News Archive

Firms could avoid consumer backlash with pricing that works both ways, says Wharton marketing professor John Zhang.

Penn’s 286th academic year formally began at Convocation, where President J. Larry Jameson drew lessons from nature by invoking fireflies—recognizing students’ brilliance, prescribing them to ‘“embrace the unexpected,” and reminding them, “Fireflies do not glow alone.”

The Ivy League released the 2025 Ivy League men’s soccer preseason poll with the University of Pennsylvania men’s soccer team landing the top spot. Penn earned the favored spot with 120 points and ten first-place votes after ending last season as the Ivy League regular-season champions.

The Penn Commonwealth-Engaged Scholars (PCES) Program is a new initiative aimed at deepening the university’s connection with communities across Pennsylvania. Funding for PCES comes from the University’s inaugural Draw Down the Lightning Grants program. The first cohort of PCES Scholars is made up of faculty and staff members interested in applying their expertise to local Pennsylvania issues.

Ayako Kano, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, has been appointed as director of the Wolf Humanities Center. Professor Kano is a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan and has been teaching at Penn since 1995.

To understand how to reduce vaping among LGBTQ+ youth, researchers at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication spoke to young Americans about anti-vaping messages on social media. They found that sexual and gender minority youth are more likely to vape, but there aren’t many anti-vaping campaigns designed specifically for them.

For their Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program project, Chinmay Govind and Nihar Ballamudi leveraged AI to locate and census whales. The study may inform policy measures that help to improve protections for whale populations worldwide.

New and returning undergraduates arrived on campus last week, attending welcome events and receptions, including an introduction to the Libraries, the Class Photo on Franklin Field, and an evening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Penn students curated and performed a series of short plays for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland Aug. 4-9.

In a new study led by Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have found that mitochondrial dysfunction in the blood-brain barrier may lead to neuropsychiatric disease in some patients with 22qDS. The researchers also demonstrate that a class of FDA-approved cholesterol drugs could potentially be repurposed to treat this dysfunction.