Faculty Senate Committees 2017-2018
Faculty Senate Executive Committee (SEC): 2017-2018 Officers
Chair: Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE
Chair-Elect: Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing
Past Chair: Laura Perna, GSE
Secretary: Cynthia Connolly, Nursing
Secretary-Elect: Ayelet Ruscio, SAS/Psychology
Past Secretary: Marcella Devoto, PSOM/
Pediatrics and Epidemiology
At-Large Representatives
Karen Detlefsen, SAS/Philosophy
C. Neill Epperson, PSOM/Psychiatry
Emily Falk, Annenberg
Karen Glanz, PSOM/Biostatistics &
Epidemiology
Robert Hurst, PSOM/Radiology
Kelly Jordan-Sciutto, Dental
Hans-Peter Kohler, SAS/Sociology
Jennifer Lukes, SEAS/MEAM
Barbara Medoff-Cooper, Nursing
Brendan O’Leary, SAS/Political Science
Anil Rustgi, PSOM/Medicine
Petra Todd, SAS/Economics
Assistant Professor Representatives
John Fiadjoe, PSOM/Medicine
Antonio Garcia, Social Policy and Practice
Sharon Irving, Nursing
Penn Association of Senior & Emeritus Faculty
(PASEF Representative)
Martin Pring, PSOM/Physiology
Constituency Representatives
Guobin Yang, Annenberg
Robert St. George, SAS/History
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, SAS/
History of Art
Ron Donagi, SAS/Mathematics
Brian Gregory, SAS/Biology
Elizabeth Rhoades, SAS/Chemistry
Kathryn Hellerstein, SAS/Germanic
Language & Literature
Steven Matthews, SAS/Economics
Suvir Kaul, SAS/English
Jianjing Kuang, SAS/Linguistics
Steve Tinney, SAS/NELC
Mirjam Cvetic, SAS/Physics & Astronomy
Julia Lynch, SAS/Political Science
Elizabeth Brannon, SAS/Psychology
Chenoa Flippen, SAS/Sociology
Kathleen Boesze-Battaglia, Dental
Janine Remillard, GSE
Gershon Buchsbaum, SEAS/Bioengineering
Rakesh Vohra, SEAS/CIS
Franca Trubiano, Design
Eric Feldman, Law
Douglas Wiebe, PSOM/Biostatistics &
Epidemiology
David Smith, PSOM/Anesthesiology & Critical Care
James Palmer, PSOM/Otorhinolaryngology
Pedro Gonzalez-Alegre, PSOM/Neurology
Frank Leone, PSOM/Medicine
Marilyn Schapira, PSOM/Medicine
Julie Brothers, PSOM/Pediatrics
Lewis Kaplan, PSOM/Surgery
Eileen Lake, Nursing
Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Social Policy &
Practice
Anna Kashina, Vet
Paula Henthorn, Vet
Eric Clemons, Wharton/Accounting, Health
Care Management, OID, Statistics
Karen Lewis, Wharton/ Finance, Legal
Studies & Business Ethics, Business
Economics & Public Policy
Jehoshua Eliashberg, Wharton/
Management, Marketing, Real Estate
The Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility (SCAFR)
Charles Bosk, SAS/Sociology
Cynthia Connolly, Nursing
David Eckmann, PSOM/Anesthesiology & Critical Care
Vivian Gadsden, GSE, Chair
Nancy Hirschmann, SAS/Political Science
Julia Lynch, SAS/Political Science
Jon Merz, PSOM/Medical Ethics
Holly Pittman, SAS/History of Art
Diana Robertson, Wharton/Legal Studies and Business Ethics
Ex officio:
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty Senate Chair-Elect
The Senate Committee on Economic Status of the Faculty (SCESF)
Kenneth Burdett, SAS/Economics
Robert Ghrist, SAS/Mathematics
Blanca Himes, PSOM/Biostatistics,
Epidemiology & Informatics
Sarah Kagan, Nursing
Iourii Manovskii, SAS/Economics
Robert Stine, Wharton, Chair
Ex Officio:
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE, Faculty
Senate Chair
Laura Perna, GSE, Faculty Senate Past
Chair
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
The Senate Committee on Faculty Development, Diversity, and Equity (SCFDDE)
Kristen Feemster, PSOM/Pediatrics
Carmen Guerra, PSOM/Medicine, Chair
Mauro Guillén, Wharton
Michael Jones-Correa, SAS/Political
Science
Irina Marinov, SAS/Earth &
Environmental Science
Kate Nathanson, PSOM/Medicine
Susan Yoon, GSE
Ex officio:
John Keene, Design, PASEF non-voting
member
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE, Faculty
Senate Chair
The Senate Committee on Faculty and the Administration (SCOA)
Joel Bennett, PSOM/Medicine
Ken Drobatz, Vet
Al Filreis, SAS/English
Katherine Margo, PSOM/Family Medicine
Pamela Sankar, PSOM/Biomedical Ethics,
Chair
Talid Sinno, SEAS/CBE & MEAM
Peter Struck, SAS/Classical Studies
Ex Officio:
Marshall Meyer, Wharton, PASEF
non-voting member
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE, Faculty
Senate Chair
The Senate Committee on Faculty and the Academic Mission (SCOF)
William Beltran, Vet
Eric Feldman, Law
Lea Ann Matura, Nursing
Susan Sauvé Meyer, SAS/Philosophy
Mindy Schuster, PSOM/Infectious Diseases
Bruce Shenker, Dental
Tom Sollecito, Dental, Chair
Lyle Ungar, SEAS/CIS
Ex Officio:
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
Gino Segre, SAS/Physics, PASEF
non-voting member
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE, Faculty
Senate Chair
Senate Committee on Students and Educational Policy (SCSEP)
Sunday Akintoye, Dental
José Bauermeister, Nursing
Laura Desimone, GSE
Sharon Irving, Nursing
Carol Muller, SAS/Music
Karen Redrobe, SAS/History of Art
Ralph Rosen, SAS/Classical Studies
Jorge Santiago-Aviles, SEAS/ESE
Dominic Sisti, PSOM/Medical Ethics
& Health Policy, Chair
Ex Officio:
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
Anita Summers, Wharton,
PASEF non-voting member
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS/ESE, Faculty
