Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2017 by Penn Arts & Sciences

Inner Explorer

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 017

Investigating the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innate ability to map our surroundings.

EXPERTS DISCUSS THE SOCIETAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES TO OUR MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE. Page 20

Tweeting the Medieval New technology illuminates age-old manuscripts.

Arts and Sciences 46 in Action Grant initiatives have faculty and students engaging with the rest of the world.

OMNIA

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 017

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

ANSWERING THE CALL

INNER EXPLORER

Experts discuss the societal and environmental challenges to our most precious resource.

Paul Sniegowski, the newly appointed Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, riffs on research, teaching, and the liberal arts.

Investigating the brain's innate ability to map our surroundings.

By Michele Berger

By Blake Cole

EDITOR’S NOTE

By Abigail Meisel

FINDINGS

The Global Neighborhood

Jane Austen’s Enduring Popularity

By Blake Cole

By Susan Ahlborn

DEAN'S MESSAGE

Through Nigerian Eyes

By Steven J. Fluharty

By Abigail Meisel

Racial Conflict and the Building of a Nation

Communities of Knowledge

By Rebecca Guenard

SCHOOL NEWS BONUS CONTENT

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Heart Rate and Gender Gap in Criminal Offending

By Jacquie Posey

How Hatchetfish Camouflage in the Deep Sea

By Ali Sundermier

A Study of the Evolution of Traditional Medicine By Rebecca Guenard

CONTENTS

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TWEETING THE MEDIEVAL

ARTS AND SCIENCES IN ACTION

New technology illuminates age-old manuscripts.

By Susan Ahlborn, Michele Berger, and Louisa Shepard

Grant initiatives have faculty and students engaging with the rest of the world.

By Louisa Shepard

FACULTY OPINION

Fairness in the Criminal Justice System By Richard Berk

IN THE CLASSROOM

Live and Learn By Susan Ahlborn

MOVERS AND QUAKERS

INSOMNIA

Office Artifacts Three Questions: Witchcraft

LAST LOOK 54

Skimming to Success By Susan Ahlborn

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

Liquid Crystal

EDITOR’S NOTE

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THE GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOOD Whether it’s our local Philadelphia community or the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan, we share our most basic need and universal challenge: water. Access to safe drinking water, warming oceans, and, as made all-too-clear in recent months, strong infrastructure and storm protection are among the top concerns communities face. And they all have one thing in common: They are studied by faculty and students at Penn Arts and Sciences. From a social science angle, access to clean water and the battle against lead exposure are closely linked to economic status. When it comes to the study of rising waters, myriad branches of the physical sciences offer essential investigatory methods. And, more and more, using the tools of the humanities—the written word, theater, film, and visual art—to communicate the stakes of these challenges is central to creating public understanding and a sense of urgency. Our cover story, “Water, Water Everywhere” (p. 20), is a deep dive into these complex challenges. Another feature, “Arts and Sciences in Action” (p. 46), applies this multi-pronged approach to issues within the global community. With this in mind, Making a Difference in Diverse Communities and Global Inquiries are new Penn Arts and Sciences programs that encourage faculty to explore innovative ways of applying their expertise and working with students to address societal challenges. The initiatives provide funding to support teams of faculty and students in multidisciplinary projects that combine coursework, research, and service to address issues of diversity and inequality at the local, national, and international level.

OMNIA is published by The School of Arts and Sciences Office of Advancement EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 Phone: 215-746-1232 Fax: 215-573-2096 E-mail: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Whether it’s reclaiming stories at a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya using video and virtual reality projects, or working with key stakeholders across southeastern Pennsylvania to develop and implement a program that will enhance efforts to eliminate lead exposure, these projects are pushing the boundaries of how a university can be a resource to the global community to effect change. In this issue, our experts explore the idea of race and national identity through a study of second-generation Nigerians (p. 13) and Spanish history (p. 14) and examine how traditional and modern medicine intertwine to impact global health (p. 17). Our faculty opinion feature takes on another large-scope challenge in “Fairness in the Criminal Justice System” (p. 18). Penn Arts and Sciences is also doubling down on its belief that civil discourse is paramount to community. This commitment is affirmed by the launch of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (p. 4), which will provide an unparalleled platform for students, faculty, and a broad public audience to explore some of society’s most pressing concerns. Penn Arts and Sciences remains steadfast in its engagement with the issues that impact individuals of all backgrounds and aspirations, and OMNIA will continue to share with you, our audience, the innovative solutions our researchers are bringing to bear.

LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications LAUREN R. THACKER Director of Advancement Communications BLAKE COLE, Editor SUSAN AHLBORN, Associate Editor LUSI KLIMENKO, Art Director LUSI KLIMENKO ANDREW NEALIS BROOKE SIETINSONS Designers

— Blake Cole

CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at www.alumniconnections. com/penn. Non-alumni: e-mail Development and Alumni Records at record@ben. dev.upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136. The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admis-

As you read through the features, keep an eye out for the icons below, which represent the key components of the Penn Arts and Sciences strategic plan, Foundations and Frontiers www.sas.upenn.edu/strategic-plan

Diversity, Inequality, and Human Well-Being Energy, Sustainability, and Environment Humanities in the Digital Age

Mapping the Mind

Arts and Culture

Global Inquiries

Public Policy and Social Impact Quantitative Explorations of Evolving Systems

sions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover Illustration: The Brave Union

DEAN’S MESSAGE

FALL/WINTER 2017

COMMUNITIES OF KNOWLEDGE BY

STEVEN J. FLUHARTY

At the end of every summer, the bustle of 10,000 undergraduates arriving on campus makes at least one thing clear — Penn is a big place. And the College, as the home of 6,400 of these students and of the liberal arts for all Penn undergraduates, can likewise seem like a sprawling enterprise.

Our 27 academic departments are likewise small communities that, in a very real sense, provide the framework for all that we do in Penn Arts and Sciences. These departments are the home for our standing faculty of more than 500. To our students, faculty are teachers and mentors, the innovators who develop new ways of engaging inside the classroom and out. You can read about a few examples of some of our newest faculty initiatives in “Arts and Sciences in Action” (p. 46). And as outstanding scholars in their respective fields, our faculty are what distinguish Penn and sustain our position among the nation’s top research universities. Because our faculty are essential to who we are, and to excellence across Penn, one of the main tasks of my office is to see that

Our history department, for example, has brought in five new scholars who explore economic, political, intellectual, and cultural history, both in the Americas and across the Atlantic, and our English department welcomed three new faculty. Among the new recruits in these two departments are four scholars who focus on African American history, literature, and culture—a cohort that is solidifying Penn’s position as an important center of African American studies. New appointments to the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Earth and Environmental Science are advancing our ability to make transformational contributions to research on sustainable energy and understanding the systems that support life on our planet. We are also ensuring our continued presence at the frontiers of research by attracting young scholars who will use the tools and techniques of big data and the digital humanities to explore areas ranging from criminal justice policy to the literature of the Renaissance. And at a time in which the critical importance of constructive global engagement could not be more evident, we are expanding global awareness through recruits whose work focuses on Eastern

Candace DiCarlo

But within this large Penn Arts and Sciences community, we are a multitude of smaller communities. One of these is the Integrated Studies Program, highlighted in this issue (p. 52). ISP provides a unique liberal arts experience to 74 incoming freshmen — one that takes on big ideas and engages students in a year-long, multidisciplinary exploration of those themes. This shared intellectual experience, combined with a strong residential component in Riepe College House, creates a smaller community within the College and fosters friendships and close relationships among the students, as well as with faculty, that will continue through their years at Penn.

the School takes full advantage of every opportunity to strengthen our faculty, and recruiting new faculty represents one of our most important opportunities. This year, our recruiting efforts have resulted in 27 new appointments who arrived on campus this fall, and three others who will join us in January. Collectively, these new recruits enhance strengths within our traditional disciplines while, at the same time, building our capacity to pursue some of the most important issues that cut across disciplinary boundaries.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

Europe, Latin America, and South Asia. In addition, thanks to an endowment gift from our Board of Overseers Chair Andrea Mitchell, CW'67, and her husband, Alan Greenspan, the newly named Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy will provide a hub for faculty, engaging with students and the public, to advance a nuanced understanding of what it means to be a part of democratic society (p. 4). As we begin the new year, my colleagues in the Dean’s Office and I are looking forward to seeing how all our faculty — new and longstanding — work together to shape the intellectual direction of the School, strengthen scholarship within each academic discipline, advance interdisciplinary investigation, and lead our students in a liberal arts education that speaks to the challenges of the 21st century.

SCHOOL NEWS

NEW GIFT ENDOWS ANDREA MITCHELL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF DEMOCRACY Andrea Mitchell, CW'67, and Alan Greenspan have made a gift to endow the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. The Andrea Mitchell Center will provide an unparalleled platform for students, faculty, and a broad public audience to explore some of society’s most pressing concerns and enhance Penn’s stature as a hub for scholarship on democratic institutions and issues. Penn President Amy Gutmann says, “Andrea and Alan share the University’s commitment to the role of scholarship and informed, reasoned dialogue in a democratic society. The Andrea Mitchell Center will engage students and faculty across disciplines and be a premier public forum for research and discourse. We are extraordinarily grateful for their generosity and abiding commitment to the study of democracy and to Penn.” The Andrea Mitchell Center will build on the work of the Penn Center on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism, an initiative established with Mellon Foundation support in 2006. The Center’s leadership is changing as well, with Jeffrey Green, Associate Professor of Political Science, taking over from founding director Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished

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Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. “Rogers has fostered exploration of democracy on the global scale and encouraged scholarly collaboration across Penn,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean of Penn Arts and Sciences. “Jeffrey and the Andrea Mitchell Center will continue that work, allowing our faculty to engage in meaningful scholarship and invite student participation in vitally important conversations.” “Penn has a unique capacity to promote democratic discourse about civic life,” says Mitchell. “The University’s home in Philadelphia, with its heritage of constitutionalism, combined with Penn’s academic resources, creates the perfect environment to consider complex experiences of citizenship and nationhood. Thoughtful inquiry is deeply important to me personally, and I believe it is of the utmost importance for our nation and, indeed, for all democratic nations. I am grateful that Penn is offering us this opportunity and that my husband and I are able to help make the Center a reality.” The Andrea Mitchell Center will support academic and public programs organized around yearly themes. These programs will also engage undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, and workshop and conference materials will be captured in a book series published in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Andrea Mitchell is the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC. She studied English at Penn, where she served as Program Director at WXPN. She began her professional broadcast career in Philadelphia at KWY Newsradio, and she has been a correspondent for NBC since 1978. She is the Chair of the Penn Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers and is a University Trustee

Courtesy of Andrea Mitchell

Andrea Mitchell, CW'67, Chair of the Penn Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers

SCHOOL NEWS

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Emerita. She also is a former Chair of the Annenberg School Advisory Committee and is a Member Emerita of the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women.

Afterlives of Slavery,” a public conversation between prize-winning author Colson Whitehead and Salamishah Tilllet, an associate professor of English and Africana studies at Penn. More information about the Wolf Humanities Center and it 201718 programs is available at: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu

WOLF HUMANITIES CENTER 2017–2018 FORUM EXAMINES "AFTERLIVES" Penn’s hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming now has a permanent endowment thanks to Dick Wolf, C’69, PAR’15, the multiple Emmy-winning creator of the Law & Order and Chicago franchises. Building upon the tradition of the Penn Humanities Forum, the newly named Wolf Humanities Center seeks to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society. The 2017-18 season will examine the topic “Afterlives” through a wide-ranging series of talks, conferences, films, and live performances that are free and open to the public. “The Wolfs’ support for cinema studies and humanities scholarship at Penn has been extraordinary,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “This most recent gift will position the Wolf Humanities Center as the locus for interdisciplinary research on the human experience and a powerful catalyst for vibrant, public forums that contribute to the very core of our understanding of critical issues from a humanities perspective.” The Wolf Humanities Center is moving to a newly-renovated wing of Williams Hall this fall and will continue the work of the Penn Humanities Forum. Since 1999, its programs have supported innovative scholarship through annual topic-based public forums in which scholars, students, and a diverse array of non-academic constituencies consider “our common stake in the thinking arts.” “Hundreds of scholars have received our fellowships, and our public events draw thousands of people every year from throughout the Philadelphia area,” said James English, Wolf Humanities Center Director and John Welsh Centennial Professor of English. “The Wolf gift stands as a recognition of the Forum’s achievements and an endorsement of our ambition to make Penn a major hub for regional, national, and global humanities research.” Led by topic director Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at Penn, the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2017-18 Forum on “Afterlives” opened September 27 with “Ghosts, Zombies, and the

NEW FACULTY FOR 2017–2018 Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 30 new members to its standing faculty for the 2017-2018 academic year. The School is pleased to welcome: Juan Pablo Atal, Assistant Professor of Economics Katie Barott, Assistant Professor of Biology Mia Bay, Professor of History (as of January 1, 2018) Ashley Brock, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology

SCHOOL NEWS

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Margo Crawford, Professor of English

Dagmawi Woubshet, Associate Professor of English

Stephanie Dick, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science

Bo Zhen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy (as of January 1, 2018)

Ivan DrpiÄ&#x2021;, Associate Professor of History of Art Marc Flandreau, Howard Marks Professor of Economic History and Professor of History Amit Gandhi, Professor of Economics (as of January 1, 2018) Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Professor of Chemistry Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Assistant Professor of Sociology Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor of Psychology and Neurology Gregory Goulding, Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies Sarah Gronningsater, Assistant Professor of History Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Jonathan Heckman, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

SLAVIC DEPARTMENT IS NOW RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures is now the Department of Russian and East European Studies, representing a shift towards a more multidisciplinary and multicultural approach to the study of a vital and highly dynamic region of the world. The department is chaired by Professor Mitchell Orenstein, a leader in the interdisciplinary study of Russia and Eastern Europe who joined Penn Arts and Sciences in 2015. Additionally, the department has introduced a new and more flexible major in Russian and East European Studies, with three concentrations: Language, Literature, and Culture; History, Politics, and Society; and Cinema, Arts, and Letters.

Morgan Hoke, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Annie Liang, Assistant Professor of Economics

Marcia Norton, Associate Professor of History Aurelie Ouss, Assistant Professor of Criminology Ileana Perez-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History Donovan Schaefer, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Kathryn Schuler, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English

Courtesy of Mitchell Orenstein

Megan Matthews, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Mitchell Orenstein, Professor and Chair of the Department of Russian and East European Studies

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The name change and multidisciplinary approach reflect the full range of languages, nations, and peoples in the East European region—including Hungarians, Romanians, Balts, Jews, and Roma—studied by members of the department. The department has long had a commitment to teaching courses on the history, politics, economics, and cinema of the region, in addition to languages and literatures. The department also hopes to expand its offerings in East European languages and literatures, as well as diversifying course offerings in the social sciences. The name change coincides with an enormous growth in public interest in Russian and East European Studies due to investigations of Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the changing perceptions on Russia’s presence on the world stage.

and American Philosophical Society. In 2006, Smith founded the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism, now the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy.

