2025 PEP, PIP, and PSP winners: Where are they now?
Nearly a year after being awarded the 2025 President’s Engagement Prize, President’s Innovation Prize, and President’s Sustainability Prize, the recipients—now alumni—provide updates on their projects.
3 min. read
As Penn prepares to announce the next cohort of President’s Prize winners for 2026 later this spring, aspiring winners face a quintessential Penn challenge: How to turn bold ideas into meaningful impact. And each year, Penn’s newest alumni approach the challenge with rigor, ingenuity, and a spirit of service.
Such is the case with the winners of 2025’s President’s Prize who, nearly a year since graduation, continue to advance their projects for the real world—improving farming efficiency, engaging West Philadelphia students with camera-based arts, empowering caregivers of seniors, and bringing healthy lunch choices to K-6 students.
The donor-supported Prizes are the largest of their kind in higher education and are awarded to students undertaking post-graduation projects that make a positive, lasting impact in the world. Each winner received a $50,000 living stipend and $100,000 to support the development of their teams’ projects.
“These projects began as the visions of passionate Penn students, now alumni, who embody the University at its finest: creative and extraordinarily committed to making a measurable difference in the world,” says Penn President J. Larry Jameson. “I am deeply proud of all they have accomplished, and I look forward to seeing more of their next chapters, which are already inspiring.”
Here, Penn Today offers a glimpse into the work of the four teams now that the caps and gowns have been put away.
The Penn-born venture has helped users achieve “up to 40% lower fertilizer expenses and up to 15% higher yields,” says Lazarek.
2025 President’s Engagement Prize: LensBright
2025 President’s Engagement Prize winner Ejun Mary Hong double majored in fine arts and cinema and media studies at the College of Arts & Sciences, while winner Jack Nicholas Roney was a double major in architecture and fine arts, also at the College. Their initiative, LensBright (formerly PIXEL), is a weekly Penn-led art mentorship initiative that provides increased access to under-resourced Philadelphia youth. Their program is supported by the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and builds bridges between camera-based art industries and public high school students while engaging them with project-based learning.
2025 President’s Innovation Prize: Sync Labs
2025 President’s Innovation Prize winner Melanie Herbert majored in electrical engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, while winning partner Alexandra Popescu majored in systems engineering, also at Penn Engineering. Sync Labs provides caregivers a privacy-centered interface that leverages the power of AI by using real-time intelligence to create a monitoring hub with camera sensors presented as picture frames that detect seniors’ eating and other daily habits—without ever streaming or recording video footage. Herbert describes it as “the copilot for caregiving.”
During an early pilot with Eskaton assisted living, caregivers using Sync Labs’ technology reported significantly improved care-transition times, allowing them to see more seniors per day while providing more personalized care.
2025 President’s Engagement Prize: Nourish to Flourish
2025 President’s Engagement Prize winner Imani Nkrumah Ardayfio double majored in history and Africana studies at the College of Arts & Sciences; Inaya Zaman completed the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, a dual-degree program in the College and the Wharton School; and Rashmi Acharya majored in health and societies, also at the College. Together, they developed Nourish to Flourish, a data- and research-driven approach to motivate K-6 students to make nutritious choices. Since winning the Prize, they have been working to bring healthy eating and nutrition programing to Comegys Elementary School in West Philadelphia, in their effort to reduce food insecurity and promote nutritional equity.
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.