Senate Chair
The Senate Committee on Publication Policy for Almanac
Sunday Akintoye, Dental
Christine Bradway, Nursing
Daniel Cohen, SAS/Sociology
Al Filreis, SAS/English
Beth Linker, SAS/History & Sociology of
Science
Cary Mazer, SAS/English
Martin Pring, PSOM/Physiology, Chair
Ex officio:
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing, Faculty
Senate Chair-Elect
Faculty Grievance Commission
James Palmer (PSOM/Otorhinolaryngology),
Chair
Mitch Marcus (SEAS/CIS), Past Chair
Martha Farah (SAS/Psychology),
Chair-Elect
COUNCIL: State of the University
At the University Council meeting on October 25, the annual State of the University presentations were made and are presented here, based on edited transcriptions of the remarks.
The President’s portion was given by three PIK professors: Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor, SAS/Law; Herbert Hovenkamp, James G. Dinan University Professor, Wharton/Law; and Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss Professor, Law/SAS.
Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor
I’m very happy to have this opportunity. I would like to introduce you to a project I’m working on that’s very relevant to this community, our country, at our university and globally. I focus on borders between states, and the project that I’m working on is being developed out of Perry World House—an interdisciplinary center for researchers from different backgrounds to study world affairs.
The project problematizes globalization. The narrative that we have heard over time is that the world is hyper-connected; that it is very easy to connect around the world. But I really want to understand the impulse to “close” as well as to “open,” to “connect” as well as to “separate,” and that’s what this project is trying to do.
Political liberalization has been one of the most important developments since the end of the Cold War. The iconic image of the Berlin Wall falling, becoming little more than a set of bricks on the sidewalk, is an example. But 16 walls existed along state borders in 1989; today, one third of the world’s countries are now building border walls or border fences.
That got me thinking about the impulse “to wall.” [showing images of various border walls] The U.S.-Mexican border near Felicity, California is a very stark example. But the United States is far from the only place where walls are going up. Morocco and Algeria: another example; Hungary and Serbia in 2015, at the height of the immigration crisis into Europe; Bangladeshi security forces patrol along the India-Bangladesh border fence. Here we can see that the lighting for security reasons is so bright it can be viewed from the space station. [referring to slide:] See that bright orange line going across? The roads are lit to a certain extent but that bright orange line can be seen from space. Walling is a trend: of 51 fortified borders, half were constructed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s amazing! We are exploring this phenomenon, by focusing on all border crossings of the world and trying understand how states display and array their authority along national borders.
The project phase I’m going to talk about today focuses on border architecture. We’re looking at the border structures that states are creating in order to control what’s going on in their jurisdictions. We use a ARC-GIS software, geospatial data, and Google Maps to try to characterize state presence at international borders. We are mapping the world’s border crossings by overlaying data on road networks with international boundaries, which gives us a series of red balls at the intersections [referring to slide]. Big thanks to the Digital Humanities folks in Van Pelt Library who’ve been extraordinarily helpful with making and manipulating this data. They’re just terrific.
This, then, maps the location of all the border crossings in the world –where major highways intersect international political boundaries. They’re very different around the world. Some are hugely built up and can filter entry and exit; you see all kinds of capacity to do so on the U.S.-Mexican border near Laredo, for example [referring to a Google Earth image]. But below, it looks like there is practically no capacity to stop you when you cross that border [referring to an image of the Burkina Faso and the Togo border]. I work with a team of students and researchers–from undergraduates to post-docs—a “multigenerational” as well as a multidisciplinary team, to code physical realities on the ground. How much and what kinds of security and inspection architecture? Conceptually what we’re trying to understand is how states display their capacity and authority to filter at the border. We code official buildings, inspection sites, barriers, and can create a scale rating the intensity of these features, from almost nothing compared to a highly concentrated state presence. Using the roads that we’ve found so far—and this is work in progress—you can see something like this around the world [referring to a world map with color coding of all international border crossings from low to high state presence].
