Perelman School of Medicine

Person in a lab coat sitting on a wooden bench outside.

Physicians, social responsibility, and sexual assault survivors

Penn Medicine’s Florencia Greer Polite wants doctors to take a more proactive approach to conversations with their patients about consent and sexual abuse.

Philadelphia city street, abandoned factory in background, housing behind sidewalk fence.

A focus on environmental inequities

A Penn symposium will confront issues of inequitable access to a clean and safe environment and the unequal burden borne by vulnerable communities, particularly low-income and underrepresented minority populations, when it comes to environmental threats.

Cultivando Juntos team members standing in nursing building

Cultivando Juntos takes shape in Kennett Square

As part of their President’s Engagement Prize project, José Maciel and Antonio Renteria are reframing the concept of healthy living for mushroom farmworkers.

shape of a human head made of outlines of wine glasses, drink glasses and beer bottles.

Consuming alcohol leads to epigenetic changes in brain memory centers

What drives the biology behind alcohol cravings has remained largely unknown. A new Penn study shows how a byproduct of the alcohol breakdown produced mostly in the liver travels to the brain’s learning system and impacts behavior around environmental cues to drink.

Clockwise from top left: Stephan A. Grupp, Beverly L. Davidson, James H. Eberwine, Guo-lin Ming, George Demiris, Charles S. Abrams

Six Penn faculty members elected to National Academy of Medicine

One of the nation’s highest honors in biomedicine, members are elected by their peers for accomplishments and contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care, and public health.

Members of LIFT US UP include (from left) Jordan Harris, Michael Perez, Mariam Olujide, Shannon Shipley, Anitra Persaud, and Cheyenne Williams.

Providing a ‘LIFT’ to first-generation med students

All new students face challenges in the transition to college, but for first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students, it’s a whole new world. Providing a community for these students helps counter feelings of isolation and the “impostor” syndrome that FGLI students may experience.

Engineers solve the paradox of why tissue gets stiffer when compressed

Tissue gets stiffer when it’s compressed. That stiffening response is a long-standing biomedical paradox, as common sense dictates that when you push the ends of a string together, it loosens tension, rather than increasing it. New research explains the mechanical interplay between that fiber network and the cells it contains.

Failure of mitochondrial quality control causes heart disease

A new Penn Medicine study reveals a well-known protein participates in mitophagy; mutations in the genes of that protein suppress mitophagy and cause disease.

Researchers unravel the early makings of an exhausted T cell

Knowing which T cells will lose the battle against cancer earlier could inform treatments and the development of new immunotherapies.

computer rendering of microscopic images of DNA helix on the left, a tumor on the right.

Algorithm personalizes which cancer mutations are best targets for immunotherapy

A new model developed by researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center hand-picks cancer cells to target for more effective, customized cancer vaccines.

Filters