School of Arts & Sciences

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a devastating illness that gradually robs sufferers of muscle strength and eventually causes a lethal, full-body paralysis. The only drug available to treat the disease extends life spans by a meager three months on average.

WHO:             University of Pennsylvania students in Herman Beavers’ “August Wilson and Beyond” course

Until recently, Etienne Benson, an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science, has trained his academic eye on the history of conservation of large, charismatic wildlife, such as tigers, grizzly bears and orc

Cancer involves a breakdown of normal cell behavior. Cell reproduction and movement go haywire, causing tumors to grow and spread through the body.

The Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania has announced a new fellowship that will enable recent Penn graduates to conduct independent research for nine months or more in India.

The Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania has published a new book by Pennsylvania State Rep. Dwight Evans “Making Ideas Matter: My Life as a Policy Entrepreneur” is described as “a primer for students of policy, political junkies, lovers of history and those who think that public service is a noble calling.”

WHO:             Penn Social Science & Policy Forum

The heart maintains a careful balancing act; too soft and it won’t pump blood, but too hard and it will overtax itself and stop entirely. There is an optimal amount of strain that a beating heart can generate and still beat at its usual rate, once per second.

If University of Pennsylvania senior Loren Kole could give her younger freshman year self some advice, it would be this: Don’t get hung up on what you think you should be doing. Like most of her Ivy League contemporaries, Kole is a high achiever in and out of the classroom.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.