Green means go—very little evidence that you will be stopped. Red means that you are likely to be stopped, if the state wants to filter you. Now, let’s zoom in on the United States and see even more closely what sorts of things are going on here. We don’t have every single border crossing in place right now but these are the ones that we’ve done so far. You see a large amount of variance across the United States itself. For example, right outside of El Paso: all kinds of capacity to stop and to filter [referring to image of traffic queues at El Paso]. But this is what you see at the Big Bend National Park. Me, crossing in a rowboat, [referring to image of rowing across Rio Grande]. I was only the second person the entire day. These images reflect the nature of state and social anxieties being expressed differentially toward ‘The Other’ at our international boundaries.
We plan not only to complete coding border crossings globally, but also to look for change at border crossings over time. In the United States, you see two complementary trends: to connect with and to separate from Mexico. Watch this architecture grow over time: 1995, 2002, 2010, 2015 [referring to a set of slides showing change over these years]. You can see these impulses both at work on our own southern border (see below).
Eventually, I want to work with others on algorithms to detect differences on each side of international borders that imply separation, distinction, and visual discontinuities that imply that institutions and practices are very different across two jurisdictions. Visible distinctions in the landscape may imply that there is something powerful going on at the border. [referring to a slide showing abnormal cells among healthy one]: These are abnormal cells that are sprinkled in with normal cells, medical researchers have developed algorithms to detect these differences without a human set of eyes going over each and every slide. Can we use such technologies to understand differentiation at international borders? [referring to a series of slides with stark difference in land and settlement across international borders] Can we detect these differences, between California and Mexico? Or these, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Or maybe this difference, between Brazil and Bolivia? In these cases, the border is separating, creating distinction. We ultimately would like to know how and why we see such sharp distinctions.
What might we learn from this research? As we continue to collect data on the world’s borders and border crossings, we hope to figure out whether our world truly is globalizing, or whether in fact we are separating ourselves. And if the latter, what are the sources of the anxiety that explain these patterns?
Herbert Hovenkamp: James G. Dinan University Professor
Thanks, I’m a newcomer here. This is my first year. My joint appointment is between Wharton and the Law School and I also do research in two quite distinct areas. One of them is anti-trust law and the other one is American legal history.
And I’m going to tell you just for a few minutes about one of my ongoing legal history projects. I’m teaching anti-trust and legal history at the Law School this fall and constitutional history to Wharton undergraduates in the spring. The project I’m working on right now is tentatively titled “Racism and Public Law during the Progressive Era.” It’s actually a response in one way to a series of books, essays blaming the Progressives for a particularly aggressive sort of racism. It’s led to movements to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name, for example, from various buildings and programs at Princeton. It’s been addressed against suffragettes like Carrie Chapman Catt. What I’m trying to do is put a little bit of perspective on this.
First of all, institutional scientific racism was taught in American universities as long as we had American universities. It goes formally back at least to the 18th century. It was a very prominent part of the curriculum of major institutions in the United States including Harvard, which became one of the founding institutions in the US for Eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th century. So whatever the Progressives did, they didn’t invent racism or even scientific racism. The paper I’m currently working on is really arguing, it was the Progressives who were responsible for abandoning scientific racism in American institutions of higher education. They certainly didn’t get rid of racism, but the particular types of racism that were being taught in institutions of higher learning very largely came to an end during the Progressive Era, including Eugenics, which very largely died as a scientific movement in the early 1920s.
One of the things I found is that it’s very important to distinguish the set of views that Progressives inherited from those that they developed internally. Most of the first generation of Progressives were born in the 1850s and 1860s, that included people like Wilson who was raised in the South—in the segregated South. It included people like Edward Alsworth Ross, a racist sociologist and Richard T. Eely, a racist economist. These are all people who wrote very early in the 20th century. If you look at the later Progressives, however, you see that the methodologies they developed were very much different from the scientific methodologies that they inherited. In particular, the two social science methodologies we identify most with Progressivism were cultural relativism, which came principally through Franz Boas, a Progressive Anthropologist at Columbia who did most of his writing very early in the 20th century and behaviorism which came through the work of John B. Watson who did most of his work in the late 19th century into the 1920s.
Then the third discipline was a marginalistic economics which made a much different, narrower and a more technical set of assumptions then the heavily historical assumptions and cultural assumptions that the classical political economist made. What each of these methodologies did, first of all cultural relativism was radically environmentalist and Boas spent most of his career railing at Eugenics and that any idea that race is other than an artificial construct.
Watson developed a view, as he put it, that babies are like Fords rolling off of an assembly line, all identical, and it is only their environment that determines who they will be after that. Marginalistic economics for its part developed the idea that people have a set of preferences that can be ranked or ordered but not externally evaluated. As a result, evaluating preferences on the basis of culture, race, intelligence, religion or anything like that is simply not part of economic science.
So the result is that coming out of the Progressive Era, American intellectuals have a much more egalitarian and environmental set of views about human nature than they did going in.
Dorothy Roberts: George A. Weiss Professor
It’s interesting, the two projects I want to tell you about follow very nicely from Professor Hovenkamp’s description of the history of Eugenics and Progressivism in the United States because one of mine has to do with the resurgence of biological concepts of race in the 21st century. I’m very interested in the way in which biological and social scientists are working together to develop theories about what causes social inequality —in other words, why do we have inequality among groups in the United States and around the world? Is it because of something inherent in those groups that makes them unequal or is it because of the social or political context that creates inequality? And increasingly, biological and social sciences are merging. In fact, there’s a burgeoning area of science called socio-genomics that involves social scientists, especially sociologists and genomic scientists.
Since I’ve been at Penn, I have been focusing on developing, in collaboration with professors and students around the University, innovative ways of thinking about how to define race, how to use race as a variable in research, and how to discredit the long-standing concept that race is a natural category that divides human beings. A year after I got to Penn, I established the Program on Race, Science and Society. We have a working group that includes faculty from the biological sciences, the medical school, the nursing school, sociology, history and sociology of science, the law school and other schools and departments. One of our projects was a piece that Sarah Tishkoff, who is a geneticist here and also a PIK professor, and I co-authored with a couple others called “Taking Race out of Human Genetics.” It was published in Science, which is a very popular, well-read science journal. And it got worldwide attention, including the attention of the NIH (National Institutes of Health). We both participated in a workshop there to try to address the problem that researchers continue to use race in their studies as if it were a natural biological category. I also started a course here called Race, Science & Justice, for undergrads, which I’ll be teaching in the spring. We explore the various ways that race has been defined by scientists and how their definition has been shaped by society but also how it affects social views of race.
Also, in the spring the Program on Race, Science, and Society will have its first international symposium looking at how scientists around the world use race and how the concept of race gets circulated across the globe. What are the differences in how scientists define and use race in different countries like Brazil, the United States, South Africa, France, New Zealand and India? We have scientists coming from all of these countries to discuss these questions, as well as the ways in which common perceptions of race are reinforced by scientists around the world. So how do scientists contest and reinforce the dangerous or perhaps promising ways of thinking about race.
I want to mention one other project quickly, because I’ve enjoyed including Penn undergrads in helping me with the research, and that’s my book project on interracial marriage in Chicago from 1937-1967. This is a very personal project for me because it’s based on 500 interviews of black-white couples over five decades in Chicago that my father, who was an anthropologist, conducted. And it includes his personal story: he married his research assistant, my mother, who is black, and my father is white. So they became like their own research subjects. I have a file as well (laughter). So it’s a fascinating story about the lives of the black-white couples they interviewed, starting in 1937 when my father was a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago all the way into the 1980s. But I’m going to end at 1967 when the Loving vs. Virginia decision came down from the U.S. Supreme Court. I have had the wonderful pleasure of working with groups of Penn undergraduate research mentees under the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program that CURF offers every year. With the help of students, we took 25 boxes of completely unorganized papers and turned them into a usable archive, digitizing all the interviews and working on articles that use these interviews. So, it’s been a great project as we discover more and more in the files and figure out where it’s going to go.
The Provost’s portion of the State of the University then focused on innovative research initiatives and was led by Dawn Bonnell, Vice Provost for Research. She was joined by two students Divyansh Agarwal, an MD/PhD student in PSOM and Fernando Rojo, CAS ‘18.
Dawn Bonnell, Vice Provost for Research
Good afternoon. It’s nice to be back and talking with you again. As Wendell alluded to, and as I have said in the past in this meeting, Penn’s Innovation Ecosystem is vast and diverse, and it touches every part of our campus. Today I’m going to highlight how the Penn community uses this infrastructure to move ideas out of the academy and into the world. I’ll start with an overview and just a couple of examples, and then I’ll turn to the real-world examples who are here to talk about their experiences. So, Penn’s ecosystem contains a wide variety of components, and in past presentations I’ve shown you that graphically and in some detail, but I just wanted to remind you of a few key highlights. There are over 15 student clubs focused on entrepreneurship, some of them topically focused, like the Wharton FinTech Club, some have working space, like Weiss Tech House. We have 10 competitions and prizes on campus, think Shark Tank, with financial support and mentoring for the winning ideas. The most prestigious of these is of course the President’s Engagement Prize and Innovation Prize, which is announced every year. And we have over 10 business incubators. These are programs and places that support the development of business plans, market analysis, and prototype development; all the things that you need to take an idea to the next stage to become a company. So these things exist across campus in many different centers, and I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that we have the most internationally renowned curriculum in this area, not only in Wharton, but in several of our other schools as well.
