Greg Johnson

NEW JERSEYAN: A freshman from Montclair, N.J., Jasmine Cole, 18, is a standout player on the Penn field hockey team.

GLOBAL LEARNING: Penn launched its Open Learning Initiative in July 2012, a vital part of the University’s mission to increase worldwide access to educational resources that can impact humanity.

Stanton Wortham’s grandmother was unhappy and wanted a simple answer. She was proud of her grandson and knew he was an accomplished scholar and professor—having graduated with highest honors from Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago—but she still wasn’t quite sure what in the world he did.

JOE COLLEGE: Joe Huennekens, a first-year graduate student in PennDesign, is assisting The Woodlands with its new master plan to reimagine the idea of the cemetery, and promote the landscape as a green space open to the community.

In 1966, God spoke to Ben Carter. He came in the form of an angelic voice (some stories name the Angel Gabriel). At first, Carter did not want to believe the celestial calling. Terrified, and afraid he was going insane, he tried to ignore the voice, but it was persistent and absolute in its command: “Lead Yah’s flock out of modern-day Babylon, the United States of America.”

Named for its benefactors, Marc E. Platt and Julie Beren Platt, both 1979 alums, the Platt Student Performing Arts House is, as its name indicates, a home for student performing arts at Penn.

LOAN-FREE AID: Initiated by President Amy Gutmann in 2008, Penn’s no-loan policy enables all dependent undergraduate students eligible for financial aid to receive loan-free aid packages, regardless of family income level.

On his way to becoming a choral music teacher, William Alexander took a detour down guidance counselor road to work with middle school students, and ended up in the land of psychology. “I think always working with young people was the central theme,” he says about his career, “so I navigated my interests from teaching to psychotherapy and psychology.”

Born in Tehran, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences, spent the first part of her life in Iran during the reign of the shah, and was an eyewitness as events unfolded during the 1979 Iranian Revolution that removed the shah from power and gave rise to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Psittacosaurus (sih-TACK-oh-sore-us) is a genus of short, beak-faced dinosaurs that lived in Asia 120-125 million years ago, roaming China, Mongolia, Siberia, and possibly Thailand. The plant-eaters lived for about 10 million years in an era after Stegosaurus and before Tyrannosaurus rex, at a time when most dinosaurs were small.