Penn President Amy Gutmann announced the four winning projects of the President’s Engagement Prize and President’s Innovation Prize, awarded annually to graduating seniors. The winners, selected out of a pool of 64 applications this year, are awarded $100,000 for their project and $50,000 for living expenses per team member.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences elected Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Carl June, director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapy in the Abramson Cancer Center, to the ranks of its academy. In total, there are 2,403 U.S. members and 501 international members.
Guthrie Ramsey, Kathleen Stebe, Eve M. Troutt Powell, and Barbie Zelizer are among 276 honorees this year to be elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is the 240th class of scholars, leaders, artists, and innovators who demonstrate exceptional work and accomplishments.
Penn President Amy Gutmann delivered a guest lecture, in conversation with Wharton School Dean Geoffrey Garrett, as part of the Wharton course Epidemics, National Disasters, and Geopolitics: Managing Global Business and Financial Uncertainty. Approximately 2,000 students are enrolled in the course.
Penn has signed an agreement, consisting of two contracts, that will result in the construction of two new solar energy facilities in central Pennsylvania. It’s a major step forward toward meeting the Climate & Sustainability Action Plan 3.0’s commitment to have a 100% carbon neutral campus by 2042.
Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, received a Guggenheim fellowship for her translations of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. She is among 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists selected this year.
A team of students and incoming students have banded together to recreate Penn’s campus in the popular video game “Minecraft.” “In terms of dealing with the quarantine, I feel like the building of campus is cool, but the real way this project helps everyone focus [during our shelter-in-place] isn’t recreating campus, but having a community to rally around and do something with,” said Makarios Chung, a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
In the face of a pandemic that has shuttered most physical laboratories across campus, researchers have maintained work and social ties through writing, virtual journal clubs, online coffee breaks, and more.
Essential workers in the School of Veterinary Medicine are caring for livestock, keeping track of disease, ensuring product consistency, and communicating with farmers to ensure that Pennsylvania farms are able to continue providing a reliable food supply for the community.
Through an audio message, Penn President Amy Gutmann addressed the Penn community about making the best of a new way of life. In the midst of misfortune, she says, “each of us can find meaning. Each of us has a calling.”
In University World News, Ira Harkavy of the Netter Center co-authored an article about how the values and resolve of universities can shape a post-COVID-19 world. He wrote, alongside his co-authors: “Higher education can add momentum by renewing our commitment to our core values of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and engagement by students, faculty, and staff, and re-emphasising the role of higher education institutions as societal actors for the public good.”
In a partnership with the University City District, Penn is providing monetary assistance in the form of grants that are being distributed to for-profit, independently owned retailers and restaurants located in the District boundaries. Said Penn Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli: “Our campus retail portfolio is more than 60% independently owned, and all of University City is well served and more vibrant by this sector.”
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Brent Cebul of the School of Arts & Sciences, a historian with expertise in the 20th-century U.S., discussed how Philadelphia can learn from the Great Depression as we face the current pandemic and its economic consequences. “A lot of people are talking about the Great Depression these days,” he said. “I need to remind them just how long and how deep that crisis was.”
The Penn Health-Tech coronavirus rapid response team united quickly to commit to producing 20,000 face shields.
Gabby Rosenzweig, a senior communications major and attacker on the women’s lacrosse team, will finish her career as the No. 1 points scorer in the history of Penn’s program. “I have never coached a kid who has worked so hard to be so good,” said Head Coach Karin Corbett.
In a PBS report, Amy Castro Baker of the School of Social Policy & Practice advised that lawmakers consider long-term societal repercussions of legislation. “Any types of inequality that we’re writing into policy now are going to have a reverberation moving forward—both in terms of policy precedent and in terms of uneven distribution of resources,” she said.