This is some of the infrastructure that we have, and because of the investment that Penn has made in the last seven or eight years, we are being recognized as an innovation leader. The first one of note was in 2013, we were ranked number two, that was a year where we had particularly good financial returns from commercialization, but we’ve been up in the top 10 and climbing up the ranks in the external recognition of this over the last few years. Just recently, we went from being ranked number eight in the Reuter’s ranking to being ranked number four within one year. The outcomes that this infrastructure is facilitating are beginning to be recognized. I’m going to tell you about three areas of strength that I’m highlighting.
One area is cell and gene therapy. You may have seen and heard the announcement of the FDA support of the first treatment putting leukemia into remission and becoming a product, that is an idea from about 20 years ago in the basic science lab that now is helping patients in real-time. We just heard about two weeks ago that the FDA is on a fast track to promote a gene therapy that is reversing certain types of blindness, so that means it’s on track to becoming a treatment that will be applied to patients. However, the great thing about this area is, it isn’t just some of the investigators who are responsible for these advances that I’ve intimated. We have a large cohort of faculty and research teams that are working in this area of strength, and it spreads all the way from basic science to translational research in the clinic to manufacturing of the components themselves. It is such an area of strength that some people are beginning to refer to it as “Cellicon Valley” (see image at right).
The second area is that we really are the East Coast Robotics Hub (see image on next page). We are bringing together academic research, start-up companies, and established corporations at the Pennovation Center. We have DJI, the largest manufacturer of consumer drones and we have Qualcomm, one of the largest producers of computer chips that go inside devices, including drones, as partners at Pennovation Works, along with PERCH, GRASP and PRECISE; engineering labs that work in aerial robotics, land-based robotics, and systems and networking. So there is a real cohort there with strength that converges right here.
And this year we opened a new area of focus; the new Center for Health, Devices, and Technology. We call it Penn Health-Tech. Penn Health-Tech is a center that brings together engineers and clinicians to focus on problems that are arising in practice right now. In fact, the first few meet-and-greets have resulted in projects that are helping engineers work to promote health care in the community. So that’s an area that you’ll be hearing from as we move forward.
How does our community—students, post-docs and faculty—engage in the ecosystem? I want to show you a few examples, and again they occur all across campus. At the Weiss Tech House, a student led program that has maker space, 822 students attended events last year and 75 students use the space on a daily basis, so students are highly engaged. DevelopUPMed is one of those Shark Tank-esque competitions; 11 faculty and 32 students were in the first cohort of that program. Penn Graduate School of Education has an educational design studio that has 29 companies in their cohort working on commercialization of educational tools to go out into the community. Wharton Entrepreneurship has awarded $500,000 to students annually, has 51 startups in their venture initiation program, and of course offers a whole variety of entrepreneurial courses. So these are various pathways that our community can take in this ecosystem to produce outcomes.
I want to give you two specific examples of ways someone can engage with this ecosystem. BioBots is a company founded by two Penn graduates, Ricky Solorzano and Danny Cabrera; it makes 3-D printers that create tissue and bone used in research related to the development of transplantable organs. It was Danny Cabrera, Ricky Solorzano and Sohaib Hashmi’s senior-year design project. You can see, they have accessed the Weiss Tech House, they won the Pennovation Prize, received funding from Ben Franklin Technology Partnerships in the region. Their company eventually sold units in January. You can see how they have progressed as they gained more investment in their ideas; they now have nine employees, and have shipped products to 17 countries. All of this starts with the Penn infrastructure that students have access to.
The second is a different way of utilizing our infrastructure. This is Exyn Technologies, a company that was founded by a Penn faculty member. The support comes from a conventional investment company that has helped to pace through various stages, from starting with a small $250,000 investment, helping to support them through pilots in 2016. They now have $3.8 million, but what’s exciting about this company is that the eight employees that are working there right now include former Penn post-grad, undergraduate or graduate students, and they’re residing right here in the Philadelphia region. We’ve met this goal of supporting the infrastructure, supporting the ideas coming out of Penn, and not only that, having really exciting jobs for our students that are in the area. This is an overview, and now to get to the best part, which is always the real-world examples.
Divyansh Agarwal, MD/PhD student, PSOM
My name is Divyansh. I am a third-year MD/PhD student, so I’m in the combined degree program at the med school, and I am here to tell you about my company, Sanguis. Let’s take an example of a cancer patient who is actively receiving chemotherapy for her breast cancer. Now, in order to receive her next dose of chemotherapy, she has to take time off work, commute to the local clinic, and before she gets her next dose of chemotherapy, the doctor orders a complete blood cell count test to make sure that her blood counts are in the normal range. Let’s say on this one given day, her counts are not in the normal range. They’re a little low. So she’s sent home and hopes that by her next visit, her counts will go up. But unfortunately, a couple of days after she’s sent home, she develops a fever, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, and is rushed to the ER.
More than likely, this patient has developed something called neutropenic fever, where neutropenia is a depletion in the infection-fighting cells of the body, also called neutrophils. And in fact, as you can tell, this problem is not hers alone. In the U.S., each year, there are more than 650,000 patients who receive chemotherapy on an outpatient basis, and more than half of them suffer through this problem of neutropenia, which leads to thousands of dose delays and reductions, and more than 15,000 deaths. To tackle this problem, there are three of us—two in the combined degree program, and another colleague of ours, also a third-year medical student right now—and we’ve been working on a device which we call Sanguis.