NEW MASTER'S DEGREE IN BEHAVIORAL AND DECISION SCIENCES Understanding how to change bad behaviors and make better decisions is an asset in areas including social and public policy, law, education, business, and medicine. Penn Arts and Sciences’ new Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences (MBDS) was created to give its students the tools to address a variety of reallife problems, by knowing how individuals and groups make Courtesy of Cristina Bicchieri

ROGERS SMITH NAMED PRESIDENT-ELECT OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION

SCHOOL NEWS

Rogers Smith has been named as the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) president-elect for the 2017-2018 term. The first political scientist from Penn to serve in the position, Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, will be on APSA’s Council and Executive Committee for three years. Founded in 1903, APSA serves more than 12,000 members in more than 80 countries and brings together political scientists from all fields of inquiry to deepen its members’ understanding of politics, democracy, and citizenship throughout the world. Trained in the history of political thought and American constitutional law, Smith, who is also Associate Dean for Social Sciences in Penn Arts and Sciences, has long championed a discipline that uses multiple methods to address pressing political issues and plans to bring that expertise to APSA’s Executive Committee. At Penn, Smith has received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Mentoring, Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and Dean’s Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Academy of Political and Social Science,

Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, and Professor of Legal Studies

SCHOOL NEWS

decisions and how to affect those decisions for the better. The program’s director, Cristina Bicchieri, Sacha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, has consulted for UNICEF and the World Bank and is the author of Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms. “The MBDS was created by Cristina Bicchieri based on demand both from undergraduates at Penn and other universities and from working professionals,” says Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education. “It’s different from many programs because it takes a cross-disciplinary arts and sciences approach to analyzing and understanding human behavior, and it allows students to select a concentration from a wide range of fields offered at Penn.”

THE FELS POLICY RESEARCH INITIATIVE ANNOUNCES GRANTS

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FPRI is also funding a conference on race, science, and society in April 2018, which will interrogate the global variability of race in science across time and space. This two-day international symposium will be organized by Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science; and Sarah Tishkoff, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology, and hosted by the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Other conferences funded by FPRI include one focusing on organized violence and Afro-descendant populations.

FALL 2017 60-SECOND LECTURE SERIES DEBUTS Every fall and spring, Penn Arts and Sciences faculty members manage to squeeze a wealth of knowledge and discovery into just one minute. Topics range from human history to fractions to fly-fishing. Courtesy of Penn Video Network

The Fels Policy Research Initiative (FPRI) has announced nine working groups and conferences it will fund through the end of 2017. Launched by Penn Arts and Sciences in 2016, FPRI seeks to increase the visibility and impact of the University’s policyrelevant research by supporting research and working groups, sponsoring events and seminars, and giving faculty opportunities to voice their opinion on important policy issues. Funding prioritizes working groups and conferences that engage faculty from Penn Arts and Sciences and involve multiple disciplines. The funded working groups include Foundations of Cooperative Organization in Living Systems: Sustaining Research in Theoretical Biology. In this project, Vijay Balasubramanian, Cathy and Mark Lasry Professor of Physics, and Junhyong Kim, Patricia M. Williams Term Professor of Biology, will bring together faculty, fellows, and students to explore the need for a fundamentally new way of viewing and understanding living systems as interacting across scales from molecules to societies and species. Other working groups funded by FPRI include an investigation of social and ecological inequalities in the built environment and a partnership between Philadelphia teachers and Penn graduate students and faculty to make the case for fully funding Philadelphia’s schools.

Charles Loeffler, Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology

Kicking things off this fall was Charles Loeffler, Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology, with his talk, "When Does a Child Become an Adult?" Loeffler made his presentation from underneath an umbrella in the Series' first rain day. Other lecturers this fall included Campbell Grey, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, with his presentation, "Why Do We Walk Where We Walk? A Meditation on Movement, Meaning, and Agency," and Meredith Tamminga, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, who presented on "Changing Sounds and Changing Signs in Philadelphia Dialects." You can stream past lectures at: sas.upenn.edu/60second

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PENN PROGRAM IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES RECEIVES MELLON SUPPORT

“This award recognizes the imagination and innovation of the Penn students, staff, and faculty who have piloted PPEH since its launch in the summer of 2014,” says Bethany Wiggin, an associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures and PPEH Founding Director. “Mellon's generosity will allow us to solidify and build ongoing collaborations—on campus, in Philadelphia, in our watershed, and still further afield.” “The environmental humanities are an exciting, collaborative movement, and Penn is at the forefront,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean of Penn Arts and Sciences. “For too long, serious environmental inquiry was confined to the sciences. PPEH adds vital voices to the conversation. The Mellon grant will ensure that environmental dialogue across the disciplines has a permanent home at Penn.” The Mellon grant will support PPEH as it moves out of its transition phase and makes sustainable investments in four priorities: interdisciplinary research, the collection and maintenance of vulnerable data, the unique environmental challenges of global cities, and public engagement via arts and cultural institutions. Wiggin says that the funding will help to develop communities of scholars, artists, cultural institutions, and interested citizens who are “capable of addressing today's environmental legacies and imagining alternative futures.” PPEH will use the funds to develop deeper and more integrated training and research opportunities for students and faculty, including an undergraduate minor and graduate certificate.

Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Founding Director Courtesy of Bethany Wiggin

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) has been awarded a grant of $1.5 million over four years from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. PPEH is a Penn Arts and Sciences initiative that combines scientific and humanistic inquiry to better address issues surrounding energy, sustainability, and the environment. The grant will allow Penn to train undergraduate and graduate students in the environmental humanities, as well as to expand public engagement with diverse local, national, and global partners.

The program plans to expand community outreach activities with the creation of additional artists’ residencies, public workshops and lectures, digital resources, and both mobile and stationary art installations.

SCHOOL NEWS

PAUL SNIEGOWSKI IS NAMED THE STEPHEN A. LEVIN FAMILY DEAN OF THE COLLEGE Paul Sniegowski, a professor of biology, is the new Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Sniegowski is a distinguished evolutionary biologist and award-winning teacher and has demonstrated a deep commitment to student well-being and the liberal arts. In 2005, Sniegowski was recognized with the School’s highest teaching honor, the Ira H. Abrams Award, and he has twice won the Department of Biology’s Excellence in Teaching Award. From

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2012 to 2016 he chaired the School’s Committee on Undergraduate Education; he has also chaired the Faculty Senate Committee on Students and Educational Policy, served on the faculty advisory boards of the College of Liberal and Professional Studies and the Center for Teaching and Learning, and chaired the School’s Teaching Awards Committee. Sniegowski has been part of Penn Arts and Sciences since 2007—his entire faculty career. He is a member of the graduate groups in biology (which he chaired from 2005 to 2011), genomics and computational biology, and history and sociology of science. He received a B.Mus. in violin performance from the Indiana University School of Music, an M.A. in biology from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago. He succeeds Dennis DeTurck, who was the Levin Family Dean of the College for 12 years. For more on Paul Sniegowski, read our Q&A on p. 30.

BONUS CONTENT Be sure to visit OMNIA online for multimedia content related to this issue: www.omnia.sas.upenn.edu/bonus-content

Here, you'll find supplemental audio and video content from our articles. A video highlights Peter Decherney, Professor of Cinema Studies and English, and his students from the Penn-in-Kenya summer abroad course, as they work with refugees to help them tell their story. You can read more about their efforts in our feature, “Arts and Sciences in Action” (p. 46). The first of the two OMNIA Podcasts features Professors Reto Gieré and Richard Pepino, both included in the same “Arts and Sciences in Action,” from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, speaking about their efforts to reduce lead exposure in southeastern Pennsylvania. The second of the two podcasts features Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, discussing how issues such as social inequality inform climate change policy. Read more on this subject in our cover story “Water, Water Everywhere” (p. 20).

“Penn-in-Kenya” video feature, with Peter Decherney, Professor of Cinema Studies and English, and students Nicholas Escobar, C’18; Melisande McLaughlin, C’19; and Sonari-Nnamdi Chidi, C’20.

OMNIA Podcast: "Reducing Lead Exposure," with Professors Reto Gieré and Richard Pepino from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

OMNIA Podcast: "The Politics of Climate Change," with Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology.

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast series on Apple iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts, to automatically receive downloads of our most recent episodes, as well previous audio features from Penn Arts and Sciences. In addition, the Penn Arts and Sciences Vimeo channel houses dozens of videos featuring faculty, students, and alums. See you online!

FINDINGS

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JANE AUSTEN’S ENDURING POPULARITY BY

SUSAN AHLBORN

Jane Austen died 200 years ago on July 18, 1817, at the age of 41. We don’t know why she died so young, although theories include Addison’s disease, lymphoma, even accidental arsenic poisoning. We don’t know much about Austen’s love life, or her time in Bath, or just what she looked like. It’s not for lack of trying. A search for “Jane Austen” in the Penn Libraries’ catalog shows 1,314 books and 178,919 articles. “I would say that of dead authors, she may very well be the most popular out there,” says English Professor Michael Gamer. “Perhaps second to Shakespeare, but arguably with a greater fan base.” Austen’s novels have always been popular, though she was not well-known during her lifetime. Due to the reputation of novels as a somewhat frivolous form of entertainment — which was only

then beginning to change — and her father’s position as a clergyman, she published anonymously. Her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, listed its author simply as A Lady. In literary circles, however, Austen was known. Her final publisher was John Murray, who also handled Sir Walter Scott, the most popular poet and novelist of his time. The librarian for the Prince Regent, the future George the IV, approached her about dedicating Emma to His Royal Highness. After her death, Austen’s brother, Henry, published her novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey and revealed her as the author. But her iconic status today is thanks to movies and TV, says Gamer. Until the mid-1990s, only one major film had been made based on her works: 1940’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Laurence Olivier. The screenplay was by Aldous Huxley, and the film was largely a bid to get Americans interested in helping Great Britain in its war with the Axis powers. Then in 1995 and ’96, five major Austen adaptations hit at once: Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Nick Dear’s Persuasion, the BBC Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, and Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow. “Their success put Austen into another orbit,” says Gamer. “They’ve allowed us to visualize the culture, see the characters come to life, and hear their voices.” Why then? “I’d say it really was just planets lining up — pure synergy, pure luck, perhaps the right author for the post-Bush era,” says Gamer. “There is something about her ability to show smart women spitting tacks at the folly and entitlement of men that, especially today, feels modern.” There’s also escapism. Gamer says that even Austen’s most desperate characters are upper-class or nearly so, giving them a kind of safety. “So there is a kind of uniformity — or bleakness, depending on your politics — in the world presented.” In his contemporary review of Emma, Walter Scott highlighted Austen’s affection for daily life. She wrote about everyday people (albeit of a certain class) doing everyday things: reading, eating, shopping. Her novels demonstrated the literary value of the domestic. Beyond that, Gamer says, “I know of no other writer of this time whose characters spend so much energy thinking about missed opportunities: what might happen, what could have happened, what should have happened.” Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film Mansfield Park includes this aspect at its end, when we hear the ultimate fates of the characters, and each segment ends with the line, “It could have all ended differently, I suppose… but it didn’t.” That wistful sentiment is typical of Austen’s characters. She created rich, internal lives for them that remain relevant and relatable.

Jane Austen, after a drawing by her sister, Cassandra.

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THROUGH NIGERIAN EYES BY

ABIGAIL MEISEL

“I was quite surprised to find that the national identity of second-generation Nigerians is quite different in the United States and Britain,” Imoagene says. “Nigerians in America really believe in the ‘American Dream’ and feel that they are part of a great tradition of a nation of immigrants. In Great Britain, the opposite is true. There are far fewer second-generation Nigerians reporting that they feel ‘British’.” Imoagene found that her research concept presented two primary challenges: conceptual and logistical.

Often, immigrating to a foreign country means taking on a new identity, a complex process of adjustment and acculturation. When race comprises a part of a national identity, the process becomes even more complicated.

“When I was first conceiving of this research project as a doctoral student at Harvard, several professors suggested that there was little research on Africans because Caribbeans were a good enough proxy,” she explains, “I had to really explain to them how these two groups are not necessarily alike because both are Black immigrants.”

In her new book, Beyond Expectations: Second-Generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain, published in February, Onoso Imoagene, an assistant professor of sociology, explores ideas of race and national identity through a study of second-generation Nigerians in the U.S. and Great Britain. Her book explores the juncture between race, ethnicity, and social class, as well as the roles of globalization and transnationalism in immigration and creating a sense of self.

Indeed, finding second-generation Nigerians as subjects did prove to be difficult, but Imoagene knew where to look. She contacted the Nigerian embassy in London and, with staff permission, sat in the waiting room with her screening questionnaire. She carried out a similar process at the Nigerian embassy in New York, in order to find a pool of subjects she sought: people who had been born to Nigerian parents or those who had come to the U.K. and the U.S. before age 12.

She also reached out to Nigerian organizations, particularly organizations for children, as well as churches in both Britain and the U.S. She followed up screening questionnaires with interviews. Among her questions: “What does being British mean to you?” and “Do you think of yourself as an American?” “On the U.K. side, 20 percent of the people I interviewed would laugh when I asked them what being British meant to them personally. Typical answers were ‘Being British means nothing’ and ‘It means having a red passport’ [enabling them to travel in and out of the country]” Imoagene explains. “If I thought I was going to hear something about dying for Queen and country, I was wrong.” In the U.S., however, her subjects “identified as American and waxed poetic about it,” she says. “They were very comfortable with a hyphenated identity of ‘Nigerian-American.’” In both countries, the second-generation Nigerians were, as a group, thriving economically as lawyers, accountants, IT experts, and in other professions. Imoagene believes that one of the reasons for the difference lies in history of Great Britain and Nigeria, a former colony. “British colonial history is an impediment to this group forming a British national identity,” she says. “It’s a wound.” Imoagene hopes that her book will lead to a greater understanding of the issues surrounding second-generation Nigerians — and also an understanding that not all Black immigrants are interchangeable. “Immigrants from differing African countries and from the Caribbean may all be ‘read’ as Black by whites native to those countries, but they’re not a uniform group, and each one needs to be studied closely to be understood.”

