Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2018

32 What Digital Currency Means for the Future

Big Ideas About 38 Microscopic Organisms

Centuries-Old 42 Playbills: Now Searchable

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24 Angela Duckworth Wants to Make Behavior Change Stick

A VIRTUAL WORLD FOR AN ANCIENT SOCIETY Clark Erickson, Professor of Anthropology, has made a career of studying humans' effect on their physical landscapes — past and present.

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A VIRTUAL WORLD FOR AN ANCIENT SOCIETY

PASSION, PERSISTENCE, AND PAYOFF

BREAKING THE BANK

Clark Erickson, Professor of Anthropology, has made a career of studying humans' effect on their physical landscapes—past and present.

Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, explores why perseverance matters.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Professor of Economics, discusses the potential—and pitfalls—of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

By Sacha Adorno

By Blake Cole

By Susan Ahlborn

EDITOR’S NOTE

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An Uncommon Perspective

FINDINGS Surviving an Epidemic: Charting Trends and Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Blake Cole

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By Blake Cole

DEAN'S MESSAGE

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Teach the World

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By Karen Brooks

By Steven J. Fluharty

SCHOOL NEWS

Seeing Shades of Gray in 20th-Century Communism On Afro-Modernism and Music

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By Katelyn Silva

For Love or Money: Untangling the Story of a Family’s Rise and Fall

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By Jane Carroll

New Method of Stabilizing Peptides Opens Doors to Diabetes Treatment

By Ali Sundermier

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CONTENTS

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FINDING MACRO-LEVEL ANSWERS IN MICROORGANISMS

PROSPECTING PLAYBILLS

Mecky Pohlschrรถder, Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Biology, on gaining insights into the workings of microscopic ecosystems.

Michael Gamer, Professor of English, and Scott Enderle, Digital Humanities Specialist at Penn Libraries, are designing a database to classify historical playbills.

By Louisa Shepard

By Katherine Unger Baillie

FACULTY OPINION

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The Crisis of Public Lands and the Promise of Bears Ears

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

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INSOMNIA

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By Etienne Benson

ONLINE CONTENT IN THE CLASSROOM

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at America

Three Questions: Carmen Maria Machado

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

MOVERS AND QUAKERS Reading is Fundamental: Jennifer Egan

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Faculty Cyclists: Over the River, Through the Woods, and Down 34th Street

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LAST LOOK

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AN UNCOMMON PERSPECTIVE What's the next best thing to walking in someone else’s shoes?

Seeing the world through their eyes.

Our cover story, “A Virtual World for an Ancient Society,” (p. 16) explores a digital world that recreates and populates pre-Columbian agricultural societies. The figures are created in part through motion capture footage of students using tools contemporary to the time and place. It's one of the many ways Penn Arts and Sciences is using technology as a means to advance knowledge.

In “Prospecting Playbills,” (p. 42)

OMNIA follows researchers on

their journey to create an archive of playbills for 18th- and 19th-century dramatic performances, which will provide unique abilities to research the lifespan of plays, as well as map out actors and actresses' career trajectories—all the way to the famous London theaters.

On the flip side of the digital coin, we spoke with an economist about the hot topic of cryptocurrency and how properties like Bitcoin and technology like block chain might change our financial landscape forever (p. 32).

A focus on the virtual has also led to the development of a new minor spearheaded by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities (p. 4), designed for students who want to augment their studies in the humanities or social

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 Email: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

sciences with digital research techniques and engagement with questions raised by digital humanities.

Another overarching theme in the issue is perseverance. Whether it's one professor’s commitment to understand what makes young students succeed, and to apply that knowledge to society-at-large (p. 24), or the decades-long research study examining how Malawians faced with the trials and tribulations of disease and famine face down these threats (p. 8), our experts are focused on understanding how people from all walks of life overcome obstacles.

The next generation of scholars— our ambitious undergrad and graduate students—are at the forefront of examining complex social issues, highlighted in this issue for tackling topics like the intersection of Black feminism and social media (p. 54), whether social class affects immigrants’ involvement in their children’s education (p. 56), and how Islamophobia affects politics (p. 55).

We at OMNIA strive to expose the reader to the myriad perspectives our outstanding faculty, students, and alums offer on the critical issues affecting our global community.

Thanks for traveling the path with us.

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

— Blake Cole

CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at quakernet.alumni.upenn.edu. Non-alumni: email 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 admissions, financial

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 the Environment Humanities in the Digital Age

Mapping the Mind

Arts and Culture

Global Inquiries

Public Policy and Social Impact Quantitative Explorations of Evolving Systems

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).

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TEACH THE WORLD BY

STEVEN J. FLUHARTY

To “teach the world” is generally not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about my daily to-do list on campus. But I would argue that it is a useful way to describe what universities are all about, and at Penn Arts and Sciences, the idea of teaching the world resonates on multiple levels.

On another level, we teach the world by addressing global perspectives and cultures—in both historical and contemporary contexts. Penn Arts and Sciences is home to a wealth of resources that support greater global understanding. Over half of our departments reflect this orientation through the very definition of their discipline and often through the program’s name. This expertise, combined with an impressive breadth of options in language instruction and curriculum requirements that address cross-cultural perspectives, keeps the world close to the core of the teaching, learning, and research that goes on at Penn.

But in a broader sense, all of what faculty do is intended to teach the world.

Research efforts, in any discipline, are driven by the goal of shedding light on issues and solving problems. Daniel José Mindiola, of Chemistry, has been working on ways to turn harmful by-products of natural gas production into useful chemicals. In Classical Studies, Emily Wilson’s recently published translation of Homer’s Odyssey is opening a new window to the ancient world. In Criminology, Greg Ridgeway is applying statistical analysis to multiple facets of the problem of gun violence. These examples are just a hint of the many ways that research seeks to provide knowledge to make the world better.

Our faculty also recognize that research alone is not enough. A commitment to teach the world recently motivated Penn faculty to organize a five-day Teach-In, a series of public programs intended to address the gap in understanding about the “production, dissemination, and use of knowledge” and the role of the academy. These events, which will likely have

Candace DiCarlo

Teaching is, of course, inherent to our conception of the role of faculty, and our faculty consistently demonstrate their commitment to imparting knowledge and shaping Penn’s talented students. In the dean’s office, we work closely with faculty as they explore ways of keeping teaching relevant and effective. This includes creating new programs like our minors in digital humanities, and in survey research and data analytics—two options that introduce students to powerful new tools for understanding the world. Our faculty are also leading the way in exciting new approaches to classroom teaching, and they pursue comprehensive efforts to assess and understand the impact of their efforts on their students’ learning outcomes.

The commitment to teaching the world is also at work in the innovative efforts of many of our faculty engaging in classrooms online. These new modes of teaching break down campus walls and enable faculty to reach anyone who remains a student, at any point in their life. Al Filreis, of English, is one of many pioneers in this unconventional teaching space.

His long-running modern poetry class, delivered through Coursera, continues to engage large numbers of enthusiastic students. Other faculty from a wide range of departments are contributing to new options that will allow many more people to achieve educational goals online.

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

just taken place by the time you read this message, involved faculty from across Penn and from departments as diverse as Biology to Philosophy.

By embracing the idea of teaching the world, engaging with communities in new ways, and sharing their knowledge directly with the public, faculty at Arts and Sciences are helping bridge the space between the academy and society, and between knowledge and action. The success of our faculty, of Penn, and of all universities in making these connections has critical implications as we seek to continue our efforts to make the world a better place.

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modeling, as well as use digital tools for collecting, organizing, and studying material culture. Course work will also expose students to debates within digital humanities and require them to attend lectures, workshops, and other relevant events at Penn and around Philadelphia.

NEW DIGITAL HUMANITIES MINOR PROVIDES PATHWAY TO DIGITAL RESEARCH TECHNIQUES A new undergraduate minor in digital humanities, spearheaded by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, has been designed for students who want to augment their studies with advanced digital research techniques and in-depth engagement with theoretical and practical questions raised by digital humanities.

The minor offers a systematic program of study and training in digital research tools and methodologies. Students who successfully complete the requirements of the minor will develop the insight to be both thoughtful users of technology and sophisticated critics of digital work.

The minor draws on faculty from various departments of Penn Arts and Sciences and other Penn schools and encourages students to enroll in courses outside of their major.

Students minoring in digital humanities will learn valuable programing and data management skills and explore topics such as digital text analysis, digital mapping, and 3-D

Courtesy of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities

Digital humanities has changed the way many scholars conduct research and share work.

For an example of how our faculty and students are using digital tools, see our feature “A Virtual World for an Ancient Society” on p. 16.

NEW DATABASE BOLSTERS GLOBAL INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH An international team of researchers, co-led by David Roos, E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology, has launched the Clinical Epidemiology Database (ClinEpiDB), an open-access online resource enabling investigators to maximize the utility and reach of their data.

Population-based epidemiological studies provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration among researchers addressing pressing global-health concerns. As with the vast quantities of information emerging in other fields, the technical challenges of sharing and mining gigantic datasets can hamper such efforts. A single epidemiological study may involve tens of thousands of clinical observations on thousands of participants.

ClinEpiDB overcomes these hurdles with a computational infrastructure established during the past 20 years for the Eukaryotic Pathogen Database.

“With ClinEpiDB, we are providing a resource to help get the information from large patient studies into the hands of those who can do the most good with it,” says Roos.

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A variety of MindCORE programs, including lectures, partnerships with local museums and schools, and community science initiatives, will engage the academic community and the public. In addition, there will be new opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to conduct research and disseminate the results.

WITH AIR FORCE GRANT, PHYSICIST WILL SHED LIGHT ON AN EMERGING FIELD IN PHYSICS NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTER TO PROMOTE THE STUDY OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AND BEHAVIOR

Bo Zhen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Elliman Faculty Fellow, has been awarded a Young Investigator Grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Zhen will receive $450,000 for a three-year period to investigate non-Hermitian topological photonics.

A new center at Penn Arts and Sciences has been established to unite researchers, programs, and initiatives involving human intelligence and behavior across the University.

Known as MindCORE (Center for Outreach, Research, and Education), the center will promote multidisciplinary research aimed at fundamental questions of human cognition, intelligence, and behavior. It will also seek to engage broad audiences with the latest research findings and provide a home for several undergraduate and graduate programs.

The Center’s inaugural faculty director, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, notes that Penn has an array of mind-brain-related centers, institutes, and programs that have grown organically over the years. “MindCORE will help to consolidate these activities within one umbrella organization and will support them strategically with resources such as seed funds, technology, staffing, and programming to make them more efficient, visible, and impactful,” she comments.

Courtesy of Bo Zhen

Dean Steven J. Fluharty notes, “Penn has a long history of excellence in research and education on the brain and behavior, with extensive cross-School collaborations already in place. MindCORE will build on these strengths and ensure that Penn remains at the cutting edge in this new era, where researchers are making game-changing discoveries into phenomena including brain abnormalities, decision-making, and the fundamental nature of human intelligence.”

Bo Zhen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Elliman Faculty Fellow

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In the past decade, topology, a branch of the mathematics studying the preserved properties of objects under continuous deformations, has received an increasing amount of attention in physics. From a topological point of view, a coffee mug and a donut are the same. Since each object has one hole, it is possible for the donut to morph into a mug through continuous deformations: one would simply make a depression into one side of the donut to make the mug and shrink the donut's hole to make the mug's handle. This sort of abstraction, Zhen says, gives way to new properties in physics and interesting applications in practice.

“When we tie our shoelaces in the morning, it's never perfect,” he says. “It's not one particular shape and we don't need to measure the exact dimensions. It’s the topology of the knot that really matters.”

Although the understanding of this new concept first started in electronic systems through the study of the topological phases of electrons, negatively charged subatomic particles, Zhen’s research focuses on photons, particles of light.

One application for this, Zhen says, is improving chemical or biological sensors to allow them to reach much higher sensitivities so they can detect tiny changes, sometime even down to a single particle, in the environment. These sensors can be used to monitor the level of glucose in blood, determine drug residue in blood or detect the level of poisonous elements in water.

comprehensible and speakable,” she says. “I wanted people to be able to have an immersive reading experience and be absorbed in the characters and what’s going to happen next.”

The Guardian called Wilson’s Odyssey “a new cultural landmark.” “I think because I’m living in, writing in, thinking in my particular cultural context, I’m able to see things in this old poem which maybe weren’t visible before, and I don’t think that’s about imposing something on it that isn’t there. It’s about bringing something out in it.”

To read a full Q&A with Wilson about how she approached the translation, see our Online Content section on p. 31.

FACULTY HONORS EMILY WILSON IS THE FIRST WOMAN TO TRANSLATE HOMER'S ODYSSEY INTO ENGLISH In November, Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies, became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. She was featured in The New York Times Magazine, and her work was positively reviewed in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Time, Vox, NPR, and many other outlets. Wilson also published an essay in The New Yorker about the desire of modern audiences to see empowerment of women in the tale.

“I love Homer, and I was excited about doing a translation because I felt I could do something different,” says Wilson. “I bring a gender awareness to this poem which is very much invested in, but also questioning of, androcentric values. I also wanted to bring out that it’s not just Odysseus’s story but the stories of a whole rich tapestry of characters.”

The Odyssey Translated by Emily Wilson Professor of Classical Studies

Wilson also wrote her translation in a poetic meter, something many modern translators haven’t attempted. “I aimed for it to be very easily

Daniel José Mindiola, Presidential Professor of Chemistry, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon members of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, by their peers. Mindiola’s expertise is in studying inorganic and organometallic synthesis, catalysis, and mechanistic chemistry. A research goal of his team is to convert natural or shale gas into more value-added materials and take advantage of the energy stored in the carbonhydrogen bonds without burning these natural resources.

