Interim President J. Larry Jameson visited VinUniversity in Hanoi earlier this month to celebrate its fifth anniversary and the seven years of allyship with Penn. During the visit, he delivered a lecture about how quality higher education advances society. “Excellent universities drive societal progress, and excellent universities help ensure humanity and the planet will thrive,” he said. (Image: Courtesy of VinUniversity)
One year since becoming Chair of the Penn Board of Trustees, Ramanan Raghavendran discussed Penn’s changes over the last year, the important of its inaugural values statement, and the relevance of institutions like Penn to American society. “I took on this role because I really care. I care not just because I am a proud Penn alumnus; I care because there is plenty of evidence that universities like Penn are central to American greatness,” says Raghavendran. “So, what is most on my mind is finding ways to communicate the abiding importance of higher education for American leadership in the world.”
Chuanyuan Liu and Habib Salim, alumni from the Class of 2023, each received a Schwarzman Scholarship, funding a one-year master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing. They are among 150 Scholars accepted this year from 38 countries and 105 universities.
Beth A. Winkelstein was reappointed as Deputy Provost. She has taught at Penn for more than 20 years as a leader of interdisciplinary research, and has served as deputy provost since 2020. Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. called her “invaluable” and added, “Her great value to the University was shown yet again last year, when she was asked to lead our implementation of the recommendations that emerged out of the important work of both the Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community and the University Task Force on Antisemitism, on which she served as vice chair.” (Image: Kevin Monko)
In a profile, Sarah Banet-Weiser, named dean of the Annenberg School for Communication in fall 2023, talked about being a leader who embodies care, compassion, collaboration, and culture. Care and joy, she says, are at the crux of the Annenberg community. “Many faculty and students here are doing work that has, as its goal, some kind of social justice, and care for others is built into that research,” Banet-Weiser says.
The Penn Center for Innovation, Penn’s hub for technology transfer, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. In its first decade, it supported the formation of more than 300 startups, facilitated more than 7,000 commercialization agreements, and secured more than $1 billion in commercially sponsored research funding. Associate Vice Provost for Research and PCI Managing Director Ben Dibling attributes PCI’s success to many things, but especially “Penn’s strategic vision that included a focus on impact and innovation, and, I think, a unique appreciation of the importance and value of engagement with the commercial sector.”
The Center for Africana Studies and the Annenberg School for Communication welcomed Orlando Patterson of Harvard to deliver the 24th annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice. Patterson, a sociologist, discussed slavery, genocide, and what he calls ethnocide, comparing the systems of slavery in both the U.S. and Jamaica. (Image: Eddy Marenco)
Five Penn faculty members, from the School of Arts & Sciences, the Perelman School of Medicine, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the School of Nursing, are among nearly 400 recipients of the 2024 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineering, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government upon science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
The School of Arts & Sciences has established the new MindCORE Neuroimaging Facility at the Pennovation Works site. The facility is the first site in the United States to use the Food and Drug Administration-approved version of the Siemens MAGNETOM Cima.X 3 Tesla MRI scanner, which can scan at higher resolutions and do more precise analyses.
Scott Hensley, a professor of microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, discussed the avian flu, the virus’s jump into mammals, and vaccine development at Penn. (Video)
Jameel Janjua, an MBA student at the Wharton School, is one of fewer than 700 people to have been to space. Janjua spoke about his experience in the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Air Force, learning to fly a plane before a car, and what it felt like to fulfill his lifelong dream of going to space. (Image: Jim Krantz)
In the Literature of Care, taught by Senior Lecturer Aaron Levy of the Departments of English and History of Art, undergraduates learn to listen as an act integral to healing and repair. The course weaves in storytelling from the Penn Medicine Listening Lab and dozens of essays and artwork highlighted by Rx/Museum. “We’re trying to uncover the hidden connections between literature and medicine,” Levy says, “and to resist the tendency to view these two disciplines as diametrically opposed.”
New research led by Joshua Kim and Mathew Madhavacheril at Penn and their collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests our universe has become “messier and more complicated” over the roughly 13.8 billion years it’s been around. Madhaavacheril says that the distribution of matter over the years is less “clumpy” than expected. (Image: Debra Kellner)
Perry World House hosted a panel of foreign policy experts to discuss anticipated priorities for the then-incoming Trump administration. They touched on topics ranging from the war in Ukraine to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. (Image: Gabrielle Szczepanek)
In The Art of Art Collecting, an interdisciplinary SNF Paideia Program class, students examined the extensive collection of modern and contemporary art that the Neumann family has developed over four generations. The collaboration between students and the Neumann family resulted in the Arthur Ross Gallery exhibition “After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Collection.” The course was co-taught by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw of the Department of the History of Art and Peter Decherney of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, both from the School of Arts & Sciences.
Penn faculty submitted written recollections and thoughts about the late former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29 at age 100. Carter and his late wife, Rosalynn, received honorary degrees from Penn in 1998 at the 242nd Commencement, where Carter was also the speaker. (Image: AP Photo/File)