Julie Nelson Davis, a history of art professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, has been named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in the fine arts research humanities category. Considered a foremost authority on Japanese prints and illustrated books, she teaches a wide range of courses on East Asian art and material culture.
She is among 184 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists chosen as 2021 Guggenheim Fellows in the United States and Canada from nearly 3,000 applicants.
Davis, considered a foremost authority on Japanese prints and illustrated books, teaches a wide range of courses at Penn on East Asian art and material culture in the greater global context.
Her research focuses on Ukiyo-e, the “images of the floating world,” and the arts of Japan’s Tokugawa period (1615-1868). Her work has confronted issues of artistic identity, gender, and collaboration, and she has further expanded her research interests to include illustrated books made in the period.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Reed College and her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Washington and studied at Gakushūin University in Tokyo.
Penn engineers and collaborators have developed a transparent, micro-engineered device that houses a living, vascularized model of human lung cancer—a “tumor on a chip”—and show that the diabetes drug vildagliptin helps more CAR T cells break through the tumor’s defenses and attack it effectively.
Tumor-on-a-chip offers insight into cancer-fighting cells in immunotherapy
Penn engineers and collaborators have built a living tumor on a chip to expose how cancers block immune attacks, and how one existing drug could make immunotherapy like CAR T more effective against solid tumors.
Xin Sun prepares samples collected from the Eastern Tropical North Pacific aboard a research vessel. By adding stable isotope tracers to these vials, Sun and her team can track how different microbial groups convert nitrogen compounds into nitrous oxide, revealing how subtle shifts in oxygen and organic matter change the ocean’s chemistry.
Can tiny ocean organisms offer the key to better climate modeling?
In the shadowy layers of the Pacific, microbes decide how much nitrous oxide—a potent greenhouse gas—rises skyward. New research from Penn’s Xin Sun offers an improved understanding of microbial ecology and geochemistry—key to forecasting global emissions in response to natural and man-made climate change.
Two X-ray plates from Arthur Goodspeed, believed to have created the world’s first X-ray image, were donated by his family to Penn’s University Archives.
Over 20,000 educators share insights on school cell phone policies
Preliminary findings in the landmark research initiative “Phones in Focus” suggest stricter cell phone policies are linked to less disruption and greater teacher satisfaction.