FINDINGS

OMNIA

RACIAL CONFLICT AND THE BUILDING OF A NATION BY

REBECCA GUENARD

Twentieth-century Spain was marked by political upheaval. The Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) ended with a victory for General Francisco Franco, who ruled the region as a fascist dictator until his death in 1975. Then began La Transición, the transition to a constitutional monarchy and democracy. In 1978, Spain established a constitution that declared “the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible home of all Spaniards.” Not “all Spaniards,” however, including members of previously autonomous communities, necessarily view Spain as “indivisible.” “I‘m one of those who doesn’t take simplistic histories of the past very seriously,” says Antonio Feros, an associate professor of history. Reflecting on Spain’s recent history compelled him to look back even further and attempt to trace the many factors that shape present-day attitudes in his home country. His latest book, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World, demonstrates the complex, fraught relationship between national and racial identities in historical and contemporary Spain. “In Spain there is a sense that Spain is formed by multinational communities. There is not only a Spanish nation, there is a Catalan nation, a Galician nation, and a Basque nation,” says Feros. He knew he would best understand the perspectives of all these nations by studying their histories. “I wanted to understand in what sense Spain tried to create a nation of Spaniards or in what sense one national view, the Castilian, was being imposed on the rest of us.” To detangle Spain’s multinational view, Feros analyzes 400 years of history. He takes Speaking of Spain readers on a tour of peninsular Spain starting in the 15th century, when the rulers of two independent kingdoms married. The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had many historical ramifications — they sponsored Christopher Columbus, for one, and their union planted the seeds for a unified

Spain. Feros turns his eye across the Atlantic as Spain established its vast colonial empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, before an extended period of decline in the 18th century. Along the way, he expertly explores the views of period scholars regarding race and the Spanish nation. Feros’ goal in researching and writing this book is to evaluate how the country’s history of independent kingdoms and colonialism shape the Atlantic Spanish community’s identification as Spaniards. “Ideologies take a long time to build and sometimes they are built on violence, and sometimes they are built on debates and discussions and looking at the history citizens have together,” says Feros. Feros traces this history to gain insight into the centuries-long scholarly debate on race and the establishment of a unified Spain. In the time frame Feros analyzes, those in power equated whiteness with Spanishness and propagated ideas of racial purity. Some scholars argued against this belief, citing Spain’s many kingdoms, significant Muslim and Jewish populations, and colonized peoples. The Spanish Inquisition, led by Ferdinand and Isabella and begun in 1478, forcibly enacted a narrow definition of Spanishness, interrogating, surveilling, and ultimately expelling many Jews and Muslims who had converted to Catholicism. These people were deemed not sufficiently white, not sufficiently Christian, and thus decidedly not Spanish. The Inquisition was not officially abolished until 1834.

Now that Feros has built the historical foundation for the interplay of race and nation in Spain, he plans to focus his research on modern history, returning him to the timeframe that first launched this retrospective. He remarks that the ethnic beliefs of Spaniards, forged through hundreds of years of conflict, lay hidden beneath a delicate facade of racial acceptance, a facade that is easily perturbed. “The interesting thing about history is that it’s very much alive; the old habits of previous centuries presented themselves in the 20th century,” says Feros. “If a society doesn’t recognize its big problems in history it is committed to repeat them, and I would not like to see that in Spain.”

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HEART RATE AND GENDER GAP IN CRIMINAL OFFENDING BY

JACQUIE POSEY

Courtesy of University Communications

Olivia Choy, an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University (L) and Adrian Raine, Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology

In the field of criminology, it is well established that men commit more crime than women. A Penn study published recently in the journal Criminology is the first to demonstrate that men’s lower resting heart rate partly explains their higher rate of criminal offending. Olivia Choy, an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University, led the research study when she was a doctoral student in the lab of Adrian Raine, Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology. For a long time, some psychologists chalked up the gender gap in criminal offending to differential parenting. “We give little girls toys and little boys toy guns,” says Raine, who holds appointments in Penn Arts and Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine. “But this is not the complete answer. Biological variables like heart rate are at play, and the more we begin to pay attention to the biological contributions to crime causation, the more we may understand, and ultimately prevent, the higher crime rates in men.”

Choy’s study, “Explaining the Gender Gap in Crime: The Role of Heart Rate,” goes beyond traditional socialization theories to address the incomplete understanding. The study examined data obtained from a subsample of 1,795 participants involved in the Mauritius Child Health Project. Children in the project were born between 1969 and 1970. They were recruited into the study from Mauritius, a tropical island in sub-Saharan Africa, when they were 3 years old. The resting heart rates of 894 children were documented when they were 11 years old and were reviewed 12 years later when the children were 23-year-old adults. The heart rate data was evaluated alongside the study participants’ self-reported criminal activity and their official conviction records for criminal offending, including violent crime and drug-related crime. The study found that resting heart rate accounted for five to 17 percent of the gender difference in crime. Prior studies have shown that people with low resting heart rates seek stimulation to raise their arousal level to a more optimal

one. This stimulation-seeking theory converges with a fearlessness theory, arguing that those with low heart rate have a low level of fear and may be more likely to engage in antisocial behavior, which requires a degree of fearlessness. “One way to get that stimulation is by engaging in antisocial behavior,” Choy says. “Obviously, you can engage in prosocial behavior like skydiving, but another major theory connects low levels of arousal to low heart rate, reflecting a low level of fear in individuals. To commit a crime, you do need a level of fearlessness.” Choy adds that the gender gap in crime is seen across time and across cultures. Differences in heart rates among male and female children are seen as early as 17 months of age: “You see it from 1 to 79 years, and even in newborn males who have lower resting heart rates than females.” Both Choy and Raine believe that researchers need to look at the biological factors that cause the higher crime rates in men to ultimately prevent them from criminal offending.

FINDINGS

OMNIA

HOW HATCHETFISH CAMOUFLAGE IN THE DEEP SEA BY

ALI SUNDERMIER

because their reflective scales allowed them to behave like a mirror: light traveling towards the fish would bounce back at the same angle, matching the light coming from behind it and effectively cloaking the fish. But Penn Arts and Sciences researchers realized that acting like a mirror would actually make fish more vulnerable in the deep sea: Light would be sent back to the predator, signaling the fish’s location.

Courtesy of University Communications

Alison Sweeney, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

The midwater region of the ocean is the largest habitat by volume in the world, making up 99 percent of Earth’s livable space. It’s home to a myriad of occupants, many of which have evolved peculiar abilities to allow them to survive. According to Alison Sweeney, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, hatchetfish, so named because the shape of their bodies resembles the blade of a hatchet, are one of the “classic-example weirdo fish denizens of the midwater.” Because many deep-sea creatures hunt by looking up and seeing shadows or silhouettes, hatchetfish’s large flat bodies keep them relatively well hidden. Their skin is somewhat metallic-looking, resembling the dull side of aluminum foil.

Hatchetfish also have a line of photophores on their belly that produce light, or bioluminescence. This is useful for when the fish are swimming in waters shallow enough for sunlight to dominate. By producing their own light with the same intensity as the faint sunlight coming from above, the hatchetfish make themselves invisible to predators. But this counter-illumination technique doesn’t work in the deep sea where sunlight doesn’t reach. In this region, other predatory sea creatures have evolved to create light with their own bodies, which they can use as searchlights to hunt for prey. Until recently, scientists believed that hatchetfish were able to hide in the void

The researchers dug deeper into the hatchetfish’s mechanisms for camouflage to reveal that, rather than bounce light directly back, they scatter it in a diffuse, non-mirror like pattern that makes them much less visible to predators hunting with light. They also found that when they shined light directly onto the side of the fish, the structures they were studying actually piped the light through the fish’s body, funneling it downward through the photophores in its belly like a “beam dump.” In the shallow part of the ocean, hatchetfish may direct some of the sideways sunlight down through their photophores to assist in their counter-illumination. In the deeper part of the ocean, dumping the light downward will throw predators off their trail. Sweeney says that one of the themes in her lab is to push physics by reaching a fuller understanding of what nature and evolution can do. By looking at the mechanisms by which biological materials control light, scientists may be inspired to use similar designs in technological applications. “I think there’s a fundamental curiosity of basically just how sophisticated nature is in terms of photonics,” Sweeney says. “We want to know if we can we actually learn mechanisms from nature that we wouldn’t necessarily have gotten to through a top-down engineering approach. And the answer to that is yes.”

FINDINGS

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A STUDY OF THE EVOLUTION OF TRADITIONAL MEDICINE BY

REBECCA GUENARD

In the past few decades, western medicine has become more cognizant of the need to maintain whole-body health and to nurture the mind, body and spirit. This evolution of modern medical science owes much to ancient medical traditions like Ayurveda, which was founded with such wellness philosophies three millennia ago. However, the integration of ideas is never one-way. In his book, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, recounts the historical evidence for how western medical devices became included in the practice of modern Ayurveda medicine. The majority of the world’s population resides in countries where some type of traditional medicine is a part of the official healthcare apparatus. In India or China, you can get training in Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine and get a job in a government hospital as a doctor. Mukharji was curious what adaptations to traditional medical teachings were necessary for it to function in a modern institutional context. “Take Chinese medicines,” says Mukharji. “They have a very different understanding of the body, about energy channels and things you can’t really find by cutting open a corpse; dissection was not very important.” Many historians point to the modernization of traditional medicines. But Mukharji’s historical interests focus on the fringe, on overlooked items or ideas that seem inconsequential until one takes the time to explore their relevance. He thus chose to focus on the uptake of diagnostic tools and technologies by Ayurvedic practitioners. Consider a ubiquitous 18th century object like the pocket watch. Though a common object, the influence of the device as a critical instrument in medical history has not been significantly addressed. Mukharji navigates the

“Technology, like the pocket watch, instead of being a tool to apply knowledge, becomes the instigator for developing new knowledge, so you get this new understanding of the body emerging in Ayurveda medicine,” says Mukharji. Mukharji traverses similar journeys toward modernization as other small devices, like the thermometer and the microscope, became a part of the Ayurvedic physician’s medical kit. Through discussions centered around these small technologies he exposes the path that Ayurveda took from its transmaterial roots—viewing the body as a combination of material and spiritual elements—to a more mechanistic and materialist practice that incorporates western intellectual traditions.

evolution of its use within Ayurveda to assist in the understanding of pulse rate. He reveals how eminent Ayurvedic physicians first acknowledge the application of the watch as a quantitative diagnostic tool being used by western physicians and then, within 20 years, incorporate a numerical normal pulse range on the pages of Ayurvedic texts (though noted as “Western opinion”). Mukharji explains that traditional methods don’t assign numbers for pulse. Instead pulse is qualitative. Determining a patient’s disease depends on whether their pulse feels like the walk of a duck, the gallop of a horse or the hopping of a frog. This qualitative pulse embedded a fundamentally different and non-mechanistic understanding of the body. Traditional healers in colonized India would have observed British doctors taking a pulse by counting the beats in a given duration. Looking at how the publications of traditional healers changed over the decades, one can observe how they slowly took this numerical approach into consideration.

“The main finding of my book is that the change was inaugurated not by the state or any centralized body, but by lay practitioners who were trying to modernize their knowledge because they were increasingly adopting these small, everyday kind of technologies.” says Mukharji. He further explains that we think innovations in knowledge produce new technology, but rather, when we acquire a new technological gadget, that often leads to innovations in knowledge. Mukharji proves as much in Doctoring Traditions and shows that the technology doesn’t have to be profound to induce knowledge innovation. Global health policymakers are increasingly interested in incorporating traditional medicine into public health systems. Mukharji hopes that these policymakers will read the book. “But I think that effort, well-minded as it is, is often hamstrung by a limited stereotypical understanding of what traditional medicine is and how it functions,” says Mukharji. He doesn’t even like using the word traditional because it evokes an idea of something fossilized. “It is not something that is stuck in time. It is modern. Its contemporary. It’s evolving constantly.” For Mukharji, the best word to describe traditional medicine is dynamic.

FACULTY OPINION

OMNIA

FAIRNESS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM By Richard Berk

Illustration by SÃ©bastien Thibault

FACULTY OPINION

FALL/WINTER 2017

Everyone wants the criminal justice system to be fair. Whatever one’s values, political affiliations, or ideology, an unfair criminal justice system is a faulty criminal justice system. Why then is there so much controversy about fairness? One important reason is lack of clarity about what fairness means. Even when clear conceptions of fairness are provided, there can be several different kinds that are in conflict. For example, men are vastly overrepresented in prisons compared to women. On its face, this is an instance of unfairness in outcome. The chances a judge will sentence a man to prison are far greater than the chances a judge will sentence a woman to prison. One reason is that men are far more likely to be convicted of violent crimes for which a long prison sentence is expected. The overrepresentation of men in prison could be easily remedied. One could decide to treat men and women differently. One could stipulate that violent crimes committed by men were less serious than violent crimes committed by women and that, therefore, incarceration was less appropriate. This would increase fairness in outcome while decreasing fairness in treatment. Would such a tradeoff be accepted? A lot would depend on why men are more far more likely than women to be are arrested for, charged with, and convicted of violent crimes. If in fact men were no more likely than women to commit violent crimes to begin with, and if the overrepresentation of men among those arrested for, charged with, and convicted of violent crimes derived from a bias again men, the tradeoff might be accepted. But that just moves concerns about fairness upstream, where the same two tradeoffs would need to be addressed at each stage. At some point, fairness

upstream would need to be examined in settings and institutions well before an arrest for a violent crime occurs. For example, why are boys more likely to be disciplined in school? At each stage, there would be a need for data and a proper analysis so that facts could be accumulated. Are men in a given jurisdiction more likely than women to be stopped and questioned by police? If so, why is that? And might some of the reasons have a legitimate law enforcement rationale? Facts matter. Do men constitute the majority of arrests in intimate partner violence? If so, why? And might some of the reasons have a legitimate law enforcement rationale? Again, facts matter. The same sorts of issues can arise for reasons other than gender: race, ethnicity, age, and immigrant status. What can be done? At one extreme are calls for fundamental change from top to bottom in the criminal justice system. Even if such changes could be clearly detailed and even if they were desirable, any practical plan would take many years to implement. In the meantime, many thousands of individuals, men and women, would be incarcerated. At the other extreme, are calls for staying the course. Unfairness that may exist is rare and aberrant, not a systematic feature of the criminal justice system. And, nothing is perfect. There is a middle path. First, there needs to be far greater clarity about what fairness means in the criminal justice system and a recognition that there are several different kinds. There will be tradeoffs — you can’t have it all. Because men are in fact far more likely to commit violent crimes, equality of outcomes cannot be obtained without inequality of treatment.

Second, data must be routinely collected and competently analyzed to properly address fairness in the criminal justice system. Rather than shutting down or grossly underfunding such efforts, these efforts should be expanded. One famous illustration is the elimination, two decades ago, of research on firearms conducted by the Centers for Disease Control. Recent examples include the decision by Attorney General Sessions to dissolve the National Commission on Forensic Science, which could address such matters as racial bias in the testimony of expert witnesses. President Trump’s FY'18 budget request calls for substantial reductions for the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Third, one must be prepared to accept modest reforms implemented over time that at best improve current practice. The yardstick is not perfection. The yardstick is current practice — can we do better? For example, can improvements be introduced in risk assessments used to inform parole release decisions that would enhance fairness? Finally, any such reforms must be evaluated with proper data and a proper data analysis. Good intentions and anecdotal claims of success will not suffice. D.A.R.E., Boot Camps, and Scared Straight are examples of programs with anecdotal, but not measurable, success. The road to criminal justice reform is littered with interventions that in retrospect did not work.

Richard Berk is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminology and Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business.

OMNIA

FALL/WINTER 2017

Arts and Sciences faculty study how this key resource is changing — from warmer oceans to once-thriving waterways now inhospitable to life — and what that means for the world. BY MICHELE BERGER ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE BRAVE UNION

OMNIA

n late summer 2017, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma barreled down on Texas and Florida, bringing with them unprecedented rain and floodwaters, while monsoons devastated regions across south Asia. Just one year prior, in that same part of the world, in the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan, aquatic insects started disappearing from the streams and rivers that are their natural habitats, and some 10,000 miles to the southwest, São Paolo, Brazil, teetered on the edge of extreme water rationing — two days with, five days without — due to a devastating drought. Closer to home, in Rust Belt cities — Detroit and Toledo, Pittsburgh and Syracuse — town hall meetings and questions to public officials brought tough-to-swallow answers about aging infrastructure and drinking water. And on the banks of the Schuylkill River, a collaboration between college undergrads, artists, and a German professor attempted to view the watery landscape from a new perspective. In the U.S., water has been top of mind since “Flint” became synonymous with unsafe drinking taps three years ago. According to the World Health Organization, it’s been a problem for a much greater swath of people for even longer, and it’s one that will continue to swell as fully half the world’s population is expected to live in water-stressed areas by 2025.

