School of Veterinary Medicine

Universities, Penn included, have a major role to play in advancing global health, combining research and education across disciplines to find solutions to urgent worldwide challenges.

When a baby is born, many new moms and dads pore over parenting books, striving to strike the right balance of firmness and warmth to raise their children into kind, intelligent, strong individuals. While nature plays a critical role, research supports the idea that parenting style and parents’ personalities do influence a child’s behavior.

Andrew Hoffman has been named the next Gilbert S. Kahn Dean of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, effective Aug. 1.

A University of Pennsylvania paleontologist has described a 5.5 million-year-old fossil species of turtle from eastern Tennessee. It represents a new species of the genus Trachemys, commonly known as sliders, which are frequently kept as pets today.

Dramatic calorie restriction, diets reduced by 40 percent of a normal calorie total, have long been known to extend health span, the duration of disease-free aging, in animal studies, and even to extend life span in most animal species examined.

As part of a breast-cancer diagnosis, doctors analyze the tumor to determine which therapies might best attack the malignancy. But for patients whose cancer is triple-negative — that is, lacking receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2 — the options for treatment dwindle. Triple-negative cancers, or TNBC, also tend to be more aggressive than other cancer subtypes.

According to the Guinness World Records, the longest any person has held a continuous vocal note is just shy of two minutes. That’s quite an achievement.Compared to the Pacific midshipman fish, however, the endurance of the human vocal cord is no match. Midshipman fish can generate a mating call that emits continuously from their bodies for a full hour.

Gene therapy holds promise for treating a variety of diseases, including some inherited blinding conditions. But for a gene therapy to be effective, one must know the precise gene responsible for a given individual’s disorder and develop a tailored treatment.

In a historic move, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved a gene therapy initially developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for the treatment of a rare, inherited form of retinal blindness.

Four members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon members of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, by their peers.