M. Elizabeth Magill was confirmed as the University’s ninth president on March 4. A procession led by the Penn Band ushered Magill down Locust Walk as faculty, staff, and students cheered with red and blue pompoms. “As someone who knows her well said to us, ‘Liz was born to lead a great university,’” said Trustee Alan Schnitzer, who served on the presidential search committee. “I could not be more pleased that it’s going to be this great University.”
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns will deliver the address at this year’s Commencement on May 16. His latest project, “Benjamin Franklin,” will premiere in April. “Over the past several decades, he has created a prolific body of work, marrying the art of filmmaking with the history, politics, and culture of America,” said Penn Interim President Wendell Pritchett. “Again and again, he reminds us of the importance of understanding history and the perspective it provides, a valuable message for our students as they begin their lives as graduates of Penn.”
Leonard A. Lauder, a Penn alumnus and emeritus Trustee, discussed his $125 million gift to the School of Nursing, creating the Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Program. “The new program will better the lives of patients and communities most in need, while providing a pathway for the many nurses interested in advanced education who may not otherwise have the means to pursue it,” he said.
The Board of Trustees approved a 2.9 percent increase in tuition and a $288 million undergraduate financial aid budget for the 2022-2023 academic year. “This year, our aid budget is growing at a rate triple that of charges, ensuring that we are able to fulfill our commitment to meet a student’s demonstrated need each year, even as costs increase,” said Senior Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli.
As part of the recently announced Energy and Sustainability Initiative, the University announced environmental scientist Michael E. Mann will join faculty as a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. Mann is widely recognized for his contributions to climate science and communication, having produced, alongside colleagues, a reconstruction of temperature changes over the past 1,000 years that’s often described as the “hockey stick” graph.
Alumni Hemal N. Mirani and Paritosh V. Thankore, through a gift to Perry World House, will establish the Thakore Family Global Justice and Human Rights Visiting Fellowship and the Thakore Family Global and Human Rights Program.
As winners of the 2021 President’s Engagement Prize, May graduates Martin Leet and Leah Voytovich co-founded Maji, a nonprofit that supports projects that aid refugee initiatives in Uganda. They recently oversaw the completion of the construction of a solar-powered water tank for the Olua I community.
Five Goldwater Scholarships were awarded to Penn students. The awards are issued to sophomores and juniors planning research careers in math, the natural sciences, or engineering. They are among 417 students named Goldwater Scholars in 2022 and 23 Goldwater Scholars in the past seven years at Penn.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a study from the Perelman School of Medicine that found even one daily glass of wine or an equivalent slightly shrank the brain compared to nondrinkers. “We’re told that moderate or low levels of alcohol are safe,” said Reagan Wetherill, a leader of the study who is a research assistant professor of psychiatry. “But we saw that there was a global basic effect on brain volume even at one drink.”
As winners of the 2021 President’s Engagement Prize, Carson Eckhard, Natalia Rommen, and Sarah Simon, their program Project HOPE was set up to provide hope for wrongfully convicted people and a roadmap for inmates set for release. In the year since receiving the prize, they’ve helped free Jehmar Gladden, who spent more than 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Lumify Care, supported by the 2021 President’s Innovation Prize and co-founded by May graduate Anthony Scarpone-Lambert and NICU nurse Jennifferre Mancillas, launched an app in January, with plans to launch a version 2.0 of its uNight Light later this year. Lumify Care’s mission is to aid nurses by providing hands-free light bright enough for them to work while not disrupting sleeping patients.
The Institute of Contemporary Art launched “RAW Académie at ICA,” a collaboration between the ICA and Senegal-based RAW Académie that has 11 international fellows-in-residence joining in conversation with RAW staff, Philadelphia arts leaders, and Penn faculty and students about infrastructure in the arts. An evolving exhibit space and a public programming series accompany the experimental and experiential residency program.
Supported by the President’s Innovation Prize, 2021 Wharton graduates Aris Saxena and Yiwen Li founded Mobility Health, an app that aims to make health care more convenient and accessible. They plan to simplify the process of connecting to medical care while emphasizing the value of at-home care.
Ph.D. student Alice Sukhina, who studies how chronic food deprivation and undernutrition affect the immune system on a cellular level, shared their family’s experience in Ukraine and described watching events unfold at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. “There is a photo going around of a civilian column walking past Russian tanks towards [the] nuclear power plant. I know people in that photo. I know people who are physically trying to stop this strategic place from falling,” Sukhina said. “It’s impossible to describe how it feels.”
The Asian American Studies Program (ASAM), created in 1996, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a podcast miniseries, weekly alumni events, and a conference with keynote speaker Cathy Park Hong. As the program celebrates, Fariha Khan, co-director of ASAM, says this “is a really important moment for us to assess our growth and reassess our history.” He adds: “It was a history of struggle and relentless perseverance to be legitimized. It’s important to say, ‘Yes, it’s great, but we want to recognize that it was very hard, and it was because of a lot of painful effort that we can stand here today.’”
The Washington Post published a series of first-hand stories from Generation Pandemic, a storytelling initiative led by Penn seniors Max Strickberger and Alan Jinich, who traveled the country for six months in 2021 to interview more than 80 young people about their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic.
