Campus & Community

With all the hoopla around nanotechnology, you’d think it was a brand new science. Not so, says David Luzzi, a professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

When Tara Betterbid decided to move to Philadelphia two years ago, she knew little about the city and didn’t know what she was going to do to make ends meet. All she knew was her rent here would be $300 less than it was in New York City—and that the local music scene, with a wealth of soulful R&B singers, seemed the perfect fit for her.

In the mid-1980s, physician Fred Kaplan met a little girl with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). Watching the disease progress in the girl “was like watching a molecular terrorist attack her body,” he says. In this and other FOP patients, soft tissues and muscles metamorphize into bone, essentially forming a second skeleton and rendering movement impossible.

Stacey Peeples pauses before opening the door to her office.

STAFF Q&A/Twenty years after leaving college to start a family, Isabel Boston took a job at Penn—and soon started the long journey of finishing her degree. “I thought I’d be a fool not to do it.”

Q&A/The Director of Penn’s Master of Science Program in Criminology talks about working with former Attorney General Janet Reno and what drew her to criminology in the first place. “It was hard and stressful in many ways, but it was kind of a golden time.”

STAFF Q&A/Being a College House dean is a full-time job, and then some, but Nathan Smith wouldn’t have it any other way. “You're at work the minute you step outside your apartment door.”

Q&A/The mysteries of the universe—where it came from, what it’s made of—have intrigued Licia Verde since she was a young girl. Fortunately for her, she’s part of a research project that aims to answer just those kind of fundamental questions, and offer humankind a greater understanding of our vast, confounding universe.

STAFF Q&A/Anne Stamer has helped turn Weiss Tech House into Penn’s ‘hub’ for technology. “Our mission is to help excite and invigorate students around technology.”

Andrew Zitcer’s charge as Penn’s Cultural Asset Manager is to look after the real estate in Penn’s portfolio that don’t fall under the traditional headings of commercial, residential or retail spaces.