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Africana Studies, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the nation’s highest honors in biomedicine. An acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, Roberts focuses on issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they affect the lives of

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women, children, and African-Americans.

She serves on the board of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is Director of the Program on Race, Science, and Society.

The appointments of 21 Penn Arts and Sciences faculty as endowed chairs have been announced since the beginning of the 2017 – 18 school year: Etienne Benson, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, History and Sociology of Science Warren Breckman, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History Harold Dibble, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology Marc Flandreau, Howard Marks Professor of Economic History Daniel Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science

Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research, Chemistry, and Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology Mark Goulian, Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor in the Natural Sciences, Biology and Physics and Astronomy

Ileana Pérez-Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Elliman Faculty Fellow Megan Robb, Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Timothy Rommen, Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College, Music

Peter Holquist, Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History

Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, English

Michael Jones-Correa, President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science

Lauren Sallan, Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Earth and Environmental Science

Michael Leja, James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art

Dawn Teele, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, Political Science

Eugene Mele, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics Anne Norton, Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science Tony Pantev, Class of 1939 Professor of Mathematics

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Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English Bo Zhen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Elliman Faculty Fellow

Courtesy of Dorothy Roberts

Courtesy of Daniel José Mindiola

(L – R): Daniel José Mindiola, Presidential Professor of Chemistry; Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Africana Studies

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SURVIVING AN EPIDEMIC: CHARTING TRENDS AND RESILIENCE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA BY

BLAKE COLE

“We never thought at the time we'd be collecting data 20 years down the road,” says Kohler.

Currently, the team is pursuing three main initiatives: Surviving an Epidemic: Families and Well-Being in Malawi, 1998 – 2021 (in collaboration with Philip Anglewicz, Tulane University); Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adolescent HIV Risk (in collaboration with Rachel Kidman, Stony Brook University); and Aging Against the Odds: Health and Well-Being Among Mature Adults in a Low-Income Population (in collaboration with Iliana V. Kohler).

Courtesy of Hans-Peter Kohler

It's a team effort: members of the 2017 Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health mature adults fieldwork team in Mchinji.

For Hans-Peter Kohler, research isn’t only about numbers—it’s about context and community, about individuals and their social networks, and about understanding the contingencies of human lives as they unfold in times filled with major challenges and novel opportunities. Kohler, Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography, is the Principal Investigator for the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH), one of very few long-standing publicly available longitudinal cohort studies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Using recurring, extensive survey data collected in Malawi over two decades, Kohler and his team are able to explore respondents’ earlier-life decisions, access to information, and perceptions of their own and others’ health, along with dozens of other factors.

These data allow insight into pressing social, epidemiological, and demographic questions: how members of the community— individually and collectively—cope with shocks such as disease and famine, and how families and communities build resilience.

When he first got involved in the project, Kohler was a recent graduate from the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1990s. Susan Watkins, then a professor of sociology at Penn (now Professor Emerita), had an interest in social networks, risk behaviors, and fertility decline in high-risk HIV populations, and she was establishing the survey that became the MLSFH. She then invited Kohler and Jere Behrman, now William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics, to head the MLSFH.

So far, the MLSFH has collected survey data in 1998, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2017, along with a wealth of qualitative studies and ethnographic journals that complement the extensive survey data and provide in-depth insights to the local context.

Throughout, the MLSFH has been at the frontier of data collection methodologies: the project was among the pioneers of collecting data on social networks and subjective expectations, and it was among the first offering door-to-door HIV testing and other health-related services to residents. MLSFH fieldwork in Malawi is an important training experience for students. For many years, groups from Penn, including faculty, Ph.D. students, and, sometimes, undergraduate students have traveled to Malawi to collaborate with local partner organizations.

How the Poor Cope With Crises To illustrate the current MLSFH research theme, Surviving an Epidemic, we follow Kohler through the life of one of the MLSFH study participants: Estere (name changed).

Estere is 57 years old, an age just shy of the current life expectancy in Malawi, and HIV positive. She is one of the 775 respondents for whom the MLSFH collected data seven or more times from 1998 to 2017.

Longitudinal data for participants like Estere is invaluable to the research. “We’re investigating the factors that might have predicted one family doing relatively well during the AIDS epidemic, as compared to individuals and families who were devastated,” says Kohler.

In 1998, Estere had been married to her then-husband for five years. She had already given birth to five children, but only three remained alive. She didn't use contraception at the time as she wanted to have additional children, but she had heard about modern family planning on both the radio and from clinics. She “worried a lot” that she herself might contract AIDS, and considered an infection through her husband as the most important

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worry. Yet, it was not considered acceptable to use a condom in marriage, and access to other forms of contraception was scarce.

“While she had talked with her spouse about HIV/AIDS, something many other women in the area in 1998 hadn’t done, she had not talked to others about HIV risks and prevention strategies,” says Kohler. “This had changed by 2001, when she had talked to at least two other women, both of whom she considered at least somewhat knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS.”

Findings so far include that mature adults have high levels of economic activity in low-income contexts such as Malawi, and they make significant contributions to families and society at large, despite health limitations. The social acceptance of older persons, including elderly with HIV, is often centered on the ability to perform broadly defined “work”; those who can’t are often excluded. Despite the importance of work, however, the well-being and productivity of older individuals is often low, due to poor health and depression.

Iliana Kohler

By 2012, Estere was infected with HIV, had given birth to one additional child, and her husband had passed away. Her health had somewhat deteriorated and she had no savings for the future. Her household had been affected during the previous two years by multiple shocks, including deaths and illness of household members, poor crop yields, and income loss.

diseases, a potential HIV infection, mortality or morbidity among family members, among others.

Aging Against the Odds

The MLSFH is an exception: it provides a unique opportunity to study older individuals, including long-time MLSFH respondents such as Estere, and to investigate the health, social, and demographic changes that occur with aging among individuals who often experienced lifelong exposure to adversity—poverty, undernutrition, exposure to infectious

Examples of childhood adversity are divided into “ecological” levels. On an individual level, participants are asked about emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. When it comes to the family experience, factors like parental HIV infection and poverty are key. Peer interaction, such as bullying or violence, is also examined, as well as communal dangers like natural disasters.

“The study of the next generation will shed light on observed trends from the past—trends that are sometimes surprising,” says Kohler.

A Vast Network of Collaboration

“Estere is member of the remarkable cohort that is reaching middle and older ages in sub-Saharan African countries affected by the HIV epidemic,” says Kohler. “Some members of this cohort were infected with HIV, but everybody was affected by HIV.”

Social and health implications of reaching old age have to date primarily been studied in high- and, increasingly, middle-income countries where the aging of the population is a defining aspect of demographic change. SubSaharan Africa harbors the most rapidly growing population of older individuals; however, a dearth of population-based data on older individuals severely limits policy-relevant research on health and aging in the region.

“We ask a set of questions trying to glean what determines HIV risk and the set of related outcomes in this critical transition to adulthood, trying to differentiate between adolescents and the HIV risk they face based on the richness of what we know about these children,” says Kohler.

Training interviewers for measuring blood pressure as part of the survey of mature adults.

Improving the Next Generation's Resilience At the other end of the age spectrum, the MLSFH provides a lens with which to study the next generation and how current adolescents fare as they approach adulthood and face a new set of challenges. A rapid transition to adulthood— defined as a dense set of life-course events, like onset of sexual activity, first marriage, and dropping out of school— occurs in Malawi often between ages 15 and 18 years and is associated with elevated HIV risk.

The MLSFH has had a prominent role in training the next generation of scholars in a broad range of topics, and it isn’t slowing down. In the next five years, the hope is to establish and publicly release a unique data set for analyzing a broad range of topics. New data will be collected on all surviving members of the MLSFH cohort, as well as some of their children.

The topics to be covered include everything from mortality and family and household dynamics to social capital and intergenerational relations. Household and individual data will be complemented by census linkages, village-level and other ecological data, and extensive ethnographies to provide context, assess data quality, and yield insights into perceptions and behaviors underlying the surviving of an epidemic.

“To cope with new crises, citizens of low-income countries will have to rely on multiple and often innovative mechanisms that rely on the unique set of resources that they have at their disposal,” Kohler says.

To learn more about the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health, visit the project website at malawi.pop.upenn.edu.

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SEEING SHADES OF GRAY IN 20TH-CENTURY COMMUNISM BY

KAREN BROOKS

Courtesy of Kristen Ghodsee

Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies

The atrocities of Joseph Stalin. Forced labor camps under the Gulag. Devastating famines. Kristen Ghodsee calls these things “the troika”— the vile images Westerners are conditioned to invoke whenever they hear the word “communism.”

when they bought previously state-owned enterprises in an “economic takeover” that led to widespread unemployment, the disintegration of many Eastern European industries, and deep social displacements that endure to this day.

This oversimplification of what she recognizes as a deeply complex era troubles Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies. In her new book, Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism, Ghodsee acknowledges the horrors enacted by communist regimes but posits that as a social and economic system, state socialism also had redeeming qualities that Western narratives omit.

“We thought we could bring democracy as a gift, and everyone would be fine—but it didn’t work that way,” says Ghodsee, noting that while people in post-communist regions wanted personal freedoms, they didn’t necessarily want free market capitalism. “Although it wasn’t practiced anywhere near perfectly, the underlying idea of state socialism was to create a more humane society that provided a basic floor under which people would not fall.

“It’s like we’ve been programmed to equate communism with Stalinism—but history isn’t that black and white,” she says.

Red Hangover comprises 10 essays and four fictional stories inspired by Ghodsee’s experiences living and traveling in Eastern Europe over more than two decades. She describes the atmosphere in Belgrade, Serbia, during a visit in spring 1990—six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War—as “pure jubilation.”

But in most post-communist countries, celebratory moods didn’t last.

Unbridled joy had turned into sheer desperation. A series of suicides and suicide attempts were triggered by extreme poverty, as democracy had come coupled with economic decline.

“It hit me that this wasn’t a temporary transitional period. We could no longer promote the rhetoric of ‘just wait, things will get better’ when people were suffering this much almost 25 years after the Wall fell,” she says.

Ghodsee believes anticommunist leaders sincerely sought to bring human rights to oppressed citizens in the Eastern Bloc, but she also confronts the economic motives that made it impossible for most of these same citizens to prosper. Western corporations wreaked havoc, she explains,

Other ideas worth saving, she says, include a strong public commitment to science, the arts, women’s rights, and education. Red Hangover argues that the West’s failure to appreciate these socialist principles, to help rebuild the economies of the former Eastern Bloc, and to confront its mishandling of post-communist regime change have led to the political extremism that permeates the world today.

“The book was my way of showing how what happened in 1989 is still reverberating now. I could feel the zeitgeist around me—xenophobia, racism, misogyny, all things that are anathema to democratic politics—even before the election of Donald Trump and before Brexit. Things were becoming more and more polarized, right there on the streets of Germany and around the world,” she recalls.

Ghodsee says it’s time for the West to acknowledge the shortcomings in its belief that free markets and democracy bring prosperity to everyone they touch and to stop silencing people who promote nuanced conversations about state socialism.

“This part of history requires a more thorough understanding, and that’s what I tried to show with Red Hangover.”

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ON AFRO-MODERNISM AND MUSIC BY

KATELYN SILVA

In his contributed chapter, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music and Africana Studies, explores the rich contributions of Black musicians in the mid-20th century, or the modernist period.

“Afro-modernism and Music” celebrates a revolutionary time period for Black music, characterized by untethered experimentation and invention, including modern jazz (or bebop), rhythm and blues, and the arrival of the electric guitar, told through the historical lens of the Negro Renaissance, the Black Power Movement, and the emerging Civil Rights Movement.

Ramsey defines Afro-modernism as “how Blacks throughout the world responded to the experience of modernity, globalism, and anti-colonialism as well as the expanded sense of artistic experimentation and visibility of Black expressive culture.” He explores the ways in which music was part of Black sociopolitical resistance and how musical and educational opportunities for African Americans began to expand, resulting in the increase of Black influence in mainstream academia and performance venues.

“During this time, Americans began to be more open to the idea of African Americans in spaces like concert halls, libraries, art galleries, and so on,” explains Ramsey.

“These growing opportunities, previously unimaginable, helped shape what people were making with their imaginations.”

Courtesy of Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

The story of Black music is one of travel, tribulation, and transformation. A new book, The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of the African Diaspora, provides readers with an in-depth look at the wide spectrum of music created by Africans and their descendants over four continents and 1,000 years—from the slave ships to the most hallowed concert halls—and outlines how that music shifts, influences, and inspires new genres and practices over time.

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music

He links this period of Black music back to the larger narrative of the book and says, “As the perspectives and experiences of African Americans began to be felt in more institutions, it did the same thing that Black music did as it traveled over continents and time. It influenced what was acceptable and what was possible in those spaces.”

One of the previously unacceptable spaces that Ramsey brings to the fore is the concert hall—a space occupied by Black musicians that doesn’t often get its historical due. He also probes the bridge between jazz and the concert world, showing that “they were not separate art worlds, but, instead, porous.”

