Altagracia Felix (right) is a financial coordinator for the Annenberg School for Communication, but she also has a side gig as a money coach. Her aim is to help “disrupt the cycle of poverty and struggle,” she says. (Image: Courtesy of Altagracia Felix)
Side Gigs for Good, part three
The final 2019 installment in our series highlighting impactful work Penn faculty and staff do.
A new role for a triple-negative breast cancer target
A team led by Rumela Chakrabarti of the School of Veterinary Medicine has made new discoveries into how a key protein involved in triple-negative breast cancer functions in puberty.
Heather Calvert, executive director of MindCORE, drops off her foster puppy Ugo at the School of Veterinary Medicine's Working Dog Center at Pennovation Works each weekday. She and her family care for the working-dog-in-training during evenings, weekends, and holidays.
Side Gigs for Good, part two
In a second installment of Side Gigs for Good stories, meet four more Penn employees whose after-work endeavors go above and beyond.
Mary Robinson, director of Penn Vet’s Equine Pharmacology Laboratory, led work with lab member Jinwen Chen, to find fingerprints of shockwave therapy, a treatment used to address injury and pain in both humans and horses. The practice is banned in racehorses 10 days prior to competition. (Image: Paulick Report)
‘Invisible,’ restricted horse racing therapy may leave a trail
Shockwave therapy is used in both horses and humans to speed healing, but it can also mask pain. For the first time, researchers led by Mary Robinson and Jinwen Chen have identified several biomarkers of the treatment, the use of which is restricted in horse racing.
In an experiment by the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Ronald Harty and Bruce Freedman, virus-like particles of Ebola (in green and yellow), which mimic the process by which the authentic Ebola virus spreads, exit a cell along filaments of actin (in red), a structural protein. Harty and Freedman are designing compounds to block this process, increasing the likelihood an infected individual could recover. (Image: Gordon Ruthel/School of Veterinary Medicine)
These overlooked global diseases take a turn under the microscope
Faculty at the School of Veterinary Medicine target neglected tropical diseases with advanced science, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and work in the lab and the field.
Carolyn Gibson of the School of Dental Medicine, Sampath Kannan of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Ellen Puré of the School of Veterinary Medicine.
Three Penn faculty named 2019 AAAS Fellows
Three from Penn have been named to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s newest class of Fellows: Carolyn Gibson of the School of Dental Medicine, Sampath Kannan of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Ellen Puré of the School of Veterinary Medicine.
A veil of haze shrouds the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. Research from Penn chemists provides new details about how this kind of particle pollution forms in the atmosphere (Image: Diliff/CC 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
A missing link in haze formation
Hazy days don’t just block the view; they mean the air contains particulate matter that can compromise human health. Chemists have discovered a way that alcohols can balance out the formation of new particles, a finding that could improve the accuracy of air-quality forecasts.
Phillip Scott and Daniel Beiting have collaborated for years on leishmaniasis, employing cutting-edge "'omics" techniques to more deeply understand the disease and work to find therapeutic targets. (Image: John Donges/Penn Vet)
Predicting treatment outcome for leishmaniasis
In a study of patients treated in Brazil, a team led by School of Veterinary Medicine researchers identified genetic factors and features of the infection itself that predict whether patients will respond to treatment.
This Penn heart patient is a 9-year-old boxer dog named Sophie
Sophie underwent a cardiac ablation procedure in a Perelman School of Medicine translational research lab to treat her arrhythmia—the first time a dog with her diagnosis received such a treatment. Veterinary cardiologist Anna Gelzer says of the collaboration, “It’s the best of both worlds.”
