Effective July 1, 2021, Scott L. Bok will become Chair of the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. He will succeed David L. Cohen, who has served as chair since November 2009. Bok has served as a Penn trustee since 2005 and holds three Penn degrees, from the Wharton School, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Penn Carey Law School. He is chairman and chief executive officer of Greenhill & Co., Inc.
Penn President Amy Gutmann, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, School Board President Joyce Wilkerson, and Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia William R. Hite Jr. announced that Penn will contribute $100 million to the School District of Philadelphia—$10 million annually over 10 years. It’s the largest private contribution to the School District in its history.
Lynn Meskell, a world-renowned archaeologist who comes from Stanford University, was named as Penn’s 36th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. She will have joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology of the School of Arts & Sciences, the graduate program in Historic Preservation and the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design, and the Penn Museum as a curator in both the Asian and Near East sections.
Thanks to additional support from P. Roy Vagelos and Diana T. Vagelos, the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology has received design approval from the University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees that will add an additional story to the building, including space to accommodate continued growth of the energy research program and enable additional faculty hires in the future. The 110,000-square-feet space at 3200 Walnut St. will consolidate existing and emerging energy research programs.
“Brick House,” depicting a Black woman’s head atop a form that suggests a skirt or a building, was installed at 34th and Walnut streets. The piece, by Simone Leigh, is cast in bronze and stands at 16 feet high, 9 feet in diameter at its base, and weighs 5,900 pounds.
The University has maintained a global presence while people are physically apart, with global-minded programs and centers like Perry World House, Penn Abroad, Penn Global, and others adapting to remote operations. “We have not slowed at all,” says Amy Gadsden, Penn Global’s associate vice provost for global initiatives. “We continue to do everything we can to provide meaningful global experiences to our students and faculty, bringing the world to Penn and Penn to the world.”
Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine describes takeaways from the news that Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are more than 90 percent effective. Weissman’s work in collaboration with former Penn faculty member Katalin Kariko, made the key breakthrough 15 years ago that allowed for the use of mRNA in these two vaccines.
Dean of the Wharton School Erika James was featured in The New York Times, discussing her professional history, topics of diversity and inclusion in business, and the future of Wharton. “I don’t think we can just assume that because we’re Wharton we can just rest on our laurels and say, we’ll always be safe,” she said. “We have to be mindful that our competition is not just other business schools. Our competition is complacency, and when you’re the best, it is very easy to become complacent.”
A group of Penn undergraduates, as part of the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), assisted the NBC Decision Desk with their data research and political science skills. Unlike previous years, they did not work from the usual spot at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, but out of their homes or the Comcast Center. “It really is a privilege to be sitting in the control room and to see all this play out there,” Leonard Chen, a junior in the School of Arts & Sciences and PORES student says. “It’s like having front row seats to history.”
Angela Duckworth, a professor in the Department of Psychology, has a new Grit Lab course as part of the SNF Paideia Program. Penn President Amy Gutmann joined the class as a guest on Nov. 4 to discuss how she applies an avid dedication to education to her work. “When you’re avid about learning, when you’re avid about creative problem-solving, you bring together the most dedicated and diverse university team because that’s how you accomplish the most,” Gutmann remarked. “Together we just work tirelessly to drive Penn’s success. So, I guess the moral of that story is, bake your strengths into your work.”
Penn virtually hosted its annual celebration of the Named Scholarship Program. “The life-changing financial aid that you make possible is even more important than ever before in Penn’s history,” said Gutmann to scholarship donors. “We couldn’t do any of this without you. Words alone cannot do justice to the difference that your generosity makes.”
New research out of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California (USC), and Switzerland’s University of Lausanne shows that in the pandemic’s early days, as schools and businesses shut down and communities were asked to stay home, nearly one-third of U.S. adults reported some level of depression or anxiety. “On average, people more concerned with the economic consequences of the pandemic were more likely to have lower mental health,” says postdoctoral fellow Fabrice Kämpfen, who led the effort. “Perceived risk of dying from COVID-19 and social distancing had less of an effect. It really seems that the economic factor plays the largest role.”
In The Washington Post, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas of the Graduate School of Education was quoted about tactics to suppress the Black vote. “One of the things that Michigan has resented since the 1960s and perhaps before is Black political power,” she said. “One of the reasons Detroit is so negatively stigmatized and why the city of Detroit is always used as a boogeyman by the far right and by white supremacists is because it was a city that wasn’t just majority Black but under Black political control.”