School of Arts & Sciences

By Christina CookThrough its Open Learning initiative, the University of Pennsylvania is dramatically transforming the who, what, when and where of learning, making the resources of higher education accessible to millions more people than ever before.

For the last century, the concept of crystals has been a mainstay of solid-state physics. Crystals are paragons of order; crystalline materials are defined by the repeating patterns their constituent atoms and molecules make.

Nancy Minyanou’s interest in Argentina was sparked in high school, and now this summer the rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania is fulfilling a vision for breaking down barriers and expanding her knowledge about the country in the Penn Summer Abroad program in Buenos Aires. 

University of Pennsylvania student Ashlin Oglesby-Neal knows that reforming education policy and improving the internal dynamics of schools can be difficult, but that’s not stopping her from trying.

PennSound, a University of Pennsylvania-based online audio poetry website, is revolutionizing the way that educators teach poetry.

As director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Greenfield Intercultural Center for 17 years, Valerie De Cruz has had a guiding hand in the creation of cultural resource centers that many Penn student see as homes away from home: Makuu, La Casa Latina and the Pan-Asian American Community House.

Daniel Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences was chosen to receive a 2014 Blue Planet Prize

University of Pennsylvania student Joyce Kim is on a mission to spur intercultural dialogue across campus and halfway around the world in North and South Korea.

Early American history is marked by multiple displacements of Native American peoples due to multiple removals from their original Indigenous territories. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists participated in other forms of removal by collecting Indigenous narratives and objects for museums.

Minh Nguyen, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences, has received the 2014 Sabin Metal Ron Bleggi Award from the International Precious Metals Institute.