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How to incentivize problem solving in groups
Artist rendering of several people conected with string stretch their connections to the limit, testing the strength of unity.

Image: Flavio Coelho via Getty Images

How to incentivize problem solving in groups

Why do some groups get smarter together while others collapse into groupthink? New research from theoretical biologist Joshua Plotkin and collaborators show that collective intelligence doesn’t emerge by rewarding the most accurate individuals but by rewarding those who improve the group’s prediction as a whole.

3 min. read

Early modern literature in the Black Atlantic world
Alyssa Smith

Alyssa Smith, MCEAS Consortium Fellow at the McNeil Center.

(Image: Courtesy of The McNeil Center for Early American Studies)

Early modern literature in the Black Atlantic world

How Alyssa Smith, a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Consortium Fellow is turning to Penn for her research.

From The McNeil Center for Early American Studies

2 min. read

A design fall studio brings interdisciplinary thinking to Philly’s historic and commercial core
Philadelphia’s Market Street east of City Hall in 1889.

Philadelphia’s Market Street east of City Hall in 1889.

(Image: John Gibb, Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and Picture Collection)

A design fall studio brings interdisciplinary thinking to Philly’s historic and commercial core

Studio Plus design students at Weitzman focused on working through the future of Philadelphia’s Market East neighborhood, and explored issues of historic preservation, urban planning, and housing.

2 min. read

Connecting Latin American fiction through infrastructure and transit
Left: Valeria Seminario; right: An old illustrated map of the Americas.

Sixth-year Spanish & Portuguese Ph.D. student Valeria Seminario.

(Image: Courtesy of Omnia)

Connecting Latin American fiction through infrastructure and transit

Penn Arts & Sciences Ph.D. student Valeria Seminario’s dissertation explores themes of transportation and infrastructure in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin American fiction.

Marilyn Perkins

2 min. read

How ‘um’ and ‘uh’ shape impressions
Jonathan Lee.

Fourth-year linguistics Ph.D. student Jonathan Lee became curious about breaks in speech when he noticed they were missing from transcripts and subtitles.

(Image: Kevin Ren)

How ‘um’ and ‘uh’ shape impressions

Disfluency, or irregularities and breaks in speech, are part of life—but do they affect how we perceive each other? Fourth-year linguistics Ph.D. student Jonathan Lee is trying to find out.

From Omnia

2 min. read

How interdisciplinary teaching becomes climate action

How interdisciplinary teaching becomes climate action

Penn graduate students are learning that net zero is a systems challenge requiring fluency across disciplines, and why interdisciplinary teaching is climate action—including how it builds the human capital the clean energy transition demands.

From Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

2 min. read

Using law to support innovation

Using law to support innovation

From protecting artists to supporting emerging technologies, second- and third-year students working in Penn Carey Law’s Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic provide free legal work to individuals and nonprofit and for-profit ventures in science, technology, business, and the arts.

From Penn Carey Law

2 min. read

Lifesaving breakthrough in bacterial behavior
Artist's rendering of bacteria moving through a nanofabricated tube.

(Pictured) An artist’s depiction of a single cell moving through the nanofabricated mictostrucures biophysicist Arnold Mathijssen’s team used to study E. coli.

(Image: Courtesy of Ruoshui Liu/Cylos Studio)

Lifesaving breakthrough in bacterial behavior

Bacteria can actively swim upstream, leading to severe infections in places like the urinary tract and respiratory system and contamination of medical devices like catheters. Biophysicist Arnold Mathijssen and colleagues have uncovered how and why this happens, revealing that E. coli actually “thrives under pressure.” Their findings point to new strategies for designing safer, more effective biomedical tools and treatments.

3 min. read