School of Arts & Sciences

PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania “Global Go To Think Tank Rankings” places the Brookings Institution first among more than 6,300 think tanks evaluated worldwide. The annual report places Chatham House first in a separate category for the best think tanks in the world outside the U.S.

PHILADELPHIA –- Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.

PHILADELPHIA –- Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania studying the processes of evolution appear to have resolved a longstanding conundrum: How can organisms be robust against the effects of mutations yet simultaneously adaptable when the environment changes?

PHILADELPHIA -- The University of Pennsylvania has received a $20 million gift designated for faculty support from George A.

 

PHILADELPHIA –- Environmentalists from the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded a $4.35 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a Critical Zone Observatory in Puerto Rico.

PHILADELPHIA –- A study of 30 years of antidepressant-drug treatment data published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that the benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo may be minimal or nonexistent in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.

PHILADELPHIA –- People who identify as African-American may be as little as 1 percent West African or as much as 99 percent, just one finding of a large-scale, genome-wide study of African and African-American ancestry released today.

 PHILADELPHIA –- Sarah-Jane Littleford, a 2009 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for study at Oxford University in England. Littleford, who is from Harare, Zimbabwe, was one of two Rhodes Scholars selected from that country. She learned of the honor today after an interview with the selection committee.

PHILADELPHIA –- Examining data obtained from a University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University psychology study, researchers at these universities and Northwestern University have reported the first placebo-controlled evidence that antidepressant medications—particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs—can substantially change patients’