School of Arts & Sciences

Pigment and parchment

Undergraduate and graduate students were paired with visiting scholars during a Penn Libraries workshop to paint illustrations like those in centuries-old illuminated manuscripts.

Louisa Shepard

Meeting of minds

With the Penn Alumni Reading Club, the Center for Africana Studies delivers intellectual engagement directly to alumni—and the public.

Penn Today Staff

Inside man

Nick Miller, a senior inside linebacker on the Penn football team and a unanimous First-Team All-Ivy selection, chats about his incredible Quaker career.

Greg Johnson

Up, up, and away

Mark Devlin and his team behind BLAST are about to embark on another scientific adventure in Antarctica, this time measuring how stars form in our galaxy.

Lauren Hertzler

Cells and cinema

As a biology major, senior Andrew Ravaschiere spends much of his time in a laboratory conducting cellular research. But as a cinema and media studies minor, he got out of the lab and into the world of filmmaking during the summer, working as an intern for a documentary filmmaker.

Louisa Shepard

Bigger brains are smarter, but not by much

Using a large dataset and controlling for a variety of factors, including sex, age, height, socioeconomic status, and genetic ancestry, Gideon Nave of the Wharton School and Philipp Koellinger of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that people with larger brains rated higher on measures of intelligence, but only accounts for two percent of the variation in smarts.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Where do comets originate?

A new technique developed by team of Penn astronomers may allow the scientists to measure radiation from celestial bodies that are only theorized to exist.

Penn Today Staff , Erica K. Brockmeier



In the News


The Wall Street Journal

Suddenly there aren’t enough babies. The whole world is alarmed

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the School of Arts & Sciences estimates that global fertility last year fell to below global replacement for the first time in human history.

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Salon.com

The world’s oceans just broke an important climate change record

Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the warming of the oceans is helping to destabilize ice shelves and fuel more powerful hurricanes and tropical cyclones.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia’s Tyshawn Sorey wins Pulitzer Prize in music

Tyshawn Sorey of the School of Arts & Sciences has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in music for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” a concerto for saxophone and orchestra.

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The New York Times

Jerome Rothenberg, who expanded the sphere of poetry, dies at 92

Charles Bernstein of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the late Jerome Rothenberg was the ultimate hyphenated person: a poet-critic-anthologist-translator.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

He started college in prison. Now, he is Rutgers-Camden’s first Truman scholar

Tej Patel, a third-year in the Wharton School and College of Arts and Sciences from Billeria, Massachusetts, was one of 60 college students nationwide chosen to be a Truman Scholar.

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