Postdocs

Can nature-inspired designs affect cognition and mood?

A team from the Center for Neuroaesthetics created a biophilic room to test the idea. Preliminary findings from a small pilot show promise, but also spur many questions about how to best use such a space.

Michele W. Berger , Kelsey Geesler, Michael Grant

Art museums plant seeds of human flourishing

Researchers from the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project in the Positive Psychology Center at Penn have found that art museums are associated with wide-ranging benefits to human health.

Luis Melecio-Zambrano

An arms race that plays out in a single genome

School of Arts & Sciences biologist Mia Levine and Cara Brand, a postdoc, shed light on an example of coevolution in fruit flies that has implications for human health.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Decoding a material’s ‘memory’

A new study details the relationship between particle structure and flow in disordered materials, insights that can be used to understand systems ranging from mudslides to biofilms.

Erica K. Brockmeier



In the News


Philadelphia Inquirer

Is an Alzheimer’s blood test right for me?

Postdoc Claire Erickson and Emily Largent of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Leonard Davis Institute discuss which people should take an Alzheimer’s blood test.

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Live Science

The brain may interpret smells from each nostril differently

A study by postdoc Gulce Nazli Dikecligil in the Perelman School of Medicine suggests that the smells flowing through each nostril are processed as two separate signals in the part of the brain that receives smell inputs.

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The New York Times

One graceless tweet doesn’t warrant cancellation

Elle Lett, a postdoc in the Perelman School of Medicine, wrote about how the word “freak” has been used to dehumanize Black women. “There is a history that dates back to the antebellum South” of “fetishizing, hypersexualizing and otherizing Black women in freak shows and displays to media and even medical textbooks,” Lett wrote. “Black women are consistently dehumanized in America. By using ‘freak of nature,’ you separate Black women from the rest of human existence.”

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