Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2025

Present, and Future

Four Penn Arts & Sciences faculty offer ideas about democracy’s relationship to wealth, modern information environments, social identities, and shared norms. PAGE 28

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

EDITORIAL OFFICES

School of Arts & Sciences

University of Pennsylvania

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P: 215-746-1232

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E: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu

LORAINE TERRELL

Executive Director of Communications

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

TIN TA

Graphic Designer

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Alumni: Visit MyPenn, the Penn alumni community, at mypenn.upenn.edu. Non-alumni: Email Development and Alumni Records at record@ben.dev. upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136. The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty, and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices.

Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or 215-898-6993 (Voice) or 215-898-7803 (TDD).

FINDINGS

Notable

OMNIA 101

A conversation about choice

Alum

Values That Abide

I

t has been a true honor to serve in the Office of the Dean for the past 15 years—primarily as Associate Dean for the Humanities and, more recently, as Interim Dean of the School. During this time, I’ve had the privilege of working across our humanities departments to advance their essential work, and with colleagues in the Office of the Dean to champion the mission of the School: to pursue excellence in teaching and research, and to prepare our students for lives of critical thought, engaged citizenship, and discovery.

As I prepare to step away from the Dean’s Office and continue my work in the Department of Music, I do so at a moment of profound uncertainty. The financial challenges now facing the University— and higher education more broadly— strike at the core of what we do. I am deeply concerned for our extraordinary faculty whose work to expand knowledge and contribute to society is being directly constrained by reductions in funding.

These cuts have halted or jeopardized groundbreaking research endeavors: Penn Development Research InitiativeDevLab’s efforts to address global challenges like human trafficking; Associate Dean for the Social Sciences Emily Hannum’s research on the intersecting risks of climate change and childhood inequality; promising investigations in Biology on CRISPR and immunity; and studies illuminating the connection between libraries and wellbeing. These are just a few examples of the important work now at risk.

Our students, too, will feel the impact— undergraduates who hoped to take part in critical lab research; postdoctoral fellows and talented graduate students who may no longer find opportunities here; and international scholars and students, whose presence enriches our community and affirms Penn’s place in the global academic network. The scope

of these challenges is unlike anything I’ve seen in my academic career.

And yet, I remain hopeful, because I know what a liberal arts education can make possible.

As a humanist, I believe the humanities offer powerful perspective on this moment. They help us understand how we arrived here, how people across time have weathered uncertainty, and how we might find a path forward. From courses in literature, cultures, philosophy, art, and history that illuminate the complexity of the human experience, to the creative energy that draws students to theater arts and the Music Department’s performance program and to Kelly Writers House, the humanities foster the perspective and empathy we need now more than ever.

If we’ve learned anything from recent events, it is that we must build the capacity to communicate across difference, with curiosity, respect, and honesty. I’m encouraged by work underway in the

College to support our undergraduates as they build these skills, along with the confidence to speak thoughtfully on complex and difficult issues. These efforts reflect the enduring strengths of a liberal arts education: to broaden our lens, deepen our thinking, and cultivate the ability to speak and listen with care.

These are not only the tools of scholarship—they are the tools of resilience, dialogue, and community.

The positive work of the School continues. We celebrate the extraordinary achievements of our faculty and, especially at this time of year, our graduating students. I believe their accomplishments—and the values that inspire them—will abide, no matter the challenges we face. And through them, we will continue to thrive.

Jeffrey Kallberg, Interim Dean and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History

Alex Schein

Research Matters

At a place like Penn Arts & Sciences, so many concepts fall under the umbrella of “research.” Scientific inquiry can solve problems and change what we know about the universe—in fact, a team from Physics & Astronomy recently shared the Breakthrough Prize (p. 6) for its work on high-energy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider.

Research also has the power to enlighten us about our everyday world. Experimental geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack and colleagues, for instance, figured out how the mud on professional baseballs offers pitchers the amazing grip it does. We tell that story on page 34, using a graphic-novel approach in our pages for the first time. (Let us know what you think!) On page 22, we share the exciting discovery of a new Chopin waltz, a collaboration between Interim Dean Jeffrey Kallberg, who is a music historian and Chopin expert, and colleagues at the Morgan Library in New York.

There are countless examples of creative ways the School is working to expand knowledge, like the College of Liberal and Professional Studies’ new Master of Applied Criminology and Police Leadership program (p. 4). The first-of-its-kind graduate degree, designed by faculty from the Department of Criminology, provides focused education for police professionals on subjects including crime theories, analytic methods, and policy analysis.

Universities today face incredible challenges, and throughout this issue— through the stories already mentioned and many others—we aim to address those head on. In our cover feature on page 28, four Penn Arts & Sciences faculty share their insights on the past, present, and future of democracy. In a piece about why fundamental science matters

(p. 18), we spotlight more than a dozen innovations and breakthroughs generated by our researchers. These all started as basic scientific questions and evolved into pioneering products and enhanced methods, often revolutionizing their fields in the process.

In June, the School starts a new chapter, with Mark Trodden at its helm (p. 4). Trodden has been at Penn since 2009 and became Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in 2023. He begins his tenure as Dean, School of Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy. We look forward to telling the stories of accomplishment and discovery to come under his leadership.

Michele W. Berger, Editor

For this cover, we tasked Nick Matej— who often illustrates our Findings sections, including in this issue— with creating an abstract design that visualized democracy as an evolving concept. Matej explains how he landed where he did: “The digital filter through which we now receive and share information has seemed to both empower citizens and sharpen the divide in political ideology. So, I wanted this illustration to encapsulate the founding principles

BEHIND THE COVER of the United States, as well as how modern era.” –Lusi Klimenko, Senior Creative Director

Though no two scientific investigations follow the same path, what they all share are the people—the principal investigators, staff, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads moving the science forward. In the illustration at right, they’re visualized in a space intended to encapsulate some of the many facets of scientific discovery.

Mark Trodden Named Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences

Mark Trodden was named Dean, School of Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, effective June 1. The announcement was made in mid-April by Penn President J. Larry Jameson and Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.

“Dr. Trodden is a distinguished physicist, accomplished academic leader, and deeply respected member of the Penn community, and brings extraordinary breadth and depth of experience to one of the University’s most vital academic enterprises,” Jameson says. “In his previous roles at Penn, Dr. Trodden has earned wide admiration for his principled leadership, collaborative spirit, and ability to navigate the intersection of research excellence, educational mission, and institutional stewardship.”

Since 2023, Trodden has served as Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences, overseeing seven departments and 15 centers and institutes, all while advancing

strategic priorities across the natural sciences and forging key interdisciplinary partnerships within and beyond Penn. In that role, he helped facilitate completion of the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology, engaging deeply with alumni, donors, and volunteer leaders across the School and University community. He arrived at Penn in 2009, and from 2014 to 2022, chaired the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

“It is a profound honor to lead the School of Arts & Sciences at this moment,” Trodden says. “This School is home to some of the most brilliant and creative minds in the world, and I am deeply committed to supporting our faculty, students, staff, and alumni as we advance knowledge, elevate discourse, and prepare our graduates for thoughtful and engaged lives. I look forward to working closely with colleagues across disciplines, and across Penn, to shape the next chapter in our School’s proud history.”

Recent Gifts Advance Key Educational Priorities

Penn Arts & Sciences recently received three transformative gifts that will advance key priorities including undergraduate financial aid and innovative academic options in the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS).

Through an estate gift of over $42 million, William J. Levy, W’57, L’64, created a fund that will support more than 40 civic-minded students annually. This brings Levy’s total support of undergraduate students in the College to $50 million.

The Robert K. Johnson Foundation additionally contributed $8 million to name and endow The Robert K. Johnson Integrated Studies Program, the first-year curriculum for Benjamin Franklin Scholars students pursuing degrees in the College. This residential academic program invites highly motivated students to examine complex themes through the integration of multiple academic disciplines and methodologies.

And The Neubauer Family Foundation contributed $2.55 million to provide tuition support for members of the Philadelphia Police Department to pursue a degree through the new Master of Applied Criminology and Police Leadership program. This LPS program, a first-of-its-kind graduate degree designed by faculty from the Department of Criminology, will offer focused education on crime theories, analytic methods, and policy analysis to guide police leaders, as well as police policy and practice.

“We are profoundly grateful for the generosity and forward thinking of these donors,” says Jeffrey Kallberg, Interim Dean and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History. “Their gifts will impact students for years to come.”

Eric Sucar, University Communications

(Clockwise from left) Wahid Sarwar, C’25, Julia Rotgin, C’25, Keemia Sarafpour, C’25, and Mame Balde, C’25, were part of the 269th College of Arts & Sciences graduating class, which included 1,545 people in 51 majors, hailing from 45 states and 64 countries. Michael Mann, Penn’s Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action, spoke to the Graduate Division’s nearly 400 recipients during their ceremony, and Vice Dean Nora Lewis celebrated with graduates of the College of Liberal and Professional Studies as she handed out 523 degrees.

Penn Arts & Sciences Celebrates 2025 Graduates

At this year’s College of Arts & Sciences graduation ceremony at Franklin Field on May 18, Michael Platt, James S. Riepe University Professor, gave the featured remarks. Platt, who earned his PhD from Penn and today has appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences, the School of Medicine, and Wharton, is known for asking some of the most challenging questions in neuroscience and conceiving innovative ways to find the answers. Working at the intersection of economics, psychology, and neuroscience, his research focuses on the biological mechanisms that underlie decision-making in social environments.

Anthony Wong, C’25, an urban studies major and Hispanic studies minor, was the student speaker. He served as

the president of Penn Mock Trial, a 40-person trial advocacy team, and in 2024, competed at the American Mock Trial Association’s National Championship Tournament. Deeply passionate about urban issues, transportation, and improving city life through law and policy, Wong has interned at SEPTA, Verizon, and the California State Assembly. After graduation, he intends to take a gap year before pursuing a career in law.

The Penn Arts & Sciences Graduate Division ceremony took place May 16 in Irvine Auditorium, with Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Penn’s Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action, as featured speaker. Mann, widely

considered one of the nation’s leading climate scientists, also runs the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Student speakers for the Graduate Division included Felipe Barbieri, Jessica Wojick, and Youngbin Yoon, who earned degrees in Economics, Biology, and Philosophy, respectively.

On May 18, the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) celebrated its graduating class at the Kimmel Center. Global workforce dynamics researcher and strategist Cecil W. Johnson III gave the address. He serves as Johnson & Johnson’s Global Head of Inclusive Business Strategy. He is currently a visiting scholar in the Organizational Dynamics Program and a member of the Penn LPS Employer Advisory Board.

Lisa J. Godfrey; Edward Savaria

Benjamin Nathans Wins Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for his book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

The narrative—called “a prodigiously researched and revealing history” by the Pulitzer committee—tells the story of the dissidents who, beginning in the 1960s, demanded that the Kremlin obey its own laws. Nathans joins only a few others from Penn who have earned the prestigious award, including Tyshawn Sorey, Presidential Assistant Professor of Music, who won in 2024.

Living the Hard Promise

Two events this semester continued the “Living the Hard Promise” series launched in 2023 to engage the campus community in meaningful, empathetic dialogue around the challenging issues of our times. In mid-April, a conversation that included Josephine Park, Associate Dean for Arts and Letters and School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English; Associate Professor of History William Sturkey; and Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor, touched on navigating difficult discussions in the classroom. A second event, this one moderated by Jeffrey Kallberg, Interim Dean and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History, included Daniel Hopkins, Julie and Martin Franklin Presidential Professor of Political Science; Douglas Jerolmack, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science; and Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, offering faculty perspectives on the shifting higher education landscape.

A Physics Breakthrough Prize

Researchers from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN received the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work studying highenergy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ATLAS shares the $3 million award with three other CERN experiments, recognizing the efforts of some 13,500 scientists worldwide, including the Penn ATLAS group.

For decades, members of this team—which today includes Joseph Kroll, Evelyn Thomson, Elliot Lipeles, Dylan Rankin, and Brig Williams of the Department of Physics and Astronomy—have participated in a wide range of LHC research. Penn ATLAS, for example, played a leading role in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle and continues to make precision measurements of the particle’s properties. The team is also confirming and investigating facets of the extraordinarily successful Standard Model, which can be used to describe elementary particles and their interactions in a range of environments, from proton collisions in a lab to the early universe.

The work continues: In 2030, the LHC will move into a new, high-luminosity stage that requires an upgrade of the entire ATLAS detector, where the Penn team is making major, unique contributions. Despite what’s still to come, receiving such an accolade now is well-deserved, says incoming Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences Mark Trodden. “I’m delighted to see Penn’s ATLAS group recognized in such a high-profile manner.” –MICHELE W. BERGER

©CERN/Maximilien

Brice

Eight toroid magnets surround the calorimeter, which measures the energy of particles produced when protons collide in the center of the detector.

Students Honored as 2025 Dean’s Scholars

Penn Arts & Sciences named 20 undergraduate and graduate students as this year’s Dean’s Scholars, a recognition bestowed annually on students who exhibit exceptional academic performance and intellectual promise. They were celebrated at the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum on April 8.

College of Arts & Sciences

Andrea Barajas, C’25, Criminology and Sociology; submatriculant in Criminology

Om Gandhi, C’25, Health & Societies and Neuroscience; submatriculant in Bioengineering

Daphne Glatter, C’25, Ancient History and English

Joy Gong, C’25, Physics; submatriculant in Physics and Astronomy

Adelaide Lyall, C’25, Sociology

Tova Tachau, C’25, Biochemistry, Comparative Literature, and Russian & East European Studies; submatriculant in Comparative Literature & Theory

Eric Yuhua Tao, C’25, Cognitive Science, Mathematics, Logic Information & Computation, and Linguistics; submatriculant in Mathematics

Joey Wu, C’25, Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, Earth and Environmental Science, Bioengineering

Eugenia Xu, C’25, History

College of Liberal and Professional Studies – Undergraduate Program

Cindy Srnka, Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences

College of Liberal and Professional Studies –Professional Master’s Programs

Desra Arriyadi, Master of Environmental Studies

Graduate Division – Doctoral Programs

Vivian Bi, Anthropology

Sophia Cocozza, Music

Alyssa M. Hernandez, Psychology

Joyce Jaeyun Kim, Sociology

Matthew Ray Mena, Chemistry

James Paul Mesiti, Spanish and Portuguese

David Mulder, History of Art

Jacqueline Wallis, Philosophy

Caroline Wechsler, History and Sociology of Science

Lisa J. Godfrey

During the 2025 Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum, Kelly Family Professor of English Al Filreis (left) and statistician and best-selling author Nate Silver had an animated conversation about risk and what those who are risk-averse can learn from those willing to embrace randomness. Their discussion ran the gamut from politics and poker to baseball and Disney princesses.

