Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2025

Unlocking the eye-brain connection through the illusions, patterns, and shapes Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are studying. PAGE 24

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

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LORAINE TERRELL

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MICHELE W. BERGER

Editor

EV CRUNDEN

Staff Writer

KRISTINA LINNEA GARCÍA

Senior Staff Writer

BLAKE COLE

Contributor

LUSI KLIMENKO

Senior Creative Director

DREW NEALIS

Senior Graphic Designer

JASMINE HE

Graphic Designer

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FINDINGS

Notable faculty research and books

OMNIA 101

An economist explains tariffs

A

A Season of Connection

n the academic year, the fall is a season of new beginnings and, in my case, a new position as Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. But I’m not new to the Dean’s Office, or to Penn. I was hired in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in 2009, later had the privilege of chairing that department, and then served as Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences for two years. In that role, I worked closely with colleagues across all of our departments, centers, and programs, which gave me a deeper view of the remarkable scholarship and accomplishments taking place throughout the School.

Becoming Dean wasn’t something I set out to do. But I’ve always been a passionate believer in the indispensable role of the School of Arts & Sciences, which is the heart of this University, and felt deeply invested in the success of this School. Higher education faces serious challenges today, including cuts to federal research support, new taxes on endowments, and more. Meeting this moment will require creativity, resilience, and bold, big-picture thinking—but these are also the qualities that define us. Over the

past year, I realized that I want to help take on these challenges and propel the School into the future.

Though we are only partway into the academic year, the excellence and impact of our work are already on full display. In just the first few weeks of our fall semester, major honors went to physicist Charles Kane, who received the Lorentz Medal, and chemist Joseph Francisco, who was selected for the 2025 Pauling Medal. Our outstanding history department has also been acknowledged with esteemed book awards going to Sarah Gronningsater, Marcy Norton, Sophia Rosenfeld, and Benjamin Nathans. And there are many other faculty accolades— we hear of new accomplishments every week.

This fall, we celebrated a LEED Platinum certification awarded to the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology, along with several transformative gifts. First, a $21 million estate gift will provide major support to the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, as well as the Rare Judaica Acquisitions

Endowment Fund in Penn Libraries.

A subsequent pair of leadership gifts from College alums Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt, both C’79 and parents of four Penn alums, will establish an endowed professorship in Jewish Studies, in addition to creating a program fund for graduate support in the Jewish Studies Program.

In the spirit of both seasonal and academic tradition, this fall has been one of connection. As the new Dean, I’ve met with faculty, staff, and students, along with alums and our extended Penn Arts & Sciences family, including visits to Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C. I have also recorded podcast conversations with faculty members across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. While I have long known how extraordinary our community is, these recent conversations have deepened my appreciation of all that we are accomplishing and of the possibilities that lie ahead.

What’s clear to me is this: The depth and scope of our intellectual rigor, combined with a cohesive community and a shared commitment to excellence, make Penn Arts & Sciences truly exceptional. I am continually impressed by the energy and creativity I see on campus and beyond. I hope you feel, as I do, that this is just the beginning for the School of Arts & Sciences.

Mark Trodden Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy

Looking Ahead, Back, All Around

What happens when a triangle is not really a triangle or when a painting’s backstory changes the meaning of the visuals? Staff writer Ev Crunden’s cover story for the Fall/Winter issue (p. 24) answers these questions—and many others. In doing so, the narrative illuminates the illusions, patterns, and shapes Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are studying to better understand perception and the eye-brain connection.

And while that piece homes in on how we physically see the world, a profile of Dean Mark Trodden (p. 18) by senior staff writer Kristina García offers a chance to look ahead. December marks six months on the job for Trodden, and this fall he embarked on a listening tour to begin shaping his vision for the School. “More than anything,” he says, “what I’m hoping will emerge from the next few years is an increased sense of who we are as the School of Arts & Sciences, our common identity and purpose.”

This issue also provides a glimpse backward, at events marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (p. 42), and a chance to look all around, via a tour (p. 36) of the

exhibitions near and far influenced by Penn Arts & Sciences faculty.

There’s so much more to discover, too: A feature about why Philadelphia’s cash assistance program is working (p. 32), and one about alums in healthcare who aren’t physicians (p. 44). Economist Enrique Mendoza explains tariffs (p. 14) and biologist Doris Wagner discusses a new course she’s teaching (p. 16) that encourages students to consider tough questions—and get their hands dirty at farms and gardens around Philadelphia.

Our Last Look (p. 65) zooms in on a tiny piece of the Large Aperture Telescope that’s being retrofitted by a Penn-led team. Once completed, it has the potential to unlock the universe’s best-kept secrets. It’s one more way the School is focused on deepening our understanding of the cosmos, broadening our perceptions, and illuminating ideas we’ve only just begun to grasp.

Michele W. Berger, Editor

Impossible objects—like those above created by Robert Ghrist of the Mathematics Department—can be depicted in drawings but cannot exist in 3D space, challenging our perception and understanding of what we think we see.

We asked illustrator Sam Chivers to share his thought process for this cover: “The starting point was obviously M.C. Escher’s fiendishly clever “Relativity.” The challenge, on top of conveying a gravity-defying space, was to include text in an interesting way. I decided to bake the text into the architectural bedrock of the image, cutting away sections to attempt to blur the boundary between the 2-D text and the depicted 3-D space. Also, I wanted to create voids of space juxtaposed with regular apertures to further create a sense of flux and unreality.” –Drew Nealis, Senior Graphic Designer

Charles Kane Honored with Lorentz Medal

Charles Kane, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics, will receive the 2026 Lorentz Medal from the Royal Academy for the Sciences in the Netherlands. Every four years, the honor goes to a researcher who has made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics.

“The Royal Academy for the Sciences in the Netherlands pays homage to one of the most influential physicists of our time,” the organization wrote in its announcement. “The medal is bestowed upon the American scientist for his visionary research into matter specifics on a quantum scale. His work has transformed our understanding of quantum physics tremendously.”

Within the broader field, Kane studies topological insulators, materials that have the capability to conduct electrons on the surface but isolate them on the inside. In 2005, he and Eugene Mele, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics, predicted the quantum-spin-Halleffect, a new state of matter in quantum physics with these characteristics. In 2007, with PhD student Liang Fu, Kane demonstrated that such materials indeed exist and that they are able to both block currents and allow them to pass.

“The discovery of topological insulators is one of the greatest scientific advances of the past 25 years or more, with potential applications ranging from low-power electronics to the creation of a topological quantum computer,” says Mark Trodden, Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy. “This research demonstrates the critical importance of the basic sciences and of the theoretical work that underlies so many pathbreaking real-world scientific advances. We are truly honored to have Charlie as part of our community.”

Kane is receiving the medal at a ceremony in December, joining the ranks of Max Planck, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Frank Wilczek, and others.

Marisa C. Kozlowski

Appointed Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences

Marisa C. Kozlowski, Ponzy Lu Endowed Professor of Chemistry, became Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in the School of Arts & Sciences effective June 1, 2025. In this role, Kozlowski oversees the Biology, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Science, Linguistics, Mathematics, Physics & Astronomy, and Psychology departments, along with a number of research centers. She succeeds Mark Trodden, who similarly started his tenure as Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences on June 1.

Kozlowski’s research focuses on the rational design of new methods and catalysts for use in organic synthesis. Her lab employs high-throughput screening, as well as several novel computational tools, for the discovery and optimization of new reagents and catalysts.

Kozlowski, who joined the Penn faculty in 1997, has been recognized with many awards and honors during her distinguished career. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 and a fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2013. She has also been recognized as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award and the Leete Award from ACS. Kozlowski has served in several leadership roles for the organic division of the ACS and is currently editor-in-chief of Organic Letters. Her teaching has been recognized with the School’s Dennis DeTurck Award for Innovation in Teaching and the Provost Award for PhD Teaching and Mentoring.

“I couldn’t imagine a better choice to take over this role at this time,” Trodden says. “Marisa’s expertise in laboratory science and deep understanding of the federal funding sphere will make her an exceptional resource at this critical moment for the sciences at Penn.”

Legacy Gift Supports Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Penn Libraries

The University received a $21 million gift from the estate of former Katz board member and dedicated supporter of Jewish Studies at Penn Louise A. Strauss, C’82. The majority of the funds will go toward strengthening initiatives at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, creating new opportunities for scholarship—both at home and abroad—and providing key support for vital programming and outreach.  A portion of the gift will also bolster Penn Libraries’ ability to acquire rare materials for its Judaica collections, which are globally recognized for their exceptional historical depth, scholarly value, and institutional legacy.

“Each of the initiatives Louise chose to support are home to exceptional scholarship and outreach,” said Mark Trodden, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy. “Her steadfast support of our Jewish studies initiatives further enhances Penn Arts & Sciences’ excellence in the field.”

Two Leadership Gifts Elevate Jewish Studies

A pair of leadership gifts from Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt, both C’79 and PAR’05, PAR’08, PAR’12, PAR’21, established an endowed professorship in Jewish Studies and also created a program fund for graduate support in the Jewish Studies Program. The gifts further strengthen Penn’s faculty, foster graduate student connections and scholarship, and enhance community and international programs, advancing Jewish Studies at Penn and across the wider academic field.

“Julie and Marc have been extraordinarily thoughtful and dedicated alumni leaders for decades,” said Penn President J. Larry Jameson. “We are grateful for their commitment and vision to advance Jewish Studies at Penn for the benefit of all. Their support will have an immediate and sustained impact on the field, enhancing education and scholarship at Penn and around the world.”

Kathryn Maxwell

Ione Apfelbaum Strauss & Hilary Strauss Rare Book Room at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

VLEST Earns LEED Platinum Certification

Penn’s Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology (VLEST) has earned a rare certification for its sustainability and environmental efficiency. Awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification is the highest standard of its kind. VLEST joins 54 other Penn projects that are LEED-certified, becoming just the second—along with Morris Arboretum & Gardens’ Horticulture Center—to earn the platinum distinction.

The VLEST building, which opened in December 2024, serves as the hub for energy research across the University and houses the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology (VIEST) and the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research.

Laboratories like these rarely qualify for LEED Platinum certification, says

Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and inaugural VIEST Director. “These buildings typically take a very large amount of energy to operate. This certification is a testament to the commitment Penn is making toward sustainability, energy efficiency, and energy research.”

To be safe for the people working in them, laboratories require significant ventilation, drawing on vast amounts of energy. They also rely on equipment that must remain on at all times, all while using considerable water and producing substantial waste. But the building’s design team says careful planning paved the way for a lab that could remain sustainable, with support from many, including benefactors P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99, and Diana T. Vagelos, PAR’90.

To achieve this, VLEST’s architects turned to creative solutions like solar geometry,

creating the now-iconic sun shades to direct and maximize light throughout. “This is one of the first signature buildings you see as you approach campus,” says University Architect Mark Kocent, C’82, GCP’91, GFA’91. “As the home of cuttingedge energy research, we wanted the building to embody that on every level.”

Penn has incorporated LEED guidance into a number of building projects. When VLEST’s Platinum certification was announced, so was LEED Gold for Amy Gutmann Hall and LEED Silver for the Ott Center for Track & Field.

Kocent says that while VLEST’s platinum honor was in no way guaranteed, receiving it reinforces all the building stands for: “It shows how we’re walking the talk, by creating a building that’s meant to be a leader in design and energy research both nationally and internationally.”

–EV CRUNDEN

Penn’s Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology recently earned a LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. That’s possible thanks to components like its now-iconic sun shades (above) that direct and maximize light.

Ayako Kano Appointed Wolf Humanities Center Director

Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Ayako Kano has been appointed the director of the Wolf Humanities Center. Kano, a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan, has taught at Penn since 1995. Since 2011, she has been involved with the Wolf Humanities Center, twice as a Penn Faculty Fellow participating in the Center’s annual yearlong forum—each one focused on a single theme—and then as the director of the Center’s Undergraduate Humanities Forum. She joins now as the Center embarks on its 2025 – 2026 “Forum on Truth.”

“Ayako Kano is a renowned scholar of Japanese feminism whose work spans a wide range of cultural texts,” says Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Associate Dean for Arts and Letters. “She is a vital presence on campus, and a legendary mentor to students and colleagues across the humanities. She has a gift for sustaining intellectual communities, and I know she will be an inspirational force for the Wolf Humanities Center.”

Kano’s affiliations include graduate groups in Comparative Literature, History, and History of Art, and she is a core faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor and Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism, and is the co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms.

New Penn Arts & Sciences Faculty

In the 2025 – 2026 academic year, 19 new faculty join 15 departments. This year, the School welcomes:

Fritz Breithaupt, Professor of Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies

Kai Chen, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Hanna Golab, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies

Kashi Gomez, Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies

Liane Hewitt, Assistant Professor of History

Tianquan (Tim) Lian, John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Chemistry

Jin Liu, Assistant Professor of Economics

Sara Mathieson, Assistant Professor of Biology

Ted McCormick, Isobel Haldane Professor of British History

Blake Miller, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Saurabh Nath, Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy

Iuri Bauler Pereira, Assistant Professor of Spanish & Portuguese

Yifan Quan, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Catherine Sirois, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Xin Sun, Assistant Professor of Biology

Lilith Todd, Assistant Professor of English

Shanyin Tong, Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Rachel Watkins, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Einara Zahn, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science

Six Decades of Scholarship and Social Connections

Paul Cobb sees the Middle East Center as many things: a home for academics studying this region of the world, a source for reliable information, a place for students of all backgrounds. “For me, that’s our prime mission, to serve as a hub,” says Cobb, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, who took over as director in January 2025.

This year the Center celebrates its 60th anniversary, and Cobb envisions moving in a slightly new direction, one that will help cultivate an atmosphere on campus that models intelligent, academically supported conversations. “Well-intentioned people are often hard-pressed to engage about the Middle East. They don’t want to offend. They don’t want to anger anyone,” he says. “This is a region that’s vital to us all, and I want to show that it’s OK to talk about it.”

Such discussions took on a different kind of urgency in light of the Israel-Hamas war, adds Liyan Alkawafhah, the Center’s assistant director. “We noticed an absence of places for students to connect with the Middle East,” she says. “We’re trying to fill that.”

To Alkawafhah and Cobb, the anniversary offers a moment not just to highlight the Center’s longevity but also celebrate the diversity of disciplines and fields, geography, and people it encompasses. They have events planned throughout the year, including lecture series and “fireside chats” with emerging scholars.

ASAM Names New Faculty Director

Bakirathi Mani, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English, is stepping into a new role this semester as faculty director of the Asian American Studies Program (ASAM). She will work alongside co-director Fariha Khan as they steer ASAM’s curriculum and prepare for the program’s 30th anniversary coming in the 2026 – 2027 academic year.

Mani says she’s “thrilled” to join ASAM as it approaches that milestone. “For nearly three decades, the program has created curricula, public programming, and fostered student research on what it means to be Asian American today,” she says. “These narratives of race and migration are central to the everyday lives of so many Penn undergraduates. They’re also central to my own life as the daughter of Indian immigrants to Japan and an immigrant myself to the United States.”