It is our vision that every patient receiving cancer chemotherapy goes home in the future with a portable, inexpensive, handheld device. To use Sanguis, they can use a commercially available lancet, similar to a glucometer, and they can keep a track of their blood counts at home. The current standard of care is that these cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are sent home with a pamphlet which includes a whole host of symptoms, and they are told, should you experience any of these symptoms, please contact your physician or your nearest ER, but by then it is already too late.
What we are hoping is that a device like ours will allow early identification of these patients who are at an extremely high risk. And we are extremely grateful to the Penn ecosystem. All three of us have been extremely lucky to win numerous competitions on campus, and we are currently being supported by not just the different organizations at Penn, but also the local Philadelphia entrepreneurship ecosystem. I just wanted to take this opportunity to express my gratitude, because all three of us are medical students and although we’ve encountered the problem of neutropenia in both our personal and professional lives, it’s really the Penn ecosystem that has allowed us to tackle this in a meaningful way.
Fernando Rojo, CAS ‘18
Big thanks to Dr. Bonnell for inviting me. My name is Fernando Rojo and I’m a senior at Penn studying math and economics. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, big football fan, just a few blocks away from the “Big House” for those who know. Go blue, that’s right. And as a six-year-old in Ann Arbor, I was pretty into selling lemonade on game days just like every other kid in my neighborhood. Every football Saturday, we’d go outside really excited and everyone would make their own stand, and our parents would make us all sell it at 50 cents to not compete with each other, and it was great. But after a few game days, I got a little bored that we were all selling the same product at the same price. I was competitive. So I thought maybe I could do things a little differently and I realized that I could probably make a little bit more money charging cars that were driving by to park on my parents’ lawn than just selling lemonade. So granted, I didn’t ask my parents’ permission and they might not have been that happy, but in the matter of one week I went from making about $8 a game to over $200, as a six-year-old. It was at that moment that I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just didn’t have that much patience to wait.
So fast forward to my freshman year at Penn. I’m visiting my family in Argentina during winter break, and I’m walking through the streets of Buenos Aires, when I come across a man named Rafael. Rafael is selling these incredible hand-crafted shoes he made on the streets of Buenos Aires at an artisan fair. And I’m telling you, these were the coolest shoes I’ve ever seen. And I guess the tourists who were buying them from him thought the same thing, I mean, there were dozens of them there. I just had to ask this guy about these shoes. I mean, they were bright, they had these Latin American textiles on them, they were unlike anything I’d seen before. Soon enough I ended up having a four-hour conversation with this man named Rafael who told me his life story, one of a skilled artisan who was struggling to get by and didn’t know how to find customers for these incredible products he had. Without thinking about it too much I was completely sold. I was like, I have to partner with this man I just met on the street that I know nothing about, to sell these incredible products in the U.S.
A week later, I was on a plane back to Penn with about 50 of Rafael’s shoes stuffed in a suitcase. And that’s where my seemingly unusual path to begin this company called PATOS began. Today, PATOS is the way that I can express what matters most to me. It’s giving back to my community and providing jobs for local artisans in Latin America. I get to travel the world and build relationships and friendships with suppliers that I never would have met otherwise, and above all I found an incredible passion for design that frankly I never knew I had. I’m pretty proud to say that since that one chance conversation I had with Rafael, in the three years since, PATOS has turned into a global brand that’s sold shoes in over 15 countries and provided full-time employment for over 15 local artisans across Latin America’s poorest communities. I was sort of born wanting to create. I broke every computer I had—not physically, but I just downloaded so many viruses. And not that much as changed.
But the part of the story you don’t always hear is the help you get along the way. You know, as a freshman at Penn, running PATOS wasn’t the easiest thing. But thanks to the mentorship and support and funding I received from Penn’s innovation ecosystem, I was able to turn PATOS into what it is today. It’s the professors like David Bell and Patrick Fitzgerald that showed me how to build a robust business plan, or the accelerators like Weiss Labs and PennApps Accelerator that showed me how to pitch my business like a pro and introduced me to top investors. The student body, where I met DJ, one of my best friends and an incredible business partner. And all my friends are here, who are all PATOS customers too. Penn is my greatest customer base. The Wharton Innovation Fund, that gave me the grants I needed to launch our first product line and allowed us to sell over $60,000 worth of shoes in our first month. Frankly, a few years ago I was just a freshman from Michigan with this idea to sell this guy’s shoes that I picked up on the side of the street. The fact that I get to be at this event right now in front of the president and all these amazing people is really an honor. Thanks so much for hearing me out and I’m happy to be here.
Membership of University Council, 2017-2018
For more information regarding University Council, including Status Reports and Resolutions, see the Council website.