Mark Devlin Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The 150 total new members—120 from the United States—are recognized for “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Devlin specializes in experimental cosmology. His work in the millimeter and submillimeter spectral bands is geared toward the study of the evolution of structure in the universe. He has led a number of experiments including the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, which just released its sixth and final dataset (p. 10), and the Balloon-Borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope. He was recently appointed co-director of the Simons Observatory, home to a powerful telescope.

Exemplary Teaching Honored

The University and Penn Arts & Sciences annually recognize faculty, lecturers, and graduate students for their distinguished teaching. This year’s honorees include 22 individuals from 10 departments and two programs.

At the University level, three Penn Arts & Sciences faculty received recognition:

Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching

Thomas Mallouk, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research

Philip Nelson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence by Non-Standing Faculty

Robert R. Johnson, Senior Lecturer, Physics and Astronomy

In addition, Penn Arts & Sciences honored the following faculty, who were celebrated at a May reception:

Ira H. Abrams

Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching

David W. Christianson, Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science

Dennis M. DeTurck Award for Innovation in Teaching

James F. English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English

Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research

Arnold Mathijssen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor

Secil Yilmaz, Assistant Professor of History

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty

Alyssa Bohen, Department of Chemistry

Melissa Jensen, Department of English

Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs

Clayton Colmon, Director of Curriculum Design, Arts and Sciences Online Learning

Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs

Nazlı Bhatia, Associate Professor of Practice, Behavioral and Decision Sciences

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students

Krishan M. Canzius, Mathematics

Jordan Carrick, Classical Studies

Christy Dickman, Political Science

James Paul Mesiti, Spanish and Portuguese

Jacob K. Nielsen, English

Henry Wright Noe, Chemistry

Tyler Colby Re, Philosophy

Gwendalynn Carlene Roebke, Philosophy

Julian Noah Tash, History

Andres Villatoro, Sociology

H. Nakata, University of Kyoto, Japan / Simons Observatory

The Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope, near the summit of Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile.

Toasting Penn’s New Home for Energy Science

The Vageloses (center), with, from left to right, Penn’s Board Chair Ramanan Raghavendran, Penn Arts & Sciences Interim Dean Jeffrey Kallberg, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering Vijay Kumar, and Penn President J. Larry Jameson.

On a cold winter day, the mood inside the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology was warm and celebratory, as some 200 people gathered to dedicate the new building named for benefactors P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99, and Diana T. Vagelos, PAR’90, who were in attendance.

Guests also included Penn President J. Larry Jameson and Board Chair Ramanan Raghavendran, Penn Arts & Sciences Interim Dean Jeffrey Kallberg and incoming Dean Mark Trodden, and Dean of Penn Engineering Vijay Kumar, along with many faculty and students who will use the 110,000-square-foot space. Designed by architecture firm Behnisch Architekten, the building is the new home for the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, and has space for students in the dualdegree Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research.

The evening marked the end of a years-long planning and construction phase and the start of a new and exciting chapter in Penn’s study of

energy science. In late 2020, the Board approved design plans, and construction started in early 2022. The first “sails,” the now iconic sunshades that let sunlight into the building and reflect the solar radiation from the glass, went up in June 2023, and in November 2024 the first occupants moved in.

With the lab’s opening, researchers from Penn Arts & Sciences and Penn Engineering now have a state-of-theart physical space to collaborate in the fight against climate change, Kallberg said. “Tonight, we are celebrating not just the opening of an incredible facility, but we are marking our commitment to the important work that will be done in this building.”

The dedication culminated in a lighting ceremony that added dazzling lights to the building’s exterior, illuminated in blue and purple. Guests then had the opportunity to explore the higher floors—each represented by cuisines symbolizing different chemical processes used in cooking—and tour the building that will help shape the future of energy research at Penn and beyond.

–MICHELE W.

BERGER

Six Perspectives on AI

At a late-April Data Driven Discovery Initiative event, artificial intelligence took center stage as a half-dozen faculty from a diverse range of departments explored how advancements in AI and technology are shifting their work.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Howard Marks Presidential Professor of Economics, for example, discussed how AI systems can track the relationship between economic sanctions on oil and a rise in the use of illegal “dark ships.” Irina Marinov, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, laid out how technological advancements have improved climate modeling and expanded research in that realm.

Andrew Zahrt, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and Sudeep Bhatia, Associate Professor of Psychology, spoke about how AI has shifted their fields, offering groundbreaking new ways to understand the complex structures of protein, or changing how experts navigate psychology.

The final two speakers, Carlos Santana, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Maria Cuellar, Assistant Professor of Criminology, leaned into the idea that there’s much still to learn about AI’s use in science. Santana, for example, suggested that his role in a conversation-focused AI project he is currently tackling is as “skeptic and naysayer.” Cuellar, meanwhile, discussed facial recognition technology: “There is an urgent need,” she said, “for research in this area to address unresolved issues around the reliability, fairness, and potential benefits and harms of technological applications in criminal justice.”

–EV CRUNDEN

Lisa J. Godfrey

Ev Crunden

Sudeep Bhatia, Associate Professor of Psychology

BY EV CRUNDEN

I Telescope’s Last ACT

A final batch of data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope shows our universe in its infancy, but Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, says many more exciting projects lie ahead.

t may be hard to fathom that something 13 billion years old had an infancy. But believe it or not, that’s true of our universe, and like proud parents capturing the early moments of a child’s existence, cosmologists have now done the same for the universe’s earliest light—a set of cosmic baby pictures, if you will.

Images and measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration show our now middle-aged universe in its infancy, at a mere 380,000 years old. Those data offer the sharpest view yet of the earliest period humans have ever glimpsed of our cosmos, measuring light that shot through the universe’s early, turbulent period and took billions of years to reach the telescope in the Chilean Andes.

“We have known for some time now that the universe had a beginning and has been expanding ever since,” says Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a member of Penn’s Center for Particle Cosmology, and ACT’s deputy director. “Throughout its evolution, it formed stars, galaxies, and collections of galaxies on immense scales.”

ACT’s new data, he adds, “basically tie the whole thing together.”

The new images mark the sixth and final ACT release, ending an ambitious 15-year

National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded effort with collaborators around the world, including Penn, which has been involved from the start.

Located at an altitude of 10,000 feet on Cerro Toco, a composite volcano in the Atacama Desert, the telescope has been in operation since 2007, winding down in 2022 and releasing its last contributions in the subsequent years.

A cosmological millimeter-wave telescope, ACT has helped researchers explore the radiation that fills space throughout our observable cosmos, what’s known as cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Research on CMB radiation has long been used as proof that the Big Bang kickstarted our universe, filling everything with dense plasma before cooling as it expanded.

With ACT’s final measurements, Devlin and colleagues have gained a more refined sense of our universe’s age—the data appear to confirm that the universe is 13.8 billion years old based on the proximity of the images ACT measured—along with insight into how fast it’s growing.

These findings are the most recent in a tenure filled with notable highlights for ACT, like being the first to detect El Gordo, the largest distant galaxy cluster.

Devlin says the images of our universe as a newborn offer “a great note to end this phase on.”

Though the telescope’s heyday has concluded, Devlin’s time in South America is far from over. He also co-directs the Simons Observatory, a major initiative home to a powerful telescope funded primarily by the Simons Foundation and the NSF, with significant investment from Penn. In spring 2025, he returned to Chile to witness the observatory’s “first light,” which will soon yield cosmological observations.

While his team waits for those results, plenty of other probing questions are kicking into high gear, including one around the Hubble constant, a number in cosmology that describes how fast the universe is expanding. There are also major new findings arguing that dark energy—which makes up nearly three-quarters of the universe—is changing rather than constant.

Teasing out these new threads offers a “very intriguing” path forward, says Devlin, one that builds on the work of ACT while paving the way for fascinating discoveries to come.

Ev Crunden is a staff writer for Omnia magazine.

The Price of Parenthood

Research from Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Alber-Klingelhofer Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology,

reveals how high childcare costs create family income inequality.

BY JUDY HILL

Much has been written about the gender inequality of childcare in the United States, particularly after the pandemic. But as an American Sociological Review paper co-authored by sociologist Pilar Gonalons-Pons makes clear, the high cost of paid childcare also creates direct inequities in family income.

Gonalons-Pons, Alber-Klingelhofer Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology, published the research with Ioana Marinescu of Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice. GonalonsPons says the study idea had been brewing for a while. “I really wanted to flesh out how the way we socially distribute care influences all sorts of outcomes, including, in this case, family income inequality.”

The premise of the researchers’ conclusion is straightforward: As childcare becomes more expensive, in the absence of comprehensive government-provided services and subsidies, women with lower earnings potential are discouraged from pursuing paid work after they give birth. Instead, they take on the unpaid work of staying home to look after the young child—losing substantial income for themselves and their families.

Using data from a national survey that tracks household information for some 50,000 families, GonalonsPons and Marinescu focused on 15-

to 45-year-olds who identify as women, who are partnered with men, and who had gone through their first or second birth.

Analyzing the relationship between birth events and family income, the researchers discovered that for women without college degrees, a $1,000 increase in annual childcare cost was associated with a work week 30 minutes shorter and an 8 percent decline in monthly earnings. By contrast, such an increase didn’t affect work hours or earnings for their male partners or for women with college degrees.

Gonalons-Pons says that understanding how the structure of care in the U.S. influences family income can help elucidate why its income inequality is greater today than in the past, and why the family income gap is larger than in other countries. “In Sweden, for example, which has robust social programs around childcare, family income inequality is significantly less than it is in the U.S.,” she notes.

Both paid and unpaid caregiving leads to economic penalties in the U.S., she says, adding, “How much would inequality among women, by class or by race, change if we got rid of these penalties?” The researchers see this work as a step toward answering such questions.

Judy Hill is a Philadelphia-based writer.

RESEARCH ROUNDUP

Boosting Math Scores

Simple email nudges to teachers can improve the math skills of their young students, according to findings from Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor, and colleagues in Penn’s Behavior Change for Good initiative. The research, which involved more than 140,000 teachers and nearly 3 million elementary-age students, showed that emails referencing data specific to a teacher’s students (versus those without) boosted progress by more than 2 percent, with effects lasting eight weeks after the intervention. “Ultimately,” Duckworth says, “this line of research could help shape smarter, more effective education policies.” The researchers published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Long-Ago Land Use

Climate models work to predict the future by relying, in part, on data from the past about how humans have modified vegetation. Given that people have affected the land for thousands of years, that information can be difficult to come by. Now, through a project called LandCover6k, a team including Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Kathleen Morrison, Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology, have showed that at two important points in agricultural history—6,000 and 12,000 years ago—most land in South Asia was used by hunter-gatherers, who also fished and foraged for food. Morrison says this work, published in PLOS One, “adds to our overall understanding of the interconnected histories of humans and the environment.”

Mortality Risk

In a recent Science Advances paper, a team that included Michael Mann, Penn’s Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action, and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, connected rising temperatures, temperature variability, and extreme heat with increased mortality risk for elderly people in China. To draw this conclusion, the researchers looked at data between 2005 and 2018 for more than 27,000 people, ages 65 and up, as well as temperature and precipitation trends. “Translating fundamental scientific research into action on the ground,” Mann says, “is an important component of our emerging vision here at Penn in the realms of climate and sustainability.”

Saturation Point

In her new book, Associate Professor of Political Science Sarah Bush explores the increasingly crowded landscape of international NGOs.

BY JUDY HILL

uring the 1990s, as the Cold War came to an end, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) flourished. Groups like Amnesty International worked to advance human rights and democracy globally, while Oxfam, Save the Children, and other INGOs focused on delivering humanitarian assistance in the wake of complex emergencies.

In the decades since, says Associate Professor of Political Science Sarah Bush, those groups have functioned in an increasingly dense environment with growing competition for limited resources. In Crowded Out: The Competitive Landscape of Contemporary International NGOs, published this spring by Cambridge University Press, Bush and co-author Jennifer Hadden, a political scientist at Brown University, explore these challenges and how INGOs have responded.

“International NGOs are crucial to global politics because they provide relief following natural disasters and health services in an era of global pandemics, and they advocate for human rights and environmental protection when these issues are under threat,” says Bush. “But they also are facing unprecedented challenges, and the very competitive environment in which these organizations now operate is discouraging the creation

of new groups, encouraging a focus on narrower approaches, and spreading them out globally.”

Having a more specialized mission can have benefits, Bush says. “An organization may develop more efficient processes, become very expert in a particular country or type of programming, or fill an important niche.”

In one book chapter, she and Hadden contrast two INGOs working in the conservation space—the World Wildlife Fund and a smaller organization called Pandas International. Part of the latter group’s strategy, says Bush, is to have “a specific focus on a specific species and a specific area so it can tap into parts of the market not already being served.” She offers as another example the humanitarian groups that deliver telehealth to people in Ukraine who are displaced and cannot access healthcare through traditional channels.

Too much specialization can have downsides, though, says Bush, particularly if it means tackling only a small part of a large systemic problem, such as climate change, or if it decreases an organization’s flexibility. “If you only work in one country, then what do you do if that country becomes less accessible?” she asks. “Or if

you only rely on a certain kind of fundraising, what happens if that funding is no longer available?”

