Man shakes hands with member of Ojibwe tribe of Wisconsin, an another man in headdress looks on.

Kindred spirits: Irish-Native American solidarity

A fundraiser for two Native American tribes hard hit by the pandemic has received tens of thousands of dollars from donors in Ireland. Conor Donnan looks at the Irish diaspora in the United States and at the transatlantic solidarity between Ireland and Native nations.

Bridging the communication divide for Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities

A medical worker in full personal protective gear holds up an x-ray of a chest and lungs

A possible link between certain psoriasis treatments and respiratory-tract infection risk

Announcement

Coronavirus (COVID-19) information and resources

Learn more →

Jiaqi Song on his Roman quarantine

Blocking tumor signals can hinder cancer’s spread

At a community health center, doctors offer COVID testing—and screening for depression

‘Expanding what it means to be a class’

The joys and trials of defending a dissertation virtually

Literary characters as masks: A reflection on identity during a pandemic

Will the pandemic cause food shortages?

EVENTS → NEWS ARCHIVES →

COVID-19’s assault on Black and Brown communities

Racism, inequality, and the coronavirus have combined to cause an alarming number of COVID-19 cases and deaths among African-American and Latinx populations.

Greg Johnson ・ May 26, 2020

Image of a body's cell representing with the words "mimicking efferocytosis-induced signals" showing the treatment of an inflammatory disease

Stimulating immune cleanup crew offers affordable possibility for treating rare genetic disorder

Compounds that mimicked the process known as efferocytosis alleviated signs of leukocyte adhesion deficiency type-1 in an animal model, according to work led by the School of Dental Medicine’s George Hajishengallis

Katherine Unger Baillie ・ May 26, 2020

Group of people standing on the steps of a state building holding signs in protest of the state’s stay at home orders due to the pandemic.

Do political beliefs affect social distancing?

A new study found that political partisanship influenced Americans’ decisions to voluntarily engage in physical distancing at the start of the pandemic, particularly in response to communications by state governors.

Kristen de Groot ・ May 22, 2020

Graphic illustration of essential worker delivering groceries to an older couple

High-impact giving during a global crisis

Penn Today talks with Kat Rosqueta and Kelly Andrews of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy to discuss how to give when the need is great

Kristina García ・ May 22, 2020

Professor of English and Africana studies Herman Beavers seated in a chair in a university hallway.

Herman Beavers named faculty director of Civic House and the Civic Scholars Program

Beavers has taught at Penn since 1989 and is a professor of English and Africana studies, a distinguished poet, and a widely published scholar of 20th-century, and is a leader in the Penn community.

Amanda Mott ・ May 21, 2020

At home, but still engaged with STEM classes

penn vet gary althouse in the swine barn

Health Sciences

Supporting agriculture and a safe food supply

Health Sciences

‘Disease knows no borders’

Campus & Community

A tribute to the extraordinary Class of 2020

As in-person festivities have been postponed, Penn live-streamed its “first” 264th Commencement for graduates and their families across the city, nation, and world.

group in front of screen with light projected on it

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Sharon Hayes on performance art

Having come of age in New York City during the AIDS crisis, artist Sharon Hayes has always made work connected to political movements. She blends performance with installation and video to create large-scale works that explore the relationship between “the private and the public; the personal and the political.”

Jumping a hurdle; saddle; clearing, landing and recovering

Science & Technology

A new way of thinking about motion, movement, and the concept of time

Eadweard Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” was the first scientific study to use photography. Now, more than 130 years later, Muybridge’s work is seen as both an innovation in photography and the science of movement, alongside his personal legacy as someone with an eccentric 19th century style and a dark past.

View of white garments hanging at the Designs for Different Futures exhibit, with a white shirt on a stand and a futuristic wheelchair and mechanical upright walking device on display.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Designs for what the future can be

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Designs for Different Futures” exhibition includes contributions and installations from several Penn faculty and alumni who seek to answer questions about what the not-so-distant future may look like.

