Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2020

Confronting 10 the Pandemic

SPRING /SUMMER 2020

FALL/WINTER 2015

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities promotes interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and learning with real-world impacts. PAGE 18

26 Finding Fun in Math

Mapping the New 34 World of Big Data

Facing Down 44 Institutional Child Abuse

OMNIA

CONTENTS

FEATURES 18 Between Critique and Action

In the wake of the explosion of a Philadelphia refinery, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities promotes collaborative teaching and learning with real-world impacts.

By Jane Carroll

18

26

34

44

56

62

26 The Math Problem Math's Julia Hartmann is finding solutions, both in math and for mathematicians-to-be.

By Susan Ahlborn

34 The New Cartographers Faculty across the arts and sciences are navigating the new world of big data.

By Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

44 David Versus Goliath Legal scholar and advocate Marci Hamilton has faced down institutional child abuse for decades—and she is just getting started.

By Blake Cole

56 Where Math Meets Physics Physicists and mathematicians showcase the importance of research that crosses the traditional boundaries that separate fields of science.

By Erica K. Brockmeier

62 Ancient Armor, a

SECTIONS 1

DEAN’S MESSAGE

Mysterious Royal Tomb, and a Pair of Massive Stone Gates at Gordion

2

EDITOR’S NOTE

3

COLLEGE DEAN Q&A

4

SCHOOL NEWS

Classical Studies' Brian Rose and his team's recent excavation at a historic site in central Turkey was one of the most successful in history.

9

ONLINE CONTENT

By Michele Berger

10 CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC 16 FACULTY OPINION

32 THE POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES 68 OMNIA 101 70 STUDENT SPOTLIGHT 74 MOVERS & QUAKERS 76 PARTNERS & PROGRESS 78 INSOMNIA 80 LAST LOOK

DEAN’S MESSAGE

SPRING/SUMMER SPRING/SUMMER2020 2020

OMNIA is published by the School of Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement

P: 215-746-1232 F: 215-573-2096 E: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts & Sciences LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications LAUREN REBECCA THACKER Director of Advancement Communications BLAKE COLE Editor SUSAN AHLBORN Associate Editor LUSI KLIMENKO Art Director LUSI KLIMENKO ANDREW NEALIS Designers CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at quakernet. alumni.upenn.edu. Non-alumni: email Development and Alumni Records at record@ben.dev. upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136.

The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover Illustration: Maggie Chiang

Advancing knowledge always involves uncovering connections previously unimagined—between disciplines, ideas, and even atoms.

In our physics and chemistry labs, we have a number of scientists whose work is opening the doors to the development of new materials with properties that were unimaginable 20 years ago.

Take graphene, for example—a super-thin material formed by a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional lattice. By virtue of the connections between atoms, the material combines flexibility and strength in a way that some have described as miraculous.

In recent weeks, I’ve been reminded of the power of connection as I have watched the response of our community to the COVID-19 pandemic. As students and faculty left campus, losing access to the spaces and resources that are part of what makes Penn great, many were already working to build a new set of connections, ones that sustain our community and continue our shared mission of advancing research and knowledge.

Faculty and staff worked quickly and collaboratively to meet the challenge of converting the final six weeks of their semester into remote learning courses. In the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Jose Vithayathil, a research specialist, and Bill Ashmanskas, a senior lecturer, assembled and sent lab kits to students in a laboratory electronics course so they could perform experiments from home, allowing students to build and measure real circuits in addition to using a computer simulation. Biology’s David Roos, an expert in infectious diseases, held virtual office hours over spring break to talk to students—and their families— about the science behind what they were seeing on the news (p.

14). Anne Berg of History created an online platform for students to

showcase their research findings (p. 12), and the Department of Music experimented with virtual performances, demonstrating that our humanists and artists play an important role in shepherding knowledge and sustaining our spirits.

Faculty have also proven incredibly nimble in shifting their focus to the crisis at hand. Geneticist and biologist Sarah Tishkoff is studying the correlation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the expression of certain proteins, while Biology’s Josh Plotkin has researched how interventions such as social distancing can be timed for optimum effectiveness.

Julia Lynch of Political Science created guidelines for hospitals to help them make decisions on how to allocate resources in times of medical scarcity. And Philosophy’s Kok-Chor Tan has been advancing conversations on critical issues like justice and health outcomes (p. 11).

Contributions like these reinforce what I have long said about the power of the arts and sciences. COVID-19 has reminded us just how connected we all are and that no person, nation, or challenge is an island. The full power of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary to answer this global challenge, one that has so quickly altered how we live in the world.

The liberal arts are a collective force for creating new knowledge across disciplines and borders and responding to ever-changing problems with flexibility and critical thinking.

This brings me to the incredible resilience of our students. This is not the spring semester any of them imagined, but they have exhibited strength and determination as they find new ways to learn. They are showing us that commitment can be sustained from a distance—like the undergrads studying elections who

Lisa J. Godfrey

EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts & Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284

STRENGTH THROUGH CONNECTION

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience are shifting attention to voter mobilization in their home communities (p. 71) and the graduate students whose research and teaching demonstrates the value and primacy of the humanities (p. 70–73).

Every person in the School— from our dedicated IT staff who worked long hours to the security staff who continue to safeguard campus—has played an important role in ensuring that our new virtual community will thrive until we are again able to work and learn in the classrooms, laboratories, dorms, and offices of Penn Arts & Sciences.

While the fabric of our community has been stretched and tested, it’s gratifying to see how it remains strong, and flexible, and focused on advancing our overall mission, which remains as relevant as ever.

Steven J. Fluharty

OMNIA

EDITOR’S NOTE

A UNIQUE—AND CHALLENGING— MOMENT IN TIME I write to you during a unique moment in time. One that is challenging society as a whole, as well as changing the daily routine in academia, with faculty and students finding new and creative ways to learn and communicate.

In the following pages, you will read about how Penn Arts & Sciences is responding and adapting to the COVID-19 crisis with both the local and global community in mind, as well as get a firsthand glance at the impact the pandemic has had on our scholars.

You’ll learn more about how we’re addressing the pandemic from the perspectives of Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience (p. 1), and Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Biology (p. 3).

Penn Arts & Sciences scholars are stepping up to offer research and expert insight on the challenges we’re facing. In a special section called Confronting the Pandemic (p. 10), you’ll find articles, interviews, and snapshots of events addressing topics related to the crisis. These include how society can work to protect individuals with fewer resources (p. 11), how labs are maintaining their experiments (p. 10), and how a class dedicated to infectious disease research is tracking the virus in real time (p. 14).

Throughout the issue, you’ll see faculty and students introducing you to their new realities. An

2

archaeology professor prepares for pauses in international research in “Ancient Armor, a Mysterious Royal Tomb, and a Pair of Massive Stone Gates at Gordion” (p. 62), and an undergraduate works on election data analysis from his dining room table beside his younger sibling in “Penn Undergrads and Decision 2020” (p. 71). In “Food and Farming During the COVID-19 Crisis” (p. 70), a master of environmental studies student discusses the U.S. food supply and the challenges facing farmers, and in “Science/Fiction” (p. 73), we profile a course taught by a doctoral candidate in English who shows that when it comes to science, communication matters.

Research beyond the pandemic continues, as our students and faculty engage in work that responds to the world around them. Whether it's the continuing struggle to adapt to climate change in our cover story, “Between Critique and Action” (p. 18), or child protection legislation in “David Versus Goliath” (p. 44), the liberal arts remain vital in addressing a wide array of current issues.

As we face whatever challenges come next, we here at OMNIA continue to be dedicated to providing you a window into the critical research of Penn Arts & Sciences.

Thanks for reading, and stay safe.

Blake Cole, Editor

As you read through the features, keep an eye out for the icons below. They represent the key priorities of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign.

POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU

Advancing Faculty Distinction

Realizing Student Potential

Driving Global Change

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Harnessing the Power of the Brain

Exploring the Human Experience

COLLEGE DEAN Q&A

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Greg Benson

A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL SNIEGOWSKI The Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College discusses adapting during a challenging time.

When the University announced on March 10 that the rest of the semester would be completed online, the College of Arts & Sciences immediately turned to the mammoth task of reconfiguring the teaching of nearly 2,500 undergraduate classes across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College and Professor of Biology, spoke with OMNIA about this transition, and how remote teaching and learning is uniting the Penn Arts & Sciences community even as we’re apart.

Q: What was it like as the College worked to find a way to finish out the semester?

Everyone has been challenged.

Instructors had to redo how they teach, students had to redo how they study and learn. We had to think of new policies midstream for teaching and academic matters. It’s been a huge transition.

All of us have been dealing with uncertainty—how will this work? How long will it last? How can we make things better for students, instructors, and staff? But there was something inspiring about how quickly we were able to make the turnaround.

Q: How did faculty meet the challenge of converting their courses from in-person to online, and what were their concerns?

Faculty have done a terrific job. We’ve been meeting almost weekly with our undergraduate chairs, and I can see their deep dedication to maintaining the academic enterprise.

Another thing that has come through is concern for the students—things like whether people have a home environment conducive to study, or good internet access. Marisa Kozlowski, in Chemistry, is teaching a class with over 200 students, and she got in touch with every one of them to find out how they were doing and what

they needed to make the situation work for them. Students have spontaneously expressed to me their great appreciation for the efforts faculty have put in.

Q: Now that there has been some time to adapt to the new class environment, what are you hearing from students?

Students have been very forthcoming in letting us know about situations where things are not going well— and we work directly with programs and faculty to address those situations. One student told me that he didn’t realize how hard it would be to watch lectures at home. A number of students said, we really miss interaction with professors and interaction with each other in the classroom. But, in general, the feedback has been very positive.

Q: What aspects of this experience have made a big impression on you?

The main thing is the swiftness with which staff, faculty, and students came together to respond. People who normally have lived in wellgrooved routines adapted quickly to the new circumstances. We’ve also been hearing directly from a number of faculty and students about their concerns over important issues like the way in which pass/fail grading has

Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College

been implemented. It is not surprising that it’s impossible to meet everyone’s concerns in an extraordinary moment like this. But as an administrator I’m extremely grateful to everyone who brings their concerns to us—and I know I speak for all my colleagues in the Dean’s Office on that point. Their input has been a vital part of a challenging process.

Q: Any lessons or takeaways from the experience? Do you think anything may be different once campus life returns to normal?

I talked about this with one of the College’s student advisory groups, and they confirmed something I sense from faculty, too. There’s something we were all taking for granted before this happened—the wonderful living-learning community that we normally have, and the ways in which instructors and students connect so meaningfully here outside the formalities of courses, grading, and so on. When we all get back on campus, we will be showing each other how much we appreciate each other, this community, and what it’s like when we are all here together.

3

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

Adithya Sriram, C’20, was a senior Benjamin Franklin Scholar in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, with majors in biophysics and physics. He was also a Vagelos Science Challenge Award winner.

2020 DEAN’S SCHOLARS Lusi Klimenko

Christina M. Steele, C’20, majored in psychology and was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a Beinecke and Marshall Scholar. She participated in two National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs.

Piotr Wojcik, C’20, majored in urban studies. He was part of the inaugural group of Gordon Fellows in Urban Studies at Penn and received high praise for his work as an intern with The Heidelberg Project in Detroit. (see p. 72)

Penn Arts & Sciences has named 20 students from the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, and the Graduate Division as 2020 Dean’s Scholars. They were chosen from over 10,000 students for their exceptional academic performance and intellectual promise.

Often described by their professors as “superstars,” these students include undergraduates who have already presented at conferences and made important contributions to their fields, and graduate students who have published, invented, and found fresh ways to teach the next generation. The Dean’s Scholars are usually recognized as part of the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum in the spring, but the event was cancelled this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“While I wish I could celebrate with these impressive students in person, it gives me great pleasure to recognize their exceptional academic performance and their sense of intellectual adventure,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “Our Dean’s Scholars truly are the best of the best.”

4

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES Fahad Ahmed, C’20, was a University Scholar with a major in communication (concentration in health communication) and a minor in chemistry. He has already co-authored a number of peer-reviewed publications.

Omkar Katta, C’20, majored in mathematical economics, completing five graduate courses and contributing to three research projects.

One professor called him “the best of the best.”

Srinivas Mandyam, C’20, was a Roy and Diana Vagelos Science Scholar who won a Vagelos Challenge Award and a Churchill Scholarship. He majored in biophysics, mathematics, and physics, while also pursuing a master’s in physics.

Melisande B. McLaughlin, C’20, was recognized in her cinema and media studies program as “a highly accomplished filmmaker,” exploring contemporary social, political, and humanitarian issues to effect social change.

Leo J. Sarbanes, C’20, majored in music and distinguished himself both as a scholar and a performer. He minored in Biological Basis of Behavior, and his drive to understand music from multiple perspectives is noteworthy.

Qingyang (Freya) Zhou, C’20, majored in cinema and media studies, comparative literature, and German. She won an award for her presentation at the Northeast Modern Language Association meeting.

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL & PROFESSIONAL STUDIES— UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM Nathan Duane Coonts, LPS’20, a political science and history major, helped conduct several research projects. He was selected to present at this year’s Student Veterans of America National Conference.

PROFESSIONAL MASTER'S PROGRAMS Hope Elliott, earning her Master of Science in Applied Geosciences, was recognized as an exceptional young scholar and departmental citizen with a focus in environmental chemistry and human health.

SCHOOL NEWS

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

GRADUATE DIVISION— DOCTORAL PROGRAMS Shorouk Badir (Chemistry) already has nine scientific publications, and her contributions to various lab projects are expected to be “hugely impactful.”

Eilidh Beaton (Philosophy) is a graduate associate at Perry World House who has cultivated interdisciplinary knowledge in political philosophy and policy engagement.

Tanner Kaptanoglu (Physics and Astronomy) is the co-inventor of the dichroicon, the first device capable of sorting photons by wavelength in largescale neutrino detectors.

Davy Knittle (English) has been called an intellectual “force” across multiple fields of study ranging from poetics and urban studies to queer theory and trans studies.

Mina Khalil (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) is recognized in his department as a skilled researcher with a sharply analytical mind.

Benjamin Oyler (Music) is a philosopher and critical theorist with a background in jazz performance. A professor described him as a “rare scholar and teacher.”

Tariq Thachil has been named Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) and Associate Professor of Political Science, effective July 1, 2020. As Director of CASI, he will also hold the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India.

Thachil comes to Penn from Vanderbilt University, where he is an associate professor of political science. He studies political parties and political behavior, social movements, ethnic politics, and urban migration, with a regional focus on South Asia. His current research examines the political consequences of rapid urbanization and internal migration in India.

Thachil’s first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India, was published in 2014 and received several awards, including the Gregory Luebbert Book Award for best book in comparative politics from the American Political Science Organization. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Politics, and World Politics, among others. He has also written for media outlets including the Indian Express and the Washington Post. In 2019, he received the Courtesy of Tariq Thachil

Ruth Moyer (Criminology) uses quantitative methods to examine the impact of changes to the urban community on crime, and has been widely published.

CASI DIRECTOR NAMED

Claire Conklin Sabel (History and Sociology of Science) studies the relationship between global commerce and the earth sciences, and stands out as a dynamic thinker.

Aline Zanardini (Mathematics) researches the geometry of elliptic fibrations and the stability of pencils of plane curves of degree six, and is a “master TA.”

Tariq Thachil, incoming Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India

Heinz I. Eulau Award for Best Article in the American Political Science Review. Thachil holds a Ph.D. in government from Cornell and a B.A. in economics from Stanford.

“CASI is a vital part of our drive to expand global understanding of and discover global solutions to issues like sustainability, poverty, and justice,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “Tariq Thachil will be an outstanding partner in this mission.”

The Madan Lal Sobti Chair was established through the generosity of numerous alumni, parents, and friends of the University.

FACULTY RECOGNIZED FOR OUTSTANDING TEACHING Four Penn Arts & Sciences faculty were recognized with University-wide teaching awards in 2020. Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Lisa Mitchell, Associate Professor of South Asia Studies, received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching—the highest honor for teaching at Penn. Bill Ashmanskas, Senior Lecturer in Physics, was recognized with a Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence by Non-Standing Faculty, and Annette Lareau, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences, received a Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

Nine additional faculty were honored with teaching awards from Penn Arts & Sciences.

Paul Goldin, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Mark Goulian, Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor in the Natural Sciences, received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching.

The Dennis M. DeTurck Award for Innovation in Teaching was given to Philip Gressman, Professor of Mathematics, and the Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research went to Megan Kassabaum, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English, received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished 5

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

Teaching by an Assistant Professor, while the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching

by Affiliated Faculty was presented to Deborah Burnham, Associate Undergraduate Chair of English, and Andria Johnson, Senior Lecturer in History and Sociology of Science.

In the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, Philip Gehrman, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, received the Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs, and Dana Kaminstein, Lecturer in Organizational Dynamics, was recognized with the Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs.

COLLEGE CELEBRATES CLASS OF 2020 Courtesy of Lucy Hu

Matthew Hamilton

Lucy Hu, from Auckland, New Zealand, majored in political science with a minor in survey research and data analytics, and wrote an award-winning honors thesis. She was on the Dean’s List during her first three years, and was selected for Phi Beta Kappa. Hu was active with the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) as a student fellow and teaching assistant. She also conducted research at Perry World House, and was published in the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics, and World Affairs. She interned at the Penn Biden Center in Washington D.C.; Comcast NBCUniversal; and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she volunteered with the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project and Civic Youth Action Partnership. Hu is now working for a political polling and public opinion firm.

KAREN TANI NAMED A PENN INTEGRATES KNOWLEDGE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

Courtesy of Karen Tani

Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Classical Studies, and Lucy Hu, C’20

Karen Tani has been named the 24th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, effective July 1, 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional festivities, but the College of Arts & Sciences celebrated the Class of 2020 with a virtual graduation ceremony on Sunday, May 17. It included addresses from Dean Steven J. Fluharty, Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, and Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College and Professor of Biology, as well as a virtual roll call and slideshow of the graduates. Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Classical Studies, and Lucy Hu, C’20, were the featured speakers.

Renowned classical scholar Emily Wilson is the author of a bestselling edition of Homer’s Odyssey, the first English translation by a woman. Her research focuses on Greek and Roman literature and its reception and translation, with particular interests in epic, tragedy, and philosophy. Wilson’s internationally recognized research has been supported by distinguished honors including the American Council of Learned Societies National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of six books and many articles and essays.

Her verse translation of The Odyssey received wide acclaim, named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018 and shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award.

6

Karen Tani, Seaman Family University Professor

SCHOOL NEWS

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched

by Penn President Amy Gutmann in 2005 as a Universitywide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines.

CENTER FOR SOCIAL NORMS AND BEHAVIORAL DYNAMICS LAUNCHES

Tani will be the Seaman Family University Professor, with faculty appointments in the Department of History and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She was the inaugural graduate of Penn’s J.D./ Ph.D. Program in American Legal History.

“From the modern welfare rights movement to the implications of Title IX in the American legal landscape, Karen Tani is an exceptionally influential scholar who brings wide-ranging expertise at the intersection of law and history to Penn,” says Gutmann. “Her work exemplifies the rigorous cross-disciplinary research and teaching that is so essential to understanding society’s most pressing issues, prominent among them the fairness and integrity of our justice system. We are delighted to welcome home this truly remarkable scholar and educator.”

The Seaman Family University Professorship is a gift of Julie Breier Seaman, C’86, and Jeffrey Seaman, W’83.

Julie Seaman, an associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the Emory University School of Law, is a University Trustee and a member of the Penn Arts & Sciences Board of Overseers. Jeffrey Seaman is the founder and CEO of Rooms To Go Inc.

Penn Arts & Sciences recently announced the launch of a center that will advance research and the development of theoretical tools on social norms, along with practical applications in the form of interventions intended to impact specific behaviors. The newly formed Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics, led

by Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, uses a data-driven approach to understand cultural and systemic behaviors and design meaningful interventions.

“In these rapidly changing times, a sophisticated understanding of large-scale social dynamics is essential to navigating them confidently,” says Bicchieri. “The center is presently studying the impact of COVID-19 on norms and behaviors around the world, from Latin America to Europe, China, and South Korea. The lessons we learn will enable communities and governments to better respond to the coming, significant societal changes.”

The center has three distinct wings. The Behavioral Lab (BeLab), the research wing of the center, conducts theoretical and experimental research on social norms, heuristics and biases, cooperation, corruption, leadership, and the dynamics of social change. The Penn Social Norms Group (PennSoNG), the applied wing of the center, provides advisory services to groups seeking to foster behavioral change at the community, national, or international levels. The center also provides consulting services to international development agencies and governments to design interventions to sustainably shift collective behaviors.

