5.24
Michele W. Berger
Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
Anthropology
Adolph Reed is retiring. But he’s still got more to say
After more than 40 years as a political science professor, incisive commentator, and mentor to countless students, Reed is ending his teaching career. Now, he can turn his full attention to writing, and the 2020 campaign.
Training physician-scholars to see patients as people, not categories
The anthropology M.D.-Ph.D. program, recently graduating its first two students, combines clinical and ethnographic skills aimed at working with and caring for society’s marginalized.
Latin American and Latino Studies celebrates 30 years of growth, plans for the future
What began as a handful of faculty and students has matured into a program offering a major and minor, grants, and a local and international community hub.
Night at the (Penn) Museum
What it’s like to sleep over with mummies and more than 10,000 years’ worth of artifacts.
Four Penn faculty receive Guggenheim fellowships
Four Penn faculty were named 2019 Guggenheim Fellows.
Declassified images from U2 spy planes reveal bygone Middle Eastern archaeological features
Researchers from Penn and Harvard are the first to make archaeological use of U2 spy plane imagery, and have created a tool that allows other researchers to identify and access the Cold War-era photos.
Making a movement from #MeToo
At Perry World House Monday, activists from around the world talked about how they’re working to make sure the stories of women and girls are told—and heard.
A tour of the ancient world—in Mandarin
The Penn Museum offers tours of its exhibits in Mandarin, increasing cross-cultural access to its invaluable assemblage of objects on display, the only known museum in Philadelphia with regularly scheduled tours in the language.
A shared past for East Africa’s hunter-gatherers
PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, Laura Scheinfeldt, and Sameer Soi use data from 50 populations to study African genetic diversity. Their analysis suggests that geographically far-flung hunter-gatherer groups share a common ancestry.
The diversity of rural African populations extends to their microbiomes
In the largest study of its kind, researchers led by PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, Matthew Hansen, and Meagan Rubel investigated the gut microbiomes of people from Botswana and Tanzania, and illuminate the impact of lifestyle, geography, and genetics in shaping the microbiome.
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National Geographic
There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label
Paul Wolff Mitchell of the School of Arts and Sciences, PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff and Yana Kamberov of the Perelman School of Medicine discussed race and genetics. Skulls from Samuel Morton collection in the Penn Museum are also featured.
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Smithsonian Magazine
Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Tells the Story of the Slave Trade’s Last Survivor
Deborah Thomas of the School of Arts and Sciences discussed novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s lesser-known work “debunking scientific racism” in the field of anthropology.
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