Dolores Albarracín has been named Penn’s 28th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, beginning July 1. Albarracín is a world-renowned social psychologist who will have joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Nursing. She previously served as a professor of communication in the Annenberg School from 2012-14. “We are delighted to welcome Dolores Albarracín back to Penn as our newest Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor,” Penn President Amy Gutmann said. “Dolores’ pathbreaking teaching and research cross traditional academic boundaries to advance the urgent goal of improving health and wellness for some of our society’s most vulnerable and at-risk people, including people with HIV/AIDS who use drugs.”
Alanna Shanahan will serve as director of Athletics and Recreation, starting July 19. She is currently the Vice Provost for Student Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and previously served as John Hopkins’ director of Recreation and Athletics. Her 20-year career at Penn also saw her serve as executive director of Penn Relays from 2011-16. “She has been a dynamic member of our community for more than half her life–across a brilliant career that brought her from captain and MVP of the women’s lacrosse team to deputy director of Athletics and executive director of the Penn Relays,” said Provost Wendell Pritchett. “She has a deep understanding of the role of athletics and recreation in our shared life on campus, which will be invaluable as we emerge from the pandemic together in the years ahead.”
Penn Today presented its annual “Year in Review” video, recapping the 2020-21 academic year in images. The video reflects on research accomplishments, obstacles overcome, local volunteer outreach, campus changes, new appointments and commitments, and much more.
William Adelman has been appointed the executive director of student health and counseling at Penn, a new position that will oversee an integrated approach to health and wellness for students. He was previously division director of adolescent medicine at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “We are thrilled to be welcoming Dr. Adelman to our Wellness team at Penn,” said Benoit Dubé, associate provost and chief wellness officer. “His unique and extensive experience in adolescent medicine will be a tremendous addition to our already expansive clinical team, further broadening our abilities to provide a full spectrum of comprehensive wellness services to our diverse student body.”
Scholars, economists, and family members of Sadie T.M. Alexander, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in economics from Penn, joined to celebrate a new book of speeches and writings. Research for the book was conducted through materials donated to Penn’s University Archives. Interim Acting University Archivist Jim Duffin spoke of the ongoing popularity of the family’s materials and its contribution toward broadening our public memory.
Senior Vice Provost for Research Dawn Bonnell and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research announced the 2021 cohort of Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellows for Academic Diversity, the largest in the program’s history. The program has supported 70 postdocs across nine of Penn’s schools and at CHOP since its inception in 2010. “As the new cohort begins their fellowship, we are hopeful that, while advancing their own research and scholarship, they will form the necessary connections to spread the ideals of this program at Penn within their field as well as in the broader community,” says Bonnell.
In a Q&A with Penn Today, PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, Giorgio Sirugo of the Perelman School of Medicine, and Case Western Reserve University’s Scott Williams discussed race-based health disparities, based on conclusions from their new commentary in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. “Ultimately, we really need to have more personalized precision medicine that’s looking at individual variation and avoid racial profiling in medicine,” says Tishkoff.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Assistant Professor Allyson Mackey of the Department of Psychology, with doctoral student Cassidy McDermott and colleagues from Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, showed that children from lower-income backgrounds and those who experience greater adverse childhood experiences get their first permanent molars earlier. “It’s really important for us to understand how to detect early maturation sooner,” Mackey says. “Right now, we’re relying on seeing when kids hit puberty, which might be too late for some meaningful interventions.”
Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the Graduate School of Education and affiliated member at the Institute for Law and Philosophy, joined an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Brandi Levy, a 14-year-old cheerleader who posted a Snapchat story with a profanity-filled photo and caption that spoke against her school. The incident has resulted in a free speech case. “With virtual and online communication, whether written or spoken, there are really no clear boundaries,” says Ben-Porath. “Does it matter that she was off campus when she posted that photo? It’s unclear that it matters, but what is very clear is that it is not feasible to expect schools to regulate every single thing that every student or teacher says on every platform.” The Court ruled in favor of Levy on June 23.
As debate continues on a proposed infrastructure package, Penn professors explain the challenges of broadband expansion, a key component of the proposal. Christopher Yoo, of the Law School, notes that the pandemic has changed the perception of the problem as one of a broader inequity that affects not only work and entertainment, but education as well. “Broadband has created what has long been known as the ‘homework gap,’ and with the pandemic and the shift to virtual education, the gap became a chasm,” says Yoo. “The ability to access broadband became an outright barrier, and not just a matter of lower quality.”
Penn professors and students discuss the meaning behind and ramifications of the more than 100 bills across the U.S. aimed at reducing the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming children and adults. “We definitely are in the middle of a major cultural war, a major political war,” says Heather Love, a professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences. “You can’t go through the Trump presidency and not think that there is a kind of crisis around white male identity.”
In an opinion piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Murali Balaji of the Annenberg School for Communication called for Hindu Americans to support the Equality Act, which would bar discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expand protections for religious minorities. “The Equality Act presents two momentous opportunities for Hindus: to help push for the legislation that puts our highest ideals into practice and to emerge from the shadows when it comes to religious voices for change,” Balaji wrote.
New funding has allowed Richard L. Zettler and Michael Danti of the School of Arts & Sciences to continue cultural heritage work in Iraq that began in 2019. The U.S. State Department has provided an additional $1.1 million to rebuild the Mashki Gate, while the German Gerda Henkel Foundation has given $100,000 to survey non-religious architecture in Mosul’s old city. The team is also working in collaboration with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities to stabilize a site south of Baghdad, Taq-I Kisra, the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world.
In The New York Times, Nakul Deshpande, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth & Environmental Science, discussed creep, the concept that landscapes are moving all the time—even without action. Desphande’s lab uses lasers in a controlled environment to study delicate movements of sand grains. “Everything is moving all the time,” he says. “It’s not just an analogy. It’s real, it’s what’s happening.”
The first cohort of Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Fellows commented on their experiences in the program, which emphasizes public engagement and community building through dialogue across differences. “The fellowship has opened my eyes to the importance of civic engagement in society,” Thriaksh Rajan, a rising junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It taught me about past and current scholarship in civic engagement, for example, why some university programs fail and others succeed in assisting marginalized communities. As an aspiring doctor, I hope to integrate this knowledge of civics and wellness into my future clinical practice.”
In the MIT Technology Review, Aaron Roth of the School of Engineering and Applied Science commented on the use of synthetic data, an alternative to real-world data that has firms creating artificial profiles of people to feed deep-learning algorithms. “Just because the data is ‘synthetic’ and does not directly correspond to real user data does not mean that it does not encode sensitive information about real people,” Roth says.