Another challenge Bush and Hadden explore is the oversaturation of INGOs in global hotspots. INGOs have been faulted, says Bush, for being too populous in countries affected by the 2004 tsunami and in Haiti after the 2016 hurricane—even though in both instances, they played a vital role in delivering aid. Sometimes, she adds, “the number of groups can present problems in terms of coordination or overtaxing of local resources.”

As they try to redefine themselves in a new era of global politics, INGOs are adopting innovative strategies that include moving to locations where fewer groups are working, and trying to build capacity with local organizations. They’re also drawing on new digital advocacy organizing methods to mobilize supporters and using direct giving campaigns to raise funds. And though the organizations are, by definition, non-governmental, Bush points out that many do, in fact, receive government funding—support, she adds, that may be imperiled by the current political environment in the United States.

Judy Hill is a Philadelphia-based writer.

Risky Business

In a new book, Cam Grey, Professor of Classical Studies, explores the vital role of human agency in experiencing and mitigating risk and disaster in the late-Roman world.

BY KATELYN SILVA

Uncertainty is a mainstay of life at any point in history. But Cam Grey, Professor of Classical Studies, argues in his new book, Living with Risk in the Late Roman World, that individuals, communities, and societies in ancient Rome approached risk in a unique, agency-driven way, one that prioritized local context and knowledge.

“Romans were nothing like us,” says Grey, adding that their world—covered in his book as the period from the end of the third century through the mid-sixth century CE—doesn’t equate to modern-day life. Romans, he says, lived in a world that’s “not familiar and doesn’t behave in the ways we might think it should.”

The book, 20 years in the making and crystallized during the COVID-19 pandemic, uses anecdotes to demonstrate that those in the late-Roman world knew they were living in uncertain and risky times. Even so, they weren’t deterred from acting and engaging when disasters, disease, or other difficult circumstances arose, often employing spiritual or metaphysical solutions.

Grey points to a story by the ancient Roman Christian writer Jerome about the local people

of a small town near modern-day Dubrovnik, Croatia. When they saw an oncoming tsunami, they rushed to bring the holy man, Hilarion, to the beach so he could protect them. Or there’s the tale of an agricultural writer named Palladius who, relaying the special knowledge of a local expert, suggested that farm workers could ward off hail by greasing their bill hook, an agricultural cutting tool, with bear fat.

The book offers myriad examples of how the Romans encountered disasters, processed them, and consistently used their own agency and local knowledge to mitigate risk at the individual and community levels. It’s a very different approach from today, Grey says.

“Nowadays, there’s so much energy put into pointing out problems and suggesting that somebody else needs to solve them,” he says.

“The most powerful thing that I take from my study of the late Romans is that they were always seizing and taking control for themselves. They didn’t always succeed, and life is hard, but they were always in it—even if some of their actions seem absurd to us now.”

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

FACULTY BOOKSHELF

Recent books from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty

Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics

ROXANNE L. EUBEN

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences

Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders—and How We Can Change That

NICOLE C. RUST Professor of Psychology

The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-Day Saints

JARED FARMER

Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History

Slavery After Slavery

MARY FRANCES BERRY

Geraldine R. Segal

Professor of American Social Thought Emerita

Health and the Body in Early Medieval England

CAROLINE BATTEN

Assistant Professor of English

CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE

Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, and Sudeep Bhatia, Associate Professor of Psychology, explore the ramifications of choice in everyday life and society.

AS TOLD TO BLAKE COLE

Every day, we make an incalculable number of choices, some inconsequential, others life-altering. But when did the notion of autonomous choice emerge and is it ever possible to have complete agency over decisions? Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, and Sudeep Bhatia, Associate Professor of Psychology, study choice in their respective fields. In a conversation guided by Omnia, they explore these questions and more.

When did modern notions of choice arise?

Rosenfeld: There’s nothing new about the idea of people making independent decisions about what they prefer or what direction to go in life, but in much of the modern world the number of options and opportunities for choice have proliferated in almost all domains of our lives. We’ve also increasingly gone from value-laden choices to ones I would describe as value-neutral, meaning they’re a matter of what we desire more than of doing what’s right versus wrong. And maybe most importantly, we’ve given these choices more meaning insofar as they’ve come to stand for something like freedom.

Bhatia: Decision-making as we think of it today is a fairly modern phenomenon that came about right after World War II. It was associated with many economic developments that recast problems of economic theory as problems of individual, rational choice. From that perspective grew many other related disciplines and ways of thinking about choice. The computer also became a bigger force in commerce and academic research and psychologists thought that maybe the mind is something like a computer. And if you take that perspective, then you start asking questions like how does the mind generate behavior? How does the mind decide?

Is self-determination real?

Bhatia: Free will is much more of a metaphysical question. If you’re looking for a philosophical term that might center us, I think “agency” is better. We like to think of people as being responsible for their choices, but ultimately, we are just brains existing in a social context and it’s not clear whether a brain existing in a social context should have the responsibility or freedom so necessary for modern capitalist and democratic and consumer cultures.

Rosenfeld: From the perspective of a historian, how much we’re driven by impulses beyond our control is not really the question, because in much of the modern world we operate as if we have an incredible amount of agency. Especially in the U.S., we narrate the stories of our lives today not in terms of fate or biology or evolution, but largely around what choices we have made at different moments. If you look at the modern novel, you’ll notice it is the “choice genre” par excellence.

To what extent are our choices a product of the systems in which we live and operate?

Rosenfeld: Even if we put somebody in a voting booth with a curtain closed, it’s impossible to imagine they aren’t bringing with them all kinds of experiences, pressures, and interests that impact their preferences. All of those are in play whenever anyone makes a decision. If you go to literature, almost every great novel involves somebody wrestling with a choice, and what they’re wrestling with is usually the tension between their desires and a set of internal and external pressures.

Bhatia: If the mind was not sensitive to context in the way it is, you probably wouldn’t have advertisements or powerful geographic clustering in choices, and something like “choice architecture” wouldn’t matter. Here’s an example: At the grocery store checkout line you see all the knickknacks, maybe small chocolates. That choice architecture has been configured to entice you to buy these products. This is not to say there is no individual preference involved, but the way in which the

preferences get manifested is driven as much by the information presentation.

In our data-driven society, how problematic is choice overload?

Bhatia: In the story of Odysseus, he restrains himself and everyone on his ship to prevent succumbing to the call of the sirens. It’s an example of someone explicitly restricting their own choices to influence their future behavior. People do that all the time nowadays. There is software you can download that’ll explicitly restrict your ability to go on Instagram, Amazon, or Facebook so you can focus. In other cases, we see settings in which people explicitly pick environments where they have less capacity to choose.

Rosenfeld: In a world of increasing options, having 6,000 different pairs of socks or 800 movies to choose from— most of which we know nothing about— produces a kind of anxiety or fear that escalates with major life decisions. “What if I didn’t pick the right person or the right experience or the right school or job?” And maybe most importantly, we’re increasingly aware that too much emphasis on individual decision-making can interfere with our ability to make collective decisions about our collective well-being.

Once you start thinking about choice, it seems to be everywhere. And what I think Sudeep and I are both wondering is not just what’s happened in the past or even now, but what will happen in the world to come—politically, socially, technologically.

Blake Cole is Penn Arts & Sciences’ Director of Advancement Communications.

Scan here for more of Rosenfeld and Bhatia’s conversation about choice.

LET’S GET DIGITAL

An advanced economics course taught by Assistant Professor Juan Camilo Castillo encourages students to apply tools and theories to digital markets in the real world.

BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

As the storage and transmission of information has gone from analog, expensive, and time-consuming to digital, cheap, and fast, new economic models have emerged—models that today’s students will have to reckon with both in the classroom and, eventually, in the real world. This shift was on Juan Camilo Castillo’s mind when he created a course covering the design and regulation of digital markets.

Castillo, an assistant professor of economics, has been teaching The Digital Economy since 2021. Available only to students with a strong background in microeconomics and econometrics, the class moves from theory to practice and does not use a textbook. Instead, Castillo assigns recent academic papers, newspaper articles, and case studies that respond to changes in the market.

“One of the great things about taking an applied class toward the end of an undergraduate career is that students are able to approach concepts in a way that relates directly to real life,” he says. “Students can ask themselves, ‘How do I apply the tools I’ve learned the past couple years to try and understand this problem?’”

That focus on application and emerging technologies seems to appeal to seniors thinking about what’s next; it’s why Lauryn Fuld, C’25, and Thomas Li, C’25, GEN’25, both chose the class.

“I was looking at econ electives and saw some that could have been taught the same way for 20 years,” says Fuld, an economics major. “This course description talked about large language models, major tech companies, and antitrust cases. It seemed like it would provide real-world context for my major.”

Li, a mathematical economics major who is also completing an accelerated master’s degree in data science, will start a doctoral program in quantitative marketing this fall. “Some of the papers

that we read in this class are actually written by professors who I’m interested in working with. It’s cool to see how the fields overlap,” he says.

One of the great things about taking an applied class toward the end of an undergraduate career is that students are able to approach concepts in a way that relates directly to real life.

In the course, students follow lectures that dive deep into the economic forces at play in industries like cryptocurrency and generative AI. But still, Castillo says, it takes work to go from theory to practice.

Fuld says she appreciates Castillo’s willingness to walk through some of the more difficult concepts. “In other classes, we might not even read some of these papers that have really sophisticated econometric models,” she says. “But he will break down the equations and show us how it relates to what we’re talking about in class. And he lets us know we can ask any questions, even if they are tangentially related.”

At times, the class might complicate an idea students encountered earlier in their studies. Here, Li brings up the foundational microeconomic notion that price equals marginal cost times a markup. In other words, a key determinant of the price of a good is how much it costs to produce and distribute.

“But digital goods have very low marginal distribution costs,” he says. “We’ve talked about how some companies, like Facebook, choose to price for free, while others, like Microsoft Office Suite, don’t. It’s been interesting to explore how you can construct an economic theory that explains the pricing structures we see around us.”

Fuld added minors in statistics and data science to her economics major because together, they let her explore her interest in leveraging economic frameworks and data interpretation to ask questions about human behavior. The Digital Economy pulls it all together. “It’s almost serendipitous to have taken this class in my last semester,” she says. “It’s the perfect synthesis of the past four years.”

Castillo says he sees the course as something of a grand finale for econ majors and hopes it will serve as a gateway to whatever they aim to pursue next. “Applying theory and statistical tools requires a lot of practice,” he says. “Once students have a good understanding of what a real-life digital market looks like, they can apply it to other settings, like healthcare or labor markets.”

His focus on digital economies is intentional, though. Castillo says that while the future is speculative, digital tools are on the path to causing an economic revolution.

“No one is able to wrap their heads around the implications of these technologies or what the market will look like five or 10 years down the road,” he says. “But it is clear they will have a big impact, and I feel it’s necessary to give my students the tools to understand what’s to come.”

Lauren Rebecca Thacker is a Providencebased higher ed writer who covers topics from poetry to politics

The Life Cycle of an Idea

Virtually every product and breakthrough we take for granted— from life-altering technologies to life-saving medical advancements— started at a university, and with fundamental scientific research.

By Michele W. Berger

Illustrations by Jing Zhang

That cellphone in your pocket likely runs on a battery that requires vast amounts of nickel and cobalt. But what’s the most sustainable, easiest, and cheapest way to extract those elements?

Eric Schelter, Hirschmann-Makineni Professor of Chemistry, is working on that problem, ensuring that something most of us use daily—hourly, even—can be produced with minimal environmental damage and recycled indefinitely.

The same can be said of research from Charles Kane and Eugene Mele, both Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professors of Physics, who uncovered a new class of materials known as topological insulators. With that discovery, which won the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, they advanced how we think about quantum materials with possible applications in next-generation electronics.

Then there’s the work from Arjun Yodh, James M. Skinner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who uses light fluctuations in milk to study motion in opaque systems, unearthing a useful way to measure blood flow and diagnose injury. There’s also wide-ranging work in psychology, like the efforts ongoing at the Positive Psychology Center, which is conducting research about human flourishing, or that from Michael Kahana, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology, who is using electrical signals to address memory loss after traumatic brain injury.

It’s not hard to come up with examples of innovations and breakthroughs from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty, discoveries that started as basic scientific inquiry and evolved into a pioneering product or an enhanced method, revolutionizing a field in the process.

Such research is part of a vast machine at Penn, made up of 195 centers and institutes and more than 5,000 research faculty. The University is also training the next generation of scholars, including more than 2,000 graduate students within Penn Arts & Sciences alone. Many of the ideas these academics generate go from theoretical to tangible with help from the Penn Center for Innovation, which has filed thousands of patent applications, created more than 7,000 commercialization agreements, and formed more than 300 startup companies since 2014.

You fund incredibly talented people to do what they’re passionate about, often driven by basic curiosity about how things work, the mysteries of the universe, or other fundamental puzzles that excite their imaginations.

For decades, this kind of research enterprise has been facilitated by a collaboration between universities and the government that’s been “breathtakingly successful,” says Mark Trodden, incoming Dean, School of Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy.

“You fund incredibly talented people to do what they’re passionate about, often driven by basic curiosity about how things work, the mysteries of the universe, or other fundamental puzzles that excite their imaginations,” he says. “Some fraction of the time, all that happens is you learn something entirely new about the world—which is wonderful in and of itself.

It Takes a Scientific Village

No two scientific investigations follow the same path, and even those in a single department or field likely use different tools. What they do share are the people, the principal investigators (PIs), staff, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads moving the science forward.

Undergraduates help with basic tasks that not only progress the research but provide experience in scientific fields they may have never worked in before.

But sometimes this leads to developing the science that gives you MRI machines, or understanding how Einstein’s theories allow GPS to work, or inventing the fundamental laws that underlie most of the technology in our modern lives.”

