Awards

For the second consecutive week, fourth-year return specialist Julien Stokes earned Ivy League Special Teams Player of the Week. He’s just the 11th player in program history to earn an Ivy weekly award in back-to-back weeks and the first on special teams.

Awarded by McGill University, the Cundill History Prize is the world’s leading award for history writing, highlighting books that uncover neglected histories and speak to the current context of conflict, protest, and the concern with freedom across the globe. Nathans and Rosenfeld are selected from a record number of over 400 international submissions.

Kathryn Connell, assistant professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences at Penn’s School of Nursing, has been named a Fellow of the American College of Critical Care Medicine. Connell is a critical care nurse and health services researcher dedicated to improving outcomes for both patients and clinicians in intensive care units.

Rézme won the $40,000 Michael & Lori Milken Family Foundation Grand Prize at the 16th-annual Milken–Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition out of seven finalists. The venture is a compliance software that dismantles systemic barriers keeping justice-impacted individuals from jobs, housing, and higher education.

Joseph Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, is awarded the Pauling Medal in honor of his work into the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere by the American Chemical Society Puget Sound Section.

The Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Penn has awarded the Elaine Redding Brinster Prize in Science or Medicine to Zhijian ‘James’ Chen, a biochemist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, for his discovery of the DNA-sensing enzyme cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGas) and its role in immune and inflammatory response.

The 2025 Library of Congress Literacy Awards recognized both Penn GSE’s Philadelphia Writing Project and a startup founded by alum Rina Madhani for their contributions to literacy and community engagement.

Awarded every four years by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the medal honors Kane’s pioneering research on topological insulators.

The Klein Family Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science’s article, “From Pluribus to Unum: The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth Century America,” will be the recipient of American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section’s Mary Parker Follett prize, awarded annually for the best scholarly article in politics and history.