The center is affiliated with the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences (MBDS) program. Created by Bicchieri and offered through the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, MBDS looks to equip students with theoretical and practical tools to address a variety of real-life problems. In collaboration with UNICEF, the center also

offers a two-part series called Social Norms, Social Change. This program, available through the online learning platform Coursera, enables participants across the globe to learn about social norms and their connection to a range of practices and behaviors.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, says, “Cristina Bicchieri’s renowned work and much-valued insight on social norms and human behavior makes her an ideal leader for the center. With its approach to research, advising, and education, the center is a key partner in Penn Arts & Sciences’ commitment to being a resource for our local and global communities.”

FACULTY HONORS Recent recognitions for our faculty include: The American Academy of Arts & Sciences awarded William Labov, John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, the Talcott Parsons Prize for distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences. Labov is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, which seeks to understand language in relation to social factors including region, race, class, and gender.

His work has impacted the practice of language science around the world, been referenced in hundreds of 7

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

Courtesy of Mirjam Cvetič

Shira Yudkoff

Courtesy of James Primosch

Courtesy of Angela Duckworth

(Clockwise from top left) William Labov, John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Linguistics Emeritus; Mirjam Cvetič, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics; James Primosch, Professor of Music; Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology

publications, and inspired the countless students and scholars he mentored. His influence is felt in education, sociology, computational and cognitive science, and law.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation recognized Mirjam Cvetič, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, with the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award. This honor is granted to researchers whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. Cvetič is regarded as an expert in string theory and its consequences for fundamental particle physics. She will conduct research at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

James Primosch, Professor of Music, received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music, which recognizes an American composer of vocal works. Primosch’s

BEN CONNECT

COLLEGE STUDENTS have questions about

career paths and life after Penn Arts & Sciences.

With our new mentorship platform, ALUMNI can be there with answers, advice, and guidance.

Learn more and grow your community at WWW.BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU For more information, contact Kathe Archibald, Director of Global Alumni Engagement, at kathea@sas.upenn.edu.

8

instrumental, vocal, and electronic works have been performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe, and they have received accolades in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times. His other honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Regional Artists Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. At Penn he directs the Presser Electronic Music Studio.

Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, was included in the top 10 of Education Week’s 2020 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. The list recognizes scholars whose work shapes public discussion around education. Duckworth is an internationally recognized scholar of positive psychology and the psychology of achievement. She is known for her role in developing and advancing the concept of grit— the ability to maintain effort toward long-term objectives— and self-control as factors in the pursuit and attainment of goals.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

ONLINE

CONTENT

OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/ONLINE-CONTENT Be sure to visit OMNIA online for exclusive multimedia content that covers all aspects of Penn Arts & Sciences research, including faculty, students, alumni, and events. Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

COVID-19 NEWS BLOG An archive of Penn Arts & Sciences research and teaching on the pandemic and its far-reaching effects.

60-SECOND LECTURES “IN QUARANTINE” (VIDEO)

IN QUARANTINE

Penn Arts & Sciences converted its long-running 60-Second Lectures series into a virtual “In Quarantine” edition, with a wide variety of scholars and experts shedding light on the pandemic.

FUTURES BEYOND REFINING (VIDEO) A community-based research project by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities partnered students with community members in South Philadelphia to design a neighborhood tour that examines the history and future of a shuttered oil refinery site.

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast series on Apple iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts, to automatically receive downloads of our most recent episodes, as well as previous audio features from Penn Arts & Sciences. In addition, the Penn Arts & Sciences Vimeo channel houses dozens of videos featuring faculty, students, and alumni.

OMNIA

CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC

WHO’S WATERING THE PLANTS? Department of Biology faculty and staff are working hard to maintain living plant collections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BY

JANE CARROLL

efore the COVID-19 pandemic brought on-campus learning to a halt, Kimberly Gallagher had been supervising several postdoctoral fellows in her lab, where research focuses on protein transfer in living plants. She also had one graduate student about to begin work on the day that classes were suspended.

Courtesy of Kathryn Butler Reber

B

“Now, I’m collecting seeds, watering plants, and communicating with my postdocs via email and photos,” says Gallagher, Associate Professor of Biology, who visits her lab once weekly. “I take pictures of plants on my phone and ask them, ‘Is this what it’s supposed to look like?’ I am just keeping things alive until we can get the plants to seed, and then preserving seeds in envelopes until we open up again.”

Gallagher works primarily with Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress. It is considered a common weed, but that doesn’t mean it’s expendable. “Because protein transfer involves random genetic mutation, some of those plants are completely irreplaceable,” she explains. “In others, we inject a protein of interest with a florescent protein to watch movement within the cell—theoretically we could replicate those plants, but it takes a lot of time.”

Courtesy of Kimberly Gallagher

Kimberly Gallagher, Associate Professor of Biology, is working from home and tending to the plants in her research lab.

10

Reber’s horticulture staff is small—up to five people in summer—and fairly isolated under normal circumstances. “Right now, three of us are working on rotation,” she says. “One of us is on site each day to water plants, do basic maintenance, and make sure the greenhouse is functioning properly. Outdoors in the park, we walk a loop around the gardens to check for safety hazards and monitor trash.”

The collections represent over 50 plant families and include some extremely old specimens, such a cycad, a palm-like woody plant, called Encephalartos lehamannii. “Judging by its size and the height of the caudex [the axis of a woody plant comprising the stem and root], we think it’s at least 30 or 40 years old,” Reber says.

An Encephalartos lehmannii is one of the oldest plants in the Department of Biology's greenhouse.

Gallagher is grateful that a National Science Foundation grant allows her to continue paying her postdoctoral researchers.

“We may be looking at five months out of the lab,” she says. “That’s a significant amount of time to put your research on hold. I’m glad that people are safe and not losing their incomes, and they can use this time to plan. When the lab reopens, we can go as fast as the plants can grow.”

As greenhouse and garden manager for the Department of Biology, Kathryn Butler Reber is also focused on keeping plants alive during the crisis. The department’s greenhouse, located at the east end of Carolyn Lynch Laboratory, contains hundreds of plants used in courses and labs, as part of a permanent study collection, and for gardens in James G. Kaskey Memorial Park (also known as the BioPond) adjacent to the Lynch Lab.

Her team is also tackling back-burner projects, like cleaning up plant records, while at home. “We are double-checking plant names and that plants are correctly marked alive or dead—things we don’t usually have a lot of time for.”

Both Reber and Gallagher say the COVID19 experience may alter the way they do their work after things return to normal.

Reber is looking at contingency plans and improvements. “It would be great to have part of the greenhouse on an automated watering system, especially some of the plants for research faculty,” she says. “That is something we had been talking about and that we will continue to pursue.”

The pandemic has given Gallagher more insight into her students’ lives. “I’ve been reaching out to my advisees and to students I taught last year to check in, and many of them have shared their stories,” she says. “Some of these kids are going through a lot. I think this will make me a more sensitive teacher.”

CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Courtesy of Kok-Chor Tan

COVID-19: IMPACTS ON THE INDIVIDUAL Kok-Chor Tan, Professor of Philosophy, says the ways in which people are affected by the pandemic are a result of a complex tapestry of economic, social, and cultural factors.

A

s the far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to impact communities around the world, we spoke with Kok-Chor Tan, Professor of Philosophy, to learn more about how external factors—such as socioeconomic status, health care, and social biases—can exacerbate or mitigate suffering.

Q: How will economic disparity impact the outcomes of citizens in different countries?

The consequences of extreme global economic inequality are aggravated during a global crisis like the one we are presently facing. Countries with Low Human Development (scored using indicators including life expectancy, per capita income, and education) are less able to respond to COVID-19 due to the lack of essential health resources such as hospitals, medical equipment and medication, and doctors and nurses.

Weak infrastructure in transportation and communications, for example, will hamper efforts to provide care and information. Poor countries also suffer disproportionately from preexisting health deficits. We should not think that what happens in other countries is not our concern. Our basic duties of humanity and justice aside, this is a pandemic that by definition knows no borders. If it cannot be contained anywhere in the world, it remains a serious threat to all of us.

Q: On a more local level, how does socioeconomic status alter a given household's well-being during a pandemic?

Socioeconomic inequality within a country raises additional issues of justice. While this is a pandemic that touches all of us, its effects on people’s lives are uneven even within a wealthy

country. Some people are able to ride it out better than their neighbors.

The lack of universal health care here in the U.S., and our broken health system more generally, is compromising our ability as a society to respond effectively. But it will be the poor and the uninsured who will bear the brunt of this collective failure.

This is especially problematic when there is stiff competition for extremely scarce resources, like hospital beds, ventilators, and healthcare providers. Poor families will also suffer more under an economic lockdown because low-paying jobs tend to be the most vulnerable. Educational inequality is also accentuated. Schools are closed in much of the country, but not all families are able to exploit remote or virtual learning. And parents who depend on free school meals for their children now face additional burdens.

Everyone is affected by the pandemic, but some will be more severely affected. COVID-19 has made very visible, and is in danger of widening, the deep cracks in our system.

Q: How do governmental safety nets fare at times like these?

Governmental safety nets, like unemployment benefits, are important.

But we must make sure that the assistance goes to the right place and the right people. We are often told that some corporations are too big to fail.

But we must not forget the ordinary

Kok-Chor Tan, Professor of Philosophy

individuals, the small business owners who are providing essential services at this moment. We should also not forget undocumented workers who mostly occupy low-paying jobs with no security. How hard will it be for them to receive government assistance? The $2.2 trillion relief package passed by Congress is a step in the right direction. But we must not forget the baseline here. The relief package in fact exposes deeper, preexisting deficiencies in our institutions, such as inadequate protection for workers and the lack of universal health care.

Q: What role do the media and social media play when it comes to ethics?

Mainstream media has the responsibility to provide truthful, unbiased and fact-based reporting, and not, say, advertise fake cures or perpetuate stereotypes in its coverage of the pandemic. Early news reports on the coronavirus as a looming danger for America (and now of course actual) were commonly accompanied by photos of Asian-Americans, set in American Chinatowns for full effect.

These images create a strong association in the mind of the public between the virus and people of Asian descent.

Journalists and reporters have this important and challenging balancing act to perform: convey the seriousness of the situation without inducing panic and irrational fears.

11

OMNIA

CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC

WASTES OF WAR Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History, shows students a different side of conflict.

BY

KRISTEN DE GROOT

AND

LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

Eric Sucar

Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History, (center) leads students in an exercise encouraging them to view trash with the eyes of an archaeologist.

A

nne Berg’s course, Wastes of War: A Century of Destruction, was unconventional from the start. The assistant professor of history began the semester by bringing in a bag of her own household trash for the students to sort, something she calls a “desensitization exercise”— a way for them to look at trash with the eyes of an archeologist.

The course asked students to consider the connections between waste and war, two concepts not usually paired. But Eric Sucar

Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History 12

Berg says that together, they fundamentally restructure the physical and social world. She explains, “Just one example is chemical weapons that were turned into pesticides in peacetime, shaping not just the language about enemies but also the cultural imagination about human control over wastes, pests, and weeds. “

Museum. The landfill was the main resource for the objects now on display in the museum, which prompts questions of when and how a thing is designated as trash or an artifact.

But the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to remote learning altered the course of the semester, and Berg began holding the seminar on Zoom and making plans for an online tour of the landfill.

“Trash is usually out of sight and out of mind, but for this class we needed to bring it back to mind,” Berg continues.

“And the kind of ‘trash’ that war and war-making produces is of a very particular kind. Bones, mines, radioactive soil, and the rifts in the social fabric remain even after the dust settles and the rubble is cleared.”

“When I first learned that all of us would teach exclusively online, I dreaded the potential technological disruptions,” she says. “But I was eager to see my students, and seeing their faces and hearing their voices has been comforting.”

Berg planned for the class to culminate in a trip to New York City to visit the Fresh Kills Landfill—where debris from the World Trade Center was taken in the days and months after the terrorist attack—and the 9/11 Memorial and

In addition to technological challenges, Berg recognizes that being separated from campus resources may affect the work her students can do. “I don’t know what their lives are like at home,” she explains. “They have other things to

CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

worry about. It’s really tricky to imagine that we could all just continue on as if nothing had happened.”

Still, she views the class as a welcome respite from current events, saying, “When we resumed online, it was obvious that every single one of us was determined to leave our own personal stresses behind and spend 90 minutes diving into a different world.”

60-SECOND LECTURES IN QUARANTINE The School adapted its iconic lecture series and went virtual to address COVID-19.

BY

SUSAN AHLBORN

Going remote meant Berg also had to make changes to the final project, an in-depth investigation into the history of Earth Day at Penn and its connections to broader social movements.

Berg worked with J.M. Duffin, Acting University Archivist, who digitized Penn records so students could access them remotely. Members of the class used online resources to find the news stories that helped them understand the historical moment in which Earth Day began 50 years ago.

“It’s a bummer that we couldn’t go into the archives and sit there and puzzle over the documents together,” says Berg. “But the students did an amazing job and we worked very collaboratively.

Some of them are even remaining on as research fellows so we can keep the project going.”

The students found Earth Day’s connection to other activism including antiwar protests, but also discovered that its celebration has often elided environmental problems experienced by predominately poor communities. “Earth Day has such happy connotations,” Berg says,” “but our research uncovered some of its less flattering aspects.”

Berg and her students built an online platform so students could showcase their findings. They took full advantage of the newly digital exhibit, including visual and audio artifacts alongside their writing.

Check out the students’ research: web.sas.upenn.edu/earthdayproject

IN QUARANTINE

During the pandemic, Penn Arts & Sciences faculty recorded lectures from their homes, addressing the science and giving social, cultural, and historical perspectives.

W

hen the COVID-19 pandemic upended everyday life, information and analysis were at a premium— so Penn Arts & Sciences converted its long-running 60-Second Lectures series into a virtual “In Quarantine” edition, with a wide variety of scholars and experts shedding light on the pandemic. More than 20 professors recorded lectures from their homes, touching on the science; the complex social, cultural, historical, and economic issues; and the response on campus. A set of lectures went live at noon each Wednesday in April.

The series kicked off with Hanming Fang, Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics, who spoke about using public policy tools to address the pandemic. “Any good policy needs to balance a tradeoff between health and economy: What are the alternatives?” he asked, giving South Korea’s combination of extensive testing and targeted quarantine as a useful example.

Other speakers included Sarah Barringer Gordon, Professor of History and Arlin M. Adams Professor

of Constitutional Law, who spoke on the history of epidemics and individual rights, and Jonathan Moreno, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics, who explained how vaccine recipients would be prioritized. Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, discussed norm-nudging, and David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English, reflected on the “greatest pandemic” in 1348.

“In this spring’s 60-Second Lectures, we looked to the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences for perspectives on meaning in times of illness and death, perspectives on human societies in times of crisis, and reliable knowledge and control of threats from the natural world,” says Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, who introduced the lectures. “They are dedicated to understanding and hope in an extraordinarily difficult time.”

The lectures are available at www.sas.upenn.edu/60-second.

13

OMNIA

CONFRONTING THE PANDEMIC

A QUICK PIVOT TURNS AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE CLASS INTO TIMELY EDUCATION Students in Otis Kendall Professor of Biology David Roos’ course learned in real time how public health scientists attempt to understand COVID-19.

BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

B

iologist David Roos kicked off his advanced course on infectious disease biology this semester with a focus on influenza and plans to also cover aspects of HIV and malaria.

Then COVID-19 emerged.

“A small silver lining to this dark cloud of the pandemic is that it wasn’t a bad semester for a class on infectious disease biology and public health,” says Roos, E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology.

In the midst of the campus shutdown that compelled faculty to move their courses online, Roos also shifted the content of his course, Molecular Mechanisms of Infectious Disease Biology, to encompass what was playing out all around us. Because the approach of the course emphasizes “how to think” rather than merely memorizing biological pathways and proteins, says Roos, the scientific approaches students had

already learned allowed them to consider strategies for discovering, characterizing, and fighting this new disease.

“We had already spent considerable time this semester discussing the cell biology, molecular genetics, evolution, and epidemiology of influenza, including the 1918 pandemic and subsequent outbreaks,” says Roos, “as well as the emergence, spread, and management of HIV.” From the first weeks of the semester in January, Roos had been sharing information with his students about the novel coronavirus in class discussions and suggesting readings and online resources related to the escalating outbreak.

Roos has a wealth of experience to inform his teachings, including three decades of laboratory research on the parasites that cause malaria and other diseases and, more recently, the responsibility for supporting genomic datasets for

Transitioning to video conference-style teaching did not pose a major barrier for Roos, whose database group is dispersed around the globe and relies on such technology on a daily basis.

He began by offering his students an optional online meeting during spring break to smooth out any technological difficulties, to see how they were faring, and to discuss some of the science behind the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Most of our readings focused on primary research literature, so I shared articles on the evolution of coronaviruses that can cause the common cold, previous epidemics like SARS and MERS, and recent preprints on the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19,” he says.

Courtesy of David Roos

Recognizing the personal toll of the pandemic, and with many students now home with their families, Roos also invited questions from family members about coronavirus biology, the ongoing pandemic, and public health responses.

Abhinav Suri, who graduated from Penn in 2019 with a double major in biology and computer science, finished the course remotely from his home in San Antonio as part of the post-baccalaureate Pre-Health Specialized Studies Program.

David Roos, E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology, teaching his infectious disease course online.

14

hundreds of parasite and fungal pathogens, and insects that transmit disease.

The Eukaryotic Pathogen, Host, and Vector Genomics Resource—an integrated database hosting data on thousands of genomes representing hundreds of species—is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (part of the National Institutes of Health), the Wellcome Trust (UK), and others. These tools allow biomedical researchers around the world to explore their own data in the context of other available information, providing insight into diseases and expediting the development of diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines.

“We talked about things like, how can scientists use these methodologies to make something along the lines of a vaccine or an antiviral for this disease? It made our discussions even more relevant to what’s going on in the world today,” says Suri.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

OMNIA

FACULTY OPINION

A HOME WITHOUT RUNNING WATER IS NO HOME AT ALL

By Howard Neukrug Professor of Practice in Earth and Environmental Science and Executive Director of The Water Center at Penn

Illustration by Jon Krause

16

FACULTY OPINION

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

his past March, urban water systems across the country placed a moratorium on residential water shutoffs. It may have taken the COVID-19 pandemic, but at long last, the negative consequences to the health and well-being of our residents has taken precedence over timely water bill payments.

Throughout human history, civilizations have endeavored to provide safe and plentiful water to all of their citizens.

It is a sad fact, however, that there are still many American households struggling daily to access this most basic of human necessities—clean drinking water and sanitation services—even in communities and cities in which the necessary infrastructure is in place and working.

The ugly truth is that in urban and rural America, including on tribal lands, many of the poorest people simply cannot afford to pay their water bills.

Manny Teodoro, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University, has reported that in the year 2019, the poorest 20 percent of American households received water/ wastewater monthly bills that exceeded, on average, 12 percent of their disposable household income. Some household water bills came to as much as 30 percent of household income. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suggests that the cost for water and sewer services should not exceed 4.5 percent of household income.

The primary and sometimes sole recourse a water utility has to coax customers into paying their water bills is to shut off water service to the property.

But for a household already living at the edge of its capacity to pay for rent, food, taxes, medicine, clothes, and school supplies, shutting off water supply has consequences beyond the health and sanitation repercussions.

An NAACP Legal Defense Fund study of race and water affordability in America’s cities showed that he collateral consequences of unaffordable water bills may include losing your home, your health, your kids, or your freedom.

This idea is reinforced by Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, which notes the impact of “water debt” on the poor is systemic; over time, water debt compounds poverty, reduces the value of homes and neighborhoods, and jeopardizes housing stability. And since water debt is attached to the property, it is often passed on with the family home, often to relatives who lack the ability to repay this inherited liability.

As my friend and colleague Maureen Taylor of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization states, “It is not only unimaginable—but unconscionable— to suggest that if you can’t pay for water, you can’t have it.”

This is all not to suggest that U.S. water utilities haven’t been providing significant economic support of their lowincome customers. In fact, for most American cities, assistance has long been available for those who need it, through senior citizen discounts, emergency services funds, and grant assistance programs. In Philadelphia alone, for example, over $34 million dollars was made available through customer assistance programs. These programs generally did nothing to help end the cycle of poverty, however, especially since they required the household to become behind in their water bills before support is offered. Until companies and cities can change this assistance model, the cycle will continue.

