School of Arts & Sciences

Jason Morgan held a variety of jobs through his 30s, but it was a job lay-off during the economic downturn that led him to the University of Pennsylvania. In 2009, Morgan lost his job as a wedding photographer but soon found a job as a clerk at a restaurant on the Penn campus.

Doing doctoral research in a ninth grade music classroom in Hamburg, Germany, set Emily Joy Rothchild on a path to work with students on a recently released CD and music video that tackles the tough topics of terrorism, Islamophobia and hate.

Despite their ubiquity in consumer electronics, rare-earth metals are, as their name suggests, hard to come by. Mining and purifying them is an expensive, labor-intensive and ecologically devastating process.

Michael Platt has been named the University of Pennsylvania’s 16th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, effective July 1.  

The University of Pennsylvania today announced a partnership with leading nonprofit online learning platform edX, expanding the University’s open learning course offerings to reach millions of additional learners worldwide.

The Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania announced today that Penn alumna Sindhuri Nandhakumar is the recipient of the 2015-16 Sobti Family Fellowship.

Liliane Weissberg, a professor of German comparative literature in the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania has been awarded the USC Shoah Foundation 2015-16 Rutman Teaching Fellowship. The award is offered annually by the Spielberg Foundation to a Penn faculty member to teach about the Holocaust.

Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould is famous for describing the evolution of humans and other conscious beings as a chance accident of history. If we could go back millions of years and “run the tape of life again,” he mused, evolution would follow a different path. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a three to five percent reduction in the probability of criminal recidivism among a sample of juveniles arrested for felony drug offenses, some of whom were processed as adults due to their age at the time of their arrests.

In 1913 in Southern California, two 241-mile-long electric lines began carrying power from hydroelectric dams in the Sierra Nevada to customers in Los Angeles—a massive feat of infrastructure. In 1923, power company Southern California Edison upgraded the line to carry 220,000 volts, among the highest voltage lines in the world at the time.