Dartmouth Research Milestones
2025
Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin showed how to link climate damages to emissions from specific companies.
2025
Michael Heinz and Nicholas Jacobson led the first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy chatbot.
2023
Dartmouth economist Christopher Snyder co-directs the accelerator, a partnership of Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, and the Center for Global Development that uses advanced market commitments to spur innovation for urgent global challenges, such as climate change and pandemics.
2022
Studio art professor Enrico Riley and English professor Vievee Francis created the opera with Stanford composer Jonathan Berger. It premiered at the Hop.
2019
Paul Novosad and Sam Asher launched an open data platform covering more than 500,000 villages and 8,000 towns in India.
2016
Jason McLellan’s Geisel lab, working with Scripps Research and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, found a way to stabilize the spike protein later used in COVID-19 vaccines.
2014
Brian Pogue’s Thayer lab and Dartmouth Cancer Center clinicians captured radiation treatment on a patient in real time.
2004
While at Dartmouth, Annamaria Lusardi, with Olivia Mitchell, designed the Big Three questions and showed how widespread low financial literacy is among Americans.
2001
Bruce Sacerdote used Dartmouth’s random roommate assignments to produce one of the first reliable measures of peer effects, a design researchers have widely followed since.
2001
Michael Gazzaniga founded the first national database for sharing fMRI data, an early model of open science that now runs from UC Santa Barbara.
1996
Building on Jack Wennberg’s work, Dartmouth clinicians teamed with economists, including Jon Skinner, and sociologists to study why the effectiveness of medical care varies.
1993
Victor Ambros moved his lab from Harvard to Dartmouth in 1992 and published the discovery of the first microRNA. He was later honored with a Nobel Prize.
1987
Michael Fanger, Paul Guyre, and Edward Ball founded the company, which went on to develop some of the first checkpoint inhibitor drugs.
1986
Donald Pease and Steve Nichols brought to campus the pre-eminent summer seminar series in literary and cultural theory, attracting major intellectuals for 10 years before moving to Cornell University.
1977
Music professor Jon Appleton, Thayer research professor Sydney Alonso, and engineering student Cameron Jones ’75, Thayer ’77, developed the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer, which became the Synclavier.
1971
Students in Alison Chase’s dance class founded the company, now known worldwide for athletic, collaborative choreography.
1964
John Rassias, an early pioneer of immersive foreign language training, developed his method while training Peace Corps volunteers at Dartmouth.
1964
John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz, and Dartmouth undergraduates created BASIC and a time-sharing system that let many people use one computer at the same time.
1963
Dartmouth faculty co-founded the study with the U.S. Forest Service. Its early measurements were the first to identify acid rain in North America.
1956
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence coined the term and defined the field.
1932–34
Dartmouth commissioned Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco to paint the 24-panel mural, now a National Historic Landmark, in Baker Library.
1900
Dartmouth founded the Tuck School of Business, the first school to offer a master’s degree in business.
1896
In Reed Hall, physics professor Edwin Frost and his brother, physician Gilman Frost, X-rayed a boy’s broken wrist weeks after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays.