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Michele W. Berger
Senior Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
For low-income people and people of color, lack of access to safe abortions in the U.S. will have a range of health and financial ramifications, compounding factors like poverty and systemic racism.
Sociologist Regina Baker finds that Black people in southern U.S. states with significant institutionalized historical racial practices experience worse poverty today. These states also have a wider poverty gap between Black and white populations.
Claire Conklin Sabel, a doctoral student in Penn’s History and Sociology of Science department, uncovers the findings of 18th-century amateur naturalist Elizabeth Thomas, along with illustrator Alix Pentecost-Farren, who brings Thomas’ work to life.
May graduates Rowana Miller and Manoj Simha lead Cosmic Writers, a project supported by President’s Engagement Prize that provides free creative writing instruction to K-12 students virtually throughout the world.
Between March 2020 and October 2021, death rates from the virus decreased for those 80 and older and increased for those 25 to 54, results that held across racial and ethnic groups.
The Women of Color at Penn held their 35th annual award ceremony with a virtual celebration hosted by the African American Resource Center. This year’s awards honored six women who have fostered and supported community.
It’s been a long and uncertain road, with some groups shouldering a disproportionately greater burden of mental anguish from COVID-19. Yet now there’s a glimmer of hope. Has the page finally turned?
Sherelle Ferguson, and Annette Lareau, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Social Sciences, find that “hostile ignorance” can come from surprising places.
A collaboration between Penn and the nonprofit Centro de Cultura Arte Trabajo y Educación aims to enhance a thriving post-secondary success program, create mentoring opportunities, and more.
Interim President Wendell Pritchett and Interim Provost Beth Winkelstein announce the appointment of Lance Freeman as the University of Pennsylvania’s 29th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor.
Michele W. Berger
Senior Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
Gideon Nave of the Wharton School and Martha Farah of the School of Arts & Sciences are quoted on their work that found evidence that both genetics and environmental influences contribute to the impact of socioeconomic status in a complex interplay with effects that span a variety of brain regions.
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Robert Seyfarth of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about how and why groups of primates “break up” and warned not to project that information onto human relationships. "You always find somebody who says, yeah, the baboons are showing us that you shouldn't have a despotic breakup and it's bad to just dump somebody and walk off," he said. "But I guess I'm not going to go into that territory."
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Steve Viscelli of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about the tough working conditions faced by long-haul truckers. "We have millions of people who have been trained to be heavy duty truck drivers who are currently not working as heavy duty truck drivers because the entry-level jobs are terrible," he said.
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PIK Professor Michael Platt and Camille Testard, a Ph.D. student in the Perelman School of Medicine, spoke about their research on how rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico adapted in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “We see this massive surge in the time they spend in proximity to other partners, and their social tolerance increasing toward many different partners,” said Testard. “We saw active building of relationships with individuals that they didn’t really interact with before.”
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Frank Furstenburg of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about the pandemic’s impact on families and relationships. “I would be very surprised if we don’t see a sharp drop in fertility, and similarly a considerable decrease in cohabitation because the ability to experiment and form relationships has been severely curtailed,” he said.
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Hans-Peter Kohler of the School of Arts & Sciences commented on the possibility of a further decline in birth rates due to the coronavirus. The question isn’t whether or not there will be decline, but rather if the decline will be lasting, he said.
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