A $125 million gift from Leonard A. Lauder, a Penn alumnus, will create the Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Program, which will recruit and prepare a diverse cadre of expert nurse practitioners to provide primary care to individuals and families in underserved communities across the U.S. This is the largest gift ever to an American nursing school and will be a tuition-free program.
A Penn Today retrospective of former Penn President Amy Gutmann’s career as president highlights her 18 years of accomplishments under the transformative Penn Compact. Prime among them: the historic decision to go all-grant in undergraduate financial aid, the establishment of Penn First Plus, the launch of the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professorships, the development of the Pennovation ecosystem, and the creation of the President’s Engagement and President’s Innovation prizes. Gutmann honorably departed Penn in February to become the U.S. ambassador to Germany.
Interim Penn President Wendell Pritchett sat down with Penn Today for a conversation about his personal history with Penn, being a law professor, and his thoughts on the future of Penn. Pritchett assumed the presidency after previously serving as chancellor of Rutgers-Camden, associate dean at the Law School and later interim dean, and Penn’s provost from 2017 to 2021. He most recently served as senior adviser to former Penn President Amy Gutmann.
At a farewell and thank-you event in a tent on Penn Commons, former Penn President Amy Gutmann celebrated her time at Penn with sweet and savory snacks, student performances, and photos. “For nearly 18 years, you have all been a family to me and mine,” said Gutmann in her invitation to staff. To students, she wrote, “Working with all the inspiring students I’ve known as president has been without a doubt the greatest privilege and joy of my life.”
The University announced a $25 million gift from James Joo-Jin Kim and Agnes Kim, and the James and Agnes Kim Family Foundation, in support of a variety of pursuits. The funds will establish the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, the Kim Family Neurovascular Surgery Program at Penn Medicine, and the Kim Korean Studies Fund at the Wharton School’s Lauder Institute for Management & International Studies.
Erin Hayes, a senior in the School of Arts & Sciences studying physics, was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England. She is one of 23 scholars chosen from the United States and the 33rd Gates Cambridge Scholar from the Roy and Diana Vagelos Scholars Program in the Molecular Life Sciences.
Yuxin Chen, of the Wharton School, and Deep Jariwala, of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, are among 118 recipients of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship, which honors early-career researchers in the United States and Canada whose creativity, innovation, and research make them stand out as the next generation of leaders. Since 1955, 126 faculty from Penn have received the fellowship.
Interim Penn President Wendell Pritchett and Interim Provost Beth Winkelstein announced the latest Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor appointment. Lance Freeman, a leading scholar of urban housing gentrification, has been named the James W. Effron University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, as well as the Department of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Two patients who have battled an insidious blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia, who were the first participants in a clinical trial of an experimental therapy underway at the Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine, have been shown in an analysis to have sustained a decade-long remission after receiving CAR T cell therapy. CAR T cells remained detectable at least a decade after infusion. “This long-term remission is remarkable, and witnessing patients living cancer-free is a testament to the tremendous potency of this ‘living drug’ that works effectively against cancer cells,” says first author J. Joseph Melehorst, a research professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine.
In a Q&A with Penn Today, Michael C. Horowitz, director of Perry World House, remarked on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. “This is a crisis of Putin’s own making,” he said. “The information that the Biden administration has released very clearly demonstrates the way that Putin, every step of the way, has manufactured this crisis to legitimize Russia’s invasion of a sovereign Ukraine.”
On display in the Arts Lounge at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is “100 Portraits,” a collection of 100 pencil-sketched portraits by West Philadelphia artist Mark Stockton. The exhibit, presented by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation in collaboration with Penn Live Arts, challenges the normalized ideas of whose portrait has historically been drawn. “What is a hall of portraiture?” Stockton mused in an interview. “Part of it’s mixed with an idea of informatics, like a census. But also, what is the composition of our society, and who are the people made visible in it, and what does that visibility look like?”
In WHYY, the School of Nursing Dean Antonia Villarruel was quoted about a new study from Penn Nursing that concludes that nurses can play a major role in helping patients navigate information about the pandemic. She advocated for health and science literacy for nurses and patients, saying that nurses can translate and simplify the information while providing access to multiple sources.
American Monuments: Designs for the Future, a history course taught by Jared Farmer, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, references the historic iconoclasm of 2020 to show how arguments over the past are really arguments about the future. “My goal was for students to understand this is a much bigger issue than Confederate monuments and to give them historical understanding of the moment that they lived through,” Farmer says.
A collaboration between the Wharton School and the National Education Equity Lab began offering the course Essentials of Personal Finance to disadvantaged high school students. The pilot program, which began in the fall, is part of a broader effort to involve more high school students and educators with the Wharton Global Youth Program. “It is an exciting opportunity to connect the world-class research and teaching of Wharton’s faculty and scholars directly to the high school classroom,” says Wharton Global Youth Executive Director Eli Lesser.
Tylar Dysart, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history and sociology of science, wrote for the Washington Post about the settler colonial history behind the Ottawa trucker protests. “It is not incidental that this latest expression of white supremacy is emerging amid a public health crisis,” she writes. “The history of Canadian settler colonialism and public health demonstrates how both overt white-supremacist claims and seemingly more inert nationalistic claims about ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ both enable and erase ongoing harm to marginalized communities.”