In July 2017, Philadelphia Water took a giant step to overcome the struggles of its neediest customers. Philadelphia initiated an income-based tier structure for its water tariffs. For households at or below 50 percent of “federal poverty

level,” water bills were reduced from an average of near $80 to $12 per month.

The goal was to treat all customers with respect and provide a real incentive for them to pay what they could afford to pay. There are some 15,000 households enrolled, which may represent about one-half of all those eligible, out of a total household base of nearly 500,000.

Each month, more in-need customers are applying to the program.

Penn, and cities across the U.S., are watching the progress as Philadelphia Water begins to assess the real impact of this change on the utility’s revenues, costs, and tariffs and the impact of this program on at-risk households. For example, are there fewer water shutoffs? Is this helping end the cycle of poverty? Can this tariff system be replicated in other cities and towns across the country?

Water is a human right, but that doesn’t mean that water must be free. It must, however, be affordable, especially for those with little to no income. And an income-based tariff may be the best approach yet to balance revenue needs with affordability because, as Community Legal Services of Philadelphia noted, “A home without running water is no home at all.”

Howard Neukrug is Professor of Practice in Earth and Environmental Science and Executive Director of The Water Center at Penn. He is the former Commissioner and CEO of Philadelphia Water.

17

OMNIA

18

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND ACTION The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities promotes interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and learning with real-world impacts.

BY JANE CARROLL ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAGGIE CHIANG

19

OMNIA

building a digital archive. The program supports Penn faculty in developing new courses and projects that extend the reach of environmental study. In fall 2020, PPEH will begin offering an undergraduate minor.

As an example of community-based participatory research—in which universities and other institutions partner with community members who have a stake in the research process and findings—Futures Beyond Refining was designed to have a tangible impact on the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood.

“M

y mother’s whole crowd she used to hang with died of cancer. Like come on. No way … Her, my step-dad, the neighbors around the side, the neighbors across the street … everybody was dying back to back …”

The typed note was pinned to a cork board inside a basement meeting room in the Donatucci Library in South Philadelphia, where city residents gathered along with climate activists, public health advocates, artists, and Penn students on a frigid December day to talk about the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex (PES). An explosion and fire on June 21, 2019, had resulted in the shuttering of the 150-year-old refinery, leaving the site and its surrounding communities with an uncertain future.

The meeting was part of a day-long event that included guest speakers, an arts-based visioning workshop, and communityled tours of the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood, which sits just to the north of PES. The day’s programming was part of a long-term project called “Futures Beyond Refining.” It was designed by students in a fall 2019 graduate seminar called Environmental Humanities: Theory, Method, Practice, taught by Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of German and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH).

Now in the third year of a four-year pilot grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, PPEH focuses on interdisciplinary, collaborative research; public engagement; raising awareness of environmental issues through collaboration with creative artists; and 20

“One of the things that we in PPEH have said from the very beginning is that we’re challenging the notion of what it is to study the environment,” says Wiggin. “It’s not just about remote forests or mountain peaks, or the supposedly pristine places thought of as ‘nature’ apart from humans. In fact, we’re interested in waterways and landscapes in which humans are very much a part. We’re thinking through the connections between environment, social justice, and public health. And we hope that by working together— often with the help of artists and writers—we can shine a light on the interdependence of human and environmental health to galvanize attention in this era of climate and ecological crisis.”

Each of the students in Wiggin’s seminar had a role to play in the Futures Beyond Refining project, from finding a location to inviting speakers and participants to publicizing the event.

Wiggin and the students made contact with neighborhood activists and residents through a local group called Philly Thrive. Most students partnered with a Gray’s Ferry resident to collect and record oral histories. The residents told of profound health impacts from living so close to the largest refinery on the East Coast, including high rates of asthma and cancer, as well as a lack of timely information about the plant’s emissions and the effects of the June explosion.

The oral histories will form the basis of a digital tour and mapping project of Gray’s Ferry that captures and amplifies people’s wishes and desires for the future, says Wiggin. “The project will consider the burdens that people have lived with and will continue to live with, and that certainly would be exacerbated if refining continues.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2020 Alex Schein

DIALOGUE ACROSS DISCIPLINES The students in Wiggin’s PPEH seminar entered the class with a range of interests and experiences. They began the semester with readings and research on other “fence-line communities” located near industrial sites. The students designed the Futures Beyond Refining project to explore the historical relationship between PES and its surrounding neighborhoods, disseminate data on impacts, and engage residents in imagining alternative uses for the site— literally a “future beyond refining.”

“We thought about the ways that energy infrastructure like PES so radically changes not only the land it’s built on, but also its surroundings through pipelines and transportation systems,” says Wiggin. “We wanted to understand the cultures that grow up around this massive infrastructure.”

Brooke Sietinsons

We want our students to grapple with complexity and the complicated histories feeding the natures and cultures we inhabit together.

Alexandre Imbot, C’20, the only undergraduate in the course, majored in environmental studies with a concentration in sustainability and environmental management. He had prior experience in public outreach thanks to an academically based community service course called Community Based Environmental Health, taught by Marilyn Howarth of the Perelman School of Medicine— another member of the PPEH faculty working group.

Imbot is convinced of the importance of personal narrative. “It’s about asking people to share their ways of knowing and being with the refinery, beyond just hard numbers,” he says. “What does it smell like? What has been constant living here and what has changed?”

(Top to bottom) (L– R) Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, community partner Tammy Reeves, and Susan Robinson of Germantown Friends School tour the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood; the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex (PES), which closed after an explosion and fire in June 2019; Charles Reeves, a community partner, leads a tour of the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood as part of the Futures Beyond Refining project.

21

OMNIA For his senior thesis, Imbot continued to build on the Futures Beyond Refining project by assessing how ethnography and community-based participatory research can create meaningful space for local knowledge in measuring the risks of large polluting facilities.

“I think one of the most powerful parts of the class was that everybody came from such different backgrounds,” he says. “We all had different ways of approaching the same material and the same issues when planning this project.”

A fourth-year student in the Perelman School of Medicine, Berryhill McCarty, G’21, M’21, is taking time away from her medical studies to earn a master’s degree in English through Penn Arts & Sciences. The move is part of her interest in medical humanities, a growing field that includes the humanities, social sciences, and the arts and their application to medical education and practice.

“I decided to take Bethany’s class because the environmental humanities is very similar to the medical humanities and because the environment is so inextricably linked to human health,” McCarty says. “We’ve seen again and again in history the need to understand the environment our patients live in.”

McCarty was intrigued by one of Wiggin’s favorite descriptions of environmental humanities: “Bethany told us that the ‘environmental humanities inhabits the space between critique and action.’ We spent the first month of the semester living in the critique space, doing a lot of reading, and then once we had that background, we began putting our knowledge into action.”

We spent the first month of the semester living in the critique space, doing a lot of reading, and then once we had that background, we began putting our knowledge into action.

McCarty created maps showing the refinery site in the 1800s, the present day, and in the climate-changed future when sea level rise will be even more apparent across South and Southwest Philadelphia.

“The December event wasn’t just about the health data or the air quality data that some of the guest presenters spoke about,” she says. “It was also about telling the story in such a way that will engage the community and get people to care.”

Meredith Hacking, a doctoral student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, studies medicine, food, consumption, and appetite in German literature with a special focus on plant matter and ideas of healing. For her, the project resonated with her interest in health and what people take into their bodies.

Hacking is a Philadelphia-area native who grew up exploring the Wissahickon Creek, one of the tributaries of the Schuylkill River. “In Bethany’s class we thought very carefully about climate change right now,” she says. “What are the different perspectives on what is happening to the lowlands around the Schuylkill River and how is our knowledge incomplete? What other perspectives do we need to bring in?”

Hacking interviewed community activist Charles Reeves, who led one of the neighborhood tours in December, and recorded his memories about growing up as an African American in Gray’s Ferry during segregation. The two held a long conversation on a small bridge where Reeves said he played as a child.

“I wondered, why would kids be playing on a bridge over railroad tracks next to a refinery?” says Hacking, “and it’s because the Black kids could not use the local playgrounds. The area was segregated.”

More About the Penn Program In Environmental Humanities The Futures Beyond Refining project is typical of the multi-modal, immersive approach embraced by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH), which grew out of student demand for environmental dialogue across disciplines. The growing field challenges the idea that environmental studies should be situated only within quantitative and natural sciences. The PPEH faculty working group includes professors from across Penn Arts & Sciences—representing traditional partners like earth and environmental science and biology, but also anthropology, sociology, history 22

and sociology of science, cinema studies, and English—as well as the Perelman School of Medicine, the Wharton School, and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Daniel Barber, Associate Professor of Architecture in the Weitzman School, serves on the PPEH faculty working group. “We are accustomed to working across disciplinary boundaries to understand the contours of an urban or landscape situation,” he says. “Collaborating with other schools greatly enhances this process, providing a rich knowledge base to students and helping them

see the broader context of their design interventions. At the same time, the strategies and methods of design contribute to explorations in other schools, providing visual and representational tools and offering new perspectives.”

Each year, PPEH courses, projects, and events revolve around a central theme or topic with a rotating faculty director. (Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many events this spring were held virtually.)

Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor of Anthropology, served as director for the 2019–2020 topic, “Elements.”

It references the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, which many traditions hold as central to the composition of both human character and the world. “The topic was organized around re-thinking the elements going forward,” says Anand. “We looked at what we might make of them now that they have been shaped and altered through different human projects to control them.”

Barber will lead next year’s topic, “Transition/Transformation.” It will explore ways to effect a transformation to a world less dependent

Jane Carroll

Rachel Ishikawa

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Meredith Hacking

(Clockwise from top left) As part of the Futures Beyond Refining project, community workshop participants wrote “postcards from 2100,” imagining varied futures for the PES site; Gray's Ferry residents shared memories of growing up near the PES refinery; Futures Beyond Refining participants engaged with large-scale maps of the PES refinery and its surroundings.

on fossil fuels, looking beyond dry land, where industrial infrachanges in technology and behavior structure often sits in proximity to toward creation of a society that low-income communities. is more equitable and less “In both cities, people living in the carbon intensive. social, political, and economic PPEH engages with other universimargins have been pushed to the ties and research partners through spatial margins of the city through conferences and information sharevictions and displacement,” Anand ing. Its global reach is illustrated by says. “Industry is simultaneously a multi-year collaboration between occupying these marginalized, Wiggin and Anand called “Rising infilled lands, so both Philadelphia Waters: Philadelphia and Mumbai.” and Mumbai share a history of peoThe project studies the threats ple being thrown into harm’s way.” posed by rising sea levels in these two port cities, each characterized Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, is affiliated with by significant amounts of landfill that have transformed wetlands into the Latin American and Latino

Studies program (LALS) and PPEH. She joined Penn in August 2018 in a faculty hire designed to grow the School’s strength in the environmental humanities.

“PPEH was one of my main reasons for coming to Penn,” says Lyons.

“I was really excited about the program’s emphasis on public engagement and interdisciplinary collaborations between the social and natural sciences and the arts and humanities. PPEH is creating generative and exciting opportunities for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, both at Penn and internationally.”

Lyons’s research focuses on the intersections of socio-ecological conflicts, justice and reconciliation, and feminist science studies in Colombia. “I’m hoping to participate in creating a bridge between PPEH and LALS,” she says, “and that we can generate opportunities to address socio-environmental issues within and across the hemisphere, the Americas.”

For more information about the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, including video, podcasts, online resources, and events, please visit PPEHLAB.ORG. 23

Lilly Dupuis

OMNIA Wiggin’s seminar aligned with Maggie McNulty’s interests as well. A student in Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies program, McNulty first heard about PPEH as an undergraduate at Drexel University, where she earned a degree in environmental studies and sustainability.

What’s Your Climate Story?

To collect and record lived experiences of climate change, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) is building a digital story bank with a project called “My Climate Story.”

Planetary warming is documented by atmospheric and ocean sensors, but My Climate Story recognizes that human sensations also provide important data for sharing and understanding localized impacts around the world.

Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director of PPEH, and several of her students presented their own personal narratives as part of the Penn Arts & Sciences 1.5 Minute Climate Lecture series, held weekly last September in front of College Hall. The storytellers told of dropping water levels in Oregon’s Willamette River, severe drought and water shortages in South Africa, and heat waves in Wisconsin. Wiggin herself recalled growing up in Maine, where the ocean was too cold for swimming when she was a child, but is no longer.

To browse stories or record and submit your own climate story, visit STORIES.DATAREFUGE.ORG. Bethany Wiggin, left in inset, and several students presented personal stories of climate change as part of the Penn Arts & Sciences 1.5 Minute Climate Lecture series last September.

24

“The Futures Beyond Refining project was a great way to engage with the public outside of the classroom,” McNulty says. “As an undergraduate, I did ethnographic research and assisted a professor with interviewing people who lived in southwest Philadelphia regarding flooding and mold in homes— related to climate change specifically— and the subsequent health impacts.”

Her community partner was Melissa Toby, and McNulty got to know Toby’s entire family and their concerns: “In talking to Melissa, what she really wanted to accomplish through this partnership was for us to really understand what it’s like to live there.”

Wiggin’s seminar continued this spring, conducted online due to the COVID19 pandemic. Two students worked remotely with neighborhood residents to gather additional narratives and help establish the tours as a permanent community resource.

“When you’re doing community-based participatory research, an academic semester doesn’t mean anything to our partners, so you can’t build projects solely driven by one class,” Wiggin notes.

PPEH public events and activities continued digitally as well, including initiatives exploring the confluence of pandemics and climate change, a full slate of Earth Week presentations, and an international conference in May

titled “Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling.” Wiggins gave a presentation contextualizing the Futures Beyond Refining project in terms of public health. “Moving the conference online gave us an opportunity to try out the Nearly Carbon Neutral digital platform developed at UC Santa Barbara,” says Wiggin. (Recorded presentations from the conference are available at climatesensing.org.)

WHAT THE ARTS CAN DO Storytelling and other creative arts are key avenues of exploration for PPEH, and each year the program engages an artist-in-residence. In 2019, the visiting artist was filmmaker, multimedia artist, and Temple University professor Roderick Coover.

For nearly 10 years Coover has kayaked along both shores of the Delaware River from the Delaware Bay to the falls at Trenton, creating online maps of the heavy industry lining the shores that indicate future water incursion levels at these facilities if climate change remains unchecked, with implications for the river’s health.

His project, “Altering Shores,” was performed last November at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

It featured words and images projected onto translucent screens while 20 “unscripted performers”—including Wiggin—walked among the projections.

“The images were text heavy and included words like ‘toluene’ [a benzene derivative] and a ton of chemical symbols,” says Wiggin. “As you walked around the screens these chemical

To watch a video about the Futures Beyond Refining project, visit OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/MULTIMEDIA.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Public Research Internships

One of the ways the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) engages students outside of the classroom is through public research internships that follow two tracks: storytelling and finance.

Alex Imbot, C’20, helped create a de-carbonized investment portfolio as part of a climate finance internship, a joint initiative between PPEH and the Wharton School. The “Sustainable Investment Portfolio Challenge” calls on students at Penn and across the country to identify ways that university endowments can invest in less environmentally harmful industries while remaining profitable. Wiggin was eager to have the climate finance interns document the process and interview investors. Imbot explains, “We’ve built a website about climate finance, looking at what is the role of investment in terms of a path toward a cleaner, de-carbonized future.”

Urban studies major Piotr Wojcik, C’20, was a PPEH storytelling intern, part of a team that helps produce the PPEH podcast and blog, “Data Remediations,” and supports the My Climate Story project. Wojcik attended the Futures Beyond Refining program last December to record interviews for the podcast. Community engagement was not new to him.

Last summer, he held an internship with the Heidelberg Project, a public art project in Detroit that called attention to vacancy and neighborhood disinvestment.

“Because of my interest in storytelling and public engagement through the arts and humanities, and how they intersect with environmental issues and political organizing, this internship was perfect,” Wojcik says. “Whoever has control over the story ends up having power in imagining the future. When we imagine ‘futures beyond refining,’ it’s about leveraging Penn’s institutional resources to raise the voices of the people.”

names and symbols were projected onto your body. It wasn’t until I was immersed in that performance that I realized—we’re all living in a chemical bath.”

Wiggin says creative expressions like Coover’s project provide a vital mechanism for understanding problems like climate change that can seem too overwhelming for people to fully comprehend and respond to.

“We’re living in a time and a reality that is so difficult to understand,” she says. “The vision that creative people bring can be more instructive than a sober analysis of data. The scale and size

of what we’re in and what we’ve caused exceeds, I think, our human capacity for realistic representation, and these experimental projects are ways of describing a very complex reality.”

Understanding the complex reality of human interaction with the environment through different modes of inquiry, and using that knowledge to make a difference, are the central tasks of environmental humanities.

Says Wiggin, “We want our students to grapple with complexity and the complicated histories feeding the natures and cultures we inhabit together.”

25

OMNIA

26

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

The MATH I Problem Julia Hartmann is finding solutions, both in math and for mathematicians-to-be.

By SUSAN AHLBORN Illustrations by MARINA MUUN Photography by JASON VARNEY

n front of the sofa in Julia Hartmann’s office, math-related toys—a two-by-two Rubik’s cube and plastic pieces formed into three-dimensional shapes called Platonic solids—cover the table. They’re useful in her teaching, but they serve a different function here. “I’ve noticed that it’s easier for students to talk if they have something to do with their hands,” says the professor of mathematics. In a field that is often negatively perceived, Hartmann spends a lot of time thinking about how to ease the way for students at all levels.

75 percent of middle- and high-school students have heard an adult speak negatively about math.

2018 Texas Instruments survey “It’s probably the only subject where you could say, ‘Oh, I’ve always hated math,’ and expect that this will be personable rather than look bad,” she says. “If you said you’ve always hated music, people would look at you and say, ‘Oh, my God.’” Hartmann is a Simons Foundation fellow who explores algebra and arithmetic geometry, the latter a relatively young field that applies techniques from algebraic geometry to solve problems in number theory. One example is Fermat’s Last Theorem, a number theory problem that was proposed in 1637 and proved in 1994 using techniques from geometry.

Before she came to Penn, Hartmann headed a research group at RWTH Aachen University and was a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Collaborating with David Harbater, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, she developed the method of field patching, which has expanded the ways mathematicians can analyze the relationships between local and global behaviors of mathematical objects.

Growing up in Germany, Hartmann found her way to mathematics through a mandatory competition in middle school.

She began getting invited to other math

competitions, and near the beginning of high school, she was accepted into a three-week summer academy. Suddenly she was surrounded by other young people who were also interested in math.

“It was a really fantastic experience to be able to share my thoughts with them, and be challenged by the problems they were giving us,” she says. “It was tough, but it was really, really interesting.

“I think the mandatory competition is a great idea because if I had to sign up for these things voluntarily, I don’t think I would have necessarily done that,” says Hartmann, who wants all students to have the opportunity to meet math and find out if they like it.

In the spring of 2017, to learn more about when negative impressions of math begin, Hartmann organized a math circle at the Penn Children’s Center, a child-care center run by the University. She found that the three- to five-year-olds she worked with didn’t see math as something intimidating or boring.

Hartmann didn’t teach them math as they would in school. Instead, she gave the children puzzles to solve—which she says is more like what mathematicians themselves do most of the time—using hands-on props. One of the activities had the children represent binary code.

In another, they were able to figure out how to securely transmit the key to a cryptosystem.

“They really liked it,” she says. “Some of the kids I’d still see when I would take my son to school, and they’d say, ‘When are we doing the math again?’”

46 percent of students said that they liked or loved math compared to 24 percent who said they hated or disliked it.

2018 Texas Instruments survey To reach older kids, Hartmann gives talks for career days. “You can show them interesting and fun things they wouldn’t otherwise see in school, that might make 27

OMNIA

Julia Hartmann, Professor of Mathematics, in her office.

them more interested in math,” she says.

“Or at least less averse to math.” She also contributed to a German book, Facettenreiche Mathematik, which describes math research so that a high school student or a teacher could understand it.

+÷× While fundamental research in math often doesn’t have immediate implications, it can have an impact years later.

When she teaches Ideas in Math to Penn students who range from curious first-years to reluctant seniors, she includes topics like cryptography that have applications in the world, but also abstract, interesting thought experiments.