Khan welcomes Mani’s appointment, noting her excitement for the partnership in the year ahead, including overseeing major projects. A focus for ASAM this year is “Migrating Lives,” a yearlong participatory mural collaboration with Penn’s Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, as well as Philadelphia community partners Centro de Cultura Arte Trabajo y Educación and the Karen Community Association of Philadelphia.

“The director serves as an advocate for students and as a leader for a rapidly growing field of study at Penn,” Khan says. “I am thrilled to be working alongside Baki as she leads ASAM with a clear vision for the curriculum and undergraduate experience and our upcoming 30th anniversary.” Before Mani began in the role, David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, co-led ASAM with Khan for three years. –EV CRUNDEN

Bakirathi Mani (left) and Fariha Khan will co-direct the Asian American Studies Program, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in the 2026 – 2027 academic year.

Celebrating 20 Years of Geosciences

Imagine it’s your job to straighten a curvy, accident-prone road or to figure out how to safely burrow a tunnel through a massive mountain. Those are two real scenarios from students in the College of Liberal & Professional Studies (LPS) Applied Geosciences Program, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025. Designed to give environmental professionals in-depth knowledge about areas like groundwater, structural geology, and geophysics, the program has evolved in the two decades since it began.

“Recent changes indicate the exciting direction of the program,” says Siobhan Whadcoat, Director of LPS Professional Masters Programs in Earth & Environmental Science. “We now offer two certificates and a course-taking option alongside a full master’s degree, all in a fully online program. These options allow us to meet the needs of working professionals in the geosciences across the globe.” In recent years, she notes, the program has added instructors from across the United States with expertise in environmental geology, hydrogeology, and engineering geology.

Keeping up with the field’s latest technological advancements is crucial for people in this program, adds Yvette Bordeaux, LPS Director of Graduate Programs. “These students are becoming project managers at places like the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re the ones cleaning up polluted groundwater. It’s a really neat program.” –MICHELE W. BERGER

Addressing Economic Complexities

The College of Liberal & Professional Studies and the Department of Economics are launching a new Master of Applied Economics and Data Science designed to offer professionals in a range of industries—from healthcare to government and nonprofits—a practical understanding of complex current economic issues and the analytic tools to address them. Francis X. Diebold, Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of Social Sciences, will act as faculty director of the two-year program, and Michael Lipsitz will join Penn as executive director and a professor of practice. Each cohort will enroll between 30 and 60 students, with the first group beginning in the fall of 2026. “We are excited to partner with our top-ranked economics department to offer this innovative applied graduate program designed to meet the growing demand for professionals with quantitative economics expertise,” says Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education.

Climate Frontlines

People

living on small islands and territories are rarely surveyed

about how they experience mounting climate impacts. Research from a team that includes Parrish Bergquist, Assistant Professor of Political Science, aims to fill those gaps.

BY EV CRUNDEN

Small island states are among the places most vulnerable to climate change, but there’s surprisingly scant research revealing what such residents think about these threats, says Parrish Bergquist, Assistant Professor of Political Science. “This segment of the population is pivotal to global conversations around climate change. Their leaders are front and center when these discussions happen, but we know so little about what members of the public in these places think and feel.”

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences closely examines exactly that issue. Through a first-of-its-kind survey completed by Bergquist and colleagues from the University of California, Santa Barbara; Stanford; UCLA; and the University of California, San Diego, the researchers gained insight into how residents across 55 small-island states and territories are approaching climate change.

Surveyed areas span the globe and include countries like Jamaica and the Philippines, along with territories like Puerto Rico. Some are major tourist destinations, while others have only around 10,000 inhabitants. To reach even the most far-flung spots—and to keep costs

down—the team turned to Facebook, an increasingly popular survey outlet among researchers.

“Facebook and social media, in general, give you access to real people out in the world,” Bergquist says. “You can use census data to designate quota cells by age, gender, and geography, which helps generate a more diverse and representative sample.” The team ended up reaching around 40,000 people who responded to questions such as how much sea water had contaminated drinking sources or whether climate change had made storms in their areas worse.

Bergquist says some findings were fairly consistent across the board. “One big takeaway was how high the levels of concern are in these places,” she says. “People understand that this is happening, and they’re worried about it. They perceive themselves to be quite vulnerable to climate change—there’s really no wavering or hesitation there.”

Within that shared understanding lies a deeper sense of connection and collective identity. For example, survey respondents who were worried about sealevel rise weren’t always based in areas immediately threatened by land loss. “They aren’t just thinking, ‘Oh, my home

is at risk,’” Bergquist says. “It’s more like, ‘Oh my whole island is at risk.’”

That finding surprised Bergquist and her colleagues—and it wasn’t the only one. Another dealt with sentiments toward global heavyweights. According to data used by the U.N. Environment Programme and many other institutions, the United States and China are among the highest emitters of carbon worldwide, either historically (the U.S.) or currently (China).

Though people living in climate-vulnerable areas do see those superpowers as more responsible for the problem than their own countries, “it’s much more muted than we expected,” Bergquist says. Survey respondents still feel their nations and territories have some responsibility for solving the problem, she explains, indicating a larger belief that the burden lies with everyone.

The survey is just the beginning of a much bigger collaboration. Bergquist says there are multiple “spin-off papers” in the works addressing issues like climate-driven migration and views on international aid funding. “Ultimately,” she says, “we’re really interested in how people think about their own vulnerability and what they want done to address it.”

Ev Crunden is an Omnia staff writer.

Musical Meaning

Most young children can identify emotions in music, according to a team in Associate Professor of Psychology Rebecca Waller’s lab. Yet the researchers also found that the task is harder for children who lack empathy or guilt.

BY ERICA MOSER

Think about the last song you heard. Did it convey happiness? Fear?

Another emotion? Music is a powerful tool to communicate mood, meaning it’s also an effective medium for understanding how children identify and respond to emotions.

Associate Professor of Psychology

Rebecca Waller studies children with traits often associated with “callousunemotional behavior”—they might lack empathy or guilt, for instance, or can’t openly express feelings. Such individuals are at higher risk for aggression, rule-breaking, and other problematic behaviors. Would they grasp a song’s emotions differently than children without these qualities?

In a study published in Child Development, Waller and a team that included former MindCORE postdoc Rista Plate, postdoc Yael Paz, and Sydney Sun, C’24, asked that question.

They found that most children ages 3 to 5 could recognize happiness, sadness, calmness, or fear in fivesecond music clips at a level of accuracy better than a random guess, with performance improving with age. “Children are good at matching emotion faces to the ‘correct’ emotion music,” Waller says. “This emphasizes how important music can be, particularly in emotion socialization and

RESEARCH ROUNDUP

Ant Genetics

teaching social skills, and for children who may still be learning ways to express their emotions verbally.”

The team also found that children whose parents scored them higher in callous-unemotional traits didn’t do as well overall in recognizing emotion from music—except for fear. This finding surprised the team, according to Paz, who was the paper’s co-lead author with Sun.

Previous work from Waller’s lab and others have shown that children with higher callous-unemotional traits have more difficulty recognizing distress from facial expressions. The researchers therefore hypothesized that these individuals would have a harder time recognizing fearful music. That they didn’t suggests that music may be uniquely well-suited for emotion recognition, Paz says. She sees music as an alternate port of entry for children who struggle with understanding emotions through facial expressions or other visual cues.

Waller says these findings point to many possible future research angles: “We’re excited to continue using music as a paradigm both to understand underlying mechanisms and as a treatment target.”

Erica Moser is a science writer with Penn’s University Communications.

If you’ve ever visited the Costa Rican rainforest, you’ve probably seen them parading by: leafcutter ants carrying foliage fragments magnitudes bigger than their bodies. But these foot soldiers aren’t the only colony members; hidden beyond view are guards and protectors, caretakers and garden groomers, each with their own predetermined task. Thanks to research published in Cell by Shelley Berger, Daniel S. Och University Professor, and colleagues, we now know that for the species Atta cephalotes, two signaling neuropeptide molecules within their genetic code can actually reprogram the brain, and thus, an individual ant’s responsibility. The team discovered something similar in naked mole rats. So, what does this mean for human behavior? According to Berger, it could shed light on our complex social systems.

Life Expectancy

How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect life expectancy in the United States? Sociologists Irma Elo, Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor, and the University of Helsinki’s Eugenio Paglino, Gr’24, aimed to answer that in a recent Social Science & Medicine paper. Using National Center for Health Statistics data, they determined that between 2019 and 2022, the U.S. experienced one of the largest life-expectancy declines among high-income countries, with COVID and natural causes of death both contributing. Despite longevity gains in 2022, mortality remained above pre-pandemic levels, underscoring the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Home vs. School

Economist Francesco Agostinelli, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, and colleagues wanted to know how home and school each affect a kindergartener’s ability to develop skills in areas like math and reading, self-control, and approach to learning. Pulling two parallel research programs—one focused on parents, the other on classrooms and teachers—into a single framework, Agostinelli and his team determined that both facets are crucial to a child’s development, yet for 5-year-olds entering kindergarten with fewer skills, classroom quality matters more. Beyond that, they write, “reducing disparities in home investments is more effective in closing incomerelated skill gaps.” The researchers published their findings in International Economic Review

Who Deserves Repair?

A book from David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, investigates the history, theory, and psychology of reparations across the Transpacific.

BY KATELYN SILVA

ighty years ago, atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the shadow of that dark anniversary, a new book from David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, investigates who “deserves” repair in the wake of global injustices and who, ultimately, makes such a decision.

With an emphasis on Asia, Reparations and the Human scrutinizes how reparations—through the lens of history, law, political theory, psychoanalysis, and literature—evolved during the European Enlightenment, the colonial settlement of the Americas, and the years following World War II. The book also examines how geopolitics, race, and ideas about human rights determine who is viewed as perpetrator and who is viewed as victim.

“This project investigates who is considered human or inhuman. It is about who deserves reparations as a human right and who is deemed unworthy,” Eng explains.

Until the end of World War II, reparations referred primarily to a losing nation paying a winning nation the costs of war. The Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials initiated a shift. “In the wake of European genocide, for the first time in international law, individuals and groups could make economic claims on nation-states for crimes against humanity,” Eng says,

“ostensibly allowing for the sovereignty of the human being to be placed above the sovereignty of the nation-state.”

But who qualifies as human? And who makes that decision? Eng explores these questions in a several ways.

Reparations, Eng notes, is a key term in both political theory and psychoanalysis. Eng first delves into an Enlightenmentera theory, which used “reparations” to subordinate others, especially Indigenous groups in the New World. As his example, he focuses on the contrasting ideas and actions of John Locke: The philosopher’s social contract theory argued that individuals had natural rights including life, liberty, and property, yet Locke also participated in the colonial administration of the Carolinas and profited from the slave trade.

The book also considers psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation as a psychological process that “can only occur through identification— that is, when people can identify with a victim,” says Eng. “In many ways, this project results from my interest in how legal and psychic notions of reparations work in tandem, and when they fall apart. That relationship matters because dehumanizing a person is profoundly a psychological process.”

Reparations and the Human explains this phenomenon by probing examples such as wartime internment, the decolonization of Asia during the Cold War, and reparations in the Americas for uranium mining and the poisoning of Indigenous peoples and their lands.

“While the human is often seen as a universal category, history reveals that those who qualify as ‘human’ continually shifts,” Eng says. “When considering the Holocaust, for example, the historiography is largely settled: Jews were the victims and Nazis were the perpetrators. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there’s no historical consensus on who were the victims and who were the perpetrators.”

Eng says he hopes that Reparations and the Human will foster empathy in readers, helping them gain a more nuanced understanding of reparations, human rights, and unresolved histories of injustice, as well as develop the ability to contextualize harm from multiple locations and perspectives. “We live in a global and multicultural society,” Eng says. “Engaging with histories of violence and the realities of repair is a complex task.”

Katelyn Silva is a higher-education writer and owner of Silva Content Solutions in Providence.

Ancient Inspiration

A book of essays edited by Professor Mantha Zarmakoupi and Loughborough University’s Simon Richards dives into a historic movement focused on recentering how we think about ecological concerns and the built environment.

BY MICHELE W. BERGER

In the 1960s and ’70s, a growing chorus of architects and town planners felt their field wasn’t responding adequately to the modern era. They wanted less focus on “cemented cities,” and, instead, a bigger spotlight on ecological concerns, says Mantha Zarmakoupi, Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture in the Department of History of Art.

One of the loudest voices calling for change was urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis. “He believed that the ancient Greeks—and it wasn’t just because he was Greek—struck the right balance between population density and the built environment,” Zarmakoupi says. “In a place like classical Athens, for instance, one could walk across the city within a manageable amount of time.”

Doxiadis started what became known as the Delos Symposia, “inviting leading thinkers of the time, from architecture and beyond,” Zarmakoupi says. They spent a week in Athens discussing ideas, then boarded a boat where, following the practices of the ancient Greek sympósion, they feasted and danced en route to the ancient settlements inspiring them. “The meeting culminated in Delos, this ancient city on a tiny island in the Aegean, and the focus

of my research now for 20 years,” Zarmakoupi says. “There, participants went to the theatre to sign the symposia’s yearly declaration— by torchlight. The meetings were eccentric, ceremonial, and very much of their time.”

In a series of essays in a new book The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis, Zarmakoupi and Loughborough University’s Simon Richards bring together such stories in one place for the first time. Drawn from three meetings the research duo led for scholars pondering nature and the built environment, the essays include tales of Doxiadis and his influential colleagues, among them town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, economist Barbara Ward, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and architect Buckminster Fuller.

Though the resulting book is written by and (mostly) for academics, Zarmakoupi believes it has broad appeal given today’s environmental moment. “We tend to think questions and discussions about climate change are just about the present. We wanted to give a historical context,” she says. “Discussions about the ecological crisis have happened before, and just as intensively, and we need a deeper understanding of those moments to have a more informed opinion about the present.”

Michele W. Berger is editor of Omnia magazine.

FACULTY BOOKSHELF

Recent books from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty

Commensality and Cultural Heritage in the Middle East and Its Diasporas

HEATHER SHARKEY

Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

The Arc of the Chinese Economy

HANMING FANG

Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics

Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

KIMBERLY BOWES

BFC Presidential Professor of Classical Studies

Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse

CHIMING YANG

Professor of English

Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World

MICHAEL MANN

Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science

PETER J. HOETZ

Baylor University

THE RISE OF TARIFFS

Enrique Mendoza, William P. Carey Professor in Economics, unpacks what they are and their potential short- and long-term e ects.

BY MATT GELB

During President Donald Trump’s second term, the United States has wielded tariffs at levels not seen since the 1940s. As of September, the estimated average effective U.S. tariff rate hovered around 18 percent, a sharp uptick from the 2.3 percent rate at the end of 2024. And according to those who pay close attention to such numbers, the rates are expected to keep increasing.

Omnia asked Enrique Mendoza, William P. Carey Professor in Economics, to explain these tariffs and their potential short- and long-term effects.

