President Amy Gutmann’s 2005 announcement of the Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) initiative has made Penn a particularly enticing home for professors whose world-renowned work bridges multiple academic disciplines. At a university where commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching is rooted as deeply as the ivy that clings to its brick, PIK professors represent a signature Penn strength.
Now, a new website provides a way to keep up-to-date with the ongoing, world-changing work of these 15 professors—a figure Gutmann plans to grow as part of the Penn Compact 2020 initiative.
By providing each PIK professor with appointments in two Penn schools, the initiative supports the full breadth and depth of their pioneering work. At the same time, it builds on the network of meaningful exchanges that take place across the University’s 12 schools, 141 research centers and institutes, 89 majors, and myriad departments: exchanges that create, debunk, and modify knowledge in ways that reverberate through Philadelphia, the U.S., and the world.
The idea of knowledge as the product of integrating different disciplines is theoretical terrain that many scholars, educators, and inventors, including Penn’s own founding father, Benjamin Franklin, have explored before.
However, Gutmann may be the first to bring such potent theory into practice at a major research university where hundreds of faculty are actively engaged in boundary-breaking work. In their labs, libraries, and classrooms, the limitations that once delineated their disciplines become limitless possibilities for powerful cross-pollination.
As Penn Provost Vincent Price says, “PIK professors embody two of Penn’s most important values: bringing together knowledge across disciplines, and using that knowledge to illuminate some of the most fundamental issues of our time. They vividly show our students that the most powerful new ideas emerge from intellectual connections and collaborations.”
Penn students are quick to speak of the impact this intellectual connectivity has on their education. University Scholar Kimberly Schreiber’s remarks on the range of disciplines from which her faculty mentors hail give evidence to this: “I am so lucky that I can mine such a wide range of perspectives, taking from their various approaches to create something that is uniquely my own.”
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.
