Dean Mark Trodden on what’s next for Penn Arts & Sciences
Dean Trodden reflects on his first year on the job, how the School of Arts & Sciences is supporting students' futures through curriculum innovation, the new Physical Sciences Complex, and other initiatives.
6 min. read
Mark Trodden, dean of the School of Arts & Sciences.
Mark Trodden is dean of the School of Arts & Sciences (SAS) and the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Physics & Astronomy. Trodden, who was previously associate dean for the natural sciences, began his service as dean in June 2025.
Trodden grew up in England and studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge before coming to the U.S. for graduate school in physics at Brown University and completed a postdoc at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. After serving as a faculty member at Syracuse University, he arrived at Penn in 2009 as a full professor, charged with fostering collaborative research in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.
He says this sort of discipline-bridging is one of Penn’s greatest strengths.
“I think the University has continued to become more and more excellent,” Trodden says. “I can feel it when I travel; I can feel it in its reputation; I can feel it in each and every national and international conversation about higher education.”
As dean, he says, his goal is to sustain this momentum while meeting the challenges of public skepticism of higher education and to federal research funding. Deciding to take the position boiled down to a simple sentiment: “I wanted someone to do this job who really cares, and I really care,” Trodden says. “I feel like I can make a difference.”
Penn Today sat down with Trodden to discuss his first year as dean, the School’s new strategic framework, SAS Horizons: Pathways for a Changing World, and the new Physical Sciences Complex project that will completely reimagine and expand the David Rittenhouse Laboratory.
SAS recently unveiled the SAS Horizons strategic framework. Why was now the right time for this?
The kinds of challenges we have in higher education have changed over the past year-and-a-half. That landscape demands us to articulate our priorities and how we’re going to implement them in a way that I think we had more luxury of time beforehand to do. That’s really another reason why we had to move quickly and get this done.
We tried to do this thoughtfully. I met with every department personally, along with different student, faculty, and staff groups. I convened two faculty committees and talked to two different advisory groups, and we did a survey to the entire school. Based on that, we were able to put together an overall vision statement, pathways we thought were important, and priorities we’d like to execute.
The University has a strategic framework called In Principle and Practice. We were not seeking to build on that, necessarily, but we wanted to understand what our school’s important priorities were and where they align with those of In Principle and Practice. The alignment ended up being very strong with both that and some of the initiatives coming out of Penn Forward. That can only be a good thing for the school.
How have you thought about addressing questions around the value of higher education?
The focus for many of our conversations was, ‘What is the role of a place like Penn Arts & Sciences at a moment like this?’ We recognized that trust in what we do is something that seems increasingly fragile. So addressing these questions around the value of higher education was really at the core of our thinking from the start.
We thought long and hard about how we prepare students to navigate change and participate in difficult conversations. We also affirmed our commitment to partnering with the public—including making sure that the knowledge we create here is accessible, credible, and has impact in communities and the wider world.
One great example is that we have just completed a reimagined journey for undergraduates—a completely new curriculum that’s been worked on for the past couple of years. It has a huge emphasis on a unified first-year, second-year, and pre-major experience. The new structure includes innovative ‘Kite’ and ‘Key’ courses that will introduce students to tools and ideas from a wide range of disciplines and use very interactive and creative formats to teach quantitative and qualitative reasoning. Our first-year seminars will facilitate complex discussions around complex topics, so all of our students will engage with many perspectives and take part in difficult conversations with people they may believe are very different from themselves. This is a skillset we believe everyone, not just our students, needs.
We are also developing a vision for AI that integrates it across disciplines and embeds it throughout our teaching, research, and engagement activities. In a world that is increasingly automated and technologically mediated, we think humanistic reasoning is becoming more important than ever. We also think it’s imperative that we give our students a framework for not just using AI, but for thinking critically about it and evaluating it.
How has AI, or other changes in higher education, affected how SAS thinks about graduate education and supporting those students?
The changes that are impacting higher education generally are magnified when we’re talking about graduate education. AI is just one of many changes—we also need to talk about challenges to our funding models and the shifting career landscape. We will always be centered on cultivating excellence in the next generation of scholars, but we also know it will be essential to prepare them to be successful and contribute to innovation in a range of careers.
When I came in, I asked our associate graduate dean, Beth Wenger, to put together some committees and do a review of graduate education, and to ask: ‘Are we doing graduate education correctly for now versus 100 years ago? Do we have the right idea of time to the degree? Do we have the right idea of cohorts? Do we have the right idea of whether our students are getting the right interdisciplinary opportunities? Do we have the right idea of what a thesis is?’ Questions like those.
We’re still sorting through that, but one thing that has been crystal clear is that the focus of a graduate degree on intellectual depth and excellence in a particular field remains central. And I’m glad to see that because it’s something I truly believe is fundamental.
The SAS Horizons strategic framework also highlights the Physical Sciences Complex. Can you say a little bit about what the intention is and why that’s needed now?
The Physical Sciences Complex project is a complete reimagining of the David Rittenhouse Laboratory, or DRL. I’ve had an office in that building for 17 years myself, and while I can say that it’s been a huge part of Penn’s scientific history, it was built for a very different era in teaching and research. It’s also a very large building, one of the most heavily used teaching spaces on campus, so it’s a major project. For many years it was quite hard to see how it would happen. It’s a real testament to the University’s belief in the future of fundamental knowledge that it has decided to invest in that complex.
The project is very ambitious: We will demolish most of DRL and build a new research tower and teaching wing, and renovate the portion of DRL that remains. When completed, it will be a completely new, updated, cutting-edge teaching and research facility that will fully house physics and astronomy, mathematics, and earth and environmental science. It will be an enormous teaching space and place where faculty and students will bang into each other all day long and have accidental conversations about what they’re working on, or classes they’re taking there. It will ensure the foundational sciences remain connected to the broader intellectual life of the University, and will turn that part of campus into an important new quadrant alongside the Vagelos Laboratory, the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, the Engineering campus, and Amy Gutmann Hall.
I think it will be a statement that Penn believes in science and technology in a foundational sense and is looking to the future.
Is there anything else from the Horizons framework you’d like to note?
There’s some real energy around creating new ways to connect the work of our humanities faculty to the conversations people are having about today's biggest challenges. We’re also exploring ways of applying faculty strengths in data in the social sciences to real-world practice needs in policy and government.
One program that has already launched is SAS Commons, an initiative that will be led by a different faculty member every two years. That faculty member will get free rein to interpret a topic, to bring intellectual programming into Penn, creatively connect all our divisions together around the topic, and find ways to engage with the broader society and community about it. Our first one is led by Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian, and the theme is ‘Democracy and Knowledge.’ It’s an area where you might think, ‘Well I can see how that touches the humanities and social sciences,’ but in fact the first panel will be on democracy and math.
I’m excited to see how all of these efforts will develop.
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