Greg Johnson

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.

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.”

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.

Swirling all around Anita Allen, a child of the ‘60s, were the country’s most divisive social issues: racial conflict and African Americans’ demand for civil and human rights, the feminist movement and women’s fight for gender equality, a War on Poverty, and a deadly and controversial war in Vietnam.

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.

BIG LIGHTS WILL INSPIRE YOU: A New Yorker, senior Rosemary Santos, 21, is the artistic director of Onda Latina, Penn’s premier Latin dance troupe.

[flickr]72157635170115589[/flickr] Photos by Scott Spitzer The interdisciplinary spirit of the School of Engineering and Applied Science was the Cupid that caused freshman Hannah Cutler to fall in love with Penn.