Awards

Rézme won the $40,000 Michael & Lori Milken Family Foundation Grand Prize at the 16th-annual Milken–Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition out of seven finalists. The venture is a compliance software that dismantles systemic barriers keeping justice-impacted individuals from jobs, housing, and higher education.

Joseph Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, is awarded the Pauling Medal in honor of his work into the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere by the American Chemical Society Puget Sound Section.

The Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Penn has awarded the Elaine Redding Brinster Prize in Science or Medicine to Zhijian ‘James’ Chen, a biochemist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, for his discovery of the DNA-sensing enzyme cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGas) and its role in immune and inflammatory response.

The 2025 Library of Congress Literacy Awards recognized both Penn GSE’s Philadelphia Writing Project and a startup founded by alum Rina Madhani for their contributions to literacy and community engagement.

Awarded every four years by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the medal honors Kane’s pioneering research on topological insulators.

The Klein Family Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science’s article, “From Pluribus to Unum: The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth Century America,” will be the recipient of American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section’s Mary Parker Follett prize, awarded annually for the best scholarly article in politics and history.

The Pennovation Accelerator held their eighth annual Pitch Day at the Pennovation Center in July, the concluding event for the six-week program focused on business development. Serpent Robotics, an advanced robotics system that eliminates the dangers of manual tree-cutting, was named the overall 2025 Pennovation Accelerator Winner. Earable Intelligence won Best Pitch for developing an ear-based wearable medical device—or “earable”—to detect, and even predict, epileptic seizures.

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.

Historian Benjamin Nathans’ huge volume on the stories and lives of Soviet dissidents has gotten renewed attention after winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Nathan’s research and insights span a four-decade-long career studying Russia and the USSR, modern Jewish history, and the history of human rights.