Research

Paul Mitchell’s deep interest in anthropology and in exploring human evolution and variation was sparked by his first course in the fall of 2009 during his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. 

PHILADELPHIA — Nicola Mason and Yvonne Paterson have been named this year’s recipients of the University of Pennsylvania

The body’s immune system exists to identify and destroy foreign objects, whether they are bacteria, viruses, flecks of dirt or splinters. Unfortunately, nanoparticles designed to deliver drugs, and implanted devices like pacemakers or artificial joints, are just as foreign and subject to the same response.

PHILADELPHIA — NASA has nominated three U.S. science teams to participate in the European Space Agency's planned Euclid mission, a space telescope designed to probe the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter and scheduled to launch in 2020.

PHILADELPHIA — For decades, researchers thought that blood plasma behaved like water. But, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania and Saarland University in Germany, plasma is more elastic and viscous than water, and, like ketchup, its flow properties depend on the pressure it is under.

Everyone has heard of DNA, the blueprint for life. But if it were up to Brian Gregory, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania, DNA’s close cousin, RNA, would get equal billing.

Gregory studies RNA, or ribonucleic acid, primarily in plants in his lab at Penn, investigating not only how it functions as a code for building proteins but also how it serves to regulate gene expression.

PHILADELPHIA — The spring 2011 flood on the Mississippi was among the largest floods ever, the river swelling over its banks and wreaking destruction in the surrounding areas.