Water has become the universal connector, adds Howard Neukrug, a professor of practice in earth and environmental science. “While we re-build our aging urban water systems, we must work together to ensure an integrative, sustainable, and resilient approach that includes the needs and priorities of our cities and citizens. It is not just about floods and water scarcity; it is equally about environmental justice, social equity, and other critical quality-of-life issues.” These water-related facets will help shape how our planet persists in the coming century — and beyond.

Much of the world’s environmental future hinges on heat and carbon: How much of these we generate, how much the oceans store, and whether these waters become more or less efficient at doing so. Marinov’s classroom is the Southern Ocean, the vast water surrounding the Antarctic continent, which, because of its circulation characteristics, takes up more than half of the human-generated carbon and even more of our heat. Her reading material is the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; her special interest is the “biology embedded in the water.” The photosynthetic activity of phytoplankton is the base of the marine food web; it also results in CO2 uptake from the atmosphere.

Researchers and academics from the Penn Arts and Sciences are throwing their expertise behind everything from climate models in the Southern Ocean to infrastructure in Mumbai, in the hopes of adding to the collective body of knowledge in a way that slows the rush of water-related challenges to more of a trickle. It’s a daunting task. “The minute you get into water and press in any direction, you find a huge amount of complexity around political systems, economic systems, social systems, cultural systems,” says Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology. “You have to be focused on the fundamentally social systems. Otherwise you’re going to miss the point.”

Marinov studies the physics, chemistry, and ecology of the oceans in a climatechanging world. “The importance of what we do is in the future of humanity,” she explains. “We’re sure that New York City and the U.S. will find a way to survive the next 10 years or the next 100 years. But it’s really the long-term state of the world that we’re getting at.”

nderstanding what this means from a climatological perspective falls squarely into the realm of Irina Marinov’s research. An assistant professor of earth and environmental science, Marinov spends her days running complex climate models and poring over oceanographic data produced by satellites.

But even that is putting it simply.

“With climate change, we’re going to have less mixing between the surface and sub-surface waters,” she explains. This means that less oxygen can penetrate in the low-latitude oceans from the atmosphere into the sub-surface ocean, creating oxygen-deprived areas nefarious to fish and other organisms. Additionally, “since most nutrients in the ocean reside in the deep ocean, this will result in fewer nutrients brought to the surface,”

FALL/WINTER 2017

she adds. “Plants photosynthesizing less. Less biological productivity in the low- to mid-latitudes. This is bad because less productivity means less CO2 uptake.” There’s more to the story, however, with scientists seeing an interesting and opposite reaction in high latitudes. As the polar sea ice melts, more light is reaching plankton below the surface— some of which have rarely seen any light, ever. This results in more photosynthesis and greater CO2 uptake. “It’s not clear yet who is going to win the CO2 game,” Marinov says. “Is it the high latitudes or the low latitudes?” To date, we don’t have a great deal of data about those high latitudes, because of their geographic remoteness, extreme weather, and lack of observing platforms. Satellites can generate global maps of phytoplankton particle numbers and

concentration, but penetrate no farther than 100 meters deep and cannot break through clouds. To learn more, a multi-institution project called the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, of which Marinov is a part, is in the process of releasing 200 deep-diving Argo floats equipped with physical, biological, and chemical sensors that will send back data daily. It’s all in the name of measuring our planet’s most mysterious ocean. “We know very little about the Southern Ocean, a region critically important for global climate,” she says. A few minutes later, she returns to this point, then broadens it. “The oceans are all fundamental for climate. They are involved intimately in the global heat and carbon cycles on our planet. Without them, we would be warming much, much faster, and life as we know it would not be possible.”

Much of the world’s environmental future hinges on heat and carbon: How much of these we generate, how much the oceans store, and whether these waters become more or less efficient at doing so.

OMNIA

“Even within a single, relatively integrated urban system, where normally everybody has access, your place in the infrastructure really determines whether or not you end up getting water.” DANIEL ALDANA COHEN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

laces across the globe already feel some water-related changes— and are bracing for more. “There are really two main challenges cities face that have to do with water and climate change,” says Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology. “One is too much water, basically in the form of sea-level rise. The other is water stress.”

land tenure. Until two years ago, a law existed that restricted water access to citizens who did not live in government-recognized housing, forcing them to obtain their water via political connections or social links. The courts recently struck it down, but many who previously struggled haven’t yet reaped the benefits of the new decision.

Cohen focuses more on the latter, specifically in Brazil’s largest city, São Paolo, and in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. Nikhil Anand, an assistant professor of anthropology, and Bryan Currinder, G’17, of the environmental studies program, look at water stress in India, and Bhutan and Bangladesh, respectively. Despite varied backgrounds, all three study water as it pertains to infrastructure, growth, and social issues.

There’s also an interesting political dynamic at play. Anand spent from July 2007 until December 2008 in India, and has returned each year since. While there, he worked with residents, city engineers, and various intermediaries such as city councilors. He concluded that in Mumbai, water infrastructures aren’t centrally controlled top-down; rather, enhanced individual components — plumbers whose familiarity with a neighborhood exceeds what engineers know, for instance — exercise significant control over the water network.

Mumbai is a fascinating example, says Anand, who wrote his book Hydraulic City about the 21-millionperson metropolis. “There is a tendency to see water problems in Mumbai as a problem of lacks. Maybe Mumbai doesn’t have enough money to extend water to all its population. Maybe it doesn’t have enough technical expertise. Maybe it doesn’t have enough water.” In actuality, it has all three, Anand says. Rather, the problem lies in an entirely different missing connector:

“That diffused control was a source of great concern for the city, but it was a source of life for the people who could make claims on plumbers and politicians,” Anand says. “The city works precisely because it runs in ways it’s not supposed to.”

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n São Paolo, a city equal in size to Mumbai, Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology, noticed a variation in the politics of water. Water distribution there tends to go hand in hand with unequal distribution of infrastructure and land access, something put into stark relief by a two-year drought that started in 2014. “It was a huge crisis,” he says. “There was less water available than had ever been the case in the history of the reservoir system.”

The São Paolo government wouldn’t consider rationing water. Instead, it mandated the city reduce pump pressure

at certain times of day to cut overall usage. Valid in theory, this plan didn’t account for discrepancies in distribution of this resource. Wealthier citizens tend to live at lower elevations, in homes with attached water tanks; poorer citizens, whose neighborhoods often sit higher up, do not. A change to water flow left richer folks relatively unaffected, but unintentionally forced those less fortunate to go days without. “Even within a single, relatively integrated urban system, where normally everybody has access, your place in the infrastructure really determines whether or not

you end up getting water,” Cohen says. “Inequality plays a huge role, not just in terms of your wages, but also in terms of where you live, your house, which is a little less fungible. You can go out and work two shifts and still not have water. You live where you live.” São Paolo got lucky. The rains came and the drought subsided. But as of yet, the city hasn’t overhauled its infrastructure; coupled with new challenges compounded by climate change, a similar situation related to water stress will likely arise again — in São Paulo and in other cities around the world.

OMNIA

art of the infrastructure challenge has to do with numbers. The U.N. projects that by 2030, the share of people residing in cities will tick upward in every single region. In just two decades, São Paolo grew 30 percent, hitting 21.3 million people in 2016. In Bangladesh and Bhutan, where Bryan Currinder, G'17, spent the better part of summer 2016, such growth — by more than 50 percent in all of Bhutan, more than 100 percent in some parts of Bangladesh — is already putting pressure on the waterways.

“Land use in both countries is having a heavy effect on the water quality of streams and rivers,” says Currinder, now a freshwater ecologist in California’s Sierra Nevada. “This is the trend the world over, but you need empirical evidence to confirm it.” So Currinder turned to the bugs, namely mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, called EPT insects for their Latin names Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera. “In most streams across the world, if you’re not finding the EPT insects, something has typically gone awry,” he says. “It’s kind of remarkable how you can extrapolate that those three groups should be present in healthy stream and river habitats, almost no matter where you are on the planet.” He and Naimul Islam, LPS’17, an environmental studies classmate, in conjunction with the Stroud Water Research Center, created a two-pronged research project to learn more. Part one was technical: For as many streams and rivers as possible, collect and quantify macro-invertebrates from a single square meter of water, then use that number to calculate total bug density, as well as to note insect diversity. Part two involved community engagement. “The citizen science aspect of the project uses leaf packs,” Currinder says, onion bags filled with leaf litter secured

to stream bottoms. “After three to four weeks, you come back and that leaf pack should have been colonized by a pretty wide diversity of bugs. That’s a low-tech, low-cost technique that can give you a pretty good idea of water quality.”

In the end, the research team developed a baseline for the ecology of freshwater in the region. But importantly, they also gained an understanding of what’s changing these waterways, and in turn, how that affects the people close by.

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n painting a picture of how a body of water touches those who live around and near it, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Bethany Wiggin’s work on the Schuylkill River does something similar to the research of Bryan Currinder, G'17, though it seems farther afield for Wiggin. That is, until you dig into her Penn tenure.

In 2013, Wiggin first taught a class about utopian experiments that incorporated conversations with students about their vision for a sustainable future. Several of those students then completed a year-long independent study with Wiggin that culminated in $10,000 in grants for undergraduates from Facilities and Real Estate Services’ Green Campus Partnership. “The winners of those fellowships,

they had individual research projects, but the way they thought their work overlapped was place-based education,” Wiggin says. The Schuylkill became the great link; the collaboration, the genesis of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH). Now, after a three-year pilot that included symposiums and publicengagement projects and an installation on the river in conjunction with an artist in residence, PPEH has solidified its place at the University, with Wiggin at the helm. A $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation covers four years of future work to enhance environmental humanities at Penn and in the broader Philadelphia region. It all began with some questions about how the Schuylkill has evolved. “It wasn’t just a historian who could explain it. It wasn’t just a river ecologist or a civil engineer. We needed all of those people to shine light on what was happening,” Wiggin says. “It was in that moment that I applied for the Whiting grant.” As a 2016 – 17 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, Wiggin worked with schoolchildren and scientists, academics and community members to understand and better their relationship with the Schuylkill, which today provides water to more than 1.5 million people. Wiggin also used the grant as an impetus for a competition asking for “eco-topian tools” that would make the river cleaner and more habitable. Winners included a giant charcoal filter (in the same vein as the Brita), bio-pod floating habitats, and an illustrated guide to native water plants. “This is such a complex landscape that we need to foster interdisciplinary research,” Wiggin says. “People really understand in this time of these massive challenges … it’s going to take a different type of research community. The engineers alone are not going to be able to fix this.” That’s precisely what Howard Neukrug, Professor of Practice in Earth and Environmental Science, is banking on.

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“We need to better understand lead levels in children over time, routes of exposure from air, soil, dust and water, and then mount a fullﬂedged effort to eradicate the greatest sources.” HOWARD NEUKRUG PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE IN EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

f all the researchers and academics profiled in this piece, Howard Neukrug, Professor of Practice in Earth and Environmental Science, has the most years of serious water experience under his belt. For nearly four decades, he worked in all aspects of the water utility business, most recently as CEO and Commissioner of Philadelphia Water. In his “retirement,” he joined Penn as a professor in earth and environmental science and as a Penn Institute for Urban Research faculty fellow. He teaches two classes, one about the role of water in urban sustainability and resilience, the other about the water industry in the 21st century. Beyond that, Neukrug has two pet projects. The first aims to prevent another Flint in other post-industrial cities with declining populations across the Rust Belt, spots like Detroit and Syracuse and Toledo. “What we’ve found is that the challenges affecting our utilities, communities, and cities are increasingly intersectional,” he says, “and the issues our water systems, environments, and people face are often intertwined.”

He notes as an example concern over lead pipes and exposure in children. “The solution is much more holistic than just digging up old pipes,” he explains. “We need to better understand lead levels in children over time, routes of exposure from air, soil, dust, and water, and then mount a full-fledged effort to eradicate the greatest sources.” This will require funding from a multitude of places, including government entities like Housing and Urban Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the water utilities, and the paint industry. It’s all part of establishing a sound water-management system for our cities, inclusive of sustainable improvements in areas like road infrastructure, education, jobs, and public safety. “Flint is a reminder of the absolute critical need for this, irrespective of cost,” Neukrug says. “With water, we thrive. Without it, we will surely perish.”

That’s when Neukrug brings up his second project: creating a water center at the University of Pennsylvania. If Neukrug had his druthers, this center would make Penn the go-to hub on the eastern seaboard for all things water-related, a think tank focused on issues of global relevance that helps prioritize practical applications of technologies and other instruments in this realm. He doesn’t picture an actual physical center but more an intellectual meeting of the minds, inclusive of all schools at Penn. “I see the water center as a way to take a diverse set of thought leaders and experts from all corners of the water practice and academia and give them a chance to talk, network, compare notes — and perhaps move us all a little closer to implementing the innovations that the world wants and deserves.” The seeds of such a center have already started to germinate. Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Nikhil Anand, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, are working together on one of the Penn Arts and Sciences Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants, exploring the future of rivers and coastal cities through the lens of Philadelphia and Mumbai. Unquestionably, Penn’s research community is ripe for many more such partnerships—and they’ll be necessary to solve the water problems that climate change will inevitably bring, says Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology. “Water is just not getting as much attention as it should. We know that water will become increasingly scarce in big cities for the foreseeable future. So the question is, how is it going to be shared?” Right now this all simmers under the surface, but soon it will come to a boil. And Penn researchers, on their own and together, will continue the trek to answer unanswered local, national and global questions about water.

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hen Hurricane Harvey dropped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston, the country’s fourth largest city, in August 2017, the metropolis and its surrounds went under water. By some accounts, more than 25 percent of the encompassing county flooded. In that same month in parts of South Asia, torrential monsoon rains caused flooding and landslides that affected tens of millions of people. Similar scenarios play out across the U.S. and the world, but now such events— previously forecasted to happen once in a lifetime—come every few years. This type of deluge puts a new strain on urban centers, forcing them to rethink waterrelated disaster preparedness and infrastructure plans.

“Many cities were originally built close to good-quality drinking water supplies and near access to safe harbors for commerce and trade,” says Howard Neukrug, a professor of practice in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science. “With that proximity to large bodies of water, you may also encounter extreme storm events like what we’ve seen in Houston.” Or what transpired with Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012 or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Also in 2005, the monsoon in Mumbai brought 37 inches of rain on a single July day. Though every place has its idiosyncrasies, certain similarities—in Mumbai and Houston, for instance, the paving-over of

absorbent terrain in favor of asphalt—play a part in the challenges that accompany excess water. “Your highways become rivers instead,” says Nikhil Anand, an assistant professor of anthropology. “We need to look at what we can do after the flood, as planners, as architects, as infrastructure specialists.” To Neukrug, that means preparing for the unpredictable, making water systems as resilient as possible by building in redundancies. For example, Philadelphia, where he ran the water utility before joining Penn’s faculty, has three drinking water treatment plants. Should something catastrophic happen to one, two others provide full backup. Neukrug also mentions diversifying the water utility’s energy sources, including generating its own electricity, to keep the water pumps running no matter what. “By decreasing the imperviousness of the city’s surfaces and increasing the sponge-like qualities of the grounds surfaces through green storm water infrastructure techniques, you can mitigate, if not eliminate, certain problems,” he says. All that being said, even the best-prepared cities can only do so much. “When a Hurricane Harvey or a Hurricane Sandy hits, you go back to the basics to do your best to respond to events as they occur,” Neukrug says. “History has taught us, however, that nature always wins.”