Basic scientific research, Trodden adds, allows us to study the building blocks of life to better understand mechanisms and processes that could eventually (and ideally) translate into new products and services that not only have the potential to alter how we live but could also save lives. Brain research, for instance, is on the cusp of “many tremendous breakthroughs, in areas like effective treatments for Alzheimer’s and cures for Parkinson’s and insights into how to treat psychiatric conditions,” says Professor

PIs, who are usually standing faculty and scientists more advanced in their careers, formulate hypotheses, strategize scientific direction, and apply for grants, among many other roles. They guide the science, play an integral role in it, and mentor the other people in the group doing it.

Postdoctoral fellows join a lab for several years following the completion of their PhDs as a way to advance their skills while contributing to and often helping to develop and lead cutting-edge lines of research.

Graduate students, who often spend five to seven years on a doctoral degree (less for a master’s) tend to specialize in a single field of study and a focused aspect of the scientific inquiry.

of Psychology Nicole Rust. If the basic research engine halts, she adds, “we lose progress. It just stops, and we’re frozen where we are now, with billions of people across the world suffering.”

If the basic research engine halts, we lose progress. It just stops, and we’re frozen where we are now, with billions of people across the world suffering.

To pull back the curtain on how basic science works, we’re highlighting some of the brain research and energy science being conducted at Penn Arts & Sciences,

two of many areas where this kind of groundbreaking work happens. Above, we offer a visual of just how many people it takes to do these types of science, from principal investigators to the undergraduates helping conduct the research.

It’s all with an eye toward highlighting the life cycle of a scientific idea. This is important, Trodden adds, because “there is a convincing argument to be made that essentially every drug, every technological advance, every biotech advance, every IT advance, every computational advance had its genesis in or critical contributions from a university lab funded by the federal government.”

Michele W. Berger is the editor of Omnia magazine.

Staff scientists, lab technicians, and other support staff contribute highly specialized technical skills and often keep the group running.

Big Ideas in

Energy Science and Brain Research

Neuroscience and energy are two particular

strengths for Penn Arts & Sciences. The examples here showcase how an idea can move through the scientific process, starting as a question, evolving into an answer that eventually contributes to life-altering technologies or life-saving medical advancements.

Professors Marsha Lester and Joseph Francisco investigate chemical processes that cleanse the atmosphere and aerosol particles that impact climate.

Research from theoretical chemist Andrew Rappe has enabled new materials for efficient lighting and advanced new paradigms for energy-efficient computing

Chemists Karen Goldberg and Tom Mallouk are developing methods to turn CO2 into fuel using sunlight.

Topological insulators, discovered by physicists Charles Kane and Eugene Mele, are important for applications in energyefficient electronics and quantum computing

Physicist Bo Zhen is working on the development and use of meta-materials, with many applications, including the efficient harvesting of solar energy

Professor Eric Schelter is working on techniques to separate and recycle elements like cobalt and nickel needed for the batteries that power many products.

Professor Jeffrey Winkler discovered a new way to make the drug Ritalin, used to treat ADHD and other central nervous system ailments

To better understand neurodegeneration, chemist E. James Petersson studies how proteins misfold, work that’s led to Parkinson’s disease imaging agents currently in human trials

Understanding how to detect neutrinos has allowed physicist Joshua Klein and colleagues to develop technologies useful for applications like PET scanners, which detect particles in a similar way.

Professor Michael Kahana is tackling memory loss from traumatic brain injury through technologies that sense momentary lapses and electrical stimulation that restores healthy brain function

Neuroscientist Michael Platt created a portable headband that allows for clinical-grade, real-time brain-activity measurements on the go, removing barriers to this type of care and data collection.

Using fruit flies, biologist Nancy Bonini is working to protect the brain against diseases like Huntington’s, ALS, and Alzheimer’s.

Physicist Arjun Yodh discovered that the same method to understand motion in opaque soft materials can be used to diagnose and treat injuries like stroke.

How Do You Authen cate a Long-Lost Chopin Waltz?

By Michele W. Berger

Jeffrey Kallberg was partway through a 10-day research trip in Europe last summer when he received an intriguing inquiry from the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City: Could he help them authenticate what they believed was a never-before-seen Chopin waltz?

“It’s my business to know what Chopin manuscripts are out there,” says Kallberg, Interim Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History, who has studied the composer’s works for five decades. “There are some in private collections that I haven’t seen, but for the most part, a handful keep popping up. I’m not accustomed to looking at a photo of one and not having a clue, so that was pretty exciting.”

Music historian and Chopin expert Je rey Kallberg recently helped veri the first significant manuscript from the famous composer since the 1930s.

they thought they had. And, even still, doubters wondered why the 24-measure waltz was much shorter than others Chopin usually wrote, why it started with a loud dissonance when Chopin generally opted for quieter sounds, why the physical paper the manuscript appeared on was so small.

Then, this spring, additional details came to light. Another manuscript confirmed as Chopin’s reemerged at auction for the first time since the mid-1950s. At Kallberg’s request, the dimensions of the staves—the lines where the notes sit—were measured, and they were an exact match to the Morgan waltz. What’s more, on the back of that same song was a long-hidden note that referenced the waltz itself.

The trouble was, being thousands of miles from his own piano, Kallberg had nowhere to play the piece.

“I had to listen to it in my mind, read the music, look at it. We’re trained to do that, but it’s not the same as playing it,” he says. “You want to feel it in your fingers.”

He considered trying it out on the Strasbourg train station’s public piano but opted to instead wait until he was home in Philadelphia. “When I sat down and played it,” says Kallberg, whose tenure as interim dean ended in May, “it confirmed in my mind, at least, what I thought was the case: Here was a piece by Chopin that we had not known of before.”

It took weeks of detailed probing from Kallberg and Robinson McClellan, the associate curator of music at the Morgan, to verify what

“Chopin never writes about his music this way,” Kallberg says. “It’s like a magical ending to a Baroque play.”

Finally, prompted by an inquisitive chemist named Philip Harrison who’d seen a recent interview he’d done, Kallberg reexamined a letter Chopin wrote to his family in December 1830. In language similar to what appeared on the back of the song, the letter explicitly described a waltz Chopin had composed but hadn’t yet shared. “It’s almost certainly the case,” Kallberg says, “that Chopin wrote both on the same paper, which he’d purchased in Vienna. They date from around the same time. They were both folded vertically, which suggests being put into an envelope and mailed, and the recipients were members of Chopin’s family. This ties up many of our loose ends.”

Objec ve Evidence

The progression to get here, of course, was an evolution. Kallberg’s research generally focuses on what he describes as “compositional process,” which means trying to understand how Chopin’s musical style evolved through the 230 or so known pieces he created in his lifetime. The work is painstaking. It entails investigating both musical changes, like the melody and rhythms, and physical ones, like handwriting and paper size. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Chopin’s manuscripts look like and what they mean,” Kallberg says.

handwriting, and aspects of the paper size including its quality, thickness, material construction, and presence or absence of watermarks.

When I sat down and played it, it confirmed in my mind, at least, what I thought was the case: Here was a piece by Chopin that we had not known of before.

When he received the request from the Morgan Library, he knew he needed to see the original copy of the waltz firsthand. He arranged a trip to New York, hoping to sort out objective evidence like ink,

Kallberg says seeing the manuscript in person was a relief. When he first viewed the image via computer, it filled his entire laptop screen, distorting the image. In actuality, it’s quite small, 4 x 5 inches, or a little larger than an index card, and when seen in its original dimensions, revealed Chopin’s

Music historian Jeffrey Kallberg studied facets like the composition length, paper and ink, even handwriting and placement of the words “Valse” and the composer’s name to determine whether the manuscript—shown here in the dimensions of the actual manuscript from the Morgan Library—was a true Chopin.

musical handwriting as it looks in all of his other authenticated manuscripts.

Next Kallberg looked for watermarks. “Chopin lived at a time that was transitioning from handmade paper with watermarks to handmade paper without watermarks to machinemade paper with watermarks to machine-made paper without watermarks,” he says.

that can generate (relatively) concrete answers. Understanding the musical evidence—the “stylistic fingerprints,” as Kallberg calls them—can be much more difficult.

Collaborators at the Morgan tested the paper and ink. The former was machine-made wove paper, the latter a type called iron gall ink developed in the 4th century and remaining popular through Chopin’s time. “That all checked out,” Kallberg says.

The final physical element was the handwriting of two words— Valse or “Waltz” in the top-left corner, and “Chopin” at top center—as well any other visible penmanship. Everything on the page, including symbols like the bass clef, matched Chopin’s hand except for one: his name. “That’s not unusual,” Kallberg explains. “People who own Chopin manuscripts would often scribble his name on it if he hadn’t.”

In this case, this process started with the composition length— 24 measures, which Chopin asks the musician to repeat once, for a total of 48 measures. It takes just over one minute to play. “Chopin loved short pieces. It’s kind of what he’s known for. He wrote a prelude that was just nine measures long,” Kallberg says.

as a gift. The early years of Chopin’s music making aligned with a moment when autograph albums were in vogue. People would glue or slip prized possessions into these scrapbooks, which fit small papers generally around the size of the waltz in question.

Then there was the piece’s progression. “Two thirds of this waltz do what we think a Chopin waltz should do, but one third doesn’t, and that’s the way it begins,” Kallberg says. “The first third is very odd.”

All the physical signs pointed to a newly discovered Chopin waltz. So, they next turned to the musical evidence.

S lis c Fingerprints

In solving this type of puzzle, the physical evidence is, objectively, easier to parse. Was the ink appropriate to the time period? Does the handwriting match that of the study subject? They’re tangible, testable aspects

Specifically, at measure seven, Chopin asks for triple forte, denoted with three of the lowercase letter “f” and indicating maximum volume, a stark contrast to the quieter sounds he generally used. What follows the loud dissonance is melancholy and subtle—an evolution leading to the question arguably hardest to answer: Why might Chopin have written this piece and for whom?

But this spring, evidence emerged to suggest that the waltz was probably written for Chopin’s sister Ludwika. To verify this, Kallberg focused on one line from a December 1830 letter from Vienna that Chopin penned to his family: “I wanted to send you a waltz I’ve composed but it’s already late; you will still get it.” It was eerily similar to recently discovered language on the back of a known Chopin song manuscript (more on that later) and explains why the waltz itself wasn’t signed and dated, “as was customarily the case for presentation manuscripts,” Kallberg says. “Signing and dating was something you did for highborn acquaintances or compositional colleagues, but not for your own family.”

Provenance

Some suggest the triple forte and the unusual sound at measure seven indicate it was an inside joke for the pianist who would play it. Other theories include the idea that he was copying someone else’s music or using it to teach composition. Kallberg initially believed the most likely explanation, given Chopin’s social circles, was that the composer created the manuscript

Until the turn of events revealing Chopin’s sister as the waltz’s likely recipient, it wasn’t clear that Kallberg and McClellan might soon—or ever—verify that particular detail. That’s because to fully authenticate a musical manuscript, it’s necessary to understand its provenance, or in this case, who took ownership of the sheet music after it left Chopin’s hands, and how it ended up in the Morgan Library almost 100 years later. It’s not as simple as tracing the historical record.

Go back far enough and the available evidence is scant. It is known that A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., a former director of the New York School of Interior Design, had the manuscript at some point, perhaps acquired from the famous Walter R. Benjamin Autographs. Kallberg had scoured copies of the shop’s catalogs for more information, but found only a letter Chopin wrote to his doctor in the last year of his life, no waltz.

Kallberg had also been following two leads in a Polish catalog of Chopin’s manuscripts, one a description of Chopin juvenilia on display in St. Petersburg in 1911, another an anecdote about a review in the Polish press of a concert that might have featured this waltz. “Like most needles in haystacks, all we found was hay,” he says. “I did find references to the pianist who played the concert, but nothing to help me.”

Kallberg about an upcoming auction at Berlin’s J. A. Stargardt auction house. A Chopin song manuscript would be listed, and it was the same size as the waltz they’d been studying. At Kallberg’s request, the auction house measured the dimensions of the staves, the lines that hold the musical notes. At first, it didn’t match the waltz, but Kallberg realized the measurements had been taken from an incorrect starting point. The second attempt, this one from the correct spot, was an exact match, indicating both pieces were Chopin’s and from the same time period.

“That alone would’ve made my day,” Kallberg says. But then they turned the paper over.

Then, in March, McClellan from the Morgan Library emailed

On the back, which had been hidden for nearly 70 years, the researchers discovered a note Chopin had written to someone close to him—a friend or family member, perhaps. The composer stated his regret at not being able

to finish the second page of the song that day, and pledged to send it along soon, accompanied by a waltz he had also promised. “He literally refers to the Morgan waltz,” Kallberg says. “This almost never happens.”

Two thirds of this waltz do what we think a Chopin waltz should do, but one third doesn’t, and that’s the way it begins. The first third is very odd.

This revelation sealed it for Kallberg. The language similarity to the December 1830 letter, plus the paper and folds of the manuscripts, confirmed the waltz was meant for Ludwika, the most musical of Chopin’s family members and who had, herself, made copies of the song manuscript.

Kallberg often teaches about Chopin, including a recent graduate-level course called Chopin’s Things (right), which explored the meanings of historical intersections between material culture and Chopin’s music.

Edward Savaria

Brooke Sietinsons

Looking Ahead

Announcing the discovery of an unknown manuscript by a famous composer is sure to attract doubters. Before now, the last significant piece of Chopin’s showed up in the 1930s, so Kallberg understood people hesitating to believe a new one had been found. But, with the latest evidence, Kallberg is more than sure the waltz is Chopin.

“Now that we know this, we’re free to think deeply about what it says about Chopin’s approach to the genre. It expands our ideas and lets us confidently say this is a kind of waltz that Chopin wrote that we hadn’t known before. And it gives us food for thought about Chopin’s style and his approach to gift giving and interacting in society.”

Of course, at least one question remains: What explains the music’s odd progression from crashing dissonance to melancholic melody? Even without

knowing that, though, Kallberg seems genuinely surprised and pleased at how much has been learned in such a short time.

