As part of the Side Gigs for Good series, Penn Today highlights staff who spend time outside their work hours giving back to Philadelphia organizations.
2 min. read
Penn staff members Candace Adams with foster cat Black Pearl (top left); JJ Ahern in the University Archives and Records Center (top right); Sherry Caputo on Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation land in New Jersey (bottom left); and Meryl Krieger.
(Images: Courtesy of Candace Adams (top left); Courtesy of Sherry Caputo (bottom left); Eric Sucar)
Many Penn faculty, staff, and students give back to communities in Philadelphia and around the globe through their research and extracurricular involvement. Through the Side Gigs for Good series, started in 2019, Penn Today has also highlighted the volunteer work that members of the Penn community do outside of their day jobs.
This roundup of recent stories features an archivist who curated an exhibition on the history of the U.S. Navy, a Penn Medicine nurse manager providing health education to the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, a College of Liberal & Professional Studies instructional designer helping creative teens with entrepreneurial and life skills, and an Institutional Review Board analyst who fosters cats and dogs.
Penn archivist J.J. Ahern has been putting his professional experience and personal passion for the past to work as a volunteer for the Navy’s 250th anniversary curating an exhibition about the human side of the service’s history.
Outside of her day job as a nurse manager for Penn Medicine at Home, Sherry “Strong Sun Spirit” Caputo has helped bring mental health education, COVID resources, and nutrition programming to her tribal community, the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey.
As a volunteer with the nonprofit after-school program Project 440, Meryl Krieger, a senior learning designer for the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, helps artistically minded high school students with life skills.
Outside of her day job at Penn’s Institutional Review Board, Candace Adams works with different organizations in Philadelphia to give temporary shelter and care to cats and dogs.
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.