Man in a suit pointing to a glass box containing artifacts

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Contemporary art enhances Penn Museum’s Africa Galleries

New installations showcase the diversity and artistry of modern culture in dialogue with historic artifacts.

rendering of DNA sequence and cells as part of gene editing from CRISPR cas9

Health Sciences

CRISPR-edited immune cells can survive and thrive after infusion into cancer patients

In the first U.S. clinical trial, cells removed from patients and brought back into the lab were able to kill cancer months after their original manufacturing and infusion.

An artist’s illustration of nanoparticles transporting mRNA into a T cell, allowing the latter to express surface receptors that recognize cancer cells.

Science & Technology

Penn nanoparticles are less toxic to T cells engineered for cancer immunotherapy

By using messenger RNA across the T cell’s membrane via a nanoparticle instead of a DNA-rewriting virus on extracted T cells, CAR T treatments could have fewer side effects.

Lab technician with a sample of plasma blood analyzing the results

Health Sciences

Promising findings for multiple myeloma immunotherapy

Adam Cohen of the Perelman School of Medicine headed a clinical trial that found an experimental therapy can make a difference for patients who have exhausted other options.

Health Sciences

Positive results in first-in-U.S. trial of CRISPR-edited immune cells

Genetically editing a cancer patient’s immune cells using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, then infusing those cells back into the patient appears safe and feasible based on early data from the first-ever clinical trial to test the approach in humans in the United States.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Ecuador’s vice president talks biodiversity protection

Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner spoke to a packed Perry World House about protecting the environment while balancing economic growth.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Documentary filmmaking in the Himalayas

Supported by National Geographic and other grants, seniors Alina Peng and Charles Zhang traveled to Bhutan to discover how villagers are coping with the effects of water scarcity and climate change.

power plant emitting carbon dioxide into atmosphere on a sunny day, surrounded by trees and roadways..

Science & Technology

What to do when cutting emissions alone is no longer enough

Four factors to consider in the race to solve the climate crisis, including how to scale up a tool called negative emissions and why the oceans can only help so much.

Amish buggy traveling on a road with a farm in the background and snow-covered winter cropland in the foreground.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

The Amish and the Anthropocene

Nicole Welk-Joerger, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, discusses what a technology adopted by the Amish can tell us about climate change and the future.

a map showing lines between a map of galaxies, shown as colored points across a dark sky

Science & Technology

A new way to measure cosmic black holes

Researchers find a link between the masses of supermassive black holes and the distances between the galaxies which surround them, allowing astronomers to more easily study many astronomical phenomena.

a cluster of galaxies shown against a dark blue background, a faint darker ring can be seen around the center of the image

Science & Technology

By the Numbers: Dark matter

Key facts and figures about the unseen matter that remains one of cosmology’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Science & Technology

Answering big questions by studying small particles

Using electronics designed at Penn, particle physicists study neutrinos, incredibly small and nearly massless subatomic particles, to understand the fundamental nature of the universe.

Science & Technology

Exploring the unseen: On dark matter and dark energy

Physics professors Mark Trodden and Masao Sako explain how dark matter and dark energy shape their work.

Business Insider

Nurses who have the coronavirus are fighting their employers to get paid time off: 'Nobody really cares about my safety'

Research led by Linda Aiken of the School of Nursing found that limiting nurses to caring for four or fewer patients at a time can lead to lower rates of readmission or death.

FULL STORY →

Vice

TV stations broke law by airing Amazon propaganda as news, experts say

Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication said the airing of marketing materials without adequate disclosure on news stations reflects the decline of quality local journalism. “Structural factors that create fertile conditions for such corporate propaganda include the loss of actual journalists, little regulatory oversight, and media ownership concentration, which tends to both intensify commercial pressures and homogenize media content,” he said.

FULL STORY →

The Wall Street Journal

Novartis inks deal to make experimental coronavirus vaccines

The pharmaceutical company Novartis has agreed to manufacture a gene-based coronavirus vaccine that Penn helped develop.

FULL STORY →

Bloomberg

House Democrats, insurance industry face off on pandemic plans

Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School said the proposed Pandemic Risk Insurance Act would require the government to take on too much risk and proposed an alternative program that would more evenly distribute responsibility between policyholders, the insurance industry, and the government.

