School of Arts & Sciences

WHO:           Brenda Casper                     Professor and Chair                     Department of Biology

Camille Z. Charles believes that where you live influences everything that happens to you and sets you up for the rest of your life. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1998, Charles, a scholar of racial inequality, was conducting research on minority students at elite universities. She found that those who came from segregated neighborhoods weren’t faring as well academically as their white peers.

This spring, University of Pennsylvania students are getting an insider’s view of the political process as they examine election results and polling data to monitor voting patterns in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. 

Three University of Pennsylvania faculty members are among recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowship, two from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, one from Penn’s 

Ian Petrie is not a maritime historian. And none of the 12 students who enrolled in his freshmen seminar had substantive experience with handwritten 19th-century manuscripts.

In the criminal justice world, there’s an ongoing debate about whether to increase the age of majority, the point at which an adolescent can no longer be tried in the juvenile legal system and instead must be tried as an adult.

“Get up and move.”

In one large metropolitan area, arraignment decisions made with the assistance of machine learning cut new domestic violence incidents by half, leading to more than 1,000 fewer such post-arraignment arrests annually, according to new findings from the University of Pennsylvania.

WHO &  WHAT:          The Public Policy Challenge invites students from across the University of Pennsylvania to develop a policy proposal based on an issue that affects Philadelphia, such as education, public health, homelessness, recidivism and others.

Five University of Pennsylvania seniors and three alumni have received Thouron Awards to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom.