Penn held its 265th Commencement, honoring students of the Class of 2021 in a hybrid ceremony with a limited number of seniors in person and socially distanced at Franklin Field and the rest of the graduating class, along with family members and friends, celebrating virtually. Among other subjects, Commencement speaker Laurene Powell Jobs spoke of remaining humble. “It’s important to partner your joy with humility,” Powell Jobs added. “Even as we use our heads, we must learn to bow them. Humility and ambition need not contradict each other. We should all be ambitious to be good stewards of our planet, and good caretakers of one another during the brief time we have together. Because sometimes our time here is briefer than we desire.”
The University announced the recipients of its inaugural Projects for Progress prize, managed by the new Office of Social Equity & Community. The projects include three teams of Penn students, faculty, and staff. The teams were awarded $100,000 each to support initiatives that promote equity and inclusion in Philadelphia by addressing, in this year’s cohort, health care, education, and environmental justice. “It’s enlightening to see the interdisciplinary collaboration among so many teams, as well as the local community, who have joined creatively together for Projects for Progress for the good of all in Philadelphia,” says President Amy Gutmann. “This initiative is near and dear to my heart, and I am incredibly excited to see how each project evolves in the coming months.”
A donation of $5 million in the form of Bitcoin was made to the University and will support the growth of programs within the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at the Wharton School. It is the largest cryptocurrency gift the University has ever received. “As the nature of philanthropy continues to evolve, Penn stands at the forefront of innovative ways to make a difference in the world,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “I am deeply grateful for this creative and groundbreaking gift to support the important work of the Stevens Center.”
President Amy Gutmann, Provost Wendell Pritchett, and Deputy Provost Beth Winkelstein announced the inaugural Presidential Ph.D. Fellows. Each fellow will receive a three-year fellowship that includes summer support for research. “Our Ph.D. students embody our profound mission of creating new knowledge, understanding, and teaching that will shape the future,” said President Amy Gutmann upon the launch of the President’s Ph.D. Initiative last fall.
The inaugural class of eight undergraduate fellows in the Office of Social Equity & Community are working to address inequities in Philadelphia neighborhoods by working with people who are homeless and food insecure. “I wanted to make the greatest impact possible, within the limitations of being an undergraduate,” says Michael Hagan a junior undergraduate and one of the fellows.
Penn virtually celebrated Class of 2021 Ivy Day honorees, recognizing leadership, service, and scholarship. “Ivy Day award recipients regularly redefine excellence across the University, and this year is no exception,” said Vice Provost for University Life Mamta Motwani Accapadi, in her opening remarks. “From inventing health care technology to dismantling oppressive systems, our 2021 winners are applying their gifts to make the world a healthier and more just place through scholarly research and spirited public policy debate.”
At the end of 2020, Penn Dental Medicine received an estate gift of $20 million from alumna Carol Corby-Waller, the daughter of alumnus Dr. Arthur E. Corby, Class of 1917. “One cannot overstate the tremendous impact of this historic gift,” said Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Mark S. Wolff. “What makes it particularly unique and impactful for the School is that the gift is unrestricted, so these resources can help support a diversity of projects as needs arise.”
Project Maji, a winning project of the 2021 President’s Engagement Prize, will install a solar-powered water tank and provide agricultural and first aid training for members of the Olua I community in Uganda. The mission is to provide clean water using the tanks and empower refugees to grow food. “When you solve a problem like water, you can watch everything else around flourish. If Maji is successful, it’s something that can be modeled in other refugee camps around the world,” says Ocek Eke, adviser for the project.
Through Project HOPE, a President’s Engagement prize winner, Penn seniors Carson Eckhard, Natalia Rommen, and Sarah Simon will bring legal and reentry support to wrongfully incarcerated Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians. They will recruit private attorneys to take wrongful-conviction and disproportionate-sentence cases pro bono and facilitate workshops for incarcerated Pennsylvanians returning home. “The biggest thing that Penn has pushed me to do is to think about what I’m learning in the classroom and how that can be applied to making the world the kind of world that I want to live in,” says Eckhard.
Aris Saxena and Yiwen Li, winners of the 2021 President’s Innovation Prize, will develop the Mobility program to provide patients around the world with health care in their homes. The project uses a software solution to help coordinate at-home primary health deliveries in under-resourced areas. “For me, entrepreneurship is about finding a problem you care deeply about and doing everything in your power to tackle it, regardless of the odds,” says Saxena.
The Be Body Positive Philly project, a 2021 President’s Engagement Prize winner, will address eating disorder risk among Philadelphia high school students. Students will go through a body-positivity curriculum led by trained Penn undergraduate volunteers. “The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the prevalence of mental health illnesses, including eating disorders, among adolescents. Be Body Positive Philly’s near-peer mentorship model is extremely timely, inventive, and impactful, helping to build confidence and community among young people who are struggling with eating disorders,” says Penn President Amy Gutmann.
In The New York Times, Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School for Communication discussed concerns about voice technologies’ potential to read moods from the sound of our voices. While there are helpful uses for it in health care or in call centers, Turow cautioned that “we have to outlaw voice profiling for the purpose of marketing. There is no utility for the public. We’re creating another set of data that people have no clue how it’s being used.”
The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation will fund 25 arts projects with $177,000 in funding, totaling approximately $1.1 million in funding for the arts, humanities, and creative practice since the Program launched in 2017. Among other projects, this year’s awards will support a new design course in Liberal and Professional Studies, a speculative novel, a translation of an Urdu novel into English, development of the Rx Museum initiative, and a digital theater translation of stories from frontline medical workers.
