News Archives

Steppin’ South Asian style

NSF grant to help West Philly kids do science

Math and science programs in West Philadelphia schools will get a $1.5 million boost thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant, which is approximately $500,000 a year for three years, will fund Access Science, an academically-based community service project involving faculty, undergraduate and graduate students. Access Science both tutors students and helps teachers design hands-on learning activities.

The tax man giveth

What Uncle Sam takes away, he sometimes gives back. And boy there’s not a single one among you who don’t already have plans for your income tax return. Catching up on past due bills is the general trend although some have more lavish plans, like a trip to Mexico, for that shiny penny. Sharon Mulholland Program Coordinator, Office of the Vice Dean, Wharton Undergraduate Division “We don’t plan on spending the money. My husband has just retired, so he’s consolidating and regrouping.”

Detective Zuberi goes investigating history

Tukufu Zuberi already wears two hats at Penn: Professor of sociology and director of the Center for Africana Studies. Now he’s added a third hat—the detective’s fedora. Zuberi isn’t just any old detective, though. Starting in July, he and three comrades—Columbia Professor of Architecture Gwendolyn Wright and appraisers Wesley Cowan and Elyse Luray-Marx—will go sleuthing for the historical significance of artifacts, buildings and legends all across America in a new PBS series, “History Detectives.”

Andy McKeague

Staff Q&A: Elena DiLapi

30 years ago, 200 Penn women—faculty, staff and students—took over College Hall Room 200 and refused to budge. They had gathered in response to a series of sexual assaults on and around campus. Out of that four-day protest was born the Penn Women’s Center, one of the oldest university women’s centers in the nation. The Current sat down with Center Director Elena DiLapi (SW’77) to wish the organization happy anniversary and to reflect on how her concern for the individual has helped further women’s causes on a broader, more institutional level.

Campus Buzz

Good morning, Baltimore: We must be doing something right with our West Philly initiatives—other cities have been picking off the people who made them happen, one by one. The latest catch: Associate Vice President Jack Shannon, who has been tapped to head a new nonprofit organization, East Baltimore Development, Inc. The group seeks to revitalize the neighborhood around Johns Hopkins Hospital. We believe that Jack will prove more than capable of bringing the vision to fruition, based on what he’s done here at Penn.

Scholars criticize, defend war against Iraq

As hostilities continue in the Middle East, Penn scholars gathered in Houston Hall to weigh in on the motivations and consequences of the war on Iraq. “Iraq: The End of the Beginning?,” a symposium cosponsored by the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and the School of Arts and Sciences, took place April 3 in front of a capacity crowd.

CCP celebrates a decade of civic service

The Center for Community Partnerships (CCP) is the heart and soul of Penn’s commitment to civic engagement. It is also the arms and legs. Led by Director Ira Harkavy and an extraordinarily dedicated staff, the center has galvanized faculty, staff and students in a decade-long effort to reach out to Penn’s West Philadelphia neighbors and heal the town/gown rift that for too long divided “us” from “them.”

“It would be a mistake to try to make pets of wild rats.”

—Karen Rosenthal, director of special species at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, on the dangers of welcoming these disease-carrying rodents into the home (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 26)