Luc Melanson; portrait courtesy of Enrique Mendoza

What is a tariff?

A tariff is exactly like a tax, and it can be a tax on consumption. So, say you’re going to buy something for a dollar. If it’s a 10 percent tariff, that means you will pay $1.10. The tariffs can be on consumer goods, for example, a car imported to the U.S. from another country. If the car was going to cost you $50,000, and the tariff is 10 percent, you’re going to pay $55,000. But it can also be tariffs on the components that firms buy to build goods, such as rare minerals. Those we call tariffs on intermediate goods.

We say an economy that has zero tariffs is fully open to international trade. The U.S. has traditionally been one of the countries most open to trade.

There’s something else called a non-tariff barrier, which serves the same purpose; it intends to reduce how many goods you’re importing, but instead of putting a tax on it, it’s a limit imposed by the government. If you had previously been able to bring 20 tons of avocado from Mexico, for example, now the government says you cannot bring more than 15.

How have tariffs traditionally been used?

Globally, tariffs are widely used for a variety of reasons. In economic theory, you can build a case for why you may want to impose any tax, but tariffs usually address what we call market failure—an over-production of a particular good, say, or a country not appropriately offsetting the cost to the environment. You use a tariff to try to bring it to its true social cost. In another scenario, a country may be unfairly supporting some industries by subsidizing them, so then you try to offset that with a tariff.

We say an economy that has zero tariffs is fully open to international trade. The U.S. has traditionally been one of

the countries most open to trade; until recently, average tariffs were below 5 percent.

What is different about this specific round?

When you look at the recent context, it’s hard to figure out exactly why the government is imposing tariffs because the government has made many different arguments. For instance, the government says that Mexico isn’t doing enough to reduce drug trafficking, so they’re going to use tariffs for geopolitical reasons to accomplish something that they think is of merit or value. Also, because our trade deficit with Mexico is too big, they say they want to use tariffs to reduce the trade deficit. That’s just one example. But situations like this breed a lot of uncertainty. And it’s not just the change in the size of the tariffs, but that the government keeps moving the posts as to the rationale for the tariffs.

Where will the average consumer notice these taxes most?

In the first four months of 2025, there was a large increase in imports into the U.S., and that was inventory. That helped mitigate the impact on prices, but those inventories, of course, will get used up. Items that come from countries that end up with high tariffs, as could be the case with China—a vast majority of toys, for example, are American brands and American designs manufactured in China—do they absorb the cost in the profits? That’s an open question. Maybe they do, and then you don’t see a whole lot of effect on prices. But I think at some point that stops happening and firms start passing costs through to consumers.

You’ve probably read what retailers like Walmart have said. They have started increasing prices in response to the tariffs. So that’s the price of appliances and big-ticket items bought from abroad. The government has been very selective about the specific items subjected to tariffs, so it also makes it hard to predict.

Do you have any guesses for how tariffs might affect the economy long-term?

Worldwide, we’ve spent the better part of the past 30, 40 years building this idea of integration of economic activity, on both the financial side and in terms of goods. A lot has been built around that being a permanent state, so this brings us back to the point about uncertainty. In an environment of uncertainty, people are a lot more cautious about long-term investments, though at this point it’s still an open question as to what will happen.

Was it a good idea? I would not have done it this way. Was it completely fair trade? In many instances, the U.S. had more favorable trade terms. But you could say some of those were for a reason, because you wanted to help poor countries develop so you want to give them more favorable access. In a sense, that’s how we started with China. After the 1970s, with Nixon going to China, we gave them favored-nation status for a strategic and almost geopolitical reason: We wanted to develop a counterbalance to the Soviet Union. In that case, we used the removal of tariff and nontariff barriers to help.

Some U.S. corporations that have really created internationally scaled production lines worry about this a lot. If they think that the world is changing permanently and that they need to bring production onshore, that means not just investing more in the U.S., but disinvesting—really dismantling all this capital they have outside and bringing it onshore. That’s a long-term investment, and you have to be pretty sure that’s where the world is headed. But even with that, we’re not clear that’s what the administration wants. Uncertainty is the key word here.

Matt Gelb is a Philadelphia-based sportswriter whose work has been featured in The Athletic and The Philadelphia Inquirer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

BUDDING QUESTIONS

Doris Wagner’s Hands on Plants class encourages students to consider tough questions—and get their hands dirty at farms and gardens around Philadelphia.

BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

Doris Wagner spends a lot of time thinking about the best approach to creating a healthy, resilient planet.

Maybe it’s regenerative agriculture, which involves crop rotation, cover crops, no tilling, and is known to improve soil health and crop yields. Then again, maybe organic farming, with no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, is the way to go. But regenerative agriculture is not always organic and neither, says Wagner, DiMaura Professor of Biology, is likely to meet the world’s food needs.

Perhaps we should turn to CRISPR technology, which rapidly accomplishes what would previously take generations of selective breeding—a technology already having real-world impacts, says Wagner, pointing to Kenyan farmers who used it to develop parasite-resistant sorghum. But hold on: This technology doesn’t square with organic agriculture, so maybe the way forward is regenerative ag plus more vigorous and nutritious crops?

It is exactly these tensions that Wagner had in mind when she developed Hands on Plants, a new undergraduate course that’s

Ayana Hall

part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program. The class, which involves numerous guest speakers and trips to farms and gardens in the Philadelphia region, is running for the first time this semester. It was co-developed with Ben Joseph Stahl and Sayli Limaye, students in Penn’s landscape architecture master’s program, as well as Zida Anyachebelu, C’25.

Wagner has never taught a Paideia course before but was drawn to the program because of its emphasis on dialogue.

“People might have different takes on what a solution would look like, and Paideia encourages being comfortable with that dialogue and being constructive,” says Wagner, whose Plant Adaptability and Resilience Center (known as Plant ARC) launched in 2024. “I wanted to lead a course that was aligned with this outlook, and I felt there was student interest in working toward solutions rather than being stuck in doomsday thinking.”

It can be really hard to truly comprehend someone else’s point of view. It’s about creating space and being willing to talk and listen. There will still be tensions, and we will find a way to deal with them.

Class field trips to sites including Penn Farm and the Philadelphia Orchard Project show students how practitioners weigh the needs of the land and community. Stahl, who serves as a TA for the class, says growers and practitioners across the region have welcomed interaction with students, a group that includes math major Hannah MacDonald, C’26.

In the summer of 2024, MacDonald had a fellowship at Penn Farm, where she and other students spent eight-hour shifts working in fields, ultimately harvesting thousands of pounds of food to donate to food access points on and off campus. “I love to be outside and get my hands dirty,”

One of the Hands on Plants field trips included a visit to the New Kensington Community Development Center and Gardens in October, where they toured the grounds and learned about the center’s efforts.

she says. “But this work is also part of the movement toward food justice.”

Hands on Plants was a way for MacDonald to nurture this interest. She says the mix of activities—short lectures, site visits, and lab work—make the class unique and valuable. “I can really engage with presenters and my classmates. We even went to Dr. Wagner’s lab and got to work on plant transformation, which was so cool,” she says. MacDonald also volunteers with one of the organizations the class visited, the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which works with communities to fill urban spaces such as gardens and formerly vacant lots with useful and edible plants.

Community involvement is key, says Wagner, pointing to another tension the course explores. “Active gardens and green spaces provide fresh, locally grown vegetables and Penn’s own Urban Health Lab has shown benefits like a reduction in gun violence and stress-related health issues” in places where the greening has occurred, she explains. “So, what’s the tension? Look at Norris Square in Philadelphia. The community has worked hard to build gardens that celebrate local culture

over the last decades. And now one result of the greening is that same community is being priced out of their homes.”

The class touches on other issues— imposing the cost of tree maintenance on under-resourced communities, for example, or determining which trees are best suited to certain areas. “There is a big native plant movement,” Stahl says. “But with the changing climate and natural disasters, should we bring plants native to the south up north, where it is warming? Are there plants better adapted to cities?”

While the course demonstrates the possibilities of working across disciplines and perspectives on these tricky issues, it cannot resolve all tensions—and Wagner says that’s ok. “The Paideia program has an outlook that it can be really hard to truly comprehend someone else’s point of view,” she says. “It’s about creating space and being willing to talk and listen. There will still be tensions, and we will find a way to deal with them.”

Lauren Rebecca Thacker is a Rhode Island–based writer who covers topics from poetry to ocean policy.

Alex Schein

Alex Schein

Alex Schein

Beginnings

As Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Mark Trodden is committed to excellence and innovation.

BY KRISTINA LINNEA GARCÍA

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX SCHEIN

“How did it all begin?”

This is one of the universal questions that, as a physicist, Mark Trodden has spent a career trying to answer. As the new dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Trodden now fields that same question about his own path.

A faculty member since 2009, Trodden, who is also Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy, has years of academic service under his belt. He previously co-directed the Center for Particle Cosmology, chaired the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and served as Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences. He has degrees from Cambridge University and Brown University, has won numerous accolades, and authored more than 180 scientific papers. In June 2025, he started as dean.

I relish the opportunity to try to protect what is valuable and to forge new paths forward for innovation and intellectual growth in the School, so the next generation of scholars can encounter a wonderful, worldclass university the way that I was lucky enough to.

It’s a challenging time in higher education: Funding avenues are drying up; artificial intelligence is changing the way educators teach; international visas are more complicated. Other hurdles include self-proclaimed internet authorities challenging how expertise is valued. In this moment, Trodden says he hopes to offer a level head and steady hand. “I relish the opportunity to try to protect what is valuable and to forge new paths forward for innovation and intellectual growth in the School, so the next generation of scholars can encounter a wonderful, world-class university the way that I was lucky enough to,” he says.

Beginnings

Trodden and his younger brother grew up in public housing in a town called Wigan, a former industrial hub along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal whose narrow locks once ferried coal, cloth, and steel through Yorkshire and Lancashire. The town sits precisely between Manchester and Liverpool in northwest England, where Trodden’s father was a factory worker and his mother worked first as a barmaid and, later, at a market stall.

Though they did not attend university themselves, his parents “understood the value of education and pushed me to do whatever I was passionate about,” Trodden says. At the time, that was mathematics.

“The truth is, I loved most things at school,” he says. “I loved languages. I loved literature. I loved the sciences. I loved mathematics.” He was particularly adept at equations, which “gave me a huge amount of satisfaction,” Trodden says. “Mathematics is beautiful. It’s creative. It’s precise. I really liked the abstract nature of it and the fact that it was a rule system you could completely understand and use to produce wonderful, deep knowledge.”

At Cambridge, where Trodden studied applied mathematics.

At 16, Trodden won a scholarship to study mathematics and sciences at a private high school before going on to the University of Cambridge to study mathematics. There, he gravitated toward applied mathematics and eventually to theoretical physics. He left England to earn a second master’s degree and then a PhD from Brown University, where he

Trodden writing equations with a fountain pen, his preferred problem-solving method.

Courtesy of Mark Trodden

met his wife, Sara Errington, then a graduate student in the history department.

While Trodden continued on in academia, Errington left after earning her PhD, working as a journalist before becoming a firefighter and later, the first woman district fire chief in Syracuse, New York, a position from which she recently retired. Trodden says as soon as someone finds out what his wife does for a living, “nobody cares about my black hole nonsense. It’s infuriating.”

After positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, and Syracuse University, Trodden received a job offer from Penn—a move that would put him about four hours from where Errington was, at the time, rising through the fire department ranks. They decided together he’d take the position and that they could manage the distance.

Starting at Penn

As a theoretical cosmologist, Trodden’s expertise focuses on the driving forces behind the expansion of the universe. He looks at dark energy, dark matter, and cosmic inflation—the rapid growth of the early universe—using data from cosmological observations to provide insights into high-energy physics, for example studying how to modify theories of gravity to answer questions about cosmic acceleration.

When Trodden arrived at Penn in 2009, he and Bhuvnesh Jain, today Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences, created the Center for Particle Cosmology, envisioning a space for

scientists to think collaboratively about topics like the universe’s origins and fundamental theories of matter. One of the first to collaborate with the new Center was Justin Khoury, who arrived at Penn the same year as Trodden. “Mark and Bhuv were already spearheading the Center’s launch when I came in as an assistant professor and I was fortunate to step into a thriving environment,” Khoury says.

The Center provided scaffolding for him to research and publish, something it continues to do for junior scholars and students today. “It’s been wonderful,” says Khoury, now Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Physics and Astronomy and one of the Center’s co-directors. Trodden, he notes, established a collegial atmosphere that encouraged people to interact. “Whenever a new student or postdoc joins the Center, Mark makes a point of introducing himself and making them feel welcome. Theoretical physics might sound like a lonely pursuit, but in fact, it’s a highly collaborative endeavor. We’re always discussing around the blackboard, batting ideas around,” he says.

“It’s important for people to feel at ease and like they can contribute,” Khoury adds, emphasizing students and postdocs.

Mary Gerhardinger, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, is one such student, working with the Center for Particle Cosmology with Trodden as her PhD advisor. She is studying how different models can confirm observations of the universe. “When I first started working with him, I was intimidated,” she says, noting Trodden’s wide expertise. “But he makes the space. I never feel bad asking the silly

Trodden greets faculty (left) and students at “Meet the Dean” events this fall.

Even as dean, Trodden continues in a mentorship role, not just for fourth-year doctoral candidate Mary Gerhardinger (above), but also another doctoral candidate and several postdocs, working with them on problems around dark energy, dark matter, gravitational waves, and cosmic expansion.

about

questions. The goal is to understand physics and create new physics,” she says.

Even as dean, Trodden continues in a mentorship role, not just for Gerhardinger, but also another doctoral candidate and several postdocs, working with them on problems around dark energy, dark matter, gravitational waves, and cosmic expansion.

Though Trodden still mentors graduate students, he does miss teaching classes. “Seeing the look on someone’s face when they get something that they never thought they would understand in a million years is remarkable,” he says. “Our undergrads are fantastic. They come and take graduate classes with us, and they hold their own every single time. If you can teach general relativity—this highly technical, difficult subject that everyone’s heard of and thinks is unreachable—to an undergraduate and watch them suddenly realize, ‘I get that. I understand something that Einstein was the first to understand,’ that’s a pretty amazing thing to give to someone.”

Service Opportunities

Ask around about Trodden, and a broad range of adjectives emerge: Disciplined. Capable. Analytical. Thoughtful. Critical, with high standards for others but especially for himself. Organized, still finding time for his own research.

Khoury, now a close friend and colleague of Trodden’s, adds respectful and courteous to that list. “I’ve always been struck by his humility—he treats everyone with the same courtesy, whether faculty, students, or staff.”

Trodden is also quick and quick-witted, says Jeffrey Kallberg, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History. “He’s got a great sense of humor. I value that in administration—and in people in general. He’s a good person to talk to in every sense.”

Kallberg and Trodden worked closely together the past two years, while Kallberg was the Associate Dean for Arts and Letters and then Interim Dean and Trodden the Associate Dean for the

Learn more

Dean Trodden and his journey in our special two-part video series.