The chapter also does justice to the commanding presence of Black women musicians, composers, and music researchers

during this period of Afro-modernism, highlighting their singular stories, motivations, and impact on the space. “I hope to correct the idea that women like Mary Lou Williams, Alice Coltrane, Rosetta Tharpe, and Undine Smith-Moore were not part of this Afro-modernist narrative,” says Ramsey. “They are a powerful part and have been there all along, waiting to be given their due.”

Perhaps Ramsey’s greatest contribution to the book is to show the ways in which Black musicians moved beyond the rules, created new musical genres of influence with songs of social justice and sociopolitical freedom, undeniably shaped how modernism is understood, and, as he writes in the closing of his chapter, “defined, for many, the aesthetic core of what was singular about American music culture.”

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FINDINGS

OMNIA

FOR LOVE OR MONEY: UNTANGLING THE STORY OF A FAMILY’S RISE AND FALL BY

JANE CARROLL

The Queen’s Embroiderer: Lovers, Swindlers, Paris, and the First Stock Market Crisis, the forthcoming book by Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor of French, has it all: star-crossed lovers, sumptuous artistry, scoundrels and family betrayal, greed and financial ruin.

It all started with an unexpected find.

DeJean, who specializes in 17th- and 18th-century French literature and cultural history, was researching in France’s National Archives in Paris when she came across a document that left her stunned: a 1719 announcement that Jean Magoulet, officially known as embroiderer to Queen Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, had accused his daughter Louise of prostitution. The announcement stated that she faced deportation to New Orleans.

“If you had seen the story of a father declaring his own daughter a prostitute in order to have her shipped off, you would have a hard time walking away, too, I think,” says DeJean. “I knew enough about Jean Magoulet to know that he wasn’t just an ordinary man. He was one of the city’s elite artisans.”

Magoulet was also a reckless spendthrift who was deeply in debt and eager to rid himself of his daughter, whose planned marriage would have enabled her to claim a percentage of her deceased mother’s estate.

Louise Magoulet’s predicament was tied to a madness gripping France known as the “Mississippi Bubble.” Decades of war under Louis XIV had left France nearly bankrupt. The monarchy turned to the economic theories of Scottish financier John Law. He proposed paying the national debt with revenues derived from opening up the Louisiana Territory to development. As head of the Indies Company, Law pushed the sale of company shares and advertised Louisiana and its newly founded city, New Orleans, as a paradise.

Under pressure to populate Louisiana with laborers, Law’s company offered free passage and land, as well as enticements for unmarried women to become “Louisiana brides.” To ensure enough white women, Law turned to strong-arm tactics, arranging to ship 150 female prisoners from Paris’s infamous Salpêtrière Prison to New Orleans. Unlike Louise Magoulet, these were mostly indigent women, immigrants, or others accused of prostitution or petty crimes. Jean Magoulet saw a chance to add his 17-year-old daughter to the ship’s manifest.

“This had never happened before,” says DeJean. “There was not a possibility of having your daughter sent away before.

In this climate of huge risk-taking and huge gains, this becomes a phenomenon. Then, when the boom is over, the phenomenon of sending women away is over.”

The value of Law’s stock and the paper money he circulated as head of France’s Royal Bank inevitably fell, plunging the country into an economic crisis. DeJean’s research revealed the surprising effects of the boom and bust on ordinary citizens.

“I had never thought about what it was like on the ground for individuals, for example, that the behavior of parents would be so closely tied to the fluctuations in the stock market,” she says.

Another surprise for DeJean was discovering that embroiderers were extremely well paid and enjoyed high status in the world of art. The Queen’s Embroiderer follows other fascinating threads and offers important takeaways for the present moment. The Magoulet story shows what can happen when people suddenly find themselves so driven by greed that they lose their moral compass.

“For me, that was a striking parallel,” says DeJean. Another has to do with the fate of the women marked for exile. “When you have no value for society, what chance do you have?” DeJean asks. “I think there’s a lesson for us about that, too.”

The Queen’s Embroiderer: Lovers, Swindlers, Paris, and the First Stock Market Crisis

By Joan DeJean Trustee Professor of French

FINDINGS

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

13

NEW METHOD OF STABILIZING PEPTIDES OPENS DOORS TO DIABETES TREATMENT BY

ALI SUNDERMIER

being able to stop that cleavage would give them a much more stable version of the drug, so they replaced the oxygen atom located at that bond with a sulfur atom. With just this single atom substitution, they were able to increase the half-life of the drug from two minutes to a span of 12 to 24 hours.

“Proteins do a lot of the work in cells,” says E. James Petersson, Associate Professor of Chemistry. “Peptides are shorter, and they're not really functional as machines in the same way that proteins are. But what they can do is signal molecules. One cell will secrete a peptide, and it will travel through the bloodstream and activate another type of cell.”

After performing in vitro tests of this method, Petersson struck up a collaboration with Matthew Hayes, Associate Professor of Nutritional Neuroscience in Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine, to see if it could actually be used in vivo. They were able to show that, in rats, the peptide was indeed longer lived and more potent than the native GLP-1. They showed that the modified peptide was as much as 750 times more stable than the natural variety, giving rats smaller blood-sugar spikes after meals.

The problem with giving patients GLP-1 to trigger insulin production is that the peptide degrades in about two minutes due to natural enzymes in the body that break it apart, a process called proteolysis. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and highlighted in Nature, Petersson’s team used in-vitro experiments and in-vivo studies in rats to demonstrate that, by modifying the peptide backbones, they can block interactions with the enzymes that degrade peptides and can produce a stabilized, longer-lasting version of the drug.

“Every amino acid in a peptide is connected by an amide bond,” Petersson says. “We've been working on modifying that carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen connection to a carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen connection, a thioamide. We wanted to test whether this could be useful in a therapeutic context, and so we picked GLP-1 because it’s been established that if you could stabilize it then it would be a valuable diabetes treatment.”

One important property of GLP-1 is that it’s not degraded everywhere throughout the peptide; there's one specific bond that breaks apart. The researchers knew that

This new method, Petersson says, does a really nice job of stopping proteolysis while being a very small modification of the peptide. The fact that they can prevent degradation without affecting other aspects of the peptide is a key finding.

“This research shows what an amazing effect just a single atom change can have,” Petersson says. “We really need to think carefully about the chemical structure of the molecules. Understanding molecular interactions even down to single atom detail can be crucial in making valuable molecules for in-vivo studies. I think this method will allow us to learn something really interesting about fundamental biology, and our long-term plan is to apply it where all other ways to stabilize injectable peptides have failed.”

Lisa Godfrey

For many people with advanced Type 2 diabetes, taking insulin is a regular part of their routine, helping them control their blood sugar by signaling the metabolism of glucose. But recently, researchers have been investigating GLP-1, a peptide that gets activated when people eat, triggering insulin through a more natural pathway.

E. James Petersson, Associate Professor of Chemistry

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FACULTY OPINION

OMNIA

THE CRISIS OF PUBLIC LANDS AND THE PROMISE OF BEARS EARS

By Etienne Benson

Illustration by The Brave Union

FACULTY OPINION

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Last December, President Donald Trump issued an executive order shrinking the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah by about 85 percent. The order stripped protections from numerous archaeologically, religiously, and ecologically valuable sites and artifacts within the 1.35 million acres of the original monument, which had been established by former President Barack Obama a year earlier. It also cut the ground out from under one of the most promising experiments in public lands protection in recent U.S. history.

Examining the troubled history of public lands in the U.S. makes it clear why the fight over Bears Ears matters. When Americans first entertained the idea of permanently retaining large swaths of land in federal possession in the late 19th century, they assumed those lands would be administered in the public interest.

Even as the system diversified to include national parks, forests, seashores, monuments, wildlife reserves, and wilderness areas, the idea that it served “the public” remained its guiding light.

But the public nature of the public lands often proved more aspirational than real.

Federal land managers repeatedly made decisions that benefited only narrow segments of the American people. On lands designated for extractive uses such as forestry, grazing, and mining, for example, they fought valiantly to prevent the worst abuses. But they often found it easier to forge alliances with large ranchers and mining and timber companies than with subsistence users or small-scale commercial operations.

Similarly, on public lands devoted to non-extractive uses, such as national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas, certain parts of the public consistently benefited more than others.

In particular, administrators focused

on the white middle- and upper-class tourists they assumed were most likely to appreciate and respect such areas’ aesthetic and scientific marvels. Despite efforts since the 1990s to make public lands more welcoming to minority and working-class visitors, they continue to be haunted by the ghosts of race- and class-based discrimination.

care for the land. Rather than placing control solely in the hands of distant bureaucrats, it gave an intertribal advisory commission an important management role. In short, it tried to support the needs and wishes of people with strong connections to the land while also ensuring that the land remained publicly accessible.

Perhaps no group in the U.S. has suffered more from the public lands system’s failures to live up to its promise than the indigenous nations that have used and cared for those lands for centuries or millennia. In some cases, their ancestors were forcibly evicted from those lands before they were designated as “public”; in others, the establishment of monuments or parks criminalized their traditional uses of the land. There are thus good reasons for Native Americans, like certain other groups, to see public lands as benefiting a “public” from which they have largely been excluded.

Today’s political polarization can make it hard to find common ground. While conservationists are sometimes tempted to take a technocratic approach to public lands, that can only further erode public support over the long-term. But turning the public lands system over to market forces, as their opponents sometimes suggest, will only unleash the kinds of heedless exploitation that led to calls for Bears Ears in the first place. By protecting public land and strengthening tribal voices, Bears Ears was precisely the kind of experiment that might point the way beyond such entrenched oppositions.

These histories of exclusion have contributed to a crisis of legitimacy for the public lands system, even as visitation to some parks and monuments has boomed. As the physical infrastructures of the public lands crumble from overuse and underfunding, so does the belief that those lands are managed in the public interest.

And if public lands never really served the public as a whole, then why should the public as a whole pay for them?

Last October, the National Park Service announced that it is considering a drastic hike in entrance prices.

The national monument system is far from perfect, and the Bears Ears model is no panacea. But it was a step toward a system that takes indigenous land claims seriously, that protects cultural and natural landscapes together, that looks to the future rather than solely seeking to preserve the past, and—above all— that believes that public lands can serve a higher purpose than resource extraction or white middle-class tourism. For anyone who still hopes that the public lands can live up to their original promise—as the intertribal coalition that is suing to reverse the executive order does—that is something worth fighting for.

Bears Ears marked a promising swerve in this often-disheartening history.

Advocated by a coalition of five tribes— the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Ute Indian, and Ute Mountain Ute—the monument both protected archaeological sites from looting and vandalism and ensured that native people could continue to use and

Etienne Benson is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and Sociology of Science.

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A VIRTUAL WORLD FOR AN ANCIENT SOCIETY Clark Erickson, Professor of Anthropology, has made a career of studying humans’ effect on their physical landscapes—past and present.

BY

SUSAN AHLBORN PHOTOGR APHY BY

KYLE KIELINSKI

OMNIA

O

ne student wields a bow and arrow, another a stone axe. A third lies in a hammock. It’s all part of Professor of Anthropology Clark Erickson’s resolution to put people into our picture of the past, and to understand how what they did affects our world today.

Most depictions of past civilizations have no human context: They’re sterile computer images of recreated temples or museum displays of relics. Erickson realized his own tendency to unconsciously dehumanize the past when he was a graduate student. “Archeologists learn about people through their stuff, so the stuff sometimes becomes more important than the people,” he says. “We make stuff the subject of sentences. Show stuff on slides. I decided as much as possible to make people the subject of the sentence.”

During his career studying the relationship between people and land in pre-Columbian agricultural societies in Peru and Bolivia, Erickson has authored three books and dozens of articles, each illustrated with drawings and paintings produced by an artist colleague, Dan Brinkmeier. As Curator-in-Charge of the American section of the Penn Museum, Erickson has designed innovative exhibits that include modern items next to ancient, recordings of Native Americans, and even projects by contemporary artists.

A virtual past world, The Pre-Columbian Hydraulic Landscape of Baures, Bolivia, is Erickson’s latest project to make people the subject of the sentence.

He’s involving undergraduates in this endeavor—they’re being recorded as they use implements from the era, to create animations of the people of that time and modeling architecture, earthworks, and individual objects in 3-D, many from the collections of the Penn Museum. These will become part of an immersive digital world that will let us see that era complete with its inhabitants living everyday life in their cultural landscapes.

For Erickson, understanding these societies is also about taking human agency and intentionality into account in our view of the world today, for a long-term perspective on environmental change, biodiversity, and sustainable management. He believes that humans have been leaving their mark on the Earth—for better and for worse—for a very long time.

As he sees it, “Moving beyond the myths of pristine environment and the ecologically noble savage and the assumptions that most human activities affect the environment negatively lets one appreciate the human creativity, agency, and traditional environmental knowledge that was employed to domesticate landscapes for human use.”

PATTERNING ON THE PAST Archaeologists realized in the 1960s that parts of South America once thought to be primeval were actually riddled with patterns that must have been caused by humans. Systems of built-up earthen platforms surrounded by canals, these “raised fields” were found in wetlands or places where a dry season alternates with rains, such as much of the Amazon region.

“You get standing water and waterlogged soils that make the land very difficult to use for anything. But for some reason, early people sought out those landscapes and figured out ways to raise up the earth,” says Erickson. “It brought up the usual big questions: Who? Why? How? What did they grow? And what was life like for the people who did this?”

Early humans did not tiptoe through the forest leaving only footprints ... and nature just didn’t groW back to some pristine state. Nature never does that.