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ANSWERING THE CALL PAUL SNIEGOWSKI, the newly appointed Stephen A.

Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, riffs on research, teaching, and the liberal arts. He will work closely with Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, on planning and priorities for undergraduate education. BY BLAKE COLE

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Brooke Sietinsons

Paul Sniegowski, Professor of Biology and the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

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HIS PAST JULY,

Paul Sniegowski, a professor of biology, was appointed the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. As Dean of the College, Sniegowski will oversee undergraduate curricula as well as programs and students in all departments and nondepartmental programs in Penn Arts and Sciences. He will also work with Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, on planning and priorities for undergraduate education. Sniegowski is a recipient of the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching in the College and has twice received the Department of Biology’s annual award for teaching excellence. Beyond the classroom and lab, he has maintained a strong commitment to undergraduate matters that includes several years of service as chair of the College’s Committee on Undergraduate Education. In addition, Sniegowski served on the Faculty Senate Committee on Students and Educational Policy, the faculty advisory boards of the College of Liberal and Professional Studies and the Center for Teaching and Learning, and chaired the Penn Arts and Sciences Teaching Awards Committee. Sniegowski’s research on population and evolutionary genetics has been widely published in top journals. We spoke with Sniegowski about his research career, his deeply-held beliefs on being an educator, and his views on the state of the liberal arts.

Q: What initially led you to your field of study? My undergraduate background is actually in music. After high school, I went to the Indiana University School of Music and got a degree in violin performance. Around the end of my time in music school, I realized that I'd always been interested in biology and if I ever wanted to follow that interest I’d better give it a try. So I started taking basic science and math courses, first while pursuing my music degree and later while working as a freelance musician and music teacher. I wound up going to graduate school at Indiana University in biology. There, I was a field biologist and studied the migration of a bird called the indigo bunting. I got more and more interested in evolution while I was doing this field biology. I pulled up stakes and went to the University of Chicago and that's where I got my Ph.D. in population genetics.

Q: One of your key research interests is mutation. Can you talk about this phenomenon? Genetic mutations are actually caused by a number of different phenomena, but for quite a few of them it makes sense to think of them as copying mistakes. There's a molecular apparatus that copies the genome, like a scribe, and once in a while this apparatus makes “typos,” if you will.

My collaborators and I study mutation rates and their evolutionary implications primarily out of sheer curiosity, but understanding the nature of mutation rates also connects directly to an understanding of why large multi-celled organisms like ourselves develop diseases like cancer. Mutations can take away the controls that regulate cell division and then you get a rogue population of cells in the body that divides faster than it should, doesn't play by the rules, takes up more resources, and sends out colonists — in other words, cancer.

Q: You’ve been involved in educational activism, such as an open letter regarding the landmark 2005 court case Kitzmiller v. Dover concerning the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public high school classrooms. Can you discuss your role? I have to give a lot of the credit for that letter to Penn Professor and Chair of Philosophy Michael Weisberg. Michael suggested that we get involved at the periphery, so we wrote an open letter from Penn to the Dover, Pennsylvania school board. The letter was signed by almost all of the natural sciences faculty in Penn Arts and Sciences. Our letter pointed out that the intelligent design creationism that the Dover school board was instructing its teachers to present

"We’re all mutants … it's likely that every newborn carries not just one new mutation compared to its parents, but tens of them." We’re all mutants. The human mutation rate is sufficiently high that it's likely that every newborn carries not just one new mutation compared to its parents, but tens of them. Many mutations make no difference to our well-being; among the ones that do make a difference, most are harmful and a few are beneficial. None of them gives us super powers, unfortunately!

as an alternative to evolution was unscientific and would put Dover High School students at an educational disadvantage. The Dover teachers themselves knew this and had written their own strongly worded letter refusing to present intelligent design.

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I don’t think that our Penn letter had an influence on the outcome of the Dover case (which was that the school board’s policy was overturned because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), but it did get the attention of the school board’s lawyers, who sent Michael Weisberg and me a rather nasty letter that I still have. Michael and I subsequently also did a Penn Science Café presentation on creationism and evolution together.

"If you think about the University of Pennsylvania as an organism, I believe the College of Arts and Sciences is its beating heart."

In discussing and teaching evolution with students and acquaintances, I try always to maintain a patient, non-confrontational attitude. I firmly believe that progress is most likely to come through calm, reasoned dialogue.

Q: What draws you to undergraduate teaching? I come from a family of teachers. My father is a retired English professor, and both my sister and brother teach high school English. Teaching has always been central to dinner table conversations where we would all get together; it is something that should be done responsibly and with your whole heart. To be honest, I can’t remember a time when I was not aware of the vital importance of teaching as a calling and the central role of teaching in human society.

Q: You’ve had a seat on faculty advisory boards, and you’ve won prestigious teaching awards. What have these experiences taught you about the culture of the University? Teaching is greatly valued here. At the same time, Penn is a high-powered research institution where significant original work is rightly valued. This puts a lot of pressure on our young faculty. One of the ways we try to help with this is by having tenured faculty members serve as mentors for young faculty to help them understand how to balance the demands of teaching and research and find complementarity between them. For example, I think many faculty will tell you that a good day in the classroom can really encourage them in their other efforts here. Teaching can be inspiring, both to the student and the teacher. The fun of being on teaching award committees has been to see, firsthand, that balance and complementarity between teaching and research are achievable. It's a little analogous to when I went to music school and saw the top end of musical ability; I had no idea people could be that good! We see that on campus too, with the best of our teachers and researchers.

Q: Can you discuss some of the key challenges the liberal arts face today? I think many of the challenges are perceived rather than real. There have been a number of surveys of chief executive officers who say that the very skills that are taught in a liberal arts degree are what they look for in hiring people: critical thinking, flexibility, adaptability, the ability to see different perspectives. The liberal arts are what, in the deepest sense, make us human. They are what we developed along the path in time from our common evolutionary ancestor with apes to today’s human societies and cultures; they are our collective future as well. At our best as humans, we strive to understand each other: That's what the liberal arts are about.

Q: How might you tackle misperceptions about the liberal arts? The need in society for flexible minds and critical thinking skills has never been more evident. These things are exactly what the liberal arts teach, and I think those of us who advocate for the liberal arts could perhaps point this out even more forcefully. But at a broader level, we also have to emphasize the central and inspiring role of arts and sciences in humanity’s ongoing quest to understand ourselves, our world, and our universe.

Q: How do you anticipate spending your first year as dean? I can't see how I can serve as the College dean without also keeping my hand in teaching, so I plan to continue some teaching as long I am dean, beginning this year. Then there is the larger role: The College dean is in some sense the standard bearer for the undergraduate liberal arts here at Penn. I see the College as a wonderful, nurturing liberal arts college embedded within a great research university. To use a biological analogy: If you think about the University of Pennsylvania as an organism, I believe the College of Arts and Sciences is its beating heart. Our distinction from the great small liberal arts colleges around this country is the direct access to research opportunities that we offer our students. And so I want to continue to explore ways of making that access easier even than it already is.

Q: What unique opportunities does a liberal arts education provide? I think where the liberal arts education goes from being fulfilling to being transformative and inspiring is when students get to the point in their education where they say, "Wow, what’s further on from here is not in books, it's not in journals, it's not on the Internet — it’s not even known. How do I go there?" This is where our faculty — who are themselves world-class researchers — can help point the way by guiding students into research. I know from my own life as a teacher and a student that such research experience gives students a tremendous new respect for how precious human knowledge and culture really are. And so I really want us to find ways to take even more students, from all backgrounds, to the edge of what is known, and beyond, and encourage them to make new knowledge and create new art from a multiplicity of perspectives. This is how the liberal arts enrich life for all of us.

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FALL/WINTER 2017

INNER EXPLORER INVESTIGATING THE BRAIN'S INNATE

ABILITY TO MAP OUR SURROUNDINGS.

By Abigail Meisel Illustrations by Sam Chivers

ou step out of a coffee shop and scan the street, looking at buildings, parked cars, people walking down the sidewalk. You notice some trees and the angle of the sun. If you’re familiar with the area, you confidentially turn toward your next destination without giving your surroundings much thought. If you’re not, you might consider each of these visuals as you decide: right or left? No matter the scenario, your brain is calling on multiple tools to build a mental map of your space and point you in the right direction.

It’s the type of scenario Russell Epstein, a psychology professor, analyzes in order to map out the brain's navigation system. “The mind is like a Swiss Army knife with different tools to solve different problems as they come up,” he says, and he wants to figure out how those tools work together to recognize places and make cognitive maps of the world that surrounds them. To this end, Epstein and his research partners study the neural differences between recognition and orientation, perceptions of static and dynamic images, and the development of spatial recognition over time. His lab tracks brain activity when people look at pictures of landscapes, city streets, buildings, or rooms, as well as pictures of faces or objects. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), he found that a specific region, called the parahippocampal place area (PPA), plays a key role in processing information about the spatial structure of visual scenes. The PPA was particularly active when

people viewed the images of streets and landscapes, but less so when looking at faces. This specialized response suggests that the PPA functions to help people orient themselves in space, and that ability is different than the ability to identify something or someone. “Most people think that locating themselves spatially is a single thought process, but the cognitive logistics are more complex than that,” says Epstein. In order to navigate successfully your mind must work out two problems simultaneously: knowing your current location and understanding which direction you are facing. Additional evidence for the complexity of spatial orientation versus recognition comes from studying the neural activity of mice. Epstein collaborated with Isabel Muzzio, a professor at The University of Texas, San Antonio, and Penn Arts and Sciences graduate students Josh Julian, GR’22 and Alex Keinath, GR’22, to understand how mice figure out where to go when they are disoriented. In their experiment, mice were placed in an enclosure with two rectangular rooms, each with unique wallpaper on one of the four walls. Researchers trained the mice on where in the enclosure food was located. When the mice were placed in the enclosure, they had to solve two problems in order to find the food. First, which chamber were they in? Second, what wall were they facing?

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“THERE IS GROWING SUPPORT FOR THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE MAP THE SOCIAL AND CONCEPTUAL WORLDS USING THE SAME MECHANISMS THAT THEY USE TO MAP THE PHYSICAL WORLD. THIS SUGGESTS THAT THE IDEA OF SPACE MIGHT LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR MUCH OF HUMAN THOUGHT.” RUSSELL EPSTEIN

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY The team observed the activity the brain structure called the hippocampus to determine that the mice used the wallpaper to figure out which chamber they were in, but they ignored it when figuring out which way they were facing. To solve the directional problem, they only paid attention to the shape of the room. Recently, Epstein’s research has expanded to include mapping brain activity when viewing static and dynamic images. He is working with John Trueswell, a psychology professor who focuses on language and thought, and graduate student Alon Hafri, GR’23, on an experiment that looks at which areas of the brain are stimulated when people view actions and whether the neural codes changed depending on visual input.

Putting his work in the larger context of current neuroscience research, Epstein says that scientists are now speculating that the orientation to space and the mapping of the physical world form a sort of brain template for more abstract concepts. The tools we use to navigate real space may be used to navigate conceptual spaces. “People gauge if they are higher or lower on a social hierarchy,” Epstein says. “They judge how ‘close’ two people are. These might be more than just metaphors. There is growing support for the idea that people map the social and conceptual worlds using the same mechanisms that they use to map the physical world. This suggests that the idea of space might lay the groundwork for much of human thought.” Courtesy of University Communications

Their experiment involved two sets of stimuli. The first set consists of dynamic videos of two actors in identical indoor settings. The actors complete various actions in these identical settings. The second set of stimuli, made up of static images, offers great variety in terms of setting and point of view. In these images, the same actors are posed in a way that suggests an action—an outreached arm, say, or a raised leg—but the images are static.

brain regions are encoding the visual input similarly to when you see the whole action from beginning to end, as in a video. That suggests the encoding we are observing is at a very high level.”

Epstein and his collaborators designed this experiment to learn more about how the brain processes movement in space. Study participants, a group of college-age adults, viewed the stimuli in an MRI machine while the researchers examined brain activity. They determined that in certain regions of the brain, activity exhibits similar patterns when viewing dynamic and static depictions of the same action. So, a video of a person taking a bite of food results in similar neural coding as a still image that suggests taking a bite. “The brain representations we observed,” Hafri says, “are surprisingly consistent no matter how different biting looks in the world. Even when you don’t see the whole action take place, like when you view a static image, these

Russell Epstein, Professor of Psychology

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SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE: THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT sychologists can rate spatial intelligence in an assessment called judgment of relative direction (JRD). In a practical application of special cognitive theory, Professor of Psychology Russell Epstein’s lab developed an iPhone app called iJRD, which allows people across the world to virtually navigate their way through their home cities and test their senses of direction as they go.

The project was spearheaded in winter 2016 by Joshua Julian, a doctoral candidate in psychology, with the research assistance of Peter Bryan, C’16,

“We wanted to take our research out of the lab and into the real world,” says Bryan. Users enter their location and choose from a list of familiar landmarks. For example, a Philadelphian might choose the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall. Users imagine standing in front of one landmark while virtually indicating the direction of other locations. User can learn about their spatial abilities and compare them to those of other who have downloaded the app.

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the

Medieval New technology illuminates age-old manuscripts.

By Louisa Shepard

Photography by Alex Schein

Opposite page: (Top) Emily Steiner, Professor of English, finds content for her scholarly tweets through research, often in medieval texts found in Penn Libraries’ rare books and manuscripts collections. (Bottom) The illuminated blue image of the “zones of the earth” in a 13th-century French manuscript in the Penn Libraries is one of many Steiner has tweeted to share depictions of science in the Middle Ages.

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OMNIA “Let’s go stag!”

Illustrated in 15th-century Italy, the knight in this Penn Libraries manuscript is a chess piece. The text compares the governance of society to a game of chess, very popular in the Middle Ages.

Breviary of Renaud de Bar, Metz ca. 1302 – 1305. Verdun, BM ms. 107

145

Aug 1

Mine are: 1. Brownies 2. Obsolete land-line numbers 3. Cat’s cradle moves 4. Corny rhymes 5. Brownies

CUL MS Nn.3.2, Douze dames de rhétorique (15thc, Bruges) #medievaltwitter @cambridgelib

5 loci of the brain. What are yours?

This medieval woman is going to get the job done!