Natural Sciences. During this time, Trodden advised the Dean’s office during federal funding cuts, explaining the significance of canceled grants, offering short-term solutions and long-term questions.

More than anything, what I’m hoping will emerge from the next few years is an increased sense of who we are as the School of Arts & Sciences, our common identity and purpose.

Trodden also recognized when he didn’t have enough context or information, Kallberg says. “He’s clearly an analytical thinker; he wants to understand the nature of the problems he is dealing with, understand the evidence, and think through with other people how best to resolve it,” Kallberg says. “There’s a kind of level-headedness about what he does. He’s not reactive in a negative sense; he doesn’t rush to judgment out of pique. He wants to step back and understand the core issues.”

That skillset doesn’t just pay off in administrative roles, Trodden says. “These are the skillsets that any scholar brings to a problem: the ability to think through complexities, to make decisions on partial information, to separate superfluous arguments and information from what’s really important. Any kind of scholarship will refine these traits,” he says. “In me, they were honed through physics.”

In the fall, Trodden embarked on a “listening tour” of all 28 departments in the School of Arts & Sciences and consulting with the College of Arts & Sciences, the Graduate Division, and the College of Liberal & Professional Studies.

At the end, Trodden aims to craft a strategic plan for the next three to five years that showcases the best of Penn Arts & Sciences, complements the University’s vision, and engages more broadly and deeply with resonant challenges such as AI and climate change.

Trodden also wants to articulate the role of the humanities. “They explore and describe some of the deepest, most fascinating aspects of what it means to be humans in this very complicated time in which we live,” serving both the modern university and the modern world, he says.

“More than anything, what I’m hoping will emerge from the next few years,” Trodden adds, “is an increased sense of who we are as the School of Arts & Sciences, our common identity and purpose. The School is home to an extremely heterogeneous group of scholars with widely different views, opinions, stances, approaches to the world today, and I don’t want to change that at all. That is one of the most beautiful things about it,” he says. “Instead, I want to bring us together and appreciate the different ways in which we all approach the world.”

No Wasted Neurons

One of Trodden’s favorite books is The Demon-Haunted World, where Carl Sagan once said, “Don’t waste neurons on what doesn’t work.”

Sagan, a well-known planetary scientist, was perhaps most famous as a science communicator, celebrating the wonders of technological achievement and rational thought. The Demon-Haunted World is Sagan’s explanation of the scientific method and an exhortation of critical thinking. “Valid criticism does you a favor,” Sagan wrote. “If the

ideas don’t work, you have to throw them away.”

Asked when he last engaged in this practice, Trodden laughs. “The answer is, ‘This morning.’ And if you’d asked me yesterday, it would have been yesterday. Scientists do this every single day of their lives, right? I have 100 ideas a week about my scholarship. Most of them are terrible; I throw them away all the time. Some of them take me five minutes to realize they’re nonsense. Some of them take me a week. Some of them take me years.”

This isn’t the autonomous purview of science, Trodden says. It’s what it means to be a scholar: the ability to separate good ideas from foolish chaff. “Most of academia is everyday fights between competing sets of ideas and throwing away the ones that don’t make the cut. That’s what it means to advance knowledge,” he says.

As Dean, Trodden is committed to cementing and advancing Penn’s status as a world-class university. “It’s something I value greatly about this country, that people want to come here from all around the world” to study and conduct research, he says.

“I feel unbelievably fortunate to have been born into and to have lived in a society that enabled me to obtain a higher education, to explore my intellectual interests, meet and educate wonderfully talented young people, and feel like a member of a community of scholars for my entire career,” Trodden says. “I love going to work every day and being surrounded by people who are the very best at what they do, who are completely immersed in that. I share that excitement with them on a daily basis. It’s just fantastic.”

Kristina Linnea García is a senior writer in the School of Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement.

Now You See It... Now You

Perception influences how we experience the world.

Across Penn Arts & Sciences, faculty are looking at illusions, shapes, and patterns to better understand our surroundings and interpret what’s happening around us.

By Ev Crunden Illustrations by Sam Chivers

One minute you think you’re looking at a triangle. The next it suddenly moves, revealing just a collection of lines, joined in such a way that it briefly appeared as a triangular shape.

That’s the kind of visual sorcery that intrigues Robert Ghrist, Andrea Mitchell University Professor of Mathematics. These days, he’s attempting to unravel the mysteries of math by creating shapes that aren’t real. “My thinking is almost purely visual,” Ghrist says, and he’s not the only one from Penn Arts & Sciences thinking about the eye-brain connection.

After all, that link is powerful, transmitting a three-dimensional world full of shapes from our individual lenses to our synapses and helping us understand what we see. Sometimes our impressions are altered— intentionally or not—by illusions or tricks of the mind, by patterns that can mislead or illuminate. Some perceptions lead us astray; others help us make sense of our surroundings.

From exploring the depths of space to parsing the vibrant world of global cinema, Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are intrigued by and investigating perception. Underpinning this School-wide work is a shared understanding: What we believe is intricately linked to what we can perceive—and what we can’t.

BELIEVING IS SEEING

Visitors entering the Arthur Ross Gallery this fall immediately encountered a large image filled with cherubic children. More than six feet tall and equally as wide, the work by artist Hung Liu shows a sequence of events: a child unsuccessful at extracting a giant vegetable from the ground until an army of equally round-faced friends comes to help.

“It’s a cute image with this message about accomplishing something through teamwork,” says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art and the gallery’s inaugural faculty director. But what viewers don’t know by looking is that this image was actually inspired by Soviet propaganda and repurposed by the Chinese communist government. “What initially appears to be adorable babies accomplishing a task,” Shaw says, “is ultimately a tool for political messaging.”

Shaw often thinks about illusions like the one in the Liu piece. She previously taught a course focused on art through the lenses of forgery, reproduction, and authenticity, drawing from her interest in, and research about, American art, especially African American art. “We see so many instances throughout history of ‘passing,’ with artists able to assume different identities that helped them do their work. Black artists, queer artists,” she says. “Once you dive in, art shows you so many ways that things can be different from what they seem.”

a piece purporting to be “The Eclipse”—falsified Thomas signature and all—that is, of course, not.

Shaw herself once had a painful experience with falsified art: In 2006, she organized an exhibit showcasing portraits of African Americans in the 19th century. One prominent piece supposedly depicted the son of Absalom Jones, an abolitionist and clergyman. But it turned out the man never existed and his likeness was painted over the image of a white man to increase its market value.

“There’s such a scarcity of Black portraits in the 19th century,” says Shaw. “It preyed on the desire of what we wanted to see.”

But how does what we want to see affect what we do see? It’s complicated, says Alan Stocker, a professor of psychology who studies models of visual perception and decision-making.

“There’s nothing our brains know for certain, so they’re operating off what they believe to be true. Belief is the brain’s currency.”

That means that our brains can be led astray—or at a minimum, asked to fill in blanks, like when we look at an Impressionist painting.

Claude Monet’s famous water lily paintings don’t depict true-to-life aquatic plants, for instance, but because the idea of lily pads resting on water is familiar to most people, they don’t need to. Abstract art is different, Stocker says. “It makes our brain work hard. It’s not an actual scene. It’s full of inputs the brain has to make sense of, triggering a lot of beliefs and interpretations.”

The intent isn’t always malicious. You can buy a copy of “The Eclipse” by the artist Alma Thomas, for instance, a replica not claiming to be an original. The trickery begins, per Shaw, when someone tries to make the art look aged or different in some way. Most audacious is a forgery,

To understand more about human perception, Stocker uses testing methods that don’t leave a lot of room for subjective influences like the tilt illusion, a series of straight lines in front of a background of tilted lines. Looking at it challenges the brain, leading us to believe that the lines in the center are askew even when they’re not. Stocker says understanding this type of perceptual misjudgment can potentially shed light on

Professor of Psychology Alan Stocker is studying the tilt illusion, when the visual cortex sees straight lines as angled depending on what’s happening in the background.

how neurotypical brains work and what happens during neurodegenerative decline.

The tilt illusion is something we can see and understand—unlike the subject Masao Sako has spent the better part of two decades studying: dark energy, the mysterious force that makes up some 70 percent of our universe.

“We can’t see dark energy at all,” says Sako, Arifa Hasan Ahmad and Nada Al Shoaibi Presidential Professor of Physics & Astronomy. “It looks like nothing.”

Sako specializes in observational cosmology with supernovae, looking at a type of supernova that occurs when two stars orbit each other and one pulls mass from the other. The latter star is called a “white dwarf,”

which eventually becomes so massive it explodes. Sako and his team locate these explosions through powerful cameras, coupled with details about their brightness and distance. Pinpointing where these explosions happen helps researchers understand how quickly a supernova is moving away from Earth.

THERE’S NOTHING OUR BRAINS KNOW FOR CERTAIN, SO THEY’RE OPERATING OFF WHAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE TRUE. BELIEF IS THE BRAIN’S CURRENCY.

Through this type of work, Sako explains, scientists have determined that our universe is not only expanding, but its expansion is

accelerating—a phenomenon they eventually determined is due to the presence of dark energy. “Naming the invisible force, calling it ‘dark energy,’ creates an illusion of understanding it, but it doesn’t mean we really grasp what those words mean,” he says, adding that even our current interpretations could be wrong. “This could all be a misunderstanding of something fundamental about spacetime. What causes mass? It could be that our understanding of gravity is wrong. Maybe dark energy and dark matter are the same phenomenon of something that’s deeply misunderstood.”

Sako says that for cosmologists, questions like those are part of the appeal of this type of research, “of parsing these illusions just by looking at the sky. We make small progress, bit by bit.”

Courtesy of Alan Stocker

VISUALIZING TO UNDERSTAND

While illusions can deceive our eyes, patterns can help us make sense of the bigger pictures we do see. Finding those and the meaning they hold is a key component of virtually all quantitative research (see “Parsing the Patterns on p. 29), but faculty across the School are also using patterns differently, studying how they appear in objects, nature, or behaviors. For Simcha Gross, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, that means studying and cataloguing incantation bowls.

Largely created between the sixth and eighth centuries in what is now Iraq and Iran, these bowls—generally the size of cereal bowls—are covered, some with writing (mostly

Jewish Babylonian Aramaic), some with images, many with a combination of both. They were typically used as a form of magic, to ward off demons and generally bestow protection.

IN A WAY, THE POINT IS TO LOOK OUT FOR THE GENUINE PATTERNS THAT OUR SUBJECTS ARE TELEGRAPHING TO US, RATHER THAN JUST THE PATTERNS THAT WE ASSUME AND IMPOSE.

Some 2,500 incantation bowls exist globally, with nearly 300 housed at Penn. But many of the Penn Museum’s bowls have been overlooked because they were faded or lacked legible

text. Improved technology has allowed Gross to make headway on the former issue, bringing dull outlines back into sharp focus. The latter issue has taken more probing, in particular of the patterns he and Ben Gurion University’s Rivka Elitzur-Leiman were seeing.

One that looked strange and illegible at first, for example, was later revealed to be “mirror script” or reversed writing. “This is a known practice. There are different reasons for it—to confuse the demons, the unusual may be more powerful,” he says. There was also a bowl that featured consonants duplicated and repeated, “maybe to emphasize certain words, maybe to make it more powerful.”

Eric Sucar, University Communications

Ascertaining an answer is complicated, he explains, because scholars have preconceptions around what incantation bowls are and look like. “In a way, the point is to look out for the genuine patterns that our subjects are telegraphing to us,” he says, “rather than just the patterns that we assume and impose.” For Charlie Johnson and Kathryn Schuler, that means analyzing what a pattern found in nature or behavior might have to do with scientific discovery, or our understanding of how humans learn.

Johnson, Rebecca W. Bushnell Professor of Physics & Astronomy, works with graphene, a two-dimensional material that forms the basis for the mineral graphite. Graphene’s atoms interlock to form hexagons that ultimately resemble honeycomb, creating an incredibly strong material that’s a powerful heat and electricity conductor. Understanding facets like how electrons move through the honeycomb, for instance, could matter in a discipline like quantum computing, which has previously relied on silicon science, or could dramatically speed up our ability to answer pressing questions in fields like physics and chemistry.

Schuler, an assistant professor of linguistics, studies language acquisition in children. “Kids are really good pattern detectors,”

she says. “Even as toddlers, kids have strong command of specific dialect rules and patterns.” She points to how quickly children pick up on the languages they’re first exposed to and detect patterns like the past tense, which they apply creatively— for example saying “go-ed,” instead of “went.”

What’s more, she notes that by age eight, children can become fluent speakers after hearing only a small slice of the language around them, while today’s AI systems require enormous amounts of training data. “We still don’t fully understand how kids manage this,” she explains. “Figuring it out could help us build AI that learns with fewer data. And in the other direction, studying how AI models succeed may also give us new clues about how humans learn.”

Better understanding innate human patterns could open up a new world for technology, expanding our minds along with machines, Schuler says. “Linguists are really skilled at studying how humans acquire language. We would be a huge asset to those studying how machines acquire language as well.”

Associate Professor Simcha Gross has been studying the patterns on incantation bowls like this, typically used as a form of magic. They were intended to ward off demons and bestow protection.

PARSING THE PATTERNS

Looking for patterns in data is a fundamental component of research, particularly in quantitative work. This is true across fields—from cosmology, chemistry, and physics to psychology, political science, and computer science.

Michel Guillot, Professor of Sociology, and Letícia Marteleto, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Sociology, both employ the approach in sociology and demography. Guillot looks for patterns to inform our basic understanding of human life, like population growth and mortality risk. Marteleto uses them to better understand fertility and reproductive issues, alongside compounding factors like inequality, education, and health.

“Identifying patterns is the essence of this work,” Marteleto says. “They’re powerful because they uncover regularities that help explain the social world.”

Guillot, for example, recently completed a large project examining how the risk of death varies from birth through age five in various populations. Typically, the older we get, the greater our risk of dying. But he found that from when we’re born until about kindergarten age, each passing year ups our odds of survival. “In this unique segment of the life cycle, the risk of death actually decreases with age,” he explains.

For her part, Marteleto has been examining how successive public health crises—in this case, Zika and COVID-19—took a heavy toll on women’s reproductive lives, in particular regarding inequalities in reproductive processes. Her team has been following some 4,000 women since 2020, documenting their experiences and subsequent reproductive decisions. A fourth “wave” of data collection is underway, with another four still to come.

Cumulative numbers in long-term projects like these can slowly reveal patterns that inform real-world issues, Marteleto says. Officials in the United States, for example, are currently worried about declining birth rates at a time when disease outbreaks are becoming more common and access to reproductive resources ranges dramatically across regions. “We can use what we uncover to guide policies in other places struggling with similar problems,” she says.

Not all patterns are equal, Marteleto cautions, advice she’s passing on to undergraduates through an intro-to-data-analytics course, which emphasizes the importance of collecting high-quality data.

BUILDING ORDER FROM FORMS

Technology has already done a lot to mold our perceptions, especially when it comes to visual media like shapes. Meta Mazaj, Senior Lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies, spends her time thinking about an iconic one: The rectangular frame through which we typically view films.

