News Archives

Penn Engineer, George Pappas, Honored with Presidential Early Career Award by President Bush

Philadelphia -- Today, University of Pennsylvania professor George Pappas was named as one of the nation's most promising young scientists and engineers by President Bush with a 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Staff Q&A: Tom Waldman

STAFF Q & A/Tom Waldman wears two hats—medieval scholar and fundraiser. Tom Waldman’s first job at the University was as bibliographer of rare books and manuscripts, a logical choice for someone who had studied medieval history at Columbia and Oxford. It wasn’t until a few years later that he discovered his skill at fundraising.

Six Guggenheim fellowships for SAS faculty  

Six professors in the School of Arts and Sciences have received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, the largest number of recipients from the school since 1995. Every year since 1925, the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recognized distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for the future by giving aid to scholars, artists and writers pursuing research in any field or creation in any area of the arts except the performing arts.

At Work With...Ed Dixon

Star search turns up fewer new ones

With few new stars being formed, will the twinkling lights above our heads soon disappear into the night sky? According to Raul Jimenez, assistant professor of physics, there is now very little gas—the main component of stars—available in the galaxies, so few new ones are forming. But since stars tend to have a lifetime of 10 to 100 billion years, and our universe is a youthful 13 billion years old, we don’t need to worry that the lights above will dim anytime soon.

Center explores ties that bind people, animals

Like most animal lovers, when James Serpell thinks about the stray dogs of Taiwan or Philadelphia’s own canine abuse problem, he gets upset. As director of Penn’s Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, a multi-disciplinary research center within the School of Veterinary Medicine, he gets to explore the root causes and work toward solutions. Doing research on how animals fare in their relationships with people is a big part of the center’s mission. It also looks at the other side of the equation—how people are affected by their interaction with animals.

Research: What’s goin’ on with Marvin Gaye?

Twenty years after his untimely death at the hands of his father, Marvin Gaye has a secure place in the pantheon of pop music. At least four biographies, a memoir and a score of other works have explored his troubled life and groundbreaking music. Now comes Michael Eric Dyson to tell us there’s more to the story.

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Appointments

Loretta Sweet Jemmott has been named Assistant Provost effective May 1. In her new position, which was announced by Provost Robert Barchi April 13, Jemmott will have primary responsibility for gender and minority issues at the University of Pennsylvania.

A show about nothing

Clear your mind and think of nothing. What do you see? Through the summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art shines the spotlight on a state of total, complete nothingness in its major group exhibition, “The Big Nothing.” Beginning May 1 in both gallery spaces, the ICA will feature more than 60 artists’ works from the 1970s to the present, including pieces from Yayoi Kusama that contemplate the metaphysical nothing, art by Jutta Koether that visualizes “nothing” as refusal or negation and Roe Ethridge’s delicate photographic image, “Moon” (left).