Katherine Unger Baillie

Prompted in part by the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, the “Ecotopian Toolkit” conference at the University of Pennsylvania will celebrate how utopian imaginaries from across disciplines can address environmental challenges.

With a suite of programs in the STEM fields being offered for middle and high school students at Penn this summer, including many with scholarships and financial aid to defray costs, Philadelphia students have fewer excuses for experiencing a “summer slide.”

When Bob Ruth of Clemens Food Group set up two swine farms in Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s, one of the first things he did was call Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mast cells, components of the immune system, are responsible for alleriges and asthma, conditions that debilitate millions. Yet relatively few scientists study them.

A quick, often imperceptible bite from a sand fly can transmit the dreaded parasitic disease leishmaniasis. No vaccine exists for the infection, which causes disfiguring and long-lasting skin ulcers.

The wide-ranging discussion emphasized the importance of collaboration among researchers, the challenge of prevention, and the crucial importance of discovery and innovation in reaching milestones in cancer prevention and treatment.

Two years ago, the vision of Shadrack Frimpong, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, was to to open a girls’ school and health clinic in his home village of Tarkwa Breman, Ghana.

Each year, about 2 million people contract leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by the bite of a sand fly. The cutaneous form of the disease results in disfiguring skin ulcers that may take months or years to heal and in rare cases can become metastatic, causing major tissue damage.

Some fossils are “problematic.” They resist all attempts at classification. They lack a home on the tree of life.The Tully monster, Tullimonstrom gregarium, is one such problematic creature.

If you’ve ever wondered how a vaccine given decades ago can still protect against infection, you have your plasma cells to thank. Plasma cells are long-lived B cells that reside in the bone marrow and churn out antibodies against previously encountered vaccines or pathogens.