The “screen” contains complex and often abstract shapes, colors, sounds, and movements. But at the core of a film image, Mazaj says, is a tension between a simple, tangible shape, and something much more difficult to grasp. “It’s kind of a paradox of perception,” Mazaj says, one that becomes especially apparent when studying or teaching world cinema—her area of specialty. “Just like the world itself, world cinema is too vast a formation to comprehend, and yet, we tend to give it a concrete shape.”

She shares an Ancient Indian parable to emphasize the point: A group of blind men, the story goes, are put in a room with an elephant and are asked to describe it. Each one only has access to a part of the elephant’s body—the trunk, maybe, or a leg—and describes the animal based on their experience. “One says, ‘Oh, it’s like a pillar.’ Another says, ‘It’s like a waterspout.’ They’re all ascribing different shapes, and they’re all right and wrong,” Mazaj says. “What I want to do is help students understand the limitations of our perceptions, how partial and dependent they are on our vantage point, but how important it is to still be aware of this larger creature even if its shape is out of our reach.”

just a tiny sliver of the global film landscape. Hollywood has traditionally dominated world markets but pales in size and audiences to India’s Bollywood or Nigeria’s Nollywood. Yet while people around the world recognize U.S. movie stars and franchises like The Avengers, very few have seen or even know of a Nollywood film. “Exposure to cinematic diversity can bring us a bit closer to understanding the shape of this overwhelming and unknowable entity,” says Mazaj.

In her upcoming class Global Genre, Mazaj aims to encourage students to explore global cinema through familiar forms—genres such as horror or westerns—which manifest very differently around the globe. “Film changes our perception, and with it the way we understand, which is incredibly powerful,” she says.

Mazaj admits that goal is a challenging one, since what we define as “world cinema” is often

Perception is also key for Robert Ghrist’s work on “impossible objects.” These optical illusions can be depicted in a drawing, but cannot exist in three-dimensional space. Ghrist, who holds appointments with Penn Arts & Sciences and Penn Engineering, has long been fascinated by impossible objects like the Penrose triangle (described at the story’s start). That shape itself is an illusion created by three straight beams of square cross-sections that meet at their right angles, forming a straight bar with lines jutting out at either end. Viewed at a certain angle, however, it appears to be a physically realistic object that it can never actually be.

Graphic artist M.C. Escher made this idea famous through the “impossible stairs” that showed up in many of his works. But there’s been little additional

The Penrose stairs are an 'impossible staircase'— a two-dimensional depiction of unending stairs that can be climbed forever without taking the climber any higher, something that cannot exist in three-dimensional geometry.

effort to create new impossible shapes, a gap Ghrist has been looking to close.

OUR FIRST YEARS AS CHILDREN ARE SO FOCUSED ON IMAGES. IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME WHY, NOT AS A SCIENTIST BUT AS A MATH MYSTIC, I WOULD SAY IT’S BECAUSE SHAPES ARE THESE PLATONIC ENTITIES THAT ARE ETERNAL AND NOT OF THIS WORLD. AND THAT RESONATES WITH US.

A professed fan of “weird things in math that lead to beautiful pictures,” he is intrigued by visual paradoxes and has been hard at work coming up with new ones, along with precise mathematical language for describing what they are and how to build them. The resulting shapes range wildly and come down to perception: Some might see a cube that isn’t a cube, a dodecahedron-like shape that seems to have a star at its center, or a rectangle whose sides appear both

connected and not at the same time. Others looking at those three things might come to completely different conclusions.

“When I’m trying to understand something difficult in mathematics, I have to draw a picture before I really understand what it’s about,” Ghrist says. That certainly isn’t true for everyone, he adds, but even those who don’t need visuals gravitate toward shapes. “We devote a significant portion of our computational resources to visualizing things. Our first years as children are so focused on images. If you were to ask me why, not as a scientist but as a math mystic, I would say it’s because shapes are these platonic entities that are eternal and not of this world. And that resonates with us.”

Working with impossible shapes does have very real payoffs, however. Ghrist suggests that this could be useful in engineering and across the natural sciences, including for activities like observing protein chains with limited imagery capabilities. “Mathematics is

platform-independent,” he says. “It’s applicable in so many places without being constrained to operate in a narrow gap.”

Like Schuler in the Linguistics Department, Ghrist is also turning to AI—perhaps even more enthusiastically, calling himself an AI “power user.” “These systems are absolutely reasoning and they’re really good at it,” he says. “Everything that I do in my research program right now is AI-enhanced. It doesn’t replace the thinking, of course, but it augments it.”

Looking to machines to better understand human perception will likely become more common as such tools improve. And yet, the innate human curiosity driving research into phenomena like illusions, patterns, and shapes will endure. After all, if, as the saying goes, we must see something to believe it, we’ll keep driving to understand what it is we’re seeing and why.

Ev Crunden is a staff writer for Omnia magazine.

Why Rental Support Works

Cash assistance drastically reduces tenants’ likelihood of eviction and homelessness, according to an ongoing study of the PHLHousing+ program from Sara Jaffee of Penn Arts & Sciences and Vincent Reina of the Weitzman School of Design.

By Jared Brey

We hoped that a program that reduces housing cost burdens would also reduce rates of forced moves and homelessness, and those rates dropped substantially.

in housing stability outcomes,” says Reina, founding director of the Housing Initiative at Penn,

Weitzman School. The findings are directly relevant to policymaking, Jaffee adds. “We hoped that a program that reduces housing cost burdens would also reduce rates of forced moves and homelessness, and those rates dropped substantially,” she says. “I’m impressed

PHLHousing+ is a cash assistance initiative designed to help vulnerable tenants in Philadelphia pay their rent with as few obstacles as possible. Reina pitched the

policymakers around the country were eagerly looking for solutions to a growing eviction crisis. The benefit was to be coupled with a research component—the first randomized control trial of its kind to examine the efficacy of various housing assistance programs. shutdowns began. The program -

ment Corporation (PHDC) and the city, along with cities around the country, turned their attention to emergency rental assistance for people affected by the pandemic. But after receiving support from local foundations and the city committing some local funding,

From the beginning, Reina worked with PHDC to design the program and evaluate its effect on tenants. It was a unique chance for Reina, who researches housing policy and assistance programs, to create a pilot testing a new approach to

rental assistance, in partnership with the agencies administering it. Given that the program was designed to target families with children, with the theory it would have downstream benefits, Reina sought to bring in a scholar with expertise in developmental psychology. Soon Jaffee became a partner across all aspects of the project and has since co-authored the findings report released in August of 2025.

As Director of the Risk and Resilience Lab at Penn, Jaffee studies how early adverse experiences in life shape the development of individuals, families, and communities, with a focus on violence and mental health. Researchers are increasingly understanding eviction and homelessness as traumatic occurrences, especially for young people.

Jaffee and Reina are working together to assess how rental assistance programs can influence life outcomes beyond housing stability, including social and emotional development and behavioral health. The ongoing study will probe data on family well-being, with questions about children’s feelings of depression and anxiety, rule-breaking and aggressive behaviors, and ability to sit still and concentrate. Other aspects of the study will examine the benefit’s effect on household mobility, neighborhood access, financial stability, and other outcomes.

Before getting that granular, though, Jaffee says it was important to determine whether cash assistance does, in fact, help people stay in their homes. “The rest of it is really premised on whether that piece worked,” she adds. “All our theories of change have to do with the ways in which these programs promote housing stability

and better housing quality, and thereby make some of these other things possible.”

The initial study phase has included surveying three groups of people about their housing circumstances over time. One subset, about 300 tenants, received cash assistance—$881 a month on average—through the PHLHousing+ program. They were selected from the bottom half of the Philadelphia Housing Authority’s waitlist for Housing Choice Vouchers, the biggest housing assistance program in the United States, which helps cover the gap between recipients’ incomes and rent. Another 170 tenants received those vouchers. A third control group of 700 people received no assistance. All survey respondents, regardless of group, received small cash payments for their time.

Regardless of whether you give people cash or a voucher, rental assistance works. It genuinely improves people’s housing in very obvious and demonstrable ways.

Reina, Jaffee, and colleagues also conducted semi-structured interviews with tenants in each of the three groups, asking about recent moves, ability to pay rent, housing conditions, and family life. The groups had similar demographics, includ ing mostly unmarried Black women with one or two children. Most had received a high school diploma or higher and were working full- or part-time. Their stories, however, were wildly divergent, says Stefan Hatch, C’26, an urban studies major who began work ing on this project as a first year.

Initially, he says, the interviews were more rigid and stuck to a list of questions, but over time he developed a natural rapport with many of the sub jects and the conversations became less formal and more fluid. The qualitative interviews rein forced the study’s conclusions. “People with not that much money tend to know how to budget and how to manage their cash,” Hatch says. “There’s this perception that people can’t do that.”

Unlike Housing Choice Vouchers, cash assistance is unrestricted; in other words, recipients don’t have to spend it on housing. And in the PHLHousing+ pro gram, which distributes benefits on a dedicated debit card, there’s no clear way to track exactly how they do spend it. That wasn’t the point, according to Matthew Fowle, research director at the Housing Initiative at Penn and project co-author. Making it easy to use was.

While Housing Choice Vouchers help more than 2.3 million families in the U.S. afford monthly rent, millions more qualify for vouchers but don’t receive one. And 40 percent of tenants who do actually get one have trouble using it, for a variety of reasons,

alking into a museum or exhibition space is like stepping through a portal into another world—an opportunity to travel through time, space, culture, imagination. The senses are activated, seeing the quick, visible brush strokes of an Impressionist painting or the layered, smooth, dramatic strokes of a Baroque-style one, smelling the earthy scents of ancient statues, Medieval carvings, or tapestries in rooms abuzz with the steady hum of animated conversations. The atmosphere is cool to protect the treasures within, but the mood is warm and welcoming.

These all-encompassing moments don’t happen by accident. Behind the scenes, they are curated or informed by academic experts, designed to create an experience that is both communal and entirely individual at once. “Exhibits are gathering places, and our faculty curators bring together materials and people across regions and periods,” says Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Associate Dean for Arts and Letters. “This kind of work can create shared experiences, and lively exhibits inspire new questions that transcend existing divisions and borders.”

From Berlin to New York to Basel, Switzerland, and beyond, Penn faculty are working on and influencing notable exhibitions, in the process bringing their scholarship to a wider public audience. In the past several years, faculty from many departments—History of Art and Africana Studies, Classical Studies and Anthropology—have shared their knowledge and expertise with places like the Louvre in Paris, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Art Institute of Chicago, and closer to

home, the Arthur Ross Gallery and Penn Museum here on campus.

André Dombrowski, Interim Chair of the History of Art Department, for example, recently advised the Musée d’Orsay on a large exhibit about French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte and masculinity. As an expert in 19th-century European art, Dombrowski helped guide the exhibition’s research and contributed to its catalog with an essay on Caillebotte’s depictions of male bathers, co-authored with his partner, Jonathan D. Katz, Associate Professor of Practice in History of

With their academic expertise, Penn faculty members are informing exhibitions around the world, including right here in Philadelphia.

By Katelyn Silva Illustrations by Josie Portillo

Park believes exhibits like these don’t just showcase the art or antiquities. “They also exhibit our renowned faculty,” she says. “Their work serves the public good, across the full spectrum of the arts and sciences. Our faculty speak to multiple audiences— students and colleagues across their professions—but in these exhibits they advance the public conversation.”

Projects informed by Penn faculty are indeed sparking dialogue. The exhibit “Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines,” curated by Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, offered the first showing of the Lebanese-born artist in Europe. “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939,” co-curated by Katz, ignited wide conversation in the media in the United States and abroad.

broader audience through talks, tours, or contributing to catalogs, which is a form of public scholarship different from our usual academic articles and book projects.”

Many of the faculty highlighted here contributed to specific art exhibitions. Still others worked on projects that helped to excavate, restore, and curate the public display of an archaeological site in Iraq, re-imagined a department of Byzantine art at the Louvre, or curated an aerial archaeology showcase using photographs from the U.S. military’s topsecret reconnaissance missions during the 1950s and ’60s.

It would take a lifetime to visit all of these exhibits. Here, we offer a portal at your fingertips, visual representations of some of the ways Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are contributing to the wider cultural conversation.

Katelyn Silva is a higher-education writer and owner of Silva Content Solutions in Providence.

“What is Enlightenment? Questions for the 18th Century”

October 2024 – April 2025

Liliane Weissberg, Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men”

October 2024 – January 2025

André Dombrowski, History of Art

“Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines”

February – August 2025

Hannah Feldman, History of Art

“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869 – 1939”

May – July 2025

Jonathan D. Katz, History of Art

“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300 – 1350”

October 2024 – January 2025

Sarah Guerin, History of Art

“Exploring Familiar Landscapes: Native American Mounds in Wilkinson County” Opened in 2019

Megan C. Kassabaum, Anthropology

Exhibition catalog of The Helen and Sam Zell Collection

Whitney Trettien, English

Credits (top to bottom): ©Deutsches Historisches Museum; Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Sophie Crépy; Huguette Caland Estate; Private Collection; The Met/The Cloisters Collection and Michel David-Weill Gift, 1999; Courtesy of Megan Kassabaum

“Reinventing Aristotle”

Opened September 2025

Eva Del Soldato, Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies

“Hung Liu: Happy and Gay”

September – October 2025

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, History of Art

Africa Galleries

Opened November 2019

Tukufu Zuberi, Sociology/Africana Studies

“U-2 Spy Planes and Aerial Archaeology”

Summer 2022 – January 2026

Emily Hammer, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

“Preserving Assyria”

Opened February 2025

Richard Zettler, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures; Michael Danti, Program Director, Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program

Native North America Gallery

Opened November 2025

Megan C. Kassabaum, Anthropology; Lucy Fowler Williams, Penn Museum; With eight Indigenous consulting curators

“Ancient Egypt in Watercolors: Paintings and Artifacts from Dra Abu el-Naga”

Opening February 2026

Ancient Egypt: Life and Afterlife Galleries

Opening Fall 2026

Josef Wegner, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Credits

Jennifer Houser Wegner, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

(top to bottom): Courtesy Arthur Ross Gallery/©Hung Liu Estate/Artists Rights Society; Penn Libraries, Kislak Center for Special Collections; Penn Museum

Interdisciplinary En gy

Trained in both physics and literature, Barri Joyce Gold, Professor of Practice in English and an inaugural Senior Fellow in Penn’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, studies the development of energy concepts and ecological discourse.

By Kristina Linnea García

For Barri Joyce Gold, interdisciplinary thinking is just the beginning. Trained in both physics and in English literature, Gold, Professor of Practice in English and an inaugural Senior Fellow in Penn’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, says that both disciplines “o er new ways of looking at the world.”

Born near Tacoma, Washington, Gold later moved to Washington, D.C., and finally to Philadelphia after her father, an engineer, retired from the U.S. Army. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study physics, where she suddenly found she had downtime while monitoring an electron discharge machine. To occupy herself, she turned to reading, which she enjoyed so much that she pursued literature, first in a master’s program at Boston College, and later, for her

doctorate at the University of Chicago. “I found that the skills are transferable,” she says.

