Top: Penn Eco-Rep Ellen Iwamoto displays a handful of wiggler worms and the compost they create. Bottom: The worms nestle into their bed of shredded paper and food waste at the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
In a composting project at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), some 3,000 red wiggler worms digest the staff’s kitchen waste. Across campus, plans are being developed to divert storm water from the School of Veterinary Medicine’s old Quad Courtyard into a collection tank for use in irrigating plant beds.
These are just two of the 18 proposals funded during 2009-10 through the Green Campus Partnership’s Green Fund, which encourages the development of innovative sustainability projects from the campus community aimed at improving Penn’s environmental performance and reducing greenhouse emissions.
Staff, faculty and students with new eco-friendly ideas have until 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 29, to submit their proposals for the 2010-11 year.
Each approved project is eligible for a one-time grant of up to $50,000, depending on its design, and must help Penn meet its Climate Action Plan goals.
At the APPC, Eco-Rep Ellen Iwamoto says she expects two to three gallons of worm compost to be harvested later this month.
“It will be used as fertilizer for office plants around the building, and the rest will be donated to the new garden at the Penn Women’s Center,” she says.
Next month, another collection pail will be added and more educational outreach to the staff is planned.
At Penn Vet, the storm water project team—made up of students, alumni, faculty and staff—plans to develop the project design this winter and install the harvesting system and landscaping in the spring.
“Determining the size of the storage capacity will be part of the design process and our intent is to use native, drought-resistant plantings,” says project leader Kimberly Kopple.
The Green Fund has financed a vegetable garden near Rodin College House and Green Acorn, a green certification process for local businesses. Other initiatives include energy-saving retrofitting of older campus buildings, as well as a variety of recycling, metering and energy sensor programs.
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.
Top: Penn Eco-Rep Ellen Iwamoto displays a handful of wiggler worms and the compost they create. Bottom: The worms nestle into their bed of shredded paper and food waste at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. 
