School of Arts & Sciences

PHILADELPHIA -- University of Pennsylvania History Professor Richard Beeman has been awarded the 2010 George Washington Book Prize for “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution.” 

PHILADELPHIA –- Physicists from the University of Pennsylvania and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have reported an elegant experimental study of the melting behaviors of thin crystalline films, uncovering a variety of interesting differences between thick films of greater than four layers and thinner or single-layer films.

PHILADELPHIA -- Robert C. Hornik will serve as chair of the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Senate in 2010-11, succeeding Harvey Rubin.

PHILADELPHIA –- Two University of Pennsylvania mathematicians have found solutions to a 140-year-old, 7-dimensional equation that were not known to exist for more than a century despite its widespread use in modeling the behavior of gases.

PHILADELPHIA -- The South Asia Center and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania will host summer language programs to teach Hindi, Urdu and Chinese to students entering grades 9-12.  The programs, to be taught by Penn faculty, are funded by Startalk, the national effort to enhance Americans’ learning and teaching of less commonly taught languages in high scho

PHILADELPHIA – Guthrie Ramsey, a University of Pennsylvania music professor, is co-curator of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution called "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment.

PHILADELPHIA – Twelve University of Pennsylvania faculty members have been honored as recipients of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Awards for Distinguished Teaching, Provost’s Awards for Teaching Excellence and Provost’s Awards for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

PHILADELPHIA –- Four University of Pennsylvania faculty members have been named Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  They are among 299 new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members recognized as leaders in sciences, arts and humanities, business and public affairs. 

 PHILADELPHIA – Psychologists led by the University of Pennsylvania have used implantable electrodes and a first-person driving game to identify the cells of the brain that indicate travel in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion, called “path cells.” The study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

PHILADELPHIA –- An interdisciplinary team of physicists and geologists led by the University of Pennsylvania has made a major step toward predicting where and how large floods occur on river deltas and alluvial fans.