Gold is fascinated by the Victorian development of energy concepts and ecological discourse. She studies science, ecocriticism, and literature in 19th-century British novels. The walls between natural sciences and the humanities, she says, are more permeable than they seem.

pass into somebody else’s brain, and I think that’s an important life skill—but also a tremendous pleasure.

Some people gravitate toward

the humanities but end up studying science or math for practical reasons. You went the other direction. What were you feeling at that time?

Why did you enjoy

studying physics?

You get a new view on the universe pretty much every semester, from special relativity to quantum mechanics to cosmology. That was my favorite part and that’s kind of my favorite thing about literary scholarship, too. Some people describe reading a book as a free

I didn’t want my 17-year-old self making all of my life decisions. But it was also a more gradual move than you might think. I used to say that I was raised in the wild by a family of engineers. That’s not quite true, but there was a strong math, science, and engineering bent in my family. And so, I went to MIT to become an engineer, and even moving to physics looked more abstract and less practical. I had to explain to my dad

Brooke Sietinsons

what I would do with a physics degree, and the answer was go to graduate school.

That shift from engineering to physics to literature was a process of moving from what I expected to where I wanted to be. I haven’t given up thinking about physics, but I think about it in a very di erent way. You could say I just flipped my profession and my hobbies, or at least the percentages.

Victorians experienced fewer disciplinary divisions than we do. At that time, people were starting to think about the conversation between science and literature in a much bigger way.

You can s way that scientific ide c culate in cult e, even bef e y’re co olidated scientific ide .

There’s a lot of pressure on students to major in something they consider practical. And it’s a shame, because there are so many opportunities to do other things. I talk to students from all over, not only in the School of Arts & Sciences, but from Engineering and the Wharton School and the Nursing School, and they all have something di erent to say—once you can convince them they can use their perspective in unexpected ways.

When did you start thinking about ecology and energy in the novel form?

Years ago, I was reading [the poet] Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and I was looking at some lines about how the hills flow:

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go

I was having co ee with a friend one day, and I brought the text, saying, “Tell me this is not about entropy.” But of course, the poem is written and even published in advance of the concept of entropy being articulated, although not before the simultaneous discoveries that go into creating the laws of thermodynamics as we know them.

I got really excited about that, and I spent a lot of time with that poem. That idea became really important to me, that you can see the way that scientific ideas circulate in culture, even before they’re consolidated as scientific ideas. For example, Tennyson’s poem—an elegy mourning his lost friend—was very much about how to reimagine loss as conservation. Tennyson’s saying, “I’ve lost my friend. How is he still here?” And of course, transformation is the answer. To a large extent, this is the discovery process that leads to thermodynamics, obviously very simplified. It’s seeing those two things as analogous processes in that cultural moment.

When you just think about the word “ecology,” by the early 20th century, it’s being defined as a full spectrum of energy exchanges among living and non-living beings and the

Well-known criticisms of works by Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen point to an off-camera presence of imperialism, including the slave trade, that supports the protagonists and their families. For instance, in Austen’s novel MansfieldPark , the reference to Antigua likely refers to sugar plantations that fueled familial wealth. Is that how you see the energy exchange principle, as a kind of subterfuge of which the author isn’t fully conscious?

“Implicit” might be a better descriptor than “unconscious.” Energy exchange is closely related to resource distribution, and so, actually tied to imperialism. But more broadly, you get a kind of growing list of things that send o the little neon sign that says, “Energy, energy, energy!” If we look at Mansfield Park, it’s not only about an underacknowledged source of wealth; it’s also about the Bertram family living at Mansfield Park. The family is kind of enervated—tired, bored, etc. But when new neighbors, Henry and Mary Crawford, move in, they experience the change as a burst of energy, life, enthusiasm. They actually use the word “energy” to describe the Crawfords; they enliven the place. But this admission of someone from the outside also creates anxiety: Are they part of the family? Are they not?

Which goes back to the question, what happens if you have a closed system? Is it always going to be in the process of becoming rundown, dissipated, fatigued until an energy source comes in? So, there’s a lot of ambivalence around energy, even before it becomes scientific energy. Energy is closely connected to resources and exchange, but there’s often not acknowledgment around those resources.

The 18th and 19th centuries make a lot of changes that become our norms: Enclosures consolidate private property. We see the rise of nation-states, places like Germany and Italy, which had formerly been conglomerations of smaller regions. The nuclear family as a unit becomes more important. This movement is tied to an emphasis on independence, the idea of a self-sustaining unit. We depend on all of this stu outside of ourselves, but we’re going to disavow it. To me, these patterns seem to have similarity across di erent scales, and they all tie to the idea of closure—as do the laws of thermodynamics.

In a closed system, energy is always conserved; entropy is always increasing. But nature doesn’t give us closed systems. The novel tries to. The aspiration and illusion of the novel is that it’s a closed system, but its own text shows that the energy is not encapsulated. We think we have the whole picture, but invariably, we’re wrong.

Kristina

Linnea García is a senior writer in the School of Arts & Sciences O ce of Advancement.

PREAMBLE

In 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. An array of programs—at Penn Arts & Sciences and with partners across the University and Philadelphia—denote the occasion.

By Michele W. Berger

In 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a preamble to moments like the drafting of the Constitution that shaped a then-nascent country.

Much of that history-making transpired in Philadelphia, says Emma Hart, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and Director of Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. “Obviously, this anniversary is a big deal everywhere in the U.S., but most of the really important events took place here, including the Continental Congress that produced the Declaration. Independence Hall, formerly the Pennsylvania State House, and Carpenters’ Hall, were the rooms where it happened.”

Hart, Penn Libraries’ Lynne Farrington, and a host of people across the University have been contemplating—for years—how to best mark the occasion.

DEMOCRACY@SAS

The thought experiment has taken on a different weight at this unique time in the country’s history, one that has given rise to deep questions like what the past can teach us about the present and the future, and why who has a seat at the proverbial table matters.

“An intellectual place like the McNeil Center needs to be creative in how it marks this anniversary,” Hart says. “The natural move would be to have a scholarly conference or publish a book of essays or have the most famous historian in the field come talk to fellow historians. Those are all important, but it’s also important for us to figure out new ways we can get our message out to a broader audience and create something a bit more lasting.”

To that end, in addition to a symposium on J. Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement—the brain child of Emerita

The idea of a democracy—a system of oversight that gives people an active say in their government—is thousands of years old. Yet it’s also the premise on which the U.S. was built 250 years ago. This fall, Penn Arts & Sciences launched Democracy@SAS to showcase the expansive approach the School brings to studying this concept.

Touching on six broad subjects, including the American Experiment, democracy under pressure, and global perspectives, the website highlights the work Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are undertaking to understand and address democracy, while teaching the next generation of leaders to do the same.

Professor of History Sally Gordon— Hart mentions five upcoming conversations hosted by National Public Radio affiliate WHYY that she and other faculty will participate in.

Some reflective moments have already occurred, like a quartet of 60-second lectures put on by Penn Arts & Sciences on Constitution Day in September. The School is also launching its Democracy@SAS website late this fall, a hub meant to showcase the expansive approach Penn Arts & Sciences takes to studying democracy—looking at its past, present, and future both globally and locally.

There’s much in store to commemorate two-and-a-half centuries since the Declaration. Think of what’s here as the preamble.

Michele W. Berger is the editor of Omnia magazine.

Nick Matej

60-SECOND LECTURES | THE CONSTITUTION AT 238

On September 17, Penn Arts & Sciences marked Constitution Day 2025 by sharing diverse outlooks and expertise on the supreme law shaping the United States. Four faculty spoke, followed by a conversation moderated by Peter Struck, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Vartan Gregorian Professor of Humanities.

“A Protest Voice and a Constitutional Microphone for Change”

Daniel Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Professor of Political Science

“What Does it Mean to be the Helmsman of the Republic?”

Cam Grey, Professor of Classical Studies

“Compromise and the Constitution” Emma Hart, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History

“Constitutional Change: How the Supreme Court Sets the Agenda” Karen Tani, Seaman Family University Professor

McNEIL CENTER MOMENTS

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies has a series of events planned for the semiquincentennial.

In 1775, the Navy and the Marines were founded in Philadelphia. To mark 250 years of these branches of the armed services, the Center, in collaboration with Rutgers-Camden, put on a two-day conference in October—on a naval battleship.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art, gave the annual Benjamin Franklin Distinguished Lectures in October.

Her subject was “seeing the stain of slavery” in art, focusing on Titian’s “Poesie” (1550) and the Maryland Portraits of Justus Engelhardt Kühn (1710).

J. Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement was published 100 years ago in 1926. “He was the first person to think about the Revolution not as a political event, but as a mass uprising,” says Hart, McNeil Center director.

Working with colleagues at the Library of Congress Kluge Center, Princeton, and the College of William & Mary, the Center will hold a symposium to ponder Jameson’s thesis in a modern context.

In 2026, five events around the city—put on by NPR’s WHYY and with experts from Penn and other area institutions— will engage in community conversations around the values of the Declaration of Independence and their resonance today.

MAKING A REPLICA

Common Press, the University’s letterpress studio, will host a 12-hour, two-day typesetting event in May 2026, that gives participants the chance to hand-set metal type of the Declaration of Independence. The idea: to create a historically accurate replica commemorating the first edition of the document, which was typeset and printed in 12 hours on July 4, 1776.

William Nowland Van Powell

Alex Schein

Alex Schein

Beyond the MD track, non-clinical career options in healthcare abound. Here are three chosen by Penn Arts & Sciences alums.

By Judy Hill

Illustrations by Jane Webster

Alternate Paths

An early fascination with Russia’s last imperial dynasty, the Romanovs, and their hereditary disposition to hemophilia led Victoria Groner, C’19, to realize, at the age of 11, that she wanted to work in genetics. “It was so interesting to see the way the disease moved through generations in this very famous family,” says Groner, who kept her career goals front and center through high school and as a biology major at Penn.

As she shadowed geneticists and doctors, eager to figure out just where she might fit in her chosen field, she was frequently asked, “Why don’t you just go to medical school?”

But that was never Groner’s ambition. Though many students who come to Penn with an interest in science start—and finish— on a pre-med track and go on to become physicians, that is by no means the only path, as Groner and two other Penn Arts & Sciences alums demonstrate. A career in healthcare can include work as varied as guiding a biotech company on its first public offering, counseling a patient with a breast cancer gene, or coordinating a global clinical drug trial.

Helping Future Generations

Amy Remick, C’00

Clinical Study Team Lead, Pfizer

Looking around at her fellow Penn students in the late ’90s, Amy Remick, C’00, saw plenty who knew they wanted to be lawyers or doctors or had a PhD in their sights. Remick knew she wanted to work in healthcare—but she didn’t yet know how to do it.

As a teenager growing up in New Jersey she had taken EMT training and volunteered at the local hospital. At Penn, she started out in the School of Nursing but quickly realized that was not the path for her and transferred to the College of Arts & Sciences, where she majored in psychology. She’s now a clinical study team lead for Pfizer, based in Portland, Oregon. In that role, she manages all operational aspects of programs focused on latestage development of drugs for rare diseases.

Remick was introduced to the world of clinical research her junior year at Penn, when she studied abroad, volunteering on a hospital-based research project in Australia. In her fourth year, back in Philadelphia, she did data entry for a clinical study and took two healthcare management classes through Wharton, which opened her eyes to other avenues within the field.

Knowing and reading the stories of actual patients, actual participants, is truly the most impactful part for me, knowing that your new drug or research has the potential to help this person or future generations with that diagnosis.

At a Penn job fair halfway through that year, she dropped her resume with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, soon landing a job there as a data assistant. That experience, where she became a study coordinator in clinical research, confirmed that it was that facet of healthcare—“not administration, not the PhD, not healthcare law,” she says—that most interested her.

“The hands-on aspect with patients appealed to me,” says Remick, who went on to earn an MBA in healthcare management and has worked for nearly her whole career on the operational side of clinical research. “When I was on the administrative side, I was away from the patients, their families, the clinical decisions. By opting for the clinical trial route, I was still in the room with them.”

In her Pfizer role, the scope is much larger; the programs she oversees include multiple studies in 30 countries. “I’m physically removed now,” says Remick, who works mostly remotely with teams in Europe, India, China, and Australia, as well as the United States and Canada, “but knowing and reading the stories of actual patients, actual participants, is truly the most impactful part for me, knowing that your new drug or research has the potential to help this person or future generations with that diagnosis.”

Most of the drugs Remick’s teams work on are in Phase 3 development, the final rounds of clinical testing before being submitted for regulatory approval. “It’s very exciting,” she says, “because you’re at the point where you’re taking your data to regulators.”

Remick’s advice to students contemplating a future in healthcare? “If the clinical side is your passion, whether it’s being a doctor, a physician’s assistant, a nurse practitioner, or a nurse, absolutely pursue that. But if you’re interested in healthcare and don’t want to be a clinician, there are vast opportunities out there in clinical research.”

Investing in Treatment

Daniel Wittmer, C’22, W’22

Healthcare Investment Banker, Bank of America

On the pre-med track when he arrived at Penn, Daniel Wittmer, C’22, W’22, transferred into the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management at the beginning of his second year. “The whole mantra of the program is ‘From bench to bedside and everything in between,’” he says. “It interested me to see that additional layer

of commercializing pharmaceutical products and getting them to the patients who need them.”

After he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology from the School of Arts & Sciences and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wharton, Wittmer moved to San Francisco to take a life science–focused investment banking position with Bank of America. “It felt like the best of both worlds, keeping up to date on everything that’s going on in biotech but also homing in on my financial analysis capabilities and technical skills,” he says.

If the drugs get approved, they will be treating debilitating diseases that don’t have a lot of support. Working with those clients and seeing how those drugs progress is very fulfilling.

A typical client, Wittmer explains, might be a private biotech company in the early stages of drug development needing financial services to enter the public markets through an initial public offering. Or a company might ask Wittmer for strategic advice on expanding in current therapeutic areas or moving into new ones. Competitive landscape analysis, where Wittmer and his colleagues analyze how a biotech company looks compared to its competitors, is also a frequent ask.

“A lot of it is pretty bespoke,” Wittmer says, adding, “I definitely use both ends of my education.” He puts his financial expertise to work determining the viability and future profitability of a client’s product. On the science side, he says, it’s more about understanding a drug’s mechanism and pinpointing scientifically relevant information to help his client make strategic decisions.

For example, if he’s working with an oncology company, Wittmer explains, he needs to know how different drugs currently on the market work—by blocking specific proteins, for example, or targeting cancer cells—in order to present a relevant competitor landscape of drugs with similar mechanisms of action.

Among his clients are companies working in areas of rare or underserved diseases. “If the drugs get approved, they will be treating debilitating diseases that don’t have a lot of support,” he says. “Working with those clients and seeing how those drugs progress is very fulfilling.”

