Penn in the News

Members of single-gender social clubs at Harvard University will be banned from holding leadership positions in official campus organizations or on sports teams beginning in the fall of 2017, the university announced Friday. Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman to hold the position, wrote a letter to the university describing the changes:

Many scientists take a certain pride in the objective nature of their work. The data are the data, no matter who’s conducting the experiment. But growing body of research suggests that’s not necessarily true, and that personalities can influence the science. A new study builds on that notion, suggesting that one’s “transdisciplinary orientation,” a personal quality predisposing one to engage in cross-disciplinary work, can affect the quality of interdisciplinary research -- good or bad.

Surely few laboratories can match the views from Barcelona Biomedical Research Park on the city’s busy beachfront. From the sun-dappled balconies of the modernist €120 million ($138 million) institute, scientists can watch boats sail out from the Olympic Port, swimmers take a dip in the Mediterranean and tourists zip along the seafront promenade on motorized scooters.

MBA students Siddharth Shah, Shashwata Narain of the Wharton School and graduate student Alexander David of the School of Engineering and Applied Science are featured for creating Fermento, a technology that speeds up the fermentation process in beer production. This was technology was develop in the lab of David Issadore of Engineering.

Monday night the Iowa City Police Department received a report from a black University of Iowa student who said he had been attacked in a potential hate crime outside an off-campus bar. Three days later the university sent to students a campus-crime alert by email and text. That response followed standard crime-alert protocol, but it incited fierce criticism from students who viewed the reaction as unacceptably delayed.

President Amy Gutmann says, “We live in a time that calls for heroes whose lives bear testimony to everything that is kind, that is brave, that is selfless.”

Douglas Jerolmack of the School of Arts & Sciences is quoted about a study he co-authored on the effect of heavy rainfalls on river erosion.

The University of Maine at Orono was looking to increase its enrollment. And like many public colleges around the country, it especially wanted to bring in more out-of-state students. But before Joel Wincowski came in as interim vice president for enrollment management, in August, Maine was relying on standard solutions from consultants to guide pricing and branding efforts, he says. Mr. Wincowski, a former enrollment manager now working at a firm that places interim higher-education leaders (his previous stints include St.

Free online courses changed the life of one super-smart Mongolian teenager. His name is Battushig Myanganbayar, and four years ago, while he was still a high-school student in Ulan Bator, he took a massive open online course from MIT. It was one of the first they had ever offered, about circuits and electronics, and he was one of about a hundred and forty thousand people to take it. He not only passed, he was one of about three hundred who got a perfect score. He was only 15 years old.

The commercial use of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)–or drones–is on track to permeate nearly every segment of the U.S. economy. The notions of drones delivering groceries, transporting medical supplies, helping farmers and assisting first responders are already moving from fiction to reality. However, as with any fast-moving innovation sector, laws and policies must allow this integration to take place in the safest and most innovative manner possible, and this can only be achieved through greater involvement by higher education institutions.