Social Sciences

Penn Global has awarded its first two Residency Grants to Chao Guo, professor of nonprofit management in the School of Social Policy and Practice, and Emily Hannum, Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences, professor of sociology, and associate dean of social sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, where she teaches courses on research methods, communication, religion, and gender. She is one of 18 current Fellows at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. This year’s 2024–25 fellowship year is devoted to the study of Jews and health, exploring health through the intersection between bodies and systems, language and physicality, religion, and science.

With funding from the Neubauer Family Foundation, the program’s creation is in direct response to the School District of Philadelphia’s call for targeted support in Algebra 1 instruction.

Rea, professor of biology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and Belldegrun Distinguished Director of the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management has won the Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Technical/Scientific Content for his article “Gliflozins for Diabetes: From Bark to Bench to Bedside,” published in American Scientist.

FORMA (led by associate professor of practice Daniel Markiewicz and Miroslava Brooks) and Studio Zimm (led by Weitzman alum Michael Zimmerman) teamed up to design a project for the Los Angeles Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition, and received Special Recognition for their work on both sites within the Gentle Density category.

The first book from psychology professor Nicole Rust of the School of Arts & Sciences dives into why research on conditions like Alzheimer’s and depression hasn’t translated more effectively into better treatments.

Schutte Ke, a sixth-year linguistic anthropology doctoral candidate in the School of Arts & Sciences, explains the importance of Indigenous citizen scientists in understanding a crucial ecosystem of nomadic livestock herders on the mountainous region of the Tibetan Plateau.

In a course led by 2024-25 McHarg Fellow Leah Kahler, students explored the movement of plants across cultures and climates, as well as the relationships between recreational and productive landscapes.

A team of researchers from the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania find that cable news has increasingly diverged from broadcast news in the topics covered and language used.

A new Annenberg School for Communication study of declassified FBI files documents how the Bureau wielded the fear of communist infiltration to infiltrate the broadcasting industry itself.