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Many of his colleagues, he says, see American archeology through a political economy theory, looking at formation of classes, equality, and the use of ideology and power by allies. “That’s the case in many situations. But from my perspective, having lived in rural communities, a lot of it has to do with whether the people have an investment in the land, meaning that they own the land and they make improvements to the land that they can pass down to their sons and daughters.”

Over time, these management practices transform environment into productive cultural landscapes, often sustaining large populations for centuries or longer.

As an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Erickson spent time working alongside community farmers in Bolivia, which he says helped him understand how to use analogies of people today to understand the past and how to see what has changed. While a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he built a (small) raised field of his own, then designed a project that used traditional archaeological methods as well as experimental archaeology to recreate the raised fields in South America in collaboration with Quechua farmers.

(L – R): Clark Erickson, Professor of Anthropology; Olivia Bridges, C’20; and Samantha Seyler, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology and teaching assistant, examine an Inca textile brought to Penn from Peru in 1896.

OMNIA

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“Experimental archaeology means taking the evidence that exists today, like a forensic scene, and using reverse engineering to figure out how it worked,” he says.

Erickson spent three and a half years in the Peruvian Highlands near Lake Titicaca, working with the local Quechua people to create, plant, and harvest raised fields. The project began to receive support from the government of Peru and interest from the United Nations, CARE, USAID, local NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and indigenous communities who wanted to use traditional technologies for sustainable development.

Before violence accompanying a communist movement and the government response ended most projects in Peru in 1986, they had 24.7 acres of raised fields in use. Raised fields could work in the contemporary world.

BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE Erickson remembers his first tour of the Penn Museum, when he came to the University as an assistant professor in 1988. “It seemed like miles and miles of shelves packed with Andean and Amazonian ethnographic and archaeological objects,” he says. “I was just thinking, oh, I could use all these for my teaching.”

Many of these artifacts are now becoming part of The Pre-Columbian Hydraulic Landscape of Baures virtual world. This fall, Erickson and Norman Badler, Rachleff Family Professor of Computer and Information Science in Penn Engineering, taught Visualizing the Past/Peopling the Past.

In the class, students helped populate a virtual world that will ultimately show a thriving landscape complete

with hundreds of people going about their everyday lives—walking, paddling canoes, hunting, making fires, socializing, cutting down trees, tending fields, and sleeping in hammocks.

Experimental archaeology means taking the evidence that exists today, like a forensic scene, and using reverse engineering to figure out hoW it Worked.

In the class, students critiqued previous representations of the past—often unconsciously biased by implicit assumptions and stereotypes about gender, race, and class in professional writing, artistic reconstructions, museum exhibits, technical illustration, textbooks, and popular culture like film, magazines, and documentaries. The students learned to think not only of the people who lived then, but also the viewpoint, assumptions, and logic, in visualizing and peopling the past, of those who created the representation.

“One of the most interesting things was the social aspect of presentation of ancient people and how a lot of that is influenced by our social politics,” says Julia Bell, C’19. “We would talk about whether virtual reality models in museums could make things more or less democratic.”

Students researched and studied items ranging from weapons, stone axes, and canoes to household items like hammocks; cooking, food processing, and storage vessels; beer-drinking bowls; baskets; and fish traps. Using the ViDi Center for Digital Visualization, they created a digital model of the object, then used a state-of-the-art motion capture system to perform and animate how it was used. Along the way they learned to use contemporary 3-D modeling tools and animation engines.

Badler emphasizes that the students do not use 3-D scanning to create the digital versions of the objects. Instead, students must study every detail of the item and figure out how to build the 3-D model from scratch, a process that parallels how the object was originally put together. The students also did library research about specific objects and how they were made and used within Amazonian cultures.

“When you think of a bow, it’s a piece of wood and a string,” says Badler. “But the students get down to really modeling the appearance and shape of the ropes and twine that are used to make it. The level of detail they had to get to was not something they would have been able to experience any other way.”

Bell and her team modeled a hammock. “It was hanging on a wall, and we had to make it look like it was organically hanging from something with gravity pulling on it. If you think of pulling a hammock taut, it’s so instinctive, but to actually translate that into a model is a lot of trial and error,” she says. “Then when we put the texture on the model so it looked real instead of just a white blob hanging there, the difference was really vivid.”

Clockwise from top: Angel Fan, ENG’20, demonstrates how to use a bow to create an animation for the virtual world project; Fan is outfitted with motion capture sensors; the computer’s rendering of her actions.

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“The students are working to create an immersive experience that we could turn into an educational game,” says Erickson. An early version of the virtual world constructed in a modern 3-D game engine opens with a bird’s-eye view, then swoops down to reveal fields, causeways, canals, fish weirs, and houses. Erickson points out that you can see the animated grass bending in a breeze and how it parts when a 3-D human model walks through it. “It’s just incredible,” he says.

Anthropology graduate student Justin Reamer says, “Clark is using the virtual world for outreach in public communities in Bolivia and getting their feedback. It can be a device to open up a conversation with the public and get them interested in archaeology. When you can say, here’s what we think the sites would look like, it allows more of a dialogue for interpretations and can make for involved and interested people.”

Images from the virtual world project.

PEOPLE POWER Erickson has continued his research on pre-Columbian raised fields and other earthworks in Bolivia. He became more interested in the aesthetics and sheer size of the earthworks, which covered hundreds of square miles. Some had earthen causeways or raised roads up to 40 feet wide and three miles long forming networks across the landscape.

“These fields and other public earthworks are not just functional,” he says. “They would have been these people’s versions of monuments, imposing order and inscribing it right on the landscape with these incredible causeway and canal systems for communication, transportation, farming, and fishing for very, very large communities.”

Erickson is now working with NASA using satellite and other imagery to determine if the people understood and were

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The students are Working to create an immersive experience that We could turn into an educational game.

Fiona Jensen-Hitch​, C’19, examines an object from Penn Museum’s collection.

intentionally exploiting hydraulic principles. “Some of these earthworks were not just draining water but controlling it, to keep it on the landscape longer and to create fisheries, which provided them with protein.”

For Erickson, the pre-Columbian earthworks demonstrate what human communities can do, given time. “There were hundreds of years of people working these landscapes—using trial and error, working things out, understanding how to make that land productive.”

In doing so, Erickson says, they changed the face of the earth forever. The interface of artificial canals and earthworks created new, rich, and productive transitional zones between aquatic and terrestrial life. Raised fields changed soil profiles as far as a yard or more below the

surface, full of archaeological remains.

By selecting and encouraging species of plants and animals they found useful, the farmers altered the character of their environment. Even before farming, systematic landscape burning strategies undertaken by hunter-gatherers for managing useful resources have shaped most ecologies in the world.

Erickson is using all of his tools to spread the word (and images). “Indigenous cases of successful landscape domestication need to be translated through popular media into practical solutions for the problems we face today,” he says. “We need to use drawing, painting, technical illustration zines, digital modeling, virtual reality, animation, and collaboration with science writers.” He’s collaborated with his long-time illustrator Dan Brinkmeier to start several zines that teach

people about raised field agriculture and fish weirs. One, written in English and Quechua, is for younger readers and describes the history of the region.

“People can change the environment more now than in the past, but early humans did not tiptoe through the forest leaving only footprints,” says Erickson.

“And nature just didn’t grow back to some pristine state. Nature never does that.”

He argues that, far from being limited by their environment, the people in pre-Columbian South America domesticated the land itself. “They had the ingenuity to figure things out. These societies were successfully packing a lot of people on landscapes using very effective techniques to make those lands productive and sustain a good life.”

OMNIA

ANGELA DUCKWORTH, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, explores why perseverance matters.

SACHA ADORNO PHOTOGRAPHY BY KYLE KIELINSKI ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAN LEE BY

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

OMNIA

sychologist Angela Duckworth knows grit—and people want to know what she knows.

Her book on the character trait spent more than 20 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. She has shared insights on the matter with the White House, the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, Fortune 500 CEOs, and school districts across the country. Some 13 million people have watched her TED Talk, making it one of the most viewed ever.

Over the past 10 years, Duckworth’s research on grit, which she defines as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, has become a touchstone for teachers, parents, coaches, employers, and others who encourage and cultivate success.

“I have always felt very motivated by public service. I remember feeling in college a tremendous sense of conviction and determination for public service. It’s really what motivates me.”

If Duckworth’s professional life centers around understanding character traits like stick-to-itiveness, was there a moment in her personal life when she remembers first persevering for a passion—when she recognized her own grit?

Duckworth’s earliest lasting act of public service was as a Harvard undergrad.

“I was acutely aware that the school’s verdant campus was a stone’s throw away from persistently poor communities,” she says. “I felt sad for all of the bright kids whose lives were not headed in a direction they were worthy of or deserved.”

“This is certainly a question I've reflected on, given what I do for a living,” says Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

This striking contrast between opportunity and disenfranchisement inspired Duckworth to start a nonprofit enrichment program for kids in Cambridge. She

raised money, secured a facility, hired staff, recruited students, and incorporated, all while barreling toward the end of senior year. The program, Breakthrough Greater Boston, opened two weeks after she graduated and remains open today. Duckworth would run it for two years before heading to Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship to earn a Master of Science in neuroscience.

Following Oxford, she worked in a series of intense environments such as McKinsey and Philadelphia, New York City, and San Francisco public schools.

While teaching, Duckworth observed that her highest-achieving students weren’t always the smartest or most talented and

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, advocates classroom lesson plans that target specific character traits, such as curiosity and self-control.

her smartest students weren’t always high achievers.

What successful students had in common was selfcontrol, stamina, and commitment to hard work.

Intrigued by the phenomenon, she applied to Penn’s doctoral program in psychology to investigate it, expressing in her application a distinctive view of education.

“Learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying—but it is also often daunting, exhausting, and sometimes discouraging. To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

At Penn, Duckworth studied with positive psychology movement pioneer Martin Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Psychology Center, building a body of research on the relationship between character—particularly grit and self-control—and achievement. Her work reverberated among educators and school reformers eager to find a measurable approach to helping kids across the socioeconomic spectrum succeed.

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OMNIA

In 2013, by then a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, Duckworth was recognized as a MacArthur Fellow. Known as the “genius” grant, the fellowship acknowledges professional, artistic and intellectual ingenuity, across a range of fields. Duckworth received the grant for transforming common understandings of the roles that grit and self-control play in educational achievement.

The same year, as Duckworth’s research on grit gained traction nationwide, she established the Character Lab, a nonprofit that studies and creates new ways of cultivating character. The Lab pursues initiatives to help one million or more middle- and high-school students improve an aspect of their character.

Located near Penn, the Lab’s 16-person team of researchers, educators, and product, design, and communication specialists—an extra supportive team member is the “Lab’s Best Friend,” a rescue dog belonging to one of the staff—takes a twofold approach to cultivating character.

First are Playbooks that help teachers translate character development research into classroom practice. Featuring ready-to-use videos, lesson plans, and worksheets, the resources target specific character traits: curiosity, grit, gratitude, self-control, purpose, growth-mindset, and zest. The Lab’s second priority is making character development field research “fast, frictionless, and fruitful.”

“We’ve learned the hard way that it takes at least a full year for a scientist to begin collecting data for a single school-based research study,” says Duckworth in the Lab’s 2017 Annual Letter. “Researchers first have to find and develop a relationship with school partners, then obtain written parental consent and approval from university research institutional review boards in order to access identifiable student data, next arrange to administer study protocols during school hours, and finally secure report card grades and other data from schools.”

The growing Character Lab Research Network of scientists and schools hopes to solve this problem. The web-based network facilitates rapid prototyping, longitudinal studies, and high-powered, pre-registered, randomized controlled trials of character development research.

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In 2016, Duckworth published her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. It catapulted her to the mainstream. She became a highly sought-after consultant or speaker for school districts and determined places like Google, Adobe, and the Seattle Seahawks. And a multitude of media outlets, among them NPR, The New York Times, Elle, HuffPost, Marie Claire, Forbes, and PBS News Hour, have cited the book.

A #1 New York Times best seller, the book draws on lessons from history, literature, and interviews with high-profile people to explore why effort counts twice toward goals; how to trigger lifelong passion for an activity; if warm embraces or high standards are better for children; and whether grit can be learned.

Today, Duckworth is widening the aperture on character to look at behavior overall. With Wharton’s Katherine Milkman, Evan C Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Associate Professor of Operations,

A young Angela Duckworth with her family.

Information, and Decisions, she has launched Behavior Change for Good (BCFG), a new initiative ambitiously described as “the greatest interdisciplinary effort in history to solve the problem of enduring behavior change” (see sidebar on p. 30).

“The project's goal is to answer the riddle of how to get people to do things that are in their best interest,” Duckworth explains. “This is true across all the domains of life, from taking care of your health to studying and learning to manage money.”

Behind the initiative is Duckworth’s “dream team” of behavioral scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, three MacArthur Fellows, and two members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The group is designing behavioral interventions in three focus areas: health, education, and personal finance.

“The challenge in these domains is that everyone really does know what's good for them, but it's very hard to make the

consistent, small choices that create change for good,” says Duckworth. “It’s an age-old worry, but we feel like we have a chance of really figuring things out because we have two things unavailable to ancient philosophers and theologians: technology and the modern science of behavior change.”

The initiative will work with partners, including national health care organizations, school districts and education providers, banks, and fitness chains, to digitally deliver behavior change programs to customers and students.

The programs are designed by BCFG team scientists.

“Both Angela and I see behavior change as the most important problem of our time,” says Milkman. “And it’s one that we can make major steps toward solving.”