She often hears from former students that they’re still thinking of concepts they discussed. “It’s actually not that 28

difficult to interest people in those subjects, but mathematicians don’t always try,” she says.

Mathematicians are realizing they need to do more outreach—not only for the future of their field, but because the National Science Foundation (NSF) now emphasizes a broader impact as part of funding proposals. These are ways of making math more available and accessible, and can range from public events to radio pieces to writing for a general audience.

“You can’t just say, oh, the world doesn’t understand what I’m doing,” says Hartmann. “You might not be able to explain exactly what you’re working on, but you can still convey some ideas or just try to get some people interested in the subject in general.”

68 percent of students said that they would like math more if they understood better how it applied to their future.

2018 Texas Instruments survey

Whether it’s because of its bad reputation or a lack of comprehension, it can be difficult to realize how much math underlies our lives, from drawing congressional districts to the coding theory used for data transmission and phone calls. While fundamental research in math often doesn’t have immediate implications, it can have an impact years later. One example is the work of Eugenio Calabi, Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, in the 1950s to find a bridge between differential and algebraic geometry. This led to Calabi-Yau manifolds, which have been vital to string theory and mirror symmetry (see page 58).

Overall employment of mathematicians and statisticians is projected to grow 30 percent from 2018 to 2028.

2019 report, Bureau of Labor Statistics Beyond the research and applications, Hartmann wants people to understand the value of how mathematicians think, saying, “Just the approach that mathematicians have and the way they view

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

the world or the things they study are useful for a lot of people.” She sees consulting companies trying to recruit math majors because they can be put into a completely new situation and understand the framework of what’s going on, analyze things, and propose a solution.

“I believe this way of thinking is something a lot of people can do,” Hartmann says. “But this is not what most people think of when they hear mathematics. They think of numbers and calculations. Tedious calculations. But it’s really something that people can find beautiful if they are exposed to it.”

Women were 41 percent of undergraduate math majors but only 28 percent of new Ph.D.s.

2015 Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences in the U.S. Beyond its PR problem, a career in math may present special obstacles to women and

underrepresented minorities.

Hartmann, the graduate chair of mathematics at Penn, is working to address what has been called the “leaky pipeline” in the U.S., where a disproportionate number of women who study math as undergraduates don’t continue as graduate students. Another group then doesn’t complete graduate school. She dealt with some of the reasons why as a student herself—teachers who assumed she wanted to teach high school rather than be a researcher, and professors who felt it would be a waste of time to teach women because they would get married, have children, and leave their careers. (Note: Hartmann has a marriage, a child, and a career.)

Academic careers involve a lot of traveling, a lot of waiting before you can settle down, a lot of uncertainty. “I have seen people drop out of grad school because they wanted to be near the person they wanted to live with,” she says. “I’m not sure that everybody regrets these choices or that it’s

GET MORE MATH-Y “I think a lot of people would be more interested if they could see math as a kind of tool to see more structure and organization in the world,” says Hartmann. “A lot of people are already doing this, maybe without knowing it. Then the question is, how can you learn to think more that way?”

Some suggestions: + Look for math circles and fun activities. You can follow the National Math Festival page on Facebook to learn more about the Washington, D.C.-based event and find puzzles and videos. ÷ Read books like Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong, which Hartmann calls “a really good start for people to learn what math really is and how to think about it, and I think it’s fun to read. It’s not a textbook.”

Courtesy of Julia Hartmann

× Check out the Global Math Project’s RAMD (Random Acts of Math Delight) section. These are designed for classrooms but include things like “The Math of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and how to calculate pi with real pies.

(Above) All of Hartmann’s research is connected by the study of symmetries.

(Clockwise from top left) Julia Hartmann, Professor of Mathematics, introduces preschoolers to math and at a dinner with Math Women With a Mission participants; a panel at the WOMAN UP! event last fall.

29

OMNIA

necessarily bad, but I think in a lot of cases, there are things that could be done to help people make choices more freely. Expose young girls to more mathematics, but also be more supportive later on.�

(Top) Julia Hartmann, Professor of Mathematics; (bottom) Hartmann works on a Rubik's cube.

30

Hartmann is involved with Penn’s Women in Math group, which serves all levels from undergraduates to faculty, and she is the faculty sponsor for the Penn chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, for undergraduates. The groups work to create a more inclusive atmosphere for women and encourage them to pursue math as a career. They sponsor events that foster a community, from regular study groups to a showing of Hidden Figures. The Women in Math group is continuing to meet virtually during the coronavirus emergency, and Hartmann is happy to see students organizing additional Zoom calls to keep up the sense of community.

In September 2019, the one-day event Math Women with a Mission, sponsored by the Penn Fund to Encourage Women, showcased how female researchers use math to change society, and speakers from other universities and the National Security Agency have also come to campus. Female undergraduate students who were thinking about applying to graduate school came to Penn from all over the U.S. last fall for WOMAN UP! (Workshop on Math Advice and Networking at UPenn), co-organized by Hartmann and Mona Merling, Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Programs like this are sought out by female students, says Hartmann.

In the summer of 2019, Hartmann worked with Renee Bell, Hans Rademacher Instructor of Mathematics, and postdoc Valentijn Karemaker, along with female mathematicians from Georgia Tech and

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

MIT, to organize an American Mathematical Society conference in Rhode Island focusing on her own field, arithmetic geometry. The conference, “Explicit Methods in Arithmetic Geometry in Characteristic p,” was designed to help early-career researchers collaborate and gain skills, as well as advance research.

+÷× Female undergraduate students who were thinking about applying to graduate school came to Penn from all over the U.S. last fall for WOMAN UP! Arithmetic geometry uses geometric approaches to look at problems in number theory.

An example is local-global principles. In geometry, when you can determine a characteristic by looking everywhere locally—like examining the outside of a ball—it satisfies the local-global principle.

Hartmann applies that thinking to algebra, finding truths about numbers by looking at one prime number at a time.

All of Hartmann’s research is connected by the study of symmetries—actions of groups on algebraic objects.

Solutions to equations often form symmetric patterns, she says, so looking at symmetries provides a path to get from one solution to another solution.

She is still working with Harbater, and with a number of other researchers at and beyond Penn. Hartmann says that math, which has traditionally been a very solitary enterprise, is becoming more collaborative. “You’re basically sitting in a room with some people you like and you’re bouncing ideas off each other and you’re finding interesting things and it’s really exciting,” she says.

“It opens it up more. It makes it easier for people to get started, and it also makes it more interesting.”

Thanks to a Focused Research Grant from the NSF, Hartmann has several papers with six authors, which is still unusual in pure mathematics. “The most interesting new math comes

from the fact that people from different areas collaborate,” she says.

issues and their problems, we need a diverse community of teachers.”

Of 1,957 new doctoral recipients in math in 2017, 212 were from underrepresented minority groups.

Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences

Julia Hartmann loves her job: the research, the teaching, the traveling, the flexibility. “I have collaborators all over the world, and mathematics is really the same wherever you go. You can talk to almost anyone. And I can do math wherever and whenever I want. I could sit in a café and have a good idea and all I need is a pen and a napkin or something.”

A broader range of viewpoints is part of the reason Hartmann wants to widen her focus to minorities who are underrepresented in mathematics. “We’re researchers and we’re teachers,” she says. “As researchers, we want the sharpest minds, not to restrict our search to certain groups of society. As teachers, we’re aiming to teach a diverse group of students, and therefore, in order to make them feel at home and be able to understand their

She would like others to have some of the same enjoyment she gets out of math. “The only thing I really want to achieve is to have a few more people out there in the next generation that don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ve always hated math.’”

31

OMNIA

At its inception, the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign sought to identify our existing strengths and new avenues for excellence. Our strengths, of course, are our outstanding faculty and students. The campaign represents an opportunity to support them in new ways as they conduct the research and learning that makes the School an incubator for groundbreaking ideas. These new avenues for excellence represent areas where our faculty and students show exceptional promise—areas of study that matter deeply to the world and where we are poised to be leaders. I am certain that these ideas will be of even greater importance as we determine how to live, work, and study in a world that has shown itself to be deeply connected yet fragile, and full of people who have revealed themselves to be resilient, creative, and motivated.

I am especially impressed by the strength our students. As a proud Penn Arts & Sciences graduate, I know how much campus and classroom life means. The pandemic quickly altered their plans: they made difficult decisions, reached compromises, and began their new normal. The 32

Lisa J. Godfrey

When my colleagues and I envisioned the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, we could not have imagined the world we’d be living in today. The spring 2020 semester looked very different than any semester in our School’s 280-year history.

As we imagine the future and what life on campus will be like in a post-COVID-19 world, it is a time to pause and reflect.

Advancing Faculty Distinction

Realizing Student Potential

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

transition was undoubtedly complicated and emotionally and mentally taxing. In the face of such circumstances, they’ve demonstrated a remarkable commitment to learning, growth, and each other.

That is why I want to tell you more about one of our fundamental priorities: Realizing Student Potential. More than ever, it is clear to me that our students have the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that our new world needs.

Steven J. Fluharty

Harnessing the Power of the Brain

Exploring the Human Experience

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Driving Global Change

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

enn Arts & Sciences teaches every undergraduate at the University, fostering the traits that distinguish Penn graduates: adults who are driven by curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, who understand context and know how to communicate.

The campaign promotes access, diversity, and opportunity through expanded resources for scholarships and for curricular innovation that will catalyze learning in every field.

UNDERGRADUATE FINANCIAL AID We’re proud that Penn has the largest grant-based financial aid program in the country; this commitment means that admitted students can graduate without the burden of insurmountable debt.

This investment in our students has an incredible impact on their lives and the lives of their entire families.

The College of Arts & Sciences is home to more than half of all Penn undergraduates. Scholarships designated for College students are a powerful expression of support for the students we know have the potential to be leaders in a world that demands thoughtfulness and drive.

PENN FIRST PLUS The comprehensive Penn First Plus program has been developed to provide unique, multifaceted support to the students who represent the first generation in their families to attend college and those who have significant financial need. Our commitment to financial aid

has resulted in a socially and economically diverse University community where diversity is synonymous with excellence. We want to ensure these talented and determined young people can thrive academically and benefit from all the opportunities Penn has to offer them.

provide the resources necessary for our students to focus on their work and become the leaders in the next generation of scholars, and demonstrate our commitment to providing an intellectual home for them at Penn Arts & Sciences.

Support for College students who are part of the Penn First Plus community includes scholarships, grants for studyabroad programs and summer courses, research, and internships, and an emergency fund which allows for flexible support in the time of personal, national, or international crises.

ARTS & SCIENCES ANNUAL FUND

GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS The talented students in Penn Arts & Sciences doctoral programs are partners in sustaining the University’s reputation as a world-class place to research and learn. As academic innovators and motivated teachers, they invigorate faculty and undergraduate students alike.

Full graduate fellowships, along with funds dedicated to supporting dissertation research and conference travel,

The Arts & Sciences Annual Fund is the most direct way to support the School and our commitment to the future and the power of the liberal arts. It provides the immediate, unrestricted funds that give the School the flexibility to respond to emerging needs and continue the research and teaching that promotes the critical thinking so essential in times of uncertainty.

To learn more about supporting the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, email Deb Rhebergen, Associate Vice Dean for Advancement, at drheberg@sas.upenn.edu or visit power.sas.upenn.edu.  33

OMNIA

34

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

The New Cartographers Faculty across the arts and sciences are navigating the new world of big data.

By Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker Illustrations by Nicholas Matej

T

he utility of a map depends on what you ask it. You can ask it how to get to where you’re going—likely the most common question we ask of maps. But you can also ask a map to answer other things: where we’ve been, what’s been lost, what life is like on a particular street, or what secrets faroff galaxies hold.

The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us particularly attuned to what maps can tell us. With maps, we can trace the spread of the disease and imagine different futures as scientists and lawmakers test different scenarios.

Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are asking big questions and using maps to find answers. Across disciplines, maps are valuable tools for making sense of large amounts of data and for understanding relationships of all types. Spatial relationships, of course, but also economic, political, historical, and environmental ones.

Maps can chart these complex relationships because of how they’ve evolved with technology. What once were discrete physical objects can now be digital, interactive, layered modes of exploration.

Researchers can map increasingly complex pieces of information largely

because of two scientific advances: big data and machine learning.

Big data’s popular definition—a variety of data, arriving at an ever-increasing volume with an ever-higher velocity— only hints at all the information it contains. Every social media post liked, every symptom searched or question queried: that’s part of big data. Jet engines and sensors that monitor their performance generate big data. So do apps on your phone that know where you are and what you like.

This is where machine learning comes in. It can handle the information big data pumps out because it can perform analytic tasks without explicit programing or instruction. Machine learning can generate an email in your inbox that says, “Rainy days call for ordering in,” with a link to that last order from your go-to takeout spot.

In academia, big data and machine learning are put to use for other purposes, but the tools are the same.

Advanced maps can be a useful way for making sense of enormous amounts of information, allowing users to interact with data in a way they couldn’t before.

They can zoom in on a digital map, examining a single street. Or they can filter a map, only seeing the information that’s most useful or interesting. Maps’ many layers offer a powerful flexibility.

With a proliferating amount of data and the flexibility and power of digital tools, researchers are spoiled for choice. What information should they use, and what should be left out?

The key, says, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is “not to be intimidated by large data sets and instead approach data with questions about how the world works.”

Researchers can map increasingly complex pieces of information largely because of two scientific advances: big data and machine learning.

All of the technology at our disposal would be of little use without a human hand to guide it. The faculty members profiled here bring their training to bear on big data, asking it questions shaped by disciplinary concerns and guided by insights gleaned by previous research. The answers, plotted on digital maps of city blocks, ancient sites, and vast sectors of the night sky, chart a new way for scholarship.

35

A Portal Into the Past Emily Hammer

channels, different types of soils, and other settlements.

They started using aerial photos that could show traces of long-ago waterways or fields.

0

50

100

Around 2014 or 2015, Hammer and Jason Ur of Harvard University realized that photos of the Middle East taken

by U-2 spy planes starting in the 1950s would be invaluable for this type of work. They spent five years tracking down, reproducing, and indexing U-2 negatives in the National Archives. To generate archaeological data for their work on ancient Mesopotamian cities, they trace archaeological features and sites visible in the images. These data are combined with on-the-ground observations to create more accurate and informative map representations of ancient landscapes, environments, and settlements.

200 m

U-2 images of southern Iraq in the late 1950s and early 1960s show the position of Marsh Arab communities, many of which disappeared after hydroelectric dams impounded the rivers, and the government of Saddam Hussein drained the marshes.

A

Emily Hammer

Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations 36

OMNIA

s an anthropological archaeologist, Emily Hammer has used maps for her entire career, but in that time the very concept of a map has changed. “I feel very differently from undergraduates I teach,” says the assistant professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations. “For them, a map is a backdrop because your phone can tell you where to turn, and I remember this time when maps were primarily objects.”

Hammer is taking full advantage of advances in digital mapping, from compiling big data and

conducting quantitative spatial analyses, to creating interactive maps that both academics and laypeople can explore and build upon.

For as long as archaeologists have excavated ancient sites, they have mapped the architecture and items they found, painstakingly measuring and drawing plans. In the mid-20th century, they expanded their horizons to include the space around these sites, showing the relationship of sites to environmental features like current and ancient river

The timing of the U-2 images was important. “In the mid20th century in the Middle East, cities were starting to grow and modern mechanized agriculture was introduced in many rural areas for the first time,” Hammer explains.

“Traces of archaeological features started to be erased by development much faster than they had been before.”

The U-2 images also give a window into the lives of Marsh Arabs, groups of people living in wetlands in South Iraq. More than half a million people lived in reed houses, fishing, hunting, harvesting reeds, and herding water buffalo, until Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Emily Hammer

1990s. “This is a destroyed way of life,” says Hammer.

“But with U-2 photos we can travel back in time see what life was like in the world of the marshes.”

Mapping has also been enhanced and greatly eased by the development of GPS technology, now readily available, inexpensive, and accurate to within a meter.

Researchers use drones to take their own aerial shots and gather topographic data.

The amount of free geospatial data archaeologists can access, through government repositories and Google Earth, has grown exponentially. And digital mapping software allows them to put it all together in new ways—from discovering the suburbs surrounding the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, to a project by Hammer’s students, who mapped patterns among the graves of commoners buried in Ur’s “Royal Cemetery.”

Hammer creates interactive online maps to go with most of her publications, both for her academic audience and for laypeople. “It’s increasingly easy to create interactive maps so that a viewer can look at things at different scales or move around,”

4–7 8–13 14–28 29–43 44–73 abandoned, number of structures 4–7 8–13 14–28 29–43 44–73 new foundation by 1968 abandoned w/o visible structures marsh paths 1960 U2 Mission 1554 photograph footprints marsh area late 1960s river 1960 0

2

4

8 km

Distribution and size of Marsh Arab villages in the Central Marshes of southern Iraq, U-2 mission 1554, January 1960.

Using a light table, Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, prepares to photograph U-2 negatives at the National Archives’ Aerial Film Section.

Courtesy of Emily Hammer

Hammer is also a member in the global collaborative project “LandCover6K,” which brings historians and archaeologists together to reconstruct human land use over the last 6,000 years in order to improve climate change modeling.

inhabited, number of structures

It’s increasingly easy to create interactive maps so that a viewer can look at things at different scales or move around.

she says, “and that allows your audience to really explore your data and see how you came up with your conclusions, or even create alternative interpretations of your data.”

“Broadly, archaeology and anthropology are interested in how humans relate to their environment, which is inherently a spatial question,” says Hammer. “Maps help us to see broader patterns and quantitatively analyze them. They can help us understand demographic changes, like when and how people congregated in cities, or dispersed back to villages after that. When dealing with places that are far away in time or distance, maps can help us to visualize the space in which people were living or moving.”

37

Cities Large and Small M

any historians work by narrowing their focus, becoming an expert on the intricacies of a historical person, event, or text. Going deep—that’s how Brent Cebul, Assistant Professor of History, was trained. But now, he’s taking a step back and considering the big picture.

“Mapping is exciting because it invites a certain way of doing history that's very different from the way scholars often work,” he says. “It invites a certain comprehensiveness and comparative quality, as well as the opportunity to look at a historically rich set of data and consider things spatially and longitudinally.”

Cebul started his career as a student of American political development and policy history. “The problem with being interested in that kind of thing is that it’s often difficult to get non-specialists interested,” he explains. “Maps literally meet people where they are and where they live. We can use that connection to build a bigger story.”

Cebul’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Richmond was an opportunity to tell an important story. In 2015, he became a lead project investigator on a team that located, compiled, and studied federal urban renewal data available between 1950 and 38

1966. Urban Renewal, a $13 billion federal project that stretched across three decades, was intended to redevelop cities by acquiring property by right of eminent domain and clearing them for new public and private housing. Over the years, the program was increasingly used to develop commercial properties. It had the practical effect of forcing hundreds of thousands of families from their homes.

Disproportionately, these were families of color.

The research project is called Renewing Inequality.

In Chavez Ravine, a traditionally Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles, families were evicted under urban renewal. This photo, taken on May 8, 1959, shows Victoria Angustain and her son Ira being led from their home by law enforcement officers.

“Many people, including historians, think of it as a northern, big city program,” Cebul explains. “But when we got the federal records showing the municipalities that received funds, we found that the majority of urban renewal projects were in cities of 50,000 or fewer people. And small cities in Alabama and Georgia actually had a high number of projects. This was amazing to see.”

Renewing Inequality shows not only where these projects took place, but also how many families were displaced in each city and the proportion that were White or of color. The resulting map shows projects concentrated in major metropolitan areas including New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but also more than 600 smaller projects on the East Coast from Maine to Puerto Rico, spreading west

Brent Cebul

Assistant Professor of History

USC Digital Library, Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection

OMNIA

Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Family Displacements by City, 1950–1966

Renewing Inequality maps family displacement, taking into account the geographic and racial distribution along with the total number of impacted families.

to Kansas, Texas, California, and Alaska, in cities as large as San Francisco and as small as Valdez, Alaska (population in 1960: 555, 140 families removed from their homes).

“Without mapping, I could go to a conference and announce, ‘Hey! Gadsden, Alabama had an urban renewal program.’ That wouldn’t get much of a reaction,” Cebul explains. “But if I’m able to show them this map, I can say ‘Look at this! The vast majority of urban renewal projects were in small municipalities. We fundamentally misunderstand the program.’ Organizing this data into maps mounts a campaign to change the way that scholars think about history.”

Cebul says it’s important to build a more complete view of history to understand how it continues to reverberate.

