School of Arts & Sciences

WHO:             Carol Muller                       Professor of Music

When University of Pennsylvania nanoscientists created beautiful, tiled patterns with flat nanocrystals, they were left with a mystery: why did some sets of crystals arrange themselves in an alternating, herringbone style, even though it wasn’t the simplest pattern?

(This is the third in a series about University of Pennsylvania students who took their arguments in support of federal student financial aid to Washington this summer in a project organized by the Office of Student Registration and Financial Services. Other profiles feature students 

Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process.

Physicist Charlie Johnson connects the biological to the digital, using graphene and carbon nanotubes to turn chemical interactions into electrical signals. Johnson will explain how attaching biological structures, such as antibodies, to these flat or rolled-up lattices of carbon atoms has enabled him and his colleagues to build new kinds of sensors, detecting things like Lyme disease bacteria.

(This is the first in a series about University of Pennsylvania students who took their arguments in support of federal student financial aid to Washington this summer in a project organized by the Office of Student Registration and Financial Services.)

Olivia Lenz graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May, but she is sticking around to continue something she started as a sophomore: seeking answers to the subtle cycle of sleep. 

Michael Katz has been elected to the American Philosophical Society.  He is the Walter H. Annenberg professor of history and a research associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Rajeev Alur and Randall Kamien of the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded five-year, $500,000 grants from the Simons Foundation, as part of its 2013 class of Simons Investigators.

The Philadelphia Lazaretto is the oldest surviving quarantine hospital in the United States, but its value to historians goes even beyond that.