Penn Today’s iconic photos of the 2023-24 academic year highlight the beauty, achievements, innovation, and celebration in the Penn community.
Penn Today has covered momentous occasions, groundbreaking research, and exemplary students in the last year. And in addition to stories, featured photos have been equally impactful. From scenes of innovation, collective joy, and natural beauty to the simplicity of athletic perfection, staff photographers have captured Penn’s finest.
First and foremost, Penn’s campus is picturesque year-round, so much so it is a designated Tree Campus USA by the Arbor Day Foundation. Spring blossoms are especially sublime on campus. Penn’s architecture, captured equally in late winter and high summer sunlight, especially at Fisher Fine Arts Library, is as visually impressive as the art at the Arthur Ross Gallery. Penn’s sustainability efforts extend to innovative land use, turning parts of Penn Park into viable farmland.
It’s the people of Penn who often capture the beauty and vibrancy of the University. Students gathered to celebrate Holi with traditional colorful powder and dancing, they gathered as a community to take in a solar eclipse, they met as an entire Class of first-year students to mark the start of their Penn experience at Convocation, and celebrated the remarkable achievements of its researchers and faculty, including the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The students are key to Penn’s spirit, and their documented talent is always a vision. Penn photographers captured performers, cultural ceremonies, athletes, and old-fashioned play throughout the year.
For the times when photos are most treasured—celebrations and achievements—Penn Today photographers captured the emotions and energy, not just the event—from the joy and relief of Hey Day and Commencement to the deep focus and precision of fine art and athletics.
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.