The genesis of BCFG was a Universitywide call for projects for 100&Change, a MacArthur Foundation competition for a $100 million grant to solve a single, critical world problem. Duckworth, Milkman,

CHANGING BEHAVIOR for the BETTER, FOREVER

Every day in the U.S., smoking, unhealthy eating, lack of exercise, alcohol consumption, and other changeable behaviors cause 40 percent of premature deaths. One in three families has no retirement savings. And half of college students drop out before earning a degree. The Behavior Change for Good Initiative (BCFG) believes behavioral science has the potential to radically change these outcomes.

BCFG unites dozens of leaders in the social sciences, business, medicine, computer science, and neuroscience across top research universities to help improve people’s daily decisions about health, education, and savings.

Using a digital platform and client relations infrastructure built and operated by Penn, the team will seamlessly incorporate the latest insights from their research into massive randomassignment experiments. The unprecedented sample sizes and speed with which BCFG can run dozens of studies at once represents a paradigm shift in social science research.

BCFG’s research team partners with some of the world’s leading companies and nonprofits to help change for the good behaviors of the partners’ customers, students, or members.

Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, maintains a regular teaching schedule, leading a master’s degree course and advising undergrads completing their research requirements.

and colleagues drafted a proposal they argued could help with the challenge of “enduring behavior change.”

“I saw the email announcing the eight 100&Change finalists before Angela did, so I called her to share the news that we weren’t in the set,” Milkman recalls. “The first thing she said when I told her we hadn’t made the final eight was: ‘What!?!?

That’s crazy!’ The second thing she said was ‘Well, obviously, we’re doing this anyway!’ Now that’s grit!”

And they did. The University and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have provided funding for an initial three years, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given early support. (Anyone interested in following the initiative’s progress can tune in to the Freakonomics Radio podcast archive. The podcast, a big fan of Duckworth’s research, has been reporting on BCFG since it was in the running for 100&Change.)

The BCFG team is already testing two behavior change programs. In the StepUp Program, the researchers are working with 24 Hour Fitness, one of the largest national gym chains, to monitor the frequency of gym visits. The scientists are aiming for hundreds of thousands of data points.

The LevelUp Program, conducted in partnership with the Character Lab Research Network, involves tens of thousands of high school students doing different activities to see which boost their grades the most.

In the meantime, as the work of changing behavior goes on around the country, Duckworth is maintaining a regular teaching schedule. She leads the master’s degree course Research Methods and Statistics and advises undergrads completing their research requirements.

And this fall, she and Milkman are co-teaching an undergraduate seminar on behavior change.

“Before I became a psychologist, when I was teaching younger students, I knew I would work on behalf of kids for the rest of my life,” remembers Duckworth.

Her work for young people has been, by the accounts of many parents, teachers, academics, and students, revolutionary.

And as she now tackles the next frontier of behavioral psychology—making lifealtering behavior change possible—her work has clearly only just begun.

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ONLINE CONTENT

OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/ONLINE-CONTENT

Be sure to visit OMNIA online for exclusive multimedia content that covers all aspects of Penn Arts and Sciences research, including faculty, students, alumni, and events.

Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

FACULTY CYCLISTS: OVER THE RIVER, THROUGH THE WOODS, AND DOWN 34TH STREET (VIDEO) In this story, we focus on faculty whose preferred method of commute is biking. This includes video of Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Biology Paul Sniegowski's harrowing route.

ORIGIN STORIES: KAREN REDROBE, THE FILM SCHOLAR (VIDEO) History of Art’s Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor in Film Studies, stars in the latest episode of Origin Stories, the OMNIA video series that traces the academic journeys of members of our faculty from impressionable young students to world-class researchers.

OMNIA PODCAST: POETRY AND THE PULSE OF LIFE (AUDIO) As part of our OMNIA Podcast series, we speak with Taije Silverman, Lecturer in the Department of English, who has been featured in the Best American Poetry collections for the past two years.

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 as 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!

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Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Professor of Economics, discusses the potential—and pitfalls—of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

By Blake Cole Illustrated by Sam Chivers

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magine never having to deal with inconvenient bank branch hours again, or having to worry about costly transaction fees. Or maybe you don’t like the government being able to track your purchases. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin tout solutions—a trading model for the people, by the people.

But what happens when users wise up and take advantage of a system often accessible only to those with the technological wherewithal and computational power to succeed? Do these platforms need to fail before they can be regulated and reapplied to everyday purposes? Is government oversight really something we want to give up? We sat down with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Professor of Economics, for an introduction to the budding cryptocurrency market.

WHAT IS CRYPTOCURRENCY?

Soccer cards worked as currency when I was in second grade.

At the very fundamental level there is nothing very different between that and a piece of cryptocurrency.

Perhaps the best way to think about cryptocurrency is from an historical perspective. So many people don't realize this, but there have been plenty of private monies throughout the course of history.

This is essentially just the trading of some kind of token for goods or services. Let’s say I walk into a Wawa and buy some tea. I give the cashier a token, which they then use to get some medical service, and then the son of the doctor uses that token, which eventually makes its way back to me. In a system like this, what you require is that these tokens are easy to recognize, that they are difficult to fake, and that somehow someone controls how many of those are issued.

From the beginning of the U.S. most tokens were issued by private banks. In 1850 you would have seen a bill issued by the Mechanics National Bank. For a number of reasons, governments took control of most of those private monies during the 19th century. And then suddenly with the arrival of the internet people revived the idea of having these private monies. First, because suddenly you don't need a network of bank branches to issue and handle that money because

everything can be done online, and second, because topographic techniques mean that the problem of verifying that this is in fact a token and not something else is radically simplified.

One of the problems of currency in the U.S. in the 19th century was that if you were a visitor from a different state, you might not be familiar with the currency. In fact, there were books for merchants that would tell you, say, how to identify this funny-looking bill from a bank in Massachusetts. But cryptocurrency solves this problem by making currency universal. So the idea of tokens hasn’t changed, no matter what form they take. Soccer cards worked as currency when I was in second grade. At the very fundamental level there is nothing very different between the soccer cards that I used to pay for an ice cream from one of my friends and a piece of cryptocurrency.

HOW DO SERVICES LIKE BITCOIN OPERATE GIVEN THERE’S NO OUTSIDE GOVERNANCE? It’s community-driven. In order to earn bitcoins, for instance, users are required to solve complicated math problems that require very powerful computers and a ton

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If I'm in the U.S., or if I'm in Europe, I'd rather trust the Federal Reserve System or the European Central Bank, but if I'm in a country with an unstable currency, I may rather take my chances with Bitcoin.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Professor of Economics

of electricity. The first individual, or company, who solves this problem broadcasts that answer, and if 51 percent of people in the network agree with it, then a few bitcoins are awarded.

The lack of oversight and anonymity afforded by the internet makes cryptocurrency extremely attractive for three groups of people: those involved in shady transactions; those in countries where the currency issued by the governments is not reliable; and finally, those who consider themselves libertarians, which includes conspiracy theorists concerned about the government taking over their freedoms.

Now, if I'm in the U.S., or if I'm in Europe, I'd rather trust the

Federal Reserve System or the European Central Bank, but if I'm in a country with an unstable currency, I may rather take my chances with Bitcoin.

MANY CRYPTOCURRENCIES LIKE BITCOIN USE TECHNOLOGY CALLED BLOCK CHAINING FOR TRANSACTIONS. CAN YOU EXPLAIN HOW THIS WORKS? Block chain is a new technology that promises to improve the ways in which we achieve transactions. It's an example of a whole new generation of payment technologies that can be much, much faster and cheaper. Forget about the fancy technological talk— block chain is really just a digital

ledger. The challenge of a system run by ledger is you need to trust the person who keeps it, and for that reason, block chain uses a centralized ledger in which users use codes to trade tokens and services. The concept being that if a sufficient number of people agree on a version of the ledger, you can trust each other. That can work fine in some situations, but it is not obvious that the problems that the block chain has are any less risky than the promise of trusting a central authority.

The first problem that block chain has is that it tends to grow over time. By very definition it forces you to keep every piece of

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It may well be the case that tomorrow there is a kid at Oklahoma State University working in his dorm who just came up with a killer app for which cryptocurrency will be just fantastic for everything.

information from the very first ledger. Given this, the size of these ledgers will become so big that it will be unrealistic to maintain them.

The second problem of block chains is they can be vulnerable to attack. You recall the Bond movie Goldfinger with Sean Connery? The villain wants to break into Fort Knox to detonate a dirty bomb that will contaminate it, thereby increasing the value of his own gold. Now let's suppose we're following a scenario where my real goal is not to profit from Bitcoin, but to destroy it. You get powerful servers that will sign up to bitcoin to create bots that help you pass a fake ledger. It will probably cost a few billion dollars, but this is way cheaper than building a nuclear bomb.

So if Bitcoin or any other of these currencies become the prevalent currency in a western country, we would be vulnerable to attack by a foreign power.

SOME VIEW CRYPTOCURRENCY AS THE NEW GOLD RUSH. IS THIS REALISTIC? Mining is done by big companies with very sophisticated computers, with very specialized software engineers, and in places where electricity is cheap. So, for the average person, you are never going to be able to mine. What is happening right now with cryptocurrencies is we have these rising prices and these drops.

But, cryptocurrency is not so different from a new technology on the stock market. You buy a share in that company and that share multiplies. So, imagine that have you been able to forecast that Bitcoin was going to have this enormous rally over the last year, then yes, you could make a fantastic return on the sale. But that applies to any financial asset that has bubbles and bursts.

WHAT TECHNOLOGIES INVOLVED IN CRYPTOCURRENCY TRADING MIGHT PROVE USEFUL ELSEWHERE? There are things we can learn from cryptocurrency.

For instance, you can use block chain to set up conditional payments, which lowers the risks of transactions falling through. The payment system we have right now in the U.S. is very antiquated. People still use checks a lot, and if you want to make a transfer between two banks it takes a long time and is very costly. So, we really want to move to a system of payments and settlements that is much more efficient and that relies much less on cash, and cryptocurrencies are exploring that.

But the last 20 years have taught us that things come in very unexpected ways. I think that a lot of the best ideas of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in terms of how to achieve payments faster and more efficiently, might end up being incorporated into mainstream payment systems, or places like the NASDAQ. My benchmark scenario is that in 10 years

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the average person in the U.S. will complete 95 percent of their transactions through cards, or electronic payments.

SHOULD CRYPTOCURRENCY BE REGULATED? Governments should never surrender the right to regulate because governments are just the natural outcome of the democratic process. I prefer a light regulatory framework and I think that we need to wait and

see how things play out. No one really knew at that moment how transformative the iPhone technology was going to be because no one really thought about all the crazy things people would use iPhones for. So it may well be the case that tomorrow there is a kid at Oklahoma State University working in his dorm who just came up with a killer app for which cryptocurrency will be just fantastic for everything.

The one thing we definitely need to do is educate a new crop of civil servants and regulators who are sufficiently savvy in these technologies, so that we'll have a pool of potential candidates to recruit that understand these issues. In the next few years, universities should make an effort to come up with programs where new generations of lawyers, accountants, and experts in finance are confident with all these issues and come prepared to work on them. 

Finding MacroLevel Answers in Microorganisms Mecky Pohlschrรถder, Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Biology, on gaining insights into the workings of microscopic ecosystems.

By Katherine Unger Baillie

Illustration by Jun Cen

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F

ound in the blackest deep-sea vents, in the salt-laden Dead Sea, and in boiling hot springs, archaea—the domain of single-celled microorganisms that are distinct from both bacteria and eukaryotes—were initially labeled extremophiles for their proclivity for harsh environments. But more recently these organisms have been found in habitats as commonplace as the human digestive tract and temperate soils, prompting a rethink of archaea’s diversity and roles.

completely new information to help us to understand not only archaea but bacteria and eukaryotes as well.”

have his hypothesis, he would test things, and he would see the results and make decisions based on his observations.”

Pohlschröder, who grew up on a farm in northwest Germany, didn’t imagine herself as a scientist in her youth. Having seen her father devote himself to the care of the family’s pigs and cows, for a long time she planned to become a veterinarian.

Pohlschröder’s plans for veterinary school faded when she realized she was thoroughly enjoying her biology classes, and a kind teacher pointed out to her that there was more to do with what she was learning than tend to the medical needs of animals. Thirsty to travel after a childhood that revolved around the pressing needs of her family’s farm, she won a fellowship enabling her to pursue her Ph.D. at an American institution. She enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studying how microbes degrade cellulose.

Comparing the similarities and differences between archaea and other life forms can give us completely new information to help us to understand not only archaea but bacteria and eukaryotes as well.

Since the group was defined as distinct from bacteria in the 1970s, researchers have come to understand archaea as a kind of bridge between bacteria and eukaryotes, possessing certain features that resemble each group and others that are all their own. Yet much is still unknown about the basic biology of these organisms and what role they play in the ecosystems they occupy.

“My dad was only in school for seven years, but thinking back I realize he was actually the first scientist I interacted with,” she says. “If a crop wasn’t growing the right way or an animal was sick, he would

Mecky Pohlschröder, Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Biology

These are the questions that have consistently driven Mecky Pohlschröder, a professor and the undergraduate chair of the Department of Biology. On the forefront of the archaea field, Pohlschröder has examined how these organisms make their way in the world, focused on how they use surface proteins to move, to form biofilms, and to anchor themselves in one place. Far from esoteric, her insights have the potential to inform the search for life on Mars and even the development of new strategies to combat infection.