Aug 2

Emily Steiner, Professor of English, makes the medieval modern on Twitter. 15

121

Aug 2

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t began with a line from a medieval encyclopedia. Fewer than 140 characters typed into Twitter, it was an academic exercise to grapple with an overwhelmingly dense tome. Emily Steiner, a professor of English, was deeply skeptical of the social media site. But late that night nearly three years ago as she struggled with research for a book, her husband, also a professor, suggested she tweet out a few quotes from the manuscript and review them in the morning, saying he suspected there was a scholarly audience on Twitter that might support her in her research and writing. “I thought Twitter was the last thing I could ever be interested in,” recalls Steiner, a recognized expert in medieval studies. But she gave it a try. On October 30, 2014, @PiersatPenn tweeted out a line in Middle English: “The little finger is called ‘auriculus’ or ‘ere fyngir’: ‘for with hym we clawen and piken the eres.’ #trevisaquotes” (The pinky is called the “ear finger” because “we claw and pick the ears with it.”) It seemed to her incongruous to quote such an ancient text on such a modern platform. Who else in the Twittersphere would be interested in work by John Trevisa, an English translator of Latin encyclopedias and a late 14th-century contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer?

Turns out, lots of people, around the world. First a retired soldier-turned-priest living on a boat in Michigan who said he loved the Trevisa sentences. And a sheep herder outside of York, England. A knitter in California. “They were my tiny audience for Trevisa. They would say “These lovely sentences get to me,’ Steiner remembers. “And I thought to myself, ‘what is it about this prose that Twitter captures so effectively? And then I realized it’s the syntax and cadence of the English prose that is so beautiful, and it resonates with us because it sounds so modern. This medieval encyclopedia is actually the precursor to modern literary prose.” It took Twitter to make her slow down, she says, and see that Trevisa’s prose was rhymed, and sometimes alliterated, with a distinct and moving rhythm. “Until Twitter, I totally didn’t see it,” she says. “That was a major breakthrough in my research.” From a late-night lark to what has become an integral part of her academic life, Twitter is a collaborative international forum where Steiner has discovered a unique voice to share her love of, and expertise in, all things medieval.

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Picturing the Middle Ages The first TED talk received mixed reviews. [Noah and the Ark] BnF, Fr. 50 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale) #TED #medievaltwitter

Steiner began to look at Twitter as a way to reach a larger audience. “I want people to love and understand the Middle Ages,” she says. “I wanted more public teaching, more conversations.” As she added images, she got more followers. “Every time I put up a quotation I started to look for a medieval manuscript image to complement it. The project became much more about word and image. People are really invested in the visual.” The images Steiner posts are deeply colorful and intricately drawn, often depicting scenes that tell a story. Some are from archives recently digitized, others from manuscripts deep in remote libraries. Each tweet is based in research and scholarship. “I try to post images I think a lot of people haven’t seen or are unaware of,” she says. Steiner often makes comments, usually just a few well-chosen words or phrases, that reference popular culture. “One thing Emily does really wonderfully is that she is able to take an image and communicate it with a pithy saying, connecting an abstract medieval image to the contemporary world,” says Mitch Fraas (@MitchFraas), curator at Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Jul 22

“There is a lot of knowledge being exchanged in a collaborative, international forum. From a scholarly perspective, it is just a tremendously rich community.” Emily Steiner

Medieval Uber

Professor of English

Trinity College, Cambridge B.11.22 (Book of Hours) #FridayFeeling

For example, a detailed drawing of two aristocratic women, one handing a soldier a severed head dripping bright red blood: “Sometimes you find the perfect gift.” Noah addressing a group of townspeople, ark in view: “The first TED talk received mixed reviews.” A dog-like creature staring at a deer with large antlers: “Nice rack.” A family in a cart, being pulled by a fantastical creature: “Medieval Uber.” “What’s unique about Emily’s Twitter account is that it is both learned and hilarious,” says Paul Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (@cobbpasha), adding that Twitter is the perfect place for “serious fun.” “That’s why Emily’s Twitter account is so successful. She has a great Twitter personality.”

Aug 4

Now, Steiner’s Twitter account has about 9,000 followers. She has posted more than 7,000 tweets in the past three years, often several a day. “I feel like this is this whole other part of my life,” she says. “It’s almost like a parallel universe.”

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Medieval writers often used the ancient symbol of the ouroboros, a dragon biting its own tail, as a symbol of the roundness of the Earth. This 13th-century French manuscript in the Penn Libraries, Treatise on the Spheres, was written and illustrated by Joannes de Sacro Bosco.

Curious

Collaborations Her Twitter universe is collaborative, diverse, and international. Half of her followers are in the U.K. More than three-quarters are college educated, and they are equal parts men and women. Her tweets appeal to several distinct sectors. The animal lovers are passionate about any image with a creature. The knitters and calligraphers are drawn to the decorative borders and patterns. The Dungeons and Dragons crowd goes for anything with a knight or dragon. Many followers revel in the rich religious imagery. Other audiences include lovers of classical mythology, transgender advocates, and insomniacs. “I follow my research and put out what is interesting to me,” Steiner says. “I always try to educate. If I post something that’s funny I always try to make sure that the attribution is right. Indirectly I’m also

trying to teach my followers something they didn’t know about the Middle Ages and its relationship to contemporary life.” While Steiner generally avoids talking about politics on Twitter, she sometimes uses tweets to comment on issues of importance to her. “Sometimes I want to talk about what is going on now. Medieval images help me to talk about those things,” she says. For example, she is passionate about the education of girls around the world. In an April tweet she posted a series of images showing Saint Anne educating her young daughter, Mary, taking her to school, book in hand, with the comment “Virgin Mary: reading, writing, loved. #girlscount #daughters #medievaltwitter.” Many scholars — other lovers of the Middle Ages — from around the world follow Steiner’s Twitter account. She is thinking of them when she makes a find she suspects few have seen.

In what she believes is one of the first Middle Ages depictions of a sunrise, found in a 15th-century French encyclopedia, gold stars shine on a lightening blue sky, yellow on the horizon behind two hills. “Medievalists went crazy for that,” she says, noting 330 likes and 111 retweets. “There are very few pictures of the dawn, just like there are not many pictures of rain.” According to Steiner, sharing information is very important in the world of online scholars. “The medievalists on Twitter are very active, in archives, taking pictures, asking people to help them solve problems, sharing tidbits,” Steiner says. “There is a lot of knowledge being exchanged in a collaborative, international forum. From a scholarly perspective, it is just a tremendously rich community.”

OMNIA

“Marginalia” is ripe for hybrid creatures and grotesques, which are shorthand for communicating the “lighthearted and earthy, even rebellious” aspects of the Middle Ages. E mily Steiner

Professor of English

In this little Penn Libraries manuscript of Latin prayers from 15th-century Italy is a Guidonian Hand, a medieval “cheat sheet” for teaching sight-singing.

Unique Voice Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (@JeffreyJCohen), Professor of English and Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at George Washington University, says Steiner is a key contributor to the medievalist world on Twitter. “Emily has an excellent eye and is great at combing archives and sharing such vivid images. She understands why these images speak to us today, and how they engage people,” Cohen says. Consistently the posts are beautiful and optimistic, he says, even though many medieval images can be disturbing or even offensive. “I like the positivity of what Emily disseminates as representation of the Middle Ages. I think it helps to challenge some of the myths about the period,” Cohen says. “Emily’s Twitter feed is so affirming.

It makes me laugh and opens my eyes to what I like best about the study of the Middle Ages.” He mentions her tweet of a 1425 illustration of a green globe suspended in blue, from the Vatican Library, with the comment “Lonely Planet.” “Emily reminded us that there was actually a medieval desire to see the round Earth as if suspended in space.” Scientific illustrations are some of Steiner’s favorites to post, using the #sciart hashtag. “What I look for are stylized pictures of the natural world,” she says, including depictions of the earth, the sun, the moon, the constellations, the zodiac, the creation of the planet, and recently, the solar eclipse. For example, two illustrations of the earth by Johannes de Sacro Bosco in 1275, one created with thick lines of pink and blue paint, another drawn as a pink flower surrounded by rings, were tweeted with the comment: “Radically simplified worlds.”

She found those images in the Penn Libraries’ Schoenberg Center for Manuscript Studies. The Center and its online catalog of digitized, high-resolution images is a key source of inspiration for her posts. Fraas of the Penn Libraries says he especially likes the illustrations Steiner finds in the margins of medieval texts. “A sheep in the margins of a manuscript, and the comment is inflected by her own interests and sense of humor,” he says. The “marginalia” is ripe for hybrid creatures and grotesques, which are shorthand for communicating the “lighthearted and earthy, even rebellious” aspects of the Middle Ages, Steiner says. “Medieval humor at its best when it shows vulnerable creatures taking control,” she notes. Rabbits hunting dogs, horse riding people, wolves in sheep’s clothing: all of these images reflect the medieval interest in portraying the social world inverted and turned upside down.

FALL/WINTER 2017

The drawings in margins are some of her favorites to tweet. “Bottom feeders,” with two fish doodled at the bottom of a manuscript from the 1320s: “Snail's pace #amwriting” with a 13th-century, delicately drawn snail in red and blue. “Sometimes collaboration makes sense,” with a rabbit playing an organ and a dog working the bellows in a psalter from the 1330s.

Crying wolf Cambrai BM MS 103

Twitter as Academic Toolbox The quotes and images that fill her Twitter archive come from a myriad of sources. She finds them in the original manuscripts in libraries. Or she pulls them from newly digitized archives, including the Vatican, the Getty, and the Schoenberg collection at Penn. Some treasures she finds in minutes, but others take her a long while, especially if she is looking for something specific.

May 28

As a professor of English, Steiner is also interested in etymologies, and will post word origins, illustrations of libraries and studies, book bindings. One day she used the term “footloose and fancy free” and wondered.

Raymond deeply regretted that last pint of ale. Pontifical of Renaud de Bar (France, c.1303 – 1316) #medievaltwitter

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“It can take a certain amount of patience,” she says, noting that the online archives can be challenging to use effectively. “There are big treasure troves of manuscripts, and if you can learn how to navigate the sites you can find things people haven’t looked at before.”

She researched “footloose,” and along with an illustration of men in a sailboat, she tweeted: “The “foot” is the bottom of a sail: a sail that is footloose is free to move whichever way the wind blows.” Footloose has been one of her most popular tweets, with more than 800 likes and 350 retweets. “Merriam-Webster retweeted that one,” she remembers.

Aug 1

The archive she has created on Twitter has become a rich resource for her teaching. A Medieval English Drama course Steiner taught incorporated biblical plays that included the tradition of Mary as a prodigy, which she says the students found surprising. “Thanks to the images I collected for my Twitter posts, I was able to give them a mini-lecture on Mary’s education,” she says. Steiner has been a professor at Penn for 18 years. She earned her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University, and her undergraduate degree from Brown University. Her latest book, the one she was researching when she started tweeting the Trevisa quotes, is nearly complete: An Information Age: Literature and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Medieval England.

A fish out of water. Book of Hours, CUL MS Dd.4.17 (East Anglia, c.1325)

Going forward, Steiner is archiving her Twitter postings to make them a manageable tool, easily searchable. Twitter has become part of the fabric of her academic research, which she says relies on instinct, accident, and collaboration, all critical characteristics of this modern medium. “I feel that Twitter is a different incarnation, but also an extension of my approach to research. That’s why I think this works well for me.”

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OMNIA

Arts Sciences in Action New grant initiatives have Penn Arts and Sciences faculty and students engaging with each other and the rest of the world. — By — SUSAN AHLBORN, MICHELE BERGER, AND LOUISA SHEPARD

FALL/WINTER 2017

onceived by Ben Franklin to teach all things useful and ornamental, Penn Arts and Sciences celebrates learning for its own sake — and then puts it into action. Now, two initiatives launched by Steven Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, are supporting that action in places ranging from West Philly to Kenya, India, and the Galápagos Islands. “Different fields look at the world in different ways, and the methods and perspectives of many specialties are needed to address the complex challenges the world faces,” says Fluharty. “We’ve created funding for projects that engage our faculty and energize collaboration between disciplines to take on some big issues.” This spring, the School awarded four Global Inquires grants to encourage the collective investigation of global topics in areas from child poverty to race, science, and society. Five Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants are supporting teams of faculty and students in initiatives that combine coursework, research, and service. The projects are underway. Faculty and students are conducting research, holding conferences, and collaborating with community members. We checked in on four projects to report on the progress already made.

OMNIA

Stewarding

The island of San Cristóbal, Galápagos, is home to about 8,000 people. But it’s also home to many of the planet’s remaining endangered Galápagos sea lions. As the island's population has grown, the influx of humans has forced the sea lions into smaller and smaller areas. They have taken to chasing children off beaches and sleeping on fishing boats. The people, in turn, are using controversial methods to disperse the animals. It’s a new tension between two groups normally not at odds.

Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and colleagues have set a plan in motion that involves local Galapagueño guides and high school students, Penn undergraduates, and Penn graduate students. This summer, the Laboratorio Para Apreciar La Vida y El Ambiente (LAVA), supported by Making a Difference in Diverse Communities, took faculty and students to San Cristóbal. There they established a community science initiative where local students researched human-induced changes to the behavior and social structure of the sea lions. In the project's next phase, the Penn team will work with the high schoolers to promote ecological literacy and empower local residents to be educators and stewards of the islands — improving the relations between Galapagueños and these urban sea lions. “We wanted to develop a project at the intersection of education, science,

GalaPagos

(Clockwise from top) Galapagueño high school student Karla Villagómez; a sleepy sea lion; Penn students with local high school students. Photos courtesy of Michael Weisberg.

and conservation, and the idea of studying urban sea lions came from the San Cristóbal community. We hope our work challenges the unfortunate local idea that conservation and science are just for outsiders,” Weisberg says. “Science and conservation can benefit everyone,

and the Galapagueño high school students are already changing perceptions in their community.” Co-director of the LAVA project is Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in Psychology. Erol Akçay and Tim Linksvayer, both assistant

professors of biology, and Karen M’Closkey, an associate professor of landscape architecture in PennDesign also assist this project and are developing several additional Galápagos initiatives supported by Making a Difference.

To view field reports written by Galapagueño students, Penn students, and Penn faculty, visit: WEB.SAS.UPENN.EDU/GALAPAGOS

FALL/WINTER 2017

Neuroscience

“A little bit of stress is inevitable and probably healthy, but unrelenting severe stress, which is common in poor families, is neurotoxic.” MARTHA FARAH WALTER H. ANNENBERG PROFESSOR IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

To read more about Martha Farah and her research, visit: OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/STORY/NEURO-PATHWAY

Poverty

For a child growing up in poverty, making a better life is not just a matter of working hard. Studies by Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Department of Psychology, have documented that poverty affects not only a child’s day-to-day life but the development of his or her body and mind. Children raised in poverty are less likely to develop strong learning and memory abilities, and research by Kim Noble, C’98, GR’05, M’07, a former graduate student of Farah’s, has shown that these effects are independent of race and ethnicity. The biggest differences are between the poor and the very poor.

“A little bit of stress is inevitable and probably healthy, but unrelenting severe stress, which is common in poor families, is neurotoxic,” says Farah, the founder of Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Center for Neuroscience and Society. Farah is leading The Global Problem of Child Poverty: Can Neuroscience Help?, one of the Dean’s Global Inquiries programs. She and her colleagues are trying to answer two major questions: Can the results of research already done be generalized beyond high-income countries like the U.S. to low- and middle-income countries, and how can the scientific knowledge be applied to policy?

