School of Arts & Sciences

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’

PHILADELPHIA -– Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Georgia have been awarded a five-year, $14.6 million contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health, to expand and extend work on the Eukaryotic Pathogen Genome Database Resource, http://EuPathDB.org.

PHILADELPHIA –- An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.

PHILADELPHIA –- Marie Gottschalk and Charlene Compher of the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholarships.

PHILADELPHIA –- University of Pennsylvania senior Joshua Bennett of Yonkers, New York has won a prestigious United Kingdom Government Marshall Scholarship for graduate studies in the U.K. He is among 35 winners of the prestigious scholarship.

PHILADELPHIA –- Environmental scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Durham University have employed a novel combination of geological and model reconstructions of wetland environments during a 10,000-year period to address spatial variations in sea-level history and provide quantitative estimates of subsidence along the east coast of England.