Katherine Unger Baillie

New PennSmiles bus expands dental care for Philly schoolchildren

Visits to the dentist are a critical component of staying healthy, and too many low-income children lack ready access to high-quality care. The lack of access puts them at a higher risk for tooth decay, which can cause chronic pain and in some cases dangerous infections. Oral health problems are one of the top reasons why children in Philadelphia miss school.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Connecting Homeless Populations With Health Care

Homeless people are uniquely vulnerable, at risk of a variety of health problems, including chronic illness, hunger, pain, and infections. While resources exist to provide homeless populations with health insurance and care, those resources don’t always make their way to the people who need them.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Luck Plays a Role in How Language Evolves, Penn Team Finds

Read a few lines of Chaucer or Shakespeare and you’ll get a sense of how the English language has changed during the past millennium. Linguists catalogue these changes and work to discern why they happened. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have been doing something similar with living things, exploring how and why certain genes have changed over generations.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Targeting enzyme in ‘normal’ cells may impede pancreatic cancer’s spread, Penn Vet team shows

Cancer of the pancreas is a deadly disease, with a median survival time of less than six months. Only one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer survives five years past the diagnosis. The reason is the cancer’s insidiousness; tumor cells hide deep inside the body, betraying no symptoms until late in the disease, when the cancer has almost invariably spread to other organs.

Katherine Unger Baillie