The group has already held a one-day workshop on neuroscience and policy that created a forum for people across Penn to share ideas and approaches and developed relationships among students and faculty. A larger conference next year will include leading neuroscientists and global policy experts and have public sessions. Collaborators include Sebastian Lipina, a poverty researcher who heads a laboratory in Argentina’s national center for science and technology and spent the summer at Penn; Jere Behrman, Williams R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics and Sociology; Petra Todd, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics; Allyson Mackey, Assistant Professor of Psychology; and Sharon Wolf, Assistant Professor of Education.

OMNIA

Getting Lead Out Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that targets young children and adversely impacts their developing brains. Over time, exposure to even minimal amounts impairs cognitive development and may cause lifelong behavioral and social impacts. With a Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant, a team led by Reto Gieré and Richard Pepino of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science is trying to develop solutions that can work in every community. The Reducing Lead Exposure: Testing a Nationally Replicable University-Municipal-Community Partnership program is being piloted in Philadelphia and 80 miles west, in Lancaster, Pa. Student groups have begun working in both communities to test the amounts of lead in soil and map the results. More importantly, they are forming partnerships with schools and community groups to test homes, share information, and teach about environmental justice. Penn is also working with the Philadelphia Water Department to turn city water main replacement into a chance to urge residents to update their individual lead pipes for free. “An important component of environmental research is that we go out to the communities and tell them about our results, good or bad,” says

Courtesy of Tabeen Hosain

Lead in the water in Flint. Lead in the soil in Philadelphia. Lead and its impact on health have been in the news across the U.S.

Tabeen Hosain, C’17, (R) works with community members in West Philadelphia to test soil using an XRF analyzer.

Gieré. “I think it's especially important to reach out to the young people via the schools. Because the kids act as multipliers. They bring it home.” Besides Gieré, Professor and Chair of Earth and Environmental Science, and Pepino, Deputy Director of the Community Outreach and Engagement Core of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the Perelman School of Medicine, the project’s faculty leaders include Trevor Penning, Molinoff Professor of Pharmacology and Biochemistry and Biophysics in the Perelman School of Medicine; Ira Harkavy, Director, Netter Center for Community Partnerships; Marilyn Howarth, an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine and pharmacology in Perelman; and Howard Neukrug, Practice Professor of Earth and Environmental Science.

“An important component of environmental research is that we go out to the communities and tell them about our results, good or bad. I think it's especially important to reach out to the young people via the schools. Because the kids act as multipliers. They bring it home.” RETO GIERÉ PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

To hear a podcast on this project, visit: OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/STORY/ OMNIA-PODCAST-REDUCING-LEAD-EXPOSURE-AUDIO

FALL/WINTER 2017

Rewriting

ScriPt

Peter Decherney, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and English, with his students.

(L–R) Laurel Jaffe, C’20, FilmAid alumnus Okello Sejo, and Michael Schwartz, C’18 confer over a shot in the Kalobeyei firewood distribution center.

More than 150,000 North African refugees and asylum-seekers live in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp and the adjacent Kalobeyei Settlement. The majority of them have arrived since 2013, fleeing the ongoing civil war in South Sudan. This summer, Penn students journeyed to Kenya to make documentary films with residents of the camp and settlement, supported by a Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant. The Penn-inKenya summer abroad course was created and led by Peter Decherney, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and English, in partnership with FilmAid International, a nonprofit that works to use the power of media to inform, educate, and empower refugees around the world. The students prepared with a “boot camp” at Penn, hearing from experts on African history, politics, and the refugee crisis, and even learning some Swahili. Upon arrival in Kenya, they met their collaborators: youngadult students in the refugee camp who had had completed FilmAid training on film production.

The Penn students taught workshops in screenwriting, social media, sound, music composition, and virtual reality filming. They then teamed up in pairs with the student refugees and FilmAid staff to make six short documentaries. The films will provide information for new arrivals to the Kalobeyei Settlement on education, food distribution, health, water and sanitation, security, and protection.

A view of the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement from the top of a water tower.

“There was a partnership while filming the documentaries,” Decherney says. “I was happy that we had a real purpose and that we were creating something that was going to be used by thousands of people very soon.” Now back on campus, the Penn students are putting together an exhibit at the Perry World House on November 7. The project’s other faculty directors are Carolyn Cannuscio, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, and John Jackson, Jr., Dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice and Richard Perry University Professor, who also has appointments in anthropology and the Annenberg School for Communication.

Sonari Chidi, C’20 (R) talks with a FilmAid Student in the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement. Photos courtesy of Peter Decherney. To see the daily blog kept during the trip, visit: PENNINKAKUMAKENYA.WORDPRESS.COM

IN THE CLASSROOM

OMNIA

< Kushal

Modi, C'21, was attracted to ISP because “living in a smaller community will allow us to take our learning out of the classroom.”

In the lab of Joseph Kable, Baird Term Associate Professor of Psychology, research specialist Kameron MacNear gets Samuel Kaufmann, C'21, ready for a functional MRI, a way to view the brain.

LIVE AND LEARN Move-In Day for freshmen in the Integrated Studies Program was the beginning of a year of living and learning together. By Susan Ahlborn

Photography by Alex Schein and Brooke Sietinsons Penn welcomed 2,458 new freshmen this August. Just 74 of them had undergone a second application process to become Integrated Study Program (ISP) scholars, immersed in the great scope of the arts and sciences from their first days at Penn. ISP students live together in Riepe College House and take two innovative doublecredit courses that ask them to consider broad topics from a range of perspectives in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The year, the students will concentrate on decisions and learning with Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy, and Joseph Kable, Baird Term Associate Professor of Psychology. We captured some of their first days at Penn. Riepe House on Move-In Day.

FALL/WINTER 2017

IN THE CLASSROOM

< Joseph

Kable, Baird Term Associate Professor of Psychology, greets students in their first class.

Graduate Associate Hector Kilgoe, C’15, GR’27 (standing), with students at their first hall meeting.

“By looking through different lenses, we can see similarities and use those connections to solve universal issues.” SYDNEY LEWIS, C'21

Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and 2017–18 ISP Director (second from left), talks with (from left) Mariko Lewis, C'21, and Michiyah Collins, C'21.

Roommates Sieun Lee, C'21, (L) and Sydney Lewis, C'21.

MOVERS & QUAKERS

OMNIA

Five years ago Carly Zakin, C’08, quit her job because she’d thought of a better way to do it. She and her roommate Danielle Weisberg, both news producers at NBC in Washington, had realized that none of their friends ever saw their work. Self-described “news nerds,” they decided to design an easy, quick way for busy women to keep up with events.

Courtesy of Carly Zakin

Today, theSkimm arrives each morning in six million e-mailboxes, including those of Oprah, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Michelle Obama. In about six paragraphs, the update gives a wry, even-handed digest of news for the day, written by working women for working women. Weisberg and Zakin have been named to the Forbes "30 Under 30 in Media," Vanity Fair’s "The Next Establishment," Fortune’s "40 Under 40," and Adweek’s "Young Influentials." We talked with Carly Zakin about her leap of faith and how Penn has affected her life. Carly Zakin, C’08

SKIMMING TO SUCCESS Carly Zakin, C'08, creates a new way to get the news. By Susan Ahlborn

MOVERS & QUAKERS

FALL/WINTER 2017

Q: How did you have the courage to quit your job and start theSkimm? I would never describe myself as a risk taker, but there were two times in my life that I have really believed in something so strongly that I didn't let nerves get in the way. One of them was applying to Penn and one of them was quitting my job and starting theSkimm. We had no savings. Everyone we went to who were experts in the industry told us not to do it. We just believed in it so much that there was truly no talking us down. We either were going to do it and fail or do it and succeed. Q: What led you to believe this kind of news update was needed? We saw that our friends weren’t watching what we were creating. They were very supportive but the reality was they weren't home when these things were airing. At the same time, traditional media outlets were trying to create programming for this new generation. We just thought that there was so much noise out there. Twitter was the big thing. You could walk away from your desk and come back and there were 500 tweets to catch up on. But there was nothing distilling information in a way that fit into your routines. So that led us to see the opportunity. Q: Did your time at Penn influence your life?

Q: How do you stay connected to Penn? My best friends are all from Penn, and I still talk a lot to some of my professors. Formally, I try to stay in touch in a few ways. I'm signed up to be an interviewer. I've been involved in the Penn Fund. I've gone back and visited a few times since starting theSkimm, and I try to recruit interns. Q: What advice would you give current college students and other entrepreneurs? You don't have to know exactly what you want to do when you graduate. I'm proof of that. One of the best things about Penn is that it can feel pre-professional, but I also think that can sometimes be one of the worst things about it when you're an undergrad, because you feel pressure to have it figured all out. I let myself be scared to not take Wharton classes and I really regret that. I think that I missed out on some basic business skills that I wish I had, and I wish I'd just pushed myself more than anything. It's okay to experiment. I'm sure anyone who was my teacher or I'm sure my parents would laugh hearing me say that because I always am such a Type A person. I always thought that was really bad advice. One of the great things about Penn is you don't know the doors it's going to open for you. I think I'm just really proud of myself that I let myself be open to new opportunities.

There's obviously a huge entrepreneurial wave right now with everyone starting startups. Danielle and I have been talking a lot about how there’s a difference between being entrepreneurial and being an entrepreneur. For me, I learned how to be entrepreneurial in the College. I never took a class at Wharton. I didn't think I was going to become an entrepreneur, but I think I was very entrepreneurial. I figured out my own major track, a dual major in political science and cinema studies, with a creative writing minor. I loved story-telling, and I figured out how to forge a path around my passionate interests.

Q: Part of your goal is keeping theSkimm neutral. Has that gotten more difficult in the current political climate?

I think that's the way the College is set up, and it allowed me to be entrepreneurial within that curriculum. I just saw the opportunity to be an independent person.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Honestly, in many ways, it's gotten easier because there's so much opinion out there. It's so obvious what this country needs is not more divisiveness and not more people saying their opinions. People just desperately want to know what is going on: “Give me the facts.” And then, if they have the right information, they can make their own opinions.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

OMNIA Erynn Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth and Environmental Science, models Mesozoic Era shells using mathematic formulas and 3-D printing, to see if predators had an effect on their evolution. She’s conducting her research in the lab of Lauren Sallan, Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies.

SHE PRINTS SEASHELLS

“My hypothesis is that the shapes of shells changed to become more protective, and that changed the makeup of the ecosystem,” says Johnson, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. If her hypothesis is true, it would help us determine the impact of human predation today. “Snails come in a lot of different shapes, but all the shells use a similar pattern, which makes them great for modeling,” she says. She’s theorizing a variety of different shapes, then using 3-D printers to create physical models. Penn’s biomedical library helped her work out different materials to use for the printed shells, and Penn Engineering will allow her to test the shells in a compression machine to see how much force is required to crush each one. She can then compare her findings to the fossil record to see if the shell shapes that are most protective are in fact the ones that flourished after predators were introduced to the system. Today, humans leave their own marks on the oceans, eating not only eat shelled mollusks like scallops, clams, and snails, but also the ocean predators who feed on them. “One thing that makes ecosystems more stable is when there are a lot of different groups doing a lot of different things,” says Johnson. “The way that people behave, we seem to target specific groups, like with fishing, and that’s not good for the rest of the ecosystem.”

Courtesy of Erynn Johnson

Ph.D. candidate Erynn Johnson

Johnson sees 3-D printing as an outreach tool, as well. “Now you can physically hold the object, whether it’s a shell or a dinosaur bone. It’s opened up a whole new opportunity for this field, for us to be able to share information.” People sometimes call paleontology a gateway science, she says, “because kids go to a museum and see dinosaurs and think, wow, this is really cool. We have this opportunity to talk about stuff that is imaginative and exciting and different, and I think we should use it.”

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2017

CREATING INTELLECTUAL RISK TAKERS Julia Spandorfer, C’17, suggests that critical feedback makes a measurable contribution to childhood learning and willingness to take intellectual risks. Her senior thesis, “How Can I Improve?: Character Strengths and Openness to Negative Feedback in Childhood,” researches children’s openness to critical feedback. The thesis won the John P. Sabini Senior Thesis Award for the Study of Emotion, Character, and Responsibility. Spandorfer’s advisor was Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. Spandorfer surveyed children and adults about qualities associated with 24 unique character strengths — including honesty, bravery, kindness, and love of learning — and graded themselves on a scale. After participants completed the questionnaire, they were asked whether they wanted to hear about one of their highest scoring character strengths, or whether they wanted to hear about one of the lowest scoring character strengths. In adults, Spandorfer says, “The key finding was that the crucial character strengths of honesty, judgement, and, at a marginal level, perseverance, were correlated with asking for mostly negative feedback. They wanted to hear mostly about where they could improve rather than where they were already doing well.” Children, however, rated themselves highly on all character strengths and preferred positive feedback. She hypothesizes that this may be due to the

developmental process of egocentrism, where children tend to believe that they are unique and that others see them the way they see themselves. Aversion to critical feedback, in children and adults, may indicate a fear of failure and resistance to challenges “It’s important for children to get more practice asking for critical feedback,” says Spandorfer. If parents and teachers can create that kind of environment, young people may better understand the value of that kind of information and begin to seek it out. Spandorfer has accepted a position as a research coordinator in the Anxiety and Complicated Grief Program at the New York University Medical Center.

CAIRO COFFEEHOUSES, A NEW MIDDLE CLASS, AND ESPIONAGE Alon Tam, a Ph.D. candidate in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department, went on what he calls an “archival tour” while researching his dissertation on 19th and 20th century Cairo coffeehouse culture. His stops included British National Archives, Durham University’s Special Collections and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Tam’s dissertation reconstructs Cairo’s coffeehouses as urban spaces for political organizing and explores social, class, and gender dynamics, as well as questions of modernity. The cafés were gathering places for intellectuals, the working class, and immigrants. They helped shape a new politically active middle- and upper-class. “These were middle-class people,” says Tam, “who had a need to come together and ‘perform that class,’ which meant they dressed a certain way, went to a

certain place — coffeehouses — to talk about certain subjects and have certain social rituals.” Members of this new middle class avidly read newspapers aloud in coffeehouses and passionately discussed politics, galvanizing a new, class-based, political consciousness. During the 1919 Revolution, they organized anti-colonial demonstrations and recruited others to join their cause. Pamphlets from various nationalist parties or strike committees were regularly distributed in Cairo’s coffeehouses. Their role in the 1919 Revolution made coffeehouses targets for state surveillance and policing. “These coffeehouses were crawling with spies who wrote about what they heard,” Tam says. “State authorities, whether Ottoman, Egyptian or British-colonial, always had an interest in knowing what was said in coffeehouses.”

A café in Cairo, Egypt.

In the British Foreign Office files from Cairo in 1919, Tam found hundreds of daily military intelligence reports, which had a sub-section titled “Native Opinion in Cafés and Bars.” He also had access to the personal archive of Abbas Hilmi II, the khedive, or ruler, of Egypt who reigned from 1894 to 1914, and photographic collections in the Bibliotheque

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT Nationale which offer insights into the gender and sexual dynamics of coffeehouse culture in Egypt during this period. “Conventional wisdom would have it that coffeehouses were mainly a male space. In my dissertation, I’m challenging that notion,” Tam says. “Women were there. They were there as entertainers, singers, dancers. They were sometimes owners.”