Since that original email from the Morgan team, Kallberg has played the waltz many times, including at Penn on a donated Érard piano—one of two major piano makers in Paris at the time Chopin lived there. Érards have a lighter, more metallic sound. The keys are slightly narrower, and the pedals work a little differently, Kallberg explains.

There’s something extraordinary about playing a newly discovered Chopin piece on the type of piano he, himself, may have played it on, Kallberg adds. The piece likely sounds different than on a modern piano. One can almost imagine Chopin tinkering on the keys, resulting in a new waltz, just 24 measures long—mere seconds of music that expand what the world knows about one of the most famous composers of all time.

Michele W. Berger is the editor of Omnia magazine.

Four Penn Arts & Sciences faculty offer ideas about democracy and its relationship to wealth, modern information environments, social identities, and shared norms.

By Katelyn Silva

Approximately 2,500 years ago, the Greeks invented democracy, a form of government predicated on the principle that power should be vested in the people. “Then, just as now, it faced challenges,” said Peter Struck, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, at the 2025 Ben Talks in New York City.

Plato, he went on to say, was skeptical of that form of government, thinking it would lead to autocracy; instead, the philosopher insisted on core values like debate and reason. “These are both the hallmarks of a great education and the necessary prerequisites of democracy,” Struck told an auditorium of more than 270 alums at the Times Center. “I learn nothing when I’m in a room full of people who think exactly like I do. Differences of opinion are the engine that make our world advance in knowledge.”

It is a “unique moment in the modern history of the United States,” he added, before turning over the conversation to four faculty experts who had come to share their thoughts on what constitutes a democracy, as well as how wealth, modern information environments, social identities, and shared norms each affect democracies.

What follows are their insights about democracy—past, present, and future.

Illustration by Nick Matej

MICHELE MARGOLIS

The Belief Identity Paradox

In a representative democracy, citizens have preferences they attempt to advance by participating in the public sphere. They do this through actions, like who they elect, or by attending a protest or writing to a policymaker. “This is the idealized form of how democracy works,” said Michele Margolis, an associate professor of political science and election analyst on the NBC Decision Desk. “But like all things, the reality differs tremendously from this imagined ideal.”

Margolis, whose work focuses on American politics, particularly public opinion, political psychology, and the interplay between religion and politics, is conducting new research about how social identities may supersede personal beliefs, influencing the ways in which individuals behave politically.

Americans believe it’s a dire threat to the world, yet also see environmentalists as people with whom they have little in common. And about half of people who strongly identify as gun rights supporters “simultaneously want to see a fair number of guns off the market,” she said.

“The first takeaway from my research is that people’s beliefs and these identities are not nearly as closely connected as we might assume,” she said. “The second finds that it is identities that matter when it comes to politics.”

JEFFREY GREEN

Democracy and Wealth

What’s behind the growing distrust of and frustration with democracy in the United States? How does wealth affect who has greater democratic power? And what do citizens now believe about how much influence wealth should reap in civic life?

Jeffrey Green, Professor of Political Science and Andrea Mitchell Endowed Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, touched on these and other key questions during his talk.

In her talk, she spoke about that new research, arguing that in reality, Americans are not acting politically based on what they believe, but rather based on their social identities. She called this the belief identity paradox. “There’s a disconnect between the beliefs that Americans hold and the identities that they attach to themselves,” she said.

Margolis provided examples from recent surveys she conducted: Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that gender discrimination against women is a large problem, yet the majority of those people don’t identify as feminists. Regarding climate change, her research found that 25 percent of

There’s a disconnect between the beliefs that Americans hold and the identities that they attach to themselves.

Margolis noted that those who identify with a group are more likely to act on behalf of it by donating money, attending a protest, or writing to a member of Congress. “They’re also more likely to respond more emotionally to their group’s successes and losses, and to interpret objective events through that group lens. They’re doing that regardless of their beliefs. In other words, it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are on abortion; it matters whether you call yourself ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life.’”

The “striking result” of the work so far, she said, means that “we have folks who are adopting a label while not holding the beliefs, but nonetheless are acting politically like they’re a member of that team.”

As Green observed, mounting distrust and frustration may stem, in a way, from something good—that we the people expect more from our democratic regimes than did citizens past. Specifically, modern notions of democracies mean they are more responsive to everyone, regardless of a person’s socioeconomic status. Until the 20th century, this wasn’t the case, with the wealthy unquestionably dominating politics and civic life, said Green, who elucidated the point by showing a slide of James Madison, fourth President of the United States, and a quote asserting “the ordinary influence possessed by property.”

In 1800, only three states had universal white male suffrage, meaning men didn’t need to own property to vote. By the 1820s, the country was moving more wholeheartedly in that direction, contemplating removing the requirement altogether. Nevertheless, Madison and many others continued to assume that the rich would retain disproportionate sway in public life.

Presenters included (from left to right) Jeffrey Green, Professor of Political Science and Andrea Mitchell Endowed Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Donovan Schaefer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies; Michele Margolis, Associate Professor of Political Science; and Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor and Chair of History.

“One thing that separates our time from his,” Green said, “is that we don’t accept this so easily.”

Green—whose research encompasses democracy, political philosophy, and contemporary social theory— argued that the past two centuries have pushed back on the idea that the wealthy should naturally have disproportionate influence in politics, and the past 50 years have “affirmed, or at least not rejected” the principle of fair equality of opportunity. This idea, from American political philosopher John Rawls, asserts that children should grow up with equal prospects of educational and career attainment, and “similarly talented and motivated citizens” should have equal prospects of influence, independent of their wealth.

Citing a recent book by political scientists Larry Jacobs and Ben Page, Green described a concept that Americans, across partisan lines, seem to agree on: conservative egalitarianism. “What’s conservative is that most Americans don’t like redistribution,” he explained. “But what’s egalitarian is they like equality of opportunity.” Green went on to lament, however, that nowhere in the world is democracy coming close to realizing fair equality of opportunity.

Because of that reality, Green said, he questions whether it’s time to reassess Madison’s assertion of the ordinary influence possessed by property—not because it’s morally right, but rather as a “recognition that wealth is so formidable,” and therefore, it may be “naive” to think fair equality of opportunity can ever be fully achieved.

DONOVAN SCHAEFER

Democracy and Information

It’s undeniable that the American political landscape is hyper-divided, and perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than online, said Donovan Schaefer, an associate professor of religious studies who researches affect and emotion in media, culture, politics, religion, and science.

“We live in a highly fragmented information environment,” Schaefer said. “It seems like different people know or believe very different things about the world and have a hard time connecting with each other.” There’s also a prevailing belief, he added, that “filter bubbles” create or exacerbate the political divide and that people are not exposed to

counter-information because the digital ecosystem obstructs that movement.

Schaefer disagrees with that premise. “I don’t think it’s true that people are not presented with counterarguments,” he said. “In fact, I think one feature of our information ecosystem is that the other side’s viewpoints are often held up on display—and dismissed.” Instead, he argued, there is a “much deeper, more fundamental dimension” at play than digital gatekeeping: emotion.

bear in mind that some styles of interpretation are more alluring, seductive, and politically powerful because of how they land.”

SOPHIA ROSENFELD Democratic Norms in Crisis

Are democratic norms in crisis? That’s the central question Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, posed to the audience during her talk.

Democracy doesn’t really work based on just laws and institutions that support them. It also needs habits of mind.

“Our beliefs have an emotional aspect to them that can’t be erased,” he said, “whether they’re true or false, whether it’s ideas that we’re familiar with, new information, new perspectives—there’s always a kind of emotional aspect to that flow of information. This is important because it shapes what we find convincing.”

Schaefer used the example of conspiracy theorists to emphasize the point. “There’s a popular sensibility that conspiracy theorists are uninformed. But that’s not true. Conspiracy theorists are hyperinformed,” he noted. They believe falsehoods because they feel them to be true, and they feel them to be true because of how the information was presented, Schaefer argued. “If we want to draw better maps of our information ecosystem,” he concluded, “we have to

A liberal democracy is predicated not only on majoritarianism, Rosenfeld said. This means that the choices of the majority rule and that civil liberty protections exist for individuals, including those with less power. However, she added, “democracy doesn’t really work based on just laws and institutions that support them. It also needs habits of mind.”

Rosenfeld, who specializes in European and American intellectual cultural history since 1650, focuses on research topics that are “so ordinary and obvious that we never talk about them except, perhaps, when they’re in crisis.”

underlying societal agreement about what the world looked like, a baseline that actually allowed for disagreement about how to make all kinds of decisions, from the everyday to those at the policy level. “That’s been challenged” by many factors, she added, including the rise of misinformation and disinformation.

What’s more, the shared agreement that rules matter is also tenuous, as is the notion of solidarity with others. “Solidarity doesn’t mean you have to love everybody or have them over for dinner, but you must believe that other people’s fates matter, that people’s suffering or death is your concern,” she said.

During her talk, she argued that three key democratic norms or habits of mind—the notion of truth mattering, agreement on the rules of play, and a sense of solidarity with others—are in danger around the world and have been for the past decade.

“I wrote a book, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, about the problem of truth and democracies because it’s something we generally take for granted,” she said, adding that in the past, there was more

Rosenfeld also noted a growing and troubling indifference or antipathy, even, among Americans that, if not reversed, undermines the ability for democracy to fundamentally work. “All these norms are under stress at the moment, and all require thinking about solutions, legal challenges, and institutional reforms of various kinds,” she said. It’s part of what she covers in her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom and Modern Life, which details how personal choice in the modern world became equated with freedom. (See more on p. 14.)

“I’m interested in the dangers of over-reliance on choice, as if that’s the only democratic or capitalist value that we need now,” she concluded, “because I do think we also need conviction about the truth, a sense of solidarity or common purpose with others, and some sense that the rules matter.”

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

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How a team led by , Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, used physics to understand how river muck transforms a baseball’s grip.

BY ILLUSTRATIONS

BY

Doug Jerolmack is a geophysicist who studies the forces at work in places where earth—dirt, sand, rock—meet water or air.

Doug was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Downingtown. By the time he came back to Philly, as a student at Drexel, he was already obsessed with rivers.

As an undergraduate, Doug focused on understanding what happens when land and water meet.

And now—through fieldwork, experiments, and theory—Doug and his team at the Penn Soft Earth Dynamics Lab focus every day on understanding the mechanics of earth materials.

They look at the patterns that emerge at the interface of fluid and sediment on Earth—and other planetary surfaces—and how these patterns evolve over time and place.

Their methods help explain a wide range of things, like how rivers change and shape the landscape over time.

They study the evolution of desert dunes and have developed a theory to explain their patterns.

They study the physics of what happens when earth moves with catastrophic results like landslides, or slower impacts like coastal erosion.

They study the geometry of the surface of the Earth, confirming that the average shape of rocks is a cube.

And by applying what they learn about Earth to other planets, they’ve found strong evidence of ancient riverbeds on Mars.

Recognizing that Doug’s group is a powerhouse when it comes to dirt, a sportswriter approached them in 2019 to analyze something known in the baseball world as “magic mud.”

For nearly 75 years, equipment managers for every baseball team in the country have been using Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud on baseballs.

The special mud removes their sheen and makes sure pitchers can get a dependable grip.

This special muck is found in just one place: a location in South Jersey along the Delaware River.

The exact spot is a trade secret of the Bintliff family crew, the people who harvest hundreds of pounds of river mud every year to supply the baseball community with enough of it to de-slick baseballs for an entire season.

The project was a little out of left field for the Penn Soft Earth Dynamics Lab. But Doug and his group were intrigued.

Doug’s team included postdoctoral researcher Shravan Pradeep; Paulo Arratia, Professor and Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Scholar in Penn Engineering; and undergraduate researcher Xiangyu Chen.

They explored the physics and chemistry of the magic mud to unravel what makes it so special.

It was clear from the start of their analysis that there’s something unusual about this mud.

The team set about designing a series of tests that simulate the interaction between the pitcher’s hand and the ball.

They even built a synthetic finger to study ball-to-hand interactions!

Led by Shravan, the team devised three sets of experiments to measure how the mud works.

Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2024.

An advanced strain- and stress-control rheometer was used on the rubbing mud to measure its spreadability.

The team designed a custom ballon-plate soft tribology apparatus to measure the surface friction on clean and mudded baseballs.

The team measured adhesive forces on clean and mudded baseball leather using atomic force microscopy—a veryhigh resolution imaging technique.

The mud offers “a very special combination.”

The relative proportions of cohesive particulates, frictional sand, and water conspire to make a material that flows like skin cream, but grips like sandpaper.

The research team notes that at least part of the mud’s magic is probably related to the proprietor’s processing—a trade secret that seems to involve straining, skimming, rinsing, and allowing particles to settle.

Their conclusion: Any attempt to create a synthetic substance to replace the mud would be foolish!

The components of Rubbing Mud are nothing special, but its mechanical behavior is.

The research provides insight that can fuel the quest to replace synthetics with sustainable geomaterials.

This mud could be a very effective lubricant, if gritty sand is removed. Mud could also be used as a friction agent for improving traction on slippery surfaces.

The combination of enhanced friction and adhesion of dried mud makes it promising for use as a binding agent, to improve the properties of locally sourced geomaterials for construction.

The magic mud study is informing other work of the Penn Soft Earth Dynamics Lab, like its ongoing studies about flow behavior in mudslides.

The new insights on adhesion and grip can be applied to problems like the interaction of feet and wheels with wet and dry muddy substrates, an understanding that’s relevant to the team’s work on developing walking robots that may someday go to Mars.

And one more outcome: Doug has learned a few things about baseball.

Loraine Terrell is Executive

From to PERIODIC TABLE Libretto

Growing up as the child of a famous scientist, Karyl Charna Lynn, CW’65, was expected to follow her father’s path. She pursued chemistry throughout her schooling, but when she started writing about opera, she knew she’d found her passion.