Affected communities lost more

than homes, they lost support networks, local traditions, and rates of business and home ownership that impact financial stability for generations.

The Renewing Inequality project demonstrates that smaller cities were often more likely to force families of color to bear the brunt of displacement. In Lubbock, Texas, for example, 92 percent of the population was White, but nearly all of the 1,300 families displaced were of color. Larger cities were not exempt from targeting families of color: The largest urban renewal project was in Cincinnati, where 5,000 Black families were displaced from the Kenyon-Barr neighborhood, effectively removing the community from the map.

Cebul came to Penn in 2018, but he continues to contribute to Renewing Inequality and use it

as a classroom tool, integrating undergraduates’ research into the map and website.

Maps literally meet people where they are and where they live. We can use that connection to build a bigger story.

He stresses the collaborative aspects of any mapping project: students, coders, and data managers help to translate historical records into interactive maps that tell big stories. In 2019, two undergraduates in Cebul’s class, Victoria (Tori) Klevan, C’19, and Victoria Reeser, C’19, made original contributions to Renewing Inequality, correcting the record about renewal programs undertaken in Lower Merion along Philadelphia’s Main Line. Thanks to the contributions of so many, the historical record continues to evolve.

“My job is to conceptualize and determine what historical questions we’re trying to answer,” says Cebul. “We collect and organize the data, and then I let myself be surprised by the results.”

39

OMNIA

Getting Granular Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative

PHILADELPHIA

BERKELEY

OAKLAND

SAN FRANCISCO

Community climate mapping displays per capita utility and auto emissions at neighborhood level.

These maps show the Philadelphia region (top) and San Francisco’s Bay Area.

“W

hen you have a lot of data, there’s a lot of math and a lot of judgement calls,” says Daniel Aldana Cohen. “My judgement calls are driven by social science.”

Daniel Aldana Cohen

Assistant Professor of Sociology 40

Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, asks questions about climate change and inequality. That’s an important pairing, he says, because it’s an uncommon one that provides unique insights. Most visual

representations of climate change map its impacts: extreme temperature, flooding, and fire risk, to name a few. While impacts are important, these types of maps don’t address the causes of climate change, and thus cannot lead to actionable solutions.

Cohen is involved in several mapping projects, all related to climate change and the lived experiences of people feeling

its effects. He and collaborators have mapped the carbon footprints of neighborhoods and studied the economic and environmental effects of powering public housing across the country with renewable energy.

Cohen’s research contributed to the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, introduced into Congress in fall 2019. He directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, known as (SC)2, based in Penn’s Population Studies Center (PSC). With Kevin Ummel, a research affiliate of PSC; Nick Graetz, a doctoral candidate in sociology; and Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Cohen and (SC)2 are working to create a public database of household and neighborhood carbon footprints, as well as a climate vulnerability index.

“It’s really exciting to take a concept that often feels abstract and make it feel visceral and concrete,” he says. “Mapping allows people to think about the relationships between their own neighborhoods and climate change.”

Granular information about neighborhoods is an important part of Cohen’s work. Government data is often broken out at the county level, which elides major economic differences between neighborhoods. By using machine learning to examine data from multiple sources, Cohen is able to get a three-dimensional picture of what’s happening on the ground in specific neighborhoods.

(SC)2’s heat mapping research is an example of what big data can tell us and how that might lead to action. The project begins with a question: Where

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Katie Lample, Nick Graetz, Alexandra Lillehei, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Billy Fleming with support from the McHarg Center, Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, Data for Progress, and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

National Public Housing Public Housing Percent Unemployment

Percent Poverty

Percent Nonwhite

Maps that include variables such as unemployment, race, poverty levels, and population density show the breadth and diversity of American Public Housing Communities, which are found in cities and rural areas all across the country.

are people vulnerable to extreme heat, and how can we understand what causes that vulnerability?

It’s really exciting to take a concept that often feels abstract and make it feel visceral and concrete.

To answer, Cohen gathers data about neighborhood demographics and redlining, a New Deal policy that withheld mortgages from so-called undesirable neighborhoods, often low-income, inner city, and Black communities. A lack of investment going back nearly 100 years means that to this day, these communities have more concrete and less green space than neighborhoods not subject to redlining, so he looks at established data about the rate of temperature difference depending on the number of trees in an area.

“This is called the urban heat island effect,” he explains. He says that between places like North Philly, with no trees, and

wooded areas like West Philly, there is a dramatic temperature difference—up to 20 degrees.

“Here’s where it gets really interesting,” he continues.

“North and South Philly were both redlined and have almost no trees. They’re exposed to the same temperature burden. But things have changed, and now South Philly is a much wealthier neighborhood.”

Analyzing data about electric costs, Cohen found that residents of North Philly spend a much higher percentage of their income on electricity.

And other data reveal that total energy use is highest in poor households, because the homes aren’t insulated and heating and cooling equipment are old.

“Residents of North Philly are exposed to higher temperatures than other parts of the

city and they are less able to afford air conditioning,” Cohen concludes. “That means their options are to keep their homes at unsafe temperatures, or sacrifice other necessities, such as food.”

Targeted policies can tackle inequality and the causes of climate change in one fell swoop, says Cohen. Green energy retrofits in a neighborhood like North Philly could insulate homes and install efficient equipment, lowering costs and carbon emissions at once.

“When it comes to climate change,” Cohen says, “the challenge is not finding information. The challenge is asking how that information can help us understand complex stories and inform action.”

41

OMNIA

Mapping the Night Sky M

aps are most often associated with land and sea, but without mapping, physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists would be lost among the stars.

“Big maps of the sky are part of both the visceral and the scientific appeal that drew some of us into astronomy in the first place,” says Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences and Co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology. “A century ago, there were basic questions about the night sky: What are these fuzzy blobs we see in the sky? It turned out they were entire galaxies—“island universes”—not gas clouds in our own galaxy. Many advances in the field came about through the use of maps, increasingly by applying statistical techniques to the data.”

42

Observation improved with the launch of the landmark Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, which has captured more than 1.3 million images in its 30-year orbit. As the number and quality of pictures increased, researchers devoted efforts to examining parts of the universe that had never before been observed.

Fast forward to 2020—Jain, along with his collaborators, is now involved in the next era of observation projects, which include the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), Simons Observatory, Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), and Euclid.

DES, which launched in 2013, is the furthest along of these projects. It has completed the data-gathering phase of its mission, providing researchers

with over 300 million images, about half of which have been analyzed. An international collaborative effort, DES seeks to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that they hope will help reveal clues about the mysteries surrounding phenomena like dark matter.

“Is dark matter confined around galaxies and clusters, or are there strands and sheets of dark matter that fill the universe? How does it affect the expansion of the universe, along with the even more elusive dark energy? These are the types of questions DES is helping us answer,” says Jain.

DES also uses visible light filters to help scientists distinguish the colors of stars and galaxies.

“This image shows our neighboring spiral galaxy, Andromeda (aka M31), as it would be viewed by WFIRST,” Jain says. “The field of view of WFIRST is a hundred times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope!

WFIRST would also image in infrared light.”

Bhuvnesh Jain

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences and Co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology

“A galaxy that's forming new stars tends to have hotter, bluer stars, while old galaxies get redder,” says Jain, who works on the project with Masao Sako, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics; and Mike Jarvis, a research scientist in physics and astronomy. “Using the colors of galaxies helps us track their distances, which in turn helps map the expansion history of the universe.”

Examining millions of images directly would be impossible for even the largest team of researchers, so Jain and the DES team employ statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques. This big data approach allows researchers to compare DES

Dark Energy Survey collaboration

Andromeda With WFIRST

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

The first mass map (top) was “an exciting proof of concept,” Jain says. “We found one of the biggest dark matter superclusters and verified it did have a filament of galaxy clusters associated with it, then we applied the technique to the first full year of data and got the bigger mass map (bottom). This new map spans 1,300 square degrees, approaching 10,000 times the size of the moon on the sky. It is so large that we see the pattern of pristine fluctuations—that is, they haven’t been altered by complex physics—that originated around the time of the Big Bang.

The way we study them is statistical. The properties of the pattern tell us about the initial conditions and dark matter.”

The land-based projects— DES, LSST, and Simons— are all located in Chile, ideal due to its elevation and its dry climate, which prevents moisture in the air from interfering with the sharpness of images.

images with high-resolution Hubble images to provide clearer analysis.

Though all of the survey projects Jain and his colleagues are involved in are similarly dedicated to mapping out celestial bodies in the night sky, the big difference is some of the telescopes are landbased, and some have been launched into space.

WFIRST and Euclid are space-based, and can see much further than their ground-based counterparts.

Using a telescope mounted on a satellite, WFIRST can glimpse and map out the first generation of galaxies, which allows researchers to pursue questions about how said galaxies were formed. It also has the capability to detect planets by observing their effects on star light.

An international collaborative effort, DES seeks to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure.

LSST will help scientists track space events over time by analyzing variables such as how a massive black hole in a quasar changes, or how the brightness of different types of stars fluctuates up and down.

“Discoveries are going to be limited only by our imagination and our algorithms,” says Jain. “There are questions non-experts or college students will be able to go after, and through serendipity or informed curiosity, will lead to new findings.”

43

OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

David VS. GOLIATH Marci Hamilton, Robert A. Fox Leadership Program Professor of Practice, has faced down institutional child abuse for decades—and she is just getting started.

By Blake Cole

Photography by Jason Varney

45

OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Hamilton was one of the first legal scholars to speak out publicly about the sexual abuse of children

by Catholic clergy. As a vocal and influential critic of extreme religious liberty, she has successfully challenged the constitutionality and applicability of laws that provide religious officials a loophole to shield themselves in the legal system. She was the lead constitutional litigator for the victims in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s bankruptcy proceedings, during which the Archdiocese argued that religious liberty shielded $50 million from the victims’ claims.

Hamilton was victorious, and those funds were made available.

In addition to her legislative and policy work, Hamilton is also a regular in national popular media.

She has authored dozens of op-eds in every major newspaper, including a 2018 piece in The New York Times titled, “Let There Be Light, in Church,” which stressed the urgency of abuse reporting by clergy.

Television appearances include The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Rachel Maddow Show, where she discussed topics like the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. She has also participated in numerous documentaries on HBO and other networks, including the recent The Witnesses, about sex abuse in the Jehovah’s

Marci Hamilton, Professor of Practice in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, at Moot Court practice for oral argument at Supreme Court at Cardozo Law School, New York, 1996.

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

Hamilton, Professor of Practice in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, has waged a career-long effort to protect and find justice for child victims of abuse, whether the crimes are current or decades old.

She is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children, which advocates for the elimination of child sex-abuse statutes of limitations, and God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has submitted expert testimony, advised legislators in every state where significant reform has occurred, and filed countless pro bono amicus briefs in the U.S. and state supreme courts for the protection of children. Before coming to Penn, Hamilton was a constitutional scholar for 26 years at the Cardozo

School of Law, Yeshiva University, where she held the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law.

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

hen I sat down with Marci Hamilton this past winter, she was busy preparing to fly to Iowa, then a political hotbed with the caucuses fast approaching.

Hamilton, as always, was laser-focused on developing new means to keep children safe, and who better to appeal to than presidential candidates?

“This should be a bipartisan issue,” she says, “but in so many cases, adults think more about protecting adults.”

47

OMNIA

Witnesses, and My Truth: The Rape of Two Coreys, which was screened in March at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles.

Hamilton is the recipient of numerous honors, including her selection

by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 2019, the 2015 Religious Liberty Award from the American Humanist Association, the 2012 National Crime Victim Bar Association’s Frank Carrington Champion of Civil Justice Award, and the Pennsylvania Woman of the Year Award in 2012—to name just a few.

A Pre-Law State of Mind Upon completing her undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University, Hamilton decided to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Penn State University. She had always been interested in the crossover between theology and philosophy—a line of thought that informs her work to this

48

Marci Hamilton, Professor of Practice in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, meets with the press following oral argument in Boerne v. Flores, Feb. 19, 1997.

day—and existentialism and famed philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche fascinated her.

But eventually it was writing that became her passion, so after getting a master’s in philosophy, she decided instead to pursue a master’s in creative writing. After graduating from Penn State University in 1984, Hamilton began teaching English at Temple

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

So, how did Hamilton, once a budding fiction writer, transition to law and come to take on some of the world’s most powerful institutions? A bit of serendipity, and a lot of refusing to give up—no matter the challenge.

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

Hamilton is also the founder and CEO of CHILD USA, a nonprofit dedicated to using interdisciplinary, evidence-based research to prevent abuse, exploitation, and neglect.

In addition to its policy work, CHILD USA has numerous initiatives dedicated to fostering public awareness. These include a commission created to investigate the abuse perpetrated by Larry Nasser, former national team doctor for USA Gymnastics and now-convicted serial child molester. The commission has provided victims an opportunity to speak out publicly about the failings of the systems meant to protect them.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

and Drexel Universities in Philadelphia, and writing short fiction, for which she won a national award.

He was fond of telling people, ‘You done good,’” says Hamilton, who is still friends with his family.

Hamilton had previously considered going to law school. Her grandfather was the District Attorney of Casper, Wyoming, and argued for the state of Wyoming before the Supreme Court. But it was for practical reasons that she eventually rekindled her dreams of law.

Her next clerkship would see her meeting face to face with one of her idols.

“It quickly became clear that there wasn’t any money for me in novels,” laughs Hamilton, who was accepted to Penn Law in 1985. “I went to law school thinking that I would write on the side, but the law swept me up and I was fortunate enough to get wonderful clerkships and start teaching, and instead of fiction, I started writing about legal matters.”

Hamilton hit the ground running, becoming the editor-in-chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, in which she published a note—an article in the world of legal research—on work made for hire copyright laws, which was soon cited by the Supreme Court.

“I thought it was totally unfair that the creative person lost all their rights,” says Hamilton, who became one of the leading experts on the topic in the country. “I testified with musicians Sheryl Crow and Don Henley against a bill that was taking all the rights from the songwriters and giving them to the label,” she says. “We ended up pushing it back.”

Hamilton’s first clerkship provided her the opportunity to practice law under the guidance of Judge Edward R. Becker in Philadelphia, a graduate of Penn and Yale Law School, known for the humorous and creative wording of his judicial rulings. “He was the mensch of all judges, just a wonderful man.

Early on, the bishops and the elders would decline to produce evidence, saying that they had a ‘sacred privilege.’

And even when they released lists of known abusers, it was coming from a closed society, where the bishops were the ones vetting these lists and deciding whom to name.

On the Shoulders of Giants On the day of Hamilton’s big interview, nothing was going right.

When she exited the train in Washington, D.C., it was pouring buckets.

“By the time I got there, the bottom of my gray skirt was black with water,” remembers Hamilton.

“My hair was flat against my head, and she just didn’t look like she felt very good. It seemed to me like she was unhappy. After, I went home and I said, ‘That is not happening.’”

The she in this case was none other than Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Appointed

by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor is the first woman to have served on the Supreme Court. She presided over numerous landmark cases, including Grutter v. Bollinger, which addressed affirmative action in student admissions, and Hamdi v.

Rumsfeld, which dealt with the U.S. government’s power of detainment of enemy combatants, before she retired in 2006.

“It turned out the day after our interview she had her appendix out,” Hamilton says, “which is just so O’Connor. That is just the way she operates. She just powers through. I thought, ‘Well, she’s going to associate me with appendicitis—I’m out.’ So, when she hired me, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

It was a meeting of kindred spirits, evidenced by the ebullience Hamilton displays at any mention of O’Connor’s name. Hamilton’s tenure under O’Connor, from 1989 to 1990, proved formative, and the justice’s philosophies on religious liberty would impact Hamilton’s very first case—and her policy positions for decades to come.

Said case, Boerne v. Flores, came only a few years after Hamilton’s clerkship ended and her career as a law professor began, and just so happened to take place in the Supreme Court—a daunting task for any new lawyer. “With two young children, research and writing, and a full teaching load, it was a busy if not sometimes chaotic time,” says Hamilton. But she had the wind at her back, having already clerked on the big stage.

“I’d never done it before, so I had no idea what I needed to be afraid of,” Hamilton says. “But no one could have done a better job of 49

OMNIA

teaching me about professionalism among disagreeing individuals than O’Connor. She taught me to stand tall for what I believe with dignity and equanimity.”

Into the Fire Boerne v. Flores, in 1997, saw Hamilton taking on a landmark new law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993 by the Clinton Administration. RFRA prohibited any agency, department, or official of the federal or state governments from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion.

The case stemmed from an incident in which the Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio (Flores) was denied a building permit to expand his church, which was located in a historic district of the city. The Archbishop had challenged the denial under RFRA, arguing that the limited space of the current church created the “burden” so cited in the act.

Hamilton’s team won the case on the ruling that RFRA was unconstitutional because it was beyond the power of Congress. But a very similar bill—which Hamilton repeatedly testified against—was reenacted in 2000, which she says was an early harbinger of the extraordinary influence that evangelical Christianity would have in the White House.

“I was essentially the only law professor in the country who was very publicly saying that extreme religious liberty was wrong. Most of the law professors were on the other side,” says Hamilton.

With the work on her first case, and her scholarly stance on the religion clauses, Hamilton was well positioned to fight the follow-up RFRA bill passed in 2000, as well as emerging state revisions, which she says were empowering individuals 50

to break the law, in ways ranging from the petty—prisoners using religious liberty claims to demand steak and sherry on Fridays—to the dire: priests and bishops covering up sex abuse.

Working on all these issues on the opposite side of organized religion had never been part of any plan.

My husband’s Catholic and I’m Presbyterian.

We’re not atheists by a long shot. But when all the clergy sex abuse reporting started happening, I began getting calls from all over the country.

“Early on, the bishops and the elders would decline to produce evidence, saying that they had a ‘sacred privilege,’” says Hamilton. “And even when they released lists of known abusers, it was coming from a closed society, where the bishops were the ones vetting these lists and deciding whom to name.”

An interesting trend occurred following the Supreme Court victory.

Hamilton began to hear from child protection advocates, mayors, state attorneys general, and organizations like the National Association

of Regulatory Agencies—parties that were all fighting against institutional child abuse.

“Working on all these issues on the opposite side of organized religion had never been part of any plan,” says Hamilton. “My husband’s Catholic and I’m Presbyterian. We’re not atheists by a long shot. But when all the clergy sex abuse reporting started happening, I began getting calls from all over the country.”

But many victims, after making the difficult decision to come forward, were met with closed courthouse doors due to statutes of limitations— laws that set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated.

“It was outrageous that this artificial deadline could have such unjust consequences,” Hamilton says.

“I knew immediately I had to do something to stop it.”

The Dam Breaks Hamilton marks the 2002 Boston Globe “Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church” report—an in-depth investigation into systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by Catholic clergy, which spawned the 2015 awardwinning film, Spotlight—as the beginning of a focused push for statutes of limitations reform.

Battling for justice on this front became Hamilton’s prime directive.

In most states, before any reform, victims had only two years from the date of the sex abuse to go to court. Therefore, a five-year-old only had until age seven. Yet, as the floodgates opened and more and more incriminating evidence became public, the discussion surrounding the rights of victims became more intense.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

“Before the investigation, we knew about some individual abusers, but we didn’t know the extent of the cover-up by trusted institutions,” says Hamilton.

After the Spotlight report was released, California implemented the first “open window,” which granted one year in which there was no statute of limitations for child sex abuse. There were about 1,150 claims, Hamilton says—and about 850 of them were directly linked to the Catholic Church.

Even today, people view sex abuse as an injury that can be treated and healed. But we need to keep in mind that it’s much more complex than that.

“All of a sudden, the public started learning that Boston was just the beginning,” Hamilton says.

In 2005, Lynne Abraham, then District Attorney of the City of Philadelphia, published a report on sex abuse in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. Hamilton joined the team as the only non-staff person to work on the legal recommendations. The collective’s arguments for opening the doors to justice continued to shed light on the issues surrounding statutes of limitations reform.

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

Marci Hamilton, Professor of Practice in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, was profiled in 1998 in Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine following her win in Boerne v. Flores, which resulted in the ruling that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was unconstitutional because it was beyond the power of Congress.

51

OMNIA

In 2007, Delaware implemented a two-year open window. It revealed sex abuse in many different institutions and uncovered abuse by perpetrators such as former pediatrician and now-convicted serial child molester Earl Bradley, who victimized hundreds of children and infants. Other states began to follow suit, but reform was still a heated battle in many states.

