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.
The Polyhedral Structures Laboratory is housed at the Pennovation Center and brings together designers, engineers, and computer scientists to reimagine the built world. Using graphic statics, a method where forces are mapped as lines, they design forms that balance compression and tension. These result in structures that use far fewer materials while remaining strong and efficient.
From ancient tombs and tiny robots to personalized gene editing and AI weather models, Penn’s 2025 research portfolio showed how curiosity—paired with collaboration—moves knowledge into impact and stretches across disciplines and continents.
Centering joy in AI development and implementation
PIK Professor Desmond Upton Patton—of Annenberg and SP2—and collaborators introduce a joy-informed framework designed to initiate conversations among engineers, designers, and researchers.
Reflecting on Jane Austen, 250 years after her birth
English professors Michael Gamer and Barri Joyce Gold have been teaching courses specifically dedicated to Jane Austen for years. They spoke with Penn Today about their approach to teaching her novels, how they challenge common readings and myths, and what makes Austen’s work so enduring—and adaptable to the screen—more than two centuries later.
Electronic medical records help save lives of HIV patients
Wharton’s Leandro “Leo” Pongeluppe and colleagues found that HIV clinics in Malawi that switched from paper to electronic medical records saw an estimated 28% reduction in deaths in five years.
