President Liz Magill and Board of Trustees Chair Scott L. Bok resign; Julie Platt is named Interim Chair.
On Saturday, Board of Trustees Chair Scott L. Bok announced President Liz Magill’s voluntary resignation as President of Penn. Magill will remain in her position until an interim president is appointed, and plans for Penn’s interim leadership will be shared in the coming days. She will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.
Magill said in a statement, “It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution. It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions.”
Shortly after Magill’s resignation, Bok tendered his own resignation as Chair of the Board of Trustees.
In a statement announcing his departure, Bok shared his belief that “now was the right time to depart.”
The Executive Committee of Penn’s Board of Trustees announced that Julie Platt, the Vice Chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Board of Trustees, has been named Interim Chair while a permanent replacement is identified.
In a message to the community, the Executive Committee said, “As current Vice Chair, Julie was the clear choice, and we are grateful to her for agreeing to serve in this capacity during this time of transition.”
The committee shared plans to immediately undertake a process, in consultation with the full Board, to make a recommendation for the next Chair to the Executive Committee before the spring term begins.
The committee concluded, “We share your commitment to this extraordinary University, and while this is a challenging time, the Penn community is strong and resilient, and together, we will move forward.”
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.
Professor of city and regional planning Erick Guerra recently published a book exploring the economic and societal impacts of American highways. He explains some of the pitfalls associated with an ever-expansive highway system, arguing that spending more on highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues.
Penn urban planner Erick Guerra’s new book, “Overbuilt,” argues that additional spending on building more highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues. In a Q&A, Guerra shares his insights.
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.