Shira Yudkoff

“I’ve noticed in my 20 years of studying archaea,” she says, “that comparing the similarities and differences between archaea and other life forms can give us

On the cusp of earning her doctorate, she attended a conference and sat in on a talk that caught her attention. The speaker was Harvard University’s John Beckwith.

She ended up pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship in his lab, employing genetic techniques to investigate protein transport in E. coli.

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My dad was only in school for seven years, but thinking back I realize he was actually the first scientist I interacted with. If a crop wasn’t growing the right way or an animal was sick, he would have his hypothesis.

“I had been working more on the biochemistry side in my Ph.D. and John Beckwith was well known for genetics, so I came to the lab and there were high school and college students running gels and doing experiments that I had never done,” she says. “It was extremely humbling.”

Humbling, but educational. After three years of postdoctoral training, a similar chance experience, a lunch with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, directed her career down another new path. Smith, who had just sequenced the first bacterial genome, shared that he was next looking to sequence the genome of an archaeal species.

“I was very familiar with archaea from having been in a microbial ecology lab, says Pohlschröder, “and taking what I had learned from John [Beckwith]’s love for genetics and protein transport it was all very natural to start working with archaea.”

Which is exactly what she did when she joined Penn’s faculty in 1998. An advantage of studying archaea, besides the fact that few other scientists were at the time, was that they were fairly easy to work with in a laboratory setting. Researchers can express proteins from a heat-tolerant archaeal species in E. coli, let them grow, then bring the bacteria to a high temperature at which all the bacterial structures break down. At this point, only the hardy archaeal proteins remain, ready for experimentation.

For her laboratory studies, Pohlschröder typically uses Haloferax volcanii (H. volcanii), a salt-loving, or halophilic, organism isolated from near the Dead Sea and Great Salt Lake (not, as one might assume from the name, in a volcano; it was named NEED CAPTION

for its discoverer, Benjamin Elazari Volcani). Interested in how these microbes interact with their environment, she has concentrated her studies on the proteins expressed on the cell membrane.

NASA funds some of Pohlschröder’s work, as H. volcanii happens to tolerate the punishing conditions found on Mars: high-salt and high levels of gamma and ultraviolet radiation. Adaptations the Pohlschröder lab identified that permit H. volcanii to thrive in harsh environments might also come in handy on Mars.

A structure that has captured much of her attention has been pilins, small filaments that line the surface of archaea, as well as many bacteria. Their ubiquity suggests that they are a truly ancient adaptation, present in an organism that gave rise to both archaea and bacteria. These structures play roles in allowing organisms to adhere to surfaces or to one another to form biofilms. Pohlschröder’s group discovered that pilins can also regulate the movement of flagella, the “tail” that some archaea and bacteria use to swim around in their environments. These diverse functions make pilins an area ripe for study.

Collaborating with colleagues including David Roos, E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology, she has developed computational programs that enable her to screen a broad swath of microorganisms, including bacteria; to identify potential pilins; and then to investigate their functions.

“One of the programs has allowed us to see that there is a much larger diversity of pilins in the various organisms than had been predicted, giving us more targets to look at,” she says.

A subset of many motility plates stabbed to screen for Haloferax volcanii that are non- or hyper-motile.

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With Benjamin Garcia, Presidential Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Epigenetics Program at the Perelman School of Medicine, Pohlschröder’s lab is beginning to examine how protein modifications may play a role in biofilm formation, a line of investigation that could have relevance to antibiotic resistance in diseases like cystic fibrosis. She suspects pilins have a role to play.

“Biofilm formation in cystic fibrosis can make these cells up to a thousand times more resistant to antibiotics,” she says.

“If we can figure out how to prevent the formation or induce the dispersion of biofilms, that would be awesome.”

Alongside her research, Pohlschröder has poured attention into education and mentorship. And strange though they may sometimes seem, archaea have given Pohlschröder an excellent teaching tool.

“H. volcanii is ideal for use in student experiments because it is non-pathogenic and grows under high-salt conditions,

so human pathogens cannot grow on the medium and sterile techniques are not required to prevent contamination,” Pohlschröder says.

To share these lessons even more broadly, Pohlschröder has led professional development trainings for high school teachers from Philadelphia and other cities, providing teachers with supplies and equipment to carry out activities in their own classrooms, effectively reaching thousands of students.

Pohlschröder welcomes trainees in her lab, from postdocs on down to high school students. Committed to expanding the diversity of life scientists, including those from underserved populations, she has also hosted high school students from Philadelphia public schools for the last several years.

“I look for enthusiasm above all else in my students because I know that I work best when I’m enthusiastic,” she says. “If I’m not, then I’m not coming in at midnight

A plate showing Haloferax volcanii streaks with growth and pigmentation defects.

because there’s another time point I need to take in my experiment; it’s not going to happen.”

Just as veterinary medicine once seemed the only available career path for Pohlschröder, she sees many students at Penn whose focus trains too narrowly. “I see that in a lot of students here,” she says.

“The only thing they see is medical school or maybe veterinary school, but they’re fascinated with science.”

In her role as undergraduate chair, Pohlschröder has tried to open her students’ eyes to the possibilities, counseling them to look beyond the obvious choices.

“This has been true in my experience and it’s what I tell my students: If you keep an open mind and just listen to what’s out there, at some point there is going to be something that you will know, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

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1790 playbill advertising two comedies performed in the English town of Hull, The Belle’s Strategem and Harlequin Foundling, has 40 lines of text to describe the performance, including: “To conclude with a DANCE of FAIRIES in THE TEMPLE OF LIBERTY.” Playbills for 18th- and 19th-century dramatic performances such as this one are not only engaging, but filled with valuable information for researchers. How to capture and catalogue all of those varied, and often quirky, details for meaningful analysis? Neither a method nor a database exists.

Until now.

Michael Gamer, Professor of English, is collaborating with Scott Enderle, Digital Humanities Specialist at Penn Libraries, to design a database and online data-entry form to tag and classify the myriad descriptive elements in playbills.

The database will be searchable, allowing researchers such as Gamer to ask and answer questions that were previously impossible to pursue with certainty. “What else can playbills tell us other than what they are designed to tell us?” Gamer asks.

“Where did new dramas go after they premiered in London? If you have enough playbills, you can map that, and even imagine the lifespan of a play” adds Gamer, who is writing a book about English melodrama, Staged Conflicts. “Similarly, where do actors and actresses come from before they get to London? Which theaters are feeders for them? You could figure out those relationships, and how they change over time.”

Boxes and Boxes

of PLAYBILLS

The raw materials of theater history in the 1700s and 1800s are primarily playbills, along with newspaper theater reviews and advertisements. “People obsessively scrapbooked the way that people today have Pinterest accounts,” Gamer says.

That’s why libraries have boxes filled with playbill collections, and some are beginning to be made available online. The British Library recently digitized its entire collection of 18th- and 19th-century playbills and made them publically available—60 gigabytes of playbill data from 1770 to 1850 alone.

The Penn Libraries have a “treasure trove” of playbills from England and America, says John Pollack, Research Curator at Penn Libraries.

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The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts holds more than 6,000 playbills from before the 20th century, half in archival boxes and half in bound volumes. Among them are playbills from the entire run of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater. The Center additionally holds more than 8,000 playbills from the 20th century to now. About 600 of Penn’s playbills have been digitized.

But digital copies are not searchable data, so Gamer and Enderle are setting out to capture the data from an estimated 250,000 English 18th - and 19th-century playbills from the British and Penn library collections. Penn student interns started inputting data last summer, as the team helped to fine-tune the database's structure and its online data-input form. The long-term goal is to turn to crowdsourcing.

“No theater historian has been able to work with this quantity of data. You physically can’t,” Gamer says. “If I wanted to know how many performances the actor John Philip Kemble did in York in his career, or even get a sense of it, there is little way of finding that out without this type of database.”

The initial phase of the project has been funded by an incubation grant through the School’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

“We love that the project is using computers to ask research questions that would have been tough—if not impossible—to answer otherwise; to see patterns that are hidden in the mountain of data they are pulling together,” says Stewart Varner, Managing Director of the Price Lab. “It is also giving students the opportunity to get real experience working on a digitally enabled and collaborative project. This means they will learn tech skills as well as organizational skills.”

Michael Gamer (L), Professor of English, and Scott Enderle, Digital Humanities Specialist, examine playbills at the Kislak Center.

Where did new dramas go after they premiered in L O N D O N ?

If

you h av e e noug h p l ay bi l l s ,

you can map that, and even imagine T H E L I F E S PA N O F A P L AY.

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OMNIA

YOU COULD SEARCH

for every play in the

database that had

a s i x - p e n c e t i c k e t.

If you wanted to know

the cheapest plays in

BR I TA I N IN 1800,

you could find out.

Playbills from Penn’s collection.

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Last summer two interns, funded by a grant through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring program, helped develop the database forms while starting to input the data. Gamer expects to engage additional Penn interns this summer.

“This project was a great introduction to how we study English in an academic way, and especially how the digital humanities are beginning to be used,” says Samantha Claypoole, C’20.

Intern Imani Davis, C’20, an English and Africana Studies major, says the project also provided her a chance to conduct research on her own project about “how Blackness was performed on the British stage.”

PROVINCIAL Productions The provincial playbills—those not from London—are what Gamer and Enderle find the most interesting.

“Those who write about the history of the stage often focus on London,” says Gamer. “We figured we’d get the biggest bang for our buck by starting with provincial playbills, because so little is known about the provincial theaters. During these centuries the stage was fairly rigidly censored, especially London theaters, but also any of main theaters in provincial cities, so productions involving politics were often added to existing plays.”

The last line of the 1790 playbill for The Belle’s Strategem and Harlequin Foundling is an important clue in understanding of the power of provincial plays, he says.

The production was highly political, performed in an industrial town in the north a year after the start of the French Revolution.

“These are the people of Hull at a very partisan time, not dissimilar to our own, proclaiming liberty in defiance of the policies of a Church-and-King authoritarian government,” Gamer says. “They are saying: we love the French democratic revolution and we want to celebrate it with a dance of fairies in the Temple of Liberty.”

Using the new Penn playbill database, a researcher will be able to isolate, for example, the special performances to commemorate, celebrate, or condemn Bastille Day after the French Revolution. The ability to search in such detail will be important for Gamer’s book, as he plans to include a chapter surveying how British theaters responded to the battle of Waterloo, focusing on the years 1815 to 1820.

MODEL NIGHT at the THEATER Creating the fields on the form to capture that data was the challenge for Enderle, who earned his Ph.D. in English at Penn in 2011.

“We created a data model that can incorporate diverse information of interest to scholars from many different fields. That meant finding a way to represent the data in the playbills that is not standard,” Enderle says.

Traditional library data models are set up for titles and authors, which doesn’t apply well to playbills.

Other playbill databases currently under development are focused on simple transcription, where data is either uncategorized or only in the simplest ways, marking title, date, playwright, director, actor, and role.

The Penn data model has more than 50 possible fields in categories that can be expanded to include even more.

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“We intentionally did not adopt a fixed scheme because these playbills have so many different kinds of contributors other than authors. We didn’t want to throw that information out in case it was interesting to a future researcher,” Enderle says. The database has a “contributor” field that can include the name, as well as the position, like playwright or dance master or fireworks manager.

“This way, if you're interested in plays that have a certain musical conductor or scene-painter, you can find them. You will even be able to search by ticket price,” Gamer says. “You could search for every play in the database that had a six-pence ticket. If you wanted to know the cheapest plays in Britain in 1800, you could find out.”

During the summer, student interns Davis and Claypoole flagged the challenges they faced categorizing the data as they went along. As a result of their feedback, Enderle and Gamer tweaked the model. “In those first weeks of summer, Imani and Samantha really helped design the database,” Gamer says.

The team realized the minor and unusual details were often the most challenging to handle, but essential to include for future researchers.

“Something seemingly inconsequential on a playbill, like the name of its printer, could be as important as the leading actor,” Davis says. “I think that's remarkable, and can teach a lot about the value of process.”

For example, one challenge is how to categorize a special feature performance “In the character of a SAILOR by Mrs. Southgate?” or “A Clown’s Flight?” or a “Bevy of Nymphs”? Or, in an 1820 playbill in Penn’s collection, a performance of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors featuring a dozen songs from other plays, amounting to an unlikely production of Shakespeare's play as a musical?

“One of the real challenges was figuring out a way how to classify things that aren't common—and which often are the most interesting,” Gamer says. “We went

An antique illustration of a theater, circa 1770s.

through every single data-entry field painstakingly, discussing it with the team, revising as we went along.”

A critical decision was to input data exactly as presented. “We decided early on that we were only going to be interested in what the playbills actually said,” Gamer says. “Working with metadata librarians, we realized that if we were

trying to figure out the truth behind the playbills—such as the author of an obscure play for which no print copy exists—we would frequently be wrong.”

The Penn team is collaborating with a project at Texas A&M University developing software that can read and transcribe 18th- and 19th-century fonts, using Optical Character Recognition.

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Transcriptions can be important for researchers because they make data searchable in simple ways. However, the use of transcriptions for research is limited, he says, especially with large quantities of data.

A search for "York," for example, could bring up thousands of results: York the place, York the theater, York as a name, York as a character.

The team at Penn is working to combat the limits of transcriptions.

“With our structured data model you could ask for all the plays in 1793 acted at the York Theater with an actor named York,” Gamer says.

Future Roles About 1,000 playbills were put into the data model by the Penn student interns last summer. The team decided to focus on the years 1814 to 1819, the period after the French Revolution.