By Michele W. Berger

Karyl Charna Lynn, CW’65, grew up in a “scientific but quiet household.” She understood that her dad worked in atomic energy, but there were never any dinner-table conversations about his job. “I knew absolutely nothing except never to ask my father what he did at work,” she says.

As it turns out, her father, Bernard Kopelman, was part of the Manhattan Project, traveling to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oakridge, Tennessee, to work on the atomic bomb. Such details emerged later in Lynn’s life, but as a child—and an only child, at that—one thing was clear: Her scientist father, with his PhD in

thermodynamics, expected her to follow his path. “He always had this vision of me being an important scientist like him,” Lynn explains.

But writing was her passion, and almost accidentally, she discovered a love of opera. Combining the two, she turned an avocation into a vocation. “I started as a scientist and ended up as an opera critic,” Lynn says. During a career that’s spanned decades, she’s written six books on the subject, traveling the world to visit more than 300 opera houses. For 28 years, she worked for the London-based Opera Now magazine as a contributing editor, critic, and correspondent, and today continues reviewing operas for her own website.

MUSIC Jbetween k CHEM LABS

The opera industry Lynn first started paying attention to barely resembles what exists now, she says. “One major change is it went from the singers being the most important part of an opera to the directors having the majority of the power.” Today, according to Lynn, opera productions with traditional staging are a relative rarity compared to updated, minimalistic, or symbolically infused versions aimed at making them more relatable to today’s audiences and attracting new operagoers to the theatre.

Lynn gets it. “Some opera performances are very powerful. Others

I have trouble staying awake through,” she says. “It just really depends.” The first opera she saw, at age 5, was Hansel and Gretl, which she recalls being fine—“nothing extraordinary.” When she was 7, her parents brought her to her first “real” opera, Tristan und Isolde, “which was, like, six hours long,” she recalls. “I refused to go to another.”

Back then it w all male musician.

No wome. After two year, I ecided I wanted more than just  watch these men  tails play instrument.

“Back then it was all male musicians. No women. After two years I decided I wanted more than just to watch these men in tails play instruments. That’s when I started going back to New York. My mother had a subscription to the Met, and I used to meet her there.”

During that time, Lynn also took whatever humanities classes she could fit into her schedule at Penn, courses like History of the Opera (still taught today), History of the Symphony, and Russian History. “Those were the first three As I got, and I only got one A in a science course,” she recalls. “Science was easy for me, but I never studied that hard.” She graduated from Penn in 1965 and headed to a PhD program at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons “where I got one C, a failing grade in graduate school,” she says. “That was my rebellion— I didn’t want a career in science.”

The boycott didn’t last long, though, because her parents enjoyed the genre, and growing up on Long Island meant close proximity to the New York City theatre world. “I was brought up in a performing arts cultural environment. I had interests in the arts,” she says. “But academically, I was pushed into chemistry.”

After attending Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for prep school, she came to Penn, intrigued by its chemistry department, its proximity to a big city, and its distance from New England’s winter weather. (Being co-ed after an allgirls prep school didn’t hurt, either, she says.) Lynn found the chemistry courses easy, but felt frustrated by her 20 hours of classes a week, including labs, compared to the lighter loads—and free afternoons— of her classmates. As an antidote, she got herself a subscription to the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Those were the days of [famed conductor] Eugene Ormandy. I had a ticket in the nosebleed section,” she says.

EVOLUTION Btoc OPERA CRITIC

Lynn inched away from academia, slowly at first, taking a job in science as a lab tech doing drug distribution studies. She then lived in Germany for a stint before returning to the States. “It was a classic case of being at the right place at the right time,” she says. German television network ZDF had both science and medical programs, and its correspondent happened to be returning to Germany. Lynn, having just lived in a place where she could study the German language, took the correspondent’s place, working for ZDF for 10 years, a time during which she also earned a master’s degree in film and broadcast journalism.

Lynn standing in front of the poster for opening night at the Los Angeles Opera.

Courtesy of Karyl

Charna Lynn

When Lynn later moved to Tennessee, her evolution to opera critic continued. Her experience with German medical and science reporting didn’t open any doors there, but given her childhood and time during college going to operas, she knew a fair bit about the genre. There weren’t any traditional operas for her to see in Nashville, but there was the Grand Ole Opry (country music’s biggest stage and the state’s version of opera), so she thought, why not try her hand at writing about them? She hasn’t stopped since.

My four years  Penn were very ositiv. They ank up there  some of  four est years of my l.

Lynn became a self-taught opera critic and author, eventually penning six books in 12 years, traveling to hundreds of opera houses around the world. “After the sixth book,” she says, “I began writing

for a London-based magazine called Opera Now,” something she continued for nearly three decades, becoming a contributing editor and senior international correspondent. She now reviews operas for her own website, theoperacritic.net.

It’s a far cry from her 12-year-old self, who once received The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics from her father inscribed with the note, “From an almost Nobel Prize winner in 1955 to a future Nobel Prize winner.” But Lynn says her only regret is that she didn’t pursue her passion sooner. “It was a long road, but I was able to segue into media by reporting about science and finally writing about the arts,” she says.

These days, she gets back to Philadelphia often from her home in Washington, DC. “My four years at Penn were very positive,” Lynn says.“They rank up there as some of the four best years of my life.”

Michele W. Berger is the editor of Omnia magazine.

Through a grant program and a new minor focused on data analytics, the Data Driven Discovery Initiative is using new tools and technologies to directly address societal challenges.

By Laura Dattaro

Illustrations by Grace Jung

When Saara Ghani, C’25, arrived at Penn as a first year criminology major, she knew she wanted to do work that could have a positive impact on society. When she voiced this to her advisor, Greg Ridgeway, Rebecca W. Bushnell Professor of Criminology, he encouraged her to develop quantitative skills that would enable her to work with the data underlying the problems she wanted to address.

designed, in part, for students like Ghani who want to both build strong technical skills and apply them to the subjects they care about most. Ghani couldn’t wait to start—it felt like “when you’re binge-watching a TV show and you’re excited for the new episode to come out,” she says.

First, Ghani tried a computer science minor. But the program seemed too focused on the technical aspects of coding, with little emphasis on applications. She next took classes through the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies, which focused on some of the social issues Ghani cared about but did not offer the broad technical foundation she wanted.

Finally, a solution arrived during her sophomore year. Ridgeway, who also co-directs Penn’s Data Driven Discovery Initiative (DDDI), told her the program was launching a new Data Science and Analytics Minor (referred to as DASA),

STUDENT _ENDEAVORS

For students, the DASA minor is aimed at building a rigorous foundation in data science, says DDDI Executive Director Colin Twomey. “Then you can take it into these different applied directions.”

Ghani, who came to Penn with no more data science experience than a high school statistics course, used her new skills to pursue an honors thesis exploring the factors that contribute to school shootings. By mining datasets like The Washington Post’s school shootings database and federal information from more than 97,000 public schools, she’s found signs of a school’s likelihood to

Eighty students have enrolled in the DASA minor in its first two years. That excitement didn’t surprise the DDDI team; DASA is one of the avenues through which DDDI encourages the use of data science tools to tackle societal challenges like health, education, safety, justice, and voting rights—an ethos known broadly as data science for social good (DSSG).

In 2022, DDDI launched a DSSG grant program, providing funding to faculty working on projects that fit this mindset.

“We were hoping for this sweet spot between advancing knowledge via the kinds of research questions that interest our faculty and having social impact,” says DDDI Co-Director Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences.

experience a shooting and developed a predictive algorithm that she hopes can guide decisions around preventative measures, such as gun policy and school security.

We wanted to give students majoring in fields like astronomy or biology or history a meaningful way for their college experience to connect to social impact.

“The goal is to say, ‘These are some issues, these are some things we need to talk about,’” Ghani says. “I wouldn’t be able to do research on that scale if it wasn’t for data science.”

Joseph Katz, C’26, has sought out similar opportunities, looking for ways to link scientific work to real-world needs. In one philosophy class, for example, his professor talked about the exclusion of knowledge from Indigenous communities in scientific publishing.

Katz tried to explore that problem by modeling interactions between scientists and those communities, but it wasn’t enough. “I was left unsatisfied, and it felt abstract,” says Katz, a double major in philosophy and computer science.

“I wanted to get into the weeds and do work that feels closer to real systems.”

Then he saw an email call for a student to help with a DSSG project modeling coral reefs, led by Emerson Arehart, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology (working with Joshua Plotkin, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor

of the Natural Sciences, and Erol Akçay, Associate Professor of Biology). Katz jumped at the chance, and for the past year, he’s spent about 10 paid hours a week working with Arehart to build models that forecast shifts in the health of ecological systems, ranging from coral reefs to the Amazon rainforest.

Katz is interested in understanding what kind of data science tools might be useful for conservationists doing fieldwork in sensitive ecosystems. “How much of what I’m doing with my fake coral reefs is actually going to provide insights that could help conserve real reefs?” Katz says. “It’s definitely something you’re always wrestling with. This project has made me reflect more about that.”

Jain says this kind of collaboration— students working with faculty on what they see as important data-driven projects—was one of the goals of both the DASA minor and the DSSG projects. “We wanted to give students majoring in fields like astronomy or biology or history a meaningful way for their college experience to connect to social impact,” he adds.

A_NEW_GRANT _PROGRAM

Those opportunities will continue to expand as the DSSG grant program grows. So far, DDDI has funded about a dozen projects that span topics from immigration and mental health to police reform and epidemics. In 2024, the program gave out more than $100,000 and will double that number in 2025.

DSSG emerged as a concept about 12 years ago, first formalized in 2013 at the University of Chicago through a summer fellowship program. In 2016, the school organized the first Data Science for Social Good conference. Jain had always been impressed with the Chicago program,

and when he co-founded DDDI in 2021, he knew he wanted to bring a similar mindset to Penn.

All the projects we’ve funded have identified a problem and see a path forward where data science puts us in position to learn something.

The funds act as seed grants, helping projects that may not otherwise receive federal funding get off the ground and overcome hurdles like cleaning up messy data. (To help with that latter point, in December 2024 DDDI hired its first staff data scientist, Elena Liang, who will support all aspects of data analysis for DSSG projects.)

Projects range in scope from local to global, on subjects from individual brains to Earth-spanning ecosystems. They all seek solutions for ways to improve human life, whether it’s alleviating depression by addressing poverty, preventing law enforcement encounters from escalating, or slowing the spread of disease. “All the projects we’ve funded have identified a problem and see a path forward where data science puts us in position to learn something,” Ridgeway says.

The projects also provide information needed before policy action can occur, Twomey adds. “Data science is not in and of itself a solution, but it helps you inform the possible decisions you could make.”

Criminology Assistant Professor Maria Cuellar, for example, received a DSSG grant to analyze how facial recognition technology performs on real-world photos, which are often blurry, obscured, or otherwise more difficult to read than the headshot-style images on which the technology is trained.

Cuellar used her funding to buy a more powerful computer for her doctoral student and cloud-based computing resources. The subsequent research is showing that recognition error rates vary based on the gender and race of the person photographed. “This research not only evaluates an algorithm as it is applied in real-world settings, but also establishes a framework for others to assess their own algorithms,” Cuellar says. “By doing so, our research team aims to enhance the accuracy and fairness of algorithmic tools used to identify suspects of crimes.”

Data science can also make qualitative findings more persuasive, Jain says. That’s been true for Julia Gray, an associate professor of political science, who received a grant to use natural language processing—a form of machine learning—to analyze stories from both mainstream newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and newspapers that specifically served Black communities, such as The Philadelphia Tribune and the Afro-American in Baltimore.

As a political scientist, Gray studies the interactions among global markets, politics, and institutions. As a former journalist, she’d always wondered how U.S. newspapers historically covered the topics she studies, but there was never a good moment to get that kind of project off the ground. The DSSG program was a chance to finally bring to life an idea she’d been quietly nurturing for years.

With the help of undergraduates and one doctoral student, she’s analyzed nearly 15,000 articles published between 1940 and 1979. She’s compared hundreds of thousands of paragraphs of text, searching for the context around relevant terms like “trade” to see how media aimed at different audiences discussed international trade and economic cooperation.

The work revealed that mainstream newspapers tended to talk about economic integration in the context of competition, particularly with western Europe and Asia. Black newspapers

told a much more optimistic story, seeing the burgeoning independence of African states as a model for Black communities worldwide.

It’s important to use the data “with the right context and expertise,” Jain says. “When used responsibly, they provide great supporting evidence.”

COMMUNITY _CONNECTIONS

The lessons within the DASA minor and the work for DSSG projects rely on data science. But they have the added benefit of improving the field, too.

Gray, for example, realized the limitations of modern language models that are built almost entirely on text available online— a tiny fraction of the language actually used by humans. Also, language changes over time. What she refers to as “trade,” for example, was more frequently called “commerce” mid-century, a problem her team recognized when running early tests of their searches. So, Gray came up with new ways to address these issues, tools that others can use in the future.

There are real ethical issues and challenges here. Our goal is to support as best we can the projects that will have a real positive impact.

Bringing the power of data science to social good could also combat uses of the technology that harm—or are perceived to harm—society, Twomey says. “There are real ethical issues and challenges here. Our goal is to support as best we can the projects that will have a real positive impact” and teach future generations to recognize those moments in the process.

One direct way to do that is through work with the city of Philadelphia—one of DDDI’s primary goals, Ridgeway says. That objective aligns with the work of City Lab, an initiative to provide data analytic support to the city, funded by the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and Penn Arts & Sciences’ Klein Family Social Justice Grant. In 2024, City Lab received a $25,000 DSSG grant to fund paid fellowships for Penn undergrads to work with departments across Philadelphia’s city government. Many of City Lab’s fellows, unsurprisingly, are DASA students.

The projects often involve helping the city evaluate whether its social programs are effective, which can guide resourceallocation decisions, says Robert A. Fox Leadership Political Science Professor John Lapinski, who heads City Lab. The team plans

to have between four and six projects running this summer, each of which will employ students full-time. They’re also hiring a Penn alum who will work as a fellow with the city to coordinate projects.