“Currently, we have 46 states that have eliminated the criminal statute of limitations, and 2019 was a banner year. So, the progress has been extraordinary,” says Hamilton.

“I started hiring more and more research assistants to document and promote access to justice for child sex abuse victims,” she says.

“After a number of years, I finally realized that if I didn’t start a nonprofit, I couldn’t do anything more than I was doing.”

Fighting Abuse With Data In 2016, Hamilton returned to Penn in the role of Professor of Practice, a position designed to bring faculty expertise into the classroom, a valuable asset for students interested in advocacy.

That same year, she launched CHILD USA, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to ending child abuse and neglect using comprehensive legal and social science research.

The organization pursues a wide swath of initiatives. This includes the familiar-to-Hamilton statutes of limitations reform, but also the abuse and neglect of athletes, medical neglect, conversion therapy, family court reform, the handling of children’s rape kits, child marriage, and more.

CHILD USA houses the Sean P. McIlmail Statute of Limitations Research Institute, which Hamilton says is funded by, “a remarkable 52

family whose son died of a drug overdose while coping with the stress of prosecuting his perpetrator, a priest.” Institute legal staff track data on a weekly basis, a necessary process as these policies are on a rapid trajectory of improvement, in no small part due to Hamilton’s work in the field.

Many times, telling your story is not enough. There has to be meaningful pressure. Whether it’s Catholics, ultraOrthodox Jews, people in the Boy Scout culture, or Penn State, people have to be able to say, ‘I love that institution, but I can’t agree with what they’ve done with respect to children.’

“We live in this era of exploding data—on children, child development, trauma, and incidents of abuse and neglect,” says Hamilton, who also advises foreign governments on child abuse prevention policy. “We need all these organizations that are doing direct service, but we also need an organization like ours that is thinking big picture. And that means strategizing about how we change the system as a whole.”

One of Hamilton’s biggest challenges on the policy reform front is educating uninformed officials.

“A decade ago I had lawmakers that refused to meet with me under the misperception that somehow I was in there to argue against the Catholic Church,” she says. “That’s changed dramatically, but what people need to remember is that policymakers require data to be able to make a difference. Unfortunately, you can’t just line up victims and say, ‘These are horrific stories.

Let’s do something just for them.’ I wish it were that simple, but it isn’t.”

The single most important statistic when it comes to statutes of limitations reform, Hamilton says, is the age at which the average child abuse victim first comes forward: 52. The complex psychological dynamic of trauma and reporting plays directly against the victim, she says, a web that often leaves them without justice.

“Even today, people view sex abuse as an injury that can be treated and healed,” Hamilton says. “But we need to keep in mind that it’s much more complex than that. Victims usually feel immensely threatened, and the humiliation and shame and trauma keep them quiet. They have to get around things like depression and PTSD and substance abuse.

It’s asking a lot of any victim.”

And the barriers to justice for victims go beyond the legal lobby.

One of the main fronts in the fight for justice for victims is the insurance lobby.

“The insurance industry covers these organizations for negligence, and they don’t want to pay out claims, so their lobby is aligned against the victims,” says Hamilton.

“But the insurance industry needs to get on the side of the children and become part of the prevention.

Instead of fighting the truth from

Courtesy of Marci Hamilton

“So happy to be with SO’C (Sandra Day O’Connor), as we call her, during our last clerks’ reunion in Phoenix,” says Marci Hamilton, Robert A. Fox Leadership Program Professor of Practice.

coming out, they should start doing an annual child protection audit.

If an organization does not pass the child protection audit, it doesn’t get insurance. And in this culture, if you don’t get insurance, you don’t exist.”

Out of the Shadows One of the initiatives gaining the most steam at CHILD USA is the fight against the abuse and neglect of young athletes. The nonprofit recently created the initiative Game Over: Commission to Protect Youth Athletes. Composed of 16 experts in the field, the commission is engaging in fact finding and the investigation of all responsible institutions and individuals that made it possible for Larry Nasser, former national team doctor for

USA Gymnastics and osteopathic physician at Michigan State University, and now-convicted serial child molester, to abuse hundreds of young athletes. The commission has held public hearings, giving victims a voice, and will issue a report on its findings. It is also building a database that will eventually be made available to the public.

“Sometimes it may look like the system is being survivor-friendly, but what these victims are testifying to is that everyone from sports watchdog agencies to the FBI to local law enforcement let them down,” says Hamilton, who frequently authors op-eds on breaking news stories related to child abuse in order to bring scandals into public view.

The stories coming out of the trials are revealing.

“Volleyball player Sarah Powers Barnhard, who had outed her abuser decades ago, was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1996 for her bravery, but she didn’t get him fully expelled from the sport until 2018,” Hamilton says. “So, many times, telling your story is not enough. There has to be meaningful pressure. Whether it’s Catholics, ultra-Orthodox Jews, people in the Boy Scout culture, or Penn State, people have to be able to say, ‘I love that institution, but I can’t agree with what they’ve done with respect to children.’”

The fight for justice extends to any and all organizations that harbor abusers, Hamilton says.

53

OMNIA

CHILD USA has now been asked to analyze data on approximately 1,500 child sex abuse victims of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), which has filed for national bankruptcy.

“These facts are critically important to understand how the BSA has endangered boys and what must change in the future,” Hamilton says.

Multiple Fronts This past March, along with her co-counsel attorneys Brian Kent and Jeffrey Fritz, Hamilton made history when she filed the first two lawsuits against the Church of Scientology for child sex abuse, brought “by two extraordinarily brave survivors,” Hamilton says.

“These lawsuits are historic because this organization has been very effective at silencing its victims even in the Me Too era,” she continues. “The statute of limitations window legislation that CHILD USA fights for is one reason that these victims have a chance at justice.”

Hamilton also filed legal arguments against mandatory religious arbitration for the alleged rape victims of actor and scientologist Danny Masterson. “It is unconstitutional and cruel to force a rape victim who has left the faith to be forced into religious arbitration regarding the rape, and the harassment from the religious organization that followed.”

CHILD USA is also taking on programming that Hamilton says is fraught with potential for abuse, like conversion therapy, a practice employed to “convert” homosexual youths to heterosexuality, which is widely considered abusive.

“I was already interested in religious camps for children that were engaging in abusive practices, and some

54

conversion camps, which have been known to use methods like creating aversion through electric shock, fit that same mold,” says Hamilton.

“To this end, we are seeking out past participants of this practice— whether in a camp or through private counseling—so we can gather experiential data, because there really have not been strong social science studies on harmful practices like these.”

These social concerns extend to medical neglect and family court.

Because Hamilton’s wheelhouse is the intersection of religion and law, she is well-positioned to advocate for children whose parents refuse essential medical care for religious or philosophical reasons.

When it comes to family court, Hamilton says there is a whirlwind dynamic that often works against the mothers of abused children.

She describes a scenario she has witnessed: “A mother discovers her child’s father is being sexually abusive and rushes to authorities to institute divorce proceedings.

In family court, the man, who is the breadwinner, shows up cool and calm and claims that the mother is trying to alienate him by making up stories. The judge gives the father dual or sole custody, placing the child back in the presence of the abuser.”

Hamilton says in these scenarios, it’s the child who becomes trapped.

“The sad truth that people need to understand is the child probably loves the father who is sexually abusing them. A child just doesn’t understand,” continues Hamilton, who cites CHILD USA staff member Danielle Pollack, one of these same protective mothers who was ignored by the court, as a wonderful

resource and ambassador for those the nonprofit is trying to help.

“Family court judges are simply not adequately trained to handle the nuances of the cases.”

An Unrelenting Fight Hamilton hasn’t given up on the idea of cozying up on the shore to write a fiction novel. She is currently at work on a historical project of a different sort, which explores the framers of the Constitutions’ interaction with Calvinism and how that laid the groundwork for the baseline of the Constitution: expect those with power to abuse it.

In addition to her advocacy and research, Hamilton is still passionate about teaching. “In my Children and the Law class, I had a wonderful group of students, including a public school principal, an Army major, an education graduate student, and even a former worker in the foster care system,” she says.

“There are such incredible insights to be had, and those insights inform my policy work. I just want to sit and speak with them all day.”

CHILD USA is making headway on its initiatives each and every day. Reflecting on her decades of pioneering work, Hamilton considers herself the luckiest woman in the world.

“I’ve been given a calling that just happens to be at the right time and in the right place. It’s what children need, and what the country needs,” says Hamilton. “It’s getting better incrementally, but every day I wake up and there’s another frontier that we need to civilize. As soon as my team and I solve one challenge, we just take that pin off the board and tack another one on.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

55

OMNIA

Collaborations between physicists and mathematicians showcase the importance of research that crosses the traditional boundaries that separate fields of science.

By Erica K. Brockmeier • Photography by Eric Sucar

56

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Advances in the fields of geometry, string theory, and particle physics have been made possible by teams of researchers who speak different “languages.” Burt Ovrut, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is one of these collaborators.

n the scientific community, “interdisciplinary” can feel like an overused, modern-day buzzword. But uniting different academic disciplines is far from a new concept. Math, chemistry, physics, and biology were grouped together for many years under the umbrella “natural philosophy,” and it was only as knowledge grew and specialization became necessary that these disciplines became more defined.

With many complex scientific questions still in need of answers, working across multiple fields is now seen as an essential part of research. Long-running collaborations between the math department and the physics and astronomy department showcase the importance of interdisciplinary research that crosses traditional boundaries. Advances in geometry, string theory, and particle physics, for example, have been made possible by teams of researchers who speak different “languages” and embrace new research cultures.

A Tale of Two Disciplines Math and physics are two closely connected fields. For physicists, math is a tool used to answer questions. For example, Newton invented calculus to help describe motion. For mathematicians, physics can be a source of inspiration, with theoretical concepts such as general relativity and quantum theory providing an impetus for mathematicians to develop new tools.

But despite their close connections, physics and math research rely on distinct methods. As the systematic study of how matter behaves, physics encompasses the study of both the great and the small, from galaxies and planets to atoms and particles. Questions are addressed using combinations of theories, experiments, models, and observations to either support or refute new ideas about the nature of the universe.

In contrast, math is focused on abstract topics such as quantity (number theory), structure (algebra), and space (geometry). Mathematicians look for patterns and develop new ideas and theories using pure logic and mathematical reasoning. Instead of experiments or observations, mathematicians use proofs to support their ideas.

While physicists rely heavily on math for calculations in their work, they don’t work toward a fundamental understanding of abstract mathematical ideas in the way that mathematicians do. Physicists

57

OMNIA

Randall Kamien, Vicki and William Abrams Professor in the Natural Sciences, works on physics problems that have a strong connection to geometry and topology.

“want answers, and the way they get answers is by doing computations,” says Tony Pantev, Class of 1939 Professor of Mathematics. “But in mathematics, the computations are just a decoration on top of the cake. You have to understand everything completely, then you do a computation.”

Sometimes, physics papers are essentially, “We discovered this thing, isn’t that cool?” But math is never like that. Everything is about understanding things for the sake of understanding them.

Culturally, it’s very different.

This fundamental difference leads researchers in both fields to use the analogy of language, highlighting a need to “translate” ideas in order to make progress and understand one another.

“We are dealing with how to formulate physics questions so it can be seen as 58

a mathematics problem” says Mirjam Cvetič, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics. “That’s typically the hardest part.”

“A physicist comes to us, asks, ‘How do you prove that this is true?’ and we immediately show them it’s false,” says Ron Donagi, Professor of Mathematics. “But we keep talking, and the trick is not to do what they say to do but what they mean, a translation of the problem.”

In addition to differences in methodology and language, math and physics also have different research cultures. In physics, papers might involve dozens of coauthors and institutions, with researchers publishing work several times per year. In contrast, mathematicians might work on a single problem that takes years to complete with a small number of collaborators. “Sometimes, physics papers are essentially, ‘We discovered this thing, isn’t that cool?’” says Randy Kamien, Vicki and William Abrams Professor in the Natural Sciences. “But math is never like that. Everything is about understanding things for the sake of understanding them. Culturally, it’s very different.”

Calabi-Yau manifolds, conjectured in the 1950s by Eugenio Calabi, now Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, are a fundamental component of research in both particle physics and cutting-edge mathematics.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Mind the Gap When asked how mathematicians and physicists can bridge these fundamental gaps and successfully work together, researchers refer to a commonly cited example that also has a connection to Penn. In the 1950s, Eugenio Calabi, now Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, conjectured the existence of a six-dimensional manifold, a topological space arranged in a way that allows complex structures to be described and understood more simply. After the manifold’s existence was proven in 1978 by Shing-Tung Yau, currently the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, this new finding was poised to become a fundamental component of a new idea in particle physics: string theory.

Proposed in the 1970s as a candidate framework for a “theory of everything,” string theory describes matter as being made of one-dimensional vibrating strings that form elementary particles, like electrons and neutrinos, as well as forces, like gravity and electromagnetism. The challenge, however, is that string theory requires a 10-dimensional universe, so physicists turned to CalabiYau manifolds as a place to house the “extra” dimensions.

Because the structure is so complex and only recently proven by mathematicians, it wasn’t simple to directly implement into a physics framework. Physicists “use differential geometry, but that’s been known for a long time,” says Burt Ovrut, Professor of Physics and

“[The physicists] speak our language, and they can explain the questions they are struggling with in a way that we can understand and approach them," says Tony Pantev (R), Class of  Professor of Mathematics, pictured with Mirjam Cvetič, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, and Ron Donagi, Professor of Mathematics.

Astronomy. “When all of a sudden string theory launches, who the heck knows what a Calabi-Yau manifold is?”

Through the combined efforts of Ed Witten, a theoretical physicist and professor of mathematical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the late Sir Michael Atiyah, a British-Lebanese mathematician specializing in geometry, researchers found a way to apply Calabi-Yau manifolds in string theory. It was the ability of Witten to help translate ideas between the two fields that many researchers say was instrumental in successfully applying brand-new ideas from mathematics into up-andcoming theories from physics.

Donagi, Pantev, and Antonella Grassi, Professor of Mathematics Emeritae, as well as physicists Cvetič, Kamien, Ovrut, and Jonathan

Heckman, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, have also recognized the importance of speaking a common language as they work across the two fields.

They credit Penn as being a place that’s particularly adept at fostering connections and bridging gaps in cultural, linguistic, and methodological differences, and they credit their success to time spent listening to new ideas and developing ways to “translate” between languages.

For Donagi, it was a chance encounter with Witten in the mid-1990s that led the mathematician to his first collaboration with a researcher outside of pure math. He enjoyed working with Witten so much that he reached out to Penn physicists Cvetič and Ovrut to start a “local” crossover collaboration. “I’ve been hooked since then, and I’ve been

talking as much to physicists as to other mathematicians,” Donagi says.

During the mid-2000s, Donagi and Ovrut co-led an interedisciplinary research group supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy with Pantev and Grassi that was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. The collaboration marked a successful first official math and physics crossover collaboration at Penn. As Ovrut explains, the work was focused on a specific kind of string theory and required extremely close interactions between physics and math researchers. “It was at the very edge of mathematics and algebraic geometry, so I couldn’t do this myself, and the mathematicians were very interested in these things,” says Ovrut.

59

OMNIA

Burt Ovrut (L), Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was one of the co-leads of the successful joint math and physics program.

Cvetič, a longtime collaborator with Donagi and Grassi, says that Penn’s mathematicians have the expertise they need to help answer important questions in physics and that their collaborations at the interface of string theory and algebraic geometry are “extremely fruitful and productive.”

“I think it’s been incredibly productive and helpful for both our groups,” Donagi says. “We’ve been doing this for longer than anyone else, and we have a really good, strong connection between the groups. They’ve almost become one group.”

And in terms of embracing cultural differences, physicists like Kamien, who works on problems with a strong connection to geometry and topology, encourages his group members to try to understand math the way mathematicians do instead of only seeing it as a tool for their work. “We’ve tried to absorb not just their language but their culture, how they understand things, how sometimes understanding a problem more deeply is better,” he says.

60

Crossing Paths Craig Lawrie and Ling Lin, current and former postdocs working with Cvetič and Heckman, know firsthand about both the challenges and opportunities of working on a problem that combines cutting-edge math and physics.

Physicists like Lawrie and Lin, who work on problems in two different branches of string theory, are trying to figure out what types of particles different geometric structures can create while also removing the “extra” six dimensions.

Adding extra symmetries, a physical or mathematical feature that remains constant when undergoing a transformation (think of a ball rotating in front of a mirror), makes string theory problems easier to work with and allows researchers to ask questions about the properties of geometric structures and how they correspond to realworld physics. Building off previous work by Heckman, Lawrie, and Lin were able to extract physical features from known geometries in

five-dimensional systems to see if those particles overlapped with standard model particles. Using their knowledge of both physics and math, the researchers showed that geometries in different dimensions are all related mathematically, which means they can study particles in different dimensions more easily.

By combining their physics intuition with their knowledge of math, Lawrie and Lin were able to make new discoveries that wouldn’t have been possible if approaches from the two fields were used in isolation. “What we found seems to suggest that theories in five dimensions come from theories in six dimensions,” explains Lin. “That is something that mathematicians, if they didn’t know about string theory or physics, would not think about.”

Lawrie adds that being able to work directly with mathematicians is also helpful in their field since understanding new math research can be a challenge, even for theoretical physics researchers. “As

physicists, we can have a long discussion where we use a lot of intuition, but if you talk to a mathematician they will say, ‘Wait, precisely what do you mean by that?’ and then you have to pull out your important assumptions,” says Lawrie.

“It’s also good for clarifying our own thought process.”

Rodrigo Barbosa, GR’19, also knows what it’s like to work across fields, in his case coming from math to physics.

While studying a sevendimensional manifold as part of his Ph.D. program, Barbosa connected at a conference with Lawrie over their shared research interests. The two researchers were then able to combine their experiences through a successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

The work was motivated

by Barbosa’s Ph.D. research in math that included both junior and senior faculty, as well as postdocs and graduate students, from physics.

While Barbosa says that the work was challenging, especially being the only mathematician in the group, he also found it rewarding. He enjoyed being able to provide mathematical explanations for certain difficult concepts and relished the rare opportunity to work so closely with researchers outside of his field while still in graduate school. “I’m very grateful that I did my Ph.D. at Penn because it’s really one of a handful of places where this could have happened,” he says.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Jonathan Heckman (L), Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, joined the physics faculty in 2017 and is already active in a number of collaborations with the math department.

The Next Generation Faculty in both departments see the next generation of students and postdocs as “ambidextrous,” having fundamental skills, knowledge, and intuition from both math and physics. “Young people are extremely sophisticated and openminded,” says Pantev. “In the old days, it was very hard to get into physics-related research if you were a mathematician because the thinking is completely different. Now, young people are equally versed in both modes of thinking, so it’s easy for them to make progress.”

Heckman is also a member of this new ambidextrous generation of researchers, and in his two years at Penn he has coauthored several papers and started new projects with mathematicians. He says that researchers who want to be successful in the future need to be able to balance the needs of both fields. “Some students act more like mathematicians, and I have to guide them to act more like physicists, and others have more physical intuition but they have to pick up the math,” he says.

It’s a balance that requires a blend of flexibility and precision, and is one that will be a continuing challenge as topics become increasingly complex and new observations are made from physics experiments.

“Mathematicians want to make everything well-defined and rigorous. From a physics perspective, sometimes you want to get an answer that doesn’t need to be welldefined, so you need to make a compromise,” says Lin.

In the old days, it was very hard to get into physicsrelated research if you were a mathematician because the thinking is completely different. Now, young people are equally versed in both modes of thinking.

This compromise is something that’s attracted Barbosa to working more with physicists, adding that the two fields are complementary. “Problems have become

so difficult that you need input from all possible directions. Physics works by finding examples and describing solutions, while in math you try to see how general these equations are and how things fit together,” Barbosa says. He also enjoys that physics provides him with a way to make progress on answering questions more quickly than in pure math, where problems can take years to solve.

The Future of Crossing Over The future of interdisciplinary research will depend a lot on the next generation, but Penn is well positioned to continue leading these efforts thanks to the proximity of the two departments, shared grants, cross-listed courses, and students and postdocs that actively work on problems across fields. “There is this constant osmosis of basic knowledge that builds up students who are literate and comfortable with sophisticated language,” says Pantev.

“I think we are ahead of the curve, and I think we’ll stay ahead of the curve.”