“We are just getting started,” Enderle says. The database may be made public in 2019 and then the project may go to crowdsourcing to input the data, following a set of prompts. New crowdsourcing tools are available to check and correct.

“It looks daunting, but it only takes about 10 to 15 minutes per playbill,” Gamer says.

Davis says the experience of working with the playbills has been important to her academic research and future career.

“I was challenged to work well both within my field and outside of my comfort zone,” Davis says. “As a scholar of Black literature, I learned the proceedings of handling research on a large archive of work without getting overwhelmed.”

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IN THE CLASSROOM

OMNIA

(L–R) Anna Todd, GR’21, Gabriel Raeburn, GR’20, and Danielle Holtz, GR’17 and Lecturer in History > Students attend a Deciphering

America lecture.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AMERICA

OMNIA visits a history course that covers challenging moments in American history.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Lisa Godfrey

IN THE CLASSROOM

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Popular accounts of history— the kinds taught in grade school or those that inform a cultural mythos—often produce simple, black and white narratives. In the Deciphering America: Telling Moments in American History course, things aren’t so simple.

“It’s history for grownups,” says Kathleen Brown, David Boies Professor of History. “And being a grownup means that you can carry dissonant thoughts with you.”

The course, originally taught by Brown and Walter Licht, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, covers 13 moments in American history, from Plymouth Plantation to the Cold War and Black Lives Matter. This semester, Brown is teaching alongside Danielle Holtz, GR’17, Lecturer in the Department of History, and teaching assistants Anna Todd, GR’21, and Gabriel Raeburn, GR’20.

In lectures and recitations, students go deep on these 13 moments.

Aided by primary sources including newspaper articles, paintings, and government documents, as well as scholarly articles, students analyze these small slices of the past.

“We made the decision that students will have a lot of information at their fingertips,” explains Brown.

“We’re aiming for them to ask questions about representations and invocations of the past. We take what may be familiar and defamiliarize it a bit.”

Benjy Zhang, C’21, says the pace of the course is manageable because of how the lectures, recitations, and readings complement each other.

“The lectures lay the groundwork and in the readings, you delve deeper,” he says. Rémi Cordelle, C’19, adds that “the structure really works. We discuss the lecture and readings in recitation and it helps you see things you missed.”

Students practice analytical skills in weekly journal entries, written in response to a visual or textual prompt (see sidebar). Students respond to each prompt twice: at the start of the week and again at the end, after attending the lectures and recitations.

Holtz sees a remarkable difference in the end-of-week entries. “Once you give students a sense of the players involved, language that was impenetrable comes to life.

When they go back to the source, suddenly the stakes are clear or they see things like satire or humor that they didn’t catch the first time around.”

Todd says that the journal entries are powerful for both students and instructors: “Seeing the light bulbs come on when I'm asking students to reinterpret the prompt from their initial impressions has been an exciting experience.” Raeburn agrees, saying, “Interpreting documents moves students away from thinking about history as memorizing facts.”

Hillary Aristotle, C’21, appreciates the journals because they help her work through information as she’s learning it. “In high school, history assignments were big papers once or twice a semester. With the journals, I’m writing every week and making sure I understand.”

Brown and Holtz want students to come away with a set of skills—the ability to read a text or look at an image and place it in context, think about intentions and consequences, and recognize complexities.

“We want students to think critically about history and about today,” Holtz says. “They can apply these skills to anything they encounter.”

"WASHINGTON AT PRINCETON"

Early in the course, students wrote journal entries responding to Charles Willson Peale’s painting “Washington at Princeton.” Students analyzed the military portrait of Washington wearing powdered hair, breeches, a navy and gold coat with epaulets, and a light blue sash across his vest. He leans against a cannon with a horse, solider, and flag immediately behind him. In class, Kathleen Brown, David Boies Professor of History, showed "Washington at Princeton" on the projector.

A student raised her hand. “Is that the same as from the prompt?” she asked.

“You’re going to have to work on that this week,” Brown replied.

It wasn’t quite the same—the sash had been painted out. But why? Brown explains: “In 1775, Washington was a new general. He was horrified that members of the continental army weren’t deferential to their officers. They didn’t recognize hierarchies. So, he instituted a system of sashes. He wore blue, other officers wore red, yellow, orange. Around 1779, Washington decided sashes smacked too much of aristocracy and distinction. We don’t know when, but at some point the sash was painted out of this portrait.

“The portrait begins to demonstrate Washington’s complex relationship with democracy. He was a military leader interested in hierarchy and taking Indian lands as soon as he could get hold of them.

He was a slave owner. He distrusted working-class people and worried about democracy becoming too popular. But, when he had an absolutely clear path to continued political power, he stepped away. And he was reputed to be scrupulously honest. I want students to come out thinking, ‘All these things are true about him.’”

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MOVERS & QUAKERS

OMNIA

READING IS FUNDAMENTAL Pieter M. Van Hattem

Jennifer Egan, C’85, sees fiction as a cultural artifact.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Jennifer Egan, C’85

Jennifer Egan, C’85, won a Pulitzer Prize for 2011’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a character-, time-, and space-hopping novel that she says “calls attention to narrative weirdness.” Most of the action in her latest novel, Manhattan Beach, takes place in New York City during World War II, where there is push and pull between terra firma and the underwater world of divers working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here, Egan talks about the “thrill and exhilaration” of writing about a bygone era and how Penn shaped her as a writer and thinker.

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Q: When did you first feel like a writer?

I don't know if I ever have really reached that point, but I know that I decided to become a writer in the gap year that I took before Penn. I had applied to Penn thinking I wanted to be an archaeologist and then I went on a small archaeological dig. I learned that the nuts and bolts of archeology were not as I had imagined. To me, the fun of archeology was the idea of imagining these former lives and finding artifacts of them—but digging, scraping the earth with a scalpel, and finding minute shards of pottery didn't really make me feel as close to those lives as I had wanted to feel.

Later that year, I traveled to Europe. It was a long way from home, so it was really thrilling in some ways but also very isolating. It was very uncomfortable to be so alone. I think in that discomfort I felt the essentialness of writing for me and I arrived at Penn knowing that I wanted to try to be a writer.

I have never wavered in that conviction.

Q: What is your writing and research process like?

With fiction, I'm creating the world that I'm writing about and with journalism I'm trying to crystallize things about the real world that I've learned. With journalism, there's an enormous amount of research that usually consists of archival research and, most importantly, talking to live human beings.

I use the same combination of approaches for fiction, but the process is geared more toward unlocking my unconscious.

Q: Do you seek input from other writers?

I have a writing group and, in fact, the first writing workshop I ever took was at Penn with Professor Romulus Linney in my sophomore year. That workshop was revelatory in that I learned how important feedback is to me and how exciting and enlivening the process of giving feedback to other people is. I still remember stories from that workshop.

I'm a big believer in the process of just listening and creating feedback based on that experience rather than reading a manuscript. In Romulus’s workshop, we read aloud. For me, that’s such an important part of attending to the music of language, and it all began in that sophomore workshop.

Q: Many reviews of your latest book, Manhattan Beach, have noted how different it is from your other fiction. Did you feel that it was a departure for you?

No, not at all. I knew that a lot of people would see it that way, because so many of my readers joined me with my previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which is structurally

MOVERS & QUAKERS

pretty wild and includes a 70-slide PowerPoint presentation.

Those readers were reasonably expecting more of the same, but I never do that. I'm always reacting against the prior book in whatever I'm doing.

I see Manhattan Beach as a pretty crazy book in its own right though, because it's really such a mash up of genres. I was thinking about mystery novels, maritime novels, and the whole history of literature in the sea. I love the idea of combining different kinds of narratives Q: What was the experience of writing Manhattan Beach like?

For five years, I was doing experiential research—interviewing people of all stripes. Longtime New Yorkers, women who had worked with the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. I went to a reunion of Army divers and actually interviewed a World War II diver. I also read a lot of World War II-era fiction. Even bad fiction, it makes no difference. Bad can be just as helpful as good because it tells so much about the period. Fiction is such a crucial cultural document.

When I started writing, I wrote for a year and a half in a kind of blind way, just seeing what happened. I filled 27 legal pads with 1,400 pages of handwriting. You can imagine it's pretty much a catastrophe. After that sprawling first draft, I use outlines and I'm much more analytical, but in that initial outpouring I work instinctively.

Q: How did your undergraduate experience shape you as a writer?

I can't overemphasize how important my time at Penn was to my development as a writer and as a thinker. My fiction is very idea-powered. I start with time and a place but I also usually start with some fairly abstract philosophical queries.

I feel like Penn really shaped me as an analytical thinker. I got to Penn knowing that I wanted to write, and I felt that in every possible way Penn supported that wish.

Q: What advice would you give to students interested in a career in writing?

The number one thing is to read. It has the advantage of being utterly entertaining but also making you smarter and more analytical, more empathetic. I'm also a big advocate for solitude. I think there are just times when it's important to get to know yourself and your own thoughts without an audience. Obviously writing is important, but to me that's actually secondary. Having something to write is what's really hard. What will give one the best chance of that are reading, thinking, and engaging in the world in a curious way.

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

THE NEW SALON Leslie Jones, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, is exploring the intellectual contributions of Black feminists on social media.

Jones uses the concept of the “salon” to create an intellectual genealogy of spaces where knowledge has been created. In early 18th-century France, a salon was a gathering of prominent intellectuals and artists at the home of a society host, usually a woman.

Recent Black feminist scholarship has described the beauty salon (launched in the American Jim Crow era) as a community-based epicenter for Black females to gather, discuss politics, and initiate social activism.

As a Price Mellon Doctoral Fellow in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Jones’ research focuses on a newer intellectual gathering place for women, specifically Black feminist women: Facebook and Twitter. Disentangling from the elite nature of the European salon, Jones is interested in the voices of everyday Black women, particularly those who are marginalized not only in the general sense but also within the corridors of intellectual production, such as academia. She says these newer types of intellectual gatherings, therefore, may be less like a salon and more like a “marketplace of ideas” that builds upon the subversive nature of beauty shop politics.

OMNIA

only missing out on a lot of important intellectual production, but also losing the pulse of the types of conversations that are happening in the public sphere,” Jones says. “That could compromise whether we're relevant as a discipline in the future.”

HOW A SONGBIRD CHANGES ITS TUNE Zachary Sheldon, C’19, intended to pursue a career in clinical medicine until a little bird told him he might be better suited for neuroscience research. Last year, Sheldon began studying zebra finches under the supervision of Marc Schmidt, Professor of Biology and Co-Director of the Biological Basis for Behavior program.

The project combines Sheldon’s interest in neuroscience with the coding skills he acquired minoring in computer science.

For his research project in Schmidt’s lab, Sheldon, a 2017–2018 College House Research Fellow, will disrupt neural signals that flow through what he believes is a critical piece of the zebra finch’s song production anatomy. His experiments will expand upon newly-developing research into the function of sensory

“Black female influencers like @FeminstaJones on Twitter cannot readily point to letters after their name or a university affiliation to give their arguments weight,” says Jones. “They have legitimization through their own experiences.

Zachary Sheldon, C’19

Courtesy of Zachary Sheldon

“For sociology to advance in the field of intersectionality and understanding interrelated systems of oppression, it must listen to the people who are positioned at these axes and doing this work. Otherwise, we're not

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Courtesy of Hajer Al-Faham

feedback in a field that, until now, has focused on an auditory system. Understanding the mechanisms of sensory feedback in birds will give researchers insight into parallels in the human basal ganglia and disorders like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Tourette syndrome, which could result from a malfunction in the feedback loop between the senses and the brain.

“The zebra finch song varies between individuals,” says Sheldon. “They have a specific song that they will sing over and over throughout their life.” The predictability of the finch’s song makes it an ideal, tractable model for sensory feedback research.

The chosen birds will receive an implant on the vagus nerve—a 3-D-printed nanoclip that wraps the nerve, allowing stimulation at a designated syllable in the bird’s song.

Current experiments performed by Kristen Miller, C’18, involve cutting the vagus nerve.

Sheldon hopes his research on auditory feedback and sensory impact will contribute to the valuable insights neuroscientists have discovered about songbird error detection and correction. He says, “If we understand the overall role that sensory feedback plays in this sensorimotor circuit, potentially we can translate that in to understanding how sensory feedback is integrated into the circuitry of the human brain.”

THE DYNAMICS OF IDENTITY Hajer Al-Faham, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, is an Iraqi refugee who came to the U.S. as a young child in the early 1990s. “In school,

Hajer Al-Faham, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science

whenever we learned about Muslims or Arabs, it was in the context of a political crisis or political violence,” she says. “But these were not the experiences I had in my faith community or my cultural community. These stereotyped images and simplistic stories drew me to academia.”

Al-Faham studies the intersecting politics of race, immigration, and religion, with an emphasis on Muslim and Arab populations. Her data-driven research investigates how people respond to discrimination: Does being part of an unpopular group mobilize people to engage more in

politics, or cause them withdraw from the political sphere? For her first published research project, Al-Faham found that Muslim American women experienced a form of gendered racialization—such as discrimination based on religious dress— that affected their day-to-day lives in powerful ways.

She is determined to advance research that lawmakers can apply in designing policies that are “sensitive and respectful” to Muslims and will better integrate them into American society instead of causing “heightened marginalization.”