NEW INSIGHT ON PHILADELPHIA’S COLUMBIA AVENUE RACE RIOT Hannah Fagin, C’17, won the History Department’s Thomas C. Cochran Prize for the best Honors thesis in American history for “A Long, Hot Summer: The 1964 Columbia Avenue Race Riot and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Philadelphia.”

OMNIA The Columbia Avenue Race Riot began on Memorial Day 1964, when two Philadelphia police officers confronted a Black couple in their car at the corner of 22nd Street and Columbia Avenue, now known as Cecil B. Moore Avenue. Fagin explains that the neighborhood was once heavily Jewish, but by 1960 was predominantly Black, though Jews continued to operate businesses there. The traffic dispute quickly escalated into three days of protest and destruction. Almost all whiteowned businesses in the neighborhood, most held by Jews, were destroyed. Fagin argues that because the Columbia Avenue riot produced comparatively less physical injury and property damage than other riots across the nation, it has not been widely studied. Those who have studied it “talk about the riot as an abrupt collapse of the storied alliance between Jews and Blacks forged at the outset of the Civil Rights Movement,” she says. Her research, however, led her to a different conclusion.

Council (JCRC) of Greater Philadelphia. In the archives, she realized that the JCRC was increasingly focused on North Philadelphia and the growing tensions between Blacks and Jews who lived and worked there in the 1950s. The Columbia Avenue riot, Fagin argues, was not the sudden collapse of Jewish/Black relations, but rather the result of steadily growing tension due to persistent racial inequality, joblessness, and poor housing, the root causes of riots across the country. In fall 2017, Fagin started her Master’s degree in art history at University College London.

RELIGION IN PRISON Rachel Ellis, GR’17, researches religion and the prison experience. Her paper, “‘You’re Not Serving Time, You’re Serving Christ’: Neoliberal Religious Messages in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration,” received the 2017 Best Student Paper Award from the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association.

Fagin began her research at the Urban Archives at Temple University, where she studied its collection of documents from the Jewish Community Relations

“My research has always focused on religion,” says Ellis. “I was very drawn to the contemporary problem of mass incarceration in the U.S. today, and I noticed that there were few studies on religion in prisons, even though prisoners who tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds are also populations that are deeply religious.”

Courtesy of Hannah Fagin

The corner of 22nd Street and Cecil B. Moore still bears the scars of the riot that occurred over 50 years ago. One reporter has written of the physical damage to the neighborhood, much of which was never restored, that it was “as if time came to a stop that Friday night.”

Ellis limited her scope to female inmates, both nonviolent and violent offenders. She spent 12 months conducting observations and informal interviews (taped interviews were prohibited) inside a state-run women’s prison, which she refers to as “Mapleside Prison.” Various studies show that the experience of incarceration tends to be punitive as opposed to rehabilitative. Ellis’s findings indicate that religious messages — especially those of conservative

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2017

Courtesy of Rachel Ellis

Rachel Ellis, GR’17

Protestant and evangelical and Black Christian denominations — reinforce this punitive model.

hope and comfort. On the other hand, I think they reinforced feelings of personal failure.”

Ellis was surprised by that finding. “I thought religious messages might focus on structural inequality, particularly with respect to racial and social class disparities,” she says. “However, in framing it as part of God’s plan, they promoted the notion of incarceration as a necessary rehabilitative step rather than a problem of structural inequality.”

She hopes her work will spark a discussion about how prison administrators decide which outside groups are allowed inside prisons to lead religious programs, as well an examination of what kinds of messages are promoted.

Ellis believes these messages affect incarcerated individuals in two ways. “On the one hand,” she says, “religious messages were deeply powerful and deeply important to inmates. Sometimes they were the greatest source of

Ellis began an appointment this fall as an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri in Saint Louis, where, in addition to teaching, she plans to turn her dissertation into a book manuscript and pursue further research.

FOUNDATIONS OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AN ONLINE CERTIFICATE PROGRAM TAUGHT BY DISTINGUISHED INSTRUCTORS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA:

DR. MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN

DR. ANGELA DUCKWORTH

NOW ENROLLING ON COURSERA.ORG

DR. CLAIRE ROBERTSON-KRAFT

DR. KAREN REIVICH

DR. JAMES O. PAWELSKI

www.coursera.org/specializations/positivepsychology

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

OMNIA

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES PROFESSIONAL WOMEN’S ALLIANCE SUMMER NETWORKING The Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Women’s Alliance held a summer networking event at Warby Parker Headquarters in New York City. College interns and recent grads had an opportunity to meet the PWA members and network with one another. PWA connects professionally accomplished College alumnae, united by their deep appreciation and understanding of the value of a liberal arts education as it relates to the workplace, with students and young alumnae of the College. PWA hosts programs in New York City and on campus to facilitate networking, mentorship, career exploration, professional development, and intellectual engagement.

(L–R) Olivia Gold, C’13; Katherine Lee, C’04, GEN’04; Swapna Podlich, C’01

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Yvonne Hyde-Carter, C’15; Courtney Cannon, C’10; Jennifer Eisenberg Bernstein, C’93, PAR’20

COCKTAILS AND CONVERSATION WITH PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES OVERSEERS Penn Arts and Sciences Overseers hosted the annual Cocktails and Conversations event at The NoMad Hotel in New York City. Alumni met members of the School’s Board of Overseers and learned about the many ways to become involved at Penn Arts and Sciences.

(L–R) Mitchell Blutt, C’78, M’82, WG’87; David Blinbaum; Jennifer Levy, C’10; Sharie Brown, C’97, G’79

> (L–R)

Rebecca Karnovitz, C’08; Stacy Bookman, C’98, W’98; Eddie Chung, C’95; Dan Keating, C’03

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

FALL/WINTER 2017

GRATITUDE FOR OPPORTUNITIES LEADS TO GIFT FOR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH James Meyerhoff, C’62, M’66, has created a fund that will support original research by Biological Basis of Behavior students. By Susan Ahlborn

It all leads back to Penn, and a room Meyerhoff rented in a house filled with psychology grad students. Brad Bucher, GR’65, helped him learn statistics and shared his love of art and music. When Meyerhoff was interested in physiological psychology but the professor, Philip Teitelbaum, was on sabbatical, another housemate, Jay Singer, GR’66, arranged an introduction. Despite the sabbatical, Teitelbaum accepted Meyerhoff for independent study, which Meyerhoff calls “the most influential experience in my undergraduate studies.” Bart Hoebel, GR’62, a graduate student in Teitelbaum’s lab, became his “friend, role model, and mentor.” Meyerhoff adds, “And in addition to great psychology courses, Penn’s Department of Chemistry was superb.” While in medical school, medicine with Beaupre and neurology with Bevilaqua, as well as summers in Britton Chance’s lab with Frans Jobsis, all contributed to Meyerhoff’s professional growth and a diverse toolkit. But ultimately it was the independent study at the College that directed his course after medical school. He believed that the then-emerging field of neuroscience would become the underpinning of both psychology and neurology. Work with patients during his residency at the University of Chicago further sharpened his focus to neurochemistry, and he flew to Carlsson’s lab in Sweden to learn assays for monamines. When Meyerhoff accepted a position at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, his supervisor and commanding officer, psychiatry pioneer David Rioch, asked him what he wanted to do. Meyerhoff answered, “Neurochemistry,” and Rioch pointed out that Walter Reed didn’t have a neurochemistry lab. Meyerhoff responded, “Well, perhaps you need one.” Three days later, Rioch gave him the go-ahead to build a neurochemistry lab, and sent him to do a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins with Solomon Snyder. During his long career, Meyerhoff created a safe, ethical, and repeatable paradigm to measure stress by studying solders going through Soldier of the Month Board interviews (a kind of dress rehearsal for promotion boards—he got the idea after his

own board examinations in psychiatry.) With colleagues, he published the first finding of stress-induced elevated plasma levels of beta endorphin in normal males, and received an Army research and development award. He helped to create an animal model of PTSD that is still in use for brain regional omics studies with colleagues. In 2007, Meyerhoff and John James Meyerhoff, C’62, M’66 Hansen of the University of Texas at Dallas were awarded a U.S. patent for measuring stress in the human voice. He has received the Achievement Medal for Civilian Service from the Army. While continuing his research on PTSD, he is also trying to create a career path for retiring military behavior health technicians to work in civilian community mental health. Courtesy of James Meyerhoff

James Meyerhoff, C’62, M’66, can name almost every person who helped him on his way to becoming a leading researcher in neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology. From the College to the School of Medicine (now Perelman School of Medicine) to Chicago to Walter Reed, he’s grateful to everyone whose support has touched his life and career. Now he’s endowed the James Lester Meyerhoff, M.D. Undergraduate Research Fund in the Biological Basis of Behavior program to continue that chain of care.

Now the Meyerhoff Fund will give students the same early exposure to research, which he says is vital. “I believe it is important for students to be exposed early to emerging trends in bioscience, before the student has made a commitment to a particular specialty. My lab courses were superb, but it is important to see first-hand how laboratory techniques are harnessed in pursuit of specific clinically-relevant questions.” He also knows how much undergraduates can benefit from informal contact with graduate students. “The combined exposure to a brilliant senior professor and a brilliant, quite approachable, and very generous near-peer graduate student was a powerful, fortuitous experience.” Now a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Meyerhoff says he himself still has a lot to learn. He’ll be intersecting with more lives along the way—including those of future students at Penn whose own lives he may change.

INSOMNIA

OFFICE ARTIFACTS BY

OMNIA GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW,

Associate Professor of History of Art

BROOKE SIETINSONS

Brooke Sietinsons

1) BLACK STUDIES LIBRARY My parents met in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. My mother pursued a Ph.D. in sociology; my father completed some college and spent the next sixty years educating himself about African American history. When I became a professor, he gave me his personal library — several hundred volumes. While I recently donated a couple dozen to Van Pelt Library’s special collections, his books remain the core of my Black studies reference section.

FALL/WINTER 2017

INSOMNIA

2) PENN'S PLACE COMIC ORIGINAL ARTWORK

3) PATRICK BURNS, MAN'S GIANT LEAP, 2016

In 2015, I curated the exhibition "Represent" for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which featured objects by artists of African descent drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. Towards the end of the show’s three-month run, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran this comic, which noted the large number of African Americans who were then visiting the galleries was occasioned by the increased presence of art by and about Black people.

During my last sabbatical, I was a senior fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The art of Patrick Burns stood out as some of the most innovative and compelling work in the D.C. area. In his flag series, Burns overlays the familiar stars and stripes above layers of vintage newspapers. This flag focuses on the ways our country has changed since the first man walked on the moon in 1969.

4) TIFFANY AND CO. BOX

5) OUR LADY OF CHARITY OF COBRE

In 1994 – 95, I completed a fellowship in the Painting and Sculpture department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The museum was in the process of opening its new building, designed by Italian architect Mario Botta. This little box made by Tiffany and Co. was an adaptation of Botta’s design. Working as a curatorial fellow helped me to focus on the goal of the Ph.D., which I began the following year.

I purchased this papier-mâché sculpture of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre in the craft market in Havana, Cuba. Cobre represents the Virgin Mary in the New World, but by some, is recognized as Ochun, a Yoruba orisha, or deity. The syncretic merging of West African orishas and European Catholic saints occurred throughout Latin America as enslaved, captive Africans and their descendants worked to retain the religious beliefs of their ancestors.

INSOMNIA

OMNIA

THREE QUESTIONS: WITCHCRAFT FEATURING ROBERT ST. GEORGE Robert St. George, Associate Professor of History, researches and teaches early American cultural history, witchcraft in the early modern world, public culture, American vernacular architecture, performing history, and American consumer culture.

Punishment for witchcraft, after a 1555 German woodcut.

HOW IS WITCHCRAFT IMAGINED IN DIFFERENT WESTERN CULTURES? From the late 15th century through the late 20th century, there have been believers in witchcraft and skeptics who have set out to show that it's no more than mere juggling, a duplicitous trick. Witchcraft is considered a voluntary thing — you have to sign the Devil's book upside down with your pricked finger, or there can be reverse baptisms. There can be the trampling of emblems of Christ, the cross on the ground, and all this kind of thing. People that are possessed, however, never have to make a contract. That's an involuntary occupying of their body by the Devil. In the case of Salem, there were both people who supposedly signed a Devil's book, and then there were other people who were possessed. In England, as well as in New England, when somebody's possessed, ministers and deacons usually prayed with them, thinking that that will drive the spirit out. Protestants wouldn’t use crosses, they didn't use unguents or anything like you saw in The Exorcist, which featured a Catholic priest showing crosses and sprinkling holy water.

There is also a difference in how witchcraft is punished in Protestant and Catholic countries. In Protestant countries, an accusation of witchcraft was considered a criminal violation of civil law, so hanging was the punishment. In Catholic countries — France, Italy, Germany — it was considered heresy by canon law, so people were burned at the stake. So that's why in England and the U.S., accused witches were not burned.

WHAT MAKES ALL THESE DIFFERENT PLACES RIPE FOR AN OUTBREAK OF ACCUSATIONS? I talk about it as an Old World regime yielding to a new kind of modern, pro-capitalist world. When a way of life begins to fade, witchcraft seems to happen. Think of astrology and the zodiac versus a new scenario where the body is conceived of as having its own natural system. Nobody's really tied to the heavens. Witchcraft occurs as a kind of hinge between these ways of thinking. There is an interregnum where we're not sure what will happen, and accusations of witchcraft occur.

HOW DID POPULAR UNDERSTANDINGS OF WITCHCRAFT COME TO BE, AND ARE ANY OF THOSE MISLEADING? Some symbols of witchcraft come from people or practices who were long demonized by Christians. They become this projected “other” that is demonized. There are so many representations of witchcraft. Broomsticks come from way before Harry Potter. There is a French manuscript from 1435 that shows a woman, a man, and an animal riding on a broomstick. A 1530 manuscript shows witches riding on forked sticks. There has been recent scholarly attention to men accused of witchcraft. The idea that only women were accused — I think that was a bias that male scholars confirmed in their research. So, for example, in Iceland, there was a big outbreak in the 1650s and '60s and uniformly it was men who were accused by other men and by leading women citizens. Men being accused of witchcraft is probably more common in Nordic records, but we see it in England as well.

FALL/WINTER 2017

LAST LOOK

65 Courtesy of Arjun Yodh

Penn researchers, led by Arjun Yodh, James M. Skinner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, recently identified complex behavior in a drying liquid crystal drop. This drying process is different from that of a drying coffee drop, another liquid the researchers have studied. The differences arise because of the character of liquid crystals, fluids with aligned phases of constituent molecules. The formation of different phases during drying, each with unique structure and symmetry, leads to novel fluid movement and solid deposition.

The study also provides insight useful for control of drying solutions of macromolecules that occur in dyes and pharmaceutical formulations. This photo is an electron microscope image (colorized) of a dried liquid crystal drop whose final shape resembles a volcano or sunken soufflĂŠ. The shape is due to convective flows that carry material towards the drop edge. The central thinned region locks in the turbulent flows present in the drop just before final formation of the more viscous liquid crystal phase.

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