Long-term, Lapinski says he hopes to build relationships with the city that will provide quality opportunities for Penn students. He sees City Lab as an opportunity to reach students before they enter their careers. “I’m really excited about showing the students what it means to do data for good,” Lapinski says. “We want to make sure that those who might end up going into this business-oriented world realize that we live in a larger ecosystem where people should give back.”

Though Ghani isn’t part of City Lab, she’s taking that lesson to heart. Her family runs a private high school, where her mother serves as a counselor and advises students on their college options. That requires balancing the students’ grades, goals, and financial situations with information from a host of countries and schools.

Recently, Ghani took a few hours to organize the high school’s data, using the coding language R to pull insights about which college options best served which students. It was something her mom had wanted to do for years; it took Ghani just a couple hours. That afternoon drove home for her how useful data science can be in helping people, she says. “It’s just so easy to say, ‘Hey, I have these skills. Do you need this done?’”

Laura Dattaro is a New Jersey–based freelance science journalist who writes about the brain and science policy, among other topics.

Penn Grad Talks

On a Friday at the end of February, 20 graduate students—five each in Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and the Professional Master’s Program—gave short TED Talk–style presentations to an audience, both in person at the Penn Museum and online, for a chance at $500 and bragging rights. Winners from each category, plus an audience choice honoree, included (from left) Peter Satterthwaite of ancient history; Lauren Palladino of political science; Suzanne Johnson of the Applied Positive Psychology program; May Pik Yu Chan of linguistics; and Leonardo Ferreira Guilhoto of applied mathematics and computational sciences. To watch all the Penn Grad Talks presentations, visit vimeo.com/channels/penngradtalks.

The New Mind

With a new Draw Down the Lightning grant, Nikola Moore, C’25, developed a workshop series focused on mitigating linguistic risk with large language models.

When Nikola Moore, C’25, tells people she studies linguistics, they often ask her how many languages she speaks. Moore, who hails from central Europe, knows seven, including two programming languages. Fluency is neither the point nor why you study linguistics, she says. “You study it to understand the possible and the impossible of what can be said and conveyed through various linguistic structures.”

Moore also focuses on linguistics because of large language models (LLMs), which have interested her since high school. She knew linguistics would give her “a front-row seat to this language model development,” Moore says. This past semester, she offered that same opportunity to the Penn community through a workshop series called “The New Mind,” focused on the safety and social impact of tools like artificial intelligence and LLMs.

Brooke Sietinsons

Linguistics major Nikola Moore, C’25, spearheaded the AI4Good Research Incubator and a series of workshops this semester. Brooke Sietinsons

The programming happened thanks to a Draw Down the Lightning Grant she won with a team from the Penn Linguistics Society. The new grants are designed to energize activity around Penn’s highest aspirations and pressing imperatives, with Moore’s project focusing on several aspects of the University’s In Principle and Practice strategic framework.

About 100 people participated in the three crossdisciplinary workshops this spring, with a final allday hackathon-style event, the AI4Good Research Incubator, held on April 19. The first workshop, with Chris Callison-Burch, Professor of Computer and Information Science, discussed how LLMs work. The team invited external guest speakers to the next two: Ollie Jaffe, of OpenAI, who talked about capability, risk, and what the future could bring, and Mikhail Samin, of the AI Governance and Safety Institute, who discussed the dilemma of balancing performance and safety in AI systems.

Moore and her team also spent a lot of time thinking about human-oriented design for the workshops. That meant tea, snacks, and a venue where people could feel comfortable asking questions, she says. “The exciting bit was when people started raising their hands,” she adds. “People were comfortable interrupting. They weren’t asking because they wanted to do better on an exam; they were asking out of pure curiosity.”

At a hackathon-style even this past April, interdisciplinary teams explored questions at the intersection of their research fields, the social impacts of artificial intelligence, and AI safety.

That’s what Moore says she hoped would happen with these sessions: to expand how people think about language. “The job of language is not only to help us define our own thoughts,” Moore explains. “Its job is to convey information. The fact that language can be transferred to not only people, but also between machines and people, is kind of unbelievable.”

— KRISTINA GARCÍA

Making Concrete Sweat

Combating urban “heat islands” may become a little easier thanks to work from VIPER student Yash Rajpal, C’26, ENG’26, on a composite that boosts water absorption in cement.

Yash Rajpal, C’26, ENG’26, worked in the lab of Penn Engineering professor Shu Yang to create a concrete composite that can absorb a large amount of water and release it as external temperatures rise.

Cities are getting hotter, and concrete isn’t helping, storing heat that can make urban centers like Philadelphia feel miserable on a summer day. But Yash Rajpal, C’26, ENG’26, a student in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, says it doesn’t have to be that way.

For the past year, the biophysics and bioengineering dual-degree student has been hard at work in the lab of Penn Engineering’s Shu Yang, Joseph Bordogna Professor, trying to create a concrete composite that can absorb a large amount of water and release it as external temperatures rise. Doing so combats the “urban heat island” effect city dwellers experience by allowing for a cooling evaporation process.

Rajpal likens the effect to one that people already understand: sweating. “Our bodies release water that evaporates, taking heat with it and passively cooling us down,” he explains. “At the same time, this concrete composite can absorb extra water, which, when heated, can evaporate to cool down the concrete.”

Efforts to create the material began with research conducted by Yang and postdoc Kun-Hao Yu, Rajpal’s mentor and now an assistant professor at Syracuse University, who were infusing concrete with diatomaceous earth. This naturally occurring, low-cost silica-based rock can transfer its porous properties to cement when the two are combined. With guidance from Yang and Yu, Rajpal mixed a type of hydrogel, a material often used for purposes like water retention and tissue engineering, with minerals to create a composite.

The resulting material, Rajpal says, could eventually help with the temperaturerelated demands cities face by “passively cooling buildings, thus lowering the energy costs for cooling and reducing the concentration of heat in urban areas.”

There are some caveats, namely that the composite is slightly weaker than typical concrete. For that reason, the research team envisions it being used on non-load bearing walls or on roofing tiles—for now. They are currently in the process of filing a patent disclosure, and within the next year, hope to publish what they’ve learned so far.

Working on the composite has been a demanding but rewarding project for Rajpal, who aspires to pursue a career in medical research. He also plans to apply what he’s learned about hydrogels to the process of creating wound dressings. And though he’s no longer actively working on the composite research, he will continue to track where it progresses. “I’m incredibly passionate about the environment and potential solutions to the energy crisis,” he says. “Being able to study so many disparate things has taught me how having an interdisciplinary perspective can contribute to my development as a scientist.” — EV CRUNDEN

Among the Elephants

Sixth-year Anthropology PhD student Rebecca Winkler has spent more than a decade documenting the lives of the elephants and Indigenous people who co-exist in Thailand’s forests.

In the forests of Thailand, an Indigenous group called the Karen (pronounced kuh-REN) and a dozen or so Asian elephants coexist in a complex, social relationship, one that Rebecca Winkler, a sixth-year doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology, has spent the past decade observing.

Researchers and governments often assume that when humans and elephants live in such close proximity, conflict is inevitable, Winkler says. But her work is showing that social relationships between these two species matter and can help them live

together peacefully—even cooperatively. “I’m trying to push back on this idea that it’s impossible to cohabitate with elephants,” she says.

It’s an idea that first emerged for Winkler when she visited Thailand in 2015 as an undergraduate. There, she connected with the Mahouts Elephant Foundation—named for the Karen people who care for their elephants—which rescues these animals from the tourism industry and forges partnerships between the Karen and researchers like Winkler. When she started her anthropology PhD in 2019, she decided to study elephants the way researchers typically study people, at the individual rather than species level.

Winkler has since spent months at a time in Thailand studying these animal-human interactions. She’s discovered that relationships between humans and elephants are not transferable— in other words, it matters which individuals are interacting— and that the dynamics are not one-way. Though the Karen have tamed some elephants, benefits flow back and forth between the species.

She learned the Karen and Thai languages so she could understand and document how the people there work with the elephants. And, recently, she began helping the Karen Community Association of Philadelphia, formed to bring together the 300 or so Karen families in the area, with dayto-day tasks like applying for grants.

Through all of this, Winkler says she’s “making the argument that the Karen people and elephants are in a kinship relationship. It’s not paternalistic, humans managing wildlife, or a pet relationship, but real interdependency and shared experiences of vulnerability.”

— LAURA DATTARO

The composite Rajpal worked on is weaker than typical concrete, but can still be used on non-load bearing walls or roofs.

Brooke Sietinsons

PhD student Rebecca Winkler is studying the “kinship” relationship between the Karen people and elephants like these in Thailand.

Courtesy of Rebecca Winkler

Letters from a Titanic Survivor

Sophie Michi, a master’s student studying English, transcribed correspondence from the noted maritime disaster while learning to work with archival material.

Sophie Michi’s not big into romance, or comedy either. She gravitates toward whodunits, action movies, thrillers. “I love the movies where the world is ending,” she says.

This might explain why Michi, a master’s student in the English department, transcribed handwritten letters from Titanic survivors for the course Professional Archiving and Curating for Academic Settings, co-taught by Holly Mengel of Penn Libraries and Associate Professor of English Zita Nunes.

Mengel and Nunes hosted weekly guest speakers, including one who presented on paleography—the study of handwritten materials. Mengel pulled up samples, one of which was a letter from the “John B. Thayer Memorial Collection of the Sinking of the Titanic,” housed at the Kislak Center for Special Collections.

Michi was riveted. Reading the letters, she says, was “like decoding something. It was a little bit of a thrill.”

The project wasn’t without its challenges, however. The early 20th-century cursive, for example, proved hard to transcribe. Together with Mengel, Michi carefully combed through one page, front and back; slowly, with context, a letter came together.

After that initial success, she transcribed several more on her own. They revealed the deep remorse of Joseph Bruce Ismay through his correspondence with Marian Longstreth Thayer,

(Left)

Thayer, who died on the Titanic.

the widow of Ismay’s friend and business partner, John B. Thayer, who died after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk into the Atlantic Ocean in April 1912.

In the letters, Ismay is wracked with survivor’s guilt, Michi says. “The man is so apologetic. He’s distraught. He’s been put in the line of fire for this.” Yet they also reveal a time in history that Michi will never know, an archive that shows the disaster’s long tail. “How many people,” she wonders, “get the chance to have something real from that tragedy, or the aftermath of that tragedy, right in front of them?” — KRISTINA GARCÍA

By the Numbers: Outstanding Achievement

Highlighting honors for Penn Arts & Sciences students and recent alums.

1

Rhodes Scholar, for graduate study at Oxford. The recipient, Om Gandhi, C’25, GEN’25, was also named a Dean’s Scholar.

7

Penn Arts & Sciences 2025 Thouron Scholars, who receive tuition for two years of graduate study in the UK.

1953

Year of the first Marshall Scholars. Penn Arts & Sciences has two this year, the University’s 26th and 27th.

150

National Schwarzman Scholarship recipients, who receive funds for a one-year master’s degree in global affairs in Beijing. Honorees this year include Habib Salim, C’23.

100,000

Amount in dollars awarded to Penn’s President Engagement Prize projects, which this year includes five winners from the College.

5

College students, all juniors, among 441 nationwide to receive a Goldwater Scholarship, which recognizes undergrads looking to pursue careers in engineering, math, or the natural sciences.

Joseph Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line and President of J.P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company; (Right) a letter from Ismay to Marian Longstreth Thayer, the widow of Ismay’s friend and business partner, John B.

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog 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

ADRIAN LORENZO, C’11

Founder, Design by Adrian Lorenzo, and Head of Design, Cultura Media House

MIAMI, FL

HISTORY MAJOR

I’ve been involved in baseball my entire life, and if you’re anywhere near the sport, you know that if you’re in it, you’re really in it. As a kid in Miami, I was in it. At Penn, baseball also dominated everything for me. And then I worked as a baseball executive—my most recent title with the Miami Marlins was senior director of international operations—and again, you’re all in. You’re trying to have your team go to the playoffs.

I eventually arrived at a point where I felt good about my contributions to baseball. We had signed a lot of talent and created a lot of Major League contract opportunities for young players all over Latin America. I felt like even if I didn’t work in baseball anymore, those contributions were solid. I also had all of these creations inside me that needed to come out. I don’t know if I’d explode if I didn’t do art, but something was compelling me to keep pushing in that direction.

I was trying to be both an artist and baseball executive only to realize I’d have to make a binary choice between them. That’s when I chose the art path. My grandmother was an artist. She was part of the village that raised me. She was a painter on an amateur level, but she did quite a few showings—she found painting after retirement, but painted all the way to the end. I always had that in the backdrop.

At first my art existed in random spurts, like a pair of sneakers I sketched in between the pages of this little moleskin journal. It wasn’t until my wife got me an iPad that things opened up. I could sketch and draw in a really high-level way. Today I have two styles. One is more refined and symbol-laden. Another is more rough and raw, more emotionally charged—Jackson Pollock-eqsue throwing paint downward onto the canvas. I vacillate between those styles, although the symbols one has more recently dominated. But that’ll flip at some point. And flip back again after that.

About a year ago, I started a studio, which attracted other creative-minded people in Miami. Very quickly we became a production company, which has evolved into a creative agency where we consult clients on different media-production strategies and campaigns.

To students today, I’d say that my journey from history major at Penn to baseball executive to full-time artist taught me that nothing is ever wasted—every job, every pivot, every risk adds a new layer. These layers can give your work depth and make your voice unique. Don’t stress about having it all figured out right away. Let your experiences stack up. You’ll be surprised how they can all come together.

–AS TOLD TO MATT GELB

Courtesy of Adrian Lorenzo

Out and About

Penn Arts & Sciences alums gathered on campus, in New York City, and Boston to meet Dean Peter Struck, mentor undergrads, mingle, and learn.