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Al-Faham, who received the 2017 Muslim Women's Justice Award through the Islamic Scholarship Fund, considers engaging young people to be just as valuable as producing data to guide fair policy development. As a teaching assistant for a constitutional law course, she pushes her students to challenge their own perspectives.

“I don’t want to shape anything they say in class, so I don’t tell them I’m Muslim until the end of the semester. My hope is that they then think of me the next time they think about Muslims, rather than the stereotypes they see on TV.”

MATTERS OF CULTURE AND CLASS Abundant research has shown that middle- and upper-class parents participate more actively in their children’s schooling than their working-class counterparts, but, separately, that immigrant families report significant barriers to school involvement.

This led Phoebe Ho, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, and Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, GR’14, to co-author a study in The Sociological Quarterly that bridges these largely disparate bodies of literature.

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“Our educational system is quite unusual in that we expect a lot of parental involvement, and that’s sort of unheard of outside the U.S.,” Ho says.

In their study, Ho and Cherng compared patterns in multiple forms of parental involvement—school-based, communication-based, and home-based—for native and immigrant families in which the mothers did and didn’t go to college.

The study found that at all class levels, immigrants were less likely to do things like attend parent-teacher meetings and contact their children’s teachers directly. These results reinforced the researchers’ suspicion that social class has less of an influence on immigrants’ involvement in their children’s education than it does on native parents.

Ho and Cherng believe their study can help change the way American educators reach out to immigrant parents. They would also like to see sociologists broaden the ways they look theoretically at social class.

“We need to come to a better understanding of how social class works across different types of families. How social class looks in one specific group might not be what we see in another group,” Ho says.

JACK STACK PURSUES HIS PALEONTOLOGICAL DREAM Some paleontologists travel far and wide to seek new fossils—to the remote regions of China or the farthest tip of Argentina. Jack Stack, C’19, on the other hand, made his first paleontological discoveries much closer to home.

At home, in fact.

Ph.D. candidate Phoebe Ho > Hua-Yu

Sebastian Cherng, GR’14

Courtesy of Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng

Courtesy of Phoebe Ho

“When I played outside as a kid, I started finding bits of invertebrates, corals and shells in the gravel that was dumped there,” says Stack. It wasn’t long after those driveway discoveries that Stack started keeping an eye out for fossils wherever he went.

Now, Stack has published articles and a book, initiated and led several research projects, given talks at leading scientific conferences, and is an active member of the lab of Lauren Sallan, Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies.

“Most undergraduates, you bring them into the lab and they don’t necessarily know what they’re interested in,” says Sallan. “Jack has the direction and drive of an advanced graduate student.”

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

Eric Sucar

Jack Stack, C'19

Since arriving in Philadelphia, Stack has embarked on other research projects with Sallan. Using fossils, he redescribed an ancient long-nosed fish species called Tanyrhinichthys. He presented his findings in a talk before an international gathering of fish paleontologists in Chęciny, Poland.

THE AWARD GENDER GAP Between 1990 and 2016, men won 60 percent of three major U.S. awards—the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle award. English major Savannah Lambert,

C’18, is using digital technology to learn more about why books by and about women are less likely to win.

“I became really interested in this project because, as much as some might argue that awards are silly or that no one can objectively say ‘What is good literature?,’ these awards are important and they do make a difference in an author’s sales,” she says. “What does that say about the kinds of voices we value?”

She used Python, an open-source programming language, to look at the text of the books to see if there were any objective differences between male and female authors, such as numbers of adjectives used. “I really didn’t find any significant difference based on gender, which I think in itself says something.”

Her findings show that not only do women win these awards less frequently, but that books by women and men are

less likely to win if they focus on women or girls as the main characters. Books written by women that win awards tend to focus on male characters—a split that doesn’t exist for the male authors.

Lambert is also examining the genders of the members of the committee who chose each year’s award. Beyond that, she wants to do case studies of a few “particularly salient” years. Ultimately, she says, “I would never claim that there’s a single definitive cause of the gender gap we’re seeing among award winners, but my findings could provide one telling explanation for a certain gendered bias or trend we see. The first step is just pointing out what the issues are.”

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USING PLAYING CARDS TO REVITALIZE LANGUAGE AND PROMOTE ECOLOGICAL DIVERSITY For two years, Ana Alonso, C’18, a double major in linguistics and environmental science, has worked with tribes in the Flathead Nation in Montana to help preserve and transmit Traditional Ecological

OMNIA

Knowledge (TEK). Alonso’s interests in environmental preservation, climate change, and language revitalization converge in her work to develop a game that shares TEK through playing cards.

“In TEK, individuals are understood to be dependent on the environment and responsible for it, rather than objective observers,” says Alonso. “It’s a community-specific knowledge that comes from direct contact with the environment over time and is traditionally passed down from generation to generation.” She notes that regions around the world with the highest biodiversity are shaped

by TEK-based management by indigenous people.

Alonso has repeatedly heard concern from the people she works with that the ability to recognize and steward hundreds of plant and animal species is

being lost, along with tribal languages.

A linguistic consultant for a company called Native Teaching Aids, she received a Penn Climate Action Grant to develop a TEK card game for an Anishinaabe group in Minnesota.

In the game, Mawinzo (“Picking Berries”), players collect berry cards to feed their tribe, and the player who feeds the most tribal members wins. Learning Ojibwe and gaining traditional ecological knowledge are necessary to advance in the game.

“Our games are designed for immersion in both language and ecology,” she says.

“They’re educational but also really fun.

They become a resource for schools, community groups, and families and are a great way to engage people of all ages who like games.”

Ana Alonso, C’18

Alex Schein

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

OMNIA

Ben Talks in NYC: Making a Difference in Diverse Communities Penn alumni, friends, and parents gathered in New York City for the Penn Arts and Sciences Ben Talks program, generously hosted by Penn Arts and Sciences Overseer and Penn Trustee Dhan Pai, W'83, and his wife Heena Pai, PAR'12, PAR'15. This year’s program featured three faculty speakers discussing how students and faculty from the arts and sciences are addressing pressing issues in communities around the world through Making a Difference in Diverse Communities, which supports initiatives that combine coursework, research, and service.

Lee Chaikin, W’95; Wendy Chaikin, C’98; Terry Laufer, C’87

Peter Decherney, Professor of English, presenting his talk, “Reclaiming Refugee Stories.”

(L–R) Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience; Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of German and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities; Peter Decherney, Professor of English and Director of Cinema and Media Studies; Heena Pai and Dhan Pai, W’83, PAR’12, PAR’15, hosts; and Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy

Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Women’s Alliance Career Roundtables The Professional Women's Alliance (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.

Each semester, PWA hosts Career Roundtables events, to provide students with an opportunity to learn about the wide variety of career paths possible with a liberal arts degree.

Jamila Justine Willis, C’06 (R), Associate at DLA Piper Suzie Cohen, C’04, Vice President of Brand Development at BuzzFeed

> Eileen

Simon, C’87, W’87, Chief Franchise Integrity Officer at MasterCard

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

College Alumni Mentoring Series The College Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS) hosts a variety of programs throughout the year, including small mentoring meals and large themed roundtable dinners to give students an opportunity to learn from College alumni and understand how their current academic paths coincide with career aspirations.

Mentoring Meals

Robin Yuxiang Ren, C’95, EE’95, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Tesla. Ren has a dual bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering and has held roles at Yahoo and Dell EMC.

Laura Alber, C’90, PAR’20, CEO, Williams-Sonoma. A psychology major, Alber joined Williams-Sonoma as a junior buyer for Pottery Barn and held several roles before becoming CEO in 2010.

Careers in Health: Beyond the M.D.

Careers in Law and Policy

From research to non-profit management, pharma to consulting, alumni discuss the multitude of health careers that Penn graduates can make an impact in.

College alumni working in law and policy talk about their journeys and how their time at Penn shaped their careers.

Julio Arias, C’93, Latin America Regional Access Manager, Neurosciences at Jansen Pharmaceutical of Johnson and Johnson

Patrick Steel, C’89, CEO, Politico

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FACULTY CYCLISTS: OVER THE RIVER, THROUGH THE WOODS, AND DOWN 34TH STREET Penn ArtsNewtown and Sciences faculty bike varied terrain to get to campus.

BY

Square

LAUREN REBECCA THACKER West Philadelphia

Havertown

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Upper Darby

SNIEGOWSKI HOME Springfield Darby

Heinz National Wildlife Refuge

PAUL SNIEGOWSKI, STEPHEN A. LEVIN FAMILY DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AND PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY Route: Swarthmore, Pa. to Leidy Laboratory, via John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge

Sniegowski is an evolutionary biologist with a passion for teaching. He’s also something of a Renaissance man. After earning an undergraduate degree in violin performance, he worked as a musician while taking the math and science courses that prepared him for graduate studies in biology. He enjoys cooking, canoeing, hiking—and Snapchat, where he often shares images of his daily bike rides and student events. Follow him at @SniegowskiSnaps, and check out our Online Content (p. 31) to learn where to watch a Go-Pro view of his 18-mile sunrise ride.

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SPRING /SUMMER 2018

DORIS WAGNER, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY

PONZY LU, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY

Route: Rittenhouse Square to Lynch Laboratory, via South Street Bridge

Route: Bala Cynwyd, Pa. to Chemistry Laboratories, via Fairmount Park

Wagner and biking go way back. “I grew up in a very small town in rural Germany close to the French border,” she says. “My family’s weekend outings consisted of bike rides together in the German and French countryside. I loved those rides.” These days, Wagner commutes from Rittenhouse Square on her Dutch cargo bike—a practical bike she learned to love as a child—and enjoys when academic conferences take her to bike-friendly cities. Her favorites have been Gyeongju and Jeju Island, South Korea, and Valencia, Spain.

Lu’s commute from Bala Cynwyd is a leisurely jaunt compared to his past cycling trips. In 1995, Lu and his daughter, Kristina, C'97, V'01, biked 3,200 miles from Santa Monica Pier to the Mall in Washington, D.C. They were invited on the trip by a fellow academic planning the trip with his own daughter. “You don't meet crazy people like that every day, so you have to seize the moment," says Lu. Now, he enjoys the financial and environmental benefits of being a bicycle commuter.

MICHAEL LEJA, JAMES AND NAN WAGNER FARQUHAR PROFESSOR OF HISTORY OF ART

ANN E. MOYER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

Route: Landenberg, Pa. to Jaffe History of Art Building, via White Clay Creek and Regional Rail

Route: Queen Village to College Hall, via South Street Bridge

Leja lives near the University of Delaware, but manages a partial bike commute three days a week. “Sounds pretty crazy, I know,” he admits. “Most of my route goes through the White Clay Creek in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Part of it is the Peltier road, a dirt trail with a railroad bed running alongside a creek.” After that 12-mile ride, he hops aboard the regional rail in Newark. “The whole trip takes almost three hours—but I get a good workout, and lots of work done on the train,” he adds. Icy roads are the only thing that keep him from this ritual.

Moyer commutes from Queen Village, riding her trusty Raleigh Record Ace. She’s had it since the ‘80s, when she purchased it in her graduate school days at the University of Michigan. “It still has its registration sticker from Ann Arbor,” she says. On her bicycle, Moyer is an observer. “I get to watch children going to school, people walking dogs, people waiting to buy bagels. I see contractors renovating old houses and building new ones. It is a wonderful way to start and end the day, from the Delaware to the Schuylkill and back.”

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THREE QUESTIONS: CARMEN MARIA MACHADO Carmen Maria Machado, Writer-inResidence at Kelly Writers House, combines science fiction, horror, folk tales, and pop culture references in stories that are utterly modern and unabashedly focused on female experience. Her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award.

Tom Storm

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THE SHORT STORY FORMAT?

Like, I have a story in my collection that began because I wanted to write about bariatric surgery. So I had to figure out how best to get into that story.

I always tell people that a novel is a thing that wrestles you to the ground over a long period of time, and a short story is like a punch to the nose. It's meant to leave you breathless, and then depart. To make you ask, “What happened?” I feel that I’m better at the short form and my desire to experiment and play around is easier to do when I'm writing a 20-page story as opposed to a 200-page novel.

There's just something about the short story form that pleases me; I love it so much.

Some writers say, "Oh, a character is speaking to me; I need to write about her." I'm not that way. I have a question and I set out to answer it.

HOW DO YOU START WRITING A STORY? A lot of my ideas start as “what ifs.” “What if this thing happened? What if we took a peek into this world?” Sometimes I will start with a setting or a question or an image. Sometimes I'm just really interested in writing about a certain topic.

YOUR STORIES REFERENCE FOLK LEGENDS AND CONTEMPORARY POP CULTURE. HOW ARE THOSE TOOLS FOR YOU AS A WRITER? Ultimately, all fiction is being re-told.

That is just how we write. We’re riffing on an essential theme or essential stories we already know. I'm really interested in what media, what literature, what art has to offer me and what it does not offer me, and then filling the space where I feel like the story or ideas are unsatisfactory to me in some way.

I’ve used Law & Order: SVU as a starting point. It's sort of our best and worst in contemporary fairytales. All fairytales tell us a lot about what we're afraid of, what's important to us culturally; SVU tells us what we think about women and women's bodies and narratives about sexual violence. There's just no better lens.

Some people think that’s very different than retelling Snow White or something like that, but it's the same idea. One is older and one is more contemporary, but they’re all the same kinds of stories.

I feel satisfied by what I'm creating, and that's really important because ultimately, I'm writing for myself. I'm trying to answer my own questions.

SPRING /SUMMER 2018

LAST LOOK

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Brooke Sietinsons

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