61

OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

ANCIENT ARMOR, A MYSTERIOUS ROYAL TOMB, AND A PAIR OF MASSIVE STONE GATES AT GORDION Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, and his team’s recent excavation at a historic site in central Turkey was one of the most successful in history.

By Michele Berger Photos courtesy of Gordion Excavation Project

hen Brian Rose and the Gordion archaeological team in Turkey began excavating a tomb this past summer, they expected to uncover the remains of a king.

“Anyone who leaves the ancient citadel has his or her eyes directed squarely toward this tomb.

Obviously, it’s someone of critical importance to the life of Gordion,” says Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies.

Instead, the researchers got a surprise: Inside the tomb lay the remains of a woman in her mid-20s, along with a child eight or nine years old and more than 600 amber beads.

The find was remarkable not just for the fact that the grave contained multiple occupants, but because one of them was female and surrounded by gems that likely came from 1,500 miles away.

Beyond the noteworthy tomb discovery, ceramic vessels and an iron-and-bronze breastplate helped the researchers push back a building’s date by 100 years, marking it as a palace for Gordion’s rulers and not the residence of a Persian governor. The Penn team also located the citadel’s South Gate, likely used as the principal entry point for 1,300 years, and finished preserving the East Gate, more than 33 feet high, which had been damaged in a recent earthquake.

“VERY RARE” PAIR Gordion’s monumental citadel mound, about 55 feet tall, lies in the middle of the ancient city, which was enclosed by an extensive system of stone and mudbrick fortifications, still mostly

“It’s an extraordinary discovery,” says Rose, who is also curator-in-charge of Penn Museum’s Mediterranean Section.

The “Midas Monument” in Midas City, which was carved in honor of Gordion’s most famous king in the late-8th century BCE.

Eric Sucar

For seven decades, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Museum have conducted work at Gordion, a historic site in central Turkey that includes nine settlements, one atop another, and spans about 4,000 years. It was the capital city of the ancient kingdom of Phrygia, whose most famous king, Midas, reportedly had a golden touch. Rose has been in charge of the project for 13 seasons. The most recent, which ran for 10 weeks in the summer of 2019, was one of the most productive ever.

Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, has been directing excavations at Gordion since 2007.

63

>

OMNIA

1

3

64

2

4

buried. Remote sensing has revealed buried residential settlements to the north, south, and west of the central mound.

The citadel had its own fortified perimeter, and the most important buildings were located there. Outside the city are 125 burial mounds, about a third of which have been excavated.

It’s very rare to have a monumental tomb for a woman in the 8th century BCE, and it’s rare to have two occupants.

Though Gordion has been studied for three-quarters of a century, plenty of outstanding questions remain. One Rose hoped to answer focused on the site’s layout. “I was interested in determining more clearly the plan of the citadel mound, which had never been a focus of earlier excavators,” he says.

This included excavating a tomb beyond the East Gate.

The sight line from the original gateway structure led to Gordion’s oldest burial mound, which dated from 850 BCE. But after a fire around 800 BCE, residents rebuilt the gate, slightly shifting its orientation toward the tomb excavated last summer by Rose and colleagues from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. Considering the mound’s prominence and size, the researchers thought perhaps it contained the body of a king.

5

The mound is large, more than 45 feet tall and 345 feet across. Inside, despite structural collapse and looting, many items were preserved: leather belts with metal studs set around a copper alloy disc or with decorative bronze plate attachments, at least 20 elaborate bronze clothing pins, bronze bowls, a ladle, and ceramic food-storage containers. The archaeologists also found hundreds of amber pieces—the largest and earliest known collection of this material at Gordion.

But the pair of human remains, the woman and young child, were what really caught Rose’s attention. “It’s very rare to have a monumental tomb for a woman in the 8th century BCE, and it’s rare to have two occupants,” he says.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

1 Areal view of the citadel mound of Gordion.

2 Excavation of the 8th century BCE storage units on Gordion’s citadel mound.

3 The pebble mosaic floor with meander patterns from one of Gordion’s palatial residences, 6th century BCE.

6

4 Conserving the Greek and Turkish shell casings from the Battle of the Sakarya River (1921), found on top of the recently excavated burial mound.

5 Teaching local high-school students about the study of ancient animal bones.

6 A fragmentary bronze and iron military breastplate from the 6th century BCE, excavated in 2019.

7 Bronze bowl from the recently excavated burial mound, 8th century BCE.

7

Given the connection between the citadel’s East Gate and the tomb chamber, these were certainly key figures in Gordion, likely royalty, even though their identities aren’t yet known. They may never be. “These finds were made at the very end of the season,” Rose says. “When we go back, we’ll do more examination of the bodies and hopefully learn more about the lives of these individuals, who were clearly important in the life of the city.”

WHAT THE ARMOR REVEALS Digging in another part of the complex revealed a new twist on a building initially dated to the middle of the 6th century.

8

Much of the area near the South Gate had been excavated in the 1950s by the team led by one of Rose’s predecessors at Penn, archaeologist Rodney Young.

A structure there, dubbed the Mosaic Building, was like nothing else uncovered in Gordion. It had an enclosed vestibule that opened into a paved courtyard, which led to another vestibule and two more rooms. Each featured blue-and-white pebble mosaic floors.

Young believed the building had housed a Persian governor. But after reanalyzing pottery from the original excavation, Rose’s team drew a different conclusion, one bolstered by the new discovery of two large pieces of armor: The building was likely 100 years older than previously thought.

8 Achilles (R) bandaging the wounds of Patroclus (L) during the Trojan War. The breastplate worn by Patroclus is of the same type as the one that was excavated at Gordion in 2019.

This armor was worn by the protectors of Gordion at the time when the Persians attacked the city. Finding armor this substantial from that time period is extraordinary.

“It was probably the palace of the rulers of Gordion in the early-6th century BCE,” Rose says. “Next to it, we found this breastplate. This armor was worn by the protectors of Gordion at the time when the Persians attacked the city. Finding armor this substantial from that time period is extraordinary.”

65

OMNIA

Research Amidst the Pandemic Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, reflects.

This is the first time in forty years in which I’m uncertain whether there can be a summer excavation season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Turkey has not cancelled field projects, and a few of them continue to operate, but new directives from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism specify that for the foreseeable future, fieldwork should be limited to study, rather than excavation. No visitors to excavation sites are allowed and dig houses (excavation headquarters) must be regularly disinfected.

Whether these conditions will continue into the summer, or become even more stringent, is unclear.

We’re scheduled to begin work at Gordion on June 10, 2020, over two months from the time of this writing. My hope is that we will still be able to have a season of some sort, but it may not include excavation, nor may it be as long as I’d planned on, which is 10 weeks. Every archaeologist I know is experiencing the same doubts about their field projects this year, and many summer study-abroad programs in the Mediterranean have already been cancelled.

Most of us continually try to situate ourselves in diachronic perspective: no one could plan for the future during the plague of Athens in 430 BCE, or the Justinianic plague in 540 CE, or the so-called Black Death in the mid-14th century. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

66

Aerial view and plan of the of the newly discovered South Citadel Gate at Gordion, looking north.

Unlike modern armor, the breastplate isn’t solid or flat, but rather made from hundreds of tiny overlapping metal scales, sewn to a backing. To the untrained eye, it could be mistaken for an object that came from the sea rather than from underground. The archaeologists immediately recognized they’d encountered something fascinating and substantial.

They already knew the pottery Young had found dated to the first half of the 6th century, but other clues placed the armor in that timeframe, too. For one, a meander design—a decorative border constructed from a continuous line, shaped into a repeated motif—created by the arrangement of the bronze scales resembled the mosaic floors of the nearby building. Beyond that, the artifact itself bore a striking resemblance to protective gear shown on

a late 6th-century cup depicting Patroclus, a warrior and companion of Achilles. Finally, other pieces of armor with a similar timestamp had been discovered on Cyprus.

The proximity of the armor to the Mosaic Building meant Young had likely gotten the timing wrong all those years ago. “Putting the armor into the first half of the 6th century BCE meant it was jettisoned at the time of the Persian attack,” Rose says. “Originally, the building had been dated after the Persian conquest, but now, we’ve been able to move it back.” Rose says in the future, he plans to expand the trench to look for additional armor.

A TALE OF TWO GATES Rose mentions two other successes when describing the most recent fieldwork season. The first entailed

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

The Tumulus  excavation in July of . From left to right: Emre Köse, Tolga Çelik, Mehmet Akalın, Enver Sağır, Brian Rose, Braden Cordivari, Mustafa Metin, İbrahim Dural, and Şerafettin Koçoğlu.

uncovering more of the citadel’s South Gate, “which became the principal gate through the late Roman period,” he explains. This project has been ongoing for seven seasons, and most recently included the discovery of a stone-paved ramp and more of an approach road Rose initially discovered in 2018.

“It has the longest approach road of any citadel gate that’s ever been found. The city’s defenders wanted this road with high walls on either side, because the longer your approach road, the harder it is for your enemies to get into the citadel.”

Such a defense system, he adds, was far more sophisticated than the researchers had imagined would exist at Gordion.

The second success capped off a longterm architectural conservation project of the 33-foot-tall East Gate, which had been badly damaged in a 1999 earthquake. For five years, the Penn team

painstakingly removed 112 of the most severely cracked stones one by one, repaired them, then replaced them in their original spots.

The city’s defenders wanted this road with high walls on either side, because the longer your approach road, the harder it is for your enemies to get into the citadel.

According to Rose, the work should ensure the gate’s stability into the next century, even if another earthquake occurs. “If we hadn’t moved, consolidated, and reinserted the blocks in their original locations,” he says, “they would have gradually crumbled, and the entire wall

would’ve fallen.” None of this work, he adds, would have been possible without the support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.

Any director of an archaeological sites hopes for such a productive and informative season. Yet it inevitably leads to more questions. Who were the woman and child in the tomb? Is there more armor to locate? There’s plenty more landscape still to explore. With each season, the historic people of Gordion reveal more of themselves, their lives, and their ultimate fate.

67

OMNIA

OMNIA 101

Ptolemy and Strabo in the School of Athens by Raphael

TRUTH, MATH, AND PHILOSOPHY Henry Towsner, Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Scott Weinstein, Professor of Philosophy, discuss the complex intersection of theory and proof.

By Blake Cole For most of us, it can be difficult to understand what is going on at the cutting edge of scholarship.

OMNIA 101 offers readers a peek into what faculty do every day in their classrooms, and how they bring their expertise to the next generation.

68

hat is truth?

How do we decide if a theoretical idea that we cannot measure or examine is correct? These are issues that mean something to people in their everyday lives, and to scholars in their everyday work. We spoke with Henry Towsner, Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Scott Weinstein, Professor of Philosophy, to examine the centuries-long evolution of human understanding in regard to these two disciplines and the search for truth.

(L-R) Henry Towsner, Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Scott Weinstein, Professor of Philosophy On the most basic level, how is proof generally defined or understood in mathematics?

Henry Towsner: Mathematicians have an official answer to what proof is: It’s a list of formal mathematical formulas where each is deduced by the rules of logic from previous steps, or from the “axioms”—our basic, agreed-upon assumptions.

OMNIA 101

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

We want the notion of proof to be something that’s completely objective.

We might disagree about whether some axioms are true (or useful, or beautiful), but there’s not supposed to be any room for disagreement or mistakes about whether a proof from those axioms is valid.

But we don’t actually live up to that ideal, because we also want proofs to be about ideas—about presenting the explanation of why something should be true. Mathematicians find long lists of formulas as boring and unintuitive as everyone else, so real proofs—the way actual human mathematicians write them—are arguments written in ordinary (though very jargon-filled) English. They need to be clear and exact enough to persuade other experts.

How did mathematical proof influence philosophy?

Scott Weinstein: The Pythagorean theorem that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side had a profound influence on the development of Western philosophy. Plato recognized that this could not have been established, nor even suggested, by empirical means such as measurement, but was rather a remarkable result that could only be achieved through the exercise of reason alone. The impact this insight had on Plato’s thought reverberates through the history of philosophy in the celebration of the primacy of reason over other cognitive capacities.

When is an argument sufficiently convincing, whether it’s math or philosophy?

Towsner: The challenge is introducing a language that is precise enough that people can say what they mean and make their arguments clearly enough so that we can check if they’re foolproof. I think philosophers of all stripes would be very happy if they could say everything in a language that absolutely could not be misunderstood. In this

sense, philosophy can be much harder than math, because it’s often more difficult to have that level of precision.

What happens when even experts can’t agree on whether an argument is convincing?

But there are exceptions where mathematics can be similarly imprecise.

There’s an example from the early 1800s that’s notorious. One of the founders of analysis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, gave a proof of a result, and then, several decades later, people realized the result wasn’t true. Then, more recently, people have gone back and argued that perhaps Cauchy’s proof was totally correct and people just misunderstood what his result was.

Either way, it’s a serious problem if we can’t agree on when a proof is correct, or even what we’re trying to prove.

The development of modern analysis and logic was heavily driven by the response to this.

Towsner: A few years ago, a proof was announced of something called the ABC conjecture, which had this very unusual feature that a lot of people were interested in it, but mathematicians couldn’t tell if it was correct.

Some of my colleagues went to conferences where people would present parts of this proof and discuss whether it was correct, and it took years to reach a consensus that there were some errors. But that’s a new idea that you could have something that is so complicated that it’s kind of beyond what we can make rigorous right now.

How did the idea of mathematical rigor evolve?

Weinstein: There had been standards of transparency of proof, but that began to break down as mathematics developed in the 19th century. It became much harder to see mathematical arguments directly in the intuitive geometrical sense that mathematicians and philosophers had treasured from antiquity through the 18th century. In the wake of what was referred to as “the crisis in the foundations of mathematics,” mathematicians and philosophers intensively pursued investigations into the logical foundations of mathematics. These investigations led to the formalization of mathematical proof that Henry just described, and to a determination of the scope and limits of the mechanization of mathematical reasoning. Crucial to this development was mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing’s mathematical characterization of mechanical computation in terms of simple devices, now known as Turing machines, which laid the scientific foundations for the revolution in computer and information technology that began in the last half of the 20th century and continues today.

How do you deal with this new wave of proofs?

Weinstein: The project of checking the validity of very complex proofs is similar to computer scientists’ efforts directed at checking the correctness of programs. For example, with security software, you need to check that a certain kind of protocol can’t be broken. Our colleague, Andre Scedrov, Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Math Department, has applied logical techniques to this problem with considerable success. Nonetheless, as is apparent from recent dramatic events— such as the software failures that occurred during the Iowa Democratic caucuses this past February—even though we’ve worked very hard on verifying the correctness of safety-critical software systems like flight controllers, and on guaranteeing the reliability and security of software for elections, we’re still not there yet. In general, the issues of proof-checking and software verification continue to present extremely challenging mathematical problems that will occupy researchers in logic for many years to come.

69

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FOOD AND FARMING DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS

even over video chat. My ‘quaroutine’ has consisted of waking up, saying my prayers over coffee, pulling a tarot card, and chipping away at the final month of my master’s degree.”

— SUSAN AHLBORN

Hannah Kass, LPS’20, on the U.S. food supply and the challenges facing farmers.

Shortages at grocery stores following the arrival of COVID-19 in the U.S. have raised concerns about food availability. Hannah Kass, a Master of Environmental Studies student in the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, recently published the op-ed “Breaking Up Big Ag Requires Reasonable Antitrust Enforcement” in The Regulatory Review. She researches food sovereignty, agroecology, political economy, and food regimes, and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with organic farmers.

HOW THE END OF THE WORLD CAME AND WENT—AND CAME BACK AGAIN Zachary Loeb, doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, discusses the untold history of Y2K and the living history of the coronavirus.

Courtesy of Hannah Kass

“I study the end of the world,” says Zachary Loeb. The doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science researches technology, disasters, and doom-saying, and explains, “I’ve always been particularly interested in the idea that human beings, specifically through science and technology, would be the agents for bringing about the end of the world.”

Hannah Kass, LPS’20, at her home in West Philadelphia.

Twenty years ago, some thought the end of the world had come and its name was Y2K. At the time, many computer programs allowed for only two digits for the year, as opposed to four.

With the turn from 1999 to 2000, many feared that computers would be unable to interpret the “00” change and technology breakdowns would lead to widespread chaos. Visions of nuclear power plant disasters, planes falling from the sky, and banks shutting down entirely became part of the collective consciousness. But none of that came to be.

According to Kass, a shortage of food itself is not the problem in the U.S. “In fact,” she explains, “food has been overproduced and prices are now too low for many farmers to adequately sustain themselves.”

Farmers who are contracted with agribusiness and growing crops for export have been receiving an unfair price for their product for decades, she says.

What people don’t understand about Y2K, says Loeb, is just how serious the threat actually was and how much work went into making sure 2000 arrived with little incident. Loeb’s dissertation delves into the massive amount of effort that went into avoiding what could have been catastrophic and the hidden history behind Y2K. Courtesy of Zachary Loeb

While there is plenty of food, Kass continues, equitable distribution was an already-existing issue that will worsen during the crisis.

Local farmers are facing the loss of outlets like farmer’s markets and restaurants. The closure of restaurants and specialty stores in areas with shelter-in-place orders, along with the lack of school meals and job losses, may mean people will go hungry.

She recommends a number of solutions: channeling some of the supply into reserves and food banks, and federal funding of delivery services. Beyond that, she argues the U.S. federal government needs to invoke the policies included in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which included price supports and supply management.

“We need to be thinking in the same ways we did then, because from an economic point of view, history is repeating itself,” Kass says.

She also urges more sustainable livestock farming, as well as shorter supply chains and vigilant food safety regulatory measures.

On finishing her degree from her home in West Philadelphia, Kass reports, “It’s a little strange, but I have to say that I am very grateful to be able to continue my education and connect with my colleagues, 70

Zachary Loeb, history and sociology of science doctoral candidate, works from home.

Loeb’s work shows that the Y2K response was robust and brought together a widespread collective of leading figures from the computer sector, government agencies, and the business world who shared concerns that Y2K was a serious problem.

“The experts understood that something had to be done about it,” says Loeb. “It really did have disastrous potential.

Fortunately, the people who needed to act rolled up their sleeves and did the work.”

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Reflecting on COVID-19 as another end-of-the-world-type scenario, he says, “Crisis situations like this one and those throughout history have always been about people dealing with the end of the world as they know it. The COVID-19 situation is tragic and horrible. Many people have lost their lives and many more will. But this isn’t going to be an extinction-level event. The planet earth is not going to suddenly vanish. The question is what will we learn?

How will we respond?” — KATELYN SILVA

PENN UNDERGRADS AND DECISION 2020 Students analyze data in the classroom and then bring their skills to NBC on election nights.

Political analysis requires data-savvy researchers, whether they are reporting polling data on election night or seeking to understand long-term policy impact. PORES—the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies—teaches students the high-level analytic and technical skills that complex social science problems demand.

Chen says, “In the grand scheme of things, I really have little to grumble about and I’m simply grateful to have my home, my health, my family, and my faith. Truly, the silver linings abound! Regarding my work with PORES, the spirit of those ventures lives on. What a time to be alive and to witness and consider the role of government and our own citizenry at truly historical scales.” — LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

Courtesy of Leo Chen

Courtesy of Ketaki Gujar

Ketaki Gujar, C’20, works at a desk at her home; (L-R) Leo Chen, C’22, and his brother, Teddy Chen, study at their home.

PORES, founded by John Lapinski, Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science and Elections Unit Director at NBC News, is home to the University’s only dedicated minor in survey research and data analytics. It offers students opportunities to take their learning outside of the classroom, with research fellowships and work at NBC’s Decision Desk—where results are analyzed and reported—during major elections.

Ketaki Gujar, C’20, voted for the first time in the 2016 election. This year, she worked behind the scenes at NBC. “We got the data in real time, and we would throw it up on TV or online.

There’s a pretty fast turnaround,” she says. “Being 21 years old and being able to do that before I even graduated from college was an incredible opportunity.”

“You’re truly diving shoulders-deep into this industry,” adds Leo Chen, C’22. He explains that during primary elections, the students review their graphics, making sure they are as accurate and informative as possible. “These are things you talk about generally in the classroom, but if you actually do them, the stakes are there.”

On the shift to remote learning, Gujar says, “For my last semester, I opted to largely take small seminars. I can’t help but miss how engaging in-class discussions could be. Realizing this, some of my professors began offering virtual discussions, which I enjoyed. With my time as a PORES fellow unfortunately cut short, I am looking for ways to get involved with

the political process from home.” She adds that she’s inspired by her fellow seniors and their work to maintain a sense of community.

