Googling Cuba
Brett Perlmutter’s mission was to open up Cuba to the internet. To say that it was
politically sensitive is an understatement. But the timing was just about perfect.
The New Biology
From matchbook-sized models of living human organs to the surprising alternative-energy implications of symbiotic giant clams, the work of three new faculty members represents the changing face of bioscience at Penn.
Dangerous Ideas
PIK Professor Dorothy Roberts exposes how the myth of biologically distinct races—forged in the era of slavery—continues to poison the present, affecting attitudes and policies on everything from child welfare to medical treatment.
Imagination Man
Scott Barry Kaufman has been called “the leading empirical creativity researcher of his generation.” Now he wants to use the tools he’s developed to unleash the “quiet potential” of vulnerable people—including kids like him—and help them flourish.
Alumni Weekend 2016
Photos by Addison Geary.
Wasser World
Julian Wasser’s photographic love affair with Hollywood began more than half a century ago. He’s been loving and hating and shooting it ever since.
The Dhaka Studio
Eight years ago, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake turned their Penn Design senior studio upside down. They demoted design in favor of research, gave aesthetics a back seat to social science and data analysis, and took all their students to Bangladesh.
Beyond the Golden Touch
There’s a lot more to King Midas than history’s most celebrated case of “be careful what you wish for.” Drawing on decades of excavations at Gordion in modern Turkey, a blockbuster exhibition at the Penn Museum illuminates the world of ancient Phrygia’s greatest ruler.
The Small, Good Stories
The Penn Cultural Heritage Center was launched to provide a forum for an “intellectual discussion” of the meaning of heritage and the role of communities in preservation efforts. Then came the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS.
That Roosevelt
Penn Law professor, legal scholar, and novelist Kermit Roosevelt III is doing his best to live up to the family name—including, in his latest book, by tackling cousin Franklin’s executive order authorizing the confinement of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.
Street Fighter
“Gridlock Sam” Schwartz is an icon in New York’s century-long war with traffic. Can his final campaign reshape the city’s transportation future?
Readin’, Writin’, Revolution
With the Minerva Project, Ben Nelson W’97 is out to “build the world’s greatest university from scratch.” Should Penn—and other top-tier schools—be worried?
March Madness Missed
What’s more frustrating than playing Ivy League men’s basketball in the same era as Bill Bradley? Winning the University’s first official Ivy championship the year after he graduated, and then being kept out of postseason play because of a fight between the League and the NCAA. Fifty years later, Penn’s 1965-66 squad still wonders what might have been.
The Shapes of Things to Come
Haresh Lalvani Gr’81 believes there’s a universal code for architecture and sculpture—a “morphological genome” that determines the shape of built structures, similar to the way that DNA shapes living things. And he’s well into the process of decoding it.
Our Labs, Our Health?
In Risky Medicine, History and Sociology of Science Professor Robert Aronowitz argues that today’s fixation on diagnosing and managing risk factors rather than treating diseases leads to anxiety and stress, over-diagnosis of conditions and overuse of drugs, and radical treatments that are unnecessary or harmful.
Walking on a Wire
One hundred years after a Penn professor was famously fired for his political views, a campus symposium on academic freedom wrestled with a familiar question: Are universities still homes of free speech and inquiry?
Homecoming 2015
Our annual photo essay. Plus: Alumni Award of Merit winners and citations.
Pulling Weeds
David Casarett used to just say No when his hospice and palliative-care patients asked about using medical marijuana as a treatment or to relieve their symptoms. After researching and writing his new book, Stoned, his answer is “a lot more nuanced.”
Passion Projects
Paul Downs EAS’85 and Jacob Lief C’99 have each had just one job since graduating from Penn—the former as the owner of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers and the latter heading up the nonprofit Ubuntu Education Fund. While their ventures are very different, these two alumni share an extraordinary degree of persistence and a rare candor.
The Roundabout Way
Todd Haimes has the career he dreamed about and sits at the top of his field. When can he stop worrying?
The Gift
When a Penn-CHOP team performed the world’s first double hand transplant on a child last summer, the landmark operation generated headlines around the world and young Zion Harvey became a YouTube star. But there’s a lot more to the story.
Building Blocks
A talk with the authors of Becoming Penn, which traces the University’s development over the tumultuous half-century from the Cold War to the Millennium.
Baby Mama
After overcoming her own infertility, Melissa Brisman has helped hundreds of couples become parents as a legal entrepreneur in the little-discussed realm of pregnancy for pay.
Healing Invisible Wounds
Yochi Dreazen had seen his share of death and combat trauma
as a military journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it wasn’t until he
met an American general and his family that he learned how deep
that trauma can go, and what needs to be done to heal it.