Making a Tangible Impact

Victoria Groner, C’19 Research Genetic Counselor, Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital

For Victoria Groner, the 2019 graduate with an interest in genetics, her path began in middle school. An “obsession” (her word) with the Romanovs led to her “devouring” Bryan Sykes’s book about mitochondrial DNA, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and enrolling in her high school’s science research program. At that point, working as a research scientist—specifically an evolutionary and anthropological molecular geneticist—was her goal.

While still in high school, Groner had the opportunity to work one summer with Theodore Schurr, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology at Penn. “I was so grateful, but I was miserable in a lab,” she says. “I didn’t want to pipette all day. I thought, ‘This is not it. I love genetics but I want to be working with people.’”

The following summer, Groner shadowed a genetic counselor and medical geneticist in a prenatal practice in New York City. She’d found her calling.

By the time she came to Penn, Groner knew exactly what she wanted to do and would have confirmed her major in her first year if that was allowed. “I remember showing up the first day of sophomore year and being like, ‘I’m ready to declare. I will major in biology.’” Inspired by her experiences learning about the ethical considerations in genetics, she also took on a minor in bioethics.

Working as a research assistant to Allison Werner-Lin, Associate Professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice, Groner dug further into the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics and genetic testing. Observing genetic counselors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia “added fuel to the fire,” she says, “to the passion that was burning.”

There was just one moment of doubt, she concedes, when she saw her classmates doing on-campus recruiting. “I thought, ‘Should I go into life sciences consulting?’ And then I was like, ‘Snap out of it. That’s not what you want.’ I never wanted to be a doctor. I felt very strongly about that.”

After grad school at Northwestern, where she earned a master’s degree in genetic counseling, Groner quickly found her niche at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She says working in that subset of the field suits her because she’s able to provide actionable information. “The genes we test for, most of them have guidelines associated with them,” she explains. “Early information leads to early screenings and prevention saves lives.”

On patient days, Groner sees three to five people, with appointments lasting up to two hours depending on the psychosocial difficulty of the case or the number of questions the patient has. Breaking bad news is part of the job, but one for which Groner feels well equipped.

I didn’t want to pipette all day. I thought, ‘This is not it. I love genetics but I want to be working with people.’

“I am the one calling people and saying, ‘Your results came back positive, and you have the BRCA2 breast cancer mutation, and this is what it means,’” she says. “It’s obviously hard, but I feel I can have a tangible impact, holding space for people and talking about how this is going to affect their life and how they feel about it, not just the cold hard facts and science. I get to talk about very high-level medical concepts in an accessible way and also talk to people and process with them.”

On research days, Groner runs a National Institutes of Health–funded study focused on digital interventions in genetic testing, a part of her job that has nurtured a growing interest of hers in improving clinic operations.

Passionate about LGBTQIA+ health advocacy, Groner also gives talks to healthcare providers about genderinclusive care, risk assessment, and decision-making for transgender and other gender-diverse patients who have hereditary cancer syndromes. “It’s really important to me to support other clinicians,” she says, “so they can have a more inclusive practice for our patients.”

Judy Hill is a writer and editor who covers a wide range of topics.

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Meet the Dean

Archive of the Unbuilt

PhD student Valeria Seminario’s dissertation explores themes of transportation and infrastructure in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin American literature.

The 1867 novel María by Colombian author Jorge Isaacs tells the tragic story of two lovers, María and Efraín. When Efraín leaves for medical school in London, the couple parts reluctantly. But when María falls ill, Efraín’s journey home to reunite with her proves too arduous, and he arrives to find she has already died.

Considered a cornerstone of Latin American literature, María has been analyzed by scholars for more than a century. But sixth-year Spanish & Portuguese PhD student Valeria Seminario urges readers to revisit it through a different lens: transportation and infrastructure.

“I’m supplementing material history into stories like these to see how it structured the plots,” she says.

A 1910 postcard celebrating the completed Panama Canal and San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire.

In the Annenberg Center in early September, Mark Trodden, Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy, offered brief remarks before chatting with the undergrads and grad students who came out to meet him. They asked him about a range of subjects, from his educational background to his favorite Philly spots.

Alex Schein

More broadly, her dissertation reimagines 19th- and early 20th-century Latin American fiction through the real and unrealized roads, railways, and canals of the region. Born and raised in Peru, Seminario first encountered these themes during her master’s at New York University, where she noticed that early Latin American science fiction often revolved around utopian visions of infrastructure.

María, she says, is a striking case. The novel never explicitly mentions infrastructure, yet Efraín’s doomed return unfolds across Colombia’s rugged, undeveloped coast. “It’s just 26 pages of obstacles and suffering,” says Seminario, who is advised by Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Ericka Beckman, who is also department chair.

Seminario found that Efraín’s route— climbing mountains, fending off snakes, paddling a broken canoe—mirrored a reallife desired transportation route for sugar and coffee, the region’s most valuable exports. At the time Isaacs was writing the novel in the 1860s, a company was struggling to build a road along the same corridor, and Isaacs himself had labored for that company.

“When you restore all that history to the novel, you can see the tragic implications of not having a road that connected those two points,” Seminario explains. “The literature allows us to see the emotions, anxieties, and fears that were tied to export routes in Latin America.”

Seminario’s dissertation also examines how the abandoned Nicaragua Canal project—an unrealized alternative to the Panama Canal—lives on in the era’s literature, and how infrastructure became a symbol of Latin America’s desired economic, social, and political identity.

Summer Experiences

College of Arts & Sciences students got real-world experience on campus and off.

In the lab of Penn Medicine’s Michael Beauchamp, Kamille Hernandez, C’27, studied how humans process language. As part of the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring (PURM) Program, run by the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF), she spent 10 weeks coding and developing a program that can test how participants react to audio and visual speech stimuli.

What does it mean for everyone to have a say in a democracy? Through the PURM program, Jasmine Ni, C’27, conducted research with Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel Wodak to explore the contradictions and questions raised by political equity and suffrage, specifically the notion of “one person, one vote.”

–MARILYN PERKINS

For Seminario, infrastructure offers a systematic lens that connects historical research with literary analysis. “It’s a key to opening up literary texts that have been read over and over again,” she says. “When you read a story through this perspective, it makes it completely new.”

Through the Summer Humanities Internship Program, history major Luiza Sulea, C’27, joined WXPN radio station’s marketing team. Among other tasks, she contributed to collaborations that promoted live music concerts and to the annual XPoNential Music Festival.

This summer, Sarah Usandivaras Klaehn, C’26, interned for Girls Inc. in New York City with support from the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and the Robert K. Johnson Integrated Studies Program. She learned the ins and outs of the international nonprofit, drafting communications and messaging, in addition to researching participant experiences.

This past summer, history major Luiza Sulea, C’27, joined the WXPN radio station team. She hopes to eventually go to law school to study entertainment law.

Eric Sucar, University Communications

A Deficit in Pennsylvania’s Pretrial Data

Leo Solga, C’26, has been studying what happens in the Commonwealth before someone goes to trial. What he’s learned reveals just how little we know.

“Thank you for your question, but we just don’t have that information. We hope you have a great day.” That message, or something like it, was one Leo Solga, C’26, received many times as he tried to track down data on pretrial detainees in Pennsylvania.

Solga, a political science major, persevered, ultimately learning that state-wide pretrial detention statistics are inconsistently tracked and recorded. He published the results in a paper for Penn Law’s Journal of Law & Social Change

At any point in time, the Commonwealth has about 60,000 incarcerated people, with two-thirds of them in state penitentiary facilities. Most of the other 20,000, who are held in local county jails, have been arrested but not yet convicted of a crime.

Solga became curious about pretrial detainees while researching the magisterial district system for a fellowship during his first year at Penn. The following summer, while working in the office of State Representative Mary Jo Daley, he dove into the topic in earnest.

“I started Googling all over the place and reaching out to my contacts,” says Solga. “I was asking, ‘What happens to these pretrial detainees? How many are there? What crimes are they being detained for? Are they being held because they can’t make cash bail? How long are they being held?’”

The answers to these questions were “terribly inconclusive,” he says. “Nobody really knew.” After filing dozens of “right-to-know” requests with Pennsylvania counties and exchanging hundreds of back-and-forth emails, Solga drew what he considered some “pretty concerning” conclusions.

For one, there’s a troubling lack of local jail data. Solga filed record requests with all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties and many could not provide him basic information. The records he was able to obtain suggested longer pretrial incarceration— close to five months, on average—than the estimated national average, and that many of these people are being held because they cannot afford bail.

Given the cost of pretrial detention to individuals and the public, Solga believes we have a responsibility to understand the system better. Solga worked with Representative Daley and her team to introduce a resolution this past summer directing the Joint State Government Commission (a bipartisan research agency of the Pennsylvania General Assembly) to conduct a 12-month study exploring current county-level recordkeeping practices. He says the hope is to explore where shortfalls exist in the system and what amendments experts might suggest.

“That’s the best way to start the conversation,” Solga says.

Doing this work has helped him refine his career goals. “I didn’t have a terribly strong idea of what I wanted to do when I came into my undergraduate studies. And this has really gotten me interested in justice systems. I think it would be exciting to be a public defender.” He is currently studying for the LSAT.

Though the research Solga’s done so far has been laborious— “I wrote a lot of letters to county clerks,” he says—it has shown him that anyone willing to put in the time can potentially change systems of government. After spending hours poring over spreadsheets he created, Solga has also realized something else: “Sometimes I see all the numbers on the screen, and it’s easy to be desensitized. I remind myself that the people I get records requests about are actual people currently being held in jail.”

–JUDY HILL

Political science major Leo Solga, C’26, filed record requests with all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties to get information on pretrial detainees.

Pause and Effect

Disfluency, or irregularities and breaks in speech, are part of life—but do they affect how we perceive each other? Fourth-year linguistics PhD student Jonathan Lee is trying to find out.

Some people are smooth talkers, others frequently say “uh.” But does that influence our overall opinion of the person speaking? That’s the question driving the research of fourth-year linguistics PhD student Jonathan Lee. “There’s this assumption that if you’re saying ‘um’ a lot, you’re taken less seriously,” he says. “But is that actually true?”

Disfluency refers to irregularities in otherwise fluid speech, but it’s different than stuttering; think more pauses or filler words. Lee is exploring whether those hesitation markers have a social cost, including how they might affect both higher-stakes situations— interviewing for a job or seeking political office, for instance—and casual interactions.

Hailing from Hong Kong with an interest in bilingualism and psychotherapy, Lee initially studied Chinese language and literature. He became curious about what he didn’t see in transcripts or subtitles: the in-between moments as someone forms the next thought.

Drawn to Penn’s Language and Communication Sciences program for its multidisciplinary approach, Lee began working with Mark Liberman, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Director of Penn’s Linguistic Data Consortium, as his advisor. As Lee’s work has progressed, he has also collaborated with faculty across the University, including those in the Department of Psychology and at Wharton.

That range of expertise has helped Lee work through challenges like how research of this sort often relies on lab recordings rather than real speech. To get around that, he has turned to external recordings—some formal, like lectures and legal recordings, some informal, like conversations between couples or families. Using software, he makes marginal, impossible-to-notice digital modifications. Then participants, who are recruited both across campus and online, listen to those recordings and answer questions around trustworthiness and their perceptions of the speaker.

So far, Lee has received more than 1,000 responses. “Disfluency is not always negative. It can be seen positively or neutrally,” he observes. “Sometimes it just sounds like an expert pausing to think carefully, and context matters, too.”

Lee says he has more work to do. He plans to probe whether small hesitations and speech could affect how we see someone’s morals and politics. Yet he says those initial takeaways are crucial. By reframing disfluency as a meaningful signal rather than a flaw, Lee hopes to change the way we think about speech itself. “There’s a stigma around hesitations,” he says. “But they’re part of what makes us human— every ‘um’ and ‘uh’ is a glimpse of thought in progress.” Some impressions fade quickly, he adds, while others can linger, subtly shaping how we think or feel about a person later on.

–EV CRUNDEN

Sustainable Success

Daria Haner, C’26, is first author on a paper indicating that organizational longevity and environmental sustainability go hand in hand.

As a high schooler passionate about the environment, Daria Haner, C’26, knew she wanted to pursue environmental research. The moment came much sooner than she expected: In her sophomore year, researchers at the nearby University of Minnesota, working with colleagues at CUNY’s Zicklin School of Business, asked her teachers for student help with a project analyzing factors behind the environmental performance of companies.

Kevin Ren/Penn MindCORE

Fourth-year linguistics PhD student Jonathan Lee became curious about breaks in speech when he noticed they were missing from transcripts and subtitles.

Haner jumped at the opportunity. At first, she did routine tasks like collecting company logos. But in her senior year, with the team’s data-gathering initiative well underway, she saw an opportunity to contribute something bigger. She proposed expanding the research scope to include company age and longevity and offered to take the lead on writing up results. When she started at Penn as an undergraduate soon after, she was already working on what would become her first authored paper. It published this past summer in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology

The findings surprised even the research team. In their analysis of thousands of companies around the world, Haner and her collaborators determined that the longest-lasting are also the most committed to environmental sustainability. “We all thought there would be some correlation, but I didn’t realize it would be so strong and so consistent everywhere in the world,” Haner says. “I was really happy and surprised to see that.”

The team studied companies listed in major indices like the Fortune 500 to gather data about 2,418 businesses from the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. They compared each one’s age to multiple third-party ratings

on sustainability, such as S&P Global. Even when controlling for financial assets and work-force size, one pattern held: The longer a company had survived, the higher it scored on environmental sustainability. The relationship was strongest in the U.S. As a group, the 90 oldest companies—all established before 1850— scored higher than the 82 companies founded after 2005.

To explain the connection, Haner turned to population ecology, the principles that govern why an animal’s population changes over time. Just as migratory birds learn to avoid deforested areas to survive, successful companies appear to adapt continuously to environmental changes. The same adaptability that ensures their longevity also drives them toward more sustainable practices.

Haner says she hopes the research might encourage corporations to “focus on their long-term viability and environmental sustainability.” For her personally, the work represents why she’s double-majoring in environmental science and anthropology. “A lot of anthropology focuses on what has happened, how we have evolved, but it’s really important to also look to the next 10,000 years,” Haner says. “Environmental science is critical to doing that.” –LAURA DATTARO

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The fall 2026 cohort application deadline is January 15

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Penn Arts & Sciences at Work

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a series that highlights College alums in their workplaces as they reflect on how and why their careers took shape.

To see more, visit www.sas.upenn.edu/at-work

NICHOLAS WILCOX, C’13, W’13

Penn Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow PHILADELPHIA, PA

BIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS MAJOR

I’m a postdoctoral fellow at Penn Medicine, which represents the final years of my medical training. I specialize in cardiology and cardiooncology, a field devoted to improving the heart health of patients with cancer, as well as echocardiography. My role can be quite varied in terms of what I am doing on a given day, but generally, most of my time is spent either pursuing research or taking care of patients in clinic. I’m currently aiming to become a clinical investigator in cardio-oncology, but one of my favorite aspects of the job is spending time face to face with patients. It’s amazing to see how your work can have a tangible, direct impact on someone’s life.