FULL STORY →

Huffington Post

Right-wing radio reaches tens of millions. Its coronavirus conspiracies are out of control

Brian Rosenwald of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about the popularity of conservative talk radio hosts, who maintain close relationships with their listeners. “They may listen 15 hours a week to that host. For Rush [Limbaugh], they might have been doing that for 30 years and they might spend more time with him than they spend with their spouse,” Rosenwald said. “It’s a deeper bond.”

FULL STORY →

Los Angeles Times

Column: Developing a coronavirus vaccine should not be rushed. Here’s why

Paul Offit of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about the 1955 Cutter incident, in which a polio vaccine was rushed to production and ended up infecting tens of thousands. “We’re much better educated about how to mass-produce vaccines than we were then,” he said.

FULL STORY →

Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia Orchestra channel gives Penn hospitals a new soundtrack

Patients at Penn’s hospitals can now access archived footage of the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Patients have given us feedback that they are utilizing it, that they find it helpful, and that they find it comforting,” said HUP CEO Regina Cunningham.

FULL STORY →

WAMU Radio (Washington, D.C.)

Social media usage is at an all-time high. That could mean a nightmare for democracy

Pinar Yildirim of the Wharton School spoke about the uptick in social media usage amidst the pandemic and about its impact on politics. “If you asked me two months ago, I would have had very different predictions about social media’s role on the election,” she said. “But now it’s become the primary source of information and social communication.”

FULL STORY →

Inside Higher Ed

Education is a team sport

Peter Decherney of the School of Arts & Sciences and a Rice University colleague wrote about the role of university staff in supporting online education.

FULL STORY →

The New York Times

There are 3 things we have to do to get people wearing masks

Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts & Sciences, Lyle Ungar of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and PIK Professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote an op-ed about how best to persuade people to wear protective face masks. “It’s not too late to apply three basic principles from behavioral science: make it easy, understood, and expected,” they write, “and we’ll soon see face masks everywhere, saving lives.”

FULL STORY →

Human Milk and Breastfeeding

Managing Stress

Future of Cities Conference

Aftermaths of Chernobyl

The Latest

COVID-19’s assault on Black and Brown communities

Stimulating immune cleanup crew offers affordable possibility for treating rare genetic disorder

Do political beliefs affect social distancing?

High-impact giving during a global crisis

Herman Beavers named faculty director of Civic House and the Civic Scholars Program

Inside Penn

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Multimedia

Penn providers on the front lines of a pandemic

Featured

Campus & Community

A tribute to the extraordinary Class of 2020

As in-person festivities have been postponed, Penn live-streamed its “first” 264th Commencement for graduates and their families across the city, nation, and world.

Big Ideas

Sharon Hayes on performance art

A new way of thinking about motion, movement, and the concept of time

Designs for what the future can be

Contemporary art enhances Penn Museum’s Africa Galleries

CRISPR-edited immune cells can survive and thrive after infusion into cancer patients

Penn nanoparticles are less toxic to T cells engineered for cancer immunotherapy

Promising findings for multiple myeloma immunotherapy

Positive results in first-in-U.S. trial of CRISPR-edited immune cells

Ecuador’s vice president talks biodiversity protection

Documentary filmmaking in the Himalayas

What to do when cutting emissions alone is no longer enough

The Amish and the Anthropocene

A new way to measure cosmic black holes

By the Numbers: Dark matter

Answering big questions by studying small particles

Exploring the unseen: On dark matter and dark energy

Penn in the NewsSee all →

Nurses who have the coronavirus are fighting their employers to get paid time off: 'Nobody really cares about my safety'

TV stations broke law by airing Amazon propaganda as news, experts say

Novartis inks deal to make experimental coronavirus vaccines

House Democrats, insurance industry face off on pandemic plans

Right-wing radio reaches tens of millions. Its coronavirus conspiracies are out of control

Column: Developing a coronavirus vaccine should not be rushed. Here’s why

Philadelphia Orchestra channel gives Penn hospitals a new soundtrack

Social media usage is at an all-time high. That could mean a nightmare for democracy

Education is a team sport

There are 3 things we have to do to get people wearing masks