one person who could do each of these: run 100 meters in 11.84 seconds, design a public park, identify the native plants of North America, chat in Ukrainian, pole vault, bake a cake that looks like a watering can, recite plot lines from both “Downton Abbey” and “The Walking Dead,” and win $20,000 on the game show “Wheel of Fortune.” But there is such a person: Natalia Gaerlan, a daughter of immigrants from Ukraine, who is graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in urban planning from the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Married and the mother of 9-year-old Malaya, she is a landscape architect whose early enjoyment of small-scale community spaces blossomed into an interest in planning at the scale of cities. “We can...