CLIMATE CHANGE IN REAL TIME Raka Sen, doctoral student in sociology, studies how inhabitants of the Sundarbans region of India and Bangladesh respond to rising seas.

Discussion of climate change often centers on ways to prevent its worst effects. But in many parts of the world, people are already struggling with the impacts of a warming climate. One such place is the Sundarbans region of India and Bangladesh.

Raka Sen, a doctoral student in sociology, who has family connections in the Sundarbans, traveled there last summer to study how residents are responding to rising seas, coastal erosion, and salination of local water sources exacerbated by devastating storms.

“I had heard about Cyclone Alia, which hit the Sundarbans in 2009,” says Sen. “I couldn’t help but feel called to see what was happening there.”

The Sundarbans are a mangrove forest situated on the Bay of Bengal. Sen explains that with sea-level rise, the salty waters of the Bay of Bengal are encroaching further into the forest and killing the trees. This destabilizes 71

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

the coast, because it is the mangroves’ thick, intertwined roots that hold the soil in place.

Traditionally, people in the Sundarbans have relied on freshwater ponds for both a water supply and a place to raise small fish. As the ponds and the region’s groundwater become saltier, people must walk farther each day to find fresh water.

This task usually falls to the women, but the changes have affected whole communities, as men increasingly must travel to find work and some children forgo school to help earn money.

Courtesy of Raka Sen

Sen intended to return to the Sundarbans this summer for more research—and she has received a Fulbright Fellowship for next year—but the COVID-19 pandemic has put her plans in flux.

When the University transitioned to remote learning, Sen returned home to Colorado where she finished her classes online, wrote a dissertation proposal, and prepared for comprehensive exams. She also continued to talk with her research respondents and collect data by phone.

“It’s an interesting time to be studying India and Bangladesh,” says Sen. “Diseases like this shed light on existing problems, such as where the edges of structural inequalities lie. I think it’s possible to both acknowledge the losses we’re experiencing as students, while also recognizing that it’s a tremendous privilege to sit in my childhood home and maintain intellectual stimulation amid this pandemic that is affecting so many people.” — JANE CARROLL 72

Undergraduate Piotr Wojcik, an urban studies major, wants to protect community gardens from disinvestment and big data.

For his senior thesis, Piotr Wojcik, C’20, examined how Philadelphia is mapping vacant land parcels—like those used for urban gardens—through information technology and how that impacts uneven spatial development.

The urban studies major and Penn Program in Environmental Humanities fellow did a fieldwork placement at the Philadelphia Orchard Project, a nonprofit organization that plants and supports community orchards in the city. That experience brought Wojcik a deeper appreciation for the sustainable development of urban land and the need for more just food distribution for those from all socioeconomic backgrounds. It also introduced him to the Neighborhood Gardens Trust, a nonprofit organization and land trust dedicated to preserving and supporting community gardens and other shared open spaces across the city.

The group helps communities create an acquisition strategy so they can have documented and legal tenure of the gardens and the land underneath.

Wojcik’s thesis investigated Philadelphia’s data-driven mapping initiatives. He explains that when the city marks a piece of land as vacant, it becomes a target for redevelopment and puts the work of community gardens—some that have been worked by the community for a decade or more—at risk. Wojcik says that the neighborhoods with the most vacant parcels are also the most under-resourced.

Wojcik would like to see the city develop a safety net policy that protects the community’s investment in urban gardens and supports the development of urban produce in under-resourced areas.

A TIME TO EXPLORE The Penn Arts & Sciences Pathways video series highlights the intellectual journeys of undergraduates.

When she arrived at Penn, Bayley Tuch, C’21, intended to major in biological basis of behavior, but she quickly discovered that her passions lay elsewhere.

Courtesy of Bayley Tuch

Raka Sen, doctoral student in sociology, at home in Colorado.

PROTECTING PHILADELPHIA’S URBAN GARDENS

This spring, while completing his senior year online due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, Wojcik continued his thesis work by highlighting alternative ways of representing and understanding uneven land development in Philadelphia. The call for social distancing and limiting time outside the home has interfered with his original plans, but he is navigating the new normal. He says the coronavirus has also “inspired deeper thinking about borders at multiple scales—of the private parcel or the home, of different neighborhoods in Philly, and of different nations across the planet.” — KATELYN SILVA

Bayley Tuch, C’21

“I started realizing that the things that made me happy were more focused on politics—largely through my involvement in Penn Democrats,” says Tuch, who grew up in Los Altos, California. After trying a few classes, she decided to declare a major in political science.

Tuch is among the latest undergraduates featured in Pathways, a Penn Arts & Sciences video series that explores the academic journeys of students in the

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

College. Newly admitted students often have a path in mind, but a compelling class, influential professor, or out-of-theclassroom experience can inspire them to chart a different course than the one they first envisioned.

Courtesy of David Zhou

David Zhou, C’20

That’s what happened with Tuch. “In my introductory data science course, we got to analyze data through coding—I was thrilled to find an intersection between political science and some of the more science-y, problem-solving interests I had,” she says.

That class also introduced Tuch to the survey research and data analytics minor, offered through the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES).

For economics major David Zhou, C’20, exploring different courses confirmed his original intentions and introduced him to new ideas.

“The longer I stuck with economics the more I enjoyed it,” he says. “Economics plays into so many elements of our lives.”

An acting class Zhou took during sophomore year helped him learn more about himself.

“It helped me figure out who I was as an individual outside of academics—and how to better express that,” he says. Zhou is also an avid baker and photographer.

The changes to the spring semester, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, required Tuch and Zhou to adapt to new routines.

the emergence of virtual book clubs and an emphasis on reading. I have a scientific background, but I’ve always been drawn to the value of the arts in times of crisis.”

“I spent my time writing my final papers and as a research assistant,” says Tuch.

“I participated in the PORES hackathon where we analyzed public opinion data surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

I also spent a lot of time exercising, playing board games, and making matzo ball soup with my mom to celebrate Passover.

I just hope my Penn peers and faculty are doing well and staying healthy.”

Malcolm, a doctoral candidate in English and a fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, studies medieval literature and how natural science was communicated and represented before the Scientific Revolution. In the spring semester, they taught a junior research seminar, Science/Fiction, which shows students the intersections between science and literature and how definitions of scientific knowledge evolve and reflect societal biases.

Zhou adds, “For my product design course this semester, my project partner and I had to get more creative with how we communicated by leveraging a variety of digital platforms. This shift to virtual learning has really made me appreciate the experience of in-person classroom learning. I feel that it is important that we apply our knowledge and resources to do what we can to not only support those most vulnerable populations that have been affected by this pandemic, but to also ensure that the world we build after this situation has subsided is one that is kinder and better respects the value and dignity of human life.” — JANE CARROLL You can watch Tuch and Zhou’s—and others’—Pathways videos through a search at omnia.sas.upenn.edu.

SCIENCE/FICTION Doctoral candidate in English Aylin Malcolm’s class shows that when it comes to science, communication matters.

“When times get bad,” says Aylin Malcolm, “the medieval world seems more relevant than ever.”

As the world weathers the COVID-19 pandemic, talk has turned to the plague, a distinctly medieval threat. This is no surprise to Malcolm. “The humanities—history, literature, art—give us examples to look to, for good or bad,” they say. “There’s the plague, the use of zombie movies as a metaphor, and even

“We often think of science as objective and literature as subjective,” Malcolm explains. “But, as we’re seeing in our news every day, science is done by humans with all their interests and shortcomings. And just as important as scientific findings is how those findings are communicated.”

Course readings included texts such as The Blazing World, a 1666 work of science fiction written by Margaret Cavendish— dismissed as an eccentric in her time but who has been reconsidered in recent years—and contemporary writers such as Rebecca Roanhorse and Ted Chiang, whose work expands the canon of science fiction and adds perspectives missing from Western or Eurocentric traditions.

The COVID-19 crisis led Malcolm to make changes to the course. Classes were held on Zoom, and continued to meet at the regular time so students could gather together and maintain what Malcolm calls the “lively community” that is the Department of English.

“There is a lot of fear and anxiety right now,” Malcolm says. “Continuing the work I care about gives me a sense of normalcy. I want to say to students that even in a time like this, the work of the humanities is valuable.” — LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

73

OMNIA

MOVERS & QUAKERS

Claudine Adams, C’82, PAR’17, speaking at a Professional Women’s Alliance career roundtable event.

ON HER OWN Claudine Adams, C’82, PAR’17, left a long career at a large company to start something from scratch.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

74

W

hen Claudine Adams, C’82, PAR’17, started at Penn she thought she wanted to be an attorney. An Intro to Psychology course changed that, despite its challenges. “I still remember that first multiple-choice test,” she says.

“I thought it would be easy, but to this day it is one of the hardest tests I’ve ever taken.” But she was hooked and declared psychology as a major, completing internships at Thomas Jefferson Hospital and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic.

Here, Adams talks about her path from Intro to Psych to defense contracting.

MOVERS & QUAKERS

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Q: What was your post-grad career path like?

After I graduated with my psych degree, I wanted to work in the field. I worked for a psychiatric hospital and I loved it. But it’s the type of field where you really need your Ph.D. to make a career, so I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my life.

I saw an ad from a headhunter in the paper—there was no internet. When I called, the original job wasn’t available but there was something at Xerox.

I interviewed and became a sales rep there, where I worked for 20 years.

Q: How did your role at Xerox change during your time there?

When I started as a sales rep, I sold what we called facilities management, a service where Xerox would operate a company’s mailroom and facilities.

As technology expanded, multifunction devices came into play, and data centers began working with a lot more information, and my job grew a lot more technical. I worked to understand all of it. When I started, I was the sales rep for the Philadelphia area, but when I left I managed the East Coast operation from Boston down to Florida and west to Tennessee.

I was there a long time, but big companies are always changing. Just when you think you understand what’s going on, something changes. It was challenging and it kept me learning.

Q: Did you call on your psychology background when you left the field?

My training in psychology and my clinical internships have had so many benefits. Studying human behavior and communication really taught me to read people and how to listen well.

I think even to this day it gives me an advantage, because being able to listen well and to pay attention

to body language or what might be troubling to clients means you can address their concerns. It really makes a big difference.

Q: What motivated you to start your own company?

I always wanted to have my own company, I just didn’t know what kind of company it would be. My husband was a software engineer and he felt the same way. We decided that we didn’t want to wait too long and if we were going to start a company, we better do it while we were a little bit younger. And so, in 2004 we incorporated an engineering firm.

The company grew, but eventually I sold myself out of it to start something solely on my own. In 2014, I started Bravura, a defense contracting firm that offers software system engineering and network operations, among other things.

Q: What are the risks of striking out on your own?

When you work for a large company, you spend a lot of time fighting internal battles in order to justify a particular business decision or to get approval for one thing or another.

But the good news with the large company is you have a lot of infrastructure.

There’s a whole HR department; there’s a whole legal department; there’s a whole payroll department— you don’t have to worry about that, you can focus on your job. The biggest transition for me in opening my own company was that all of a sudden I was every department.

There wasn’t anyone else to call on the phone and say, “Hey, what do I do with this situation?” Making sure that I had the right information to make good decisions as a small business owner was really key.

Q: Are there particular challenges to being a woman-owned business in the defense sector?

There’s not a whole lot of women in this business, but more are coming in than ever before. Do you still run into some of the norms, the good-old-boy networks that you have to battle?

Absolutely.

The federal government has a Woman-Owned Small Business program and so they are now mandated

by Congress to do a certain amount of work with women-owned businesses. But that’s relatively new.

There’s still a challenge in being a woman in a man’s world, for sure.

Q: Do you have any advice for students who want to start their own businesses?

Before you strike out as an entrepreneur, work for another company for a little bit. That helped me because it taught me things that I used to open my own business. If I had started my own business straight out of school, I wouldn’t have had the benefit of a lot of the training and experience I got working for a large company. By the time I started, I understood how HR works, how contracts work, and what types of training benefit employees.

Take the time to learn how an organization operates, learn what’s good, and learn what’s not so good and then branch out on your own.

Q: When you remember your time at Penn, what do you think about?

My favorite thing to do was walk down Locust Walk in the springtime, when the snow had melted and the vendors were coming out. I lived in the high rises, which we called the superblock back then. From there I’d walk over the bridge and head down Locust Walk. It was always a treat.

75

OMNIA

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

STAYING CONNECTED We want the community of Penn Arts & Sciences alumni, friends, and students to stay connected and engaged while our physical events are on hold. To help facilitate student-alumni connections, Penn Arts & Sciences has launched a new online mentorship program, Ben Connect. Ben Connect allows students to interact with alumni, learn about different industries, and seek professional

and educational opportunities and growth. If you’re interested in learning more about Ben Connect or joining the program, visit BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU. TO LEARN ABOUT UNIVERSITY RESOURCES AND VIRTUAL EVENTS, GO TO WWW.ALUMNI.UPENN.EDU/GOVIRTUAL.

Brooke Sietinsons

PWA CAREER ROUNDTABLES College alumnae representing fields from medicine to banking to entrepreneurship visited Penn for a Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) career roundtable that attracted 46 female students. PWA members are professionally accomplished alumnae of Penn Arts & Sciences who share an understanding of the value of a liberal arts education in the workplace, and the desire to assist students and young alumnae of the College through professional development and career networking opportunities.

Almost 50 College women participated in an on-campus Professional Women’s Alliance career roundtable led by PWA members.

The College Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS) brings College undergraduates together with alumni in mentoring relationships to help students determine how their academic paths coincide with career aspirations. On-campus events like mentoring meals and roundtables give students a look at life beyond Penn. Two recent CAMS dinners focusing on careers in sustainability and alternatives to medical school drew more than 100 students.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.COLLEGE.UPENN.EDU/CAMS.

76

VISIT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/PWA.

Brooke Sietinsons

COLLEGE ALUMNI MENTORING SERIES

FOR MORE INFORMATION,

On campus in February for the College Alumni Mentoring Series dinner on alternatives to medical school are (L-R) Sundeep Bhan, C’94; Jean-Paul Rebillard, C’93, G’99; Kelly McCallion, C’13; Rebecca Setta, C’07; Amber Ashley Parker, C’11; Sara Levin, C’06; James Hinz, C’05; and Joseph Becker, C’14.

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

PENN ARTS & SCIENCES AT WORK Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog series that highlights College alumni in their workplaces and encourages reflection on how and why their careers took shape.

TAKE A LOOK AT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/AT-WORK.

Brooke Sietinsons

“With someone trying to rebuild their life after they’ve been away in a carceral setting, whether it’s for a couple of months or decades, we walk alongside people.”

- JOANNA VISSER ADJOIAN, C’04, L’10 Co-Founder and Co-Director at Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP) Philadelphia, PA URBAN STUDIES MAJOR, HISPANIC STUDIES MINOR

Brooke Sietinsons

“The freedom to explore is a privilege—and I took full advantage at Penn. In my first year I studied everything from human biology to religious studies with a Star Trek twist!”

-JOHN ADRACTAS, C’98 CEO/Founder of Encircle Labs; Board Advisor at Simplee; Angel Investor at One Shared Mind Ventures San Mateo, CA MATHEMATICS MAJOR

77

OMNIA

INSOMNIA

EXTREME TRANSLATION Ahmad Almallah’s debut collection, Bitter English, is an exploration of identity and poetic form.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

hmad Almallah says that Bitter English, his debut poetry collection, was five years in the making.

But in many ways, the book is the result of a decadeslong journey. Almallah, a lecturer in English and Arabic, came to the U.S. from Palestine in 2000 intending to study engineering as an undergraduate. His plans changed and he went in a more creative direction, studying communications and film, only to change course again and pursue a doctorate in Arabic literature. He secured a tenure-track position as a professor at Vermont’s Middlebury College, but he found that academia didn’t allow him the time to pursue the writing that was increasingly important to him. “I was just stuck on this idea of wanting to become a poet,” he says.

Coming to Penn provided an opportunity. Almallah moved to Philadelphia with his wife, Huda Fakhreddine,

78

Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and their young daughter. “It was a strange time for me because I felt like I really needed to write,” he remembers.

“And I decided that whatever writing I was doing in Arabic was not reaching its potential.”

He decided to pursue yet another change—writing in English. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to exile myself into English,’” he says. “The title is Bitter English because it wasn’t an easy decision. I felt a sense of loss and guilt.

But the tensions between the languages played out in a very generative way.”

Bitter English is full of poems that explore how different aspects of Almallah’s experiences—as a son, father, husband, immigrant, scholar, and witness to his mother’s Alzheimer’s and contemporary events— relate to and complicate

one another. He considers the collection “an act of extreme translation,” where the Arabic poetic tradition plays out in relation to the English tradition.

“The Bookcase,” reprinted here, grapples with the concerns about identify that play out across the book.

“I wrote ‘The Bookcase’ very early,” Almallah says.

“I even published a version in a completely different form, a more stripped-down and lyrical version. But the alienation of the speaker isn’t quite captured in the lyrical version. I was thinking about the sense of being in between places and languages, and in this version, I try to render that in a very real way. I’m still conflicted about which is better. I do that a lot—experiment with revisions as a way of exploring the possibilities of a text.”

Bitter English was published

by University of Chicago Press in 2019.

Ahmad Almallah, lecturer in English and Arabic

>

Ahmad Almallah, lecturer in English and Arabic, giving a poetry reading at age five.

INSOMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

THE BOOKCASE 1 After the eye can no longer take on the world, vaguely, it looks vaguely, as though hidden behind a shield of shadows, and after my last trip to Palestine, I sit in Philly staring at the bookcase in our living room, around me I keep seeing mother’s lips moving toward these words.

I couldn’t then understand, when home, when traveling back, one truth, one pure emotion, no calculation, this is the moment of anger: “You are all waiting for me to die. I want to go back to my mother.”

2 After the eye can no longer take on the word, after it sees its truth glaring, as though it’s waking up against the morning sun, remembering all of this now, and how it happened so quickly: I can’t remember anything! I sit staring at the bookcase in our living room, while my daughter watches Arabic cartoons on TV. I see wood collecting everything but books: time, how many times are being collected, and all those books I picked up from side streets in America … how did we survive all this moving?

How could anyone survive life without once saying, “I want to go back to my mother.”

Courtesy of Ahmad Almallah

3 After the eye can no longer take on the void, after it sees nothing in truth, after it closes its lid to the light, after disaster, after all … we sit by the bookcase, I sit beside it, my wife with her back to it, as we are trying: our daughter stares at the moving images on TV, smiles at them. My wife tells me I need to see this video. She tells me I have to! And where would I fit another image? Aren’t we drowned?

Isn’t the world just full? And those words as The body lies on shore for the waves to rock gently, as I see the little dead boy sleeping, death seeping, mothers crying, and the order, all things disappearing, and us, lining up against the sea and its waves shouting, “You are all waiting for me to die.

I want to go back to my mother.”

79

LAST LOOK

%

n Fall 2019, the Black Student League (BSL) published Faces of Black Penn, a photobook highlighting undergraduates in the Black community. Photographers Harold Milton-Gorvie, C’21, and Biruktawit Tibebe, C’21, captured the portraits at the James G. Kaskey Memorial Garden, also known as the BioPond, where students posed wearing earth tones, referencing the BSL’s 2019–2020 theme of “Roots.” The publication showcases the diversity, accomplishments, and talents of Black students.

Christine Olagun-Samuel, C’20, BSL President, says, “Even though we have all these different interests, backgrounds, and perspectives, we were exploring the greater idea of being rooted in your Blackness.”

BSL is a home for students of the African diaspora at Penn. It was originally founded in 1966 as the Society of Afro-American Students.

— KRISTINA GARCÍA

(L–R) Autum Leak, C’23; Niko Simpkins, C’22; Stephanie Hasford, C’22; Mckayla Warwick, C’20; Sia-Linda Lebbie, C’21; Julia Jones, C’23 80

OMNIA

Harold Milton-Gorvie, C’21, Biruktawit Tibebe, C’21

SPRING/SUMMER 2020

Non-Profit U.S. Postage

PA I D

University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES GRADUATE DIVISION COLLEGE OF LIBERAL & PROFESSIONAL STUDIES Stay in touch with Penn Alumni.

Join QuakerNet, your key to connect: quakernet.alumni.upenn.edu

Studying how politics affects people

POWERS THE ARTS & SCIENCES

POWERS us MAKE YOUR GIFT ONLINE: WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/ANNUAL-FUND FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact Robbie Brennan Hain, C’79, GEd’79, at mhain@sas.upenn.edu or 215-746-8208.