Sandy Smith

STAFF Q & A/Accomodating the honorary degree recipients is a breeze, says Alison McGhie. After talking with Alison McGhie C’91,GEd’92, the woman who shepherds Penn’s honorary degree recipients through Commencement, we couldn’t help but think: Other event coordinators would probably kill for a job like this.

Best of seven: A round of applause, please, for Shani Boston C’07, the second member of the Penn women’s track team ever to win a Penn Relays event. Boston took the heptathlon medal at the 110th Relays April 21 with a total score of 5,049 points, 40 more than the second-place finisher, teammate Kai Ivory C’04.

How is Johnny doing in calculus? Not as well as he could be, according to Mathematics Professor Dennis DeTurck. In a Provost’s Lecture Series talk April 12, DeTurck explained why calculus matters and gave a history of efforts to improve math teaching in elementary and secondary schools.

Steven Hahn did not set out to become a historian. “I was always sort of interested in it, and was good at it, but I wasn’t a history buff at all,” said Penn’s Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History. “When I went to college, initially I wanted to be an astronautical engineer. I found out before I even got to college that this was probably not the best choice for me.”

LITERARY LIFE/A distinguished author discusses a constantly shifting topic.

A big apple for the teacher: Perhaps the greatest testament to Dennis DeTurck’s reputation as a teacher is the presence of so many of his present and former students at his recent lecture on math education (see “Education”).

Twenty years after his untimely death at the hands of his father, Marvin Gaye has a secure place in the pantheon of pop music. At least four biographies, a memoir and a score of other works have explored his troubled life and groundbreaking music. Now comes Michael Eric Dyson to tell us there’s more to the story.

One of the newest members of Penn’s faculty is now its sixth Pulitzer Prize winner.

Associate Professor of Surgery Hansell Stedman has discovered a clue that may help solve a long-running evolutionary puzzle—how the brain was able to expand, thus distinguishing humans from their primate predecessors.

In order for meat to pass Islamic dietary laws, it must be slaughtered by a butcher who first cries out, “I do this in the name of God! God is great!” Celebrated diarist James Boswell suggested that it was cooking, not reasoning, that distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.