CAMS Mentoring Meal with Maria McClay, C’01

Kyla Goodman

CAMS Coffee Break with Randi Michel, C’91

Callum Bhatti

CAMS Careers in Media & Technology Roundtable Ta’Liyah Thomas

Professional Women’s Alliance Career Roundtable

Brooke Sietinsons

Bob Dylan, Democracy, and Dissent: A Conversation with Jeffrey Edward Green

Chelsea Nicolais

An Evening with College Dean

Peter Struck

Chelsea Nicolais

Alumni Weekend 2025

Tin Ta

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE CLASS AT PENN?

As a literature lover, I never would have enrolled in Evolutionary Anthropology if it weren’t for Penn’s “Living World” requirement. As it was, the course opened my eyes in ways my high school workaday biology class never did. Learning in the near-mystical Penn Museum, flanked by somber reminders of our common ancestors, I came to understand how humans’ physical evolution was inextricably connected to cultural development. The biological-cultural imperative was electrifying.

–KATIE AMBROGI, C’01

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUAN TANG HON

Introduction to Anthropology taught by Professor Peggy Sanday. It was wonderful to learn about different cultures in a small, lively seminar setting and to have the opportunity to use the Anthropology library to research the Inca culture. The entire class also enjoyed having the end-ofsemester dinner at the professor’s home.

–CAMILO FERRANDEZ, C’89, W’89

Advanced Physical Chemistry Lab. I turned out to be the only student who registered! Professor Marsha Lester convinced me to stay in the course and we designed a creative way to learn the content—visiting different researchers’ labs, learning about what they do and how they do it, and then writing reports and discussing with her. Great experience.

–TOM SCHWARTZMAN, C’87

Math 381, spring semester 1971. This class made me decide to become a mathematician. One day Professor Frank Warner said, “Now you know the precise meaning of those dxi and d/dxi .” At the time, I knew I didn’t really understand, but I decided to keep studying math until I did. Eighty research papers, seven books, a few seminar and colloquium talks at Penn, and various awards later, I realize I made the right choice.

–JOHN D’ANGELO, C’72

Madness in Literature was taught by a mad genius Paul Korshin (RIP) who showed up to every class resplendent in suit and bow tie to spin hilarious stories about the authors, books, and lives we were reading and leading. I took this class because I needed a new purpose and I found it. Shortly after, I decided to major in English so I could learn to read and write. The rest is history.

–JOEY

ARNEL SAYSON, C’89

My favorite course was the two semesters of Astronomy I had to take to fulfill the Science part of the core curriculum. That course opened my eyes to the mysterious vastness of the universe, which, in the half century since I took it, has grown even more mysterious.

–EUGENE

STELZIG, C’66

European History with Professor Albert Rieber. He really brought this class to life. He was dramatic, provided great information, and was engaging. It was held in College Hall 200, and I liked it so much I took the full year. I still remember his lecture on WWI.

–JUDITH LOBEL, C’88

Intensive Beginning Chinese taught by Professor Chiang during the Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 semesters. I was able to take a Chinese class for two hours every day, five days a week. It not only allowed me to learn Chinese in a safe, non-judgmental environment, but I was able to get to know all of my classmates, knew all their names, and could practice speaking Chinese with them outside of class.

–MAGGIE

PHAN, C’04

It was a biology class on Humans and Their Environment (I think) by Professor Dan Janzen and I was riveted at every lecture. He had such a breadth of experience and had a way of telling the story of nature that captivated me. That was also one of the hardest term papers I ever had to write, but I remember learning so much as I did. I always wished that class was available for the world to see and experience.

–RACQUEL STUCKY, C’09

BIO 555 (Summer 1982) was a six-week field course in intertidal ecology at the marine station on Swans Island, Maine. Professor Hans Borei was a field ecologist right out of central casting: a lanky old Swede with a pipe and a great accent. He knew his stuff and inspired a lifelong love of ecology and the Maine Coast.

–WILLIAM CONNERS, C’84

BRIDGING MEDICINE AND BUSINESS

Arun Das, C’10, W’10, took a winding path to end up at Cabaletta Bio, a biotechnology company that wants to revolutionize autoimmune disease treatment.

BY MARILYN PERKINS

In 2005, then high-school senior Arun Das, C’10, W’10, was filling out his paper application to Penn. As he made his way through the pages, he saw a checkbox asking whether he’d like to apply to a demanding dualdegree track: the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management (LSM). When he went to research the program, he learned his was the first incoming class offered this option.

Das knew from a young age he wanted to be a physician, and he had a feeling that signing up for this brand-new degree program would work out. “I thought it fit me perfectly,” he says, so he took a leap of faith, one that has led to a career that’s wound from healthcare investment banking at Goldman Sachs to a medical degree from Johns Hopkins to a pediatrics residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and, finally, to Cabaletta Bio six years ago.

Through his medical training, Das had become familiar with the paradigm of treating symptoms rather than root causes, and he wanted to be part of an organization focused on changing that. Today, as the Chief Business Officer (CBO) of Cabaletta Bio, he’s working toward that, alongside a team trying to bring new immunotherapy treatments to people with autoimmune disorders.

In the United States, about 8 out of every 100 people has an autoimmune disease, a condition where a person’s immune system becomes overactive and attacks the body. Doctors don’t know exactly why such diseases happen,

and most treatments only target symptoms, not underlying causes, according to Das.

It was great to be part of a program that created a structure around how you can do this type of work in a thoughtful way, not just stumbling in the dark.

Cabaletta Bio, a company born in 2017 from an academic collaboration between Penn Medicine professors Aimee Payne and Mike Milone, is revamping CAR-T cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that’s made big waves in cancer treatment. This treatment type harnesses the immune system’s power, using a person’s own cells to fight disease. Das and the Cabaletta team have been refining this technique to get CAR-T cells to wipe out the parts of the immune system that lead to autoimmune disease, hopefully resetting that system to a healthy state.

The treatment is being researched in multiple clinical trials for diseases including lupus and myositis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the muscles. Das says that early results in small patient groups are promising. “You’re actually getting to what may be the root cause of disease,” he adds.

As Cabaletta Bio’s CBO, Das oversees business development, external communications, and corporate strategy. In the next year, he’s looking forward to the company presenting updated clinical data and aligning with the FDA on registrational trial designs in myositis that can move toward drug approval. He says that his varied career experience has been invaluable in preparing him for the role.

“I never would have charted the career path that I ended up taking, but it’s been incredibly valuable to have the medical background that I do,” he says. “I know what it’s like to be a physician counseling a patient who’s getting a new therapy.”

He’s also grateful for his time in his undergraduate program at Penn. As a double major in biological basis of behavior—what is now the neuroscience major—and economics with a concentration in finance, Das says his courses went past memorizing scientific material and taught him how to problem-solve. Das graduated in 2010, but he’s now back at Penn part time—as faculty, co-teaching the LSM senior capstone course.

“It was great to be part of a program that created a structure around how you can do this type of work in a thoughtful way, not just stumbling in the dark,” he says. “Guiding a new generation of students through this course is something I’m really fortunate to be able to do.”

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

Three Questions: On Anime

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jolyon Thomas studies anime to better understand the role of religion in Japan. Here, he shares how the two influence each other in surprising ways.

BY MARILYN PERKINS

How can we better understand the role of religion in modern-day Japan, a place where few people describe themselves as religious despite traces of such practices everywhere, from roadside statues and large temples to rituals and ceremonies? Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jolyon Thomas thinks one avenue is through anime, a type of animation that originated there. He teaches a course on the subject, The Religion of Anime, one that he hopes broadens what his students know about Japan and, at the same time, sharpens their media literacy skills.

Why is anime a valuable tool for understanding religion?

There’s a misconception that anime is juvenile content, but a lot of anime are made for adult audiences. They contain deep meditations on selfhood or responsibility, which naturally lends itself to religious plot points. People also assume that anime draws on old, static traditions of religion and reproduces those. But anime is often in active dialogue with religion. Throughout Japan’s long history,

there’s been a close connection between religion, art, and literature. So much Japanese media produced between the 8th and 20th centuries had allusions to Buddhist themes about impermanence, for example. So really, I’m just situating this contemporary media form in light of a very long tradition.

How does anime dynamically influence religion in the real world?

Outside of Tokyo, there’s a small city that’s the setting for a popular anime from the 2000s called Lucky Star. Fans started to travel there to visit the real-world shrine that inspired the one in the show. But they didn’t only visit; they started participating in the city’s annual shrine festival. Eventually, they collaborated with the shrine, and they started carrying their own portable shrine, called a “mikoshi,” during the parades. Fans visited this city so much that it totally changed the local economy. So, we not only see anime borrowing from a real religious setting, but also transforming what that religious place looks like in practice, even transforming the whole economic structure of a local community.

In what ways are anime and religious services similar?

They’re trying to elicit an emotional and intellectual reaction in an audience, and they do so by using certain strategies to get the audience invested. Media producers might compose a shot in a way that makes you feel like you’re involved in the scene. But that’s not a passive process—it involves the audience’s active imagination. Similarly, religious rituals require the participants’ active involvement to feel like they’re in dialogue with an entity they can’t physically see.

One example of this is how people at Shinto shrines (traditional Japanese places of worship) will perform a series of prescribed movements when visiting: bow twice, clap hands twice, put hands together in prayer position, bow once. The venues are different, but the techniques have striking similarities in terms of eliciting certain reactions from people—whether they are audience members or members of congregations—who then also see themselves in solidarity with others who have had the same experience.

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

Shinkai Makoto, dir. Your Name. (2016); Jolyon Thomas portrait by Brooke Sietinsons

ONLINE CONTENT

This semester included two Knowledge by the Slice lunchtime talks—with pizza, of course! One focused on living deliberately, the other on democracy in South Korea. Watch the full videos online at omnia.sas.upenn.edu, and while you’re there, check out the rest of our multimedia content. We’ve provided a couple other enticing examples below.

Knowledge by the Slice: Living Deliberately Through Existential Despair

Justin McDaniel, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Religious Studies, discussed courses where students take on “monastic” challenges, and how unplugging can lead to unexpected moments of clarity.

Knowledge by the Slice: Whither South Korean Democracy?

A panel of faculty experts, led by Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology Hyunjoon Park (right), discussed democratic backsliding, executive power, and constitutional governing in the wake of recent political turmoil in South Korea.

Inspiring Figures in Black History

Three students from the College of Arts & Sciences highlighted individuals including journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and John Edmonstone, a taxidermist who trained Charles Darwin.

Penn Arts & Sciences Pathways: Daniel Shevchenko, C’25

A study abroad experience in Spain and a course on language policy deepened Shevchenko’s interest in linguistics and political science.

Office Artifacts: Megan Kassabaum

The Associate Professor of Anthropology describes four meaningful objects that surround her as she works.

COVID Doodle

COVID was a hard time for all of us, and I found that I could avoid being distracted by the existential crises we were all facing by keeping my hands busy doodling during Zoom meetings. I met my now husband about a month before quarantine began, and one of the first presents he gave me was a set of colorful pens to level-up my doodling. This box once held beers I picked up from a local brewery during the height of the pandemic, but it was quickly repurposed as a laptop stand. It was during this phase of its life that I fully covered it in doodles.

Hog Farm Rd. Street Sign

Far off the beaten path in Jefferson County, Mississippi, sits a dirt road old enough that its many years of use have cut its banks deep into the Natchez Bluffs. This road is named after the Alcorn State University Swine Development Center, but for me, it is the access road to 1,000 years of Native American history as it leads to four earthen ceremonial mounds constructed and used between 400 and 1200 CE. These mounds have been the focus of my research since 2005. When my dissertation advisor found this downed street sign, he kept it and gave it to me as a graduation present.

Replica Pot

I purchased this vessel from [fellow UNCChapel Hill alum] Joe Herbert while I was a graduate student there. It is the type of pot in which Native people in North Carolina would have cooked their meals. Thinking about what archaeologists can learn from ceramic artifacts, particularly as they relate to understanding foodways,

is a big part of my research. When I got to Penn, I developed a hands-on ceramic analysis class to teach students these methods. As part of this class, students made and fired their own pots. During our outdoor firing, we used Joe’s pot to cook chili for the class. Later, students were able to examine the residue left behind to help them understand what we see in the archaeological record.

Mushroom Lawn Ornament

A fellow archaeologist in Mississippi has a fun habit of hiding amusing presents on the sites her friends are excavating. During my first season running a field school for Penn, she hid this ceramic mushroom in one of our units. When we discovered it, it became our mascot—that is, until it was tragically crushed by a falling shovel. Unbeknownst to me, my students collected all of the fragments, and at the end of the season, they presented me with this re-fit and carefully glued mushroom wrapped in an accurately labeled artifact bag. It makes me smile every time I see it.

How can you capture the intricacies of fruit fly mating behavior through audio and video? Design your own recording rig, of course. Assistant Professor of Biology Yun Ding and collaborators custom-built SongTorrent, a 96-channel system that helps record the visuals and sounds of Drosophila courtship rituals. Supported by the National Institutes of Health, SongTorrent enables Ding to study the evolution of these behaviors in her lab, with help from

postdoc Dawn Chen, PhD student Minhao Li, and others. The process requires specialized technology: For microphones to pick up the sounds, the system is encased in a soundproof box, with a barrier dividing fruit flies. Once it’s lifted, male and female flies interact and SongTorrent records, creating a tool to better understand how the fly’s nervous system works. The device also uses panels of red light to aid the scientists as they study which neurons control certain behaviors.

“Ultimately, we want to understand how diverse behaviors within and between species are encoded in the brain,” Ding says. Already, the team has learned about wing-spreading in female fruit flies— a previously uncharacterized behavior— signaling a more active role for these females in mating routines. “We study the evolution of these courtship behaviors,” Chen says, “because they give us a glimpse into how the nervous system changes to encode new behaviors.”

–EV CRUNDEN

University of Pennsylvania

School of Arts & Sciences

3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

GRADUATE DIVISION

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL & PROFESSIONAL STUDIES

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