I’ve always enjoyed the patientoriented aspect of medicine. During undergrad, I volunteered at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Early exposure to what a medical career can look like inspired me

to continue down this path. One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to anyone interested in pursuing medicine is to get as much early exposure as you can to different aspects of the field. Medicine is a long career, and it can require a lot of sacrifice; understanding what drives you is what sustains you.

Another key aspect of my undergrad experience was being part of the Vagelos Life Sciences & Management dual-degree program. It was the foundation for me to pursue my dream of being a doctor, and I’ll always be grateful for that. The LSM capstone class sticks in my mind as one of my most notable academic experiences. You work in a team with your classmates to develop and commercialize early-stage medical technology that has the potential to impact biology and medicine in a big way. It was such an important period for me, and the project I worked on led to my first job helping to develop

CAR T-cell therapy for leukemia and lymphoma, which solidified my interest in a research career.

By virtue of still being in Philadelphia, I’m lucky enough to continue interacting with the LSM program leadership and its students, the latter in a mentoring capacity. It’s a true joy, and it speaks to one of the most important pieces that grounded my undergrad experience: mentorship. A strong support system like the one I had at Penn makes all the difference and instills so much confidence in you, especially in the face of a challenging career.

Penn has played a really important role in my life. It’s where I met my wife and became a physician-scientist. I’ve had a lot of major life milestones here. I’m grateful to still be part of the Penn community and will always value the skills my undergraduate experience instilled in me. –AS TOLD TO BEA HARLEY

What do you wish you’d known on your first day at Penn?

I wish I knew that it was okay to need help! Seeking out resources like the Weingarten Center—not just for tutoring, but also to meet with learning specialists to work on study strategies and time management—truly helped me survive undergrad!

–ANNA NGUYEN,

C’22

We asked, you answered. Alums share their memories, thoughts, and ideas with Omnia.

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY JUAN TANG HON

I have so much to learn! What a blessing to have this opportunity.

–STEPHEN OLER, C’83

When you’re training for the crew team, don’t run in tennis shoes.

–IRA GINSBURG, C’83

I didn’t know everything, but I knew enough. Penn gave me many choices and exposure to many things. The ultimate choice was mine. It’s the beauty of freedom and a great school.

–WILCA GALLAGHER, C’83, GR’84

That as a new college student, you are allowed to say “yes” and “no.” I advised my own son to have an improv mindset going to college—that is, to say “yes, and...” to new opportunities. But new students must also realize there is nothing mandatory at college besides your classes. Graduation remains job #1.

–DANIEL MCDONALD, C’93

That my interests and goals can and will change as I meet more people. Every interaction I make with a stranger, friend, classmate, professor builds upon the mosaic that I am.

–SARAH O’KONSKI, C’25

Take classes in subjects you never studied before, or subjects you may not have enjoyed before. I found myself loving history and political science, two subjects I had not liked or studied. Also, your career path is not predicated on your major in college. You can study anything and still pursue other goals.

–JANET MERMEL, C’04

I wish I had known how challenging homework would be. Early on we were told that for each hour spent in class—15 per week—we had to spend three hours on projects and homework. Given that I was something of an athlete (rowing), that proved to be challenging.

–STEPHEN DEXTER, C’65

How quickly four years would fly by. Make the most of the time you have, take advantage of the resources available, and have fun.

–TONICA

JENKINS, C’03

How absolutely inspiring and rich in depth my Dynamics of Organizations courses would be! I entered the master’s program the day I started as an IT director at Lehigh Valley Medical Center—at age 47—so it was challenging. I got way more out of it than I had any reason to expect, other than the fact that Penn is such a wonderful university.

–SAROJ GILBERT, GR’95

FORMIDABLE FRAMEWORK

Inspired by trailblazing women, former NBC10 broadcast journalist Rosemary Connors, C’05, took a leap, moving out of journalism and into a successful scaffolding company she founded.

BY KATELYN SILVA

Alex Schein

“Y

ou look just like NBC10 newscaster Rosemary Connors,” said the general contracting superintendent at a project meeting at a Philadelphia-based university.

As Rosemary Connors, C’05, recalls the moment several months ago, she laughs. “Early on, I was quiet about my career shift because I wanted to get it right before everyone knew about it. It’s understandable he didn’t realize my new profession.”

She’s talking about the move from Emmy-winning broadcast journalist of 20 years to founder and owner of the scaffolding company Rosette Specialty Trades, launched in January 2025. “I loved my time in broadcast journalism, but I was ready for a new challenge,” says Connors, who spent nearly 15 years at NBC10. “My husband owns a construction-related business, and I’ve always been his unpaid consultant behind the scenes, so this was a familiar space to me. When I was introduced to a team of seasoned scaffolding professionals looking to find a new company, it just made sense.”

Connors’ career trajectory, including a law degree from Temple University and her jump to the construction space, are rooted in a long line of trailblazing women, she says. Connors’ mother was a sports reporter in New York before moving to Philadelphia to work as a reporter at the Daily News and later, as a reporter and editor for the Inquirer, including for the business section. Her grandmother also reported the news in Philadelphia before becoming one of the first women to earn a law degree from Villanova University, and her motherin-law founded a chimney restoration firm at a time when there were few female-owned businesses in the space.

“I’ve been blessed with incredible female role models,” says Connors,

who notes that her husband and brother-in-law eventually purchased her in-laws’ company, D.J. Cross. They serve the Philadelphia region, including working on a Penn renovation project, which Connors says feels extra special because she looks back fondly on her undergraduate experience.

I squeezed everything I could out of my experience, particularly leaning on the brilliance of other women.

Recruited to Penn for field hockey, Connors was enthusiastic to join the community as a student-athlete and highlights the significant role women played in shaping her development on campus as well. In particular, she acknowledges her teammates, campus mentors, and peers like Nikki Battiste, C’02, of CBS News, who helped her secure the Today Show internship in New York City that paved the way for a later internship at NBC10.

“I squeezed everything I could out of my experience, particularly leaning on the brilliance of other women. For instance, being part of a Division I team helped me personally and professionally. So much about success in life is learning how to be a good teammate and the bonds I built on the field will last forever,” says Connors, who majored in sociology with a concentration in deviance and the sociology of law. “I also worked as a student employee for Penn’s professionally managed radio station WXPN, and I reported the news on Penn UTV. I credit my mentors at Penn

radio, Debby Seitz and Kim Winnick, for cementing my desire to pursue a career in broadcast journalism. They really took me under their wing.”

Connors says the power of female connection in her life continues to this day. Rosette Specialty Trades’ first project—work on another Penn building—came through a referral from another woman-owned construction business.

“There is a dearth of women in construction, but the women [in this field] have opened their arms wide and been tremendous to me,” Connors says. “Not to mention it was especially meaningful for my company’s first project to be at my alma mater.”

Today, Connors isn’t even a year into her new professional chapter, yet her company has already started or completed projects at Penn, Temple University, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Pennsylvania Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University, Lincoln Financial Field, SEPTA, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and Citizens Bank Park. She also completed a pro bono project for Ronald McDonald House, a nonprofit that supports the families of sick children.

Rosette Specialty Trades, which is based in Media, Pennsylvania, works across four states with a current union labor force of 25 people in the field and an office staff of five.

Connors encourages aspiring entrepreneurs, especially women, not to be afraid to take a chance: “When you decide it’s time to make a pivot in life, have the confidence to make the change. Your Penn experience has prepared you for it.”

Katelyn Silva is a higher-education writer and owner of Silva Content Solutions in Providence.

The Woman Behind a Computing Powerhouse

An off-campus supercomputer designed to tackle massive artificial intelligence datasets has a surprising connection to Penn Arts & Sciences: Its namesake, mathematician Frances “Betty” Holberton, CW’39. Dubbed “Betty,” the powerful machine is Penn’s first school-wide high-performance computing and AI cluster.

Holberton, a pioneer in the early field of computing, graduated with a degree in journalism because she wanted to travel. But as World War II raged, she signed on to compute ballistics trajectories, becoming one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (part of which is still on display at Penn today).

While working on ENIAC, Holberton invented breakpoints in debugging, a key mechanism for ensuring that a computer properly functions. She would go on to help write the first generative programming system, among many other groundbreaking efforts. And now Betty bears her moniker, a supercomputer honoring Holberton’s massive contributions to the field and sharing her name with the next generation. –EV

CRUNDEN

Learning and Mingling

This fall, Penn Arts & Sciences alums mentored undergrads, reconnected, and gathered to meet Dean Trodden. They also learned from faculty at events like Ben Talks Los Angeles, which focused on the evolution of printing technologies, art as a nuanced archive of sexuality, memory cards as media distributors, and more.

Alumni

College Alumni Mentoring Series: Careers in the Biological Sciences Roundtable Dinner

Ayana Hall

Courtesy of Priscilla Holberton

Ben Talks Los Angeles: Art, Artifacts, & Society Loraine Terrell

College

Mentoring Meal with Jessica Weiser, C’03

Ayana Hall

What Forces Shape Health and Well-Being?

The most urgent challenges in health don’t begin— or end—at the bedside. They are rooted in biology, shaped by society, and filtered through history and culture. That’s why faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences are asking foundational questions. Across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Penn Arts & Sciences is building the knowledge base essential to a healthier future—and to Penn’s broad commitment to health and human well-being. Introducing our new online hub:

Origin Stories: Philip Rea

The path the LSM program co-director has taken from music to biology, photography, and beyond.

AS TOLD TO ALEX SCHEIN

According to Professor of Biology Philip Rea, anyone who knew him during his “formative years” expected he’d become a classical trumpet player. “That’s what I was best known for until the age of 17 or 18. That’s what I cared about the most,” he says. But through a winding path—including a revelatory moment at the University of Sussex—Rea became a scientist and educator. Today he is Belldegrun Distinguished Director of the Roy & Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management (LSM), which he co-founded. He’s also a professor of biology, and has expanded his artistic repertoire to science writing and photography.

Childhood

I’m a Brit. It’s a long story, but the short of it is that I’m an adopted kid who, as the child of Peggy Cooper, actually started life in Wolverhampton as Anthony Paul Cooper before being adopted by Allen and Jose Rea, and assuming my current name. That adoption was in the town of Buxton, where I spent the first two years of my life before we, as a family, moved to Leicester.

Music as Life

Growing up I loved science, but everyone—my friends, teachers, parents—tacitly assumed that I’d end up playing trumpet in one of the professional orchestras. When I reflect on these times, especially as a member of the trumpet section of the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, I continue to be amazed. We had the opportunity to perform at venues like the Royal Festival Hall in London and under the baton of conductors and composers like Sir Michael Tippett and André Previn. We also recorded two full albums and were featured in a rehearsal with Previn in a show on the BBC.

Multi-Faceted Moment

Those who know me from my years at Penn recognize me as a dedicated plant biochemist and molecular biologist, or identify me as founding faculty director of the LSM program, a science writer, communicator, and educator. I’m also a passionate photographer. What I try to do in a photograph, whether isolating form, color, or light to reveal something familiar in a new way, is not so different from what I do in the classroom or on the printed page. In all cases, I’m trying to capture something essential that might otherwise go unnoticed. It’s all about noticing, framing, and revealing.

Brooke Sietinsons; inset photography

courtesy of Phil Rea

Listen as Rea shares his story.

Three Questions: On Improv

Assistant Professor of Psychology Nacho

Sanguinetti is using an unexpected technique to teach students about the brain: improvisational theater.

BY MARILYN PERKINS

Though Nacho Sanguinetti, Assistant Professor of Psychology, ended up in the sciences, he also has a passion for art, something he never wanted his career path to compromise. Sanguinetti always strived to balance the two, taking advanced science classes and doing theater in high school, for example, or working as a semi-professional improv performer during his PhD program.

Now, as a researcher studying how animals understand the space around them, he’s bringing his performing arts background to the neuroscience classroom, through a course called Learning to Read Minds—Discovering the Brain Through Improv. Each week students discuss research around a scientific idea, then engage in improvisational theater exercises related to the concept.

“I’ve always had these dual sides to my personality,” Sanguinetti says. “This is a very exciting moment, because it’s the first time I’m mixing them.”

How can improv teach cognitive neuroscience concepts?

There are many examples, but let’s look at nonverbal communication. Research shows that human brains are very good at picking up on emotions and intent through facial expressions alone. So, we might do an improv exercise where all that students can say out loud are successive numbers, like they’re counting. But by using intonation and facial expressions, they’re able to transmit a whole scene. Testing those skills allows a student to understand the brain’s basic needs and the processes the brain undergoes when it’s trying to infer certain kinds of emotional, contextual information from someone.

What prompted you to combine these areas?

During my PhD, I learned how we use the brain to see others’ perspectives, enter flow states, and make connections between different topics. As I was exploring this literature, I was also doing all this improvisation and teaching improv classes, and I

was really interested in exploring the basic elements of improv. I started developing an intuition of how understanding the human brain can help us understand improv, and how improv can provide real-world, experiential examples of how the brain works.

Are there lessons from improv that extend beyond the stage?

The main tenet of improv is “Yes, and,” so as a scientist, it’s been a fantastic tool to learn how to listen to others and have debates that come from a place of trying to understand each other. Improv can also help develop soft skills, like how to give a presentation or have a meaningful conversation, and it shows you the brain’s capabilities—something I hope mesmerizes my students. I see improv as CrossFit for the brain, because you’re pushing it to the top of its ability for constructing meaning, building social relationships, creating flow, rhyming. For me, improv introduces an element of openness to other people’s ideas.

Marilyn Perkins is a writer and journalist who covers a wide range of topics.

Stock; portrait by Mark Garvin

To unlock the secrets of the universe, you need a camera—“a really, really special camera,” says Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and co-director of the Simons Observatory. Nestled in Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert at 17,000 feet, the observatory’s Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) provides a high-resolution view of the faint radiation aftermath of the Big Bang, called cosmic microwave background. LAT was built to hold 13 optics tubes, but has so far included just seven

to date. Now, with National Science Foundation backing, Devlin and colleagues are retrofitting LAT to help it reach its full capacity. The gold-plated “stage” seen here will be held at a temperature just above absolute zero and located at the focus of the camera, “the equivalent of where film would be in an SLR camera,” Devlin says. It’s one of thousands of components within the telescope’s receiver. Due to federal funding uncertainties, Devlin’s team has accelerated the schedule of the telescope’s updates, with

plans to be operational by late-spring 2026—a rush Devlin believes is worth it. He says LAT’s potential compared with his last project, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), feels revelatory. “It will be able to do in seven months what ACT, our previous telescope, took 15 years to complete. ACT made amazing measurements of our early universe, helping us to understand the underlying physical processes that govern its evolution. Our new instrument will take these to a whole new level.” –EV CRUNDEN

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COLLEGE OF LIBERAL & PROFESSIONAL STUDIES Keep in touch with Penn Arts & Sciences through the Penn alumni community, at mypenn.upenn.edu, and through LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/pennsas