School of Arts & Sciences

Eight faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania have been named Penn Fellows. The announcement was made today by Penn Provost Vincent Price and Anita Allen, vice provost for faculty.

WHO:             Johannes Eichstaedt                        Graduate student, Department of Psychology

The University of Pennsylvania will host three celebrated writers as Kelly Writers House Fellows during the 2015 spring semester: poet Anne Waldman, editor and author Dorothy Allison and playwright and novelist Jessica Hagedorn.

“In today’s world, the stereotype of the nerdy scientist, by himself, looking at a microscope, is no longer accurate and no longer useful,” says Gabriel Innes, a third-year student in the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

For the all-female musical sketch comedy group, Bloomers, making people laugh is another benefit of their educational experience at the University of Pennsylvania.

University of Pennsylvania senior Steve Scarfone and junior Jeffrey Ng are part of a local community-engagement project that mixes volunteering and increasing access to learning through Penn Science Across Ages.

When University of Pennsylvania student Amy Phillips learned about the Girl Scouts at Penn program, she immediately joined.Having been a Scout from kindergarten through high school, Phillips was thrilled to be able to continue her involvement at Penn.

When the human genome was first sequenced, experts predicted they would find about 100,000 genes. The actual number has turned out to be closer to 20,000, just a few thousand more than fruit flies have. The question logically arose: how can a relatively small number of genes lay the blueprint for the complexities of the human body?

At the turn of the millennium, the cost to sequence a single human genome exceeded $50 million, and the process took a decade to complete. Microbes have genomes, too, and the first reference genome for a malaria parasite was completed in 2002 at a cost of roughly $15 million. But today researchers can sequence a genome in a single afternoon for just a few thousand dollars.

By Christina Cook