Steering Committee
The Steering Committee shall consist of the president of the University, the provost, the chair, the chair-elect and the past chair of the Faculty Senate, the chair of the Undergraduate Assembly, the chair of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, the chair of the Penn Professional Staff Assembly and the chair of the Weekly-Paid Professional Staff Assembly. Drawn from the Council membership there shall be in addition four faculty members, one graduate/professional student and one undergraduate student elected by the respective governing bodies, as well as one additional member of the Penn Professional Staff Assembly and one additional member of the Weekly-Paid Penn Professional Staff Assembly, each elected by their representative assemblies. The chair of the Faculty Senate shall be the chair of the Steering Committee. In the absence of the chair, or at the request of the chair, the chair-elect shall serve as chair of the Steering Committee. The Council moderator will be an official observer at meetings of the Steering Committee. The secretary of the Council shall serve as secretary of the Steering Committee. Members of the Steering Committee may attend the meetings of Council committees.
—Council Bylaws
Members of Steering Committee
Kathleen Boesze-Battaglia
Cindy Connolly
Ron Donagi
Antonio Garcia
Amy Gutmann
Heather Kelley
Rhonda Kirlew
Miles Owen
Laura Perna, Past-Chair
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Chair-Elect
Wendell Pritchett
Jay Shah
Santosh Venkatesh, Chair
Marcus Wright
Michelle Xu
Stephanie Yee
1 TBD
Members of Council Faculty: Forty-five members of the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. The Faculty Senate shall ensure that each faculty is represented and that at least three assistant professors serve on the Council. The members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee who are members of the Council shall otherwise be chosen in accordance with the rules of the Faculty Senate.
One full-time lecturer and one full-time member of the research faculty to be selected to serve two-year terms by vote facilitated by the Office of the Secretary in consultation with the Steering Committee of the full-time lecturers and research faculty, respectively, from a slate consisting of the five lecturers and the five members of the research faculty receiving the largest number of nominations by lecturers and members of the research faculty. If the Steering Committee receives fewer than five nominations for either group, additional nominations shall be solicited from the constituency representatives of the Senate Executive Committee.
Administrative and Staff: Eleven administrative officers, including the president, the provost and nine members of the administration to be appointed annually by the president, at least five of whom shall be deans of faculties.
Two elected representatives of the Penn Professional Staff Assembly. One elected representative of the Librarians Assembly. Two elected representatives of the Weekly-Paid Professional Staff Assembly.
Students: Fifteen graduate and professional students elected as members of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly shall ensure that, to the extent possible, each school is represented. The members of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly who are members of the Council shall otherwise be chosen in accordance with the rules of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.
Fifteen undergraduate students elected as members of the Undergraduate Assembly. The Undergraduate Assembly shall ensure that, to the extent possible, each undergraduate school is represented. The members of the Undergraduate Assembly who are members of the Council shall otherwise be chosen in accordance with the rules of the Undergraduate Assembly.
One elected representative of the United Minorities Council.
—Council Bylaws
Elected by the Faculty At-Large
Santosh Venkatesh, Chair
Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Chair-Elect
Laura Perna, Past Chair
Cynthia Connolly, Secretary
Ayelet Ruscio, Secretary-Elect
PASEF Representative
Martin Pring
Elected by Faculty Constituency
Guobin Yang
Rakesh Vohra
Robert St. George
Franca Trubiano
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Eric Feldman
Ron Donagi
Douglas Wiebe
Brian Gregory
David Smith
Elizabeth Rhoades
James Palmer
Kathryn Hellerstein
Pedro Gonzalez-Alegre
Steven Matthews
Frank Leone
Suvir Kaul
Marilyn Schapira
Jianjing Kuang
Julie Brothers
Steve Tinney
Lewis Kaplan
Mirjam Cvetic
Eileen Lake
Julia Lynch
Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Elizabeth Brannon
Anna Kashina
Chenoa Flippen
Paula Henthorn
Kathleen Boesze-Battaglia
Eric Clemons
Janine Remillard
Karen Lewis
Gershon Buchsbaum
Jehoshua Eliashberg
Assistant Professor Representatives
John Fiadjoe
Antonio Garcia
Sharon Irving
Lecturers and Research Faculty Members
LeAnn Dourte
Matt O’Donnell
Members of the
Administration
Shaina Adams-El Guabli
Amy Gutmann
William Gipson
Pam Grossman
John Jackson
Vijay Kumar
Wendell Pritchett
Ted Ruger
Maureen Rush
Fritz Steiner
Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum
Graduate/Professional Students
Yun Cha
Miles Owen
Uma Ramaswamy
Alex Warshauer
Paul Welfer
10 TBD
Undergraduate Students
Dhruv Agarwal, UA/AIS
Sean Collins, Lambda Alliance
Caleb Diaz, Latin@ Coalition
Aliya Farmanali, PRISM
Michael Krone, UA Speaker
Zahraa Mohammed, MSA
Anea Moore, Penn First
Nile Nwogu, UA/College Republicans
Sabino Padilla, APSC
Bevan Pearson, SSAP
Calvary Rogers, UMOJA
Jay Shah, UA Vice President
Michelle Xu, UA President
George Yang, UA
Jamie Ye, PAGE
United Minorities Council
Ajjit Narayanan
Penn Professional Staff Assembly
Heather Kelley, Chair
Stephanie Yee, Chair-Elect
Weekly-Paid Professional Staff Assembly
Marcus Wright, Chair
Rhonda Kirlew, Co-Chair
Librarians Assembly
Mia Wells
Parliamentarian
Lauren Steinfeld*
ROTC Representative
Colonel Kenneth DeTreux
Vice President And Secretary
Leslie Laird Kruhly*
Moderator
Therese Richmond *
University Council Standing Committees 2017-2018
Academic & Related Affairs
Chair: Joe Libonati, Nursing
Liaison: Leo Charney
Staff: Jennifer Canose
Faculty:
Julie Fairman, Nursing
Nicola Mason, Vet
Daniel Raff, Wharton
Guobin Yang, ASC
Graduate Students: 2 TBD
Undergraduate Students:
Yasmina Al Ghadban
David Gordon
PPSA:
Yuhong He
Patty Lynn
WPPSA:
Marcia Dotson
Marcus Wright
Campus & Community Life
Co-Chairs:
Emily Hannum, SAS
Monica Calkins, PSOM
Liaison: Karu Kozuma
Staff: Destiny Martin
Faculty:
Delphine Dahan, SAS
Nancy Hodgson, Nursing
Annette Lareau, SAS
James Lok, Vet
Catherine McDonald, Nursing
Americus Reed, Wharton
Graduate Students: 2 TBD
Undergraduate Students:
Jihyeon Kim
Samara Wyant
PPSA:
Ashley Bush
Tessa Mansell
WPPSA:
Maria Puciata
Maureen Goldsmith
Diversity & Equity
Chair: Ezekiel Dixon-Román, SP2
Liaison: Sam Starks
Staff: Kuan Evans
Faculty:
Margo Brooks Carthon, Nursing
H. Gerald Campano, GSE
Kim Gallagher, SAS
John Keene, Design
Ebony Thomas, GSE
Graduate Students:
2 TBD
Undergraduate Students:
Curie Shim
Johany Dubon
PPSA:
Richard Chinery
Shaina Adams-El Guabli
WPPSA:
Laura Naden
Tiffany Perkins
Facilities
Chair: Masao Sako, SAS
Liaison: David Hollenberg
Staff: Taylor Berkowitz
Faculty:
Erick Guerra, Design
Brent Helliker, SAS
Kathryn Michel, Vet
Claire Mitchell, SAS
Paul Schmidt, SAS
Dom Vitiello, Design
Graduate Students: 2 TBD
Undergraduate Students:
Adam Mansell
Kyle O’Neil
PPSA:
Patrick Dolan
Tom Wilson
WPPSA:
Marcus Wright
Maria Puciata
Personnel Benefits
Chair: Russell Localio, PSOM
Liaisons:
Jack Heuer
Susan Sproat
Staff: Melissa Brown
Faculty:
David Balamuth, SAS
Tanja Kral, Nursing
Iourii Manovskii (fall term), SAS
Olivia Mitchell, Wharton
Andrew Postlewaite, SAS
Bob Stine (spring term), Wharton
PPSA:
Desiree Fleck
Cindy Kwan Dukes
Adam Roth-Saks
Denise Mancuso Lay
WPPSA:
Darlene Jackson
Rhonda Kirlew
Rosa Vargas
Ex-Officio: Anita Allen
Committee on Committees
Chair: Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Nursing
Staff:
Joe Gasiewski
Patrick Walsh
Faculty:
Kathleen Boesze-Battaglia, Dental
Cindy Connolly, Nursing
Ron Donagi, SAS
Antonio Garcia, SP2
Laura Perna, GSE
Santosh Venkatesh, SEAS
Graduate Student: 1 TBD
Undergraduate Student:1 TBD
PPSA: Stephanie Yee
WPPSA: Loretta Hauber
Asterisk [*] indicates observer status.
2017-2018 Meetings: Focus Issues and Discussion Topics for University Council
The following are the dates for meetings of the University Council, which are open to observers who register their intention to attend by calling the Office of the University Secretary in advance at (215) 898-7005. All meetings are held on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. in Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall. The agenda will be announced in Almanac prior to each meeting. Council meeting coverage is also published in Almanac in the issue following the meeting. Note: Focus Issues appear on the schedule in Italics.
December 6, 2017
Athletics and Extracurricular Activities
Open Forum
January 31, 2018
Diversity and Inclusion
February 21, 2018
Penn Connects 3.0
Open Forum
March 28, 2018
A discussion of the ways our faculty are using multidisciplinary approaches to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges
Reports on Budgets and Plans for the Next Academic Year
April 18, 2018
Presentation of Final Committee Reports
Discussion of Potential Focus Issues for the 2018-2019 Academic Year
Discussion of Potential Committee Charges for the 2018-2019 Academic Year